Living to Tell the Tale (67 page)

“It’s not a dead fish anymore, it’s a rotten one,” I insisted.

For the first and only time I refused to do for the paper what it was my obligation to do. Guillermo Cano resigned himself to the reality and sent away the shipwrecked sailor with no explanations. Later he told me that after saying goodbye to him in his office,
he began to reflect and could not explain to himself what he had just done. Then he ordered the porter to bring the shipwrecked sailor back, and he called me on the phone with the unappealable notification that he had bought the exclusive rights to the complete story.

It was not the first time and would not be the last that Guillermo would become obstinate about a lost case and in the end be
proved correct. I informed him, depressed but in the best possible style, that I would write the article out of obedience as his employee but would not put my name to it. Without having thought about it first, this was a fortuitous but
on-target determination regarding the story, for it obliged me to tell it in the first-person voice of the protagonist, in his own style and with his own ideas,
and sign it with his name. And so I protected myself against any other shipwreck on dry land. In other words, it would be the internal monologue of a solitary adventure, just as it had happened and just as life had made it. The decision was miraculous, because Velasco turned out to be an intelligent man, with an unforgettable sensibility and courtesy, and a sense of humor at the right time and in
the right place. And to our good fortune, all of it was subject to a character without flaws.

The interview was long and thorough and took three exhausting weeks, and I did it knowing it was not for publishing raw but needed to be cooked in another pot: a feature article. I began with some bad faith, trying to have the shipwrecked sailor fall into contradictions in order to reveal his hidden
truths, but soon I was certain he had none. I did not have to force anything. It was like strolling through a meadow of flowers with the supreme freedom to choose the ones I preferred. Velasco would come to my desk in the newsroom at three o’clock sharp, we would go over the previous day’s notes, and then proceed in a straight line. At night I would write each installment that he recounted, and it
was published the following afternoon. It would have been easier and surer to write the complete adventure first and publish it revised, with all the details verified in a meticulous way. But there was no time. The topic was losing immediacy with every passing minute, and another sensational news item could topple it.

We did not use a tape recorder. They had just been invented and the best ones
were as large and heavy as a typewriter, and the magnetic tape would tangle like angel-hair candy. Transcription alone was a great feat. Even today we know that recorders are very useful for remembering, but the face of the person interviewed must never be neglected, for it can say much more than the voice, and at times just the opposite. I had to settle for the routine method of notes in school
copybooks, but thanks to this I believe I did not miss a word or nuance of the conversation and was better able to explore in a profound
way as we went along. The first two days were difficult, because the shipwrecked sailor wanted to tell everything all at once. But he soon learned, through the order and extent of my questions, and above all through his own narrative instinct and innate ability
to understand the carpentry of the work.

In order to prepare readers before throwing them into the water, we decided to begin the account with the sailor’s final days in Mobile. We also agreed not to end it at the moment he set foot on dry land but when he arrived in Cartagena cheered by the crowds, the point at which readers could follow the narrative thread on their own with facts that had
already been published. This gave us fourteen installments to maintain suspense over a period of two weeks.

The first installment was published on April 5, 1955. That edition of
El Espectador,
preceded by advertisements on the radio, sold out in a few hours. The explosive crux of the matter was suggested on the third day, when we decided to disclose the real reason for the disaster, which according
to the official version had been a storm. Searching for greater precision, I asked Velasco to tell about the storm in all its detail. By now he was so familiar with our common method that I could see a flash of roguishness in his eyes before he answered:

“The problem is there was no storm.”

What happened—he specified—was some twenty hours of strong winds, typical of the region at that time of
year, which had not been foreseen by those in charge of the voyage. The crew had been paid back wages before weighing anchor, and they spent it at the last minute on all kinds of domestic appliances to take home, something so unexpected that no one seemed alarmed when they ran out of space in the interior of the ship and secured the largest cartons on deck: refrigerators, washing machines, stoves.
The kind of cargo prohibited on a warship, and in such quantity that it took up vital space on the deck. Perhaps it was thought that an unofficial voyage of less than four days’ duration, with excellent weather forecasts, did not need to be treated with undue rigor. How many times had they made others like it, and how many more would they make without anything happening? The unlucky thing for
everybody was that winds not much stronger than those predicted convulsed the sea under a splendid sun, made the vessel list much more than expected, and broke the lines holding a cargo loaded in a careless way. If it had not been a ship as seaworthy as the
Caldas,
it would have gone down without fail, but eight sailors standing guard on the deck fell overboard. And so the primary cause of the
accident was not a storm, as official sources had insisted since the beginning, but what Velasco stated in his account: an overload of domestic appliances stowed improperly on the deck of a warship.

Another issue kept under the table was the kind of life raft available to the men who fell into the sea, of whom only Velasco survived. It is supposed that there must have been two kinds of regulation
rafts on board that fell in with them. They were made of cork and canvas, three meters long by one and a half meters wide, with a safety platform in the center, and supplied with provisions, potable water, oars, a first-aid kit, equipment for fishing and navigation, and a Bible. Under those conditions, ten people could survive on board for eight days even without the fishing equipment. But the
Caldas
had also taken on a load of smaller rafts with no supplies of any kind. According to Velasco’s account, it seems that his was one of the rafts that had no gear. The question that will remain afloat forever is how many other shipwrecked sailors managed to board other rafts that did not take them anywhere.

These had been, beyond any doubt, the most important reasons that delayed official
explanations of the shipwreck. Until it occurred to them that their claim was unsustainable because by now the rest of the crew was at home, telling the whole story everywhere in the country. The government insisted to the very end on its version of the storm, and made it official in the categorical statements of a formal communiqué. Censorship did not go to the extreme of prohibiting publication
of the remaining installments. Velasco, for his part, did his best to maintain a loyal ambiguity, and it was never learned that he had been pressured not to reveal certain truths, and he did not ask us to reveal them or prevent us from doing so.

After the fifth installment there had been a plan to issue an
offprint of the first four installments to meet the demand of readers who wanted to collect
the complete story. Don Gabriel Cano, whom we had not seen in the newsroom during those frenetic days, came down from his dovecot and went straight to my desk.

“Tell me something, my young namesake,” he asked, “how many installments is the shipwrecked sailor going to have?”

We were in the account of the seventh day, when Velasco had devoured a business card as the only edible thing in his possession,
and he could not tear his shoes apart with his teeth in order to have something to chew on. That meant we still had another seven installments. Don Gabriel was horrified.

“No, my young namesake, no,” he responded with annoyance. “There have to be at least fifty.”

I gave him my arguments, but his were based on the fact that the paper’s circulation was about to double. According to his calculations,
it could rise to a figure without precedent in the national press. An editorial committee was improvised, the economic, technical, and journalistic details were studied, and it was agreed that a reasonable limit would be twenty installments. That is to say: six more than the number planned.

Although my name did not appear on the printed installments, my method of working had leaked out, and one
night when I went to fulfill my obligations as film critic, an animated discussion about the story of the shipwrecked sailor began in the lobby of the theater. The majority of the people there were friends with whom I exchanged ideas in nearby cafés after the movie. Their opinions helped me to clarify mine for my weekly review. As for the shipwrecked sailor, the general desire—with very few exceptions—was
that the story go on for as long as possible.

One of those exceptions was a mature, elegant man wearing a beautiful camel’s hair coat and a melon-shaped hat, who followed me for some three blocks after I left the theater and was returning alone to the paper. He was accompanied by a very beautiful woman, as well dressed as he, and another man who was less impeccable. He removed his hat to greet
me and introduced himself with a name I did not retain. Without further
preamble he told me he could not agree with the report on the shipwrecked sailor because it played straight into the hands of the Communists. I explained without too much exaggeration that I was no more than the transcriber of the story told by the protagonist himself. But he had his own ideas and thought Velasco had infiltrated
the Armed Forces in the service of the Soviet Union. Then I sensed that I was talking to a high-ranking officer in the army or navy, and I was enthusiastic at the idea of a clarification. But it seemed that was all he wanted to tell me.

“I don’t know if you are aware of what you are doing,” he said, “but in any case you are doing a disservice to the country on behalf of the Communists.”

His
dazzling wife gestured in alarm and tried to move him away by the arm with a plea in a very low voice: “Please, Rogelio!” He concluded his comment with the same composure he had shown at the beginning:

“Please believe me, I permit myself to say this to you only because of the admiration I feel for what you write.”

He shook my hand again and allowed himself to be led away by his distressed wife.
His male companion was surprised and did not manage to say goodbye.

It was the first in a series of incidents that set us thinking in all seriousness about the risks in the street. A few days earlier, in a poor tavern behind the newspaper that served workers in the district until dawn, two unknown men had attempted an unprovoked attack on Gonzalo González, who was drinking his last coffee of
the night. No one could understand what motives they might have had against the most peaceable man in the world, except that they had confused him with me because of our Caribbean manners and customs, and the two g’s in his pseudonym: Gog. In any event, security at the paper warned me not to go out alone at night in a city growing more and more dangerous. For me, however, it was so reliable that I
would walk to my apartment when I finished work.

One dawn, during those intense days, I felt my hour had come in a hailstorm of glass, when somebody on the street
threw a brick through my bedroom window. It was Alejandro Obregón, who had lost his keys and had not found friends who were awake, or a room in any hotel. Tired of looking for a place to sleep, and of ringing the broken bell, he solved
the night’s problem with a brick from a nearby construction site. He almost did not greet me when I opened the door so as not to wake me altogether, and he stretched out faceup and slept on the bare floor until noon.

The crowd eager to buy the paper at the door of
El Espectador,
before it reached the street, grew bigger every day. People who worked in the business center would wait to buy it
and read the installment on the bus. I think the interest of readers began for humanitarian reasons, continued for literary reasons and in the end for political considerations, but it was always sustained by the internal tension of the account. Velasco told me episodes that I suspected were invented by him, and he found symbolic or emotional meanings in them, for example the one about the first seagull
that did not want to fly away. The story of the airplanes, as recounted by him, had a cinematic beauty. A friend of mine who was a seaman asked me how it was that I knew the sea so well, and I replied that I had only copied down Velasco’s observations with absolute fidelity. After a certain point I no longer had anything to add.

The high command of the navy did not agree. A short while before
the end of the series they sent the paper a letter of protest because it had judged, with a Mediterranean criterion and in an inelegant form, a tragedy that could occur wherever naval units operated. “In spite of the mourning and grief that have overwhelmed seven respectable Colombian homes and every man in the fleet,”—the letter said—“reporters who were neophytes in this area did not hesitate to
write a series overrun with nontechnical and illogical words and concepts, placed in the mouth of the fortunate and praiseworthy sailor who valiantly saved his life.” For this reason, the fleet requested the intervention of the Office of Information and the Press of the presidency so that it would approve—with the assistance of a naval officer—publications about the incident in the future. It
was fortunate that when the letter arrived we were at the next-to-the-last installment and could pretend ignorance until the following week.

Anticipating the final publication of the complete text, we had asked the shipwrecked sailor to help us with the names and addresses of shipmates who had cameras, and they sent us a collection of photographs taken during the voyage. There were pictures of
everything, but most were of groups of men on the deck, and in the background you could see the cartons of household appliances—refrigerators, stoves, washing machines—with their prominent brand names. That stroke of luck was enough for us to deny the official denials. The government’s reaction was immediate and categorical, and the supplement’s circulation exceeded all precedents and predictions.
But the invincible Guillermo Cano and José Salgar had only one question: