Living to Tell the Tale (47 page)

In contrast to the rest of the country, official violence had not ravaged Cartagena until the beginning of that year, when our friend Carlos Alemán was elected deputy to the Departmental Assembly by the very distinguished district of Mompox. He was an attorney fresh out of the oven, and very good-natured, but the devil played a bad joke on him in the opening session when the
two rival parties opened fire on each other and a stray bullet scorched his shoulder pad. Alemán must have thought, and with reason, that a legislative power as useless as ours did not deserve the sacrifice of a life, and he preferred to spend his government salary in advance in the good company of his friends.

Oscar de la Espriella, who was a sterling carouser, agreed with William Faulkner that
a brothel is the best residence for a writer, because the mornings are quiet, there is a party every night, and you are on good terms with the police. Deputy Alemán took this in a literal way and made himself our full-time host. One night, however, I repented of having believed in Faulkner’s illusions when an old boyfriend of Mary Reyes, the madam of the house, knocked down the door to take away
their son, a child of five, who lived with her. Her current boyfriend, who had been a police officer, came out of the bedroom in his shorts to defend the honor and goods of the house with his regulation revolver, and the other man greeted him with a burst of gunfire that resounded in the dance hall like a shot from a cannon. The frightened sergeant hid in his room. When I came out of mine, half
dressed, the transient tenants were contemplating the boy from their rooms as he urinated at the end of the hallway, while his papá smoothed his hair with his left hand and held the still-smoking revolver in his right. All you could hear in the house were Mary’s insults as she reproached the sergeant for not having any balls.

During this same time a gigantic man came into the offices of
El Universal
unannounced, removed his shirt with a great sense of theater, and walked around the newsroom to surprise us with the sight of his back and arms mottled with scars that seemed to be of cement. Moved by the astonishment he had
inspired in us, he explained the devastation of his body in a thundering voice:

“Lions’ claws!”

It was Emilio Razzore, who had just arrived in Cartagena to prepare for the
performance season of his famous family circus, one of the great ones in the world. It had left Havana the week before on the steamship
Euskera,
of Spanish registry, and it was expected the following Saturday. Razzore boasted of having been in the circus since before he was born, and you did not need to see him perform to know he was a wild-animal tamer. He called the beasts by their first names
as if they were members of his family, and they responded with behavior that was affectionate and brutal at the same time. He would go unarmed into the cages of tigers and lions and feed them out of his hand. His pet bear had given him a loving hug that kept him in the hospital for one entire spring. The great attraction, however, was not Razzore or the fire-eater, but the man who screwed off his
head and walked around the ring holding it under his arm. The least forgettable thing about Emilio Razzore was his indomitable nature. After listening to him, fascinated, for many long hours, I published an editorial in
El Universal
in which I dared to write that he was “the most tremendously human man I have ever met.” At the age of twenty-one there had not been that many, but I believe the phrase
is still valid. We ate at La Cueva with the people from the paper, and he was cherished there, too, with his tales of wild animals humanized by love. On one of those nights, after thinking about it a good deal, I dared to ask him to take me into his circus, even if it was to wash out the cages when the tigers were not inside. He did not say anything but gave me his hand in silence. I understood
this as a secret circus gesture, and I considered it done. The only person I told was Salvador Mesa Nicholls, a poet from Antioquia with a mad love for the circus who had just come to Cartagena as a local partner of the Razzores. He too had gone away with a circus when he was my age, and he warned me that those who see clowns cry for the first time want to go away with them but regret it the next
day. Yet he not only approved of my decision but convinced the tamer, on the condition we keep it a
complete secret so that it would not become news too early. Waiting for the circus, which until then had been exciting, now became irresistible.

The
Euskera
did not arrive on the anticipated date and it had been impossible to communicate with her. After a week we established from the newspaper
offices a system of ham radio operators to track weather conditions in the Caribbean, but we could not prevent the beginning of speculation in the press and on the radio about the possibility of horrifying news. Mesa Nicholls and I spent those intense days with Emilio Razzore in his hotel room, not eating or sleeping. We saw him collapse, diminishing in volume and size during the interminable wait,
until all our hearts confirmed that the
Euskera
would never arrive anywhere, and there would be no report on what had happened to her. The animal tamer spent another day alone in his room, and the next day he visited me at the paper to say that a hundred years of daily struggle could not disappear in a single day. And so he was going to Miami with not even a nail and without a family to rebuild
piece by piece, and starting with nothing, the shipwrecked circus. I was so struck by his determination in spite of the tragedy that I accompanied him to Barranquilla to see him off on the plane to Florida. Before he boarded he thanked me for my decision to join his circus, and he promised he would send for me as soon as he had something concrete. He said goodbye with so heartbreaking an embrace
that I understood with my soul the love his lions had for him. I never heard from him again.

The Miami plane took off at ten in the morning on the same day that my editorial on Razzore appeared: September 16, 1948. I was preparing to return to Cartagena that same afternoon when it occurred to me to stop by
El Nacional,
an evening paper where Germán Vargas and Álvaro Cepeda, the friends of my
friends in Cartagena, were working. The newsroom was in a decayed building in the old city, a long, empty room divided by a wooden railing. At the back of the room a young blond man in shirtsleeves was typing on a machine whose keys exploded like bombs in the deserted room. I approached almost on tiptoe, intimidated by the mournful creaking of the floor, and I waited
at the railing until he turned
to look at me, and in a curt way, in the harmonious voice of a professional announcer, he said:

“What is it?”

He had short hair, strong cheekbones, and clear, intense eyes that seemed annoyed by the interruption. I answered the best I could, letter by letter:

“I’m García Márquez.”

Only when I heard my own name spoken with so much conviction did I realize that Germán Vargas might not know who
I was, though in Cartagena they had said they talked about me a good deal with their friends in Barranquilla after they read my first story.
El Nacional
had published an enthusiastic note by Germán Vargas, who was not easy to fool when it came to new literature. But the enthusiasm with which he received me confirmed that he knew very well who I was, and his affection was more real than I had been
told. A few hours later I met Alfonso Fuenmayor and Álvaro Cepeda in the Librería Mundo, and we had drinks at the Café Colombia. Don Ramón Vinyes, the learned Catalan whom I longed to meet and was terrified of meeting, had not come to the six o’clock
tertulia
that afternoon. When we left the Café Colombia, with five drinks under our belts, we had been friends for years.

It was a long night of
innocence. Álvaro, an inspired driver who became more certain and prudent the more he drank, followed the itinerary for memorable occasions. In Los Almendros, an open-air tavern under the flowering trees where they only admitted fans of the Deportivo Junior team, several patrons were involved in an argument that was about to come to blows. I tried to calm them down until Alfonso advised me not to
intervene because in that place filled with doctors of soccer, things did not go well for pacifists. And so I spent the night in a city that was not the one it had always been for me, or the one of my parents in their early years, or the one of poverty-stricken times with my mother, or the one of Colegio San José, but my first time in Barranquilla as an adult, in the paradise of its brothels.

The red-light district was four blocks of metallic music that made the earth tremble, but they also had domestic corners
that came very close to charity. There were family brothels whose owners, with their wives and children, tended to their veteran clients according to the norms of Don Manuel Antonio Carreño’s Christian morality and urbanity. Some served as guarantors so that apprentices would
go to bed on credit with known clients. Martina Alvarado, the oldest brothel, had a furtive door and humanitarian rates for repentant clerics. There were no hidden charges, no doctored accounts, no venereal surprises. The last French madams from the First World War, ailing and melancholy, sat in the doors of their houses under the stigma of red lightbulbs, waiting for a third generation who still
believed in their aphrodisiac condoms. There were houses with cooled rooms for clandestine meetings of conspirators and sanctuaries for mayors fleeing their wives.

El Gato Negro, with a courtyard for dancing under a bower of crape myrtle, had been the paradise of the merchant fleet ever since its purchase by a bleached-blond Guajiran who sang in English and sold her hallucinogenic pomades for
ladies and gentlemen under the table. On a historic night in the house’s annals, Álvaro Cepeda and Quique Scopell could not endure the racism of a dozen Norwegian sailors who stood in line outside the room of the only black girl while sixteen white girls sat snoring in the courtyard, and they challenged the sailors to a fight. By dint of their fists the two forced the twelve to flee, with the help
of the white girls who were happy when they woke and finished the job by hitting the sailors with their chairs. In the end, in a lunatic act of indemnification, they crowned the naked black girl queen of Norway.

Outside the red-light district there were other houses, legal or clandestine, and all on good terms with the police. One was a courtyard of large flowering almond trees in a poor district,
with a dilapidated shop and a bedroom with two cots for rent. The merchandise consisted of two anemic girls from the neighborhood who earned a peso at a time with confirmed drunkards. Álvaro Cepeda discovered the place by accident one afternoon when he was caught in an October downpour and took refuge in the shop. The owner invited him to have a beer, and she offered him two girls instead of
one with a right to repeat until
the weather cleared. Álvaro continued inviting his friends to drink ice-cold beer under the almond trees, not to go to bed with the girls but to teach them to read. He obtained scholarships for the most diligent to study at state schools. One of them had been a nurse at the Hospital de Caridad for years. He made the owner a present of the house, and until its natural
extinction, the ramshackle kindergarten had an enticing name: “The house with the little girls who go to bed because they’re hungry.”

For my first historic night in Barranquilla they chose the house of La Negra Eufemia that had an enormous cement courtyard for dancing surrounded by leafy tamarind trees, with cabanas for five pesos an hour and little tables and chairs painted bright colors and
curlews wandering as they pleased. Eufemia in person, monumental and almost a hundred years old, greeted and selected clients at the entrance, behind an office desk whose only implement—inexplicable—was an enormous church nail. She chose the girls herself for their good manners and natural graces. Each one took whatever name she liked, and some preferred the ones that Álvaro Cepeda, with his passion
for Mexican movies, gave them: Irma the Wicked, Susana the Perverse, Midnight Virgin.

It seemed impossible to have a conversation with an ecstatic Caribbean orchestra playing the new mambos of Pérez Prado at top volume, and a group that played boleros for forgetting bad memories, but we were all expert in shouting our conversations. The night’s topic, brought up by Germán and Álvaro, had to do
with the ingredients common to the novel and feature articles. They were enthusiastic about the one John Hersey had published about the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, but I preferred the direct reportorial testimony of
Journal of the Plague Year,
until the others explained to me that Daniel Defoe had been no more than five or six years old during the plague in London, which served as
his model.

By this path we came to the enigma of
The Count of Monte Cristo,
which the three of them had carried over from previous discussions as a riddle for novelists: how did Alexandre Dumas manage to have a sailor who was innocent, ignorant, poor, and
imprisoned without cause, escape an impenetrable fortress transformed into the richest and most cultivated man of his time? The answer was
that when Edmund Dantès entered the castle of If he already had constructed inside him the Abbot Faria, who transmitted to him in prison the essence of his knowledge and revealed what he needed to know for his new life: the place where a fantastic treasure was hidden, and the way to escape. That is: Dumas constructed two different characters and then switched their destinies. So that when Dantès escaped
he was already one character inside another, and all that was left of himself was his good swimmer’s body.

It was clear to Germán that Dumas had made his character a sailor so that he could escape from the burlap sack and swim to shore when they threw him into the sea. Álvaro, erudite and no doubt more caustic, replied that this was no guarantee of anything because sixty percent of Christopher
Columbus’s crews did not know how to swim. Nothing pleased him as much as sprinkling those grains of pepper to rid the stew of any aftertaste of pedantry. Carried away by the game of literary enigmas, I began to drink without moderation the cane rum with lemon that the others were drinking in slow sips. The conclusion of all three was that the talent and handling of information by Dumas in that
novel, and perhaps in all his work, was more a reporter’s than a novelist’s.