Living to Tell the Tale (55 page)

Half an hour later I led Germán Vargas by the arm to the
back of Café Japy. As soon as we had been served I said that I had to
have an urgent consultation with him. He froze, the cup halfway to his lips—identical to Don Ramón—and asked in alarm:

“Where are you going?”

His clairvoyance impressed me.

“How the hell do you know!” I said.

He did not know but had foreseen it, and he thought my resignation would be the end of
Crónica,
a grave lack of responsibility that would weigh on me for the rest of my life. He made
it clear that this was little less than treason, and no one had more right than he to tell me so. No one knew what to do with
Crónica,
but we were all aware that Alfonso had supported it at a crucial moment, including investments beyond his means, so that I could never shake Germán free of the bad idea that my irremediable move was a death sentence for the magazine. I am certain that he, who understood
everything, knew that my reasons were inescapable, but he fulfilled his moral duty to tell me what he thought.

The next day, as he was driving me to the
Crónica
office, Álvaro Cepeda gave a moving demonstration of the turmoil that his friends’ inner storms caused him. No doubt he already knew from Germán about my decision to leave, and his exemplary timidity saved both of us from any salon argument.

“What the hell,” he said. “Going to Cartagena isn’t going anywhere. The fucked-up thing would be if you went to New York, like I had to do, but here I am again, in the flesh.”

It was the kind of parabolic response that helped him in cases like mine to leap past his desire to cry. By the same token I was not surprised that he chose to talk for the first time about the project of making films in
Colombia, a conversation that we would continue without results for the rest of our lives. He brought it up in passing as an oblique way of leaving me with some hope, and he stopped short in the midst of the surging crowd and the little shops that sold trinkets on Calle San Blas.

“I already told Alfonso,” he shouted at me through the window, “to hell with the magazine: let’s do one like
Time
!”

My conversation with Alfonso was not easy for me or him
because we had been postponing a clarification for six months, and we both suffered from a kind of mental stammer on difficult occasions. During one of my puerile tantrums in the typesetting room I had removed my name and title from the masthead of
Crónica
as a metaphor of my formal resignation, and when the storm had passed I forgot to replace
them. No one noticed it except Germán Vargas, two weeks later, and he talked about it with Alfonso. It was a surprise for him as well. Porfirio, the head typesetter, told them about my tantrum, and they agreed to leave things as they were until I gave them my reasons. To my misfortune, I forgot about it altogether until the day Alfonso and I agreed I would leave
Crónica.
When we finished, he said
goodbye to me weak with laughter at a joke that was typical of him, strong but irresistible.

“The lucky thing is,” he said, “that we don’t even have to take your name off the masthead.”

Only then did I relive the incident as if it were a knife wound, and I felt the earth sinking beneath my feet, not because of what Alfonso had said in so opportune a way but because I had forgotten to clarify
the matter. Alfonso, as was to be expected, gave me an adult interpretation. If it was the only injustice we had not aired, it was not decent to leave it pending without an explanation. Alfonso would take care of the rest with Álvaro and Germán, and if all of us were needed to save the boat, I could get back in two hours. As a last resort we were counting on the editorial board, a kind of Divine
Providence that we never had managed to seat at the long walnut table of major decisions.

The comments of Germán and Álvaro filled me with the courage I needed to leave. Alfonso understood my reasons and accepted them with a kind of relief, but in no way did he suggest that
Crónica
would come to an end with my resignation. On the contrary, he advised me to take the crisis with serenity, calmed
me down with the idea of constructing a firm base with the editorial board, and said he would let me know when something could be done that in reality would be worthwhile.

It was the first clue I had that Alfonso could conceive of the unimaginable possibility that
Crónica
would end. And it did,
without grief or glory, on June 28, after fifty-eight issues in fourteen months. But half a century
later, I have the impression that the magazine was an important event in the nation’s journalism. No complete collection remained, only the first six issues and some clippings in the Catalan library of Don Ramón Vinyes.

A fortunate coincidence was that they wanted to change the living-room furniture in the house where I was living, and they offered it to me at a very reduced price. The night
before I left, as I was settling accounts at
El Heraldo,
the paper agreed to pay me in advance for six months of “La Jirafa.” With part of that money I bought Mayito’s furniture for our house in Cartagena, because I knew the family was not taking what they had in Sucre and had no way to buy new furniture. I cannot omit that after fifty years it is in good condition and still in use, because my
grateful mother never allowed it to be sold.

A week after my father’s visit I moved to Cartagena, taking only the furniture and little more than what I was wearing. In contrast to the first time, I knew how to do everything necessary, I was familiar with everything that might be needed in Cartagena, and I hoped with all my heart that things would go well for the family but not for me, as a punishment
for my lack of character.

The house was in a good location in the district of La Popa, in the shadow of the historic convent that always has seemed on the verge of falling over a precipice. The four bedrooms and two bathrooms on the ground floor were reserved for the parents and their eleven children, ranging from me, the oldest, almost twenty-six years old, to Eligio, the youngest, who was five.
All of them well brought up in the Caribbean culture of hammocks and straw mats on the floor and beds for as many as could fit in.

On the upper floor lived Uncle Hermógenes Sol, my father’s brother, and Carlos Martínez Simahan, his son. The entire house was not large enough for so many people, but the rent was lowered because of my uncle’s business dealings with the owner, about whom we knew
only that she was very rich and was called La Pepa. The family, with its implacable gift for
making jokes, did not take long to find the perfect address in the style of a popular tune: “The house of La Pepa at the foot of La Popa.”

The arrival of the offspring is a mysterious recollection for me. The electricity had gone out in half the city, and we were trying to prepare the house in the dark
so that the children could go to sleep. We older children recognized one another by our voices, but the younger ones had changed so much since my last visit that their enormous sad eyes frightened me in the light of the candles. I endured the disorder of trunks, bundles, and hammocks hanging in the dark as a domestic April 9. But what made the deepest impression on me was trying to move a shapeless
sack that kept slipping out of my hands. It contained the remains of my grandmother Tranquilina, which my mother had disinterred and taken along in order to place them in the ossuary of San Pedro Claver; the remains of my father and my aunt, Elvira Carrillo, are in the same crypt.

My uncle Hermógenes Sol was the providential man in that emergency. He had been appointed general secretary of the
Departmental Police in Cartagena, and his first radical action was to open a bureaucratic breach to save the family. Including me, with my misguided politics and a reputation for being a Communist that I had earned not for my ideology but because of how I dressed. There were jobs for everyone. They gave an administrative position without political responsibility to Papá. My brother Luis Enrique
was named a detective, and they gave me a sinecure in the offices of the National Census, which the Conservative government insisted on carrying out, perhaps in order to have some idea of how many of its adversaries were still alive. The moral cost of the job was more dangerous for me than the political cost, because I collected my salary every two weeks and could not let myself be seen in the area
for the rest of the month in order to avoid questions. The official explanation, not only for me but for more than a hundred other employees, was that I was on assignment outside the city.

The Café Moka, across the street from the census offices, was always crowded with false bureaucrats from neighboring towns who came only to collect their money. There was not a
céntimo
for my personal use during
the time I signed for my wages, because my salary was substantial but all of it went for household expenses. In the meantime, Papá had tried to matriculate me in the faculty of law and collided with the truth I had hidden from him. The mere fact that he knew it made me as happy as if I had received my diploma. My happiness was even more warranted because in the midst of so many setbacks and
difficulties, I at last had found the time and space to finish my novel.

When I walked into
El Universal
they made me feel as if I were coming home. It was six in the evening, the busiest time, and the abrupt silence that my entrance caused at the linotypes and typewriters brought a lump to my throat. Not a minute had gone by for the Indian hair of Maestro Zabala. As if I had never left, he asked
me to please write an editorial piece for him that had been delayed. An adolescent novice was using my typewriter, and he fell in his reckless haste to give up his seat to me. The first thing that surprised me was how difficult it was to write an anonymous note with editorial circumspection after some two years of the excesses of “La Jirafa.” I had a page of copy when the publisher López Escauriaza
came over to say hello. His British impassivity was a commonplace in
tertulias
with friends and political caricatures, and I was touched by his flush of joy when he greeted me with a hug. When I finished the editorial, Zabala was waiting with a slip of paper on which the publisher had offered me a salary of one hundred twenty pesos a month for writing editorials. I was so impressed by the sum,
unusual for that time and place, that I did not even give an answer or say thank you but sat down to write two more, intoxicated by the sensation that in reality the Earth did revolve around the Sun.

It was as if I had come back to my origins. The same topics corrected in liberal red by Maestro Zabala, then abbreviated by the same censorship of a censor already defeated by the impious tricks
of the newsroom, the same midnights with steak topped by a fried egg and fried plantains at La Cueva, and the same topic of changing the world that went on until dawn on the Paseo de los Mártires. Rojas Herazo had spent a year selling
paintings so that he could move anywhere else, until he married Rosa Isabel, la Grande, and moved to Bogotá. At the end of the night I sat down to write “La Jirafa,”
which I sent to
El Heraldo,
by the only modern means available at the time, which was ordinary mail, and I missed very few times, always through force majeure, until the debt was paid.

Life with my entire family, in difficult circumstances, lies in the domain not of memory but imagination. My parents slept in a bedroom on the ground floor with some of the younger children. My four sisters felt
they had the right to a bedroom of their own. Hernando and Alfredo Ricardo slept in the third, under the care of Jaime, who kept them in a state of alert with his philosophical and mathematical preaching. Rita, who was fourteen, studied until midnight at the street door, in the light of the streetlamp, in order to save electricity in the house. She memorized her lessons by singing them aloud with
the grace and good diction that she still has. Many strange moments in my books come from her reading exercises, with the mule that goes to the mill, and the child who chases the chocolate chicken, and the seer who sees the seesaw.
^*
The house was livelier and above all more human after midnight, between going to the kitchen for a drink of water, or to the toilet for liquid or solid emergencies,
or hanging crisscrossed hammocks at different levels in the hallways. I slept on the second floor with Gustavo and Luis Enrique—when my uncle and his son moved into their family house—and later with Jaime, who was subjected to the penance of not pontificating about anything after nine o’clock. One night we were kept awake for several hours by the cyclical bleating of an orphaned lamb. Gustavo said
in exasperation:

“It sounds like a lighthouse.”

I never forgot it, because at the time it was the kind of simile I caught on the fly in real life for the imminent novel.

It was the liveliest of several houses in Cartagena, which became more and more humble as the family’s resources diminished. Looking for cheaper neighborhoods, we came down in class until we reached the house in Toril, where
the ghost of a woman would appear at night. I was lucky enough not to have been there, but the accounts of my parents and brothers and sisters caused me as much terror as if I had. On the first night my parents were dozing on the sofa in the living room, and they saw the apparition as she passed from one bedroom to another, not looking at them, wearing a dress with little red flowers, her short
hair fastened behind her ears with red ribbons. My mother described her down to the print on her dress and the style of her shoes. Papá denied having seen her in order not to further upset his wife or frighten the children, but the familiarity with which the apparition moved through the house starting at dusk did not permit anyone to ignore her. My sister Margot once woke before dawn and saw her on
the rail of her bed, scrutinizing her with an intense gaze. But what affected her most was the terror of being seen from the next life.

On Sunday, coming out of Mass, a neighbor confirmed for my mother that no one had lived in that house for many years because of the boldness of the phantom, who once appeared in the dining room in the middle of the day while the family was eating lunch. The next
day my mother went out with two of the youngest children to look for a house to move into, and she found one in four hours. But it was difficult for most of my brothers and sisters to exorcise the idea that the ghost of the dead woman had moved along with them.