Miguel Torres, the writer who portrayed on April 9, 74 years after the death of Gaitan and El Bogotazo

THE NARROWNESS OF MEMORY

The powder of that day has been the most intense in the last 100 years of our history. The blood and fire that spread on April 9, 1948 still leave traces today. That day, the one in El Bogotazo, they not only murdered Jorge Eliécer Gaitan, they ended with the idea of a country that demanded change in a time of deep-rooted customs and radical whims. Much has been written and done around this date. Poems, stories and novels; essays, biographies and dissertations; films, short films and series, plays, performance, everything, even posters and t-shirts. April 9, 74 years ago, is still, in some way, April 9 today. We are in 2022 and the flames are still felt, the screams are heard, and the blood flows, which since 1948 has not stopped running.

That day Gaitan died and the country died. He was so dead, sunk in his stench, that he is still in the stage of decay. Juan Fernando Ramírez Arango says that in a Facebook post today he dedicated himself to recalling the fact that eight days after the hecatomb the 78th edition of Semana magazine would begin to circulate with the headline on its cover: “The nation's capital will rise from its ashes”. This headline would be developed on page 5 of the magazine, giving the details of what happened that terrible Friday of the 40s:

“Gaitan would arrive at his office, located at the 7th race # 14-35, on the third floor of the Agustín Nieto building, at 8 a.m. He had slept barely four hours, since the night before, Thursday, April 8, 1948, he had defended Lieutenant Jesús María Cortez, accused of the death of journalist Eudoro Galarza Ossa in a public audience: “Gaitan defended the soldier and unanimously obtained his acquittal from the jury of conscience. After the diligence, he went to the Morrocco restaurant, with the purpose of having a snack before retiring to rest in his residence, where he arrived at 4 AM.” The rest of the morning would be elated by that professional victory, described at the time as his “last triumph”. Around noon, several of his friends would begin to arrive at the office: the doctor Pedro Eliseo Cruz, Alejandro Vallejo (co-director of Jornada), Jorge Padilla (Treasurer of Bogotá), and the liberal politician Plinio Mendoza Neira, who would invite Gaitan and the others to lunch: “I accept, but I warn you that I am expensive,” the party chief replied and laughed happily” (...). Once on the street, the five friends would be divided into two groups: “Go ahead, taking Gaitan's arm in arm, Mendoza Neira advanced. Behind them were Cruz, Padilla and Vallejo.” As soon as the first ones won the platform and took two steps to the street, three detonations would be heard in a row and a fourth a few seconds later: “Gaitan fell backwards. All three impacts had hit him. Nobody touched the room. The San Francisco clock marked one and a quarter in the afternoon. With the smoking revolver in his hand, the killer backed away. The people crowded and the doctor Cruz knelt to listen to the wounded man. 'He still lives, he still lives, 'he said.”

Gaitan would be taken in a taxi to the Central Clinic, located five blocks from the incident, on 12th Street # 4-44. There, he would be taken directly to the operating table, where he would be operated on by Doctor Cruz and seven other colleagues. As they performed a blood transfusion, the Clinic would be filled with people: “All eyes reflected anguish, amazement, expectation, fear. It was necessary to close the front door. The growing rumor of the voices reached the room where doctors worked and the crowding prevented the rapid movement of practitioners and nurses. On the grand portal they beat fists asking to be let in.” That crowd that wanted to enter would not even be scattered by a small rain that would quickly turn into a violent downpour. However, it would make way for the dying man's wife: “Within her natural distress, but preserving an exemplary serenity, Dona Amparo Jaramillo de Gaitán arrived. They respectfully and quietly let her pass so that she could get to where her husband was struggling with death.” A struggle that would be marked by three medical parts: “There is still hope”, “Every moment seems more serious” and “The heart decays”. Decay that would cease at 1:55 PM, when the fourth and final medical report communicated: “The head of the liberal party is dead.”

We already know everything that came after and the pile of conspiracy theories around. We have already read the books of Arturo Alape, José Antonio Osorio Lizarazo, Albalucía Ángel, Gustavo Álvarez Gardeazabal, Juan Gabriel Vasquez and many others. We've been there, we've already revived it. The questions seem to remain the same as those of those days and the pains too.

A few years ago, when I was working in the Colombian subsidiary of a renowned Spanish publishing group, I met Miguel Torres, the author of La siempreviva. I had read it in college, in my days as a student of literature, and now I had the possibility of working alongside him. The editorial director at that time delegated me a task that, at such a young age, I could not have even imagined. I was ordered to take care of and accompany the edition of the author's three novels in which he had been given the task of telling what happened in El Bogotazo. Although they had already been published at different times and by different publishing groups, they would now all be gathered under the same label and in the same collection.

I began to re-read the Trilogy of April 9 with the eyes of a surgeon and on each page, in addition to pointing out the amendments of the case, I was stuck in the phrases that struck me the most. It was like I was reading something about a recent news story. Meetings with Miguel became frequent to talk about words, corrections and the questions I asked him about books, but also about how the character of Gaitan had managed to become a figure with such power, to the point of starting a civil war. What are the men who are above the others? What makes them stay there?

Once the editing exercise was over, we talked at length, and part of that conversation, which we published together with Andrés Osorio Guillot in El Espectador, gave an account of the details after the research that the author had to do to venture to tell on April 9 and his reflections on it. “The way I took the novels, that I leave them still in their time, frozen, that is, for me, how everything turned out. In ruins. It's a metaphor for the history of the country. The ruins in which the city was left. From there everything was torn apart, broken, broken. And those ruins are the ones that survive the city as a kind of testimony to what happened and what does not disappear until things change. They're gonna be there. The path we are walking is very scary. There we are walking on those ruins, trying to build something on them.”

In 2006, I have written it before, Miguel Torres published the first of his novels about El Bogotazo. The story of The Crime of the Century revolves around the life of Juan Roa Sierra, described as a most insignificant subject, thin, almost skeletal, always pale and with the face of a sick person; lonely, isolated from his family and friends; with bad luck kept in his pocket, penniless, living on the back of the care of his mother and the charity of his acquaintances; a fan of meaningless beliefs, superstitious; lazy, stubborn and with an irrefutable ability to get into trouble and always be in the wrong place. He had a peculiar fixation with power figures and believed that his mission in the world was to reincarnate the great feats of men like General Francisco de Paula Santander; hence his attraction to Jorge Eliécer Gaitan, who began as idolatry and ended up becoming repulsion.

“I just wanted to write a book,” Miguel commented that afternoon. “I thought that at the end of The Crime of the Century my obsession with Gaitan would be healed. But over time, something began to complain to me that I couldn't leave things like that. If he had already talked about what happened on April 9, he also had to talk about what happened next. While I search for what I want to say, I am writing it and fiction takes over everything. I didn't really know where to continue, but it was the voices that gave me the excuse.”

In El arson de abril, the second book, the author goes to a series of different voices to describe what happened after the murder of Gaitan, in the heart of Bogotá, narrates the burden of those who starred, in reality or through fiction, that terrible afternoon in April. These are the voices of the fire that are present, stories that bombard the reader with different scenes located in the same space, moments inside another larger one that takes place in parallel. Suddenly, the character in the first story may meet the character in the sixth or eighth story, and so on. It ends with the story of a woman who finds a child lost in the midst of the fires.

The third and final book, The Invention of the Past, recovers the story of this woman and child, and tells us the Bogotá of the years of the dictatorship, where there are still lags behind El Bogotazo. The story is narrated by Henry Barbusse, the boy whom Ana Barbus finds helpless in an alley that night of April 9, and through him we know the lives of his mother, Martina and Juan Pablo, their grandmother and the friends who appear over the years. In The April Fire, Ana goes out in search of her husband, but instead of finding him she ends up finding this little boy that she decides to take as her own to raise and love him for the rest of his days. This unborn son of Ana becomes a painter, like Francisco, the missing husband, and spends his days portraying the faces of pain, of that violence that swarms in the air and makes life impossible for them.

Everything happens in a large house in the center of Bogotá that, over time, will become a shelter where the characters go to save themselves, a kind of loop that keeps them intact, apparently protected, from the passage of time and the scourge of injustices in a country that seems not to learn from its mistakes. The reader will enter these pages with absolute curiosity and as they go by, will witness this moving story that will allow them to understand that, in proof of everything, life prevails and is always stronger than death.

From my encounters with Miguel, I miss the way he held the cigar and released the smoke on his head, with his back to his library, where he has photos with García Márquez and Santiago García, among other things. I remember him moving his hands to tell us about Gaitan and the fateful day. I remember it, as if it were yesterday, even if it happened almost five years ago. Andrés detailed everything, I focused on smells, sounds, things that moved, the cat, Smoke. Juan Felipe took pictures, portrayed Miguel in a prodigious way, and he also captured us.

Miguel was excited to talk to us about his days in the theater and how one art had led to the other, how he had gotten into his head, almost by force, the idea that if it wasn't him anyone else would write about it, at least not in this way. He scratched his head, lit one cigar after another, looked at us. The cadence and tone of his voice kept us stunned on board his story. It seemed as if we were listening to a reporter who had arrived before anyone else, that day 9, to document everything. Miguel is a writer with a prodigious memory and, after reading it, it is enough to talk to him to prove it.

He is, for sure, one of the most important Colombian writers of the last 50 years. Like many, it has not been recognized in the right way. His novels, the others, those he has written on the margins of the historical event, allow us to trace a sentimental and historical geography around the city. His novels are about Bogotá, about us, about those of us who stand still before the flames, before tears, before angry loves; still like statues, paralyzed, wanting to take a step forward, but tied to ourselves, in the midst of fear.

There are several moments of Miguel that I treasure. After those days, the encounters were reduced to a phone call from time to time, or an email. The pandemic and its ravages ended up distancing us until a few days ago that I saw him, because of the promotion of his most recent book, La Polvera, a novel in which, once again, he gives prominence to the city. Miguel now wears a gray beard, still smells of tobacco, and his hair is more messy than usual. I saw him from afar, as he was leaving.

Every April 9 I remember it, as I remember those who fell that day so long ago. I wasn't born, maybe most of those who read this either. I knew it from my mother, from my Nona and her stories, I knew it because they told me and because, I think, we are hopeful that if we know our past, we won't be condemned to repeat it. Miguel Torres, given the narrowness of our memory, has spent several years trying to make this happen. Write with the spirit that what was once is not forgotten, that the ashes of yesteryear are not today the dust of our corners. His work allows us, 74 years later, to remember how and why the most important political leader in our history fell and how a country fell victim to itself.

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