Because of a mistake in calculating the time zone, I called the Presidential Palace at three in the morning. The intrusiveness seemed even more alarming when I heard the president in person on the phone. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said in his bishop’s cadence. ‘This job is so complicated that now is the only time I have to read poetry.’ For that’s what President Belisario Betancur was up to during those tremulous small hours of power: rereading the mathematical verses of Don Pedro Salinas, before the newspapers arrived to embitter the new day with the fantasies of real life.
Nine hundred years ago, William IX, Duke of Aquitaine, also stayed awake on the nights before battle composing libertine sirventes and love ballads. Henry VIII — who devastated incomparable libraries and beheaded Thomas More — ended up in anthologies of the Elizabethan period. Tsar Nicholas I helped Pushkin correct his poems to prevent him from stumbling upon the ruthless censorship the Tsar himself had imposed. History did not prove as truculent with Belisario Betancur because in reality he wasn’t a ruler who loved poetry but a poet on whom destiny had imposed the penance of power. A ruling vocation whose first pitfall he encountered when he was twelve, in the seminary of Yarumal. This is what happened: fatigued by the dryness of rosa rosae rosarum, Belisario wrote his first verses clearly inspired by Quevedo before he’d read Quevedo, and in masterly octosyllables before he’d read González.
O Lord, O Lord, to Thee we pray
And we shall pray forevermore,
To please send down your rays of shit
Upon our Latin professor.
The first one fell on him, with his immediate expulsion. And God knew very well what He was doing. If this hadn’t happened, who knows whether today we would be celebrating the seventieth birthday of the first Colombian pope.
Young people today cannot imagine to what extent we lived back then in the shadow of poetry. We didn’t say first year of the baccalaureate but first year of literature, and the degree granted in spite of chemistry and trigonometry was bachelor of letters. For us, aborigines from all the provinces, Bogotá was not the capital of the country or the seat of government but the city of freezing drizzle where the poets lived. We not only believed in poetry but we knew with certainty — as Luis Cardoza y Aragón would say — that it is the only concrete proof of the existence of man. Colombia entered the twentieth century almost half a century late because of poetry. It was a frenzied passion, another way of experiencing a kind of fireball that moved everywhere on its own: you lifted the rug with the broom to hide the dirt and you couldn’t because poetry was already there; you opened the paper, even the business section or the police reports, and there it was; in the sediment in our coffee cup, where our fate was written, there it was. Even in the soup. Eduardo Carranza found it there: ‘The eyes that look at one another through the domestic angels of steam from the soup’. Jorge Rojas found it in the ludic pleasure of a magisterial quip: ‘Mermaids don’t spread their legs because the scales made them think there was something fishy.’ Daniel Arango found it in a perfect hendecasyllable written in compelling letters on the show window of a store: ‘the total fulfilment of your existence’. It was even in the public urinals where the Romans hid it: ‘If you don’t fear God, fear syphilis.’ With the same reverential terror we felt as children when we went to the zoo, we would go to the café where the poets met at dusk. Maestro León de Greiff taught us to lose at chess without rancour, never to give in to a hangover, and, above all, not to be afraid of words. That’s the city Belisario Betancur came to when he began the adventure of the world, in a crowd of untamed Antiochians, wearing his felt hat with a brim as wide as a bat’s wings and the priest’s overcoat that distinguished him from all other mortals. He came to stay in the poets’ café and was right at home.
From then on, history would not give him a minute’s peace. And as we know very well, even less so in the presidency of the republic, which was perhaps his only act of infidelity to poetry. No other Colombian president had to face at the same time a devastating earthquake, the eruption of a genocidal volcano, and two bloody wars in a Promethean country that for more than a century has been killing itself in its longing to live. I believe, however, that if he managed to sort everything out, it was not only because of his politician’s guts, which he has, and very firmly placed, but because of the supernatural power of poets to take on adversity.
It has taken seventy years and the faithlessness of a youthful journal for Belisario finally to reveal himself in the nude, without the many fig leaves of so many colours and sizes that he has used in his life to avoid the risks of being a poet. It is, in the backwater of old age, a worthy and beautiful way to be young again. That is why it seemed so fitting for this gathering of friends to take place in a house of poetry. And, above all, in this one, during whose small hours the secretive steps of José Asunción, kept awake by the sound of the roses, can still be heard, and where many of us, the friends who loved Belisario best from the time before he was president, have met again, we who so often pitied him while he was in office and who continue to love him more than ever now that he has achieved the rare paradise of not holding that office and not wanting to.