Solitude & Company

by Silvana Paternostro

  He talked about vallenato music when nobody paid any attention to the vallenato. He talked about a thousand things.

  The thing is that, first of all, he’s a genius. Don’t be deceived. He has the intelligence of a genius. He’s super-perceptive. And he also has the ability to get ahead of events. With a sixth sense. So he’s a genius beyond any doubt. Second, he read a great deal from a very early age, so much so that they were afraid he’d lose his mind when he was young, he read so much. And third, his context. That context that’s so well told in his family’s memory, with all that traveling. That singular family. That condition of a kind of intermediate class. A person who had access to many people. That is, in financial terms they were poor but with access to all kinds. Trips through the entire region and the things with his grandfather. All of that is very interesting. All of that influenced his very special personality.

  RAFAEL ULLOA: His mother always said that his novels were in code and she had the key. She would read the book and say: “This man he mentions here is So-and-so in Aracataca.”

  3

  The Coast Gets Ready to Speak

  In which Gabito goes to Bogotá to study law and because of the Violence returns to the coast and finds a job as a journalist

  CARMELO MARTÍNEZ: When I arrived in Bogotá in 1948, he was in his second year of law school.

  MIGUEL FALQUEZ-CERTAIN: At that time they publish his first two stories in the literary supplement of El Espectador. The intellectuals in the capital begin to follow his progress.

  CARMELO MARTÍNEZ: Then came what is known as the Bogotazo,* the mass riots in Bogotá after the assassination of Luis Carlos Gaitán, so he came to Cartagena and started working at El Universal.

  NEREO LÓPEZ: I had to deal with the problem of the assassination of Gaitán in Barrancabermeja. That murder was what started the period of La Violencia when Liberals and Conservatives started killing each other. I was the general manager of Cine Colombia in Barrancabermeja. I managed not only the base theater but also the theaters in nearby towns. And I’m talking now about 1948. Gaitán was assassinated April 9, 1948, and I was there until ’52. That was where I contacted the people at El Espectador and that’s how I arrived in Barranquilla as the graphic correspondent for El Espectador.

  I lived right in the theater and at that time, after the death of Gaitán, came the Violence—Colombia still hasn’t come out of that—which was the assault on the Liberals by the Conservatives. Luis Carlos Gaitán was the presidential candidate for the Liberals. People called the Conservatives “the chulavitas” [the boys from the hamlet of Chulavita] and in turn the Conservatives called the Liberals “cachiporros” [blackjacks]. I remember once a drunk, a Liberal, said to me: “I don’t care that they call us cachiporros. What bothers me is the other name.” “But what’s the problem with the other name? What is it?” I asked him. “Cachiporro sonuvabitch.” Cachiporro didn’t bother him.

  It was an absolute violence. I have two anecdotes about that. One is how at eleven at night—and there it was super late—some people came to the theater, knocked on the iron gates, and passed their revolvers over each iron bar, making the most grating ominous sound. “Nereo, we want you to come with us and take some photos.” They were having an event glorifying a portrait of Laureano Gómez, the head of the Conservative Party at the time. I looked out and looked at them and said: “No way, man, it’s very late.” “Come on, man, come with us nicely.” But banging his revolver nicely. So then, “nicely,” in quotation marks, so I went to photograph the glorification event at the Hotel Pipatón. There the booze made the rounds, revolvers made the rounds. In short, a political orgy.

  The abuse of power was so widespread that every government employee wanted to go into the theater free of charge. Everybody, from the janitor at a jail to the police, and I opposed it and said no. What happened? They threatened me. And at that time they didn’t kill you but they did beat you, they would put you in a dark room and fuck you up by beating you, and people came out of that sick or dead. They didn’t kill you, but they turned you into nothing. They tortured you with blows. They didn’t manage to get hold of me, though. I’m not much of a believer, but God is very great. It turned out that the army commandant, who was a religious fanatic, also loved photographs. When it was 100 degrees he would go to Mass wearing all his medals and his dress uniform, and he was the only one, and the priests said a Mass just for him. And I would develop his rolls of film. Colonel Acosta was his name, and I had access to him. If I had a problem, I’d come in and tell him and he solved the problem. Nobody messed with me anymore, but even so, the matter reached a point that although the business at the time was worth a million pesos, I sold it for 200,000 just to get out of Barrancabermeja. I came to New York to present my photography thesis, and from here I went to Baranquilla as a correspondent in ’52.

  MARGARITA DE LA VEGA: Gabo arrives in Cartagena after the Bogotazo. Bogotá was paralyzed, and he used that to get out of the commitment he had made to his father to study law, because at that time he was still struggling, and struggling a lot, in his father’s shadow.

  MARGOT GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: We came to Cartagena in 1951 for several reasons: because Sucre began to decline, to lose its old prosperity, and my father’s situation became tight and by then we were five students studying outside the home; and because Gabito said that only if we came there would he continue to study at the University of Cartagena. He didn’t need much more to graduate as a lawyer, I think one more year.

  MARGARITA DE LA VEGA: He arrives in Cartagena and enrolls in the Faculty of Law at Cartagena. Remember that Cartagena has a law school at the university. He’s alone and had already written a little in Bogotá. They had published two or three things in El Espectador. Fiction.

  In Cartagena we didn’t feel the Violence. I arrived in Bogotá when Gabo arrived in Cartagena, more or less, and I discovered that the Violence did exist. That people were talking about it in the newspapers. In Cartagena it didn’t exist. I remember April 9 because my uncle (actually, I have a lot of them) was the governor of the Department of Bolívar at the time. I remember that we went to my grandmother’s house and my father went there and not to my house to eat, as he did every day, because my grandmother was distraught and frightened: she knew what had happened in Bogotá, that the city had been burned and Gaitán killed. That much was known but they were frightened that what was happening in Barranquilla would happen there, that people would go out and burn something in the Plaza de San Nicolás, on the Paseo Bolívar. And in Cartagena nothing happened. My uncle arrived late; instead of coming at seven in the evening he didn’t come until eight thirty. And we didn’t eat until he arrived because that was another of our families’ customs.

  HÉCTOR ROJAS HERAZO: Gabriel was already famous in the newspaper world. They had already written articles about him in El Espectador [because of his short stories]. Important ones. Zalamea Borda, the cousin of the other Zalamea Borda, wrote a beautiful piece about him. Gabriel must have been nineteen when this happened.

  In fact nobody introduced us when he started to work at El Universal but we met and began to be friends. Of course, Maestro Zabala* played a part in this. Damn! He was another extraordinary character. Maestro Zabala. How I cried when he died. He was a very affectionate man . . . Well, the maestro was a great friend. An extraordinary person. And he was an individual who could smell out intelligence. When he smelled an intelligent person, whoever he was . . . And, of course, Gabo arrived. That’s when they became linked . . .

  MARGARITA DE LA VEGA: Clemente Zabala was the managing editor at El Universal. At the newspapers there was a managing director, who ran the operation, and another one who edited the articles. Another one took care of the political thing. There was an editing room and people met there. It wasn’t the solitary work it is now. All the papers in Colombia were born as party papers. El Universal was Liberal and the Diario de la Costa was Conservative. When Gabo arrived it must have already belonged to the Escallón Villa famil
y. People went broke owning newspapers. Now El Universal is the only one. Nothing has replaced the Diario de la Costa.

  They had the same interests, so the ones who talked and the ones who didn’t talk got together there. That’s what you were looking for. At that moment, they were the young intellectuals, the ones who wrote and all that. Remember that newspapers were also cultural instruments, and remember how important the literary supplements were. That’s extremely important. They published poetry, did interviews, but they also published international figures. In a sense some of those were stolen because I’m not sure they were paying for the rights to what was published in Argentina, in Mexico, in the United States, in France, or in Italy. Those people were from different social backgrounds, middle class, upper class, even the pueblo, and nobody really knew how it was that everyone met on the same plane. Because they all had intellectual interests in literature, poetry, the theater; some more interested in some things than in others. And they met at the papers but also in the cafés, the squares . . . they were part of those conversations, many of them might have known El Tuerto López or others, you understand? They told stories and talked and conversed and read. Because there was a great love of reading. They lent one another books, but there was also a library, there was also a university. Being a humanist was thought to be an important thing. Humanist in the way of the Greek classics. Gustavo Ibarra Merlano would recite for you in Greek and in Latin.

  HÉCTOR ROJAS HERAZO: Gabo was a very loved person. And he was always around the persons he loved. He talked about them, he used his column to speak in the best way he could about the things and people that interested him. That began to shake up Colombian journalism. All these things were being done at El Universal because El Universal was such a terrific place. They just had the lower part of a two-story building. It was the lower part and that’s where the bubbling began . . .

  The good thing is that we would talk about everything. Something that we always managed to talk about with him was the importance of Latin American letters. Because of something very simple: the different sectors that imposed their way of writing novels; that is, that had said what they had to say. English novelists, French novelists, Russian novelists . . . Afterward came the Faulkner thing, which was this thing . . . the narrative impulse in the United States. Then we said: “What the world needs now is what Latin America is going to say. Let’s see.” And we began to talk about Latin American things—that this was like this and that was like that—to see how we could achieve the most direct knowledge possible of the reality we were living and suffering. What happens is something: uncontrolled influence. We, the people who were being influenced at that moment—we had no control. We were influenced by the movies, by one thing and by another. Everything. A hunger for knowledge. But the fact is that each human being has to live ignorance, enjoy it, and transform it into creativity. It’s like love. It always has to be suffered and admired and enjoyed individually.

  Back then one really walked in a windstorm of influences of all kinds. Any great novelist, let’s say Faulkner, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy. The great ones. The great French novelist Balzac, who wrote close to a hundred books. I always kept in mind a thought of Tolstoy, the great Russian novelist. It says: “Look carefully at your village and you’ll be universal.” Then we kept that in mind. The village, the village, the village. Don’t go beyond that.

  MARGARITA DE LA VEGA: Rojas Herazo always had that poetic and metaphorical style of speaking. A little bit on the moon, let’s say, very little in reality.

  HÉCTOR ROJAS HERAZO: We talked about everything. The famous poet they murdered, García Lorca. About everything. Then we were all on the same track . . . Now El Universal in Cartagena is very good and has an imposing building, all those things. Now it’s a different thing. But back then a great reporter, Gabriel “Gabo” Bazo, told us: “When you don’t want anyone to know about a bad thing, publish it on the front page of a newspaper.” The paper began as a thing worked on with much love because a number of us who had a desire to get somewhere were working on it . . .

  MARGARITA DE LA VEGA: The poetry reunions in Cartagena were important, and the ones about film. Gabo’s thing with the movies might come from the film clubs there. My father founded the one in Cartagena.

  HÉCTOR ROJAS HERAZO: Besides, we people from the coast had a great advantage. We had no kind of vanity because we didn’t have [a history of cultural greatness] . . . That is to say, the guards were silent until that moment. We’d had important people and achievements, but not on a grand scale. Then I remember one day, when I was in Cali, that I was interviewing the maestro [Pedro Nel Gómez], the painter from Antioquia who was very notable and so forth. As I was leaving, I began to tell him what we aspired to because he was a very pleasant, very affectionate man. And then he said to me: “Well, and what’s going on with the coast that it hasn’t produced anything until now?” And I: “Don’t worry, maestro. We, the people from the coast, are now listening to the sound of the sea. When we are ready, let us stand up and speak and then you’ll see what will happen.”

  MARGOT GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: My father, as long as Gabito finished law school, went along, but what Gabito wanted was to write, and soon he told my father that he couldn’t stand studying the law anymore; he left his studies and went to work at El Universal. At that time he lived in the house with us; I remember hearing him every night, tack tack tack, on the typewriter.

  HÉCTOR ROJAS HERAZO: At least Gabo got somewhere . . . I knew he was going to make a difference. Yes, I always assumed he was going to be big but not colossal. There was already universal attention to what Latin America was writing. Then he arrived in time to catch the bus and he took off.

  A Spanish writer, poet, and narrator came to Colombia and Gabriel was already working at El Universal. Then Maestro Zabala, Ibarra Merlano, and I went to hear him. Maestro Zabala invited us. He tells us: “Come on, we have to go there to meet this man.” He was a famous poet and writer. One of the most important there in Spain at that time. He was a scholar of Luis de Góngora, the great poet of the singular period in Spain, and then we went to hear him. He talked and talked and talked. After his talk, when we were about to go, Maestro Zabala says: “No, no, no. We have to go and meet this gentleman. He’s an important man who’s come here and it’s worth it.” So we went. He’s a charming person and asked us to bring him a sample of what we were doing in literature because he was delighted with us. He came with his wife. The writer I’m talking about is Dámaso Alonso, who was famous. Then the maestro, Gabo, and I decided to do this. So we decided not to take him anything of ours but for Gabo to represent us, though he was much younger, but he was already somewhat known. The maestro took Gabo’s thing and then, much later, in Spain, when the maestro was talking to this gentleman Dámaso Alonso, he said to him: “Maestro, do you know . . .” (They had already given Gabo the Nobel.) “Do you know the boy we introduced to you? He was Gabriel García Márquez.” “What? Man, I remember!”

  García Márquez surrounded by friends.

  * The Bogotazo or Gaitanazo refers to the riots that followed the assassination of Liberal leader and presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán on April 9, 1948. The riots left much of downtown Bogotá destroyed. García Márquez writes in his memoirs that his typewriter burnt down and he decided to take a plane to Cartagena where things were less turbulent. The Bogotazo is also seen as the ignition of a period known as the Violence (La Violencia) a bloody war between the Liberals and the Conservatives throughout the country. It ended with a national pact between the two parties in 1958.

  ** Clemente Manuel Zabala was the editor of El Universal who hired García Márquez when he arrived in Cartagena, escaping law school and the Bogotazo. In his memoir, García Márquez remembers him as “peaceful,” “confidential,” “a wise man in the penumbra.” He appears in a García Márquez story as Maestro Zabala and has a cameo as the reporter’s editor in Of Love and Other Demons.

  4

  First and Last
Friends

  In which he arrives in Barranquilla and meets the “wise Catalonian” and the “four arguers” he immortalizes in the final chapter of One Hundred Years of Solitude as “the last and first friends he ever had in his life”

  QUIQUE SCOPELL: He comes to live in Barranquilla when Alfonso Fuenmayor hired him at El Heraldo.

  SANTIAGO MUTIS: When Gabo first goes to find work in Barranquilla, Alfonso says to him as a test: “Well, write tomorrow’s editorial for me.” Then he sits him down at his desk. Alfonso reads it and says: “Damn, this is very good!” And then he thinks: “This guy must have prepared the editorial ahead of time.” Then he tells him: “Look, this is very good, but write me the one for the day after tomorrow.” Gabo writes the one for the day after tomorrow. Then he takes it and goes to the editorial office and says: “You have to hire the boy.” “Alfonso, we don’t have the dough. There’s no money for anybody,” they tell him. “You have to do it,” he insists. “We can’t,” they reply. “Then my next two-week salary check will be split in two. One for him, one for me,” answered Alfonso. I mean, that was the quality of those people.

  HÉCTOR ROJAS HERAZO: Cartagena and Barranquilla are very close, but they are different and it seems to me that he got on very well with that group in Barranquilla. They offered him a job. Because El Heraldo was there, which was more functional than El Universal from a financial point of view. It must have been that, don’t you think?

  MARGARITA DE LA VEGA: Cartagena is a very small provincial city that lives a great deal on its past glory. Even if it’s not as traditional as they say. But there’s no doubt that the contrast between Cartagena and Barranquilla was that Barranquilla was founded by people who didn’t get ahead in Cartagena because no path was open to them. Many people from Cartagena went to Barranquilla because they were more dynamic, more modern. They had new ideas, and Barranquilla welcomed every immigrant with open arms. Jews, Turks, Russians, whatever.