THE SUNDAY THE NEWSPAPER SMELLED OF INK

By Gilberto García Mercado

In 1998, I looked forward to Sundays like someone waiting for a love letter. From the crack of dawn, I would start counting the hours, the minutes, and even the seconds. I would wake up at four in the morning, while Cartagena still slept under the silence of its streets, knowing that it would be several hours before the newsstands opened their doors. But the wait didn't make me impatient. On the contrary, it felt like a ceremony. At eight or nine in the morning, I would head out in search of my treasure.

In those days, buying Bogotá's El Tiempo was much more to me than just buying a newspaper. It was a ritual. I awaited it with the same longing others reserved for Sunday lunch or a visit from a relative. There was its magazine, its literary pages, its great long-form reporting, and that marvelous sensation that, upon opening it, the whole world fit between my hands.

I would set off on foot around the old Tránsito area, near the SENA on Pedro de Heredia Avenue. Cartagena was just beginning to wake up then. A few shopkeepers were raising their storefront shutters, and the streets still held that tranquility that today seems to belong to another city entirely. I walked with a sort of anticipated happiness, thinking about what I would find within those pages.

And then the miracle would happen.

I would return home breathing in the scent of the ink. Yes, the smell of the ink. A scent that perhaps no one misses today because almost no one knows it. To me, it was part of the newspaper, just like the letters, the photographs, and the news. Opening those pages was like opening a window onto an unknown world.

The delight of El Espectador’s Sunday magazine awaited me—the chronicles, the special envoys, the famous "chiva" scoops, news of the latest Pulitzer Prize, and the columns of men who had turned journalism into a form of literature. There were the columns of Juan Gossaín and D’Artagnan, and those television and journalistic chronicles by Ernesto McCausland, capable of turning an everyday story into a narrative you finished reading as if it were a short story.

At the Portal de los Dulces, newsboys would appear announcing the dailies, shouting out the day’s "chiva." Those men seemed to know they weren't just selling paper. They were selling curiosity. They were selling wonder. They were selling the chance to find out what was happening in Colombia and the world while you sat over a coffee or a Coca-Cola.

I could spend hours with the newspaper spread across the table. It was a companion. You read it without haste; you’d return to a page, fold down a corner, underline a phrase, and come back later to that piece of news that had stayed swirling in your head. Sunday had a different rhythm because the newspaper had a different rhythm too.

Over time, that ceremony began to disappear. Immediacy took a seat in the newsroom and ended up evicting literature. The news stopped waiting for the next day's paper. Now it arrives before we do; it runs through the phone, appears on a screen, and vanishes a few minutes later to be replaced by another. Journalistic prose—the kind you breathed in with your whole body—gave way to a tagged, fast, urgent prose designed to be consumed and forgotten.

Many printed newspapers vanished as well. And with them came a silent mourning among those of us who belong to a generation that learned to stay informed by turning pages.

History has its ironies, however. While we lost the smell of ink, Mother Earth gained a little room to breathe. Countless trees stopped being felled to be turned into tons of paper. Technology, which robbed us of that ceremony, also granted the forests a small truce.

Sometimes I think it’s not just the newspapers I miss. I miss the man I was while I read them. That boy who woke up at four in the morning to wait for a Sunday that hadn't yet begun.

And perhaps that is what truly disappeared: not the newspaper, but our way of waiting for the world.

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