Solitude & Company

by Silvana Paternostro

  So that’s the etymological origin and meaning. It’s very difficult to translate, not only to another language but to other cultures too. The phenomenon most similar to being a mamagallista or to mamar gallo is the teller of the tall tale. The Irish tell unbelievable stories with a serious expression on their face.

  I’ll give you an example: I would tell my friend Joaquín the most absurd lies. That I did this and I did that and I swore it was true. Then he would keep looking at me and I would tell him: “No, man, no, that’s a lie.” And he would say: “But why do you tell me that stuff? You swore it was true and all this time I thought it was true.” That’s when you’re “nursing on a rooster.” That is what makes you a prankster of La Cueva. You’re making situations that are completely false and you’re making another person believe them.

  MARGARITA DE LA VEGA: That’s what mamagallismo is: constructing a tiresome joke.

  As for Gabo being one, he was. And he loved to tell stories that can be truth or fiction. It’s using hyperbole, to use an elegant term. Exaggeration. It’s telling a story where there’s some silly thing. When they tell you on the coast that there was a lunch that lasted until the next day, well, in Valledupar there really are lunches like that. Gabo certainly was a mamador de gallo. He liked to play jokes. That’s where certain things in the novels come from. That comes from the culture. That’s what he was living.

  RAFAEL ULLOA: You couldn’t have a serious conversation with Gabito without its being a joke. Later on he must have changed, but when he was here he was a full-fledged mamadera de gallo. And he’s a guy who . . . how shall I say it? Popular. He talked to everybody and said fuck you to life. So one day Gabito said to me: “Listen, Rafa, have you already smoked the tobacco?” “What tobacco?” “The grass your cousin gave you.” Doña Victoria, who was a relative of mine, would say, “Just be patient, my son Alfonso smokes marijuana.” So when he sees me, Gabo says to me: “Aha, burro.” You know that here [in Barranquilla] they call people who smoke marijuana burros. And I come from a town where burros are the ones that fuck burras. And he was asking me if I was a burro . . .

  JUANCHO JINETE: Gabito was another mamador de gallo.

  JAIME ABELLO BANFI: The pranksters of La Cueva were basically a group of friends who had a central nucleus. The people who were part of the central nucleus were people dedicated to literature, to journalism, to art. Very cultivated people who always preferred a sense of humor and laughter and the ability to mock everything to pretensions of seriousness or even to leaving a legacy or a very clear body of work. I believe they valued being alive, having a good time, sharing. And they valued their surroundings very much. Gabo said to me: “Barranquilla is Macondo when it became a city.”

  7

  Another Whiskey

  In which Quique and Juancho, the only survivors of the group of mamagallistas at La Cueva, take us on a stroll around the Barranquilla of the 1950s, when García Márquez arrived and they saw him as a total hick

  JUANCHO JINETE: Here it’s all Gabo, Gabo up and Gabo down. That’s now.

  QUIQUE SCOPELL: I’m telling you, people divide it all in two. It’s Gabito before the Nobel and after the Nobel. Before the Nobel, nobody paid any attention to Gabito. They called him the lizard. “Let’s get out of here, here comes Gabito.” People hid from him.

  MIGUEL FALQUEZ-CERTAIN: A lizard is a busybody who goes where he doesn’t fit in, who isn’t part of the group, who pushes in, somebody who approaches a group and is seen as beneath them. A lizard is somebody who becomes unbearable, who wants help, who pushes in everywhere. What they mean is that Obregón and Cepeda didn’t appreciate García Márquez.

  QUIQUE SCOPELL: The Nobel Prize fucking hurt Colombian literature with García Márquez. Because now everybody wants to be García Márquez. So “Ah noooo! If García Márquez didn’t say it then it isn’t literature!” It’s a very large shadow. A ceiba tree.

  It fucked up literature. “Ah, if Gabito didn’t say it . . . !” Even the president, Alfonso López, says: “Because, as Gabito said . . .” You tell me, Alfonso López, when the hell did you ever meet Gabito? You met him after the boom of the Nobel Prize. Before that Gabito was an outsider . . . He went around with those manuscripts under his arm and he received a letter that said: “Señor García Márquez, dedicate yourself to something else because you’re no good as a writer.”

  GUILLERMO ANGULO: He tried to write One Hundred Years of Solitude in Barranquilla, but he realized it was too big for him. It ended up as Leaf Storm, his first book, published in 1955.

  GUSTAVO GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: Once he had finished Leaf Storm, he took it to the guy from Losada. And this was the answer he got: “Look, Señor García, take up something else, because this isn’t right for you.”

  JUANCHO JINETE: It seems to me the Mundo Bookstore is where everything is born . . . It was there in the center of town, near the Colombia movie theater. So there on the corner was the Mundo Bookstore and then that Café Colombia on the corner. So there in the café is where that bunch of . . . all of them . . . Then Alfonso took Gabo there and introduced him, and after that he began to go there. I knew him. I saw him when he began to sing vallenatos* and we hadn’t heard that here. The vallenato was something that was not liked here . . . When we would get together there and have a few beers, then he would sing. No, of course not! Not a good voice at all. But he liked it. He didn’t play anything. That’s how the thing happened.

  I wasn’t literary or anything like that. I was a listener. But I went around with them. A café already existed here, a bookstore called Mundo Bookstore, it belonged to a Señor Rendón, one of the brothers . . .

  HÉCTOR ROJAS HERAZO: Books came in, especially to Barranquilla. You’d say such-and-such a book, and generally they had it, but in case they didn’t they’d say to you: “Okay, come on such-and-such a day,” and they’d have the book for you.

  QUIQUE SCOPELL: That no longer exists because they knocked it down and now they put up something that’s called . . . What’s the name of that man who shows up? Alladin.

  Álvaro, since he had money, bought books at the Mundo Bookstore. Gabo would go to the bookstore to read. Don Jorge Rendón was very . . . You can’t research that because he is up there in heaven with his memories, but he was a wonderful man and helped Gabito a lot.

  Because he would say: “Oh man, poor boy, he’s fucked.” He would lend him books. He said: “This boy is worth it because he’s a thoughtful boy and he’s curious, studious. The kid’s worth it.” Like Alfonso Fuenmayor always believed in Gabito a lot. He bears a lot of the blame for Gabito being . . . Because that business with Gabito is a sickness.

  Listen. Álvaro was studying at the Colegio Americano. And I was at the Colegio San José. So we’d meet there. We got out of school at two or three in the afternoon, at four or five we’d meet there.

  JUANCHO JINETE: Because there was an entrance there, and the Café Colombia was close by.

  QUIQUE SCOPELL: The Colombia Theater was there. They knocked that down and made a commercial center. At the back was the Colombia Theater. Here to the side was a bar, and there was the Mundo Bookstore. We would meet there in the afternoon. Especially in the afternoon, that’s where we would meet. Álvaro was studying at the Colegio Americano.

  JUANCHO JINETE: With me.

  QUIQUE SCOPELL: Everybody would say: “How much dough do you have?” Wow, I had thirty-five cents. Álvaro had fifty cents. Alfonso had twenty, and Gabito didn’t have shit. He was flat broke. Germán worked at the comptroller’s office, and Germán had fifteen cents. Then we’d leave, leave the Mundo Bookstore, for the Japi, which is at San Juan and Veinte de Julio, but just after the bookstore, now where the electric company is. Next to it was the Japi Bar. Then we would order a bottle of white rum and a bottle of tamarind. A bottle of white rum with a bottle of tamarind cost twenty-five cents. And they added slices of lemon. Germán was the one who mixed it: he’d add the lemon, and with the sixty or seventy cents that we had we could drink three bottl
es of white rum. We must have been seventeen, eighteen years old. And then each of us went home. There was no money for anything else. He would sit with us there in the Japi because, I repeat, he didn’t drink. He drank very little.

  RAFAEL ULLOA: At that time Gabito must have been twenty-three years old. He was already writing here. No, no, no . . . Initially he was a guy nobody paid any attention to. Besides, they thought he was crazy. His clothes were sloppy. People, I’m not kidding, saw him . . . as a lost cause.

  EDUARDO MÁRCELES DACONTE: But we can’t forget that at the age of twenty-three he was already writing Leaf Storm.

  QUIQUE SCOPELL: Gabito isn’t much of a drinker and he doesn’t chase women. He doesn’t chase women and he’s not a drinker, my girl, and that’s why I’m telling you that Alejandro and Álvaro would say: “Here comes that damn lizard to talk about literature.” “And look, now Doña Manuela is going to marry . . .” Man, don’t be a faggot. I’ve already read that novel two hundred thousand times in the Japi. Every day he read a goddamn chapter of that thing and everybody told him it wasn’t worth a damn.

  “Maestro, look,” he would say to Alfonso Fuenmayor. “Maestro, I sent it to Argentina. And no joke, you’ll see how contracts for that thing are going to come in.” The Mexican and the Spaniard publishers told him they didn’t want the novel, but the Argentine was the one who said: “Señor García, try something else, because you’re no good at this.”

  GERALD MARTIN: Gabo doesn’t like to be helped by other people. He had no money and I’m sure that was the reason he didn’t drink a lot at that table; and not drinking very much was a diplomatic disaster in the Barranquilla of that time.

  RAFAEL ULLOA: His father had a lot of faith in him, understand? His father would tell the relatives that Gabito was the very best and like that, but, of course, people didn’t believe him because appearances are deceiving and so they didn’t believe him. He says Gabito is two-headed, that he had two brains. That’s the old man’s fiction. The fact is the old man’s a storyteller too. The fact is we have a goddamn strain of first-class liars. It’s a family thing.

  JUANCHO JINETE: He lived here, but he would always disappear.

  MIGUEL FALQUEZ-CERTAIN: Later, when One Hundred Years of Solitude comes out, this is what Jacques Gilard, the French academic who comes to Colombia in ’76 to decipher Macondo, baptizes as the Barranquilla Group.

  QUIQUE SCOPELL: But you have to understand that the Barranquilla Group never existed. Never. That was something that intellectuals made up.

  García Márquez walking with a friend in Bogotá.

  * Vallenato is northern Colombia’s country music. Accordion-heavy and troubadour-like, it tells of the travails, friendships, and love stories of the men of the Valley of Upar, located between the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and the Serranía de Perijá in northeast Colombia. In the times of García Márquez, it was frowned upon as music of the lower classes and farmers. Today, it is a proud export to the world; there is even a vallenato category in the Latin Grammys. García Márquez, always a lover and promoter of the genre, has said that One Hundred Years of Solitude is a 360-page vallenato song.

  8

  La Cueva

  Concerning the emergence of La Cueva, the bar that Gabo apparently did not frequent very often, and that thanks to him is today a national treasure

  MIGUEL FALQUEZ-CERTAIN: I’m going to tell you how we drank in Barranquilla. In Barranquilla there really were very few elegant bars. At that time only the important hotels had them. The Patio Andaluz was the most elegant, it was in the Hotel El Prado, but there they kept it dim and so married men took their girlfriends there to dance. The Patio Andaluz was dangerous because that was in El Prado and they could tell your wife. And there were what they called “grills.” These were in second-rate hotels in other parts of Barranquilla, in the center of town, and such. They became famous. And you went in and couldn’t see anybody. Back then they had chairs and armchairs and you sat down, and they brought you your drink. You would bring the current girlfriend, dance very close, and then go to a hotel to fuck. There was a very famous one called the Sitting Bull. And there was the grill of the Hotel Génova and the grill of another hotel that was divine, like a European hotel, and that was the Hotel Astoria. Those were the grills that the rich men in Barranquilla used, where they took women who were their lovers. Then there was a form I didn’t like, but there was another alternative, and that was to drink in shops.

  There was a shop on every corner, in every neighborhood in Barranquilla, before supermarkets existed. In Barranquilla there was just one market, the Grain Market. Back then you had to go downtown. Then, for the people who lived in the Boston and El Prado districts, they opened the Boston Market, and it was cleaner, nice for society ladies. And the ladies would go with their maids. If they needed something, they would send to the corner and on the corner there was always a shop and it usually belonged to people from the capital. Some were in the garages of houses and others were local. They sold beer and sometimes there were tables at the door. People would sit there and talk. The table would be covered with bottles, and only men would go there.

  That’s what La Cueva was. A shop.

  QUIQUE SCOPELL: You have to separate La Cueva from what’s called the Barranquilla Group. They’re two different things. It’s the same thing, but they’re two different things. At La Cueva we never talked about literature . . . La Cueva began with Alfonso Fuenmayor, who was the one who set up the shops for Álvaro, because Álvaro was the head of publicity for the Águila Brewery owned by Santo Domingo. He set up the shops to sell beer. That was his job. Then one afternoon Alfonso said to him: “Don’t fuck around Álvaro. Come over here, to Veinte de Julio and Sesenta y nueve.” (Friend, do me a favor and pour me a whiskey over here, please.)

  JUANCHO JINETE: Another one over here, too. I’ll read to you from this old newspaper: “The place speaks now of afternoons of conversation, beer, and boleros, of photos of fishermen. A place enlivened by the presence of Fuenmayor, Gabriel García Márquez, Alejandro Obregón, Germán Vargas Cantillo, Álvaro Cepeda Samudio, and others like the painter Noé León, Enrique Scopell, Juancho Jinete, Abel Valle, and the figure of the Spaniard Ramón Vinyes, better known as the wise Catalonian.” But, as I was saying, it began to have a certain air, we could even name governors, that’s when they were appointed, not elected like now. And La Cueva had that. Old man President López came to Barranquilla and he went to the La Cueva. All those characters . . .

  The story is that Alfonso Fuenmayor had a cousin, Eduardo Vilá, who had a shop and put in stereo equipment. We would go there to listen to music, and in the end, the shop became a bar. It’s there in the Boston district.

  QUIQUE SCOPELL: Look, Alfonso Fuenmayor is a shop drinker. So he calls Álvaro and says: “Álvaro, I have a damn fine corner here for you.” Álvaro knew the corners because he lived in Barranquilla his whole life. It was at Veinte de Julio and Setenta y cinco. “Come here so you can see what kind of thing it is.” So he goes and there they have a shop called the Fluctuation. The shop was called Fluctuation, like his wife, who fluctuated in her faithfulness as well. And the fact is it’s true . . . So it turns out that Vilá turned out to be Alfonso’s cousin because he’s a Vilá Fuenmayor. Alfonso asks him:

  “And what’s your name?”

  “Eduardo Vilá Fuenmayor.”

  “What? And who’s your father? And your mother, who is she?”

  “A Fuenmayor.”

  “Wow! She’s my father’s sister.”

  They were cousins and didn’t know each other. Then, when he saw the shop, Álvaro immediately said to him: “Don’t fuck around, maestro, really! This is good!” Because it’s right on the corner, as soon as you come to the end of Veinte de Julio you run into that house . . . Then Álvaro says to him: “Would you sell this, this business here, and put up something from the brewery?” And Vilá said to him: “Well, that depends. Wait and tell me how that idea of yours goes.” “Well, I’ll call the
brewery. And you tell me how much are all the plantains and bananas that you have here worth?” And he bought the place.

  “This thing is mine.”

  “So how much is this thing worth?”

  “It’s worth about ten thousand pesos. Give me about ten thousand pesos.”

  “Well, I’ll buy the whole thing from you and throw it all out at once. And I’ll call the painters and set up this thing for you. We’ll make a bar here. No store, no nothing. No rice and plantains. A bar. And what will we call it? We’ll call it La Cueva.”

  I don’t know who said they should call it La Cueva. If it was Alfonso, or Germán, or . . . Then, Álvaro said: “Agreed?” “Well, yes, agreed,” said the other one. “All right, then.”

  EDUARDO MÁRCELES DACONTE: It was like a house and there was like a little terrace. You went in and then there was a bar, a folkloric bar, I mean, with all kinds of hats, and then there were some armchairs and some little tables, and this was a meeting place for hunters and the reporters who were working then and painters. But at that moment there were more reporters. The literary question was just starting and it was their meeting place. We went a couple of times to have some beers there and see the place.