Living to Tell the Tale (38 page)

My friendship with Torres Restrepo and Villar Borda soon overflowed the limits of classrooms and newsrooms, and we spent more time together on the street than at the university. Both of them were simmering over a slow fire in a stubborn lack of conformity with the political and social situation
of the country. Enthralled by the mysteries of literature, I did not even try to understand their circular analyses and gloomy premonitions, but the memory of their friendship is among the most gratifying and useful of those years.

In the classes at the university, on the other hand, I foundered. I always regretted my lack of devotion to the merits of the teachers with great names who endured
our boredom. Among them was Alfonso López Michelsen, the son of the only Colombian president in the twentieth century to be reelected, and I believe this gave rise to the general impression that he too was predestined by birth to be president, as in fact he was. He came to his introductory class on the law with an irritating punctuality and some splendid cashmere jackets made in London. He lectured
without looking at anyone, with that celestial air of intelligent myopics who always seem to be walking through someone else’s dreams. His classes seemed like monologues on a single note, which is what any class not about poetry was for me, but the tedium of his voice had the hypnotic power of a snake charmer. His vast literary knowledge had a reliable foundation, and he knew how to use it in his
writing and speaking, but I began to appreciate it only when we met again years later and became friends far from the lethargy of the classroom. His prestige as an inveterate politician was nourished by his almost magical personal charm and a dangerous lucidity in discovering the hidden intentions of people. Above all those he liked least. But his most outstanding virtue as a public man was his
astonishing ability to create historic situations with a single phrase.

In time we achieved a close friendship, but at the university I was not the most assiduous and diligent student, and my irremediable
shyness kept me at a hopeless distance, in particular with people I admired. For all these reasons I was surprised to be called to the first-year final examination despite the absences that
had earned me a reputation as an invisible student. I turned to my old stratagem of deviating from the subject with rhetorical devices. I realized that the teacher was aware of my trick, but perhaps he appreciated it as a literary diversion. The only stumbling block was that in the agony of the exam I used the word
prescription
and he hastened to ask that I define it to be sure I knew what I was
talking about.

“To prescribe is to acquire a property over the course of time,” I said.

He asked without hesitation:

“To acquire it or to lose it?”

It was the same thing, but I did not argue with him because of my congenital insecurity, and I believe it was one of his celebrated after-dinner jokes, because in the grading he did not penalize me for my indecision. Years later I mentioned the
incident to him and he did not remember it, of course, but by then neither he nor I was even sure the episode was true.

We both found in literature a retreat where we could forget about politics and the mysteries of prescription, and we would discover surprising books and forgotten writers in infinite conversations that would sometimes ruin visits and exasperate our wives. My mother had convinced
me that we were related, and it was true. But more than any kind of lost relationship, our shared passion for
vallenatos
connected us.

Another fortuitous relative, on my father’s side, was Carlos H. Pareja, a professor of political economy and the owner of the Librería Grancolombia, a favorite of students because of its admirable custom of displaying new books by great authors on open, unguarded
tables. Even his own students would invade the shop during the negligent moments at twilight, and we would make the books disappear by sleight of hand, following the students’ code that says that stealing books is a crime but not a sin. Not because of virtue but physical fear, my role in these raids was limited to watching the backs of the more dexterous, on the condition that in addition to books
for themselves,
they would take a few that I had indicated. One afternoon, one of my accomplices had just stolen
The City Without Laura,
by Francisco Luis Bernárdez, when I felt a fierce claw on my shoulder and heard a sergeant’s voice:

“At last, damn it!”

I turned around in terror and confronted Maestro Carlos H. Pareja while three of my accomplices escaped in a stampede. It was my good luck
that before I could beg his pardon, I realized that he had not caught me for a thief but because he had not seen me in his class for more than a month. After a more or less conventional reprimand, he asked:

“Is it true that you’re Gabriel Eligio’s son?”

It was true, but I told him it was not, because I knew that his father and mine were in fact estranged because of a personal incident I never
understood. But later he learned the truth, and from that day on he pointed me out in the bookstore and in classes as his nephew, and we maintained a relationship more civil than literary in spite of the fact that he had written and published several books of uneven verse under the pseudonym Simón Latino. The awareness of our relationship, however, was helpful to him only because I no longer offered
my services as a screen for stealing his books.

Another excellent teacher, Diego Montaña Cuéllar, was the opposite of López Michelsen, with whom he seemed to have a secret rivalry, López as a straying Liberal and Montaña Cuéllar as a left-wing radical. I maintained good relations with him outside the classroom, and it always seemed to me that López Michelsen viewed me as a poetic dove, while
Montaña Cuéllar saw me as a good prospect for his revolutionary proselytizing.

My fondness for Montaña Cuéllar began because of a difficulty he encountered with three young officers from the military school who attended his classes in parade uniform. They had the punctuality of the barracks, sat together on the same seats apart from the rest, took implacable notes, and obtained well-deserved
grades on rigorous examinations. After the first few days Diego Montaña Cuéllar advised them in private not to come to class in battle uniforms. They replied with their best manners that they were obeying the orders of their superiors,
and they lost no opportunity to let him feel the weight of that. In any case, aside from their peculiarities, it was always clear to students and teachers that
the three officers were outstanding students.

They arrived in their identical uniforms, impeccable, always together, and punctual. They sat to one side and were the most serious and methodical students, but it always seemed to me that they were in a world different from ours. If you spoke to them, they were attentive and polite, but their formality was invincible: they said no more than answers
to what they had been asked. When we had exams, we civilians would divide into groups of four to study in cafés, we would meet at the Saturday dances, at the student stone-throwing fights, in the tame taverns and dreary brothels of the period, but we never ran into our military fellow students.

I almost never exchanged greetings with them during the long year when we were all at the university.
Besides, there was no opportunity, because they came to classes right on time and left at the teacher’s last word, not mixing with anyone except other young soldiers in the second year, whom they would join during rest periods. I never learned their names or heard anything else about them. Today I realize that the reticence was not so much theirs as mine, for I never could overcome the bitterness
with which my grandparents had evoked their frustrated wars and the atrocious slaughters of the banana companies.

Jorge Soto del Corral, the teacher of constitutional law, was famous for knowing by heart all the constitutions of the world, and in class he kept us dazzled by the brilliance of his intelligence and legal erudition, marred only by a limited sense of humor. I believe he was one of
the teachers who did everything possible to keep their political opinions from cropping up in class, but they were more evident than they themselves believed, even in the gestures of their hands and the emphasis placed on their ideas, for it was in the university where one felt with greatest clarity the profound pulse of a country that was on the verge of a new civil war after some forty years of
armed peace.

In spite of my chronic absenteeism and judicial negligence, I passed the easy first-year law courses with overheated last-minute
cramming, and the more difficult ones by using my old trick of eluding the subject with clever devices. The truth is I was not comfortable in my own skin and did not know how to continue groping my way along that dead-end street. I understood the law less
and had much less interest in it than any of the subjects at the
liceo,
and I felt I was enough of an adult to make my own decisions. In short, after sixteen months of miraculous survival, all I had was a group of good friends for the rest of my life.

My scant interest in my studies was even scantier after the note by Ulises, above all at the university, where some of the other students began
to call me Maestro and introduced me as a writer. This coincided with my resolve to learn how to build a structure that was credible and fantastic at the same time but had no cracks. With perfect distant models, like Sophocles’
Oedipus the King,
whose protagonist investigates the murder of his father and ends up discovering that he himself is the murderer; like “The Monkey’s Paw,” by W. W. Jacob,
the perfect story in which everything that happens is accidental; like Maupassant’s
Boule de suif
and so many other great sinners, may God keep them in His holy kingdom. I was involved in this one Sunday night when at last something happened to me that deserved to be recounted. I had spent almost the entire day venting my frustrations as a writer with Gonzalo Mallarino in his house on the Avenida
Chile, and when I was returning to the
pensión
on the last streetcar a flesh-and-blood faun got on at the Chapinero station. No mistake: I said a faun. I noticed that none of the few passengers at midnight seemed surprised to see him, and this made me think he was just another of the men in costume who sold a variety of things on Sundays in the children’s parks. But reality convinced me I could
have no doubts, because his horns and beard were as wild as those of a goat, and when he passed I could smell the stink of his pelt. Before Calle 26, the street where the cemetery was located, he got off with the manners of a good paterfamilias and disappeared among the trees in the park.

After half a night of being awakened by my tossing and turning in bed, Domingo Manuel Vega asked me what
was wrong.
“It’s just that a faun got on the streetcar,” I told him, half asleep. He was wide awake when he replied that if it was a nightmare, it must be due to Sunday’s poor digestion, but if it was the subject for my next story, he thought it was fantastic. The next morning I did not know if in reality I had seen a faun on the streetcar or if it had been a Sunday hallucination. I began by admitting
I had fallen asleep, tired at the end of the day, and had a dream that was so clear I could not separate it from reality. But in the end, the essential thing for me was not if the faun was real but that I had lived the experience as if he were. And for the same reason—real or dreamed—it was not legitimate to consider this as a bewitchment of the imagination but as a marvelous experience in
my life.

And so I wrote it the next day in one sitting, put it under my pillow, and read it and reread it for several nights before I went to sleep and in the mornings when I woke up. It was a bare, literal transcription of the episode on the streetcar, just as it occurred and in a style as innocent as the announcement of a baptism on the society page. At last, hounded by new doubts, I decided
to submit it to the infallible test of print, not in
El Espectador
but in the literary supplement of
El Tiempo.
Perhaps it was a way to encounter a judgment different from that of Eduardo Zalamea, and to not involve him in an adventure he had no reason to share. I sent the story with a friend from the
pensión,
along with a letter for Don Jaime Posada, the new and very young editor of the “Suplemento
Literario” of
El Tiempo.
But the story was not published and my letter was not answered.

My stories of that period, in the order in which they were written and published in
Fin de Semana,
disappeared from the archives of
El Espectador
in the assault on and burning of that newspaper by government mobs on September 6, 1952. I had no copies, nor did my most conscientious friends, so I thought with
a certain sense of relief that they had been burned by oblivion. But some provincial literary supplements had reproduced them at the time without authorization, and others were published in a variety of magazines, until they were collected in a single volume by Ediciones Alfil of Montevideo in 1972, with
the title of one of the stories:
Nabo, the Black Man Who Made the Angels Wait.

One was missing
that has never been included in a book, perhaps for lack of a reliable version: “Tubal Caín Forges a Star,” published by
El Espectador
on January 17, 1948. The name of the protagonist, as not everyone knows, is that of a biblical blacksmith who invented music. There were three stories. Read in the order in which they were written and published, they seemed to me inconsequential and abstract, some
absurd, and none based on real feelings. I never could establish the judgment with which a critic as severe as Eduardo Zalamea read them. Yet for me they have an importance they do not have for anyone else, for in each one there is something that corresponds to the rapid evolution of my life during this time.

Many of the novels I was reading then, and which I admired, interested me only because
of their technical lessons. That is: their secret carpentry. From the metaphysical abstractions of the first three stories to the last three of that period, I have found precise and very useful clues to the elementary formation of a writer. The idea of exploring other forms had not even passed through my mind. I thought that the story and the novel not only were different literary genres but two
organisms with natures so diverse it would be fatal to confuse them. Today I still believe that, and I am convinced more than ever of the supremacy of the short story over the novel.