by Ilan Stavans
The riots during El Bogotazo lasted ten hours. They started in Bogotá and quickly spread to the rest of the country. Stores were looted; goods were stolen and fenced at cheap prices. The death toll reached 200,000, and approximately one million were injured. La Violencia raged for a decade, until 1958. In the article “Bogotá 1947,” about the book Mafia: Historias de caleños y bogotanos by Gonzalo Mallarino, García Márquez described the day he first set foot in Bogotá at the age of thirteen: “. . . it was a somber January afternoon, the saddest of my life.” He added that the greatest heroism of his life, and of his generation’s, was having been young in Bogotá at the time. He would jump on the trolleys on Sunday and go from Plaza Bolívar to Avenida de Chile. Sometimes he would meet a random person, usually a man, and they would have coffee together and chat until midnight.29
During the riots, García Márquez’s boarding house burned down and the Universidad Nacional closed. A penciled statement in his transcript reveals that he transferred to the Universidad de Cartagena. “I realized that literature had a relationship with life that my short stories didn’t,” García Márquez said later. “And then an event took place that was very important with respect to this attitude. It was El Bogotazo, on April 9, 1948, when a political leader, Gaitán, was shot and the people of Bogotá went raving mad in the streets. I was in my pensión ready to have lunch when I heard the news. I ran toward the place, but Gaitán had just been put into a taxi and was being taken to a hospital. On my way back to the pension, the people had already taken to the streets and they were demonstrating, looting stores, and burning buildings. I joined them. That afternoon and evening, I became aware of the kind of country I was living in, and how little my short stories had to do with any of that.”30
García Márquez’s entry into journalism took place shortly afterward. He decided to leave Bogotá after witnessing the riots. While he understood the causes that had led to the mobilization of the masses, he was shocked and frightened by the anarchy. He needed to leave the nation’s capital, to gain perspective by looking at things from afar. He decided to go to Barranquilla first, but the university there was closed. After some time he made his way to Cartagena, a thriving coastal city with deep colonial roots where Afro-Colombian culture thrived. It was a bold move. These two cities, Bogotá and Cartagena, dramatically different in their metabolism and in the way García Márquez approached them, would allow him to come to terms with his own literary talents.
Chapter 3
Mamador de gallos
“When I was later forced to go back to Barranquilla on the Caribbean, where I had spent my childhood,” García Márquez later recalled, “I realized that that was the type of life I had lived, known, and wanted to write about.”1 Being a participant of El Bogotazo convinced him that the responsibility of a writer was to bear witness, to use words to describe the dramatic transformations taking place in a journalistic fashion.
Once in Barranquilla, García Márquez started writing a daily column and some editorials for the newspaper El Heraldo. Its offices were located on a street known for its underworld bar, which people referred to as Calle del Crimen (Crime Street). He lived in “one of those hotels for casual customers which are really brothels.”2 The newspaper paid him three pesos per column and another three per editorial. At the time, according to his friend Germán Vargas Cantillo, whom he had just met, García Márquez worked intensely, “after midnight, on an insurmountable novel, La casa [The House], which he never finished nor did he publish with that title, but it’s unquestionable that in that novel, which we called el mamotreto, the huge thing, there were probably, in essence, a few of the stories and some of the novels for which he would later be known among readers and critics.”3 But progress was slow. He wasn’t quite sure what the plot was about, how to approach it, and what narrative perspective to take. He struggled with it, often feeling disappointed. Did he have to accept that the project needed to be aborted? The material was germinating within him but, although he refused to acknowledge it, the novel wasn’t quite ready to acquire its final shape.
He was twenty-two, frustrated, and anxious. Eager to test his talent, he spent late nights at the office of El Heraldo and began another novel that would eventually become La hojarasca (Leaf Storm). García Márquez wrote the manuscript in a hurry. He was broke. “When I hadn’t got the one-fifty to pay for the room,” he later said, “I used to leave the manuscript . . . as a deposit with the hotel doorman. He knew that I valued those papers highly. A long time afterwards, when I had already written One Hundred Years of Solitude, I came across this doorman among the people who would came to see me or ask for an autograph. He remembered everything.”4
There is much debate among critics regarding exactly where García Márquez wrote Leaf Storm. For years the writer himself suggested that he had composed it in Barranquilla among friends, but there were two versions of the novel. The first was likely written in Cartagena between the end of 1948 and the beginning of 1949, while García Márquez was working at El Universal. He held a deep affection for Cartagena, but he told an interviewer that he harbored some reservations about its people “porque son cachacos,” because they were too similar to the people in Bogotá. The second and final version, in his own words, was written in Barranquilla.5
His technique in Leaf Storm is reminiscent of some of his idealized masters: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Faulkner. Its structure resembles the shifting viewpoints used by Faulkner in As I Lay Dying, although, unlike Faulkner’s narrators, who aren’t always identifiable, García Márquez had only three unnamed ones: an old man, a boy, and a woman. From Wolf and Joyce he assimilated a modernist bent, which is palpable in this novel as a style but is more evident in his first stories published in newspapers, such as “The Third Resignation,” “Bitterness for Three Sleepwalkers,” and “Dialogue with the Mirror,” later collected in Ojos de perro azul (Eyes of Blue Dog) (1973). Such is the impact of the Modernists on him that many of these stories, when read today, don’t feel like having been written by García Márquez. Perhaps he even nurtures a distaste for them, as if they were his bastard children. Is that why these stories have never appeared in English in a separate book as Eyes of Blue Dog but, instead, were integrated to the volume Collected Stories translated by Gregory Rabassa that Harper & Row released in 1984?
Trying to publish the book was a nightmare; for years he and others believed that his opera prima was cursed. It took him five years to find a publisher. He sent it to Editorial Losada, the prestigious publishing house in Buenos Aires, but the Spanish critic Guillermo de Torre, who worked for Losada (and was Borges’s brother-in-law), sent him a rejection letter that stung him deeply. Not only did de Torre say that Leaf Storm wasn’t for Losada but he advised García Márquez, in spite of the manuscript’s poetic quality, not to pursue literature and to concentrate on other things. At least de Torre “recognized something in me that now gives me a lot of satisfaction,” García Márquez expressed as a form of consolation, “a definite feeling for poetry.”6
In 1955, Leaf Storm finally was published in Bogotá by the editor Samuel Lisman Baum, with a probable print run of a thousand copies (although the published book included a colophon that announced a printing of four thousand copies). Its cover image was by the Cartagena painter Cecilia Porras. Dedicated to Germán Vargas, Leaf Storm was priced at five pesos. But the book was full of typographical errors! García Márquez was beside himself. He and a group of friends decided to buy the entire print run. Among those who helped in this endeavor was Eduardo Zalamea, who took—in exchange for half the royalties for a novel he had published with Lisman Baum—about five hundred copies of Leaf Storm.
The embarrassment of the ubiquitous typos didn’t stop García Márquez from enjoying his success. This was his first published book, and the critical response in Bogotá, Barranquilla, and Cartagena was positive (the first review was by Eduardo Zalamea, under the pseudonym of Ulysses, in El Heraldo). Leaf Storm announced many of García Márquez�
��s literary themes, in particular his interest in immigrants. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, the presence of immigrants is represented by the Street of the Turks, a catch-all term for those who had come to Colombia’s Caribbean coast from different parts of the Ottoman Empire, including Turkey, Syria, Egypt, and Greece. Another prominent element in Leaf Storm that is later amplified in García Márquez’s oeuvre is natural disasters, such as plagues.
His fascination with these flare-ups of nature may be traced to what he saw as a child in Aracataca and from his readings of the Bible, the Greek tragedies, and other classics. “Beginning with Oedipus,” he reminisced, “I’ve always been interested in plagues. I have studied a lot about medieval plagues. One of my favorite books is A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe, among other reasons because Defoe is a journalist who sounds like what he is saying is pure fantasy. For many years I thought Defoe had written about the London plague as he observed it. But then I discovered it was a novel, because Defoe was less than seven years old when the plague occurred in London. Plagues have always been one of my recurrent themes—and in different forms.”7 (In an interview in the Cuban newspaper Gramma, García Márquez was asked what he wanted to die of: “Love would be good,” he replied, “but not from AIDS. As a subject, love in the time of AIDS would never interest me because AIDS is a plague that is much related to one’s behavior. It’s not like cholera or other plagues that are uncontrollable dangers, they cannot be evaluated, they creep up on you even if you don’t move, shut away in your home . . .”)8
Leaf Storm was published in Colombia during a time of political repression. After Gaitán was assassinated in 1948, the country was mired in political instability. On June 13, 1953, General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla seized power in a coup d’état supported by both Liberals and Conservatives, as well as the United States. Rojas Pinilla had been a delegate to the United Nations, and he was supportive of American opposition to communism. A year before the coup, the Conservative government of Laureano Gómez promoted him to the rank of general of the Armed Forces of Colombia. His rule heralded a period of military repression and the restriction of civil liberties which lasted until 1957.
At the time, García Márquez was a strong proponent of socialism. In his words, he wanted “the world to be Socialist and I believe that sooner or later it will happen.”9 As an engaged intellectual, he was committed to the cause of change. Yet Leaf Storm didn’t seem to present a clear ideological stand. According to his friends, the book condemned repression but it didn’t expose anything. García Márquez felt guilty about it. His progressive loyalties were apparent, but his writing was less a tool for transformation than a source of enjoyment, at least on the surface. He responded that, while he sympathized with the socialist cause, he opposed what in the Soviet Union was described as “committed literature.” He believed that when writers became tools for government-sponsored plans, the aesthetic effect was deadly. “Far from accelerating any process of raising consciousness,” García Márquez argued that this type of literature “actually slows it down. Latin Americans expect more from a novel than an exposé of the oppression and injustice they know all too well. Many of my militant friends who so often feel the need to dictate to writers what they should or should not write are, unconsciously perhaps, taking a reactionary stance inasmuch as they are imposing restrictions on creative freedom. I believe a novel about love is as valid as any other. When it comes down to it, the writer’s duty—his revolutionary duty, if you like—is to write well.”10
Years later, in 1972, when the English translation of Leaf Storm by Gregory Rabassa was published in the United States, Alfred Kazin reviewed it in the New York Times Book Review: “Unlike the subtle but timid Borges, who comes out of a library and may be remembered as the Washington Irving of Latin America, Márquez—born in 1928 [sic]—reflects the incessant ironies of post-imperialist national development. He has extraordinary strength and firmness of imagination and writes with the calmness of a man who knows exactly what wonders he can perform. Strange things happen in the land of Márquez. As with Emerson, Poe, Hawthorne, every sentence breaks the silence of a vast emptiness, the famous New World ‘solitude’ that is the unconscious despair of his characters but the sign of Márquez’s genius.”
Kazin understood that García Márquez was not a Protean romantic of the time when it seemed that all the world would soon be new. Instead, he is a “dazzlingly accomplished but morally burdened end-product of centuries of colonialism, civil war, and political chaos; a prime theme in all his work is the inevitability of incest and the damage to the gene pool that at the end of his great novel produces a baby with a pig’s tail. Leaf Storm was Márquez’s first book, begun when he was 19 . . . In each of these stories Márquez takes a theme that in a lesser writer would seem ‘poetic,’ a handsome conceit lifted out of a poem by Wallace Stevens but then stopped dead in its narrative tricks. Márquez manages to make a story out of each of these—not too ambitious, but just graceful enough to be itself. He succeeds because these are stories about wonders, and the wonders become actions.”11 Kazin concluded: “I am guessing but I wonder if the outbreak of creative originality in Latin America today, coming after so many years of dutifulness to Spanish and French models, doesn’t resemble our sudden onrush of originality after we had decided really to break away from the spell of England.”12
To illuminate the way dialogue works in Leaf Storm—he ascribes so little of it, yet when it is present its strategic location in the narrative makes it resonate loudly—it is useful to bring to mind a response García Márquez once gave to an interviewer. Dialogue, he stated, “doesn’t ring true in Spanish. I’ve always said that in this language there’s a wide gulf between spoken and written dialogue. A Spanish dialogue that’s good in real life is not necessarily good in a novel. So I use it very little.”13
The five years it took for Leaf Storm to be published were constructive. During this time García Márquez perfected the art of mamar gallo, a Colombian expression meaning to tease, to kid, to make clownish jokes. Although his newspaper job was demanding, he started writing short stories on the side and publishing them in the Sunday magazine. Around 1949, García Márquez met a group of writers, artists, and intellectuals, mostly male who, like him, were mamadores de gallo. The cadre was eventually known as El grupo de Barranquilla and included Germán Vargas Cantillo, a journalist, literary critic, and newscaster born in Bucaramanga, Colombia in 1929, Álvaro Cepeda Samudio (Barranquilla, 1926), and Alfonso Fuenmayor (Barranquilla, 1915).
One of El grupo de Barranquilla’s collaborations was the making of a short film, the production of which has become legendary in Colombian intellectual circles. It was an eleven-minute, black-and-white short called La langosta azul (The Blue Lobster). Directed by three members of the group—Álvaro Cepeda Samudio, cinematographer Luis Vicens, a Catalan bookseller who founded the first cinema club in Bogotá, and painter Enrique Grau—it was filmed at the end of 1954 in Puerto Salgar with a 16-milimeter Boller movie camera. Some additional footage was taken in early 1955 by Cepeda Samudio, and the short was edited by Vicens.
Almost everyone involved in La langosta azul contributed money for its production. In spite of the lore that surrounds the project, the truth is that García Márquez was only a peripheral participant in the endeavor. It appears that his involvement may have been used to attract publicity for the film. La langosta azul may be classified as science fiction, in the tradition of such films as The Andromeda Strain and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In that sense, it’s a fascinating experiment. After all, Latin America isn’t known for its embrace of science fiction. The number of novels, stories, films, and TV shows that belong to that genre is insignificant. A gringo, or foreigner (played by photographer Nereo López-Meza), arrives in a small Caribbean coastal town with a suitcase full of lobsters, one of which is blue and has atomic power. As the gringo wanders around town, the blue lobster is lost. Most of the film features the search for the blue lobster; this allows
the camera to explore the tropical landscape. In the end, a strong wind blows the lobster away.14
The short has a similar feel to some of the surrealist projects of André Breton, Tristan Tzara, or Salvador Dalí. It is loosely reminiscent of Luis Buñuel’s Un chien andalou (Andalusian Dog) and L’ age d’or (Golden Age), although La langosta azul has a narrative that is far less discombobulated and its intent is not to scandalize but to entertain. The plot is supposedly based on an idea by García Márquez, and it has elements that would lend credence to that. But the degree of his involvement has been called into question a number of times, not least by García Márquez himself.
Through El grupo de Barranquilla, García Márquez met other young writers, including the poet Meira Delmar, with whom he would share a long-lasting friendship.15 The center of gravity and inspirational figure around whom the group revolved was Don Ramón Vinyes, immortalized in One Hundred Years of Solitude as el sabio catalán, the Catalan wise man. Born in 1882 in Berga, a village in the Pyrenees, Catalonia, Vinyes later became an icon to García Márquez, Cepeda Samudio, Germán Vargas Cantillo, and Alfonso Fuenmayor.16 A voracious reader, he was a European expatriate who cut an elegant figure. He had immigrated to the Americas in 1911, arriving in Puerto Colombia on June 16. What brought him to Colombia? An adventurous spirit, no doubt. He first worked as a bookkeeper for Correa Hermanos, a cocoa exporting company. Vinyes wrote an autobiography that includes the following segment: “I arrived in Colombia fleeing from literature. The influence of Catalonia over me may be seen in my verses, ‘La ardiente cabal-gata’ and ‘Consejas a la luna.’ I tore up the last copies because they were overwhelmed with pretentious symbolism during an ocean crossing that took me from Barcelona to the Colombian beaches. I had also written a play, Al florecer de los manzanos, which was awarded a prize. I had believed naïvely in literature with almost mystic candor. Thus, the disappointment I suffered was violent. Violent enough to make me not want anything to do with it. And believe me, I did need courage. Anyway, on the ship an Italian woman lent me a copy of The Divine Comedy. Due to the fact that I would never return the book to her, a new lasting alliance with literature was established.”17