JUANCHO JINETE: One day he left for Bogotá and went to work at El Espectador. And he would show up here from time to time.
JOSÉ SALGAR: Gabo came to El Espectador with a little bit of fame that El Espectador itself had given him without knowing him. He already had fame as a writer because of Eduardo Zalamea and the short story of Gabo’s that was published in El Espectador. But when he came and they gave him to me, he was an ordinary run-of-themill reporter. Besides, he was from the coast. Common. Vulgar. They have a very good word there: a hick. Very shy then . . . And I was the editor in chief, I was the veteran.
MIGUEL FALQUEZ-CERTAIN: And we know very well that being from the coast is not the same as being vulgar. On the contrary. Barranquilla was a village in the 1940s. In ’48 they killed Gaitán, then the Violence began for ten years and a lot of people, especially from the interior, not only from Bogotá but from Santander, too, began to come down the Magdalena River. All those people displaced by the first violence (from ’48 to ’58), who began to come down the river . . . Hicks were the ones that came from small towns to Barranquilla and stayed.
Barranquilla was a family in those days. Everybody knew everybody else in the thirties and forties. When the diaspora begins because of the Violence, they begin to come first from the towns along the Magdalena River and then from Tunja, from Popayán and Tuluá, where the slaughter was going on between Conservatives and Liberals. Then that entire generation was called hicks, corronchos, because they didn’t have the manners of the quote-unquote decent people of Barranquilla. Before then, when I was a boy, they didn’t say “hick.” My father didn’t say “hick,” he would say “uncouth.” People who weren’t in society were uncouth and had bad taste. They had no manners. That word exists in every culture. In Spain they call them paletos, the village people who go to Madrid. In Cuba they call them guajiros, who are the peasants. In Puerto Rico they’re called jíbaros. Every place has a nasty word for the rustic who comes to the city and doesn’t know how to behave. Who doesn’t know how to handle the silverware. Who embarrasses himself.
PLINIO APULEYO MENDOZA: I met him in a café. He was badly dressed and was a chain smoker . . .
SANTIAGO MUTIS: The fact is, look, let’s say that in Bogotá they were nurturing a great contempt for Colombia: a great contempt for the provinces, a great contempt for poverty. It’s lamentable, but it’s also a force that the country still maintains. At that time everything comes from England, it comes from France, from Mexico, from the United States. All the painters went to study in Mexico because the muralists were there. It wasn’t coming from Cézanne anymore. Now it was coming from Mexico. It’s always going to come from the outside. And then there are the ones who come along who say: “Nowhere else. It’s here.”
HÉCTOR ROJAS HERAZO: We had to have confidence in ourselves because there was no generosity then. People were very pretentious. Yes . . . Humph! What does one have to be vain about? You have to enjoy your ignorance and use it as a creative element. Ah, no! You came to Bogotá and then they showed you: “He’s the poet so-and-so . . .” They had so much vanity . . .
MARGARITA DE LA VEGA: They used “slicker” in Bogotá and it means a very elegant gentleman. A cachaco. Let’s say Arturo Abella, who was incredible—I worked a great deal with him—he was very much a slicker, very much a Bogotano. Arturo always said: “For us, a slicker is a refined, elegant person who knows how to dress, who knows how to eat, who does the appropriate thing, and you people from the coast call us slickers as a put-down.”
MIGUEL FALQUEZ-CERTAIN: In Barranquilla they have the bad habit of calling any person who’s not from the coast a slicker. A Barranquillan friend of mine, Campo Elías Romero, used to say that everything that comes after Gamarra is slick. Gamarra is a village on the Magdalena. Everything that comes after halfway down the Magdalena is slick. But in reality, I never used it as an insult because my godfather is from Bogotá. In my house it was used the way Bogotans use it (meaning that he’s elegant). It’s a word that even the Bogotans use when they say “Hey, how slick you look!” And it means: “How well-dressed you are, how elegant.”
Colombia has always been a very divided country, there’s always been this rivalry. Even along the coast, the Barranquillans and the Cartagenans have always taken potshots at one another. In Santa Marta, when the Junior played, they threw rocks. In Cartagena they always say that Cartagena is the one that has a history. When [Gustavo] Bell said in his CV when he was running for vice president that he had studied history in London and had written a book on the history of Barranquilla, the Cartagenans held their noses and said: “What history!”
JOSÉ SALGAR: Gabo exaggerates when he says it was a writing staff of wise men and that it was marvelous. That’s from the coastal point of view. The environment along the coast saw the people at El Tiempo and El Espectador as the elite of national journalism. At El Espectador there were very brilliant figures: Zalamea, de Greiff, Villegas.
HÉCTOR ROJAS HERAZO: I love Bogotá in spite of that whole thing of their thinking they’re superior. They thought they were wise men and like that.
What was it I said in an article I wrote when they assassinated Gaitán? That in Bogotá they said hello, damn it!, in Latin . . . convinced they were extremely refined . . . and they called it . . . What did they call it? They said it was the Athens of South America. And they believed it. Something so comical, and of course when the thing happened, the impetus that brought the death of Gaitán . . . If it hadn’t rained as hard as it rained that day, they would have finished off Bogotá. They would have burned it. Fortunately, damn it!, Jesus Christ came out and sent the downpour . . . But Bogotá had something . . . It had a silent thing deep down. Some beautiful parks. It had tranquillity. It was a peaceful capital. It looked like a terminal . . . Melancholy . . . Like all endured joy that turns into melancholy. It’s muffled. It’s peaceful. That’s why the horror of assassinations frightened people so much here. It has always been a very sweet city. Very peaceful. You arrived, let’s say, there were some places where you went to eat or to think. A few places where the food was cheap. We would go there every day and we had friends. That was where you made friends because the other places were too haughty. But Bogotá is certainly very loved . . .
SANTIAGO MUTIS: Now, Bogotá, what does it have to offer Gabo? Writers. That’s it.
JOSÉ SALGAR: And there’s a name that belongs to that moment, which is our friend. Eduardo Zalamea Borda. He was also a novelist. He wrote a famous novel: Four Years Aboard Myself. He was also a great journalist, but he embellished his literature a great deal with the atmosphere of La Guajira. Four Years Aboard Myself is the adventures of a Bogotan along the coast. It also had a great influence on that magic moment that presented itself to Gabo. He says: “Well, I can stop making literature, the literature that obsesses me, and then I’ll devote myself exclusively to journalism. But journalism and reality are very cold, even ugly. You have to bring imagination to that.”
SANTIAGO MUTIS: What Gabo’s doing is confirming a possibility. It’s a road they’re opening. Opening it in a newspaper, an editorial, a circle of friends, making their own lives. When those things stop being that way, the truth begins to appear and they’re the ones who begin to make that truth. There are many things against them. But they can’t do anything against Gabo. One sentence of Gabo’s undoes everything; nobody has a greater talent for contradicting; they couldn’t do anything with him.
HÉCTOR ROJAS HERAZO: Besides, what one had to do in life, Gabo did. One thing is for sure, our desire to accomplish was the right desire.