Living to Tell the Tale (56 page)

In the house at the foot of La Popa, in spite of all the time I had at my disposal, I took so much joy in writing that the days seemed
too short. Ramiro de la Espriella reappeared with his degree of doctor of laws, more political than ever and enthusiastic about his readings of recent novels. Above all
Skin,
by Curzio Malaparte, which that year had become a key book for my generation. The effectiveness of its prose, the vigor of its intelligence, and the truculent conception of contemporary history kept us trapped until dawn.
But time showed us that Malaparte was destined to be a useful example of virtues other
than the ones I desired, and in the end they overthrew his image. Just the opposite of what happened to us almost at the same time with Albert Camus.

The De la Espriellas lived close to us at the time, and they had a family wine cellar that they looted in innocent bottles and brought to our house. Disregarding
the advice of Don Ramón Vinyes, I would read long selections from my rough drafts to them and my brothers and sisters, just as they were, with the rubbish still not cleared away, and on the same strips of newsprint where I wrote everything during my sleepless nights at
El Universal.

At this time Álvaro Mutis and Gonzalo Mallarino returned, but I had the fortunate modesty not to ask them to read
the unfinished rough draft that still had no title. I wanted to lock myself away and without interruption make the first copy on standard paper before the final correction. I had some forty pages more than the version I had anticipated, but I still did not know that this could be a serious obstacle. I soon learned that it was: I am slave to a perfectionist exactitude that forces me to make a preliminary
calculation of the length of a book, with the exact number of pages in each chapter and in the book as a whole. A single notable mistake in these calculations would oblige me to reconsider everything, because even a typing error disturbs me as much as a creative one. I thought this absolutist method was due to a heightened sense of responsibility, but today I know it was simple terror, pure
and physical.

On the other hand, once again not heeding Don Ramón Vinyes, I sent the complete first draft to Gustavo Ibarra when I considered it finished, though it still did not have a title. Two days later he invited me to his house. I found him in a reed rocking chair on the terrace facing the sea, tanned and relaxed in beach attire, and I was moved by the tenderness with which he caressed
my pages as he talked to me. A true teacher, who did not deliver a lecture on the book or tell me if he thought it was good or bad, but who made me aware of his ethical values. When he finished he observed me with satisfaction and concluded with his everyday simplicity:

“This is the myth of Antigone.”

From my expression he realized that I did not understand, and he took the book by Sophocles
down from his shelves and read to me what he meant. The dramatic situation in my novel was in essence the same as Antigone’s, condemned to leaving the body of her brother Polynices unburied by order of King Creon, their uncle. I had read
Oedipus in Colonus
in the volume that Gustavo himself had given to me in the days when we first met, but I did not recall the myth of Antigone well enough to
reconstruct it from memory within the drama of the banana zone, and I had not noticed their emotional affinities until then. I felt my soul stirred by happiness and disillusionment. That night I read the work again, with a strange mixture of pride at having coincided in good faith with so great a writer, and sorrow at the public embarrassment of plagiarism. After a week of dark crisis I decided to
make some fundamental changes that would rescue my good faith, still not realizing the superhuman vanity of modifying a book of mine so that it would not resemble one by Sophocles. At last—resigned—I felt I had the moral right to use a sentence of his as a reverential epigraph, which I did.

The move to Cartagena saved us in time from the serious and dangerous deterioration in Sucre, but most
of our calculations were illusory, as much for the meagerness of our income as for the size of the family. My mother used to say that the children of the poor eat more and grow faster than those of the rich, and the example of her own house was sufficient proof of this. All of our salaries would not have been enough for us to live without sudden alarms.

Time took care of the rest. Jaime, by means
of another family scheme, became a civil engineer, the only one in a family that valued a degree as if it were an aristocratic title. Luis Enrique was a teacher of accounting, and Gustavo graduated as a topographer, and both continued to be the same guitarists and singers of other people’s serenades. Yiyo surprised us from a very early age with a well-defined literary vocation and a strong character,
of which he had given us an early demonstration at the age of five when he was caught trying to set fire to a closet full of clothes in the hope of seeing firefighters putting
out the blaze inside the house. Later, when he and his brother Cuqui were invited by older fellow students to smoke marijuana, Yiyo was frightened and refused. Cuqui, on the other hand, who was always curious and reckless,
inhaled the smoke deep into his lungs. Years later, shipwrecked in the quicksand of drugs, he told me that after that first trip he had said to himself: “Shit! I don’t want to do anything else in my life but this.” For the next forty years, with a passion that had no future, he did nothing but keep the promise to die of his convictions. At the age of fifty-two he fell from his artificial paradise
and was struck down by a massive heart attack.

Nanchi—the most peaceable man in the world—stayed on in the army after his obligatory military service, excelled in all kinds of modern weaponry, participated in numerous war games, but never took part in any of our many chronic wars. He settled for being a firefighter when he left the army, but there too he never had occasion to put out a single
fire in more than five years. But he did not feel frustrated, because of a sense of humor that made him famous in the family as a master of the instant joke, and allowed him to be happy because of the mere fact of being alive.

Yiyo, in the most difficult years of poverty, became a writer and journalist by sheer hard work, without ever having smoked or taken a drink too many in his life. His irresistible
literary vocation and concealed creativity stood firm against adversity. He died at the age of fifty-four, almost not enough time to publish a book of more than six hundred pages of masterful research into the secret life of
One Hundred Years of Solitude,
which he had worked on for years without my knowing about it and without ever making a direct inquiry of me.

Rita, early in her adolescence,
knew how to learn from other people’s experience. When I returned to my parents’ house after a long absence, I found her suffering the same purgatory that all the girls had suffered because of her love for a good-looking, serious, and decent dark-skinned man whose only incompatibility with her was a height of some fifty centimeters. That same night I found my father listening to the news on his
hammock in the bedroom. I turned down the volume, sat
on the bed facing him, and asked him with my right of primogeniture what was going on with Rita’s boyfriend. He fired the answer at me that he no doubt had always anticipated.

“The only thing going on is that the guy’s a thief.”

Just what I expected.

“What kind of thief?” I asked him.

“A thief thief,” he said, still not looking at me.

“But what has he stolen?” I asked him without mercy.

He still did not look at me.

“Well,” he said at last with a sigh. “Not him, but he has a brother who’s in jail for stealing.”

“Then there’s no problem,” I said with easy imbecility, “because Rita doesn’t want to marry him but the one who’s not in jail.”

He did not reply. His well-proven honesty had gone astray beginning with the first answer,
because he also knew that the rumor about the imprisoned brother was not true. With no further arguments, he tried to cling to the myth of dignity.

“All right, but they should marry right away, because I don’t want long engagements in this house.”

My reply was immediate and had a lack of charity that I have never forgiven myself for:

“Tomorrow, first thing.”

“Man! There’s no need to exaggerate!”
Papá replied, startled but smiling his earlier smile. “That girl doesn’t even have anything to wear yet.”

The last time I saw Aunt Pa, when she was almost ninety years old, was on an afternoon when the heat was hideous and she arrived unannounced in Cartagena. She had traveled from Riohacha in an express taxi, carrying a student’s schoolbag and wearing strict mourning and a black cloth turban.
She entered the house happy, her arms spread wide, and shouted to everyone:

“I’ve come to say goodbye because I’m going to die now.”

We took her in not only because she was who she was, but because we knew to what extent she understood her dealings with death. She stayed in the house, waiting for her time in the little maid’s room, the only one she would agree to sleep in, and
there she died
in the odor of chastity at an age that we calculated to be a hundred and one years old.

That period was the most intense at
El Universal.
Zabala guided me with his political knowledge so that my pieces would say what they had to and not collide with the censor’s pencil, and for the first time he was interested in my old idea of writing feature articles for the paper. A dreadful subject soon arose
when tourists were attacked by sharks on the beaches of Marbella. But the most original idea that occurred to the municipality was to offer fifty pesos for each dead shark, and on the following day there were not enough branches on the almond trees to display the ones captured during the night. Héctor Rojas Herazo, collapsing with laughter, wrote from Bogotá in his new column in
El Tiempo
a mocking
note about the blunder of applying to the shark hunt the timeworn method of barking up the wrong tree. This gave me the idea of writing an article about the nocturnal hunt. Zabala supported me with enthusiasm, but my failure began from the moment I set foot on the boat and they asked me if I got seasick and I answered no; if I was afraid of the ocean and the truth was yes but again I said no;
and the last question was if I knew how to swim—it should have been the first—and I did not dare tell the lie that I did. In any event, on solid ground and in a conversation with sailors, I learned that the hunters went to Bocas de Ceniza, eighty-nine nautical miles from Cartagena, and returned loaded down with innocent sharks to sell as criminals at fifty pesos each. The big news ended that same
day, and my hope for the article ended too. In its place I published story number eight: “Nabo, the Black Man Who Made the Angels Wait.” At least two serious critics and my uncompromising friends in Barranquilla judged it a good change of direction.

I do not believe I had enough political maturity to be affected, but the truth is that I suffered a relapse similar to the previous one. I felt so
bogged down that my only diversion was to stay up all night singing with the drunks in Las Bóvedas, the vaults at the walls, which had been soldiers’ brothels during the colonial period and then a sinister political prison. General Francisco de Paula Santander had served an eight-month sentence
there before he was exiled to Europe by his comrades in cause and in arms.

The custodian of those historical
relics was a retired linotypist whose active colleagues met there with him after the papers went to press to celebrate the new day every day with a demijohn of clandestine white rum made by the arts of horse thieves. They were educated typographers by family tradition, dramatic grammarians, and great Saturday drinkers. I joined their brotherhood.

The youngest was named Guillermo Dávila, and he
had accomplished the feat of working on the coast in spite of the intransigence of some regional leaders who resisted admitting Cachacos into the brotherhood. Perhaps he accomplished this by means of the art of his art, because in addition to his good trade and personal charm he was a marvelous illusionist. He kept us dazzled with the magical mischief of making live birds come out of desk drawers
or leaving the paper blank on which the editorial was written that we had just turned in as the edition was about to close. Maestro Zabala, so uncompromising in his duty, forgot for an instant about Paderewski and the proletarian revolution, and requested applause for the magician with the warning, always repeated and always disobeyed, that this was the last time. For me, sharing the daily routine
with a magician was like discovering reality at last.

On one of those dawns in Las Bóvedas, Dávila told me his idea of putting out a newspaper measuring twenty-four by twenty-four—half a standard sheet of paper—that would be distributed free of charge at the busy time in the afternoons when businesses closed. It would be the smallest newspaper in the world, meant to be read in ten minutes. And
it was. It was called
Comprimido (Condensed),
I wrote it in an hour at eleven in the morning, Dávila typeset and printed it in two hours, and a daring newsboy who did not even have enough breath to shout its name more than once handed it out.

It came out on Tuesday, September 18, 1951, and it is impossible to conceive of a more overwhelming or short-lived success: three editions in three days.
Dávila confessed to me that not even with an act of black magic would he have been able to
conceive of so great an idea at so little cost, that would fit into so small a space, be executed in so short a time, and disappear with such great speed. The strangest thing was that for an instant on the second day, intoxicated by the scramble of takers on the street and the fervor of fans, I came to think
that the solution to my life might be this simple. The dream lasted until Thursday, when the manager showed us that one more edition would leave us bankrupt even if we decided to publish advertisements, for they would have to be so small and so expensive there was no rational solution. The very concept of the paper, based on its size, brought with it the mathematical seed of its own destruction:
the more it sold the more unaffordable it was.