Living to Tell the Tale (43 page)

I met him eleven years later, when I was present as a reporter for his triumphant entry into Havana, and in time we
achieved a personal friendship that has endured countless difficulties over the years. In my long conversations with him about everything divine and human, April 9 has been a recurrent subject that Fidel Castro would always evoke as one of the decisive dramas in his formation. Above all the night in the Quinta División, where he realized that most of the rebels who were coming in and going out were
wasting their time looting instead of persisting in the urgent effort to find a political solution.

While those two friends were witnesses to the events that divided the history of Colombia in two, my brother and I survived in the darkness with the other refugees in Uncle Juanito’s house. At no moment did I realize that I was already an apprentice writer who would try one day to reconstruct from
memory the testimony of the hideous days we were living through. My only concern at the time was the most mundane of all: to inform our family that we were alive—at least so far—and find out at the same time about our parents and brothers and sisters, and above all about Margot and Aida, the two oldest girls, who were students at boarding schools in distant cities.

Uncle Juanito’s refuge had
been a miracle. The first days were difficult because of the constant shooting and the lack of reliable news. But little by little we began exploring the nearby businesses and were able to buy things to eat. The streets were occupied by assault troops with absolute orders to shoot. In order to circulate with no restrictions, the incorrigible José Palencia disguised himself as a soldier with an explorer’s
hat and gaiters he found in a box of trash, and by a miracle he escaped the first patrol that discovered him.

The commercial radio stations, silenced before midnight, remained under the control of the army. The telegraph and telephones, primitive and scarce, were reserved for security forces, and no other means of communication existed. The lines for sending telegrams were endless outside the
packed offices, but the radio stations inaugurated a service for sending messages on the air for those lucky enough to hear them. This seemed the easiest and most reliable method, and we turned to it without much hope.

My brother and I went outside after three days of confinement. It was a horrific sight. The city was in ruins, cloudy and dark because of the constant rain that had dampened the
fires but delayed recovery. Many streets in the center were closed because of nests of snipers on the roofs, and you had to make senseless detours by order of patrols armed as if for a world war. The stink of death in the streets was unbearable. The army trucks had not yet picked up the promontories of bodies on the sidewalks, and the soldiers had to confront groups of people desperate to identify
their relatives.

In the ruins of what had been the business center, the stench was so unbreathable that many families had to give up their search. On one of the great pyramids of corpses one body stood out, barefoot and trouserless but wearing an impeccable frock coat. Three days later, the ashes still exhaled the stench of unclaimed bodies rotting in the rubble or piled up on the sidewalks.

When we least expected it, my brother and I were stopped cold by the unmistakable sound of a rifle bolt at our backs, and a categorical order:

“Hands up!”

I raised them without even thinking about it, petrified with terror, until I was brought back to life by the laugh of our friend Ángel Casij, who had responded to the Armed Forces call-up as a reservist first class. Thanks to him, the refugees
in Uncle Juanito’s house were able to send a message over the air after waiting for a day in front of Radio Nacional. My father heard it in Sucre among the countless messages that were read day and night for two weeks. My brother and I, irredeemable victims of the family’s conjectural mania, were afraid our mother might interpret the news as an act of charity by friends while they prepared her
for the worst. We were not far from wrong: beginning on the first night, our mother had dreamed that her two oldest children had drowned in a sea of blood during the disturbances. It must have been so convincing a nightmare that when the truth reached her by other means, she decided that neither of us would ever return to Bogotá, even if we had to stay at home and die of hunger. Her decision must
have been final because the only order our parents gave us in their first telegram was that we should travel to Sucre as soon as possible to determine our futures.

In the tense period of waiting, various fellow students had painted the golden possibilities of continuing my studies in Cartagena de Indias, thinking that Bogotá would recover from its rubble but the Bogotáns would never recover from
the terror and horror of the slaughter. Cartagena had a centenarian university as prestigious as its historical relics, and a faculty of law on a human scale where they would accept as valid my poor grades from the Universidad Nacional.

I did not want to reject the idea without first letting it cook over a high flame, or mention it to my parents until I had tested it myself. All I told them was
that I would fly to Sucre by way of Cartagena, since the Magdalena River during that shooting war might be a suicidal route. Luis Enrique, for his part, said he would look for work in Barranquilla as soon as he could settle accounts with his employers in Bogotá.

In any case, I knew I would not be a lawyer anywhere. I just wanted to gain a little more time in order to distract my parents,
and
Cartagena might be a good technical stopping place to think. What never occurred to me is that this reasonable calculation would lead me to resolve, my heart in my hand, that it was the place where I wanted to continue my life.

Obtaining five seats in the same plane for any place along the coast during that time was a feat of my brother’s. After standing in interminable and dangerous lines and
spending an entire day running around an emergency airport, he found the five seats in three separate planes, at improbable times and in the midst of invisible shots and explosions. Two seats were confirmed for my brother and me in the same plane to Barranquilla, but at the last minute we left on different flights. The drizzle and fog that had persisted in Bogotá since the previous Friday stank
of gunpowder and rotting bodies. On the way from the house to the airport we were questioned at two successive military checkpoints where the soldiers were dazed with terror. At the second checkpoint they threw themselves to the ground and made us go down too because of an explosion followed by the firing of heavy weapons that turned out to have been caused by a leak of industrial gas. Other passengers
heard him when a soldier told us that his drama was standing guard there for three days with no relief, but also with no ammunition since there was none left in the city. We almost did not dare to speak after they stopped us, and the terror of the soldiers was the finishing touch. But after the formal procedures involving identification and destination, it comforted us to know we had to remain
there and do nothing else until we were taken on board. The only thing I smoked while I was waiting were two of the three cigarettes that someone had given me out of charity, and I saved one for the terror of the flight.

Since there were no telephones, the announcements of flights and other changes were learned at the different checkpoints by means of military orderlies on motorcycles. At eight
in the morning they called a group of passengers to board without delay a plane for Barranquilla that was not mine. Later I learned that the other three people in our group embarked with my brother at another checkpoint. My solitary wait was an asinine cure for my congenital fear of flying, because when it
was time to board the plane the sky was overcast and there was stony thunder. And since
the stairs to our plane had been taken for another, two soldiers had to help me board on a bricklayer’s ladder. It was in the same airport and at the same time that Fidel Castro boarded another plane that left for Havana with a cargo of fighting bulls—as he told me years later.

To my good or bad fortune, I was on a DC-3 smelling of fresh paint and recent grease, without individual lights or ventilation
regulated from the passenger cabin. It was outfitted to transport troops, and instead of separate seats in rows of three, as on tourist flights, there were two long benches made of ordinary planks well anchored to the floor. My luggage consisted of a canvas suitcase with two or three changes of dirty clothing, books of poetry, and clippings from literary supplements that my brother Luis
Enrique had managed to save. The passengers sat facing one another from the cockpit to the tail. Instead of safety belts there were two hemp cables for tying up ships, which were like two long collective safety belts for each side. The hardest thing for me was that as soon as I lit the only cigarette I had saved in order to survive the flight, the pilot in overalls announced from the cockpit that
smoking was prohibited because the plane’s gasoline tanks were at our feet under the wooden floor. Those were three interminable hours of flying.

When we arrived in Barranquilla it had just rained as it rains only in April, with houses torn up by the roots and carried away by the current in the streets, and solitary patients drowned in their beds. I had to wait for the weather to clear, in the
airport thrown into confusion because of the flood, and I just managed to learn that the plane taken by my brother and his two companions had arrived on time, but they had rushed to leave the terminal before the initial thunderclaps of the first downpour.

I needed another three hours to reach the travel agency, and I missed the last bus that left for Cartagena on a schedule that had been moved
up in anticipation of the storm. I did not worry because I believed my brother had gone there, but I was frightened for myself at the idea of spending the night in Barranquilla with no money. At last, thanks to José Palencia, I
obtained emergency shelter in the house of the beautiful sisters Ilse and Lila Albarracín, and three days later I traveled to Cartagena in the broken-down vehicle of the
Postal Agency. My brother Luis Enrique would stay in Barranquilla hoping for a job. I had no more than eight pesos left, but José Palencia promised to bring me a little more on the night bus. There was no room, not even standing room, but the driver agreed to carry three passengers on the roof, sitting on the freight and suitcases, for a quarter of the regular price. In so strange a situation, and
in the full sunlight, I believe I had become aware that on April 9, 1948, the twentieth century began in Colombia.

A
T THE END OF A JOURNEY
of lethal jolting along the hairpin curves of the highway, the Postal Agency truck breathed its last just where it deserved to: mired in a mangrove swamp that reeked of rotting fish half a league from Cartagena de Indias. “The man
who travels in a truck doesn’t know where he’s going to die,” I recalled, along with the memory of my grandfather. The passengers, stupefied by six hours of naked sun and the stink of the salt marshes, did not wait for the ladder to be lowered in order to disembark but hurried to throw over the side the crates of chickens, bundles of plantains, and all kinds of things for selling or for killing
that they had used as seats on the roof of the truck. The driver jumped down from the cab and announced in a caustic shout:

“La Heroica!”

It is the emblematic name by which Cartagena de Indias is known because of its past glories, and that is where it should have been. But I did not see it because I almost could not breathe inside the black wool suit I had been wearing since April 9. The other
two in my wardrobe had met the same fate as the typewriter in the pawnshop, but the honorable version for my parents was that the typewriter and other personal trifles had disappeared along with my clothes in the confusion of the fire. The brash driver, who had made fun of my bandit’s
appearance during the trip, was about to burst with amusement as I kept turning in circles without finding the
city.

“It’s up your ass!” he shouted at me for all to hear. “And be careful, they give medals to assholes there.”

Cartagena de Indias, in fact, had been at my back for four hundred years, but it was not easy for me to imagine it half a league from the mangrove swamps, concealed by the legendary wall that had kept it safe from heathens and pirates during its great years, and disappearing in the
end under a thicket of branches growing wild and long trails of yellow bellflowers. And so I joined the confusion of passengers and dragged my suitcase through brambles carpeted with live crabs whose shells popped like firecrackers under the soles of our shoes. Then it was impossible for me not to remember the
petate
that my companions tossed into the Magdalena River on my first trip, or the funereal
trunk I dragged across half the country crying with rage during my early years at the
liceo,
and that I at last threw over a precipice in the Andes in honor of my bachelor’s degree. It always seemed to me there was something of another person’s destiny in those undeserved extra loads, and my years have not been long enough to disprove that.

We had just begun to glimpse the outline of the domes
of some churches and convents in the late-afternoon mists when a windstorm of bats came out to meet us, flying at the level of our heads, and it was only because of their knowledge that they did not knock us to the ground. Their wings whirred like a rush of thunderclaps and left in their wake a stench of death. Overwhelmed by panic, I dropped the suitcase and crouched on the ground with my arms
over my head, until an older woman who was walking beside me shouted:

“Say
La Magnífica
!”

That is: the secret prayer for conjuring attacks by the devil, repudiated by the Church but sanctified by great atheists when they ran out of blasphemies. The woman realized I did not know how to pray, and she seized my suitcase by the other strap to help me carry it.

“Pray with me,” she said. “But remember:
with a lot of faith.”

She recited
La Magnífica
for me line by line and I repeated
them all with a devotion I have never felt again. The windstorm of bats, though I find it hard to believe today, disappeared from the sky before we finished praying. All that was left then was the immense crashing of the ocean against the cliffs.

We had reached the great gate of El Reloj. For a hundred years there
had been a drawbridge that connected the old city to the outlying district of Getsemaní and the dense slums of the poor from the mangrove swamps, but it was raised from nine at night until dawn. The population was left isolated not only from the rest of the world but also from history. It was said that the Spanish colonists had built that bridge because of their terror that the poverty-stricken
from the outskirts would sneak across at midnight and cut their throats as they slept. But something of its divine grace must have remained in the city, because it was enough for me to take a step inside the wall to see it in all its grandeur in the mauve light of six in the evening, and I could not repress the feeling of having been born again.

And with reason. At the beginning of the week I
had left Bogotá, splashing through a swamp of blood and mud, with promontories of unclaimed corpses abandoned among smoking ruins. Then the world changed in Cartagena. There were no traces of the war that was laying waste to the country, and it was hard for me to believe that this solitude without sorrow, this incessant ocean, this immense sensation of having arrived was happening to me less than
a week later in the same life.

Because I had heard it talked about so much from the time I was born, I identified without hesitation the little square where the horse-drawn carriages parked, and the freight carts that were pulled by donkeys, and in the background the arcaded galleries where popular commerce became denser and noisier. Although it was not recognized as such in official consciousness,
that was the last active heart of the city since its origins. During the colonial period it was called the Portal de los Mercaderes. From there the invisible threads of the slave trade were controlled and spirits heated up against Spanish domination. Close by was the Portal de los Escribanos, its name derived from the taciturn calligraphers in woolen vests and false
half sleeves who wrote love
letters and all kinds of documents there for the illiterate poor. Many sold inexpensive books under the table, in particular works condemned by the Holy Office, and it is believed they were oracles of the American-born conspiracy against the Spaniards. At the beginning of the twentieth century, my father would relieve his poet’s impulses with the art of writing love letters in the Portal. The truth
is he did not prosper as either poet or scribe because some clients who were shrewd, or in reality destitute, asked not only that he write their letters out of charity but give them the five reales for postage.

For several years it had been called the Portal de los Dulces, with rotted canvas awnings and beggars who came to eat the leavings of the market, and the oracular shouts of Indians who
charged a good deal of money not to sing out to the client the day and hour of his death. The schooners of the Caribbean would stop at the port to buy sweets with names invented by the same
comadres
who made them, and versified in their vendors’ cries: “Sugar cream for my dream, chocolate drops for pops, coconut candies for dandies, brown sugar cakes, no mistakes.”
^*
For in good times and bad the
Portal continued to be the vital center of the city where matters of state were aired behind the government’s back, the only place in the world where the women who peddled fried food knew who the next governor would be before the president of the Republic in Bogotá had even thought about him.

Fascinated on the spot by the clamor, and dragging my suitcase behind me, I made my way by fits and starts
through the six o’clock crowd. From the bootblacks’ stand a ragged old man, nothing but skin and bones, watched me, not blinking, with the icy eyes of a hawk. He stopped me cold. As soon as he realized that I had seen him he offered to carry the suitcase for me. I thanked him, until he specified in his mother tongue:

“For thirty pieces.”

Impossible. Thirty centavos for carrying a suitcase was
a huge bite out of the four pesos I had left until I received reinforcements from my parents the following week.

“That’s worth the suitcase and everything inside it,” I told him.

Besides, the
pensión
where the group from Bogotá must have already gone was not very far. The old man resigned himself to three pieces, hung the sandals he was wearing around his neck, loaded the suitcase on his shoulder
with a strength that was unbelievable for his bones, and ran like an athlete barefooted along a rough terrain of colonial houses crumbling after centuries of abandonment. I was twenty-one and my heart almost burst out of my mouth as I tried not to lose sight of the Olympic old man who could not have had many hours of life left in him. After five blocks he went through the large door of the hotel
and climbed the stairs two at a time. With his breath intact he placed the suitcase on the floor and held out his palm:

“Thirty pieces.”

I reminded him that I had already paid him, but he insisted that the three centavos at the Portal did not include the staircase. The landlady, who came out to greet us, said he was right: the staircase was a separate charge. And she made a prediction that was
valid for the rest of my life:

“You’ll see, in Cartagena everything’s different.”

I also had to face the bad news that none of my companions from the
pensión
in Bogotá had arrived yet, even though they had confirmed reservations for four, including me. The plan I had made with them was to meet at the hotel before six that day. The change from the regular bus to the risky vehicle from the Postal
Agency had delayed me three hours, but I was there before everyone else and unable to do anything with four pesos less thirty-three centavos. The landlady was a charming mother but a slave to her own norms, as I would confirm in the two long months I lived in her hotel. And so she refused to register me unless I paid the first month in advance: eighteen pesos for three meals and a room that slept
six.

I did not expect help from my parents for another week,
which meant that my suitcase would not move from the landing until the friends who could help me arrived. I sat down to wait in an archbishop’s easy chair with large flowers printed on it that was like a gift from heaven after an entire day in the full sun on the truck of my misfortune. The truth was that no one was sure of anything
during that time. Our agreeing to meet there on an exact day and at an exact hour lacked a sense of reality, because we did not dare say, even to ourselves, that half the country was involved in a bloody war that had been hidden in the provinces for several years, and open and lethal in the cities for the past week.

Eight hours later, stranded in the hotel in Cartagena, I did not understand what
could have happened to José Palencia and his friends. After another hour of waiting with no word from them, I went out to wander the deserted streets. In April it gets dark early. The streetlights were already on, so dim they could be confused with stars through the trees. It was enough for me to take that first fifteen-minute aimless walk along the cobbled twists and turns of the colonial district
to discover, with great relief in my chest, that this strange city had nothing to do with the canned fossil they described to us in school.

There was not a soul on the streets. The crowds who came in from the outskirts at dawn to work or sell returned in a rush to their neighborhoods at five in the afternoon, and the inhabitants of the walled enclosure shut themselves in their houses to eat supper
and play dominoes until midnight. The custom of owning private cars had not yet been established, and the few for hire remained outside the wall. Even the haughtiest functionaries still arrived at the Plaza de los Coches in buses made by local artisans, and from there they made their way to their offices, jumping over the stores of trinkets displayed on the public sidewalks. One of the most
affected governors during those tragic years boasted that he still traveled from his elite quarter to the Plaza de los Coches on the same buses he had taken to school.

The curbing of automobiles had been unavoidable because they were contrary to historical reality: they did not fit in the narrow, twisting streets of the city where the unshod hooves of
rachitic horses resounded in the night. When
it was very hot, when balconies were opened to let in the cool air from the parks, you could hear, with a spectral resonance, sudden bursts of the most intimate conversations. Dozing grandfathers heard furtive steps on the stone streets, paid attention to them without opening their eyes until they recognized them, and said in disappointment: “There goes José Antonio to see Chabela.” The only thing
that in reality drove the wakeful out of their minds were the dry knocks of the pieces on the domino table that echoed all through the walled district.

It was a historic night for me. I almost did not recognize in their reality the academic fictions from books, which had already been defeated by life. It moved me to tears that the old palaces of the marquises were the ones I saw in front of me,
chipped and peeling, with beggars sleeping in the entrances. I saw the cathedral without the bells that had been carried off by the pirate Francis Drake to make cannons. The few that were saved from the assault were exorcised after the archbishop’s sorcerers sentenced them to burn because of their malignant resonances meant to summon the devil. I saw the faded trees and the statues of illustrious
heroes that did not seem like sculptures in perishable marble but living dead men. For in Cartagena they were not preserved from the rust of time; on the contrary, time was preserved for things that continued to be their original age while the centuries grew old. That was how, on the night of my arrival, the city revealed its own life to me with every step, not as the papier-mâché fossil of the
historians but as a flesh-and-blood city, no longer sustained by its martial glories but by the dignity of its ruins.