DREAMS FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Paris, France, March 8, 1999
The Italian writer Giovanni Papini infuriated our grandparents in the 1940s with a venomous sentence: ‘America is made from the waste of Europe.’ Today we not only have reasons to suspect that it is true, but also something even sadder: that the fault is ours.
Simón Bolívar had foreseen this and wanted to create for us an awareness of our own identity in the brilliant line from his Jamaica Letter: ‘We are a small human race.’ He dreamed, and said as much, that we would be the largest, most powerful, most united country on earth. At the end of his days, mortified by a debt to the English that we still haven’t paid in full, and tormented by the French who were trying to sell him the last bits and pieces of their revolution, he pleaded in exasperation: ‘Let us have our Middle Ages in peace.’ We ended up being a laboratory of failed dreams. Our greatest virtue is creativity, and yet we have not done much more than survive on reheated doctrines and other people’s wars, heirs of an unfortunate Christopher Columbus who found us by accident when he was looking for the Indies.
Not many years ago it was easier to know us among ourselves in the Latin Quarter in Paris than in any of our countries. In the small cafés of Saint-Germain-des-Prés we traded serenades from Chapultepec for gusts of wind from Comodoro Rivadavia, stewed conger eel from Pablo Neruda for twilights from the Caribbean, nostalgia for an idyllic, remote world where we had been born without even asking ourselves who we were. Today, as we see, nobody has thought it strange that we had to cross the vast Atlantic to find ourselves in Paris with ourselves.
It is your task, you dreamers younger than forty, to resolve these immense injustices. Remember that the things of this world, from heart transplants to Beethoven’s quartets, were in the minds of their creators before they existed in reality. Don’t expect anything from the twenty-first century, for it’s the twenty-first century that expects everything from you. A century that doesn’t come factory-made but ready to be forged by you in our image and likeness, and that will be only as peaceful and as much our own as you are capable of imagining it.
THE BELOVED THOUGH DISTANT HOMELAND
Medellín, Colombia, May 18, 2003
‘All these squalls to which we have been subjected are signs that the weather will soon improve and things will go well for us, because it is not possible for the bad or the good to endure for ever, and from this it follows that since the bad has lasted so long a time, the good is close at hand.’
This beautiful sentence by Don Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra does not refer to the Colombia of today but to his own time, of course, but in beginning this lament, he never would have dreamed it would fit us like a glove. For a ghostly synthesis of what contemporary Colombia is does not allow one to believe that Don Miguel would have said what he said, and said it so beautifully, if he had been a compatriot of ours. Two examples would have been enough to destroy his illusions: last year, close to 400,000 Colombians had to flee their houses and land because of the violence, as almost 3 million others had already done for the same reason over the previous half-century. These displacements were the embryo of another rootless country — almost as populous as Bogotá, and perhaps larger than Medellín — that wanders aimlessly within its own sphere, searching for a place to survive, with no more material wealth than the clothes on its back. The paradox is that these fugitives from themselves continue to be victims of the violence sustained by two of the most sustainable businesses in this irrational world: drug trafficking and the illegal sale of weapons.
They are primary symptoms of the groundswell that is suffocating Colombia: two countries in one, not only different but opposites in the colossal black market that sustains the drug trade in the United States and Europe and, in the long run, the entire world. For it is impossible to imagine the end of violence in Colombia without the elimination of narcotraffic, and the end of narcotraffic is unimaginable without the legalization of drugs, which become more profitable the more they are prohibited.
Four decades of every conceivable disturbance of public order have absorbed more than a generation of the marginalized with no way to live other than subversion or common criminality. The writer R. H. Moreno Durán said it with greater accuracy: ‘Without death, Colombia would give no signs of life.’ We are born suspicious and die guilty. For years, peace talks — with minimal but memorable exceptions — have ended in blood talks. For any international matter, from innocent tourist travel to the simple act of buying or selling, we Colombians have to begin by demonstrating our innocence.
In any case, the political and social atmosphere was never conducive to the peaceful homeland our grandparents dreamed of. It succumbed early to a system of inequalities, to a confessional education, a rockbound feudalism, and a deep-rooted centralism, with a remote, self-absorbed capital in the clouds and two eternal parties, at once enemies and accomplices, bloody, crooked elections, and an entire saga of governments without a people. So much ambition could be sustained only by twenty-nine civil wars and three military coups between the two parties, in a social broth that seemed anticipated by the devil for today’s misfortunes in an oppressed nation that in the midst of so many misfortunes has learned to be happy without happiness, and even in spite of it.
And so we have reached a point that barely allows us to survive, but there are still some puerile souls who look to the United States as a polestar of salvation with the certainty that in our country we have used up even the sighs to die in peace. However, what they find there is a blind empire that no longer considers Colombia a good neighbour, or even a cheap, trustworthy accomplice, but only another target for its imperial voracity.
Two natural gifts have helped us avoid the empty spaces in our cultural predicament, grope for an identity, and find the truth in the fogs of uncertainty. One is the gift of creativity. The other is a raging personal determination to move up. From our very origins, both virtues nourished the natives’ providential shrewdness which was used against the Spanish from the day they disembarked. The conquerors, dazzled by novels of chivalry, were beguiled by dreams of fantastic cities built of pure gold or the legend of a king covered in gold swimming in lagoons of emeralds. Masterpieces of a creative imagination intensified by magical means to survive the invader.
Some 5 million Colombians who live abroad today, fleeing from native misfortunes with no other weapons or shields than their temerity or ingenuity, have demonstrated that this prehistoric cunning is still alive in us, allowing us to survive by hook or by crook. The virtue that saves us is that, by the grace and works of our creative imaginations, we do not allow ourselves to die of hunger, for we have known how to be fakirs in India, English teachers in New York, or camel drivers in the Sahara. As I have tried to show in some of my books — if not in all of them — I trust more in these absurdities of reality than in theoretical dreams that most of the time serve only to muzzle a bad conscience. That is why I believe we still have a deeper country to discover in the midst of disaster: a secret Colombia that no longer fits in the moulds we had forged for ourselves with our historical follies.
It is not, therefore, surprising that we should begin to glimpse an apotheosis of artistic creativity among Colombians and to effect the country’s good health with a definitive awareness of who we are and what we’re good for. I believe Colombia is learning to survive with an indestructible faith, whose greatest merit is being more fruitful the more it encounters adversity. Historical violence forced it to decentralize, but it can still reunite with its own greatness through the work and grace of its misfortunes. Experiencing that miracle in the deepest way will allow us to know with certainty and forever in what country we were born and to continue between two opposing realities without dying. This is why I am not surprised that, in these days of historical disasters, the good health of the country should prosper with a new awareness. Popular wisdom is making its way, and we aren’t waiting for it sitting in
the doorway of the house but in the middle of the street, perhaps without the country itself realizing that we are going to overcome everything and find its salvation even where it had never been sought before.
No occasion seemed more auspicious than this one for me to leave the eternal, nostalgic clandestinity of my study and stitch together these ramblings for the two hundredth anniversary of the University of Antioquia, which we celebrate now as a historical date that belongs to everyone. An auspicious occasion to begin again at the beginning and love as never before the country we deserve so that it will deserve us. If only for that reason, I would dare to believe that the dream of Don Miguel de Cervantes is now at the right point for us to glimpse the dawn of a calmer time, that the evil that overwhelms us will last much less time than the good, and that on our boundless creativity alone depends knowing now which of the many roads are the right ones, in order to experience them in the peace of the living and enjoy them by right and for ever more.
Amen.
A SOUL OPEN TO BE FILLED WITH MESSAGES IN SPANISH
Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, March 26, 2007
Not even in my most delirious dreams in the days when I was writing One Hundred Years of Solitude did I imagine I would see an edition of 1 million copies. To think that a million people could decide to read something written in the solitude of a room, with only the twenty-eight letters of the Spanish alphabet and two fingers as the entire arsenal, seemed madness from every point of view. Today, the Academies of the Language have published this edition as a gesture towards a novel that has passed before the eyes of fifty times a million readers, and towards an insomniac artisan like me, who cannot leave behind his surprise at everything that has happened.
But this is not and cannot be a matter of honouring a writer. This miracle is the irrefutable demonstration that there are an enormous number of people prepared to read stories in the Spanish language, and therefore a million copies of One Hundred Years of Solitude are not a million tributes to the writer who blushes as he receives today the first book of this print run. It is proof that there are millions of readers of texts in the Spanish language waiting for this nourishment.
Nothing has changed since then in my writing routine. I have never seen anything other than my two index fingers striking one by one and at a brisk pace the twenty-eight letters of the unmodified alphabet that I’ve had before my eyes for more than seventy years. Today, it was incumbent upon me to lift my head and attend this tribute, for which I am grateful, and all I can do is stop and think about what it is that has happened. What I see is that the non-existent reader of my blank page is today an immense crowd hungry to read texts in Spanish.
The readers of One Hundred Years of Solitude are a community who, if they lived on the same piece of ground, would be one of the twenty most populous countries in the world. This isn’t a boastful statement. Just the opposite. I simply want to show that there are a number of human beings who have demonstrated with their habit of reading that their souls are open to be filled with messages in Spanish. The challenge for all writers, all the poets, narrators, and educators in our language, is to quench that thirst and increase that crowd, the real raison d’être of our craft and, of course, ourselves.
When I was thirty-eight, having already published four books since my twenties, I sat down at the typewriter and wrote: ‘Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.’ I had no idea of the significance or the origin of that sentence, or of where it would lead me. What I know today is that for eighteen months I didn’t stop writing for a single day until I finished the book.
It may seem untrue, but one of my most pressing problems was typewriter paper. I was ignorant enough to think that mistakes in typing, language, or grammar were actually creative errors, and whenever I found them I tore up the page and tossed it in the wastepaper basket to start again. With the rhythm I had acquired in a year of practice, I calculated it would take me six months of daily mornings to finish the book.
Esperanza Araiza, the unforgettable Pera, the typist for poets and filmmakers, had typed fair copies of great works by Mexican writers. Among them, Carlos Fuentes’ Where the Air is Clear, Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, and several original scripts by Don Luis Buñuel. When I proposed that she type up the final version, the novel was a rough draft riddled with corrections, first in black ink and then in red to avoid confusion. But that was nothing for a woman accustomed to everything in a lion’s cage. Years later, Pera confessed that, as she was taking home the final version that I had corrected, she slipped as she got off the bus in torrential rain, and the pages were left floating in the quagmire of the street. She gathered them, soaking wet and almost illegible, with the help of other passengers, and dried them in her house, page by page, with an iron.
What could have been the inspiration for another, better book was how Mercedes and I survived with our two sons during that time when I didn’t earn a penny anywhere. I don’t even know how Mercedes managed to have food in the house every day during those months. We had resisted the temptation of loans with interest until we tied up our hearts and made our first incursions into the pawnshop.
After the short-lived relief afforded by certain small things, we had to turn to the jewellery that Mercedes had received from her family over the years. The expert examined them with the rigour of a surgeon, inspected and checked again with his magical eye the diamonds in the earrings, the emeralds in the necklace, the rubies in the rings, and finally returned them to us with the long verónica of a bullfighter: ‘All of this is nothing but glass.’
In the moments of greatest difficulty, Mercedes made her astral calculations and told the patient landlord, without the slightest tremor in her voice:
‘We can pay you the full amount in six months.’
‘Excuse me, señora,’ the owner replied, ‘but do you realize that by then it will be an enormous amount?’
‘I do realize that,’ said an impassive Mercedes, ‘but by then we’ll have everything resolved. Don’t worry.’
And when she responded to the good lawyer who was a highly placed state official and one of the most elegant and patient men we had ever met, again her voice didn’t tremble:
‘Very well, señora, your word is good enough for me,’ and he made his fatal calculations. ‘I’ll expect you on September 7.’
At last, at the beginning of August 1966, Mercedes and I went to the post office in Mexico City to send to Buenos Aires the finished version of One Hundred Years of Solitude, a package containing 590 pages typed double spaced on ordinary paper, and addressed to Francisco Porrúa, literary director of Editorial Sudamericana.
The post-office clerk placed the package on the scale, made his mental calculations, and said:
‘That’ll be eighty-two pesos.’
Mercedes counted the notes and loose change remaining in her purse and confronted reality.
‘We have only fifty-three.’
We opened the package, divided it in half, and sent one to Buenos Aires without even asking ourselves how we would get the money to post the rest. Only afterwards did we realize that we hadn’t sent the first half but the second. But before we got hold of the money to mail it, Paco Porrúa, our man in Editorial Sudamericana, anxious to read the first half of the book, forwarded us the money so that we could send it to him.
That was how we were reborn into our new life of today.
EDITOR’S NOTE
The texts that Gabriel García Márquez has brought together in this book were written by the author, intended to be read by him in public before an audience, and cover practically his entire life, from the first one, which he wrote at the age of seventeen to say goodbye to his classmates in the advanced course in Zipaquirá, in 1944, to the one he read before the Academies of the Language and the king and queen of Spain in 2007.
; In the earliest texts the aversion the young Colombian feels towards oratory is explicit. ‘I’m not here to give a speech’ is the warning he gives his secondary-school friends the first time he stands at the podium, and the phrase our author chose as the title of this book. In the following text, ‘How I Began to Write’, read when he was already the successful author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, in 1970, he again informs his listeners of his aversion to the genre: ‘I began to be a writer in the same way I climbed up on this platform: I was coerced.’ In his third effort, when he received the Rómulo Gallegos Prize in 1972, he confirms that he has agreed ‘to do two of the things…that I’d promised myself I would never do: accept a prize and give a speech’.
Ten years later, Gabriel García Márquez received the Nobel Prize in Literature and found himself in urgent need of writing the most important speech a writer can ever give in his life. The result was a masterpiece: ‘The Solitude of Latin America’. From then on, the genre became essential in his career as an admired, award-winning author whose presence and words were requested all around the world.
In this edition I have had the privilege of working with the author, literally side by side, in revising the texts. The changes have been the usual orthographic and typographical ones, and his decision to give titles to some speeches that until now had been known by the occasion on which they were delivered, such as the one for the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, which he calls here ‘Because of You’. Rereading these scattered or forgotten texts, in a genre he always considered ‘the most terrifying of human commitments’, has led García Márquez to be reconciled with them and to remark: ‘Reading these speeches, I’ve rediscovered how I have changed and evolved as a writer.’ Not only are the central themes of his literature concentrated in them but also the clues that help us understand his life more deeply.
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