Before adolescence, memory is more interested in the future than the past, and so my recollections of the town were not yet idealized by nostalgia.
I had left the university the year before with the rash hope that I could earn a living in journalism and literature without any need to learn them, inspired by a sentence I believe I had read in George Bernard Shaw: “From a very early age I’ve had to interrupt my education to go to school.” I was not capable of discussing this with anyone because I felt, though I could not explain why, that my reasons might be valid only to me.
Those who knew me when I was four say that I was pale and introverted, and spoke only to recount absurdities, but for the most part my stories were simple episodes from daily life that I made more attractive with fantastic details so that the adults would notice me. My best sources of inspiration were the conversations older people had in my presence because they thought I did not understand them, or the ones in intentional code in order to prevent my understanding them. Just the opposite was true: I soaked them up like a sponge, pulled them apart, rearranged them to make their origins disappear, and when I told them to the same people who had told the stories earlier, they were bewildered by the coincidence between what I said and what they were thinking.
I do not believe there is a method better than the Montessorian for making children sensitive to the beauties of the world and awakening their curiosity regarding the secrets of life. It has been rebuked for encouraging a sense of independence and individualism, and perhaps in my case this was true, but on the other hand I never learned to divide or find a square root or handle abstract ideas.
The trip to Cataca with my mother, my historic conversation with Don Ramón Vinyes, and my deep connection to the Barranquilla Group had filled me with an encouragement that lasted for the rest of my life. From then on I did not earn a centavo except with the typewriter, and this seems more meritorious to me than one might think, because the first royalties that allowed me to live on my stories and novels were paid to me when I was in my forties, after I had published four books with the most abject earnings. Before that, my life was always agitated by a tangle of tricks, feints, and illusions intended to outwit the countless lures that tried to turn me into anything but a writer.
He was the headmaster. His name was Juan Ventura Casalins and I remember him as a friend of my childhood, with nothing of the fearsome image that people had of teachers at the time. His unforgettable virtue was treating all of us as equal adults, though I still think he paid particular attention to me. In classes he would ask me more questions than he did the others, and he helped me so that my answers would be accurate and fluid. He allowed me to take books from the school library to read at home. Two of them, Treasure Island and The Count of Monte Cristo, were my happiness drug during those rocky years. I devoured them letter by letter, longing to know what happened in the next line and at the same time longing not to know in order not to break the spell. With them, as with The Thousand and One Nights, I learned and never forgot that we should read only those books that force us to reread them.
His relationship with money was very personal. Once when my mother caught him scratching at the money for the market in her purse, his defense was somewhat savage but lucid: the money one takes without permission from the purses of one’s parents cannot be a theft because the money belongs to everybody in common and they deny it to us out of envy because they can not do with it what their children do. I defended his argument to the extreme of confessing that I, too, had sacked her domestic hiding places when the need was urgent. My mother lost her temper. “Don’t be so stupid,” she almost shouted at me. “You and your brother don’t steal anything from me, because I leave the money where I know you’ll find it when you’re in trouble.” In an attack of rage I once heard her murmur in despair that God ought to allow the theft of certain things in order to feed one’s children.
I never shared the malicious view that the patience with which my father dealt with poverty showed a good deal of irresponsibility. On the contrary: I believe these were Homeric tests of an unfailing complicity between him and his wife that allowed them to maintain their courage even at the edge of the abyss. He knew that she managed panic even better than despair, and that this was the secret of our survival. What he did not think of, perhaps, is that she alleviated his sorrows while leaving the best of her life behind her.
What made Sucre an unforgettable town for me was the feeling of freedom we children had moving through the streets. In two or three weeks we knew who lived in each house, and we behaved as if we had always known them. Social customs—simplified by use—were those of modern life within a feudal culture: the wealthy—cattle ranchers and sugar industrialists—lived on the main square, and the poor wherever they could. As for ecclesiastical administration, it was a territory of missions with jurisdiction and control in a vast lacustrine empire. In the center of that world, the parish church on the main square of Sucre was a pocket version of the Cologne cathedral, copied from memory by a Spanish priest doubling as architect. The wielding of power was immediate and absolute. Every night, after the rosary, they rang the bells in the church tower the number of times that corresponded to the moral classification of the film being shown in the nearby theater, in accordance with the catalogue of the Catholic Office for Films. The missionary on duty, sitting in the door of his office, watched those who entered the theater across the street so that transgressors would be sanctioned.
The only condition for the safety of children was that they learn to swim before they walked, for the town was divided in two by a channel of dark waters that served as both aqueduct and sewer. From the time they turned one they were tossed from the balconies of the kitchens, first with life preservers so they would lose their fear of the water, and then without life preservers so they would lose their respect for death. Years later, my brother Jaime and my sister Ligia, who survived the dangers of initiation, excelled in children’s swimming championships.
From the time I was an infant in the house in Aracataca I had learned to sleep in a hammock, but only in Sucre did I make it a part of my nature. There is nothing better for taking a siesta, for experiencing the hour of stars, for thinking without haste, for making love without prejudices.
It is difficult to imagine the degree to which people lived then in the shadow of poetry. It was a frenzied passion, another way of being, a fireball that went everywhere on its own. We would open the paper, even the business section or the legal page, or we would read the coffee grounds at the bottom of the cup, and there was poetry waiting to take over our dreams. So that for us aborigines from every province, Bogotá was the capital of the country and the seat of government, but above all it was the city where poets lived. We not only believed in poetry, and would have died for it, but we also knew with certainty—as Luis Cardoza y Aragón wrote—that “poetry is the only concrete proof of the existence of man.”
My scant interest in my studies was even scantier after the note by Ulises, above all at the university, where some of the other students began to call me Maestro and introduced me as a writer. This coincided with my resolve to learn how to build a structure that was credible and fantastic at the same time but had no cracks. With perfect distant models, like Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, whose protagonist investigates the murder of his father and ends up discovering that he himself is the murderer; like “The Monkey’s Paw,” by W. W. Jacob, the perfect story in which everything that happens is accidental; like Maupassant’s Boule de suif and so many other great sinners, may God keep them in His holy kingdom.
It was a historic night for me. I almost did not recognize in their reality the academic fictions from books, which had already been defeated by life. It moved me to tears that the old palaces of the marquises were the ones I saw in front of me, chipped and peeling, with beggars sleeping in the entrances. I saw the cathedral without the bells that had been carried off by the pirate Francis Drake to make cannons. The few that were saved from the assault were exorcised after the archbishop’s sorcerers sentenced them to burn because of their malignant resonances meant to summon the devil. I saw the faded trees and the statues of illustrious heroes that did not seem like sculptures in perishable marble but living dead men. For in Cartagena they were not preserved from the rust of time; on the contrary, time was preserved for things that continued to be their original age while the centuries grew old. That was how, on the night of my arrival, the city revealed its own life to me with every step, not as the papier-mâché fossil of the historians but as a flesh-and-blood city, no longer sustained by its martial glories but by the dignity of its ruins.
In the solitude of my weekends, when the others took refuge in their houses, I was lonelier than my left hand in the empty city. My poverty was absolute, and I had the timidity of a quail, which I tried to counteract with insufferable arrogance and brutal frankness. I felt I did not belong anywhere, and even certain acquaintances made me aware of this.
The model for an epic poem like the one I dreamed about could not be anything but my own family, which was never a protagonist or even a victim of anything, but only a pointless witness and a victim of everything.
Alfonso, a specialist in every genre, placed the weight of his faith in detective stories, for which he had a burning passion. He translated or selected them, and I subjected them to a process of formal simplification that would help me in my own work. It consisted of saving space through the elimination not only of useless words but also of superfluous actions, until the stories were reduced to their pure essence without affecting their ability to convince. That is, deleting everything unnecessary in a forceful genre in which each word ought to be responsible for the entire structure. This was one of the most useful exercises in my oblique research into learning the technique for telling a story.
It was fortunate that instead of becoming easier as the days passed, the novel-in-progress began to impose its own criteria in opposition to mine, and I was ingenuous enough to understand this as a symptom of favorable winds.
Life with my entire family, in difficult circumstances, lies in the domain not of memory but imagination.
One night we were kept awake for several hours by the cyclical bleating of an orphaned lamb. Gustavo said in exasperation: “It sounds like a lighthouse.” I never forgot it, because at the time it was the kind of simile I caught on the fly in real life for the imminent novel.
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 simple search for a daily subject had made my first few months bitter. It did not leave me time for anything else: I lost hours scrutinizing other newspapers, I took notes on private conversations, I became lost in fantasies that disturbed my sleep until real life came out to meet me. In that sense, my happiest experience occurred one afternoon when I saw from a passing bus a simple sign on the door of a house: “Funeral palms for sale.” My first impulse was to knock at the door in order to ascertain the facts of that discovery, but shyness vanquished me. And so life itself taught me that one of the most useful secrets for writing is to learn to read the hieroglyphs of reality without knocking or asking anything.
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 only repose I permitted myself in those heady times were slow Sunday afternoons in the house of Álvaro Mutis, who taught me to listen to music without prejudices of class. We would lie on the rug listening with our hearts, and with no learned speculations, to the great masters. It was the origin of a passion that had begun in the obscure little room at the Biblioteca Nacional and never forgot us again. Today I have listened to as much music as I have been able to obtain, above all romantic chamber music, which I consider the pinnacle of all arts. In Mexico, while I was writing One Hundred Years of Solitude—between 1965 and 1966—I had only two records, which wore out because they were played so often: the Preludes of Debussy and the Beatles’ Hard Day’s Night. Later, in Barcelona, when at last I had almost as many as I had always wanted, alphabetical classification seemed too conventional, and I adopted for my own convenience an instrumental order: the cello, which is my favorite, from Vivaldi to Brahms; the violin, from Corelli to Schoenberg; the clavichord and the piano, from Bach to Bartók. Until I discovered the miracle that all things that sound are music, including the dishes and silverware in the dishwasher, as long as they fulfill the illusion of showing us where life is heading.
My limitation was that I could not write to music because I paid more attention to what I was hearing than to what I was writing, and even today I attend very few concerts because I feel that in my seat a somewhat prurient intimacy is established with strangers sitting near me. But with time and the possibilities of having good music at home, I learned to write with a musical background in harmony with what I am writing. Chopin’s nocturnes for quiet episodes, or sextets by Brahms for happy afternoons. On the other hand, for years I did not listen to Mozart after I was assaulted by the perverse idea that Mozart does not exist, because when he is good he is Beethoven and when he is bad he is Haydn.