Living to Tell the Tale (52 page)

I had to change the title
La casa
—so familiar
by then to my friends—because it had nothing to do with the new project, but I made the mistake of noting in a school copybook the titles that occurred to me as I was writing, and I came up with more than eighty. At last I found it without looking for it in the first version that was almost finished when I succumbed to the temptation of writing an author’s prologue. The title sprang to my eye,
as the disdainful and at the same time compassionate name with which my grandmother, in the fragments of her aristocratic self, baptized the desolation left behind by the United Fruit Company:
Leaf Storm
.

The authors who stimulated me most in the writing of it were North American novelists, in particular those whose books my friends from Barranquilla had sent to me in Sucre. Above all because
of the affinities of all kinds that I found between the cultures of the Deep South and the Caribbean, with which I have an absolute, essential, and irreplaceable identification in my formation as a human being and as a writer. After I became aware of this, I began to read like a real working novelist, not only for pleasure but out of an insatiable curiosity to discover how books by wise people were
written. I read them forward first, then backward, and subjected them to a kind of surgical disemboweling until I reached the most recondite mysteries of their structure. In the same way, my library has never been much more than a working tool, where without delay I can consult a chapter by Dostoevsky, or verify a fact about Julius Caesar’s epilepsy or the mechanism of an automobile
carburetor.
I even have a manual on how to commit perfect murders in the event one of my defenseless characters should ever need it. The rest of it was created by friends who guided me in my reading and at the right moment lent me the books I had to read, and by those who have made pitiless readings of my originals before they are published.

Examples like these produced a new self-awareness in me, and the
Crónica
project gave me wings. Our morale was so high that in spite of insurmountable obstacles we even had our own offices on the third floor of a building without an elevator, surrounded by the shouts of the women peddling food, and the lawless buses on Calle San Blas, which was a tumultuous fair from daybreak until seven at night. There was almost no room for us. The telephone had not yet been
installed, and an air conditioner was a fantasy that could cost us more than publishing the weekly, but Fuenmayor had already had time to fill the office with his ragged encyclopedias, his press cuttings in any language, and his celebrated manuals of strange trades. On his publisher’s desk was the historic Underwood he had rescued at grave risk to his own life from a burning embassy, which today
is a jewel in the Museo Romántico in Barranquilla. I occupied the only other desk, with a typewriter lent to us by
El Heraldo,
in my brand-new capacity as editor-in-chief. There was a drawing table for Alejandro Obregón, Orlando Guerra, and Alfonso Melo, three famous painters who had agreed in their right minds to illustrate the contributions, and they did, at first because of their congenital
generosity, and in the end because we did not have a
céntimo
to spare even for ourselves. The dedicated and self-sacrificing photographer was Quique Scopell.

Aside from the editorial work that corresponded to my title, it was also my job to supervise the typesetting and help the proofreader in spite of my Dutchman’s spelling. Since my commitment to
El Heraldo
to continue “La Jirafa” was still
in effect, I did not have much time for regular contributions to
Crónica.
I did, however, have time to write my stories in the idle small hours of the morning.

Alfonso, a specialist in every genre, placed the weight of his faith in detective stories, for which he had a burning passion.
He translated or selected them, and I subjected them to a process of formal simplification that would help me
in my own work. It consisted of saving space through the elimination not only of useless words but also of superfluous actions, until the stories were reduced to their pure essence without affecting their ability to convince. That is, deleting everything unnecessary in a forceful genre in which each word ought to be responsible for the entire structure. This was one of the most useful exercises
in my oblique research into learning the technique for telling a story.

Some of the best ones by José Félix Fuenmayor saved us on several Saturdays, but circulation was immovable. The perpetual life raft, however, was the temperament of Alfonso Fuenmayor, who had never been recognized for his talents as a man of business, and with a tenacity superior to his strength he persisted in ours, which
he himself tried to wreck at every step with his terrible sense of humor. He did everything, writing the most lucid editorials or the most trivial notes with the same perseverance he brought to obtaining advertisements, unthinkable amounts of credit, and exclusive pieces from difficult contributors. But they were sterile miracles. When the newsboys came back with the same number of copies they had
taken out to sell, we attempted personal distribution in our favorite taverns, from El Tercer Hombre to the taciturn bars in the river port, where we had to collect our scant profits in ethylic kind.

One of the most reliable contributors, and no doubt the one who was read the most, turned out to be El Vate Osío. Beginning with the first issue of
Crónica
he was unfailing, and in his “Diary of
a Typist,” written under the pseudonym Dolly Melo, he succeeded in conquering readers’ hearts. No one could believe that so many different kinds of jobs were performed with so much flair by the same man.

Bob Prieto could prevent the shipwreck of
Crónica
with some medical or artistic find from the Middle Ages. But in questions of work he had a transparent standard: if you do not pay there is no
product. Very soon, of course, and with sorrow in our hearts, there was none.

We managed to publish four enigmatic stories by Julio Mario
Santodomingo, written in English, which Alfonso translated with the eagerness of a dragonfly hunter in the foliage of his strange dictionaries, and Alejandro Obregón illustrated with the refinement of a great artist. But Julio Mario traveled so much, and with
so many contrary destinations, that he became an invisible partner. Only Alfonso Fuenmayor knew where to find him, and he revealed it to us in an unsettling phrase:

“Every time I see a plane fly over I think Julio Mario Santodomingo is on it.”

The rest were occasional contributors who in the last minutes before going to press—or before payment—kept us in suspense.

Bogotá approached us as equals,
but none of those useful friends made any kind of effort to keep the weekly afloat. Except Jorge Zalamea, who understood the affinities between his magazine and ours and proposed an agreement for exchanging material, which had good results. But I believe that in reality no one appreciated what
Crónica
already had of the miraculous. The editorial board consisted of sixteen members chosen by us
according to each one’s recognized merits, and all of them were flesh-and-blood creatures but so powerful and busy that it was easy to doubt their existence.

For me,
Crónica
had the lateral importance of obliging me to improvise emergency stories to fill unexpected spaces in the anguish of going to press. I would sit at the typewriters while linotypists and typesetters did their work, and out
of nothing I would invent a tale the size of the space. This was how I wrote “How Natanael Pays a Visit,” which solved an urgent problem for me at dawn, and “A Blue Dog’s Eyes” five weeks later.

The first of these two stories was the origin of a series with the same character, whose name I took without permission from André Gide. Later I wrote “The End of Natanael” in order to resolve another
last-minute drama. Both formed part of a sequence of six, which I filed away without sorrow when I realized they had nothing to do with me. Of those I remember in part, I recall one but do not have the slightest idea of its plot: “How Natanael Dresses Like a Bride.” Today the character does not resemble anyone I have known, and it was not based
on my own or other people’s experiences, and I cannot
even imagine how it could be a story of mine with so equivocal a subject. No question, then, that Natanael was a literary risk with no human interest. It is good to remember these disasters in order not to forget that a character is not invented from zero, as I tried to do with Natanael. It was my good luck that I did not have enough imagination to go too far away from myself, and my bad luck
that I was also convinced that literary work had to be paid as well as laying bricks, and if we paid typographers good salaries, and on time, with even more reason we had to pay writers.

The greatest resonance we had from our work on
Crónica
came to us in Don Ramón’s letters to Germán Vargas. He was interested in the most unexpected news, and in events and his friends in Colombia, and Germán
would send him newspaper clippings and tell him in endless letters the news prohibited by the censors. That is, for him there were two
Crónicas
: the one we produced and the one Germán summarized for him on weekends. Our most rapacious desire was for Don Ramón’s enthusiastic or harsh comments on our articles.

People proposed several causes to explain
Crónica
’s difficulties, and even the uncertainties
of the group, and I found out by accident that some attributed these to my congenital and contagious bad luck. As lethal proof they would cite my article on Berascochea, the Brazilian soccer player, with which we had wanted to reconcile sport and literature in a new genre, and which was a categorical disaster. When I learned about my infamous reputation it was already widespread among the
patrons at Japy. Demoralized down to the marrow of my bones, I mentioned it to Germán Vargas, who already knew about it, as did the rest of the group.

“Take it easy, Maestro,” he said without the slightest doubt. “Writing the way you write can be explained only by a kind of good luck that no one can defeat.”

Not all nights were bad. July 27, 1950, in the sporting house of La Negra Eufemia, had
a certain historical value in my life as a writer. I do not know for what good reason the madam had ordered an epic stew with four kinds of meat, and the curlews,
excited by the untamed aromas, shrieked without restraint around the fire. A frenetic patron grabbed a curlew by the neck and threw it alive into the boiling pot. The animal just managed a howl of pain and a final flap of its wings,
and then it sank into the depths of hell. The savage killer tried to grab another one, but La Negra Eufemia had already risen from her throne with all her power.

“Be still, damn it,” she shouted, “or the curlews will peck out your eyes!”

It mattered only to me, because I was the only one who did not have the heart to taste the sacrilegious stew. Instead of going to sleep, I hurried to the
Crónica
office and wrote in a single sitting the story about three patrons in a bordello whose eyes were pecked out by curlews and nobody believed it. It had only four office-size pages, double spaced, and it was told in the first person plural by a nameless voice. Its realism is evident and yet it is the most enigmatic of my stories, and it also turned me onto a path I was about to abandon because
I could not follow it. I had begun writing at four in the morning on Friday and finished at eight, tormented by a prophet’s blinding light. With the infallible complicity of Porfirio Mendoza, the historic typesetter at
El Heraldo,
I altered the layout for the edition of
Crónica
that would circulate the next day. At the last minute, desperate because of the guillotine of going to press, I dictated
to Porfirio the definitive title I had found at last, and he wrote it straight into molten lead: “The Night of the Curlews.”

For me it was the beginning of a new era, after nine stories that were still in metaphysical limbo and when I had no plans to continue with a genre I could not manage to grasp. The following month, Jorge Zalamea reproduced it in
Crítica,
an excellent journal of important
poetry. I reread it fifty years later, before I wrote this paragraph, and I believe I would not change even a comma. In the midst of the disorder without a compass in which I was living, that was the beginning of spring.

The country, on the other hand, was going into a tailspin. Laureano Gómez had returned from New York to be proclaimed the Conservative candidate for the presidency of the Republic.
Liberalism abstained in the face of the empire of violence,
and Gómez was elected as the lone candidate on August 7, 1950. Since Congress was in adjournment, he took office before the Supreme Court.

He almost had no chance to govern in person, for after fifteen months he retired from the presidency for real reasons of health. He was replaced by the Conservative jurist and parliamentarian Roberto
Urdaneta Arbeláez, in his capacity as first deputy of the Republic. Shrewd observers interpreted this as a formula, very typical of Laureano Gómez, to leave power in other hands but not lose it, and to continue governing from his house by means of an intermediary. And in urgent cases, by means of the telephone.

I think that the return of Álvaro Cepeda with his degree from Columbia University
a month before the sacrifice of the curlew was decisive for enduring the grim prospects of those days. He came back with more disheveled hair and without his brush mustache, and wilder than when he left. Germán Vargas and I, who had been expecting him for several months fearful that he had been tamed in New York, died laughing when we saw him leave the plane in a jacket and tie, waving at us from
the steps with Hemingway’s latest:
Across the River and into the Trees.
I tore it out of his hands, caressed it on both sides, and when I tried to ask him something, Álvaro anticipated me:

“It’s a piece of shit!”

Germán Vargas, weak with laughter, whispered into my ear: “He’s just the same.” But Álvaro clarified for us later that his opinion of the book was a joke, because he had just started
to read it on the flight from Miami. In any case, what raised our spirits was that he brought back with him, more virulent than ever, the measles rash of journalism, movies, and literature. In the months that followed, as he reacclimated, he kept our fever at 104 degrees.