Living to Tell the Tale (63 page)

In the newsroom of the paper we regarded it as certain that there was not much we could do to stop the dismemberment decreed by a government on bad terms with the Liberal press. Primo Guerrero,
El Espectador
’s veteran correspondent
in Quibdó, reported on the third day that a popular demonstration of entire families, including the children, had occupied the main square, determined to stay there day and night until the government abandoned its plan. The first photographs of the rebellious mothers holding their children in their arms were languishing as the days passed because of the ravages of the vigil on a population
living outdoors. Every day we reinforced these reports in the newsroom with editorials or statements by Chocoan politicians and intellectuals residing in Bogotá, but the government seemed resolved to win through indifference. After several days, however, José Salgar approached my desk with his puppeteer’s pencil and suggested that I go to investigate what was really happening in El Chocó. I
tried to resist with the small authority I had gained with my report on Medellín, but it was not enough. Guillermo Cano, who was writing with his back to us, shouted without turning around:

“Go on, Gabo, the women in El Chocó are better than the ones you wanted to see in Haiti!”

And so I left without even asking myself how you could write an article on a protest demonstration that rejected violence.
I was accompanied by the photographer Guillermo Sánchez, who for months had been pestering me about our doing war stories together. Tired of hearing him, I had shouted at him:

“What war, damn it!”

“Don’t be a damn fool, Gabo,” he delivered the truth with a single stroke, “I always hear you saying that this country has been at war since Independence.”

At dawn on Tuesday, September 21, he appeared
in the newsroom ready to cover a muzzled war, dressed more like a guerrilla fighter than a photojournalist, with cameras and bags hanging all over his body. The first surprise before you even left Bogotá was that you went to El Chocó from a secondary airport without services of any kind, surrounded by the wreckage
of dead trucks and rusted airplanes. Ours, still alive through the arts of magic,
was one of the legendary Catalinas from the Second World War operated as a cargo plane by a civilian company. It had no seats. The interior was unadorned and gloomy, with small clouded windows and a cargo of bales of fibers for making brooms. We were the only passengers. The copilot in shirtsleeves, young and good-looking like the aviators in movies, told us to sit on the bales because they seemed
more comfortable. He did not recognize me, but I knew he had been a notable baseball player in the La Matuna leagues in Cartagena.

The takeoff was terrifying, even for a passenger as experienced as Guillermo Sánchez, because of the thundering roar of the engines and the scrap-metal clanging of the fuselage, but once stabilized in the translucent sky of the savanna, the plane glided along with
the courage of a war veteran. But past Medellín we were surprised by a diluvian rainstorm over a tangled forest between two cordilleras, and we had to fly right into it. Then we experienced something that perhaps very few mortals have experienced: it rained into the airplane through the leaks in the fuselage. Our friend the copilot, leaping over bales of brooms, brought us the day’s papers to use
as umbrellas. I covered even my face with mine, not so much to protect myself from the rain as to keep the others from seeing me weep with terror.

After two hours of luck and chance, the plane leaned to its left, descended in attack position over a dense forest, and gave two exploratory turns above the main square of Quibdó. Guillermo Sánchez, prepared to capture from the air the protest exhausted
by its erosive vigils, found nothing but the empty square. The dilapidated amphibian gave one last turn to confirm that there were no obstacles living or dead in the peaceful Atrato River, and completed its felicitous landing on water in the suffocating heat of midday.

The church patched with boards, the cement benches plastered by birds, and an ownerless mule crunching on the branches of a gigantic
tree were the only signs of human existence in the dusty, solitary square that looked like nothing so much as an African capital. Our original intention had been to take urgent
photographs of the crowd standing in protest and send them to Bogotá on the return plane, while we obtained enough firsthand information for tomorrow’s edition, which we could send by telegraph. None of that was possible,
because nothing had happened.

There were no witnesses as we walked the very long street parallel to the river, lined with shops that were closed for lunch and residences with wooden balconies and rusted roofs. It was the perfect stage but there was no play. Our good colleague Primo Guerrero, correspondent for
El Espectador,
was taking a siesta without a care in the world in a springlike hammock
under the arbor in his house, as if the silence that surrounded him was the peace of the grave. The frankness with which he explained his indolence could not have been more objective. After the demonstrations of the first few days, the tension had eased for lack of topics. Then a mobilization of the entire town was organized with theatrical techniques, some pictures were taken that were not published
because they were not very credible, and patriotic speeches were given that in fact had shaken the country, but the government remained imperturbable. Primo Guerrero, with an ethical flexibility that perhaps even God has forgiven him for, kept the protest alive in the press by dint of telegrams.

Our professional problem was simple: we had not undertaken that Tarzanic expedition in order to report
that the news did not exist. On the other hand, we had access to the means to make it true and achieve its purpose. Primo Guerrero proposed organizing the portable demonstration one more time, and nobody could think of a better idea. Our most enthusiastic collaborator was Captain Luis A. Cano, the new governor appointed after the angry resignation of the previous one, and he had the fortitude
to delay the plane so that the paper would receive Guillermo Sánchez’s red-hot photographs in time. That was how the news item invented by necessity became the only one that was true, magnified by the press and radio throughout the country and caught on the fly by the military government in order to save face. That same night a general mobilization of Chocoan politicians began—some of them very influential
in
certain sectors of the country—and two days later General Rojas Pinilla declared the cancellation of his own decision to distribute pieces of El Chocó to its neighbors.

Guillermo Sánchez and I did not return to Bogotá right away because we persuaded the paper to allow us to travel through the interior of El Chocó in order to gain profound knowledge of the reality of that fantastic world. After
ten days of silence, when we walked into the newsroom tanned by the sun and dropping with fatigue, José Salgar received us, happy but with his usual firmness of character.

“Do you know,” he asked us with his unconquerable certainty, “how long the news about El Chocó has been over?”

The question confronted me for the first time with the mortal condition of journalism. No one, in fact, had taken
interest again in El Chocó once the presidential decision not to dismember it had been published. But José Salgar supported me in the risky undertaking of cooking up what I could out of that dead fish.

What we tried to convey in four long installments was the discovery inside Colombia of another inconceivable country that we had not been aware of. A magical homeland of flowering jungles and eternal
downpours, where everything seemed like an unimaginable version of ordinary life. The great difficulty in constructing overland routes was the enormous number of indomitable rivers, but there was no more than one bridge in the entire territory. We found a highway seventy-five kilometers long through the virgin forest, built at enormous cost to connect the towns of Itsmina and Yuto, though it
did not pass through either one: an act of retaliation by the builder because of his disputes with the two mayors.

In one of the villages in the interior the postal agent asked us to take six months’ worth of mail to his colleague in Itsmina. A pack of domestic cigarettes cost thirty centavos there, as it did in the rest of the country, but when the small weekly supply plane was late the cigarettes
increased in price for each day of delay, until the inhabitants found themselves forced to smoke foreign cigarettes that ended up cheaper than domestic ones. A sack of rice cost fifteen pesos more than at the site of cultivation
because it was carried through eighty kilometers of virgin jungle on the backs of mules that clung like cats to the mountainsides. The women in the poorest towns panned
for gold and platinum in the rivers while the men fished, and on Saturdays they would sell commercial travelers a dozen fish and four grams of platinum for only three pesos.

All this took place in a society famous for its desire to study. But schools were few and far between, and students had to travel several leagues every day, on foot and by canoe, to get to school and come home again. Some
were so crowded that the same school was used Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for boys, and Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays for girls. Circumstances made them the most democratic in the country, because the child of the laundress who did not have enough to eat attended the same school as the child of the mayor.

Very few Colombians at the time knew that in the very heart of the Chocoan jungle
was one of the most modern cities in the country. Its name was Andagoya, located at the juncture of the San Juan and Condoto Rivers, and it had a perfect telephone system, and docks for the boats and launches that belonged to the city of beautiful tree-lined avenues. The small, clean houses, with large fenced-in spaces and picturesque wooden steps at the door, seemed planted on the lawns. In the
center was a casino with a cabaret-restaurant and a bar where imported liquors cost less than in the rest of the country. It was a city inhabited by men from all over the world who had forgotten nostalgia and lived there better than in their own lands under the all-embracing authority of the local manager of the Chocó Pacífico. For Andagoya, in real life, was a foreign nation of private property,
whose dredgers plundered gold and platinum from prehistoric rivers and carried them away in its own boats that went out into the world under no one’s control through the mouths of the San Juan River.

This was the Chocó that we wanted to reveal to Colombians, but with no result at all, because once the news was over everything fell back into place and it continued to be the most forgotten region
in the country. I believe that the reason is evident: Colombia had always been a country with a Caribbean
identity that opened to the world by means of the umbilical cord of Panama. Its forced amputation condemned us to be what we are today: a nation with an Andean mentality whose circumstances favor the canal between two oceans belonging not to us but to the United States.

The rhythm of the
newsroom every week would have been fatal if not for Friday afternoons, when we freed ourselves from work and congregated in the bar of the Hotel Continental across the street for some relaxation that tended to last until dawn. Eduardo Zalamea baptized those nights with a name of his own invention: “cultural Fridays.” It was my only opportunity to converse with him so I would not miss hearing about
the new books in the world, which he kept up with in his capacity as an extraordinary reader. The survivors in those
tertulias
filled with infinite drinks and unforeseeable conclusions—other than two or three eternal friends of Ulises—were those of us reporters who were not afraid to wring the neck of the swan until daybreak.

It had always surprised me that Zalamea never made any observation
regarding my editorials, although many of them were inspired by his. But when the “cultural Fridays” were established, he gave free rein to his ideas on the genre. He confessed that he disagreed with the judgments in many of my pieces and would suggest others to me, not in the tone of superior to disciple but as writer to writer.

Another frequent refuge after functions at the Cinema Club were
the midnight gatherings in the apartment of Luis Vicens and his wife, Nancy, a few blocks from
El Espectador.
He had been a collaborator of Marcel Colin Reval, editor-in-chief of the magazine
Cinématographie française
in Paris, who had traded his cinematic dreams for the good occupation of bookseller in Colombia on account of the wars in Europe. Nancy behaved as a magical host who could enlarge
a dining room that sat four into one for twelve. They had met at a family dinner soon after he arrived in Bogotá in 1937. The only place left at the table was next to Nancy, who was horrified when she saw the last guest come in, with his white hair and the skin of a mountain climber burned by the sun. “What bad luck!” she said to herself. “I’ll have to sit next to this Pole who probably
doesn’t
even know Spanish.” She was almost correct about the language, because the new arrival spoke Castilian in a raw Catalan crossed with French, and she was from Boyacá, with a short temper and a freewheeling tongue. But they got on so well after their initial greeting that they agreed to live together forever.

Their gatherings were improvised, after the great showings of films, in an apartment crowded
with a mixture of all the arts, where there was no room for another painting by the young artists of Colombia, some of whom would become famous in the world. Their guests were selected from the best in arts and letters, and members of the group in Barranquilla would show up from time to time. I was made right at home after the appearance of my first movie review, and when I left the paper before
midnight I would walk three blocks and oblige them to stay up all night. Maestra Nancy, who in addition to being a sublime cook was also a pitiless matchmaker, would improvise innocent suppers to connect me with the most attractive and liberated girls in the artistic world, and she never forgave my twenty-eight years when I told her that my true vocation was not to be a writer or a journalist
but an invincible bachelor.