Luis Enrique stayed on in Barranquilla and started looking for employment; he would soon land a job with the airline company LANSA and would work there for the next eighteen months. Meanwhile all the transport systems of the country remained in chaos in the aftermath of the Bogotazo and Gabito, with a heavy suitcase and a similarly heavy dark suit, found himself perched on top of a postal truck in the searing heat of the Caribbean coastlands, heading for Cartagena.
Cartagena was the merest shadow of its former self. When the Spaniards arrived in , it became a vital bastion of the colonial system linking Spain to the Caribbean and South America and, before long, one of the most important cities for the delivery and sale of slaves in the entire New World. Despite this grim antecedent it had also become and has remained one of the most gracious and picturesque cities anywhere in Latin America. But after independence in the nineteenth century Barranquilla expanded to become the large trading city that Colombia required and Cartagena stagnated, nursed its wounds and its grievances, and consoled itself with the knowledge of its glorious past and its ravaged beauty.
He was back in the Caribbean, back in a world where the human body was accepted for what it was, in its beauty, its ugliness and its fragility, back in the realm of the senses. He had never before visited the heroic city and was struck, simultaneously, by its magnificence and its desolation. It had not entirely escaped the effects of the Bogotazo but, like the Costa as a whole, it had quickly returned to a somewhat uneasy normality despite the state of siege, the curfew and the censorship.
The owner would not give him a room on credit and he was forced to wander the old walled city, hungry and thirsty, and eventually to lie on a bench in the main square and hope that Palencia would soon turn up. He spent the night on the floor in a police cell. This was his introduction to Cartagena and the auguries were not good.
Palencia finally turned up the next day and the two young men were admitted to the residence. He was a student again. Then fate took a hand. Nevertheless, he had now been taken on as a journalist precisely because of his pre-existing literary prestige, just past his twenty-first birthday.
