Living to Tell the Tale (42 page)

Everything seemed in order, except for a man of such humble background and with no criminal record to have with him so many proofs of good conduct. But the only thing that left me with doubts I have never been able to overcome was the elegant, well-dressed man who had thrown him to the enraged hordes and then disappeared
forever in a luxury automobile.

In the midst of the uproar over the tragedy, as they were
embalming the corpse of the murdered apostle, the members of the Liberal leadership met in the dining room of the Clínica Central to decide on emergency measures. The most urgent was to go to the Palacio Presidencial without a prior appointment to discuss with the chief of state an emergency measure that
would avert the cataclysm threatening the country. A little before nine that night the rain tapered off, and the first delegates made their difficult way along the streets wrecked by the popular uprising and past the corpses riddled by the blind bullets of snipers on balconies and roofs.

In the waiting room of the presidential office they met some Conservative functionaries and politicians, and
the wife of the president, Doña Bertha Hernández de Ospina, very much in control of herself. She still had on the dress she wore when she accompanied her husband to the exposition in Engativá, and a regulation revolver was at her waist.

At the end of the afternoon the president had lost contact with the most critical sites, and behind closed doors he was trying to evaluate the state of the nation
with military men and his ministers. The visit of the Liberal leaders a short while before ten at night took him by surprise, and he did not want to receive them all at once but two by two, but they decided that under those circumstances none of them would enter the office. The president gave in, but the Liberals still took this as a reason to be discouraged.

They found him seated at the head
of a long conference table, in a faultless suit and showing no sign at all of uneasiness. The only thing that betrayed a certain tension was the constant, avid way he smoked, at times putting out a cigarette when it was half smoked and then lighting another one. One of the visitors told me years later how much he had been struck by the light from the fires on the silver head of the impassive president.
Through the large windows of the presidential office, the embers in the debris under the burning sky could be seen all the way to the horizon.

What is known about that meeting we owe to the little recounted by the protagonists themselves, the rare breaches of faith of some and the many fantasies of others, and the reconstruction
of those ominous days put together piecemeal by the poet and historian
Arturo Alape, who to a large extent made it possible to sustain these memoirs.

The visitors were Don Luis Cano, publisher of the Liberal evening paper
El Espectador,
Plinio Mendoza Neira, who had encouraged the meeting, and three of the youngest and most active Liberal leaders: Carlos Lleras Restrepo, Darío Echandía, and Alfonso Araujo. In the course of the discussion, other prominent Liberals
went in or came out.

According to the lucid recollections I heard years later from Plinio Mendoza Neira in his impatient exile in Caracas, none of them had prepared a plan. He was the only witness to the assassination of Gaitán, and he recounted it step by step with the artfulness of a born narrator and a chronic journalist. The president listened with solemn attention and then asked the visitors
to express their ideas for a just and patriotic solution to the colossal emergency.

Mendoza, famous among friends and enemies for his unadorned frankness, replied that the most appropriate action would be for the government to delegate power to the Armed Forces because of the confidence the people had in them just then. He had been minister of war in the Liberal government of Alfonso López Pumarejo,
he knew the military well from the inside, and he thought that only they could reopen the channels of normalcy. But the president did not agree with the realism of the plan, and the Liberals themselves did not support it.

The next intervention was from Don Luis Cano, well known for his brilliant prudence. He had almost paternal feelings for the president, and he would offer himself only for any
rapid and just decision that Ospina decided with the backing of the majority. Ospina gave him assurances that he would find the indispensable means for a return to normalcy, but always adhering to the constitution. And pointing through the windows at the hell that was devouring the city, he reminded them with barely repressed irony that it was not the government that had caused the situation.

He was famous for his moderation and good breeding, in contrast to the obstreperousness of Laureano Gómez and the
arrogance of other members of his party who were experts in arranged elections, but on that historic night he demonstrated that he was not prepared to be any less recalcitrant than they. And so the discussion went on until midnight, without any agreement, and with interruptions by Doña
Bertha de Ospina bringing news that grew more and more frightening.

By this time the number of dead in the streets, of snipers in unassailable positions, of mobs crazed by grief, rage, and the expensive brands of alcohol looted from luxury stores, was incalculable. For the center of the city was devastated and still in flames, and exclusive shops, the Palacio de Justicia, the Gobernación, and
many other historic buildings had been destroyed or set on fire. This was the reality that was narrowing without mercy the paths to a peaceful agreement by several men against one on the desert island of the presidential office.

Darío Echandía, who perhaps had the greatest authority, was the least expressive. He made two or three ironic comments about the president and again took refuge in his
impassivity. He seemed to be the indispensable candidate to replace Ospina Pérez in the presidency, but that night he did nothing to deserve or to avoid it. The president, considered a moderate Conservative, seemed to resemble one less and less. He was the grandson and nephew of two presidents in one century, a paterfamilias, a retired engineer, a lifetime millionaire, and several other things that
he engaged in without any noise at all, to the point where it was said, with no foundation, that the one who in fact gave the orders, at home and in the palace, was his resolute and aggressive wife. And even so—he concluded with acid sarcasm—he would not mind accepting the proposition, but he felt very comfortable heading the government from the chair where he was sitting by the will of the people.

As he spoke he was no doubt fortified by information the Liberals did not have: a certain and complete knowledge of the security forces in the country. He kept it up-to-date, for he had left his office several times to have thorough briefings. The garrison in Bogotá had fewer than a thousand men, and in every department the news was more or less grave, but in all of them the Armed Forces were
loyal and had matters under control.
In the neighboring department of Boyacá, famous for its historic Liberalism and its harsh Conservatism, the governor José María Villarreal—a hard-nosed Goth—not only had repressed local disturbances at the start but was dispatching better-armed troops to subdue the capital. So that all the president needed to do was to put off the Liberals with his well-measured
moderation, speaking little and smoking without haste. At no moment did he look at his watch, but he must have calculated with care the hour when the city would be well supplied with fresh troops more than proven in official repression.

After a long exchange of tentative plans, Carlos Lleras Restrepo suggested what the Liberal leadership had agreed on at the Clínica Central and held in reserve
as a last resort: proposing to the president that he delegate power to Darío Echandía for the sake of political harmony and social tranquility. The plan, no doubt, would be accepted without reservation by Eduardo Santos and Alfonso López Pumarejo, former presidents and men of high political standing, but on that day they were out of the country.

The president’s reply, spoken with the same circumspection
he used when he smoked, was not what one might have expected. He did not miss the opportunity to display his true disposition, which few people had known until then. He said that for him and his family, the most comfortable thing would be to withdraw from power and live abroad with his personal fortune and no political worries, but he was troubled by what it could mean for the country
if an elected president were to flee office. Civil war would be inevitable. And when Lleras Restrepo insisted again on his retirement, he allowed himself to recall his obligation to defend the constitution and the laws, which was a commitment not only to his country but to his conscience and God as well. That was when they say he said the historic sentence that it seems he never said, though it was
regarded as his forever after: “A dead president is worth more to Colombian democracy than a fugitive one.”

None of the witnesses recalled hearing it from his lips or from anyone else’s. Over time it was attributed to a variety of talents, and people even discussed its political merits and historical
validity, but never its literary splendor. From that time on it became the motto of the government
of Ospina Pérez, and one of the pillars of his glory. It has even been said that it was invented by various Conservative journalists, and with more reason by the noted writer, politician, and current minister of mines and petroleum, Joaquín Estrada Monsalve, who in fact was in the Palacio Presidencial but not inside the conference room. So the sentence remained in history as having been said
by the one who should have said it, in a devastated city where the ashes were beginning to cool, and in a country that would never be the same again.

In the long run, the real merit of the president was not inventing historic sentences but putting off the Liberals with soporific candies until after midnight, when fresh troops arrived to put down the rebellion of the lower classes and impose a
Conservative peace. Only then, at eight in the morning on April 10, did he wake Darío Echandía with a nightmarish eleven rings of the telephone and name him minister of the interior for a regime of consolatory bipartisanship. Laureano Gómez, displeased with the solution and uneasy about his personal safety, traveled to New York with his family while conditions were beginning to favor his eternal
longing to be president.

Every dream of fundamental social change for which Gaitán had died vanished in the smoking rubble of the city. The dead in the streets of Bogotá and the deaths caused by official repression in the years that followed must have amounted to more than a million, not to mention the wretched poverty and exile of so many others. Long before the Liberal leaders placed high in
the government began to realize they had assumed the risk of passing into history as accomplices.

Among the many historic witnesses to that day in Bogotá, there were two who did not know each other at the time and years later would be two of my great friends. One was Luis Cardoza y Aragón, a political and literary poet and essayist from Guatemala who was attending the Pan-American Conference
as the foreign minister of his country and the head of its delegation. The other was Fidel Castro. Both were also accused at one time or another of being implicated in the disturbances.

The specific accusation against Cardoza y Aragón was that he had been one of the instigators, cloaked by his credentials as a special delegate of the progressive government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. It must
be understood that Cardoza y Aragón was the delegate of a historic government and a great poet of our language who never would have lent support to an insane adventure. The most painful evocation in his beautiful book of memoirs was the accusation by Enrique Santos Montejo (Calibán), who claimed in his popular column in
El Tiempo,
“The Dance of the Hours,” that his official mission was to assassinate
General George Marshall. Numerous delegates to the conference took steps to have the paper rectify that lunatic rumor, but it was not possible.
El Siglo,
the official organ of Conservatism in power, proclaimed to the four winds that Cardoza y Aragón had instigated the riots.

I met him and his wife, Lya Kostakowsky, many years later in Mexico City at their house in Coyoacán, sanctified by memories
and made even more beautiful by the original works of great painters of the time. Their friends would gather there on Sunday nights for intimate evenings of an unpretentious importance. He considered himself a survivor, first because his car was machine-gunned by snipers just hours after the crime. And days later, when the rebellion had been put down, a drunkard stopped him in the street and
fired into his face with a revolver that jammed twice. April 9 was a recurrent subject of our conversations, in which rage mixed with nostalgia for the years that were gone.

Fidel Castro, in turn, was the victim of all kinds of absurd charges because of actions connected to his position as a student activist. On the black night, after an awful day among the rampaging mobs, he ended up in the
Quinta División of the Policía Nacional, looking for a useful way to help end the slaughter in the streets. One would have to know him to imagine his desperation in the fortress in revolt, where it seemed impossible to reach a consensus.

He met with the leaders of the garrison and other rebelling officers and tried to convince them, without success, that any force that stays in its barracks is
lost. He proposed that they
take their men out to struggle in the streets for the maintenance of order and a more equitable system. He presented all kinds of historical precedents but was not heard, while official troops and tanks were riddling the fortress with bullets. In the end, he decided to throw in his lot with the others.

In the small hours Plinio Mendoza Neira arrived at the Quinta División
with instructions from the Liberal leadership to obtain the peaceful surrender not only of the officers and men in revolt, but of numerous Liberals who were adrift as they waited for orders to act. In the long hours needed to negotiate an agreement, the image remained fixed in Mendoza Neira’s memory of the stocky, argumentative Cuban student who intervened several times in the controversies
between the Liberal leaders and the rebellious officers with a lucidity that surpassed everyone else’s. He learned who he was only years later in Caracas, when Fidel Castro was already in the Sierra Maestra, because he happened to see him in a photograph of that terrible night.