Solitude & Company

by Silvana Paternostro

  ALFONSO FUENMAYOR

  JUANCHO JINETE: Alfonso Fuenmayor was the oldest. He’s from 1922 or ’23.

  QUIQUE SCOPELL: Alfonso was the most cultivated. Then, in their culture, are Alfonso and Alejandro Obregón; then comes Álvaro Cepeda, and then Germán Vargas. Gabito was learning.

  HÉCTOR ROJAS HERAZO: Alfonso Fuenmayor was a very cordial person. Very lively. Very cultivated.

  JUANCHO JINETE: Alfonso Fuenmayor wrote the editorials, things like that. The old Juan B. [Fernández], the father, managed the paper. At that time Gabriel García Márquez contributed a column called “The Giraffe.”

  JAIME ABELLO BANFI: Well, Alfonso is divine. I’ll never forget Alfonso. With my Carnival group, every Carnival Monday we had a party, and for years Alfonso Fuenmayor would drop in at that party. And Alfonso had half a stammer. Always stammering. Always with a glass of whiskey in his hand. Plump, congenial, brilliant. He was like Gabo’s older brother. Gabo would call him “maestro” because Fuenmayor was always concerned about him. Fuenmayor took care of him a little. He tried to find him work. At the same time his father had been a reference for all of them, Don José Félix. It was a relationship with a good deal of friendship, affection, and respect. Fuenmayor was like an older brother then. Exactly like that.

  GERMÁN VARGAS

  MIGUEL FALQUEZ-CERTAIN: Germán Vargas was a journalist and one of those who would meet at the Mundo Bookstore, which I never knew. It was in Calle San Blas. They would meet there and that was where the Catalan wise man would preside.

  JAIME ABELLO BANFI: Germán. Germán was, above all, a man of culture. And Germán was a man of great sweetness, very serious and a very good friend, very affectionate. Very serene.

  MARGARITA DE LA VEGA: Germán was the most timid, the most silent, or the most reserved of the group. But he was one of the intimate friends. After Barranquilla he went to Bogotá, a little like Ibarra Merlano, who was a lawyer. I don’t know what else he did, but he worked at Radio Nacional and at HJCK. On the radio he did many things that helped culture, like programs with poets, and interviews.

  He was an upright guy, already graying when I met him. Supremely amiable, but he almost didn’t seem like someone from the coast. He was reserved but also a good conversationalist.

  MIGUEL FALQUEZ-CERTAIN: In the late fifties or early sixties, Germán went to Bogotá. He had a column there. After he came back to Barranquilla, he had a column in El Heraldo. He reviewed books. The Vargases were originally from Santander, I think. I don’t believe he was born in Barranquilla. He was a critic and did things like that, but he couldn’t live on that and for many years he worked for an organization that specializes in Colombian statistics. He was an official in that company and went with them to Bogotá. I believe he was serious. Not such a prankster.

  ÁLVARO CEPEDA SAMUDIO

  JUANCHO JINETE: I was born on Calle Obando and Álvaro Cepeda lived on Calle Medellín. We went to the Colegio Americano for boys, which back then was run by gringos, very American but Protestant. We celebrated every American holiday at the Colegio. Álvaro Cepeda was already something of an intellectual and like that. Damn . . . I don’t remember whole years. I must have been eighteen and now I’m seventy-two. Now I’m not even good with numbers. Álvaro was older than me. In ’46 Álvaro founded a literary center during the school year and got me into those things. In his house he had a kind of office where he typed a newspaper, I don’t remember what it was called. Álvaro had lots of things like that. He was very restless.

  MIGUEL FALQUEZ-CERTAIN: The Kid, as they called him, was originally from Ciénaga, but his family has lived in Barranquilla for a hundred years. I saw him in the airport once when I happened to fly to New York on the same plane and he was with Julio Mario Santo Domingo. Julio Mario was dressed very well, in a jacket and tie, carrying a briefcase, and Álvaro had his shirt open and you could see the hair on his chest. He was wearing sandals. He was a camaján, a word they used in Barranquilla. It’s a kind of gigolo who also dresses in two-tone shoes and makes his living from women. Usually they didn’t work, but they had money, and if they didn’t have it, they would find it. He had the gift of gab. He was a hustler. Back then Kid Cepeda and Obregón were very similar in that regard. They didn’t respect the rules of society.

  HÉCTOR ROJAS HERAZO: Kid had a hoarse voice: “Keep on moving” and such. Like “Yo, wassup.” What was the name of the place where they would get together? La Cueva. Cepeda was also trying to create. He had a will . . . But no, he never had the tenacity; he isn’t the same as Gabo. It’s a calmer thing. But more than anything else his temperament is what mattered. He was an extraordinary boy. A great friend to Gabo. And laughter and things. No, and stories. We Were All Waiting. I said he was the best short story writer in Colombia. He was a guy with talent. But insistent creativity, like Gabo’s, that’s something else.

  QUIQUE SCOPELL: Álvaro Cepeda is more of a natural writer than Gabito. What happens is that an angel appeared to Álvaro. His name was Julio Mario Santo Domingo, and he said to him: “Come and work with me. Salary? No, what salary! You take some whenever you want. There’s money.”

  HÉCTOR ROJAS HERAZO: Because he was one of Faulkner’s great admirers. So he resolved to meet him. Faulkner lived in the Deep South. He got there and saw Faulkner who sat at that hour in the doorway of his house to drink. Then he stopped the car and began to watch Faulkner drinking. Each time Faulkner took a drink, so did he. He wanted to have a dialogue with him . . . and he was getting drunk. And suddenly he said to himself: “What the hell am I going to say to Faulkner? That I’m a jerk. You’re an asshole. What am I going to say to him? Let’s go, then. See you later, Faulkner!” He was a man with a sense of irony.

  QUIQUE SCOPELL: Gabito picked up a lot of culture when he got old. But Cepeda had more culture. First, he had money to read books and Gabito didn’t. Álvaro read Faulkner, who at that time was popular, and afterward he lent his books to Gabito. Gabito had no money. He was fucked. He worked at El Heraldo, where they paid him three pesos a week. That shit Juan B., paying him three pesos. Gabito was up the creek, getting fifty-cent whores because he couldn’t afford any better. Don’t fuck around . . .

  Like I’m telling you, their friendship was literature. Álvaro as a young man was better read than when he got older. Because at first he was more drawn to literature but he ran across a guy named Julio Mario Santo Domingo. Julio Mario was the ship that comes into port. You have to have a will of iron to say no to all that dough.

  MIGUEL FALQUEZ-CERTAIN: They called Cepeda “Shaggy” because his hair was wild then, in the forties, when it wasn’t fashionable. He was ahead of his time. I have a photo of him wearing a baseball cap backwards. Back then nobody did that.

  QUIQUE SCOPELL: Don’t fuck around! Álvaro was eccentric . . . He never wore shoes. Spanish alpargatas, that’s what he wore. And he never wore a business shirt or anything, he was always badly dressed.

  JUANCHO JINETE: He went around like a hippie. A prankster. Cecilia Porras’s husband called him the Anthony Quinn of America.

  QUIQUE SCOPELL: Well, look: Álvaro and I went to study in the United States. I think I went to the university three times to matriculate, and Álvaro twice. We were going to Baton Rouge, in Louisiana, but my grandmother lived in Havana. Then Álvaro said to me: “Don’t be a faggot. Before we go to the university, let’s spend a week in Havana and stay with your grandmother.” Well, my grandmother was delighted to have me there in Havana. And there we met two penniless Venezuelan girls and we began to go around with the Venezuelans. They told us they were going to study in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Look, from Louisiana to Ann Arbor, from Baton Rouge to Michigan is all of the United States. Then Álvaro said: “Listen and if now . . . what will we do starving in Baton Rouge? Let’s go with those lunatics to Ann Arbor.” That’s why we went to Ann Arbor. And now I’ll tell you: I went to the university like three times; Álvaro must have gone twice. Then he became “Dr. Álvaro Cepeda.” He studied journalism. What journalis
m! In his book of short stories, Juana’s Stories, there’s the story of that black girl who lived with Álvaro in New York. Afterward he came up with a diploma in journalism from Columbia. A lie! It never happened. Nothing ever happened. You have to tell things the way they are because people invent stories. People who don’t know people and begin to make up stories.

  ALEJANDRO OBREGÓN

  SANTIAGO MUTIS: Art critic Marta Traba said that young painters should pass before Alejandro Obregón like Ulysses before the Sirens, but in this case with their eyes blindfolded.

  MIGUEL FALQUEZ-CERTAIN: He came from a distinguished family. His sister, Beatriz Elena, an intimate friend of my aunt La Nena, was a super distinguished lady. I put on magic shows for her. All those Obregóns were from a family from the highest Barranquilla society.

  He always wore khakis, with his hair uncombed, and he didn’t bathe. Or he did bathe, I don’t know, but he didn’t use deodorant, like the French. He had that strong, concentrated odor. And Mona Falquez, who was the tidiest, neatest woman in the world, when he would show up—he adored my Aunt Mona—and kiss her, then Mona would give him a kiss and all and say: “Ay, but what an odor Alejandro has!”

  JUANCHO JINETE: There’s a story about Maestro Obregón. La Cueva, which was a house and a bar, also had a living room and a dining room, rented to old Movilla. So the old man lived there. And there was a refrigerator, and that old man was bizarre; he made up that he was a cook and presented himself as one. Sometimes Álvaro cooked at La Cueva. One day he made rice with iguana eggs . . . the least of the stupidities that crazy old man did. He had a pet cricket. Listen, this is true! He had a cricket that he called Fififififi. He put out food and things like that for him. And then one day that little cricket came out and he said: “Maestro, maestro, I prepared something there for you today.” The maestro sees the cricket and thinks . . . the little cricket. We were fixing some things with sausage when the maestro takes two pieces of bread and he took the cricket and wham! gobbled him.

  NEREO LÓPEZ: And Alejandro loved to fight, he would get drunk and look for a fight. I made the best portraits of Alejandro Obregón. Spectacular photographs. Even to take one I had to fight with him. I remember that I said to him: “Pick up brushes, open them and put them up to your eye.” And he: “No, because . . .”

  JULIO MARIO SANTO DOMINGO

  MIGUEL FALQUEZ-CERTAIN: The story I had heard since I was a boy is that the old man, Don Mario, his father (later on I learned he was also named Julio Mario, though nobody called him that) came on foot from Panama to Barranquilla. He had money but he wasn’t a millionaire. He had money put away from his business there in Panama. He was an ordinary person. This Señor Mario Santo Domingo came to Barranquilla with money in his pocket and he became connected to the Barranquilla society of that time, which must have been very small, and he became related by marriage to the Pumarejo family. The Pumarejos originally came from La Guajira, from Valledupar, around there. My mother’s family would go there sometimes because they had parties there on the farm in Dibulla. It belonged to the Pumarejos and people went there for a rest. They were there for a week and there were parties; people came from Bogotá and paid attention to them.

  Don Mario married the sister of Alberto Pumarejo and began a brilliant career. When I was a boy, the richest family in Barranquilla wasn’t Mario Santo Domingo’s. The famous ones were the Mancinis. The Mancinis were the richest.

  When I was studying economics in ’70, my teacher used Julio Mario’s surprise as an example. Julio Mario was a dandy for a time, a playboy. He didn’t settle down until the seventies because he had a brother, Pipe Santo Domingo, who was killed in a car accident in Puerto Colombia. He was with Diana Limnander de Nieuwenhove. Diana survived and Pipe was killed, and that was a tragedy for the old man. And Julio Mario, who had spent his time traveling and living the good life, had to make himself respectable because Pipe died. The same thing that happened to John F. Kennedy with his brother who died (his older brother Joseph): he had to pick up the reins.

  Julio Mario took advantage of the fact that his father was cautiously buying stocks in various companies. My grandfather had one hundred, two hundred. But old Mario was methodical and bought shares and shares and kept them. At the time of the conflict between the Germania Brewery and Águila, he created the Santo Domingo Group. He formed the Santo Domingo Group with people from Barranquilla who also had shares, among them Pacho Posada and a number of men, and with my father’s block and those shares he appeared before the general assembly of stockholders. Those guys had no damn idea. They were going to have their general assembly, they were going to name a new board of directors, and when they counted those shares, Julio Mario’s amounted to 51 percent. So they seized the reins of Germania and that was Julio Mario’s brilliant coup of ’69, around then. He became the lord and master of Colombia.

  QUIQUE SCOPELL: It isn’t that Julio Mario was arrogant but he had different habits. He was a club type.

  MIGUEL FALQUEZ-CERTAIN: Julio studied at Columbia University, I think. This must have been in ’46. And he paid for the Kid’s studies at Columbia University. The Kid studied journalism and there’s where he wrote the stories in We Were All Waiting. People supposed that he read William Saroyan and wrote the stories while he was living in New York. When he returned to Barranquilla he didn’t have a job, and since Julio Mario had money and wanted to invest it, he started the Diario del Caribe in order to give it to the Kid Cepeda. That’s the story I know. And he made the Kid Cepeda the editor in chief. The Diario del Caribe was originally a Liberal paper because Julio Mario was from a Liberal family, of course. His mother was Alberto Pumarejo’s sister. Later, because of Pacho Posada, he became Conservative.

  THE PRANKSTERS OF LA CUEVA

  CARMEN BALCELLS: Starting in the year 1965, I made quite a few trips to Colombia as well as to Mexico. On one of those trips I was in La Cueva and I met the individuals whose names at this moment I can’t recall. I was accompanied by Álvaro Cepeda Samudio, who introduced me in depth to the world of Barranquilla: La Cueva, the bookstores, Vinyes, and everything that now forms part of the mythic life of the author of One Hundred Years.

  SANTIAGO MUTIS: It’s all there. They’re all friends with one another because they were all very great. Because Obregón was no fool. I mean, Obregón was a prodigious personality. Alejandro’s presence was like an animal’s. Alejandro disturbed. One felt a hope. A beautiful thing. And Alfonso was like being in a place, like saying: “We’ve arrived, something good is going to happen here.” With Rojas Herazo too, because they were people capable of responding to life, capable of giving life. Strong internally. Beautiful. So a number of very beautiful things converged there. They were all special people. It wasn’t friendship alone, it was just good-natured and easygoing. They were united by love for humanity and for literature, and that’s the same thing.

  La Cueva in its heyday.

  * When García Márquez wrote Big Mama’s Funeral, he mentions the “pranksters of La Cueva.” He is referring to his wild friends from Barranquilla. Mamagallista, a prankster or jokester, is a word used in the city’s slang that García Márquez used in his writing and entered the country’s lexicon. La Cueva (the Cave) is the name of their favorite watering hole. He mentions them again in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Alfonso, Álvaro, and Germán appear by name. Gabriel is himself.

  6

  To Be a Prankster or a Writer

  In which what is required to be a mamagallista is explained, the term being an expression totally unknown before the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude, or How only a writer could make the pranksters famous

  HERIBERTO FIORILLO: In La Cueva there were four principal actors; three of them appear later in the last chapter of One Hundred Years of Solitude. They are Alfonso, Germán, Álvaro, and Alejandro. The Vaivén was a store that was at Victoria and Veinte de Julio, and it became La Cueva. The owner, Eduardo Vilá, was Alfonso’s cousin and it humiliated him to have to sell groceries.
He only wanted to wait on his hunter friends. Alfonso called Álvaro who transformed the store into the bar La Cueva. The urinals were very close to the bar, as proposed by Obregón. In the late fifties I lived two blocks from there, and would walk past with my father on our way to the nearby movie theaters. One day he said to me: “This is where some gentlemen who are artists get together and drink beer and come to blows and then they argue and drink and come to blows again and . . .” He also told me this as a warning, and that awakened a great curiosity in me. Later, when I began to read Colombian literature, you know, Cepeda Samudio, Rojas Herazo, García Márquez, I realized they were those same friends. And from Tarzan and Batman, my heroes at the time, I passed on to my new heroes, the madmen in La Cueva.

  MIGUEL FALQUEZ-CERTAIN: When One Hundred Years of Solitude came out, he referred to the jokers of La Cueva, and called them the “four arguers.” He used a number of regional words that weren’t known in the rest of the country. People began to ask themselves what he meant by them. For example, the term “male swallow,” which they thought was a bird, and everybody knows that the male swallow in Barranquilla is when the pores in your armpits become clogged and you get boils.

  Like the term “prankster,” or “mamar gallo,” also appeared. They began to speculate in El Tiempo, in El Espectador, about what García Márquez meant by that, and they asked questions and such. That was the origin of that theory, which is the one I remember. It comes from cockfights. I never went to a cockfight in Barranquilla in my life. That wasn’t common. I never saw a cockfight until I went to La Guajira. It’s a ritual there; like drinking contraband whiskey and listening to vallenatos, being in the group that went from house to house with the trio, going to cockfights too. In the cockpits people were very belligerent but also great jokers; then it was between making jokes and being aggressive. The comic thing could change and the man would take a revolver and kill you because you were mocking him. Then the etymological origin is that the rooster has a natural spur. But roosters never fight with their own spurs but they put things on them that are made of copper. Then, to put the copper on, as an imitation of a spur, they put wax inside and then set that wax on a candle, put it in fire. When the wax has melted they put it on the rooster’s spur and set it in place so that it stays on the natural spur. And then, to cement it, they put it in their mouth and suck the spur. That’s why they say “nurse,” or mamar; to nurse is to suck.