The Scandal of the Century

by Gabriel García Márquez

  Sheppard didn’t ask any concrete question, or use a tape recorder, but every once in a while he took very brief notes in a school exercise book, nor did he care what prizes I’d been given before or now, nor did he try to find out what my engagement was as a writer, or how many books I’d sold, or how much money I’d earned. I’m not going to give a summary of our conversation, because everything we talked about now belongs to him and not to me. But I haven’t been able to resist the temptation to point out the fact as an encouraging event in the troubled waters of my private life today, when I do nothing but answer the same questions several times a day with the same answers as ever. And even worse: the same questions, which have less to do every day with my job as a writer. Sheppard, on the other hand, and as naturally as he breathed, moved without stumbling through the densest mysteries of literary creation, and when he said goodbye he left me drenched in nostalgia for the times when life was simpler and one enjoyed the pleasure of wasting hours and hours talking of nothing but literature.

  However, none of what we talked about grabbed my attention as intensely as the Borges quote: “Now, writers think of failure and success.” One way or another, I’ve said the same thing to so many young writers I meet in these worlds. Not all of them, fortunately, have I seen trying to finish a novel hastily and carelessly in time to enter it in a contest. I have seen them plummet into chasms of demoralization after a critical review, or after a rejection letter from a publisher. I once heard Mario Vargas Llosa say something that disconcerted me from that start: “At the moment he sits down to write, every writer decides if he’s going to be a good writer or a bad writer.” Nevertheless, several years later a twenty-three-year-old kid arrived at my house in Mexico who had just published his first novel six months earlier and that night felt triumphant because he’d just submitted his second novel to his editor. I expressed my perplexity at the haste with which he was conducting his premature career, and he answered with a cynicism I still want to remember as involuntary: “You have to think a lot before writing because everyone reads everything you write. But I can write very fast, because very few people read me.” Then I understood, like a dazzling revelation, Vargas Llosa’s phrase: that kid had decided to be a bad writer, as, indeed, he was until he got a good job at a used-car dealership, and stopped wasting his time writing. However—I think now—maybe his fate would have been different if before learning how to write he’d learned how to talk about literature. These days there is a fashionable phrase: “We want fewer deeds and more words.” It is a phrase, of course, charged with great political treachery. But it could serve writers as well.

  A few months ago I said to Jomi García Ascot that the only thing better than music is talking about music, and last night I was about to say the same thing about literature. But then I thought more carefully. Actually, the only thing better than talking about literature is doing it well.

  February 9, 1983, El País, Madrid

  That News Board

  From the third decade of this century, and for about ten years, a newspaper existed in Bogotá that perhaps had few antecedents in the world. It was a board like we had in schools back then, where the latest news would be written in chalk, and it was hung twice a day over the railings of El Espectador’s balcony. That intersection of Avenida Jiménez de Quesada and Carrera Séptima—known for many years as the best street corner in Colombia—was the busiest place in the city, especially at the times when the news board appeared: twelve noon and five in the afternoon. It would become difficult, if not impossible, for the streetcars to get through the hindrance of the impatiently waiting crowd.

  Those street readers also had a possibility we don’t have nowadays, and that was to applaud the news they thought good, to whistle disapprovingly at news that didn’t completely satisfy them and throw stones against the board when the news struck them as contrary to their interests. It was a form of active and immediate participation, by which El Espectador—the evening paper that sponsored the board—had a thermometer more efficient than any other to measure the fever of public opinion.

  Television did not yet exist, and there were very full radio news bulletins, but at fixed hours, so before going to eat lunch or dinner, one might stand waiting for the appearance of the board in order to arrive home with a more complete vision of the world. One afternoon we learned—with a murmur of astonishment—that Carlos Gardel had died in Medellín, in an airplane crash. When there was very big news, like that one, the board would change several times outside of its usual hours, to feed with extraordinary bulletins the public’s apprehension. This almost always happened during elections, and did so in an exemplary and unforgettable way during Enrique Concha Venegas’s famous flight between Lima and Bogotá, the incidents of which we saw reflected, hour after hour, on the news balcony. On April 9, 1948—at one in the afternoon—the popular leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was struck down by three well-aimed bullets. Never, in the stormy history of the chalkboard, had such big news happened so close by. But it couldn’t register it because El Espectador had moved its offices and modernized informative systems and habits, and only a few old-fashioned nostalgic guys remembered when we knew it was twelve noon or five in the afternoon because we saw the news board appear on the balcony.

  Nobody remembers now at El Espectador whose original idea that direct and alarming form of modern journalism was in that remote and lugubrious city as Bogotá then was. But we know that the one who drafted the headlines, in general terms, was a kid who was barely twenty years old and would go on to be, without doubt, one of Colombia’s best journalists without having gone beyond primary school. Today—after fifty years in the profession—all his compatriots know his name was, and still is, José Salgar.

  The other night, at an in-house tribute to him at the newspaper, José Salgar said, more serious than joking, that due to that anniversary he’d received in life all the praise usually kept for the dead. Maybe he hadn’t heard that the most surprising thing in his journalistic life is not having completed half a century—something that has happened to many old men—but the reverse: having started at the same newspaper at the age of twelve, and when he’d already been looking for work as a journalist for almost two years. In fact, every time he walked home from school, back then in 1939, José Salgar dawdled in front of the windows of the Mundo al Día watching the pedal presses printing the variety newspaper, which was in great demand at the time, the most read section being one of pure journalism. It was called “I Saw It with My Own Eyes,” and it was readers’ own experiences told in their own words. For every piece they published, Mundo al Día paid five centavos, at a time when almost everything cost five centavos: the newspaper, a cup of coffee, a shoeshine, a streetcar ride, a soda, a packet of cigarettes, a child’s cinema ticket, and many other primary and secondary necessities. So anyway, José Salgar, from the time he turned ten, began sending in his written experiences, not so much for the five centavos as to see them in print, and he never succeeded. Fortunately, since if they had he would have been celebrating fifty years of journalism two years ago, which would have been almost abusive.

  He began in order: at the lowest rung. A friend of his family who worked in El Espectador’s printing works took him along to work with him on a shift that began at four in the morning. José Salgar was assigned the tough task of melting the metal bars for the linotype, and his seriousness caught the attention of a star linotypist—the kind of guy they don’t make anymore—who, in turn, caught the attention of his workmates for two distinguished virtues: because he looked like a twin brother of the president of the Republic, Don Marco Fidel Suárez, and because he was as knowledgeable as his lookalike on the secrets of the Spanish language, to such an extent that he was a candidate for the Academia de la Lengua. After six months of melting lead for the linotypes, José Salgar was sent to a cramming school by the editor in chief—Alberto Galindo—even if it was just to learn the elemental rules of spelling, and wa
s promoted to office messenger. From then on he worked his way up from the inside, until becoming what he is today, deputy director of the newspaper and its most senior employee. In the times when he started to write the news boards a street photographer took his picture in a black suit with wide lapels and a hat with a tilted brim, in the style of the time imposed by Carlos Gardel. In photos of him these days he doesn’t resemble anyone but himself.

  When I joined the staff of El Espectador—in 1953—José Salgar was the heartless managing editor who ordered me, as if it were the golden rule of journalism, “Wring the swan’s neck,” meaning to stick to the facts. For a novice from the provinces who was ready to get himself killed for literature, that order was not much short of an insult. But maybe José Salgar’s greatest merit has been to know how to give orders without pain, because he doesn’t put on a boss’s face when he gives them, but that of a subordinate. I don’t know if I did what he told me to or not, but instead of feeling offended I thanked him for the advice, and since then—and still today—we’ve been accomplices.

  Maybe what we’re most grateful to each other for is that when we’re working together we don’t stop doing so even in our time off. I remember that we didn’t leave each other’s side for a minute during those three historic weeks when Pope Pius XII got the hiccups that wouldn’t go away, and José Salgar and I declared ourselves on permanent watch, waiting for either of the two endings to the news: either the pope cured his hiccups or he died. On Sundays we drove out to the countryside on the plateau roads, with the radio on, to follow without pause the rhythm of the pope’s hiccups, but without going too far away, so we could get back to the office as soon as we heard the outcome. I was remembering those times one night last week when we attended his retirement dinner, and I think I hadn’t realized till then that maybe the sleepless feel of the job came to José Salgar from the incurable custom of the news board.

  September 21, 1983, El Espectador, Madrid

  Return to the Seed

  Unlike most good and bad writers of all eras, I’ve never idealized the town where I was born and where I was raised until the age of eight. My memories of that time—how many times I’ve said it—are the clearest and most real I happen to have, to the extreme that not only can I evoke as if it were yesterday the appearance of each one of the houses that are still there, but I can even discover in a wall a crack that didn’t exist during my childhood. A town’s trees tend to last longer than human beings, and I’ve always had the impression that they remember us too, maybe better than we remember them.

  I was thinking all this, and much more, as I walked the dusty, scorched streets of Aracataca, the small town where I was born and where I returned a few days ago sixteen years after my last visit. A bit overwhelmed by reunions with so many childhood friends, bewildered by a troop of children among whom I seemed to recognize myself when the circus came to town, I had, nevertheless, enough serenity to be surprised that nothing had changed in the house of General José Rosario Durán—where now, of course, there was no one left from his illustrious family; that despite the freshly painted strips the plazas were still the same, with their thirsty dust and almond trees as sad as they’d always been, and that the church had been painted and repainted many times in half a century, but the dial of the clock on the tower is the same. “And that’s nothing,” someone specified. “The man who repairs it is still the same one.”

  Much—I would say too much—has been written on the affinities between Macondo and Aracataca. The truth is that each time I return to the real town I find it resembles the fictional one less, except for certain external elements, like the overpowering heat at two in the afternoon, its white, scorching dust, and the almond trees that are still there on some street corners. There is a geographical similarity that is obvious, but which doesn’t go much further. For me there is more poetry in the history of animes than in all that I have tried to leave in my books. The same word—animes—is a mystery that has pursued me since those times. The dictionary of the Royal Academy says that the anime is a plant and its resin (“elemi,” in English). In the same way, although with many more precisions, Mario Alario di Filippo’s excellent lexicon of Colombianisms defines this word. Father Pedro María Revollo, in his Costeñismos colombianos, doesn’t even mention it. Meanwhile, Sundenheim, in his Vocabulario costeño, published in 1922 and seemingly forgotten forever, devotes a very ample note of which I’ll transcribe the part that most interests us: “The anime, among us, is a sort of benevolent duende who helps its protégés in difficult and critical moments, and thus when someone is said to have animes we are given to understand they count on a person or mysterious force that has provided them its help.” As we can see, Sundenheim identified them with magical creatures, duendes, and more precisely, with those described by Michelet.

  The animes of Aracataca were something else: minuscule beings, no more than an inch high, that lived in the bottom of the large earthenware jars. Sometimes they were confused with gusarapos, which some people called sarapicos, and which were really mosquito larvae frolicking in the depths of the drinking water. But those who knew did not confuse them: animes had the ability to escape their natural refuge, even if the jar was well sealed, and they enjoyed getting up to all sorts of mischief in the house. That’s all they were: naughty, but benevolent spirits, who curdled the milk, changed the color of children’s eyes, rusted the locks, or provoked twisted dreams. However, there were times when their moods would get deranged, for reasons that were never understood, and they would take to stoning the house where they lived. I met them at the house of Don Antonio Daconte, an Italian emigrant who brought great novelties to Aracataca: silent films, the billiards hall, bicycles for rent, gramophones, the first radio receivers. One night word went round town that the animes were stoning Don Antonio Daconte’s house, and everybody went to see. Contrary to what people might think, it was not a horrific spectacle, but rather a joyful party that in any case did not leave a single window intact. You couldn’t see who was throwing them, but stones came from every direction and had the magic virtue of not hitting any people but striking their exact objectives: anything made of glass. A long time after that enchanted night, we children carried on sneaking into Don Antonio Daconte’s house to take the lid off the water jar and see the animes—quiet and almost transparent—getting bored at the bottom of the water.

  What might have been the most famous house in town was next door to that of my grandparents on a corner like so many others, and known as the house of the dead. In it lived the parish priest who baptized our whole generation. Francisco C. Angarita, who was famous for his tremendous moralizing sermons. Many good and bad things were murmured about Father Angarita, whose fits of rage were fearful; but just a few years ago I found out that he had taken a very definite and consistent position during the strike and massacre of the banana workers.

  I often heard it said that the house of the dead was called that because people saw the ghost of someone who during a session of spiritualism said his name was Alfonso Mora wandering there at night. Father Angarita told the tale with such realism that your hair would stand on end. He described the apparition as a heavyset man, with his shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows, his hair short and tightly curled, and the perfect luminous teeth of a black man. Every night, at the stroke of midnight, after walking through the house, he disappeared under the calabash tree that grew in the middle of the courtyard. The area around the tree, of course, had been excavated many times in search of buried treasure. One day, in bright sunlight, I went next door in pursuit of a rabbit, and tried to catch it in the outhouse, where it had hidden. I pushed open the door, but instead of the rabbit, I saw the man crouched in the latrine, with a look of pensive sadness we all have in those circumstances. I recognized him immediately, not only by his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, but also by his beautiful teeth that shone in the darkness.

  These and many other things I remembered a few da
ys ago in that scorching town, while old and new friends, and those who were just beginning to be friends, seemed to be truly pleased that we were together again after so long. It was the same source of poetry whose drumroll of a name I’ve heard resonate in half the world, in almost every language, and that, nonetheless, seems to exist more in memory than in reality. It is difficult to imagine another place more forgotten, more abandoned, more apart from God’s ways. How could one not feel one’s soul twisted by a sense of upheaval?

  December 21, 1983, El País, Madrid

  How Do You Write a Novel?

  This, without doubt, is one of the questions people most often ask novelists. Depending on who’s asking, you always have a satisfactory answer. Even more: it’s useful to try to answer, because not only is there pleasure in variety, as they say, but also within it is the possibility of finding the truth. Because one thing is certain: I believe that those who most often ask themselves the question of how you write a novel are novelists themselves. And we also give ourselves a different answer every time.

  I’m referring, of course, to writers who believe that literature is an art destined to improve the world. The others, the ones who believe that literature is an art destined to improve their bank accounts, have formulas for writing that are not only accurate, but can be resolved as precisely as if they were mathematical formulas. Editors know this. One of them amused himself recently explaining to me how easy it was for his publishing house to win the National Literature Prize. In the first place, they had to analyze the members of the jury, their personal history, their work, their literary tastes. The editor thought that the sum of all those elements would end up supplying an average of the general jury taste. “That’s what computers are for,” he said. Once they’d established what kind of book had the best possibilities of being awarded the prize, they had to proceed with a method contrary to what we normally use in life: instead of looking where that book was, they had to investigate which author, good or bad, was best equipped to fabricate it. All the rest was a question of signing a contract to get that author to sit down and write to measure the book that will win next year’s National Literature Prize. The alarming thing is that the editor had submitted this game into the mill of computers, and they had given him an eighty-six percent chance of accuracy.