Back then everyone was young. But there was something worse: in spite of our implausible youth, we were always meeting others who were younger than we were, and that made us feel a sensation of danger and an urgency to finish things that were not letting us calmly enjoy our well-earned youth. The generations shoved one another, especially among the poets and the criminals, and just as soon as you’d done something, along came someone threatening to do it better. Sometimes I find by chance a photograph from those days and I can’t suppress a shiver of pity, because I don’t think those in the picture are actually us, but rather that we were our own children.
Bogotá was a remote, lugubrious city back then, where an inclement drizzle had been falling since the beginning of the sixteenth century. I suffered that bitterness for the first time on an ill-fated January afternoon, the saddest of my life, when I arrived from the coast just thirteen years old, in a black wool suit of my father’s that had been tailored to fit me, with a vest and hat, and a metal trunk that had something of the splendor of the holy sepulcher. My lucky star, which has so rarely failed me, did me the immense favor of making sure no photo exists of that afternoon.
The first thing that caught my attention in that somber capital was that there were too many hastening men in the streets, that they were all dressed like me, in black suits and hats, and, conversely, I could not see any women. The huge Percheron horses that pulled the beer wagons in the rain caught my attention, as did the pyrotechnical sparks from the streetcars as they turned the corners under the rain, and the stopped traffic to let the interminable funerals pass by under the rain. They were the gloomiest funerals in the world, with high altar carriages and horses decked out in black velvet and feather hoods, and corpses of good families who think themselves the inventors of death. Under the fine drizzle of the Plaza de las Nieves, as a funeral pulled out, I saw a woman on the streets of Bogotá for the first time, and she was slender and stealthy, as poised as a queen in mourning, but I was left forever with half the illusion, because her face was covered by an impenetrable veil.
The image of that woman, which still flusters me, is one of my few nostalgic memories of that city of sin, in which almost everything was possible, except making love. That’s why I have said on occasion that the only heroism of my life, and that of others of my generation, is having been young in the Bogotá of that time. My most salacious fun on Sundays was to take the blue-glassed streetcars, which for five centavos revolved unceasingly from Plaza de Bolívar to the Avenida de Chile, and spend those desolate afternoons there that seemed to drag the interminable tails of many more empty Sundays. The only thing I did during the journey in vicious circles was to read books of verses and verses and verses, at a rate perhaps of a block of poems for each city block, until the first streetlights came on in the eternal rain, and then I’d make my way through the taciturn cafés of the old city in search of someone who’d do me the charity of sharing conversations about the verses and verses and verses I’d just read. Sometimes I’d find someone, who was always a man, and we’d stay until after midnight drinking coffee and smoking the butts of the cigarettes we’d smoked ourselves, and talking of verses and verses and verses, while in the rest of the world all of humanity was making love.
One night as I was returning from my solitary poetic festivals on the streetcar, something happened to me for the first time that deserved to be told. It happened that at one of the stations in the north a faun had boarded the streetcar. That’s what I said: a faun. According to the Dictionary of the Real Academia Española, a faun is “a demigod of the woodlands and countryside.” Each time I reread that unhappy definition I regret that its author had not been there that night when a flesh-and-blood faun boarded the streetcar. He was dressed in the style of the day, like a chancellor on his way home from a funeral, but his bullock’s horns and billy goat beard gave him away, and the well-groomed hooves under his fancy trousers. The air was pervaded by his personal fragrance, but no one seemed to notice that it was eau de lavanda, maybe because the same dictionary had repudiated the word “lavender” as a Gallicism that means agua de espliego.
The only friends I told such things were Álvaro Mutis, because he found them fascinating even though he didn’t believe them, and Gonzalo Mallarino, because he knew they were true even if they weren’t exactly factual. On one occasion, the three of us had seen in the atrium of the Church of San Francisco a woman who was selling toy turtles whose heads moved in a surprisingly natural way. Gonzalo Mallarino asked the woman if those turtles were alive or if they were plastic, and she replied:
“They’re plastic, but they’re alive.”
Nevertheless, the night I saw the faun on the streetcar neither of the two answered their telephones, and I was suffocating from the urge to tell someone. So I wrote a short story—the story of the faun on the streetcar—and I mailed it to the Sunday supplement of El Tiempo, the editor of which, Don Jaime Posada, never published it. The only copy I kept burned in the boardinghouse where I was living on April 9, 1948, the day of the Bogotazo, and that’s how national history did us a double favor: one for me and one for literature.
I couldn’t avoid these personal memories as I was reading the delightful book Gonzalo Mallarino just published in Bogotá: Historias de caleños y bogoteños. Gonzalo and I were at the Faculty of Law at the Universidad Nacional at the same time, but we did not attend classes as regularly as we did the little university café, where we dodged the drowsiness of legal codes by exchanging verses and verses and verses of the vast universal poetry we both could recite by heart. At the end of classes, he went home to his family house, which was big and pleasant among eucalyptus trees. I went back to my gloomy boardinghouse on Calle Florián, with my friends from the coast, borrowed books, and tumultuous Saturday dances. Actually, it never occurred to me to ask Gonzalo Mallarino where the hell he was in the many hours we didn’t spend at the university, while I went all around the whole city reading verses and verses and verses on the streetcars. It took me thirty years to find out, reading this exemplary book, where he reveals with so much simplicity and so much humanity the other half of his life in those times.
October 21, 1981, El País, Madrid