Solitude & Company

by Silvana Paternostro

  MARÍA LUISA ELÍO: Then, talking with her, he said: “It’s a good idea for you to marry me because I’m going to be somebody very important.” I think he really did know everything that was to come.

  MARGARITA DE LA VEGA: That story in One Hundred Years of Solitude about how he met her, all of that is true. She was very young because she was his neighbor. But there’s a lot of machismo in that too, isn’t there? You spot them when they’re very young and she’s going to be the ideal woman because nobody else is going to see her. And he marries her and she’s in love. I call that bolero philosophy. It’s a part of machismo, all those melodramatic songs. Because “only once,” because love like that happens only once, and it doesn’t matter what happens, there’s something above reality, which is that special union with the person one loves for the first time, that the man behaves badly but it isn’t that he wants to, it’s that he has certain instincts, but in reality you’re the first one. It’s like a disease. It’s part of the entire culture. It’s adoration, devotion, the apparent veneration that flatters you so much and also that romantic thing that also comes from romanticism, that there’s one special man for you. Don’t tell me the gringos don’t have it, of course they do.

  * General Marcos Pérez Jiménez ruled oil-rich Venezuela with a firm hand from 1952 to 1958. García Márquez landed in Caracas to work at a magazine as the Pérez Jiménez days were coming to an end. This gave him firsthand knowledge of life under the rule of an authoritarian dictator, a subject he returns to in Autumn of the Patriarch.

  ** Alejo Carpentier, a Cuban novelist, essayist, and ethnomusicologist, has been baptized as the father of the term “magical realism” to explain how in Latin America the real and the surreal live side by side. He writes in the prologue to The Kingdom of This World, a novel about the revolution in Haiti: “But what is the history of Latin America but a chronicle of magical realism?” Both writers lived in Caracas at the same time but it is unclear if they ever met. Alejo Carpentier was Cuba’s ambassador and a worldly man with literary recognition; García Márquez was a lowly staff writer at a gossip magazine.

  14

  “That Communist Newspaper”

  The true and little-known story of how García Márquez comes to Prensa Latina, the official organ of the Cuban Revolution

  PLINIO APULEYO MENDOZA: When I decided to leave Venezuela and return to Colombia, I intended to become fully connected to political activity inspired by what was then, for me, the fascinating Cuban experience.

  Gabo planned to go to Mexico and continue writing.

  We said goodbye one night at the door to his house in the San Bernardino district in Caracas; our Venezuelan experience was coming to an end.

  We didn’t know that in less than a month we’d be reunited in Bogotá. Thanks to Cuba.

  GUILLERMO ANGULO: One day a Mexican came to Bogotá. Gabo has never told this because he says it’s more important to say it was a guerrilla who came. He’s been cultivating his image. But the truth is this: a Mexican came whom I knew—I had lived in Mexico for five years—and he called me. He was in the Hotel Tequendama, and I said to him: “No, bro, you come stay in my house.” I was a bachelor. I brought him home, and the guy, whose name is Slim Rodríguez, always had his valise with him. He went to the bathroom with the valise. He never left the valise. And I thought: “A novel.” Of course, who’s going to leave a novel lying around? And I said to him: “Listen, why don’t you ever put that fucking suitcase down?” “Because I’m carrying dough.” (He was carrying dough. Dough!) He was carrying money to set up Prensa Latina. And he was carrying a sum that today may even sound ridiculous but which was a lot of money then. Ten thousand dollars. “Wow, what? What’s that for?” “To set up Prensa Latina here and you’ll be the first manager.” I told him I’m not a journalist or a manager. “You’re the only person I know. The only one I have confidence in, so you’ll be the first manager.” So then I started Prensa Latina. Afterward I met Fidel and I said to him: “You people owe me a statue because I’m the founder.” Fidel thought that was funny. Then I called these two guys [Plinio and Gabo] and said to them: “Look, this is for you two. This isn’t for me. What should I do?” That was when the two of them began working for Prensa Latina.

  PLINIO APULEYO MENDOZA: I called Caracas: “Listen, Gabo, there’s something important happening here that I can’t talk about on the phone. Come to Bogotá. A press office, I’ll tell you all about it . . . we’ll be the bosses.”

  I was already talking like the Mexican.

  In four or five days, Gabo and Mercedes come down the airplane steps. Mercedes was expecting.

  RAFAEL ULLOA: That Castro loves him to death.

  PLINIO APULEYO MENDOZA: Of course, that period has a dramatic connotation seen from the perspective of the years, when one looks at the implications of the Cuban Revolution, its illusions, the rhetorical notions that were developed around it (Régis Debray’s unfortunate “foco theory”), the influence they had on many individual destinies that touched ours.

  But on the margin of this political excitement we led an organized, easy life, circling around our daily news dispatches, and in the apartment of Gabo and Mercedes, where I, still a bachelor, was a daily guest: at breakfast, lunch, and supper.

  With Gabo we had bought identical blue raincoats, and everywhere (editorial rooms, cafés, the houses of mutual friends) they would see us come in at the same time, like two boys dressed by the same mother.

  When Gabo (who, with admirable discipline, was writing the final version of In Evil Hour at night) stayed home working, I would take Mercedes to the movies.

  GUILLERMO ANGULO: Afterward they went to Cuba to work there.

  PLINIO APULEYO MENDOZA: Still, each time I returned to Havana (García Márquez would go later), the growing intervention in everything by party members was revealed to me and the demarcation between them and the rest of the agency reporters was accentuated.

  Now they were organizing vague indoctrination meetings and letting the idea of collective management of Prensa Latina circulate in the corridors.

  JUANCHO JINETE: A Communist from Prensa Latina kept showing up in Barranquilla from time to time.

  PLINIO APULEYO MENDOZA: The appearance in Bogotá of one José Luis Pérez as a special visitor from the agency was the first alarm signal for García Márquez and for me.

  GUILLERMO ANGULO: Then Gabo leaves for New York.

  PLINIO APULEYO MENDOZA: Gabo returned after a few weeks of training in Havana. Instead of Montreal, he’d be sent to New York. He was boiling over with information . . .

  GUILLERMO ANGULO: The gusanos begin to call Gabo to accuse him. His first child had just been born and then, too, Gabo is very fearful.

  PLINIO APULEYO MENDOZA: In case of any attack, Gabriel worked with an iron bar within reach.

  GUILLERMO ANGULO: Plinio retires.

  PLINIO APULEYO MENDOZA: Mercedes turns to me with a smile, while the child she is holding onto jumps around beside her:

  “So then, compadre, the Reds took over the Prensa?”

  “They did, comadre.”

  When I tell her of my resignation, she, placid and calm as always, remarks:

  “Gabito already wrote his. But he was waiting for you to turn it in.”

  GUILLERMO ANGULO: He travels to Mexico City by land. But it felt like he had already seen that, because Leaf Storm is like Faulkner. It’s As I Lay Dying. He sees the true Faulkner. He sees him in images. But he already knows Faulkner as a twin soul. I think he’s his most important influence from a technical point of view because afterward he invents an entire world. I don’t know whether he helped or harmed literature, because although Gabo is very good, Gabo’s imitators are very bad.

  PLINIO APULEYO MENDOZA: Now Gabo intends to finally carry out his long-standing and postponed project of going to live in Mexico City. Without any money, it’s an adventure as mad as the one years earlier, when he decided to stay in Paris without the means to do so.

  WILLIAM
STYRON: Well, I think that’s the reason for his great admiration for Faulkner, because Faulkner without the tag of magic realism nonetheless visualized and created an entire world, a universe based on an actual world, which was the Mississippi he made his own and called Yoknapatawpha. Macondo is the equivalent of Yoknapatawpha. And I think that was an important contribution of Faulkner to Gabo’s own sense of a literary creation.

  EMMANUEL CARBALLO: Well, how did Gabo get to Mexico City? I’m thinking Álvaro Mutis must have said to him: “Come to Mexico City.” Mutis came to Mexico City running from a fraud he had committed in Colombia, and here in Mexico he was in Lecumberri.* He has a book about Lecumberri, which is the most famous prison in Mexico. When he got out, he worked in television. He was the voice of a character in a very famous North American series. When Gabo arrived in Mexico City, he went to see his friend, who had been his friend in Colombia and introduced him to all of us who were writing literature at the time.

  DANIEL PASTOR: It was The Untouchables. A black-and-white television program about Eliot Ness’s team, the ones who put Al Capone in prison. Mutis was the off-camera voice that came on at the start of the program.

  EMMANUEL CARBALLO: His voice was very famous and he earned money and prestige. He met the most interesting people in Mexico. When Gabo arrived, Mutis introduced him to everyone.

  * In 1958, at age thirty-six, Álvaro Mutis spent fifteen months in prison in Mexico City, facing embezzlement charges that were later dropped. The Mexican magazine Letras Libres wrote about Mutis’s experience: “He came out of Lecumberri, which had imprisoned such others as the murderer of Trotsky, Ramón Mercader, the painter David Alfaro Siqueiros, the writer José Revueltas, the novelist José Agustín, and William Burroughs, a different man, convinced that ‘we may not judge our fellow man,’ an essential certainty that guided the voyages and efforts of his literary alter ego, Macqroll, the lone sailor.”

  15

  “Tell Me More”

  In which Gabriel García Márquez goes to Mexico City and recounts to an acquaintance the story of the book he would like to write

  MARÍA LUISA ELÍO: Where did we meet? He wasn’t living in Mexico yet. He was working with Prensa Latina and was going to Paris via Mexico City. Very young, very young. Skinny, skinny. I don’t remember. I don’t know exactly where. With Álvaro Mutis. At one point Álvaro says to him: “Gabo, tell that story about the ship,” and Gabo told the story of the ship that appears in One Hundred Years of Solitude. You must remember a ship that they find in the middle of the jungle. Do you remember? That’s when I met him the first time.

  RODRIGO MOYA: One day I go to my mother’s house and she was having a party. I was already studying photography with Guillermo Angulo and see a man who’s occupying almost the entire chaise longue, there was a motley crowd, a lot of people in the chairs, on the edges of chairs, and I see a young man I didn’t like because of his arrogant attitude. It was Gabriel García Márquez, stretched out on a sofa like an Indian Madonna, as if the sofa belonged to him and he was in his palace. At that moment he was a writer, one of many Colombians, he had won some prize. But he had everyone spellbound listening to him talk.

  When he arrived in Mexico City, he went to my mother’s house very often. Years later he said to me, as he was chatting about my mother, that he loved her very much, he said to me: “The truth is your mother often killed my hunger.” He would go to eat at my mother’s house, food from Antioquia. My mother cooked Colombian. She’d fix flank steak in a hurry and there was always cold brown-sugar water. In the icebox, before she bought her first electric refrigerator. Then I see Gabo there and we’re introduced this time and somehow we like each other, and on other occasions I ran into him again. I remember a long walk that he recounts in a piece at some point: “I would go out walking with Rodrigo Moya, who had a cat that knew how to walk outside.” I remember that he asked me a lot of questions and we talked a great deal.

  GUILLERMO ANGULO: I’m responsible for the first prize given to Gabo. The Esso Prize.

  Yes. That was the first prize in the Esso competition that was held for ten years or more. A very important prize in Colombia. I worked with Esso. I wasn’t an Esso employee, but I took photographs for them, and made films. I made some documentaries about the unknown coasts, about the city, Bogotá, two others. At that time I was very involved with the people in public relations. Botero was there. Botero did the magazine. He was the designer of the magazine, Fernando Botero. And one day I saw there was a competition, a very important competition. Do you know how much the first prize was? Fifteen thousand pesos. It was very, very important. With that you could buy yourself a car, with fifteen thousand pesos. The first Volkswagen they imported here sold for thirty-eight hundred pesos. So I said: “Man, I have a friend who’s very important.” Gabo already had a name here as a journalist, he hadn’t done many literary things, but people knew, with Leaf Storm, that we had a writer here.

  Gabo already had respect, but it was more about an expectation because he’d already done something solid. Then they said: “Then ask him to send in something.” And he sent me his novel tied up with a necktie and a title that I removed. Because I said: “With this title you don’t win the prize.” It was called This Shit Town. So I told them: “Look, the novel doesn’t have a title. It’s missing a title.” I told them: “There’s a very important novel out there, it’s Gabo’s. No chance they give the prize to anybody else.” So then the prize went to Gabo. The novel’s In Evil Hour.

  MIGUEL FALQUEZ-CERTAIN: Germán Vargas was a juror for the competitions, and in the 1960s, he was very important because García Márquez wasn’t appreciated in Colombia. All they had published of his, thanks to his friends on the magazine Mito, were two or three sections of Nobody Writes to the Colonel. His first novel, which he paid for out of his own pocket, Leaf Storm, was published in the 1950s. It was a small edition, and it didn’t amount to much, as they say nowadays in Colombia. He wrote stories that won prizes in Bogotá, in El Espectador, when he was a journalist. Afterward he went to Europe and to Mexico. Then he didn’t come back to Colombia anymore and wrote that novel that’s called In Evil Hour, though it wasn’t called In Evil Hour but This Shit Town. He sent it in like that, with that title. The Esso Prize was given by Esso, the oil company, which had a Jesuit priest, Father Whatever, who was very important. And he was the president of the Colombian Academy of Language. And since he was a priest, that man was very prudish. Germán had a lot to do with their giving the prize to his friend García Márquez. And they gave him the prize. García Márquez was the first to win that prize. Germán Vargas was always a juror and he always helped his friends.

  JOSÉ SALGAR: He won the Esso Prize and it was his first published work. He says: “With this I twist the swan’s neck because I finally published my book.” A few copies that he gave as gifts were in circulation, but nobody bought it. He gave me this one. He gave it to his friends as a gift.

  EDUARDO MÁRCELES DACONTE: He wins the prize and that does a lot for him. That’s when I really find out that he’s from Aracataca. His stature grows. My family would say: “Listen, Gabito . . .” “Listen, things are going really well for Gabito, how nice!” and so forth. They held Gabito up as an example. They all call him Gabito. Gabito, Gabito . . . Since they remember him as a boy, he’s Gabito. Nobody can call him Gabo or Gabriel, nothing but Gabito. Especially those who knew him when he was a kid.

  SANTIAGO MUTIS: He’s had the best luck in the world with friends and boardinghouses. In Barranquilla it was Alfonso Fuenmayor. The landlady at the boardinghouse in Paris, and then in Mexico City the story is more or less the same.

  GUILLERMO ANGULO: Álvaro Mutis was an advertising man, or he was an advertising man for a long time. One day I was with Mutis and we went to an agency in Mexico City and all the women threw themselves at him; they embraced him and kissed him. I said to him: “Maestro, you make me jealous. How do you do it?” And he said: “Look, maestro, I’m going to tell you a secret. You have
to make all the women think you are always an available man.” And I have a book of his where he writes: “For the only friend I know is always available.” I was in Mexico City when Gabo arrived and I had the impression that he had already retired from literature because he was very involved with film people.

  EMMANUEL CARBALLO: Mutis put him in touch with writers, with publishers, with newspapers. And with film. He worked with the Barbachanos. They put out a weekly newsletter and made movies. Lots of people worked there. He met Carlos Fuentes, who unfortunately can’t tell you anything now.

  MARÍA LUISA ELÍO: My husband Jomí and I made an experimental film called On the Empty Balcony. We filmed it in Mexico City. And each time they showed this film—it couldn’t be shown in movie theaters but only in art houses—Gabo’s face would appear, hiding so we wouldn’t see him again. But Gabo was there watching it. I think he’s seen that film twenty thousand times. He was always watching it. In that film a huge number of people appear. There’s Jomí, who’s the one who made the film. There’s Emilio García Riera. José Luis González de León. Jaime Muñoz de Baena. Diego de Mesa. There’s Salvador Elizondo. Juan García Ponce. Tomás Segovia. Who else appears? They’re stories I wrote that were unified afterward. My husband directed it. Gabo didn’t act in it. Salvador Elizondo plays a seminarian and John Page is a priest. Gabo isn’t in it because he didn’t have the face of someone born in Spain. Gabo has that exotic face. Marvelous cheekbones. A beautiful face . . . enormously beautiful, but it isn’t a Spanish face. A solemn face.

  GUILLERMO ANGULO: He’s had some incestuous love affairs with the movies and it’s gone very badly for him. There’s not a single great film by Gabo. There’s not a single great screenplay by Gabo. And they’re marvelous ideas. Stupendous. But Gabo’s so literary that his literature can’t be transferred to the screen, or it would have to be done by someone very special, someone like Bergman, who I thought at a certain moment, I don’t remember which one, was going to let us see God opening a door. No? Then you need a very special genius that corresponds to Gabo’s genius. On the other hand, I think it’s a little . . . how shall I say it? . . . exaggerated to try to demand of Gabo that in addition to being a great writer he should also be a great filmmaker.