Living to Tell the Tale (41 page)

A new throng of poor people in an open attitude of combat surged forward from every corner. Many were armed with machetes they had just stolen in the first assaults on stores, and they seemed eager to use them. I did not have a clear perspective on the possible consequences of the assassination,
and I was more interested in lunch than in the protest, and so I retraced my steps to the
pensión.
I ran up the stairs, convinced that my politicized friends were ready for war. But no: the dining room was empty, and my brother and José Palencia—who shared the adjoining room—were singing with other friends in their bedroom.

“They killed Gaitán!” I shouted.

They signaled that they already knew,
but everyone’s state of mind was more recreational than funereal, and they did not interrupt the song. Then we sat down to eat lunch in the deserted dining room, convinced the matter would go no further, until someone turned up the volume of the radio so that we indifferent ones could hear. Carlos H. Pareja, honoring the way he had incited me an hour earlier, announced the formation of the Junta
Revolucionaria de Gobierno composed of the most notable Liberals on the left, among them the very well-known writer and politician Jorge Zalamea. Their first resolution was the establishment of the executive committee, the command of the National Police, and all the organisms for a revolutionary state. Then the other members of the junta spoke with rallying cries that grew more and more extravagant.

In the solemnity of the act, the first thing that occurred to me was what my father would think when he learned that his cousin, the hard-nosed Goth, was the principal leader of an extreme left-wing revolution. The landlady at the
pensión,
considering the importance of the names connected to universities, was surprised that they were behaving not like professors but like rowdy students. It was
enough to go past two stations on the dial to find a different country. On Radio Nacional, the pro-government Liberals were calling for calm, on other stations they were clamoring against Communists loyal to Moscow, while the highest leaders of official Liberalism defied the dangers of the warring streets as they tried to reach the Palacio
Presidencial to negotiate a pledge of unity with the Conservative
government.

We continued to be dazed by that demented confusion until one of the landlady’s sons shouted that the house was on fire. In fact, a crack had opened in the rear masonry wall and thick black smoke was beginning to rarefy the air in the bedrooms. It came, no doubt, from the Departmental Office of the Interior adjacent to the
pensión,
which had been set on fire by the rioters, but the
wall seemed strong enough to keep standing. And so we raced down the stairs and confronted a city at war. The tumultuous attackers were throwing everything they could find in the offices of the Gobernación out the windows. The smoke from the fires had darkened the air, and the clouded sky was a sinister blanket. Maddened hordes, armed with machetes and all kinds of tools stolen from the hardware
stores, attacked and set fire to the businesses along Carrera Séptima and the adjacent streets with the help of mutinous police officers. An instantaneous glance was enough for us to realize that the situation was out of control. My brother anticipated my thought with a shout:

“Shit, the typewriter!”

We ran to the pawnshop, which was still intact with its metal grates locked, but the typewriter
was not where it had always been. We were not concerned, thinking that in the days that followed we could recover it, still not realizing that this colossal disaster would have no days that followed.

The military garrison in Bogotá limited itself to protecting government centers and banks, and public order was left to no one’s responsibility. After the first few hours many high-ranking officials
of the police had entrenched themselves in the Quinta División, and numerous patrolmen followed them with loads of weapons they had picked up on the streets. Several of them, wearing the red armband of the rebels, fired a rifle so close to us that it resonated in my chest. Since then I have been convinced that just the report of a rifle can kill.

When we returned to the pawnshop we saw the businesses
along Carrera Octava, the richest in the city, laid to waste in minutes. The exquisite jewels, English woolens, and Bond Street
hats that we students from the coast had admired in unreachable shopwindows were now within reach of everyone under the gaze of impassive soldiers guarding foreign banks. The very refined Café San Marino, which we never could enter, was open and dismantled, for once without
the waiters in tuxedos hurrying to stop Caribbean students from going in.

Some of those who came out loaded down with fine clothing and great bolts of woolen cloth on their shoulders left them abandoned in the middle of the street. I picked one up, not thinking it would weigh so much, and much to my sorrow I had to leave it behind. Wherever we went we stumbled across household appliances thrown
into the street, and it was not easy to walk through the bottles of expensive brands of whiskey and all kinds of exotic drinks that the mobs beheaded with blows of their machetes. My brother Luis Enrique and José Palencia found remnants of the looting in a good clothing store, including a sky-blue suit of very good wool in my father’s exact size, which he wore for years on important occasions.
My only providential trophy was the calfskin briefcase from the most expensive tearoom in the city, which allowed me to carry my originals under my arm on the many nights during the years that followed when I had no place to sleep.

I was with a group making its way along Carrera Octava toward the Capitolio, when machine-gun fire swept over the first ones to approach Plaza de Bolívar. The instantaneous
dead and wounded piled up in the middle of the street stopped us cold. A dying man bathed in blood who dragged himself out of that promontory clutched at my trouser cuff and shouted a heartrending plea:

“Boy, for the love of God, don’t let me die!”

I fled in terror. Since then I have learned to forget horrors, my own and other people’s, but I never forgot the hopelessness of those eyes in the
brilliant glow of the fires. Yet it still surprises me not to have thought, even for an instant, that my brother and I might die in that pitiless hell.

At three in the afternoon it began to rain in great gusts, but after five o’clock a biblical deluge put out many smaller fires and lessened the impetus of the uprising. The small Bogotá
garrison, incapable of confronting it, managed to separate
the fury in the streets into smaller groups. It was not reinforced until after midnight by emergency troops from neighboring departments, in particular Boyacá, infamous for being the school of official violence. Until then the radio incited but did not inform, so that no news report had a source and the truth was impossible to determine. In the small hours the replacement troops took control of
the business center devastated by the mobs and with no light other than the fires, but politicized resistance still continued for several days, with snipers stationed in towers and on roofs. By then, the dead in the streets were uncountable.

When we returned to the
pensión
most of the city’s center was in flames, with overturned streetcars and ruined automobiles serving as improvised barricades.
We put the few things worth saving in a suitcase, and only later did I realize that I left behind the first drafts of two or three unpublishable stories, my grandfather’s dictionary, which I never recovered, and the book by Diógenes Laercio that I received as a prize in the first year of my baccalaureate.

The only thing my brother and I could think of was to ask for shelter in Uncle Juanito’s
house, only four blocks from the
pensión.
It was a second-floor apartment with a living room, dining room, and two bedrooms, and my uncle lived there with his wife and children, Eduardo, Margarita, and Nicolás, the oldest, who had been in the
pensión
with me for a while. We almost did not fit, but the Márquez Caballeros had the good heart to improvise spaces where there were none, even in the
dining room, and not only for us but for other friends and companions of ours from the
pensión:
José Palencia, Domingo Manuel Vega, Carmelo Martínez—all of them from Sucre—and others whom we did not know.

A little before midnight, when it stopped raining, we went up to the roof to see the infernal landscape of the city illuminated by the embers of the fires. In the background the hills of Monserrate
and La Guadalupe were two immense masses of shadow against the sky darkened by smoke, but the only thing I kept seeing in the desolate fog was the enormous face of the
dying man who dragged himself toward me to beg for impossible help. The hunt in the streets had subsided, and in the awful silence you could hear only the scattered shooting by countless snipers posted all around the center, and
the clamor of troops who little by little were exterminating all traces of armed or unarmed resistance in order to control the city. Overwhelmed by the landscape of death, Uncle Juanito expressed in a single sigh the feelings of all of us:

“My God, it’s like a dream!”

Back in the semidarkness of the living room I collapsed onto the sofa. The official bulletins from the radio stations occupied
by the government depicted a panorama of gradual tranquility. There were no more speeches, but you could not distinguish with precision between the official stations and those still controlled by the rebellion, and even these were impossible to differentiate from the uncontrollable avalanche of ill-intentioned rumors. It was said that all the embassies were overflowing with refugees, and that General
Marshall was staying in the embassy of the United States, protected by an honor guard from the military school. Laureano Gómez had also taken refuge there in the first few hours and had held telephone conversations with his president, trying to stop him from negotiating with the Liberals in a situation that he considered directed by the Communists. The former president Alberto Lleras, who was
then secretary general of the Pan-American Union, had saved his life by a miracle when he was recognized in his unarmored car as he was leaving the Capitolio, and the mob had tried to make him pay for the legal transfer of power to the Conservatives. By midnight most of the delegates to the Pan-American Conference were safe.

Among so many contradictory news reports, it was announced that Guillermo
León Valencia, the son of the poet of the same name, had been stoned to death and his body hanged in the Plaza de Bolívar. But the idea that the government was controlling the situation began to take shape as soon as the army recovered the radio stations that were in the hands of the rebels. Instead of proclamations of war, the news reports attempted to calm the country with the consoling thought
that the government was master of the situation, while high-ranking Liberals were negotiating with the president of the Republic for half the power.

In reality, the only ones who seemed to act with any political sense were the Communists, a minority of zealots, who could be seen in the midst of the disorder in the streets directing the crowd—like traffic police—toward the centers of power. Liberalism,
on the other hand, showed itself to be divided into the two halves denounced by Gaitán in his campaign: the leaders who tried to negotiate a portion of power in the Palacio Presidencial, and their voters who resisted however they could and as far as they could from towers and roofs.

The first doubt that arose in connection with the death of Gaitán concerned the identity of his assassin. Even
today there is no unanimous belief that it was Juan Roa Sierra, the solitary shooter who fired at him from the crowd on Carrera Séptima. What is not easy to understand is that he would have acted alone, since he did not seem to have the kind of background of autonomy that would allow him to decide by himself on that devastating death, on that day, at that time, in that place, in that manner. His mother,
Encarnación Sierra, the Widow Roa, who was fifty-two years old, had learned on the radio about the assassination of Gaitán, her political hero, and was dyeing her best dress black in order to mourn him. She had not finished when she heard that the assassin was Juan Roa Sierra, the thirteenth of her fourteen children. None of them had gone past primary school, and four of them—two boys and two
girls—had died.

She stated that for some eight months she had noticed strange changes in Juan’s behavior. He talked to himself and laughed for no reason, and at one point he confessed to the family that he believed he was the incarnation of General Francisco de Paula Santander, the hero of our independence, but they thought it was a bad drunken joke. Her son was never known to do harm to anyone,
and he had succeeded in having people of a certain importance give him letters of recommendation for obtaining work. He was carrying one of them in his wallet when he killed Gaitán. Six months earlier he had written
in his own hand to President Ospina Pérez requesting an interview in order to ask him for a job.

His mother told investigators that her son had also outlined his problem in person
to Gaitán, who had not offered him any hope. It was not known if he had ever fired a weapon in his life, but the manner in which he handled the one used in the crime was very far from being a novice’s. The revolver was a long .38, so battered it was astonishing that it had not misfired.

Some employees of the building believed they had seen him on the floor where Gaitán’s offices were located
on the night before the assassination. The porter stated without any doubt that on the morning of April 9 he had seen him go up the stairs and come down afterward in the elevator with an unknown man. It seemed to him that both men waited for several hours near the entrance to the building, but Roa was by himself next to the door when Gaitán went up to his office.

Gabriel Restrepo, a reporter
on
Jornada
—the newspaper of Gaitán’s campaign—inventoried the identity papers Roa Sierra was carrying with him when he committed the crime. They left no doubt regarding his identity and social status but gave no clue regarding his intentions. In his trouser pockets he had eighty-two centavos in mixed coins, when several important things in daily life cost only five. In an inner pocket of his jacket
he carried a black leather wallet with a one-peso bill. He also had a certificate that guaranteed his honesty, another from the police according to which he had no criminal record, and a third with his address in a poor district: Calle Octava, number 30-73. According to the record of military service as a reservist second class that he carried in the same pocket, he was the son of Rafael Roa
and Encarnación Sierra, born twenty-one years earlier on November 4, 1927.