NEREO LÓPEZ: Vilá was a frustrated dentist.
JUANCHO JINETE: Vilá was a hunter and he went around with those pricks, those hunters . . .
QUIQUE SCOPELL: Yes, but when he had a shop the hunters didn’t go there. Later on the hunters went to La Cueva. Not to the shop. Alfonso found that shop, and Álvaro said to him: “All right, what’s all the rice that you have here worth? Put it in the doorway so everybody, every pauper who goes by, can take what he wants from here.” He called the brewery: “Once and for all, send me the truck with this stuff. With four refrigerators, ten gallons of beer, and two hundred bottles.” And I don’t know what else. Called painters who wrote La Cueva up high. And I don’t know what else. In half an hour the Fluctuation was transformed into La Cueva because this madman brought him three coolers. Two freezers. Two refrigerators. Two syphon barrels. They’re still there.
JOSÉ ANTONIO PATERNOSTRO: A group of us, friends, would go after leaving the office on Saturday to have a beer from the tap and talk about politics and the economy. See what we could do for Barranquilla. We would go to La Cueva in a jacket and tie and Cepeda was there in rags. The Kid, an irreverent madman, called us “the clowns.” We were clowns because we belonged to the business sector. Kid Cepeda was already at a table having a drink and would say: “Here come the clowns.” Scopell was with him. Jinete was there.
QUIQUE SCOPELL: We would sit at the bar. Álvaro’s office was there. He moved the office from the brewery, he moved it there. Then Álvaro, Alfonso, Alejandro, and I would go. Then, since Álvaro’s office was there, everybody went to get him to buy ads from them. You know that the brewery is the principal producer of advertisements in Colombia. All the radio broadcasters would go to ask Álvaro for publicity ads, to haggle with Álvaro.
NEREO LÓPEZ: It was a team of drunkards. There were no women. The only woman I saw there was Cecilia Porras. She was a painter, the wife of Jorge Child. Nobody took women there.
MARGARITA DE LA VEGA: Cecilia was a Cartagena painter but she lived in Bogotá. She was one of the few women they treated as an equal, which was not very frequent. She was very pretty. The coastal type: black hair, white skin, pretty eyes, a great body. Very charming. If you saw her in The Blue Lobster you’d see the charm she had. She lived in Bogotá. She would go to cafés with men when women didn’t go to cafés. Let’s say she was a bold woman, unconventional. She was as good a painter as Obregón and Grau but was never recognized because she was a woman, and there one is always somebody’s wife or somebody’s daughter, and she couldn’t break with that. Her husband was the founder of the magazine Mito. She died when she was relatively young, of cancer, I think. In a sense she’s a tragic figure. She would get drunk with them.
NEREO LÓPEZ: Everybody went there to drink. Especially on tap, which was what there was. Beer on tap. If you ate, it was snacks. It was a tavern. Alfonso Fuenmayor would go. Germán Vargas would go. The crocodile hunters would go. People who were his clients would go, they went to drink beer on tap. When I came to Barranquilla, La Cueva was already there. You’d go there, order from the demijohn. I came as a graphic reporter for El Espectador. I was a friend of all of them. Álvaro and Alejandro and Fuenmayor and Gabito. But there was never a separation of talents. Scopell would come in and order a beer. Álvaro came in and ordered a beer. Alejandro came in and so forth. They came in. The hunters arrived and drank. A mix of people drinking beer at a bar.
JUANCHO JINETE: Well, it was all a flood of rum and of . . . but people believe that’s how La Cueva was, and that we were there talking about literature and things like that. Then one day some kids from the universities showed up so we would talk to them about La Cueva, and Quique already had the drinks because that’s how it’s always done. And suddenly Quique says: “I’m sick to death of this shit. There in La Cueva, nobody ever talked about literature there. What happened is that the literary types were Alfonso Fuenmayor, Germán Vargas, Álvaro Cepeda, Alejandro Obregón, and Señor García Márquez, when he came here. That was all. Because of us, all the rest of our friends would meet there too, and what we talked about was rum and things, and from there we would go to the whores.” “Man, Quique, no, no.” “No! I’m sick of this shit. Don’t make me keep repeating the same shit about this being a temple of literature. What literature, damn it! What philosophy!”
9
“The Guy Has the Persistence of That Business”
In which the reader understands that Gabito, although a prankster, never stopped writing
QUIQUE SCOPELL: What else shall I tell you about Gabito? Let’s have another to keep talking about this. (He realizes that the bottle of whiskey is empty. Holding up his glass, he calls to a waiter who is passing.) Hey, hey! The same again. I drink whiskey on the rocks but with ice and a little water on the side . . . When Gabito wasn’t yet . . .
JUANCHO JINETE: He’d show up here at different times.
QUIQUE SCOPELL: The guy has the persistence of that business. He drank with us every day with a notebook under his arm . . . and he sent his manuscript to Argentina, to Mexico, to Spain, and from Argentina they wrote back: “Señor García Márquez, do something else because you’re no good as a writer. This is a terrible novel. This isn’t worth a damn.” And the only one who said the novel was good was Alfonso Fuenmayor. Among other things, Álvaro said: “This is shit. This . . . don’t fuck around.”
JUANCHO JINETE: Gabito would send the originals of the stories to Fuenmayor.
Alfonso was a scholar in syntax and things like that . . . He’d come with his big notebook, and since Alfonso would come wearing a jacket, he’d put the papers in his pockets. I don’t know how he didn’t lose them.
QUIQUE SCOPELL: Every day he’d write a new chapter and then he’d say to us: “Read this.” Álvaro would say: “Don’t fuck around, you have a lot of balls, this is shit!” I didn’t read One Hundred Years of Solitude after it was published, but I read it two hundred thousand times because every day that madman would read it to us; he’d read the damn chapter he had written the night before. It wasn’t called One Hundred Years yet. He’d bring it, along with the same damn fifty centavos he’d gone to bed with. He has a persistence . . . because he insisted, insisted, and insisted until a madwoman showed up, that woman . . . What was the name of that Spanish woman?
CARMEN BALCELLS: Who was Carmen Balcells? I was the same as I am today but less known or not known at all. I was an unassuming girl from a working-class family, educated in a nuns’ school, who wanted to be emancipated and earn her living before anything else. And a friend of mine named Joaquín Sabria recommended a job that he said was called literary agent and he brought me some books and a roll of paper. And I began this job before receiving that mandate from Caballero Bonald with the recommendation of García Márquez.
JAIME ABELLO BANFI: Those years in Barranquilla always loomed large in his life. In 1994, he decides to return so he buys an apartment, and decides to come stay in it for a few weeks. And then he dedicated himself to playing tennis at the Hotel El Prado with my brother Mauricio the doctor, who was his tennis buddy. It was in ’94. A key year in García Márquez’s life. It’s the year when he’s ready to come back to the country. And then sometimes we went out to look around the city. He told me a few things there. We went with his driver. At that time he had a kind of air-conditioned van, sort of silver-colored. The two of us would go. He was taking notes for his memoirs. He went around with a mixture of memories and writing, I think. At one time he talked about writing three short novels, one of them turned out to be Memories of My Melancholy Whores. At that time he had even asked me to make a few inquiries, which I did. He sent me a questionnaire and I went into the periodical archive.
QUIQUE SCOPELL: He always sent questionnaires to me. To Alfonso. Things he wanted to clarify.
JAIME ABELLO BANFI: A questionnaire that asked about when the first ship entered Bocas de Cenizas; like what was the ship’s name; when was the Atomic Match played, which was a soccer game; which people were on the field; wh
at was the name of the then manager of the Junior, the city’s team, and how . . . Very amusing. There was a question about whorehouses in Barranquilla. I was personally checking the periodicals in the Nieto Arteta Archive. And, among other things, I found a number of amusing items that I also sent to him. References to the Diva Sagibi, who was a famous occultist in Barranquilla during the 1950s. I looked at the newspaper La Prensa at that time, and I looked at the other papers, and so I passed information on to him. And then he comes to Barranquilla to take possession of his new apartment. He stays there for quite a few days. I think it was two weeks, something like that, and among other things it was my job to accompany him on that tour around the center of town. And the tour was looking for things (here’s such and such, so-and-so building, the bookstore was here, this was here, the other was here), and taking notes. It was one day. A Saturday.
Saturday at eleven in the morning. From time to time he lowered the window and the people saw him and yelled: “Aha, Gabo. García Márquez!” And he joked back in turn.
ALLIANCE PINZÓN: I am working here at the Romantic Museum in Barranquilla as part of my military service. I give the tours. Here, we house all the important things about the history of Barranquilla since 1620, when it was called Sabanita de Camacho. It consists of twenty-six rooms. The material about García Márquez is down below. We have some things from García Márquez but they are taken out only when there’s a García Márquez event. Then they take out all the paintings of García Márquez and place them there, outside. We have a García Márquez typewriter. The fact is that while giving you this tour I didn’t attribute much importance to him, but there it is. His typewriter. It was his. He wrote Leaf Storm on that typewriter. (The lights go out all over the museum.) Ah, that happens almost every day. Don’t worry. They’ll come back on right away.
10
Slickers and Hicks
In which Gabito, the ugly duckling, the hick from the coast, moves to the cold, slick capital to work as a reporter for El Espectador
JUANCHO JINETE: One day he left for Bogotá and went to work at El Espectador. And he would show up here from time to time.
JOSÉ SALGAR: Gabo came to El Espectador with a little bit of fame that El Espectador itself had given him without knowing him. He already had fame as a writer because of Eduardo Zalamea and the short story of Gabo’s that was published in El Espectador. But when he came and they gave him to me, he was an ordinary run-of-themill reporter. Besides, he was from the coast. Common. Vulgar. They have a very good word there: a hick. Very shy then . . . And I was the editor in chief, I was the veteran.
MIGUEL FALQUEZ-CERTAIN: And we know very well that being from the coast is not the same as being vulgar. On the contrary. Barranquilla was a village in the 1940s. In ’48 they killed Gaitán, then the Violence began for ten years and a lot of people, especially from the interior, not only from Bogotá but from Santander, too, began to come down the Magdalena River. All those people displaced by the first violence (from ’48 to ’58), who began to come down the river . . . Hicks were the ones that came from small towns to Barranquilla and stayed.
Barranquilla was a family in those days. Everybody knew everybody else in the thirties and forties. When the diaspora begins because of the Violence, they begin to come first from the towns along the Magdalena River and then from Tunja, from Popayán and Tuluá, where the slaughter was going on between Conservatives and Liberals. Then that entire generation was called hicks, corronchos, because they didn’t have the manners of the quote-unquote decent people of Barranquilla. Before then, when I was a boy, they didn’t say “hick.” My father didn’t say “hick,” he would say “uncouth.” People who weren’t in society were uncouth and had bad taste. They had no manners. That word exists in every culture. In Spain they call them paletos, the village people who go to Madrid. In Cuba they call them guajiros, who are the peasants. In Puerto Rico they’re called jíbaros. Every place has a nasty word for the rustic who comes to the city and doesn’t know how to behave. Who doesn’t know how to handle the silverware. Who embarrasses himself.
PLINIO APULEYO MENDOZA: I met him in a café. He was badly dressed and was a chain smoker . . .
SANTIAGO MUTIS: The fact is, look, let’s say that in Bogotá they were nurturing a great contempt for Colombia: a great contempt for the provinces, a great contempt for poverty. It’s lamentable, but it’s also a force that the country still maintains. At that time everything comes from England, it comes from France, from Mexico, from the United States. All the painters went to study in Mexico because the muralists were there. It wasn’t coming from Cézanne anymore. Now it was coming from Mexico. It’s always going to come from the outside. And then there are the ones who come along who say: “Nowhere else. It’s here.”
HÉCTOR ROJAS HERAZO: We had to have confidence in ourselves because there was no generosity then. People were very pretentious. Yes . . . Humph! What does one have to be vain about? You have to enjoy your ignorance and use it as a creative element. Ah, no! You came to Bogotá and then they showed you: “He’s the poet so-and-so . . .” They had so much vanity . . .
MARGARITA DE LA VEGA: They used “slicker” in Bogotá and it means a very elegant gentleman. A cachaco. Let’s say Arturo Abella, who was incredible—I worked a great deal with him—he was very much a slicker, very much a Bogotano. Arturo always said: “For us, a slicker is a refined, elegant person who knows how to dress, who knows how to eat, who does the appropriate thing, and you people from the coast call us slickers as a put-down.”
MIGUEL FALQUEZ-CERTAIN: In Barranquilla they have the bad habit of calling any person who’s not from the coast a slicker. A Barranquillan friend of mine, Campo Elías Romero, used to say that everything that comes after Gamarra is slick. Gamarra is a village on the Magdalena. Everything that comes after halfway down the Magdalena is slick. But in reality, I never used it as an insult because my godfather is from Bogotá. In my house it was used the way Bogotans use it (meaning that he’s elegant). It’s a word that even the Bogotans use when they say “Hey, how slick you look!” And it means: “How well-dressed you are, how elegant.”
Colombia has always been a very divided country, there’s always been this rivalry. Even along the coast, the Barranquillans and the Cartagenans have always taken potshots at one another. In Santa Marta, when the Junior played, they threw rocks. In Cartagena they always say that Cartagena is the one that has a history. When [Gustavo] Bell said in his CV when he was running for vice president that he had studied history in London and had written a book on the history of Barranquilla, the Cartagenans held their noses and said: “What history!”
JOSÉ SALGAR: Gabo exaggerates when he says it was a writing staff of wise men and that it was marvelous. That’s from the coastal point of view. The environment along the coast saw the people at El Tiempo and El Espectador as the elite of national journalism. At El Espectador there were very brilliant figures: Zalamea, de Greiff, Villegas.
HÉCTOR ROJAS HERAZO: I love Bogotá in spite of that whole thing of their thinking they’re superior. They thought they were wise men and like that.
What was it I said in an article I wrote when they assassinated Gaitán? That in Bogotá they said hello, damn it!, in Latin . . . convinced they were extremely refined . . . and they called it . . . What did they call it? They said it was the Athens of South America. And they believed it. Something so comical, and of course when the thing happened, the impetus that brought the death of Gaitán . . . If it hadn’t rained as hard as it rained that day, they would have finished off Bogotá. They would have burned it. Fortunately, damn it!, Jesus Christ came out and sent the downpour . . . But Bogotá had something . . . It had a silent thing deep down. Some beautiful parks. It had tranquillity. It was a peaceful capital. It looked like a terminal . . . Melancholy . . . Like all endured joy that turns into melancholy. It’s muffled. It’s peaceful. That’s why the horror of assassinations frightened people so much here. It has always been a very sweet city. Very peaceful. Yo
u arrived, let’s say, there were some places where you went to eat or to think. A few places where the food was cheap. We would go there every day and we had friends. That was where you made friends because the other places were too haughty. But Bogotá is certainly very loved . . .
SANTIAGO MUTIS: Now, Bogotá, what does it have to offer Gabo? Writers. That’s it.
JOSÉ SALGAR: And there’s a name that belongs to that moment, which is our friend. Eduardo Zalamea Borda. He was also a novelist. He wrote a famous novel: Four Years Aboard Myself. He was also a great journalist, but he embellished his literature a great deal with the atmosphere of La Guajira. Four Years Aboard Myself is the adventures of a Bogotan along the coast. It also had a great influence on that magic moment that presented itself to Gabo. He says: “Well, I can stop making literature, the literature that obsesses me, and then I’ll devote myself exclusively to journalism. But journalism and reality are very cold, even ugly. You have to bring imagination to that.”
SANTIAGO MUTIS: What Gabo’s doing is confirming a possibility. It’s a road they’re opening. Opening it in a newspaper, an editorial, a circle of friends, making their own lives. When those things stop being that way, the truth begins to appear and they’re the ones who begin to make that truth. There are many things against them. But they can’t do anything against Gabo. One sentence of Gabo’s undoes everything; nobody has a greater talent for contradicting; they couldn’t do anything with him.
HÉCTOR ROJAS HERAZO: Besides, what one had to do in life, Gabo did. One thing is for sure, our desire to accomplish was the right desire.
11
The Neck of the Swan
In which the lost cause is transformed into a great journalist by day and a short story writer by night
JOSÉ SALGAR: Of course Gabo was good, but at that time I also had magnificent reporters, more brilliant and more skillful in reporting. The editorial board of the newspaper would meet to deal with the day’s topics, and say: “Today you go there and cover this,” and give some instructions. But there’s also personal initiative by which it occurs to the reporter: “I’m going to write on this subject,” he proposes it, and you tell him to do it or not to do it. He? Initiative? Not much. Not much. Gabo had initiative for his novels and for the worm of magical realism and literature, but at the newspaper as a journalist he had to march in time with everybody else . . .
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