Living to Tell the Tale (66 page)

From the beginning I realized that he had kept informed about my life ever since I bought the watch at
El Nacional
in Barranquilla. He would read my articles in
El Espectador
and identify my anonymous editorials to try to interpret their hidden meanings. But he agreed that the best service I could perform for the country was to continue in the same way and not allow anyone to involve me in any
kind of political militancy.

He started talking about the topic as soon as I had the opportunity to disclose the reason for my visit. He was as informed about the situation in Villarrica as if he had been there, and we could not publish a word about it because of official censorship. But he gave me important facts so that I would understand that this was the prelude to a chronic war after half
a century of casual skirmishes. His language on that day and in that place had more elements of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán than the Marx who was his bedside reading, as he spoke of a solution that did not seem to be the rule of the proletariat but a kind of alliance of the powerless against the dominant classes. The fortunate result of that visit was not only a clarification of what was going on in the
country but also a method for better understanding it. That was how I explained it to Guillermo Cano and Zalamea, and I left the door ajar in case the end of the unfinished article ever appeared. It goes without saying that Vieira and I established a very good relationship as friends, which facilitated our contacts even during the most difficult times of his clandestinity.

Another adult drama
was growing underground until the bad news broke through the wall in February 1954, and the press published the story that a veteran of the Korean War had pawned his medals in order to eat. He was only one of the more than four thousand who had been recruited at random in another of the inconceivable moments in our history, when any fate was better than nothing for the campesinos expelled at gunpoint
from their lands by official violence. The cities, overpopulated by the displaced, offered no hope. Colombia, it was repeated almost every day in editorials, on the street, in the cafés, in family conversations, was unlivable. For many displaced campesinos, and numerous boys with no prospects, the war in Korea was a personal solution. All kinds of people went there, mixed together, without precise
criteria, not even for their physical condition, almost in the way the Spaniards came to discover America. When they trickled back to Colombia, that heterogeneous group at last had a common characteristic: they were veterans. It was enough for some to take part in a brawl for the blame to fall on all of them. Doors were closed to
them with the facile argument that they had no right to work because
their minds were imbalanced. On the other hand, there were never enough tears for the countless numbers who came back transformed into two thousand pounds of ashes.

The article about the man who pawned his medals showed a brutal contrast to another published ten months earlier, when the last veterans returned to the country with almost a million dollars in cash, and when they were exchanged at
the banks they made the price of the dollar in Colombia fall from three pesos, thirty centavos, to two pesos, ninety. But the prestige of the veterans fell lower the more they confronted the reality of their country. Before their return, scattered stories had circulated to the effect that they would receive special scholarships for productive careers, that they would receive pensions for life, that
they would have the opportunity to stay and live in the United States. The truth was just the opposite: soon after their arrival they were discharged from the army, and the only thing many of them had left in their pockets were pictures of their Japanese sweethearts left waiting for them at the military camps in Japan where they had been sent on leave from the war.

It was impossible for that
national drama not to remind me of my grandfather Colonel Márquez and his eternal wait for his veteran’s pension. I had come to think that this niggardliness was retaliation against a subversive colonel in a fierce war against the Conservative hegemony. The survivors of Korea, on the other hand, had fought against the cause of Communism and for the imperial yearnings of the United States. Yet on their
return they did not appear on the society pages but in the crime reports. One of them, who shot two innocent people to death, asked his judges: “If I killed a hundred in Korea, why can’t I kill ten in Bogotá?”

This man, like other criminals, had been sent to the war when the armistice had already been signed. But many like him were also victims of Colombian machismo, which manifested itself in
the triumph of killing a Korean veteran. It had been less than three years since the first contingent had come back, and the veterans who were the victims of violent deaths already numbered more than a dozen. For a variety of reasons, several
had died in pointless fights soon after their return. One of them was stabbed to death in a brawl because he repeated a song on a tavern jukebox. Sergeant
Cantor, who had honored his name by singing and accompanying himself on the guitar during breaks in the fighting,
^*
was shot to death only weeks after his return. Another veteran was also stabbed to death in Bogotá, and to bury him it was necessary to organize a collection among his neighbors. Ángel Fabio Goes, who had lost an eye and a hand in the war, was killed by three unidentified men who
were never captured.

I remember—as if it had happened yesterday—that I was writing the last installment of the series when the telephone on my desk rang, and I recognized the radiant voice of Martina Fonseca:

“Hello?”

I abandoned the article in the middle of the page because my heart was pounding, and I crossed the avenue to meet her at the Hotel Continental after twelve years without seeing
her. From the door it was not easy to distinguish her among the other women who were having lunch in the crowded dining room, until she signaled me with her glove. She was dressed in her usual personal style, wearing a suede coat, a faded fox on her shoulder, and a hunter’s hat, and the years were beginning to be too noticeable in her wrinkled skin, mistreated by the sun, and her dimmed eyes, all
of her diminished by the first signs of an unjust old age. We both must have realized that twelve years were a long time at her age, but we bore it well. I had tried to track her down when I first came to Barranquilla, until I learned that she was living in Panama, where her sailor was a pilot on the canal, yet it was not pride but timidity that kept me from bringing up the subject with her.

I believe she had just eaten lunch with someone who had left her alone to wait for my visit. We had three fatal cups of coffee and together smoked half a pack of rough cigarettes, groping for a way to talk without speaking, until she dared to ask me if I ever thought about her. Only then did I tell her the truth: I
had never forgotten her, but her goodbye had been so brutal that it changed my way
of being. She was more compassionate than I:

“I never forget that you’re like a son to me.”

She had read my newspaper articles, my stories, and my only novel, and she talked about them to me with a lucid and merciless perspicacity possible only through love or spite. Yet I did nothing but elude the traps of nostalgia with the meanspirited cowardice that only men are capable of. When at last
I managed to ease my tension, I dared to ask if she had given birth to the child she wanted.

“He was born,” she said with joy, “and is finishing primary school.”

“Black like his father?” I asked her with the pettiness that goes with jealousy.

She called on her usual good sense. “White like his mother,” she said. “But his papá didn’t leave as I feared but grew even closer to me.” And in the
face of my evident confusion she confirmed with a lethal smile:

“Don’t worry: the boy is his. As well as two daughters as much alike as if they were only one.”

She was happy she had come, she entertained me with some memories that had nothing to do with me, and I was vain enough to think she was hoping for a more intimate response from me. But like all men, I also mistook the time and place.
She looked at her watch when I ordered the fourth coffee and another pack of cigarettes, and stood without preamble.

“Well, baby, I’m happy to have seen you,” she said. And she concluded: “I couldn’t stand it anymore, having read you so much without knowing what you’re like.”

“And what am I like?” I dared to ask.

“Ah, no!” She laughed with all her heart. “That’s something you’ll never know!”

Only when I caught my breath in front of the typewriter did I become aware of the longing to see her that I had always had, and the terror that kept me from staying with her for the rest of our lives. The same desolate terror I felt many times after that day whenever the phone rang.

The new year of 1955 began for journalists on February 28, with the news that eight sailors on the destroyer
Caldas
of the Armada Nacional had fallen into the sea and disappeared during a storm when they were less than two hours from Cartagena. They had sailed four days earlier from Mobile, Alabama, after spending several months there for a mandated repair.

While the entire newsroom was listening in suspense to the first radio bulletin about the disaster, Guillermo Cano had turned toward me in his swivel chair
and kept his eye on me, an order ready on the tip of his tongue. José Salgar, on his way to the printing plant, also stopped in front of me, his nerves well tempered by the news. I had returned an hour earlier from Barranquilla, where I prepared a report on the eternal drama of Bocas de Ceniza, and now I was beginning to wonder when the next plane to the coast would leave so that I could write
the first story about the eight men lost at sea. But it was soon made clear in the radio bulletin that the destroyer would reach Cartagena at three in the afternoon, with no further news, for they had not recovered the bodies of the eight drowned sailors. Guillermo Cano exhaled.

“What the hell, Gabo,” he said. “Our scoop drowned.”

The disaster was reduced to a series of official bulletins, and
information was handled with the honors required for those fallen in the line of duty, but nothing more. Toward the end of the week, however, the navy revealed that one of the men, Luis Alejandro Velasco, had reached a beach in Urabá in a state of exhaustion, suffering from exposure but certain to recover after floating for ten days on a raft without oars and nothing to eat or drink. We all agreed
it would be the story of the year if we could manage to be alone with him for even half an hour.

It was not possible. The navy kept him incommunicado while he recovered at the naval hospital in Cartagena. An astute reporter from
El Tiempo,
Antonio Montaña, sneaked into the hospital disguised as a doctor and was there with him for a few brief minutes. To judge by the results, however, all he obtained
from the shipwrecked sailor were some pencil sketches of his position on the ship when he was swept overboard by the storm, and some incoherent statements that made it clear he
had orders not to tell the story. “If I had known he was a reporter I would have helped him,” Velasco declared a few days later. Once he had recovered, and was under the protection of the navy, he gave an interview to the
correspondent for
El Espectador
in Cartagena, Lácides Orozco, who could not go as far as we would have liked in order to find out how it was that a gust of wind could cause a disaster with seven men dead.

Luis Alejandro Velasco, in fact, was subjected to an ironclad commitment that prevented him from moving around or expressing himself freely even after he was transferred to his parents’ house
in Bogotá. Any technical or political question was resolved for us with cordial skill by a frigate lieutenant, Guillermo Fonseca, but with equal elegance he avoided essential facts regarding the only thing that interested us then, which was the truth about the adventure. In order to gain time, I wrote a series of background pieces on the return of the shipwrecked sailor to his parents’ house, and
his uniformed chaperones again kept me from talking to him but authorized a mindless interview on a local radio station. It became evident that we were in the hands of masters of the official art of letting the news grow cold, and for the first time I was shaken by the idea that they were hiding something very serious about the catastrophe from the public. More than a suspicion, today I remember
it as a premonition.

It was a March of icy winds, and the dusty drizzle increased the burden of my regrets. Before facing the newsroom when I was overwhelmed by defeat, I took refuge in the nearby Hotel Continental and ordered a double at the deserted bar. I was drinking it in slow sips, not even taking off my heavy ministerial overcoat, when I heard a very sweet voice almost in my ear:

“The
man who drinks alone dies alone.”

“From your lips to God’s ear, beautiful,” I answered with my heart in my mouth, convinced it was Martina Fonseca.

The voice left a trail of summery gardenias in the air, but it was not Martina. I watched her go out the revolving door and disappear, with her unforgettable yellow umbrella, on the avenue stained by the drizzle. After a second drink I crossed the
avenue, too, and reached the newsroom, sustained by the first
two drinks. Guillermo Cano saw me come in and let out a happy shout for everyone:

“Let’s see what story the great Gabo has brought us!”

I answered with the truth:

“Nothing but a dead fish.”

I realized then that the pitiless mockers in the newsroom had begun to like me when they saw me pass by in silence, dragging my dripping wet
overcoat, and none had the heart to begin the ritual gibes.

Luis Alejandro Velasco continued enjoying his repressed glory. His mentors not only permitted but sponsored all kinds of publicity perversions. He received five hundred dollars and a new watch to say the truth on the radio that his timepiece had withstood the rigors of the weather. The factory that made his tennis shoes paid him a thousand
dollars to say that his were so sturdy he had not been able to pull them apart in order to have something to chew. In a single day he gave a patriotic speech, let himself be kissed by a beauty queen, and was shown to the orphans as an example of patriotic morality. I was beginning to forget him on the memorable day when Guillermo Cano announced to me that he had him in his office, prepared
to sign a contract to recount his complete adventure. I felt humiliated.