The Scandal of the Century Read online

  Often a republic’s fate depends more on a single barber than on all its leaders, as in most cases—according to the poet—that of a genius depends on the midwife. Señor Ospina knows it and that’s why, perhaps, before going to inaugurate the direct telephone service between Bogotá and Medellín, the head of state, with his eyes closed and legs outstretched, submitted to the pleasure of feeling the cold and ironic contact of the blade very close to his jugular, while a crowded parade of all the complicated problems he’ll need to solve during the day marched through his head. It’s possible the president would have told his barber that later the same morning he was going to inaugurate a perfect telephone service, an honor to his government. “Who should I call in Medellín?” he must have asked, as he felt the sharp edge on his throat. And the barber, who is a discreet family man, who strolls the city in his free time, must have kept a prudent but significant silence. Because in reality—the barber must have thought—if instead of being what he was, he were president, he would have attended the inauguration of the telephonic service, would have picked up a receiver, and, visibly preoccupied, would have said in the voice of an efficient public servant, “Operator, connect me to public opinion.”

  March 16, 1950, El Heraldo, Barranquilla

  Topic for a Topical Piece

  There are those who turn the lack of a topic into a topic for a journalistic piece. The choice is absurd in a world like ours, where things of incalculable interest are happening. Someone who thinks of sitting down to write about nothing need only flip casually through the day’s newspaper to make the initial problem turn into its exact opposite: how to know which topic to choose out of the many on offer. See, for example, the front page of your average newspaper. “Two children burned while playing with flying saucers.” Light a cigarette. Look over, very carefully, the scrambled alphabet of the Underwood and begin with the most attractive letter. Think—once you’ve read the information—of the painful loss of prestige flying saucers have just suffered. Remember the number of articles that have been written about them, since they appeared for the first time—almost two years ago, somewhere around Arkansas—until now, when they’ve turned into simple yet dangerous children’s toys. Consider the situation of the poor little flying saucers, who, like ghosts, get no respect from humanity despite their elevated category of interplanetary element. Light another cigarette and consider, finally, that it’s a useless topic due to its excessive speed.

  Then read the international news. “Brazil will not have a surplus of coffee at its disposal this year.” Ask yourself, “Who could care about this?” And carry on reading. “The problem of the Mares settlers is not a simple legal case.” “El Carare, a great surprise.” Read the editorials. In each adjective, find the fingerprint of the implacable censor. All, in reality, of undeniable interest. But none seem like an appropriate topic. What to do? The most logical thing: look at the comic strips. Pancho cannot leave his house. Tío Barbas attends a pistol duel to the death. Clark Kent has to fight against Superman and vice versa. Tarzan becomes a dealer in skulls. Avivato stole, as usual, a string of fish. Penny attends a philosophy class. How awful! And now what: the society page. Two who are getting married when life is so expensive and the climate so hot. Generalísimo Franco’s daughter marries a gentleman who will henceforth be known as none other than the dictator’s “son-in-lawísimo.” One dies and seven are born. Light another cigarette. Think that you’re getting to the end of the newspaper and still haven’t decided on a topic. Remember your wife, the scene of children waiting, starving to death, and who will continue dying indefinitely as long as there’s no appropriate topic. It’s terrible! We’re starting to get sentimental. No! There are still the movie ads. Ah, but yesterday we wrote about cinema. After this, the flood!

  Light another cigarette and discover—with horror—that it was the last one in the pack. And the last match! Night is falling and the hands of the clock turn, turn, turn, performing the dance of the hours (Caliban). And now what? Throw in the towel like a mediocre boxer? Journalism is the profession that most resembles boxing, with the advantage that the typewriter always wins and the disadvantage that you’re not allowed to throw in the towel. We’d be left with no Jirafa column. Great, so many will applaud the idea. However, you once heard a phrase that is now affected and worn out from use and abuse: “It’s never too late to make a good start.” That is, starting is the difficult part. We begin, then, now without cigarettes, without matches, to find a topic. We write a first sentence: “There are those who turn the lack of a topic into a topic for a journalistic piece.” The choice is absurd…but so damn easy! Isn’t it?

  April 11, 1950, El Heraldo, Barranquilla

  An Understandable Mistake

  It was Tuesday in Cali. The gentleman, for whom the weekend was a murky timeless period—three days without trace—had been decorously and obstinately raising glass after glass until midnight on Monday. On Tuesday morning, when he opened his eyes and felt his room was completely full of a giant headache, the gentleman believed that he had only been partying the night before and was waking up on Sunday morning. He didn’t remember anything. However, he felt a dignified regret over some mortal sin he might have committed, without knowing exactly to which of the seven his regret might correspond. It was just a regret. A lone, unconditional, rabidly independent, and incorruptibly anarchist regret.

  The only thing the gentleman knew for sure was that he was in Cali. At least—he must have thought—while that building that stood outside his window was the Hotel Alférez Real and while no one proved to him mathematically that the building had been moved to another city on Saturday night, he could rest assured he was in Cali. When he opened his eyes all the way, the headache that was filling the room sat down beside his bed. Someone called the gentleman by his name, but he did not turn to look. He simply thought that someone, in the next room, was calling a person who was a complete stranger to him. The left side of the gap began on Saturday evening. The other side was this unpleasant daybreak. That was all. He tried asking himself who he really was. Only when he remembered his name did he realize it was he who was being called in the next room. However, he was too busy with his regret to worry about an unimportant call.

  All of a sudden, something thin and flat and gleaming came in through the window and hit the floor, a short distance from his bed. The gentleman must have thought it was a leaf blown in by the wind, and kept his eyes fixed on the ceiling that had become mobile, floating, wrapped in the fog of his headache. But something was tapping on the floorboards beside his bed. The gentleman sat up, looked on the other side of the pillow, and saw a tiny fish in the middle of his room. He smiled sardonically; he stopped looking and turned his face to the wall. “How bizarre!” the gentleman thought. “A fish in my room, on the third floor, here in Cali so far away from the sea.” And he kept on laughing sardonically.

  But all of a sudden, he leapt out of bed. “A fish,” he shouted. “A fish, a fish in my room.” And he fled panting, exasperated, toward the corner. Regret came out to meet him. He had always laughed at scorpions with umbrellas, pink elephants. But now he could not have the slightest doubt. What was jumping, what was struggling, what was gleaming in the middle of his room, was a fish!

  The gentleman closed his eyes, clenched his teeth, and judged the distance. Then came the vertigo, the endless void of the street. He had jumped out the window.

  The next day, when the gentleman opened his eyes, he was in a hospital room. He remembered everything, but now he felt well. He wasn’t even feeling pain under the bandages. Within his reach was the day’s newspaper. The gentleman wanted something to do. Distractedly he picked up the newspaper and began to read:

  “Cali. April 18. Today, in the early hours of the morning, a stranger jumped out the window of his apartment located on the third floor of a building in the city. The decision seemed to have been due to the nervous excitement produced by alcohol. The injured man is
now in the hospital, where his condition does not appear to be serious.”

  The gentleman recognized himself in the news item, but he now felt too calm, too serene, to worry about the previous day’s nightmare. He turned the page and carried on reading the local news. There was another article. And the gentleman, feeling again the headache that prowled around his bed, read the following information:

  “Cali. April 18. Inhabitants of the capital of the Cauca Valley had an extraordinary surprise today, as they observed in a downtown city street the presence of hundreds of small silvery fish, approximately two inches long, that appeared strewn all over the place.”

  April 20, 1950, El Heraldo, Barranquilla

  The Lonely Hearts Killer

  When Raymond Fernández and Martha Beck met in New York, a few years ago, one of those startling idylls was born, the most favorable setting of which are little fleabag hotels, between long kisses and deadly pistols; Martha and Raymond—two magnificent names for characters in Don Arturo Suárez’s next novel—must have arrived at the state of spiritual purity in which the police surprised them, by way of a scrupulous check of their mutual feelings, proved by common interests and abilities. Life was not good to them. It was a sort of dog tied up in the corridor of the building where they lived, that during the day showed them its ferocious and hungry gleaming teeth and howled all night long, troubling their sleep and threatening, hour after hour, to break its chains. That was life for Martha and Raymond, two lovers who maybe, during their courtship, instead of plucking the petals off nostalgic daisies like the protagonists of romantic novels, fired a machine gun against the walls of their house repeating the classic refrain: “She loves me, she loves me not…”

  Later, when they went to live in the small apartment with the tied-up dog, they discovered the way to throw a little digestive fuel on that love, which would eventually have cooled off, if not for that providential appeal, for lack of a little hot soup in the heart. Raymond and Martha discovered the vulnerable flank of a widow, a Mrs. Janet Flay, enrolled in one of those melancholy clubs poetically called lonely hearts. Mrs. Flay seemed to have what Martha and Raymond lacked to triumph over the dog and seemed to lack, instead, what they had in abundance during their nights of shared beds and fright.

  Things must have gotten serious when Raymond communicated with the widow and proposed the exchange. She would contribute money and he at least one of the innumerable enamored fibers that were already hardening in his heart, for want of a cup of broth. The plan was perfected—at least in the way Raymond saw things—and began to develop slowly, setting in motion its innumerable little secret plays, until the day when something went wrong, something hampered the perfectly devised mechanism, and Raymond and Martha, without knowing how, ended up in jail with their deadly dueling pistol love, their dog, and all the rest.

  This sentimental story would have ended there, if not for the self-sacrificing Martha, who suffers from the contagious ailment of lonely hearts and starts to flirt with a guard in Sing Sing prison. William Ritcher, Fernández’s lawyer, got the federal judge, Sylvester Ryan, to expedite an edict of habeas corpus ordering the prisoner’s transfer to New York, since the unexpected feelings Martha has displayed toward her jailer have subjected Raymond to “mental torture,” which did not figure in his sentence.

  But the trip—according to the cable—did not manage to mitigate Raymond’s ailment. He has been seen wandering around his cell, talking to himself, tormented by the memories of those fleabag hotel nights, which now seem happy in spite of the dog and in spite of the rats fighting over an editorial page under the bed in their love nest. “The Lonely Hearts Killer,” as he’s now known, has become one of the members of that club, in the New York prison, and has requested an efficient therapy for his ailment. A therapy of high voltage, which will no doubt transform the current grumbling Raymond into a new euphoric Raymond, when the prison officers bring into operation the efficient mechanism of the electric chair.

  September 27, 1950, El Heraldo, Barranquilla

  Death Is an Unpunctual Lady

  Reading a piece of news from Middlesboro, Kentucky, I remembered the beautiful parable of the slave who fled to Samarra because he met Death in the market and she made a gesture the slave interpreted as threatening. A few hours later the slave’s owner, who seemed to be a personal friend of Death, met with her and asked, “Why did you make a threatening gesture this morning when you saw my slave?” And Death answered, “It was not a threatening gesture but rather one of surprise. I was startled to see him there, since he had an appointment with me this evening in Samarra.”

  That parable is, in a way, the diametrical opposite of something that happened two days ago in Middlesboro, Kentucky, to a man who that morning had an appointment with Death, and, for reasons that have not yet been possible to establish, it was Death, and not the man, who failed to arrive for the appointment. Because James Longworth, a sixty-nine-year-old mountain man, got up earlier than ever that morning, took a bath, and prepared as if for a trip. Then he lay down in his bed, closed his eyes, and said all the prayers he knew, while outside, pressed up against the window, more than two hundred people waited for the invisible boat to arrive that would take him away forever.

  The expectation had begun three years ago, one morning when the hillbilly spoke of his dreams at breakfast time and said that in one of them Death had appeared and promised to come for him at 8:20 a.m. on June 28, 1952. The announcement spread through the local population and then around the district and then all over the state of Kentucky. Sooner or later all citizens had to die. But the mortality of James Longworth was from that day on different from that of his neighbors, because he was now a mortal man who could have done anything, even subsist on a diet of mercuric chloride, sure that Death’s word of honor, so gravely pledged, would not be taken back after such precise and peremptory notification. Since that day, James Longworth, more than anything else, was known in the streets and the district of Middlesboro and in the state of Kentucky simply as “the man who is going to die.”

  So when they woke up, two days ago, all the inhabitants of the district remembered that it was June 28 and that in two hours Death would come to keep her appointment with James Longworth. What should have been a morning of mourning was in a way a bit of a holiday, when the curious citizens planned to show up late for work in order to walk a stretch and attend a man’s death. In reality, it’s not likely that people would have thought that James Longworth’s death should be different from any other. But even so, something was at stake in it that we mortals have been interested in checking since the beginning of the world: the fidelity of Death’s word of honor. And men, women, and children went to check, while James Longworth waved goodbye to them from his bed as if he were doing so from the boarding step of that invisible vehicle that, three years earlier, had allowed him to know one of the innumerable millions of stops on its endless itinerary.

  Suddenly, with their hearts in their throats, the spectators established that it was exactly twenty minutes past eight and Death had not yet arrived. There was a sort of haughty desolation, a dashed hope in the two hundred heads pressing against the window. But the minute elapsed. And the next one elapsed, and nothing happened. Then James Longworth sat up disconcertedly in his bed, and said, “I’ll be disappointed if I don’t die soon.” And it’s possible that by now, the two hundred people who got up early and walked a long way and were then gasping in the luminous morning of this sweltering summer are in the town square calling for Death. Not to be dragged away by her, but to lynch her.

  July 1, 1952, El Heraldo, Barranquilla

  The Strange Idolatry of La Sierpe

  The Extravagant Veneration of Jesusito. A Syndicate of Idols. Saint Plank and the Holy Kidney. Pacha Pérez

  Idolatry has acquired an extraordinary prestige in La Sierpe since the long-ago date when a woman believed she discovered supernatural powers in a cedar plank. The wom
an was transporting a case of soap when one of the slats fell off and all efforts to reattach it were futile; nails bent even in the weakest part of the wood. Finally, the woman observed the plank closely, and in its knots and grain, she said, she discovered the image of the Virgin. The consecration was instantaneous and the canonization immediate, with neither metaphor nor circumlocution: Santa Tabla, Saint Plank, a strip of cedar that performs miracles and is paraded in supplication when winter threatens the crops.

  The find gave rise to an extravagant and profuse calendar of saints’ days, incorporating cattle horns and hooves, worshipped by those who aspire to banish disease from their animals; gourds that were specialists in safeguarding travelers against the dangers of wild beasts; pieces of metal or domestic utensils that provided maidens with made-to-measure grooms. And among so many others, Saint Kidney, canonized by a butcher who believed he had discovered in a cow’s kidney a startling resemblance to the face of Jesus crowned by thorns, and to which those who suffer afflictions of the internal organs appeal.