I never imagined that, nine months after I had completed secondary school, my first story would be published in Fin de Semana, the weekend literary supplement of El Espectador, in Bogotá, and the most interesting and demanding literary publication of the time. Forty-two days later, my second story was published. The most surprising thing for me, however, was an introductory note by the editor of the supplement, Eduardo Zalamea Borda (whose pen name was Ulises), the most lucid Colombian critic at the time, and the one who was most alert to the appearance of new trends.

The way in which all this happened was so unexpected that it is not easy to recount. In February of 1947, I matriculated in the faculty of law at the Universidad Nacional of Bogotá, as my parents and I had agreed. I lived at the very center of the city, in a pensión on Calle Florián which was occupied for the most part by students who were, like me, from the Atlantic Coast. On free afternoons, instead of working to support myself, I read either in my room or in the cafés that permitted it. The books I read I obtained by chance and luck, and they depended more on chance than on any luck of mine, because the friends who could afford to buy them lent them to me for such limited periods that I stayed awake for nights on end in order to return them on time. But, unlike the books I had read at school, in Zipaquirá, which belonged in a mausoleum of consecrated authors, these were like bread warm from the oven, printed in Buenos Aires in new translations after the long publishing hiatus caused by the Second World War. In this way, I discovered, to my good fortune, the already very much discovered Jorge Luis Borges, D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene and G. K. Chesterton, William Irish and Katherine Mansfield, and many others.

For the most part, these new works were displayed in the unreachable windows of bookstores, but some copies circulated in the student cafés, which were active centers of cultural dissemination for university students from the provinces. Many of those students reserved their tables year after year and received mail and even money orders at the cafés. Favors from the proprietors or their trusted employees were instrumental in saving a good number of university careers, and quite a few professionals in the country may owe more to their café connections than they do to their almost invisible tutors.

My favorite café was El Molino, the one frequented by older poets, which was only two hundred metres or so from my pensión, on the corner of Avenida Jiménez de Quesada and Carrera Séptima. Students were not allowed to reserve seats at El Molino, but we could be sure of learning more from the literary conversations we eavesdropped on as we huddled at nearby tables and learning it better than in textbooks. It was an enormous café, elegant in the Spanish style, and its walls had been decorated by the painter Santiago Martínez Delgado with episodes from Don Quixote’s battle against the windmills. Though I did not have a reserved place, I always arranged for the waiters to put me as close as possible to the master León de Greiff—bearded, gruff, charming—who would begin his tertulia, his literary talk, at dusk with some of the most famous writers of the day, and end it with his chess students at midnight, awash in cheap liquor. Very few of the great names in the country’s arts and letters did not sit at that table at least once, and we played dead at ours in order not to miss a single word. Although they tended to talk more about women and political intrigues than about their art or work, they always said something that was new to us.

The most attentive of us were from the Atlantic Coast, united less by Caribbean conspiracies against the Cachacos—people from the sierra—than by the vice of books. One day Jorge Álvaro Espinosa, a law student who had taught me to navigate the Bible and made me learn by heart the names of Job’s companions, placed an awesome tome on the table in front of me and declared, with the authority of a bishop, “This is the other Bible.”

It was, of course, James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” which I read in bits and pieces and fits and starts until I lost all patience. This was premature brashness. Years later, as a docile adult, I set myself the task of reading it again in a serious way, and it not only resulted in the discovery of a genuine world that I had never suspected inside me but also provided me with invaluable technical help in freeing language and handling time and structure in my own books.

One of my roommates at the pensión was Domingo Manuel Vega, a medical student who had been my friend ever since our boyhood days in the town of Sucre and who shared my voracity for reading. One night, Vega came in with three books that he had just bought, and he lent me one, chosen at random, as he often did, to help me sleep. But this time the effect was just the opposite: I never slept with my former serenity again. The book was Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”—in the translation published by Losada in Buenos Aires—and it determined a new direction for my life from its opening line, recognized today as one of the great devices in world literature: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”

These were mysterious books whose dangerous precipices were not only different from but often contrary to everything I had known until then. They showed me that it was not necessary to demonstrate facts: it was enough for the author to have written something for it to be true, with no proof other than the power of his talent and the authority of his voice. It was Scheherazade all over again—not in her millenary world, where everything was possible, but in an irreparable world, where everything had already been lost.

When I finished reading “The Metamorphosis,” I felt an irresistible longing to live in that alien paradise. The new day found me at the portable typewriter that Domingo Manuel Vega had lent me, trying to write something that would resemble Kafka’s tale of a poor bureaucrat turned into an enormous cockroach. In the days that followed I did not go to the university for fear the spell would be broken, and I continued, sweating drops of envy, until Eduardo Zalamea Borda published in his pages a disconsolate article lamenting the lack of memorable names among the new generation of Colombian writers, and the fact that he could detect nothing in the future that might remedy the situation. I do not know with what right I felt challenged, in the name of my generation, by the provocation in that piece, but I took up the story again in an attempt to prove him wrong. I elaborated on the plot idea of the conscious corpse in “The Metamorphosis,” but relieved the story of its false mysteries and ontological prejudices.