Gabriel García Márquez in Mexico D.F. 1966, writing One Hundred Years of Solitude.
solitude
& company
the life of GABRIEL GARCÍA
MÁRQUEZ told with help from his friends,
family, fans, arguers, fellow pranksters,
drunks, and a few respectable souls
SILVANA PATERNOSTRO
Translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman
Seven Stories Press
New York • Oakland • London
Copyright © 2014 by Silvana Paternostro
English translation © 2019 by Edith Grossman
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Paternostro, Silvana, author. | Grossman, Edith, 1936-translator.
Title: Solitude & company : the life of Gabriel García Márquez told with help from his friends, family, fans, arguers, fellow pranksters, drunks, and a few respectable souls / Silvana Paternostro ; translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman.
Other titles: Soledad & Compañía. English | Solitude and company
Description: New York : Seven Stories Press, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018045522| ISBN 9781609808969 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781609808976 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: García Márquez, Gabriel, 1927-2014. | García Márquez, Gabriel, 1927-2014--Friends and associates.
Classification: LCC PQ8180.17.A73 Z825513 2019 | DDC 863/.64 [B] --dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018045522
Book design by Jon Gilbert
Printed in the United States of America
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Prologue
ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE
The Earthquake of 1967
B.C.
BEFORE CIEN AÑOS DE SOLEDAD
1. The Son of Luisa Santiaga and Gabriel Eligio
2. Raised by Grandparents
3. The Coast Gets Ready to Speak
4. First and Last Friends
5. The Citation of One Hundred Years of Solitude
6. To Be a Prankster or a Writer
7. Another Whiskey
8. La Cueva
9. “The Guy Has the Persistence of That Business”
10. Slickers and Hicks
11. The Neck of the Swan
12. SOFTAG: Society of Friends to Aid Gabito
13. Sacred Crocodile
14. “That Communist Newspaper”
15. “Tell Me More”
16. Solitude and Company
17. “There Was a Blinding Light”
18. Geography Lesson
19. BOOM!
20. Gabo Is Adjective, Substantive, Verb
A. C.
AFTER CIEN AÑOS DE SOLEDAD
21. Rich and Famous
22. The Death of Five Kings
23. “Excuse Me, What’s Your Name?”
24. Persona Non Grata
25. Something New
26. “Shit, He Died”
27. “I Don’t Want to Be in Stockholm by Myself ”
28. Ex Cathedra
29. Damaged Goods
30. Dreams of Power
31. Knockout
32. Cod-Liver Oil
33. The Start
Epilogue: The Day We All Woke Up Old
Notes on the Most Important Voices
List of Images
To Gabriel García Márquez
and George Plimpton,
teachers, in memoriam
I am consoled, however, that at times oral history might be better than written, and without knowing it we may be inventing a new genre needed by literature: fiction about fiction.
Gabriel García Márquez, Living to Tell the Tale
Prologue
In November 2000, the magazine Talk, recently founded by Tina Brown, asked me to prepare an oral history of Gabriel García Márquez. They wanted two thousand words; badly counted and with photographs, that amounted to three or four pages. That is, something short. Definitely not his biography.
I was hired because although I’ve lived in New York since 1986, I was born in Barranquilla, and therefore was a neighbor of the imaginary world of Macondo. Besides, in the winter 1996 issue of The Paris Review, I had published “Three Days with Gabo,” a detailed chronicle of a journalism workshop García Márquez offered in Cartagena that I attended as a student.
I proposed that instead of interviewing the heads of state, movie stars, and immensely wealthy men with whom he associated on a daily basis, I would travel to Colombia to talk with those who knew him before he became the legendary Latin American author. When I said I would even talk to the characters who appear in One Hundred Years of Solitude, referring to a group of friends he had immortalized as “the pranksters of La Cueva” and the “first and last friends that he ever had in his life,” they immediately sent me a plane ticket that I found very funny, because printed on the front of the folder that held the ticket was the image of Mickey Mouse. Talk was financed by the Disney Corporation.
“After Colombia, I have to go to Mexico,” I risked telling the editor. “That was where he wrote the novel.”
“Whatever you need,” was the answer.
The piece was never published. Talk closed because the formula of mixing show business with journalism and literature was not an obvious success. “What other magazine puts a bare-chested Hugh Grant on the cover and devotes six pages to a serious section on books?” the editor who had asked me for it told me not long ago. “Only Tina would have asked for an oral history of Gabriel García Márquez.”
Thanks to Tina’s daring, however, I was able to produce twenty-four tapes, ninety minutes on each side, of people talking about Gabriel García Márquez. I published a few pieces carved out of those conversations. In 2002, when Living to Tell the Tale, his book of memories, was published in Spanish, the magazine El malpensante (The Evil-Minded) came out with a more Colombian and more extensive version of what I had prepared for Talk. I called it “Solitude & Company,” the name that at one point García Márquez was going to give to a film production company he wanted to set up with some Colombian partners. With the same title I published another version in the edition of The Paris Review commemorating its fiftieth anniversary, which in turn was translated and published in Mexico by the magazine Nexos in its spring 2003 issue. Almost a decade went by before I decided, in March 2010, that it was time to listen to those tapes again and transform them into this book.
When I finished listening to them, though, I realized that what I had was not enough for a book. I needed to fill in gaps. Which is why I began a second round of interviews with those who I thought would provide context and chronology to the first voices.
Solitude & Company is divided into two parts. In the first, “B.C.: Before Cien años de soledad,” his siblings speak, as well as those who were his buddies before he became the universally loved Latin American icon. Those who knew him when he still didn’t have a proper English tailor nor an English biographer—two things I heard him say are the marks of a writer’s success—and didn’t accompany presidents and multimillionaires (as on the night I saw him cut the baby-blue inaugural ribbon at the Museo Soumaya, Carlos Slim’s gift to Mexico City, which reminded me of the interviews I had prepared for Talk). This first part gathers together the voices of those irrevere
nt and hopeful times when a boy from the provinces decided to become a writer. This is the story of how he did it. Here we witness the formation of the creator venerated throughout the world. In the second part, “A.C.: After Cien años de soledad,” a prize-winning García Márquez appears, a celebrated man.
A great deal has been written about García Márquez, but no matter how much is written, the author’s prose, the censorship of his memories, and the analysis of his biographer weigh heavily. Oral history, the formal name of this genre, allows those who were very close to him to describe for us the man who became the most important writer in Latin America, the lover of power, and defender to the end of Fidel Castro. It allows them to tell us how they welcomed him, helped him, and watched him create himself; it permits them to make us feel how much they love him or how much he annoyed them; just them, without other narrators or descriptions as intermediaries.
This book, then, is a ticket to a celebration where everybody talks, everybody shouts, everybody has an opinion and even tells lies. That is the essence of oral history, along the lines of Edie: American Girl by Jean Stein and George Plimpton, and Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances and Detractors Recall His Tur-bulent Career by Plimpton. This format, which fell from the skies with that imperative phone call from Tina Brown, is formidable because it is amusing and light, yet profoundly true.
But you must keep in mind that each morsel of dialogue deals with the version of the person who is speaking. Reading it is as fun as attending a fiesta and stopping to listen to the guests talk about García Márquez, and, as at the best parties, some speak more than others. The shouters are here, the super-analytical, the pranksters, the singers, the vulgar, and even those who have had too much to drink. At this party we are with the company that made possible the solitude that García Márquez needed to write his One Hundred Years of Solitude.
To write this book I didn’t speak to García Márquez. That is exactly what oral history demands. That is, it is written with the voices of others. Oral history involves talking to someone about a person without that person being present, and even more important, recording those conversations. To begin working, I organized the tapes in the order in which the interviews had been held. Then, I started to listen to the interviews I had conducted and recorded more than a decade before. Through the headphones I heard my own laughter, but at the same time new questions jumped out at me. For example, I chuckled listening to the people from my native Barranquilla, but I also realized that outside of Colombia, no one understands what “nursing at a rooster’s tit” means. Then I understood that I had to resolve not only how to explain Barranquillan argot, but also the fact that I was talking to people of advanced age. Their memory would fail and they would stammer when they couldn’t remember something. And since I wasn’t going to give them back their memories, I left in their voices the tenderness of their declining years.
Music, especially the vallenato, an accordion-infused country blues, played an important part in those first conversations, and more than once the interviewees broke into song, and so I let them sing here, too. I also include the machista logic of the judge García Márquez consulted so that he could tell him what had happened on that fateful Sunday when, as a young man, the magistrate had witnessed what the world knows today as “the chronicle of a death foretold.” I also include a lot of explanations about Barranquilla, because it is not only fertile ground for the so-called magical realism; it is also where García Márquez met his first and last friends, the wise Catalonian along with Alfonso, Álvaro, Germán, and a few others of the “arguers” who appear in the last chapter of One Hundred Years of Solitude. When I arrived in Barranquilla with my tape recorder these faithful friends had all passed away but I was lucky to find two survivors to tell me what they were like when they took care of García Márquez. This book is an homage to friendship, a recognition of his friends because in Barranquilla he certainly had the very best.
Looking for more accounts of friendship, I wanted to communicate with María Luisa Elío and Jomí García Ascot. One Hundred Years of Solitude is dedicated to them. All the Gabologists and Gabolaters in Colombia knew by heart the works and miracles of the “arguers” that appear in the novel, but no one could tell me anything about these two people, obviously important in the life of the author. Other than that they lived in Mexico City.
I arrived in Mexico City, with another ticket from Disney, registered at the Casa Durango, and began my search. Carlos Monsiváis told me they were a Spanish couple; told me that Jomí, the husband, had died and gave me the phone number of the señora. The next day a very attractive and elegant lady in a gray-blue pantsuit that matched the color of her eyes and scarf received me in the library of a house to the south of the city. She was as generous with her stories as she had been with Gabriel García Márquez, when for hours she listened to him, simply the friend of a friend at a dinner party, recount the story of the book he was planning to write. That idea turned into One Hundred Years of Solitude, and the first edition is dedicated to her. I am sure she recounted the story of that dinner party at many other dinner parties. That afternoon María Luisa Elío told me as I turned on my tape recorder that this was the first formal, taped interview of that memory.
There are certain individuals who are not as close to García Márquez, and a few who never met him. However, their commentary on moments in Colombia’s history that marked the life of the writer, like the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán on April 9, 1948, and the historical period known as the Violence unleashed by this event, are essential to understanding the history of García Márquez and of his books. Nereo López, the official photographer of the Colombian delegation sent to Stockholm when García Márquez received the Nobel Prize, moved to New York in 1997 when he was eighty “to open up his horizons,” and I took advantage of his admirable audacity to have him talk to me about the days when García Márquez was just another colleague and Colombia was bleeding to death. His vivid recollections brought history to life.
Here a García Márquez appears without the self-censorship of Living to Tell the Tale, and without the weight of the more than seven hundred pages of the excellent biographies by Dasso Saldívar and Gerald Martin. It is a rich, rare historical document that retrieves the collective memory of his life and reflects on the work of being a writer; of how he comes to the necessary Rilkean pact with solitude. It is a book that demonstrates how friendship and circumstances, but above all discipline and dedication, are necessary in order to triumph.
His close friend the Argentinian writer Tomás Eloy Martínez confessed to me that in order to be Gabo’s friend, you had to take an omertá, as if you were in the mafia. “You have to never write about him,” he told me one afternoon on his patio in New Jersey. García Márquez recounts that in Paris, when he was young and poor, he had seen Ernest Hemingway in a park. Instead of approaching him and beginning a conversation, he decided to shout his name from the other side of the little square, raise his hand, and signal with that gesture how much he respected him. I understood the fear he felt, for it is very difficult to let oneself be tempted by proximity.
I have written this book from a distance and in the same spirit. It is a human portrait of someone who turned into a legend. I firmly believe we are bigger, more important, more eternal, and even more saintly than myths. García Márquez is great without our having to accept the comfortable tales that he had no errors, defects, defeats, recklessness, loves, or enmities. If we do that, we will only contribute to an empty foolishness.
To enjoy this book one must put aside the notion that everything in life has a single truth. Oral history contrasts each person’s truth. That is part of its charm. Come to this party with that in mind and holding a whiskey on the rocks, or a glass of champagne, which is what I am told Gabo himself preferred. If you are in for the full experience, walk to your bookshelf and take out your copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude, or go to your nearest bookstore and buy it. Read it ag
ain, or for the first time, now that you’ve heard the fun facts and indiscretions, the behind-the-scenes of what is described as “probably the finest and most famous work—a classic of world literature for all time.” The last two chapters will fill you with delight as you understand the winks he made to his friends. I hope you will laugh out loud when you read, for example, that “Álvaro frightened the crocodiles with his noisy laughter and Alfonso invented outlandish stories about the bitterns who had pecked out the eyes of four customers who misbehaved the week before, and Gabriel was in the room of the pensive mulatto girl who did not collect in money but in letters to a smuggler boyfriend who was in prison on the other side of the Orinoco because the border guards had caught him and had made him sit on a chamberpot that filled up with a mixture of shit and diamonds.” You will understand why he always contested those who said he had a great imagination with a simple sentence: everything in his fiction is based on facts.
ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE
The Earthquake of 1967
GREGORY RABASSA: It happened the way earthquakes happen. We can’t predict earthquakes, even though we know they’re going to happen.
EMMANUEL CARBALLO: An astonishing case in the history of literature in Spanish. It’s something genetic. There are genes that predestine you to be a great writer, and he worked very hard. He didn’t devote himself to literature gratuitously, but he worked very hard. Very, very disciplined. He left all his jobs, borrowed money, sold things, and shut himself up in his house for eight months to write. His entire family, his wife, his sons, his friends, we all made an empty space around him because he was frenetically dedicated to one thing. They lived very modestly in a small apartment, there were no luxuries there, they spent only what was necessary.
Everyone agreed that he should have peace, time, and affection. And thanks to that—principally to his family and his friends— the novel was written. I was the person who read the novel from the time he began to write it until he finished it, and because I was reading and commenting chapter after chapter every week, by the time he brought over the next chapter I had nothing to correct, nothing to replace, because all my suggestions were already there in the novel.
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