Living to Tell the Tale (62 page)

“Don’t worry, my little namesake.”

The next day the response to the producer appeared in “Day
by Day,” written by Guillermo Cano in a deliberate academic style, and its conclusion said it all: “The public is not intimidated and certainly no one’s interests are prejudiced if the press publishes serious and responsible cinematic criticism, which resembles that of other countries and breaks the old and prejudicial patterns of immoderate praise for what is good as well as what is bad.” It was
not the only letter or our only response. Functionaries from the movie theaters attacked with bitter complaints, and we received contradictory letters from confused readers. But it was all in vain: the column survived until movie criticism stopped being occasional in the country and became routine in the press and on the radio.

After that, in a little less than two years, I published seventy-five
critical reviews, to which should be added the hours spent seeing the films. In addition to some six hundred editorials, a signed or unsigned article every three days, and at least eighty feature articles, some signed, some anonymous. My literary contributions were published in the
Magazine Dominical
of the same paper, including several stories and the complete series
on “La Sierpe,” which had
been interrupted in the magazine
Lámpara
because of internal disagreements.

It was the first prosperity in my life, but I had no time to enjoy it. The apartment that I rented furnished, with laundry service, was no more than a bedroom with a bath, telephone, breakfast in bed, and a large window looking out on the eternal drizzle of the saddest city in the world. I used it only for sleeping from
three in the morning, after I had read for an hour, until the morning newscasts on the radio would orient me to the actuality of the new day.

I did not stop thinking with a certain disquiet that it was the first time I had my own fixed place to live but had no time even to think about it. I was so busy dealing with my new life that my only notable expense was the lifeboat I sent without fail
at the end of the month to my family. I realize only today that I almost had no time to think about my private life. Perhaps because there survived inside me the idea of Caribbean mothers that women from Bogotá gave themselves without love to men from the coast only to fulfill their dream of living by the ocean. But in my first bachelor apartment in Bogotá, I accomplished this without risk when I
asked the porter if visits from female friends at midnight were permitted, and he gave me this wise reply:

“It’s prohibited, Señor, but I don’t see what I shouldn’t.”

At the end of July, without prior warning, José Salgar stopped in front of my desk as I was writing an editorial and looked at me in a long silence. I stopped in the middle of a sentence and said to him, intrigued:

“What’s going
on!”

He did not even blink, playing an invisible bolero with his red pencil, wearing a diabolical smile whose purpose was far too noticeable. He explained without being asked that he had not authorized me to write the article on the massacre of the students on Carrera Séptima because it was a difficult assignment for a beginner. On the other hand, he would offer me, on his own responsibility,
the reporter’s diploma, in a direct way but without the slightest spirit of a challenge, if I was capable of accepting a mortal proposition from him:

“Why don’t you go to Medellín and tell us what the hell it was that happened there?”

It was not easy to understand, because he was talking about something that had occurred more than two weeks earlier, which allowed the suspicion that the news
was stale beyond recovery. It was known that on the morning of July 12 there had been a landslide in La Media Luna, a steep, craggy place in the east of Medellín, but the outrage in the press, the disorder among the authorities, and the panic of those injured had caused administrative and humanitarian confusions that obscured the reality. Salgar did not ask me to try to establish as far as possible
what had happened, he ordered me flat out to reconstruct the whole truth and nothing but the truth on the site, and in a minimum amount of time. But something in the way he said it made me think that at last he had loosened the rein.

Until then the only thing everyone knew about Medellín was that Carlos Gardel had died there, burned to a crisp in an aerial catastrophe. I knew it was a land of
great writers and poets, and that the Colegio de la Presentación, where Mercedes Barcha had begun to study that year, was located there. Faced with so delirious a mission, it no longer seemed unattainable to reconstruct, piece by piece, the calamity of a mountain. And so I landed in Medellín at eleven in the morning, in a rainstorm so frightening I deceived myself into thinking I would be the final
victim of the landslide.

I left my suitcase in the Hotel Nutibara, with clothing for two days and an emergency tie, and went out to the street in an idyllic city still clouded over with the remnants of the storm. Álvaro Mutis had made the trip to help me endure my fear of planes, and he put me on the track of well-placed people in the life of the city. But the chilling truth was that I did not
have the slightest idea of where to begin. I wandered streets radiant under the golden dust of a splendid sun following the storm, and after an hour I had to take shelter in the first store I came to because it started raining again while the sun was shining. Then I began to feel the first flutterings of panic in my chest. I tried to repress them with my grandfather’s magic formula in
the middle
of combat, but in the end my fear of fear overcame my morale. I realized I would never be able to do what I had been assigned to do, and I had not had the courage to say so. Then I understood that the only sensible thing would be to write a letter of thanks to Guillermo Cano and go back to Barranquilla and the state of grace in which I had found myself six months earlier.

With the immense relief
of having come out of hell, I took a taxi to go back to the hotel. The midday newscaster made a long commentary at the top of his voice, as if the landslides had happened yesterday. The driver almost shouted as he gave vent to his feelings about the negligence of the government and the poor handling of relief for the injured, and somehow I felt responsible for his righteous anger. But then it
cleared again, and the air became diaphanous and fragrant because of the explosion of flowers in Parque Berrío. All of a sudden, I do not know why, I felt the onset of madness.

“Let’s do this,” I said to the driver. “Before we go to the hotel, take me to the place where the landslides happened.”

“But there’s nothing to see there,” he said. “Just lit candles and little crosses for the dead they
haven’t been able to get out.”

This was how I learned that victims as well as survivors came from different parts of the city, and the survivors had walked across town en masse to recover the bodies of those killed in the first slide. The great tragedy occurred when curious onlookers overran the site, and another part of the mountain slid down in a devastating avalanche. So that the only people
who could tell the story were the few who had escaped successive slides and were alive at the other end of the city.

“I understand,” I told the driver, trying to control the tremor in my voice. “Take me to where the living are.”

He made a U-turn in the middle of the street and raced off in the opposite direction. His silence must have been the result not only of his current speed but also his
hope of convincing me with his explanations.

The thread of the story began with two boys, eight and eleven years old, who had left their house to cut wood on Tuesday, July 12, at seven in the morning. They had gone about a
hundred meters when they heard the crash of the avalanche of earth and rocks rushing toward them down the side of the hill. They just managed to escape. Their three younger
sisters were trapped in the house along with their mother and their newborn baby brother. The only survivors in the family were the two boys who had just gone out, and the father, who had left early for his work as a sand vendor ten kilometers from the house.

The place was an inhospitable wasteland along the highway from Medellín to Rionegro, which at eight in the morning had no inhabitants to
become further victims. The radio stations had broadcast the exaggerated news item with so many bloody details and urgent appeals that the first volunteers arrived before the firefighters. At noon two more victimless slides had taken place, which increased the general anxiety, and a local radio station set itself up for direct transmission from the site where the disaster had occurred. At that time
almost all the inhabitants of nearby towns and neighborhoods were there, in addition to the curious from all over the city drawn by the appeals on the radio, and the passengers who got off intercity buses more to interfere than to help. In addition to the few bodies from the morning, there were another three hundred in the successive slides. But late in the afternoon, more than two thousand unprepared
volunteers were still offering confused assistance to the survivors. By sunset there was almost no room to breathe. The crowd was dense and chaotic at six o’clock, when another devastating avalanche of six hundred thousand cubic meters came down with a colossal din, causing as many victims as if it had happened in Parque Berrío in Medellín. A catastrophe so rapid that Dr. Javier Mora, the
city’s secretary of public works, found in the rubble the body of a rabbit that did not have time to escape.

Two weeks later, when I visited the site, only seventy-four corpses had been recovered, and numerous survivors were out of danger. Most were victims not of the slides but of imprudence and unruly solidarity. As happens in earthquakes, it was not possible to calculate the number of people
with problems who took advantage of the opportunity to disappear without a
trace in order to escape their debts or change their wife. But good fortune also had a part to play, because a subsequent investigation showed that after the first day, while recoveries were still being attempted, a mass of rock capable of generating an avalanche of fifty thousand cubic meters had been about to dislodge.
More than fifteen days later, with the help of survivors who now were calm, I was able to reconstruct the story, which would not have been possible at the moment it happened because of the awkwardness and unwieldiness of reality.

My job was reduced to rescuing the truth that had been lost in a tangle of contrary suppositions and reconstructing the human drama in the order in which it had occurred,
and apart from all political and sentimental calculation. Álvaro Mutis had set me on the right track when he sent me to the publicist Cecilia Warren, who organized the data I brought back from the site of the disaster. The feature article was published in three parts, and it at least had the merit of awakening interest in a forgotten news item two weeks after the event and bringing order to
the chaos of the tragedy.

But my best memory of those days is not what I did but what I almost did thanks to the delirious imagination of my old pal from Barranquilla, Orlando Rivera (Figurita), whom I happened to run into on one of my few breaks from the investigation. He had been living in Medellín for the past few months, and was the happy new husband of Sol Santamaría, a charming, free-spirited
nun whom he had helped to leave a cloistered convent after seven years of poverty, obedience, and chastity. During one of our memorable drinking bouts, Figurita revealed that he had prepared, with his wife and on his own account, a masterful plan to get Mercedes Barcha out of her boarding school. A priest who was a friend of his, and famous for his arts as a matchmaker, would be ready at any
hour to marry us. The only condition, of course, was that Mercedes agree, but we found no way to talk it over with her inside the four walls of her captivity. Today more than ever I feel fierce regret at not having the temerity to live that newspaper-serial drama. Mercedes, for her part, did not learn of the plan until more than fifty years later, when she read about it in the rough draft of this
book.

It was one of the last times I saw Figurita. During Carnival in 1960, disguised as a Cuban tiger, he slipped from the float that was taking him back to his house in Baranoa after the final parade and broke his neck on the pavement covered with debris and trash.

On the second night of my work on the landslides in Medellín, two reporters from
El Colombiano
—so young they were even younger
than me—were waiting at the hotel, determined to interview me about the stories of mine that had been published up to that time. It was hard for them to persuade me, because I had, and still have, a prejudice that may be unfair against interviews understood as a session of questions and answers in which both parties make an effort to maintain a revelatory conversation. I suffered from this prejudice
at the two papers where I had worked, and above all at
Crónica,
where I tried to infect the contributors with my reluctance. But I granted that first interview for
El Colombiano,
and its sincerity was suicidal.

Today I have been the victim of countless interviews over the course of fifty years and in half the world, and I still have not convinced myself of the efficacy of the genre, either asking
the questions or answering them. An immense majority of the ones I have not been able to avoid on any subject ought to be considered as an important part of my works of fiction, because they are no more than that: fantasies about my life. On the other hand, I consider them invaluable, not for publication but as raw material for feature articles, which I value as the stellar genre of the best
profession in the world.

In any case, it was not the time for festivals. The government of General Rojas Pinilla, now in open conflict with the press and a large part of public opinion, had ended the month of September with the decision to divide the remote and forgotten department of El Chocó among its three prosperous neighbors: Antioquia, Caldas, and Valle. Quibdó, the capital, could be reached
from Medellín only on a one-lane road in such bad condition that more than twenty hours were needed to travel one hundred seventy kilometers. The situation is no better today.