Solitude & Company

by Silvana Paternostro

  JAIME ABELLO BANFI: García Márquez called me Barranquilloso, not Barranquillero. It’s beyond demonym. It’s like a state of mind and reminds me of the idea of dandyism. The Barranquilloso is a dandy but also something like a conqueror of the world.

  MARGARITA DE LA VEGA: Cartagena had a series of immigrants and things went very well for some, and there are different kinds: Frenchmen, a few Jews; and there was no difference, it wasn’t that people treated them badly, there weren’t enough of them to form a colony. Then, new arrivals went directly to Barranquilla because Cartagena lost its port when they opened the Dique Canal and Bocas de Ceniza in Barranquilla. They tried to build a few projects that almost closed the bay of Cartagena because of the dredging and things like that.

  JAIME ABELLO BANFI: Everybody in Barranquilla knew who that reporter for El Heraldo was; that was the Barranquilla that García Márquez enjoyed. I remember that the poet Meira del Mar told me Gabo was famous when he was working at El Heraldo. And this man saw Barranquilla as a kind of metropolis. It was the metropolis of the Caribbean. A thriving city. People from other areas of the country lived there, it was the anchor city of the Caribbean. While Cartagena was colonial, historic, and so forth, Barranquilla was the modern city. The city with broad avenues, housing developments, public services, and an independent attitude among the people. The Barranquillero doesn’t ask permission. A Barranquilloso doesn’t ask permission. A Barranquilloso does whatever he has to do and Gabo fit right in . . . That’s why he refers so often to the spirit of the Barranquilleros.

  HÉCTOR ROJAS HERAZO: The first time I went to the Superior Normal School of Barranquilla, which had just opened and was very beautiful, I was sixteen years old. It was near the soccer stadium. When I went, I began to see things I didn’t know about, like traffic lights turning off and on so the cars could go. I thought it was a really big city. I came from a tiny village, understand, and then I went there. And I also came from Cartagena, which was quieter. Cartagena didn’t have wide streets, big department stores, cafés. Back then I thought Barranquilla was beautiful. My first impression. And the people really nice. Besides, the Barranquillero isn’t fazed by anything. After the Nobel, this is how they greet Gabriel: “Hey, Mr. Prize?” as if it was impressive but maybe not so important. As I said one day: “There’s no prestige here except in living.” So that’s something that takes tenacity away from people. No need to do more than just live. Barranquilleros are very good friends. Damn! Good friends. Great friends.

  GERALD MARTIN: When I was talking to Cartageneros and Barranquilleros, the Cartageneros felt that Gabo hadn’t given them enough credit, but it’s also true that, with all the importance that Cartagena had in his formation, he wasn’t as comfortable in Cartagena in the forties and fifties as he would be in Barranquilla.

  JUANCHO JINETE: He began to show up here in ’52. He came from Cartagena. I can tell you where he lived. He had no family here, and he lived in the Barrio Abajo, in a room. In Campana, I think it is, and he lived in a little house. Alfonso took me there several times. He had a room there and next to it was something called El Tokio. A shop that sold the most awful oatmeal.

  He paid for room and board, because what they paid him I think was two pesos for each column. What happens is that when he worked at El Heraldo sometimes he did all the columns; and at El Heraldo, from the second or third floor they could look out and there was a brothel across from them. They would see a lady at the window taking care of her clients. And the poor old woman opened the window because it was so hot, and they got it into their heads to go to the brothel and see who she was. And since he liked writing those things, that’s the story, then, of when he moved to the Skyscraper to live with those ladies . . .

  QUIQUE SCOPELL: Yes, but then he moved over there near the Ley store, which is at Cuartel and 36th.

  JUANCHO JINETE: Oh, of course. It had some stairs . . . El Heraldo paid fifteen pesos a month. It’s what they paid. It was also the currency circulating at that time, but it wasn’t a salary you could live on decently; Alfonso couldn’t live decently then. And Gabito was less than Alfonso at El Heraldo, so he must have earned twelve pesos a month.

  QUIQUE SCOPELL: We were all broke. Álvaro Cepeda had money because he inherited the money when his father died. He was born with money. And I lived well because my father supported me and I was a pauper during secondary school. We were the only ones that had some dough there, because Alfonso was broke. Germán Vargas, broke. Gabito, broke. Alejandro wasn’t here.

  JUANCHO JINETE: He was in Albany.

  QUIQUE SCOPELL: Is that tape recorder on or off? Leave it on! Then Alfonso had the idea of starting a newspaper to support himself. It was called Crónica, a tabloid. You can get the issues at El Heraldo. They must be in the files there because Alfonso printed them at El Heraldo to earn a few more pesos. Even when the masthead of that paper said “Executive Manager: Julio Mario Santo Domingo,”* Julio never wrote a goddamn article. As they say, the paper can stand anything. All he can do is multiply by eight. He knows how to multiply because he knows how to make money. He knows how to do that. Make money. But I don’t think he knows how to write. Back then our paper was: a guy named Álvaro Cepeda; a guy named Alfonso Fuenmayor, who was the editor; Germán Vargas, who’s better educated than any of them; Gabito. Álvaro translated an American story, Germán Vargas wrote something for it. A guy named Alejandro Obregón did the illustrations and a guy named Figurita Orlando Rivera did the smaller ones. Aha! What a list! Nowadays in Colombia, with those five guys, you’d be publishing Cromos or Semana. And I took the photographs. I’m a photographer, and then I’m a drunkard. I was raised with photographs. Then a guy named Gabito wrote a column that was called “The Giraffe.” Nobody read the goddamn column in that thing. Afterward they said the thing was genius . . . Because after Gabito became a Nobel laureate, they discovered all his virtues: before that, he was nothing but an asshole. And we’d go out on Saturdays to sell Crónica. And do you know what we did to sell that thing? We traded it for beer, because the store guy said to us: “Oh, man, that thing won’t sell.” A real disappointment. Two thousand copies were printed and 1,990 were left over. They gave away 1,990 copies. They were printed at El Heraldo. And Gabito was the only one Alfonso paid for the losses. Alfonso paid Gabito two pesos a week to put together that magazine.

  Afterward they invented something that was the thing that sold the paper most. It was a weekly magazine. What sold most was their switching from literature to soccer, because at that time those Argentine soccer players who came got all the girls in Barranquilla. They came to play for the two teams, Junior and the Sporting, but all the ones who came to the Sporting were for export. Some good-looking sonsofbitches. Italian Argentines, you know that those Argentines . . .

  JUANCHO JINETE: Yes, they were handsome.

  QUIQUE SCOPELL: Alfonso called me the Philosopher. He would say to me: “And you, why don’t you write a book?” Because I don’t know. What I know is how to talk shit. I don’t know how to write. Talking, yes, but I don’t know how to write. I don’t even know how to write the Our Father. Ask me to write the Our Father and you’ll see . . . “Our Father . . .” that’s as far as I get. And Alfonso said to me: “Don’t fuck around, Philosopher, why don’t you write yourself a novel?” No, man, don’t be a faggot. I don’t have the head to write a novel. To talk shit, yes.

  MIGUEL FALQUEZ-CERTAIN: And it’s supposed that in those meetings, those get-togethers in the 1950s, when García Márquez arrives in Barranquilla after having studied I think a year of law in Cartagena and having worked at El Universal, he met mainly Alfonso Fuenmayor and Germán Vargas, the literary types. They would meet in a bookstore presided over by the Catalan wise man Don Ramón Vinyes, who spoke Spanish and was Catalan. He spoke Catalan, he had books in Catalan, he read English, and he also translated I think from French. He was a very erudite man. He died in Spain during the 1950s. People say he missed Barranquilla and had bought a boat ticket to return. But he died in Bar
celona a few days before he was supposed to leave. Ramón Bacca visited his grave.

  GUILLERMO ANGULO: Originally Gabo tries to write One Hundred Years of Solitude. It was something he didn’t talk about, that he called the ‘monster,’ and he couldn’t do it. He realizes it. Then he knew that the novel needed a much more experienced writer, which he wasn’t, and he had the patience to wait until he was the writer capable of writing One Hundred Years of Solitude.

  QUIQUE SCOPELL: That’s where I was going. And you can publish that because it’s the truth. Even as I’m drinking, but I wouldn’t like to say something and then have them say that I said that Gabito is a sonuvabitch. Of course he’s a sonuvabitch, but I also can’t say it publicly because he’s a man who, first of all, is already distinguished by his merits. For me, he has the great merit of obstinacy. An obstinate man, obstinate, who insists, insists and keeps at it and keeps at the sonuvabitch novel, and keeps at it and keeps at it. He’d come with rolls of newsprint under his arm, which is what he used to write on. Because he worked at El Heraldo and Alfonso worked at El Heraldo. And I repeat, Alfonso from the very beginning, Alfonso saw into Gabito . . . For me, the only one who saw into Gabito is named Alfonso Fuenmayor. And Alfonso believed in Gabito his whole life. The ones who influenced Gabito are named Álvaro Cepeda and José Félix Fuenmayor, Alfonso’s father, who was a literary genius. The old man knew the literature of the time. Because sixty, seventy years ago, literature wasn’t the way it is today.

  JUANCHO JINETE: Don Ramón Vinyes was an old man, a Spaniard who came here during the time of Franco. He came to the bookstore. They always came looking for Fuenmayor because Fuenmayor wrote and they published his things in foreign newspapers, literary ones. And then Gabo also became a very good friend, he would go there to see Fuenmayor and also this Spaniard.

  QUIQUE SCOPELL: The man who oriented him was Don José Félix Fuenmayor. Because we would go there to the house Don José Félix Fuenmayor had in Galapa. Álvaro and I would go with Gabito so that Don José Félix Fuenmayor could give Gabito lectures on literature.

  MIGUEL FALQUEZ-CERTAIN: Alfonso Fuenmayor was the bridge between the newspaper El Heraldo and the wise man Don Ramón because the Spaniard lived in a place, which I got to know, that was a den where there were whores and everything. It was just across from El Heraldo. Later on I went there a good deal, in the sixties, with a friend. We went to see Midnight Cowboy at the Rex Cinema. It was nearby and we went to smoke there in that place, and some prostitutes had a room there. Alfredo de la Espriella, the founder of the city’s Romantic Museum, was the one who told me: “Gabo lived there, in that place. Because the Catalan wise man lived there too.” It was just opposite El Heraldo there on the Calle del Crimen, near the Church of San Nicolás. A two-story Republican-style building. But it was very run-down and it had a kind of staircase. Since the rooms faced the street, you could go up. And Alfredo told me: “Gabo lived with the Catalan wise man because he didn’t have five cents.”

  Alfredo has the typewriter that García Márquez wrote on at El Heraldo. I think that place where I visited, which was decrepit, that’s the place García Márquez refers to. And the old man must be the Catalan wise man because he lived there and they say it’s the place that appears in his last book, the one about my whores and some damn thing. Memories of My Melancholy Whores.

  JUANCHO JINETE: He’s the wise Catalonian that he puts in One Hundred Years. And we did know the other one. Germán Vargas was working with him. The one from the Bogotá bookstore. Not the Buchholz but the other one. The one in the film The Blue Lobster.

  NEREO LÓPEZ: Luis Vicens. The original story about The Blue Lobster is by Álvaro Cepeda. And Vicens, who was a movie fan, wrote a script with the painter Enrique Grau. And they sent that script to Gabito, and Gabito read it to see whether he would join them. They brought it to him so that he’d take a good look at the script, or so that he’d write the script. They filmed it in ’55 or ’56. And now the credits say that the script is by Gabito, but all he did was read it in a hurry and that’s all.

  QUIQUE SCOPELL: Alfonso was the one who corrected his syntax and spelling . . . Alfonso would show up with Gabo’s manuscripts. At the brothel owned by Black Eufemia, the house across from the police station . . . What was it called again? White Sea. That’s where Alfonso was correcting those things.

  RAFAEL ULLOA: When I came here to Barranquilla, when I was studying at the Universidad del Atlántico, I saw him. Gabito was working then at El Heraldo and I lived on Road Forty-Nine at Sixty-Seventh, with people who were my family and his. And he would come there to write articles around the Hotel El Prado. He would start to drink beer with the older sons of the family. Well, I was younger. I would go to buy the beer there in the store. He never wore socks. Always without socks and in a guayabera, blue or green. The people here called him Crazy Rags, and he went around with the cab drivers and went whoring more than goddamn anybody else. He would go into the bars there on Crime Street to have drinks with the women and then he didn’t have money to pay. Then he would leave the manuscripts of Leaf Storm there as pledges. All his early books . . .The first book of his that was well known was Leaf Storm. Then came Big Mama’s Funeral . . . Of course, I went out to buy them.

  CARMEN BALCELLS: It was sometime in the sixties. José Manuel Caballero Bonald, a Spanish poet, was in Colombia at the time and recommended that I read a new writer named Gabriel García Márquez. Then that young man named Gabriel García Márquez sent me—or I don’t know if it was him or Caballero, it’s all the same—his two books, which were Big Mama’s Funeral and Leaf Storm. I have no idea right now. What I do remember very clearly is the great pleasure it was to read him. After that we corresponded, and I confirmed that I would represent him, be his agent, and sold them and other short narratives not only in Italy but in the United States too, in 1965.

  RAFAEL ULLOA: I’m a García Márquez fanatic. I have his photo. Not a photograph but a clipping from a magazine. On the doors to the library. That’s where I have it. Then when people come to the house and ask, “And who the hell is this?” I say: “Shit, that’s a relative of mine.”

  * Julio Mario Santo Domingo, born in Barranquilla in 1923, was Colombia’s first jet-setting billionaire. His father, Don Mario Santo Domingo, built what is today one of the world’s largest brewery fortunes, still in the hands of Julio Mario’s immediate family.

  When García Márquez arrived in Barranquilla penniless and started befriending the local bohemians, Julio Mario was the rich dandy of the group living abroad. When in Barranquilla for short visits, he enjoyed hanging out with his buddy Álvaro Cepeda Samudio, who was part of the group of journalists, painters, and wannabe writers like García Márquez. Thanks to Santo Domingo’s friendship with Cepeda, the group had nice access to the coffers of his family’s brewery when Cepeda became the head of public relations for Cervecería Águila (Águila Brewery). Julio Mario Santo Domingo, in many ways, may be the benefactor of the posse that became the “arguers” García Márquez names in One Hundred Years of Solitude and calls “the first and last friends that he ever had in his life.”

  They were: Alfonso Fuenmayor, the eldest of the group, a journalist and columnist; Álvaro Cepeda Samudio, the charismatic playboy with a huge library and literary sensibilities; and Germán Vargas, the quiet one of the set, a radio commentator and literary critic. Gabo doesn’t mention an important member of the group: Alejandro Obregón, the eccentric painter who liked to pick a bar fight and whose family, like Santo Domingo’s, was part of the city’s elite. The group first appears as “the pranksters of La Cueva” in Big Mama’s Funeral.

  5

  The Citation of One Hundred Years of Solitude

  In which the lives and deeds of the arguers and the others who remained outside are explained

  That encyclopedic coincidence was the beginning of a great friendship. Aureliano continued getting together in the afternoon with the four arguers, whose names were Álvaro, Germán, Alfonso, and Gabriel, the first
and last friends that he ever had in his life. For a man like him, holed up in written reality, those stormy sessions that began in the bookstore and ended at dawn in the brothels were a revelation. It had never occurred to him until then to think that literature was the best plaything that had ever been invented to make fun of people, as Álvaro demonstrated during one night of revels.

  —from One Hundred Years of Solitude

  MIGUEL FALQUEZ-CERTAIN: In ’68 I went to a lecture Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza gave at the Colegio Americano. He was the first to speak about the book, in a masterly lecture, when One Hundred Years came out. He mentioned that García Márquez was obsessed with Carlos Fuentes, and for that reason he put in General Artemio Cruz and he explained “Mambrú Went to War,” the children’s song we all know. Mambrú was the Duke of Marlborough. He also said Gabo admired Julio Cortázar and that’s why he mentioned Rocamadour, the child character from Hopscotch. All the critics understood that García Márquez arbitrarily includes these people as a private homage. They also discovered that the names at the end of the book were genuine and began to find out who they were. There were four: Alfonso, Álvaro Cepeda, Germán, and Gabriel.* Alfonso is his Maecenas. Germán as well. There was literary rivalry with Álvaro, but at the same time they were keys. The Catalan wise man was named Ramón Vinyes. He doesn’t mention Alejandro Obregón, though he was part of the group, and he was Gabriel. He puts in himself. He also leaves out Julio Mario Santo Domingo, the dandy who was heir to the most important fortune in Barranquilla, the owners of Águila Brewery.

  JAIME ABELLO BANFI: They were keys, as we say in the Caribbean. That is, solidarity.