Praise for Requiem with Yellow Butterflies
Australia and Latin America enter into a mutually illuminating dialogue in Halford’s travel essays, with their engagingly unheroic protagonist.
J.M. COETZEE
Literary in the best sense of the word – attentive to place, inventive in its descriptions and bold in its disclosures.
GAIL JONES
At its heart, Requiem with Yellow Butterflies is a deeply loving portrait of South America, and of the often unexpected currents that flow from its shores to our own. James is a writer who wants to hear and to learn, and so inevitably his travels bring him closer to the lives of the continent’s many brilliant writers and the extraordinary cultures that produced them. He collects their stories, and along the way seeks out the first steps of his own – as a writer, traveller, husband and father.
KÁRI GÍSLASON
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James Halford is a Brisbane writer who has spent extended periods in Latin America and often writes about the region. His fiction, creative nonfiction and criticism have been published in Best Australian Stories, Meanjin and Sydney Review of Books. He holds a literature degree and a creative doctorate from the University of Queensland, where he now teaches, and has studied Spanish in Argentina, Mexico and Spain.
First published in 2019 by
UWA Publishing
Crawley, Western Australia 6009
www.uwap.uwa.edu.au
UWAP is an imprint of UWA Publishing, a division of The University of Western Australia.
This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.
Copyright © James Halford 2019
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
ISBN: 978-1-76080-061-1 (epub)
978-1-76080-062-8 (ePDF)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia
The epigram on p. vii is from F. Nietzsche in E. Bertram, Nietzsche: Attempt at a Mythology, R. E. Norton (trans.), University of Illinois Press, Chicago, 2009, p. 220.
Cover design by Alissa Dinallo
Cover image by Shutterstock
Typeset in 11 pt Bembo by Lasertype
Contents
Requiem with Yellow Butterflies
Caracas
We Want Them Alive
Roraima & Manaus
Don’t Care if It Ever Rains Again
And the Village Was Fair to Look upon
Redcliffe
Old Peak, Young Peak
Uluru: How to Travel Without Seeing
Porto Velho & Brasilia
Coetzee in Buenos Aires
Parque Lezama
Such Loneliness in That Gold
San Miguel del Monte
The Lakeside House
Notes
Acknowledgements
To rediscover the South in oneself…
– Nietzsche
Requiem with Yellow Butterflies
…a feeling as primitive and as simple as that of love.1
– Gabriel García Márquez
In faraway Brisbane, news reached me within an hour.
‘Gabo died today,’ said a familiar female voice down the line. ‘I thought you’d want to know.’
It had been more than a year since we were in touch.
‘R, is that you?’
‘Se murió en su casa en México.’
‘That’s sad.’
She seemed to be calling from her Skype account; my office phone didn’t recognise the number.
‘Where are you?’
‘They’re leaving flowers and books and paper butterflies outside his house. He died of pneumonia.’
‘You’re outside his house?’
I whispered to avoid annoying my work colleagues. Aside from fingers punching keys, the office was silent. It was ten o’clock on Friday morning in Australia, Thursday evening in Mexico.
‘Do you remember the yellow butterflies?’ she said.
‘I’m not sure.’
‘I’ve tried and tried, but I can’t remember that part. Anyway, people are hanging strings of them outside his house.’
I dimly recalled an image of butterflies fluttering over a couple making love in the bath. But my clearest memories of One Hundred Years of Solitude were of us. We’d read it together across a year of long, lazy Sunday morning sessions in bed, sunlight streaming through the window of our sixth-floor apartment by the muddy Brisbane River. I’d read the novel aloud for her, cover to cover, in the hard-won, mongrel Spanish I’d learned over years travelling and working in Latin America, while she corrected my pronunciation and patiently explained every unfamiliar word (‘el revoloteo de una mariposa’). That was her fifth year in Australia, her third living with me, and we both knew there would be no further extensions to her PhD scholarship. A few months after we finished reading Cien años de soledad she submitted her thesis. The conditions of her Mexican scholarship required her to return home and work for a year. We discussed me quitting my day job to follow her:
‘We could go back to Oaxaca in the new year,’ she said. ‘To that village in the sierra with the beautiful little chapel.’
‘It’s too soon. I’ve told you.’
The day of her flight, we lingered on the boardwalk in the Botanic Gardens until the tide exposed the mangroves below. They have a word in Mexico for an embrace so tight it hurts: un abrazo rompecostillas, a rib-cracker.
‘I remember a lot of things,’ I said. ‘But I don’t remember the butterflies.’
After García Márquez died, I found myself emailing and chatting with R nearly every day. We sent each other links to articles about him as a pretext, but we both knew what was really happening. Once we started looking, we found yellow butterflies in nearly all the memorials around the world, but never any explanation of their significance or where they’d appeared in the novel. Our Spanish Royal Academy fortieth-anniversary edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude was still on my bookshelf. But the thought of opening its dark-green cover pained me. We promised that somewhere in the world, at some unspecified point in time, we’d sit together with our old copy of the book and go butterfly hunting. For now, she wouldn’t even tell me where she was living, or where she’d found work.
‘No importa. You made your choice. You decided not to come.’
As I read the memorials from around the world, a spark of curiosity kindled. I was struck by how little impact academic critiques of authorship have made on popular portrayals of it. Since the 1960s, much professional criticism has emphasised readers’ interpretive freedom and down-played authorial intention. Yet nearly all the coverage of Gabo’s death, even in the quality press, returned to good old-fashioned biographical criticism, reinscribing the myth of the author-genius. Much of it described him as a ‘universal writer’ and his work as ‘universal literature’, without seriously considering what these categories mean or how they are constructed. The popular press focused on García Márquez as a global brand name and commodity whose prestige derived from the marketplace – more than 25 million copies of One Hundred Years of Solitude sold in over 30 languages – and from famous, powerful admirers like Bill Clinton, King Juan Carlos of Spain, and Fidel Castro.
When I started reading the obituaries for Gabo at the local, national, Latin American and international levels, I found something quite different. I encountered a series of culturally particular and contested versions of Gabo/García Márquez. In Colombia, his death occasioned soul-searching about negative p
erceptions of the country internationally; in Mexico, he was celebrated as an immigrant success story – someone who had made a better life in their country for a change; in Spain, at a moment of profound cultural pessimism sparked by the economy, the death of the ‘new Cervantes’ became an elegy for the illustrious Hispanic past. Meanwhile, in the English-speaking world, especially the USA, the obituaries played out a range of stereotypes, fantasies and fears about Latin America that have lingered since the end of the Cold War.
Working my way through all those different Gabos eventually led me back to R.
In Aracataca, where the writer was born, the memorial was staged largely for the benefit of the visiting media. On the Monday after his death, a symbolic funeral was held and screened on national television. A few distant relatives were present, but no one from García Márquez’s immediate family. Some residents felt abandoned and grumbled that their most famous son should have done more to help the underdeveloped town economically. The municipal government embraced the celebration regardless, hanging yellow paper butterflies from the town’s main buildings: the García Márquez Museum, the García Márquez school, and the Macondo residences (named after Gabo’s fictionalised Aracataca). This community of roughly 25,000 people was once economically reliant on banana plantations. For the best part of 60 years, the United Fruit Company, which Gabo excoriated in One Hundred Years of Solitude for its exploitation of local workers and brutal repression of organised labour, was the cornerstone of the local economy. The company’s withdrawal in the early 1970s prompted a financial downturn from which the town has never fully recovered.
In recent decades, Aracataca has enjoyed a modest resurgence due to African palm plantations, and a little Nobel Prize–related tourism. Attempts to convert the town into a living García Márquez museum, however, haven’t been wholly successful. In a 2006 poll, a slim majority voted to rename the town Aracataca-Macondo, but the total votes were insufficient to make the change law. Around the same time, a Dutch expatriate succeeded in establishing a guesthouse for tourists. But when the owner publicly criticised the town’s inconsistent water supply, the provincial government withdrew financial support. Shortly after shutting down the main accommodation option in town, the mayor erected an oversize English sign for tourists beside the main road: ‘Welcome to Aracataca-Macondo, Nobel Land’ – a gesture of grandiose futility that might have pleased José Arcadio Buendía, the impractical patriarch of the Buendía family.
Aracataca’s memorial for Gabo was similarly shambolic. Heavy rain turned the decorative butterflies to mush, the main street to mud. Until a few minutes beforehand, it was unclear if the event would happen at all. Eventually, a procession of school students and a marching band picked their way through puddles and fallen mangoes, watched by a disappointingly small crowd. The literature teacher from the local high school read a eulogy. Due to technical problems only a short segment was able to be televised. Locals kept asking visiting journalists when the authorities would send Gabo’s ashes. People wanted to know why the great man hadn’t come home to be buried.
Days earlier, José Gabriel Ortíz, the Colombian ambassador to Mexico, where Gabo had lived for more than 50 years, sparked a minor diplomatic dispute by suggesting on television that the writer’s ashes be divided between the two countries. Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, in full campaign mode ahead of the May 2014 elections, took up the theme. His eulogy appealed to national pride. García Márquez was ‘the most admired of Colombians,’2 he said. ‘They [Mexican authorities] know perfectly well we Colombians would like to have the ashes, but we will respect the wishes of his family. Those who say Gabo turned his back on Aracataca and Colombia are mistaken. Glory to him who brought us most glory.’3
In December 2015, after nearly two years of negotiations, Gabo’s ashes were eventually transported to Cartagena, the coastal Colombian city where he still kept a house. But this looked unlikely in the immediate aftermath of his death. By six o’clock in the evening on the day of the memorial in Aracataca, the streets had emptied out. A few stragglers at The Leafstorm Café – named after García Márquez’s first novel – watched the much larger Mexico City memorial on television, the only glimpse of the funeral urn they were likely to get. Outside the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, enormous clouds of yellow butterflies cascaded through the air. Despite heavy rain and strong winds, the crowd was large and animated, clutching photos of the writer, playing the trumpet, adapting the grito of Mexican Independence for the occasion:
‘¡Viva Gabo!’
Eduardo Zalamea Borda, an editor at the Colombian newspaper El Espectador, invented the nickname while García Márquez was a journalist for the paper in the 1950s. In Mexico City, more than 60 years on, it was cheered by thousands of strangers. After queuing patiently in the rain for up to six hours, mourners were allowed inside in groups of 50 to sight the urn and lay tributes of yellow roses and butterflies. Those unable to enter watched the ceremony on giant screens set up outside.
With a high-domed ceiling, plush red carpets and wall-sized murals by Diego Rivera decorating its interior, the Palacio de Bellas Artes is an opulent setting. Many of Mexico’s most notable cultural figures have been memorialised here, among them García Márquez’s good friend Carlos Fuentes, who died in 2012. But the formal ceremony was at odds with the writer’s common touch. ‘Gabo would have liked less solemnity and more white clothing,’ wrote local journalist Juan Cruz.4
The most energetic moment of the night was the appearance of a live band playing upbeat Colombian Vallenatos, selected by García Márquez’s sons, Gonzalo and Rodrigo. The least lively moments were the presidential speeches. Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos wisely dropped the nationalism he’d adopted in Bogotá in favour of inclusive Pan-American rhetoric: ‘Macondo is a new world and an old one at once where a peaceful utopia is possible – one we seek together.’5 Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto said it was a great loss not only for literature, but for humanity. He is not known as a reader. During the 2012 presidential election campaign, he was famously unable to name a book that had influenced him (other than the Bible). Between these two men sat Mercedes Barcha, García Márquez’s widow. Dry-eyed and dressed in black, she fanned herself and chatted calmly through the ceremony. Her grieving would be done in private, but her presence bestowed a quiet dignity on the occasion that it would otherwise have lacked.
To understand how Mercedes Barcha came to be flanked by two presidents at her husband’s funeral, to understand how García Márquez came to be celebrated as a ‘universal’ writer, I started reading up on his early days in Mexico, the period just before the 1967 publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude.
R still refused to tell me where she was living and working. But we remained in email and Skype contact.
‘You should definitely write something on Gabo,’ she said.
Legend has it that Gabo and Mercedes arrived at Mexico City’s dusty central railway station in 1961 with only US$20 to their name. It was July the second: the day Ernest Hemingway took his own life. García Márquez’s first Mexican publication was an obituary for Papa Hemingway, one of his idols. Literary modernism was dying and nobody was quite sure what would follow. Soon Mercedes, who had waited patiently through a 12-year engagement before their 1958 marriage, found herself financially supporting her husband and their two young sons while he wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude. The novel combined Latin American folklore with narrative strategies recognisably derived from modernist fiction in its North American incarnation (especially Hemingway and William Faulkner), but its global distribution and reception would make it a key text in the transition to postmodernism.
The 2014 obituaries in the major Mexican newspapers emphasised the young couple’s upward trajectory in their adopted country: ‘they were lost, undocumented, probably happy, but hungry.’ Narratives of social mobility resonate well in Mexico, as anyone who’s seen a telenovela will attest. Framing the couple’s story in this way
foregrounds a quintessentially Mexican preoccupation with the politics of migration in the region: ‘Peña Nieto didn’t say it in the farewell…but fifty-two years ago that woman [Mercedes] passed hours at the government office on Bucarelli Street waiting…for them to give her residency.’6
It should be recognised that the couple’s poverty was, at least in part, elective – la vie d’artiste. It’s true that politics was partly responsible for the move to Mexico City. Colombia was still emerging from La Violencia, a decade-long civil war, and García Márquez had made powerful enemies with his investigative journalism series, ‘Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor’, about a government cover-up. But the move was, as much as anything, a calculated risk by a highly educated and already accomplished writer pursuing the career benefits on offer in the metropolis.
By that time, he’d published a good deal of outstanding journalism, reporting from behind the Iron Curtain in Europe, and from Cuba after the revolution. He had already published many of his best short stories, like ‘Isabel’s Monologue Watching It Rain in Macondo’ and ‘Baltazar’s Prodigious Afternoon’. And he had published three ‘Macondo’ novels: Leaf Storm (1955), Nobody Writes to the Colonel (1961), and In Evil Hour (1962). The second of these – a bleak, deeply unmagical account of small-town dreams destroyed – is now considered a classic. But that status was conferred only after the global success of One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Irrespective of the literary quality of his work, García Márquez knew he needed to shift closer to the centres of literary capital if he was going to become a professional novelist, let alone a figure of ‘universal literature’. Mexico City was not New York, Paris or London, but it was a regional cultural force (alongside Buenos Aires), and it was closely connected to North American and European centres through translators and polyglot intellectuals like Fuentes and Octavio Paz. The energetic promotion of Latin American writing in Europe and the USA was about to produce the 1960s Boom.
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