I still have it around somewhere [the edition of The Colonel that Gabo sent me]. On yellow paper. He sends it to me in Rome so I’ll read it, and I told him that I liked it; I wrote to him and made some commentary or something. He said: “I’ll be in Paris. I’ll be at seize on the Rue Cujas.” That was where Gabo lived with this famous lady. What was her name? Madame. Madame La Croix I think was her name. So then I said: “Well, I have to go to Paris. I’ll be in Paris for about six months, so we’ll see each there. I’ll come to the hotel.”
SANTIAGO MUTIS: What Paris gave him was a woman who kept him for a year, the owner of a boardinghouse, an older woman, and a person who wasn’t Paris either. I mean, yes, well, she’s the profound Paris, let’s say, but Paris doesn’t give him Leonardo da Vinci. What Paris gives him is brutal confinement, and he uses that to say: “Well, who am I? What am I doing here?” And it obliges him to define himself. And what he decides to be is what he has always been: a man who comes from Barranquilla, from Cartagena, from Aracataca, and who loves [the music of ] Escalona, who loves Alejandro Durán, who loves La Guajira, who saw the most beautiful women in the world there. That’s the thing.
GUILLERMO ANGULO: The hotel was called Hôtel de Flandre, on the Rue Cujas, and in front of it was this black Cuban poet, Nicolás Guillén. He was exiled in a hotel poorer than the one on the Rue Cujas. He went out every day and came back with bread under his arm, the way all the French carry it, so that you think it’s very strange that they use bread like a deodorant. Afterward Guillén was ambassador in Paris, and of course, there’s a very nice story. They asked him: “Well, what about . . . Diplomacy, so, is it very hard?” And he said: “Yes, yes, yes. Diplomacy is hard, but working is much, much harder.”
So then I come to seize on the Rue Cujas and the lady tells me: “No, García Márquez went for a little trip around the Iron Curtain.” When he made his reports about the Curtain with Plinio. I had decided that I’d never see him again. Then I said: “Señora, I need a room, the cheapest one you have.” And she says: “How long will you stay?” I said at least three months. And she said: “Ah, good,” and she gave me a room on the top floor, which was very uncomfortable because the roof was there. You hit your head when you got up.
One day there’s a knock at the door and I see a guy in a blue sweater and a scarf wrapped around a few times, and he says: “Maestrico, what are you doing in my room?” It was Gabo. And that’s how we met. I have a photograph made there, right at that time.
SANTIAGO MUTIS: He can’t pay and he stays there writing, going hungry. The days go by . . . What could he be to La Croix? Nothing. He was the journalist who’s there, poor, working.
GUILLERMO ANGULO: Gabo was very, very poor then. While I was there, he would come every day to eat with me. He would come, I kept five metro tickets, he was living in a maid’s room in Neuilly, a very elegant area, but in a maid’s room. It was a tiny room with an outside bathroom, and he had a small stove where he heated water and fixed coffee and eggs. That was all he could eat. He was very, very poor. So I invited him to supper every night. He would say to me: “What do you have to read? Remember that it’s a forty-five minute trip on the metro.” I’ve been a magazine reader my whole life. I had Cahiers du Cinema. I had Paris Match. He chose whatever there was and said: “I’ll bring it back tomorrow,” and he’d take a double ticket, round-trip. That was when we became very very good friends.
JOSÉ SALGAR: The other day he says to me: “Tell me about when I went to Europe and they closed El Espectador and I was left stranded and without a newspaper. Then I sat down to tell all my troubles, to tell you all the adventures I was having in Paris in some very long letters, and I ended up begging you to get me the check that the paper was going to send me.” It was the only income he counted on. “Do you remember anything from those letters I sent to you?” And then my answer is, it’s the saddest thing, that like all the things that are sent to a paper and aren’t published, they were tossed out. Please! What that was! Of course, he’s reconstructed all those changes of fortune throughout his work.
But those letters were firsthand and very, very personal. Stupendous letters, because the man doesn’t venture to sit down and write something if he doesn’t do it very well. It’s another mania. He told me he was writing about that time the two of us lived through, and that’s why he asked me for some facts for the first volume of his memoirs. He’s reconstructing everything in minute detail, and he’s surely going to talk about things I didn’t know about.
JUANCHO JINETE: There was a Society of Friends to Assist Gabito, the SOFTAG. But it was a fraud, a fraud because the society never existed as such. SOFTAG collected money to send to him. I didn’t give even five cents. But Julio Mario and Álvaro, they did.
GUILLERMO ANGULO: Then I’ll go on with the story, I didn’t finish telling about Pupa. When I had already met him, I said: “Listen, how did you meet Pupa?” And he says: “Ah, that’s a long story. Look, I was very bad off for money and one day I receive a card from Barranquilla, from my friends at La Cueva, signed by Vilá, by the Kid Cepeda, by Alejandro, it was covered with palm trees and sun, and they said: ‘You fool, you’re there putting up with the cold and we’re here terrific in the sun. Come here.’ Then I said: ‘Assholes, damn it, you could have sent me money!’”
HERIBERTO FIORILLO: They made that postcard here on the bar of La Cueva. The one who knew how to make that sandwich was Jorge Rendón, owner of the Mundo Bookstore. Germán Vargas sent the telegram that alerted Gabito to the existence of the hundred-dollar bill inside the postcard.
GUILLERMO ANGULO: Then after a while he received a special delivery letter from Barranquilla that said: “Since you’re very dense, you surely haven’t realized that the card is a sandwich with a hundred dollars inside.”
QUIQUE SCOPELL: In the old days the image would detach from postcards. The glue was bad, you put it in water, and the image would detach. Álvaro put in the hundred dollars. Back then it was illegal to send money by mail, which is why he didn’t send it on the outside.
GUILLERMO ANGULO: Then Gabo went down to look through the hotel’s trash—imagine, condoms, everything. Searching. He finds the card and there really is a hundred dollars.
QUIQUE SCOPELL: Álvaro put in ninety and I put in ten. And we fastened them inside.
GUILLERMO ANGULO: But it was Saturday and it was the time when the dollar was like black market, it was very difficult because you didn’t change them in a machine like today, and he was desperate because he was hungry. Then he began to ask where he could change money and somebody told him: “Look, there’s a friend of ours named Pupa. She arrived yesterday from Rome after changing her salary, so she must have lots of money, so go see her.”
He left, wrapped up as always, dying of the cold. We were in winter, and Pupa opened the door. A tidal wave of heat came out of a room that was ben riscaldata, vero? And Pupa was completely naked. Pupa wasn’t pretty but she had a marvelous body. And at the slightest provocation, or even without one, she would strip. You’d say to her: “Look, what pretty spectacles. Ah, and where did you buy them?” Then she would strip and in all her splendor she’d show off her eyeglasses. And, well, Gabo entered and then Pupa sat down. “What bothered me most,” says Gabo, “no, not bothered, surprised, is that she behaved as if she were dressed. Very naturally. She crossed her legs and began to chat, and she talked to me about Colombia, the Colombians she knew, and I said to her: ‘Look, this is my problem.’ And she said: ‘Yes, of course.’ Then she stopped with great elegance. She went to the other side of the room, where there was a small chest. She opened it. She took out some money. She said . . . and I saw that what she wanted was to go to bed with me, but I wasn’t thinking about that. What I was thinking about was eating. And she said: ‘Listen, why don’t we have something to drink?’ ‘If I drink anything now’”—Gabo told me—“‘I won’t be able to help getting drunk.’ I said to her: ‘No, no, no, look, we’ll see each other later.’ Then I went to eat and I ate so much that I was
sick with indigestion for a week, I had been hungry for so long.”
HÉCTOR ROJAS HERAZO: He’s had great friends who loved him a great deal. Most friends betray you at some point. They do you enormous harm. But friends have been extraordinarily faithful to him. Man, that’s a beautiful essence of a destiny. Why is it that he’s never complained that his friends hadn’t valued him or done something . . . No, no. They always wanted to work for him. That’s indisputable.
PLINIO APULEYO MENDOZA: Every night Gabriel wrote until dawn, working on a novel that would become In Evil Hour. He had just begun when he had to interrupt it: a character, the old colonel waiting in vain for his pension as a veteran of the civil war, demanded his own sphere. A book. He wrote Nobody Writes to the Colonel in part to clear the way for In Evil Hour and in part to exorcize literarily his ordinary troubles at the time: like his character, he didn’t know how he would eat the next day and was always waiting for a letter, a letter with money that never arrived.
QUIQUE SCOPELL: At that time I was living in Havana. He knew I was living in Havana. My father was Cuban. I had my parents as a base in Havana, but I bought pieces of alligator skin here in Barranquilla, took them to Havana, tanned them in Havana, made wallets and shoes in Havana, and went to Miami and sold everything in Miami. In other words, I’d spend two or three months here in Barranquilla, one in Havana, and two or three months in Miami. I left after the revolution, the year that Fidel came in my daughter was born in Havana . . . He knew I was involved with roosters, and he sent me a questionnaire. Gabito personally asked me questions. He called me and said: “Quique, I’m going to send you a questionnaire, man, because I’m writing a chapter . . .” about I don’t know what damn thing about roosters. Then he asked me: “What are roosters like?” “What color are roosters?” “How do you catch a rooster?” “When do you wring a rooster’s neck?” Well, something like two thousand questions.
JUANCHO JINETE: Quique has been a fan of cockfights his whole life.
RAMÓN ILLÁN BACCA: I heard about García Márquez in ’58. I didn’t know Leaf Storm or García Márquez’s first stories, I had no idea. When the Barranquilla Group appears here, I was studying for my bachelor’s degree at a seminary very far from any of these things. Then in ’58 I still remember that Nobody Writes to the Colonel was published in Mito.
PLINIO APULEYO MENDOZA: Nobody Writes to the Colonel was published in a literary magazine without its editors asking for prior authorization or paying for any rights at all: they thought, in good faith, that it was a generous enough gesture to bring out a manuscript turned down by publishers.
SANTIAGO MUTIS: One can’t say that Nobody Writes to the Colonel is a political book though it is an immense denunciation of the deception the government perpetrated in this country. And yet, the amount of humanity in that book is so strong.
RAMÓN ILLÁN BACCA: I liked Nobody Writes to the Colonel, but it didn’t produce the kind of upheaval in me that you get when you’re reading Thomas Mann; it wasn’t The Magic Mountain. I was reading Demian, Steppenwolf. Those were the things I was reading, the things that impressed me.
CARMELO MARTÍNEZ: He hears stories and he takes hold of them and puts them in his books. In Montería there was a woman named Natalia. Lame Natalia. She was lame, they had cut her ankles, she walked on crutches, and when she didn’t have anything to eat, she’d put stones in the pot so the neighbors would say: “Natalia’s eating.” That’s what she told my father; Natalia was a friend of my father’s. Her house was near the cemetery, a little house . . . She would put the pot outside and put in water and put in stones. “So nobody would think that Natalia was hungry.” Do you remember that detail from the book about the colonel? His wife boils stones to save face with the neighbors.
Mercedes Barcha.
13
Sacred Crocodile
In which, thanks to his enormous ability to choose good friends, he obtains work in Venezuela and returns to Barranquilla with the “sacred crocodile”
PLINIO APULEYO MENDOZA: The only thing he had in his room in Paris was a red Olivetti typewriter I had sold him, and tacked to the wall the photo of Mercedes, the sweetheart he had in Colombia. The first time I visited him, he pointed at the photograph and said: “The sacred crocodile.”
GUILLERMO ANGULO: He comes back from Paris and begins to work as a journalist in Venezuela with Plinio. I don’t remember the name of the magazine. The “crocodile” was always very steady and they decide to marry when he’s in Caracas.
GERALD MARTIN: With Tachia, his Paris sweetheart, there was no way the relationship would survive; it was stormy, but very significant.
MIGUEL FALQUEZ-CERTAIN: Plinio is the one who helped him throughout this period. The period when he was dead broke, in the 1950s in Paris, when he was stranded because Rojas Pinilla closed down El Espectador and he was unemployed and didn’t have five cents. And as it happened, it was the same period when Vargas Llosa lived there, though they say they lived a block apart but didn’t know each other. So he was broke, without money, and Plinio arrived with Delia Zapata Olivella and a dance troupe, the folkloric ballet or however you call it, and they were on tour in Europe. Plinio was always a journalist. His father was a famous politician who was a friend of Gaitán’s. Gaitán died in the arms of Plinio’s father. He was there at the moment they assassinated him. His father was also named Plinio Mendoza, Plinio Mendoza Neira.
Gabo wanted to go to Russia with the ballet and they couldn’t justify the expense of taking him. So that he could go, Plinio talked to Delia and they hired him as a maraquero, and he went as if he played the maracas. They traveled by train to the Soviet Union.
He lived in Venezuela with Plinio at the time of Pérez Jiménez’s coup,* and that was where he met Alejo Carpentier.** That’s the origin of the theory I have that the famous magical realism is not magical realism. It’s the marvelous real: that’s what they called Carpentier’s literature, before García Márquez.
JAIME ABELLO BANFI: One of the great moments in his journalism happened in Venezuela. He makes huge strides in Venezuela. Plinio, who was managing Momento, a magazine which was in the Capriles Group, calls him in Paris to offer him a fulltime job. And Venezuela is also in an enormously prosperous state. The society was all about oil, and growth. He lives through all of this and the fall of Pérez Jiménez. He writes some memorable articles, like “Caracas with No Water.” Now I’m going to point something out: the Gabo of “Caracas with No Water” is very different from the Gabo of News of a Kidnapping. In News he boasts that he invented absolutely nothing. On the other hand, he’s recognized that in “Caracas with No Water” the German in the article is himself; Gabo was the man who supposedly shaved with peach juice, a half-invented anecdote meant to demonstrate the situation. To dramatize the journalistic tale he was recounting. Saying: “It’s a news article, everything is true, but I put in a little grain of fiction.” But with News of a Kidnapping, he insists that everything was super-verified, investigated, researched, confirmed. Total fact-checking. And that’s why he insists so much at the Foundation on the ethics of not inventing. That is, now he’s a mature Gabo, much more careful because he himself had been the victim of a lot of inventions. That’s why he was concerned about the way they conducted interviews, misusing the tape recorder.
PLINIO APULEYO MENDOZA: After the first weekend he came back married. Mercedes didn’t say a single word until the third day after we had met.
MARÍA LUISA ELÍO: When did he meet Mercedes? When she was a girl, isn’t that so?
RAFAEL ULLOA: They met when they were kids. She’s from Sucre. Those Barchas are from Magangué, but they went to live in Sucre and Gabito’s father went to Sincé. And after Sincé he went to Sucre and that’s where they met.
MARÍA LUISA ELÍO: Once, when Mercedes was about eleven years old, she was in her father’s pharmacy. Gabito went into the pharmacy and said to her: “I’m going to marry you when you’re older.”
MARGARITA DE LA VEGA: She’s not onl
y from the coast but is also a mix of Spanish and Turkish. What we call “Turkish,” they could be from Syria or Egypt, but they were Turks because they came with a passport from the Ottoman Empire. They were much more established than García Márquez’s family. It’s in Sucre when the García Márquez family achieves a bourgeois kind of prosperity, and that’s why Chronicle of a Death Foretold takes place in Sucre, when his father was a pharmacist.
MIGUEL FALQUEZ-CERTAIN: Her father was a pharmacist and had a higher status than García Márquez’s father. He would spend his vacations with his parents, and on one of these he met Barcha, who was a little girl, and he said to the girl: “I’ll come back for you when you’re big so we can get married.” And he left. And came back when he was thirty-three years old at least. He had no relationship with her, and it was like one of those love affairs in India where they’re engaged when they’re children and marry without knowing each other. Not at all. He went, picked her up, got married, and left with her. That’s the story.
CARMELO MARTÍNEZ: This isn’t for you to repeat. He was in love with a girl named Uricoechea, the daughter of Dr. Uricoechea, from Bogotá. Her name’s Camila. Camila . . . no, Camila is her sister. Camila’s here, married to Orval’s brother. This girl was the younger one. Amparo. He was in love with her but Dr. Uricoechea was a class snob and refused to accept Gabito because Gabito didn’t dress well. He was a poor man. Besides, he didn’t like dressing well. So the old man was opposed. Then Amparo went to Bogotá. She entered nursing school, and like every nurse, she marries a doctor. She married a Bogotan doctor, they went to California, but they separated and so she married again and so did he. But as far as I know, she never came back to Colombia. Mercedes was a friend of Amparo’s, the Uricoechea girl. Of course she didn’t take him away from Amparo. Dr. Uricoechea drove Gabito away.
MARGARITA DE LA VEGA: Mercedes was very pretty. She had beautiful eyes. Maybe she wasn’t pretty in the traditional sense, but I always noticed her. She had very large eyes, very pretty hair, a lot of expression. She was much better-looking than Gabo.
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