Solitude & Company

by Silvana Paternostro

  CARMEN BALCELLS: He never wanted a film made of One Hundred Years. And even today it’s a desire respected by his family, which I think will be upheld forever. And I don’t really know why, except because of the impossibility of transferring the brilliance of that text and that work of art and turning it into a different product. It’s absolutely unthinkable that it would be as brilliant as the book. This would be true of any book by García Márquez. But I’ve often insisted that he accept offers or cinematic proposals for reasons that were sometimes financial, other times because of the reliability of the people involved in the project, but in fact it’s very difficult to transform an inspired sentence into an image.

  EMMANUEL CARBALLO: Well, I met him because I was very connected to ERA Publishers. ERA was Gabo’s publisher in Mexico. ERA published In Evil Hour, with a note saying that he withdrew authorization from the first edition that had won the prize offered by an oil company in Colombia. They had translated it from Colombian into Castilian and he was very annoyed with the book. So then ERA published it and it said: “This is the first edition in Spanish.” The other one was in a language that resembled Colombian but wasn’t Colombian or even real Castilian. At that time I was married to the director and owner of ERA Editions. A Catalan. Neus Espresate. Vicente Rojo is another person who was very good friends with Gabo. Vicente Rojo brought Gabo to ERA. I met him there, introduced by Vicente. Neus Espresate met him, I met him, and we became friends. We saw one another frequently. We talked once or twice almost every week. With Mercedes, his wife. With him. We had a very good friendship.

  QUIQUE SCOPELL: Ah, this is with Gabito, who was already in Mexico City. Kid Cepeda calls me one day. Get ready for Carnivals. We’re going to have a really wild time. Since I knew that he always had plenty of cash because at the brewery they didn’t pay shit but there was money, he says: “I am flush for the Carnivals. I need you to film them. The two of us are going to make a documentary about the fucking Carnivals because the two of us know Barranquilla and what the parties are like. So get ready.” I said, okay, the first thing you need is film to be able . . . Immediately he says, “There’s no problem at all.” Calls Panamá: “Send two hundred rolls of 16 millimeter.” There was nothing like what we have today, digital, but 8, 16, and 35 millimeter. “Send me two hundred rolls.” Álvaro said to me: “You’re not going to pay for this. Don’t worry.” We had two hundred rolls of that stuff. A brewery truck. “I already have a brewery truck ready. It’s all set for us. I’ll pick you up at three in the morning” (because parties begin at three, four in the morning). We did it: I was filming, Álvaro beside me drinking rum, and Gabito behind us. Álvaro sent it to Mexico City to be developed, and Gabito edited it there. A little while ago they showed me the film. The film is narrated by that radio personality who died. What’s his name? Marcos Pérez. It comes out. Credits: photographs by Gabriel García Márquez, edited by Álvaro Cepeda. Enrique Scopell doesn’t appear anywhere. Same thing happened with The Blue Lobster.

  GUILLERMO ANGULO: The fact is he liked making films as he says to me: “Look, this is the only thing I studied, right?” Remember that he studied film at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia de Roma.

  EMMANUEL CARBALLO: He was a writer known by the intelligent people of Mexico, Latin America, and Spain, but he wasn’t famous. We overgrown boys knew him, boys who were going to be interesting in time but who were ordinary and commonplace, not worth very much. We were his friends. Well, Vicente Rojo brings him to ERA, the publishing house where I was an editor. And ERA published all his Colombian books and the new books he wrote in Paris and in Mexico City. We eat lunch, we eat dinner, we talk, we get drunk for months.

  CARMEN BALCELLS: That year of 1965 when I sold that first group of short texts was the year I met him for the first time in person during the trip I took to Mexico City after Washington, where I went for the first time with my husband Luis, and we were there in Mexico and met Gabo and Mercedes. The meeting was a marvelous meeting, and from then on our relationship grew stronger and stronger. That first trip to America was an extraordinary discovery and the start of everything my professional life has been, and even today I have a phrase that sums it up: “My destiny is America.”

  MARÍA LUISA ELÍO: It was the third time we saw each other. We went to have supper again at Álvaro Mutis’s house; he hadn’t married his wife, Carmen, yet. Carmen was preparing Catalan-style rice, and when we left a lecture we went in a group to eat the Catalan-style rice. Then Gabriel was sitting close to me and began to talk and talk and talk talk talk. To everybody.

  EMMANUEL CARBALLO: He was defensively simple. He seemed like anything but a writer. He wasn’t presumptuous. He didn’t speak a language filled with literary figures and exquisite words, he spoke the way everybody else does. In fact, he played at being so simple that he disarmed the pedants.

  MARÍA LUISA ELÍO: And then, when we reached Álvaro’s house, a tiny apartment, people had already heard him but he kept walking up and down and talking. I was so moved by what he was telling me that I stayed right beside him. I said: “Tell me more, what’s next? And then what happened?” Then everybody left and I was alone with him and he told it all to me, all of One Hundred Years of Solitude. All very different from what’s written, but all of it already there . . . And I remember, for example, when he told me that the priest levitated, that I believed him, I totally believed him. What he was saying was so convincing that I said: “Why wouldn’t a priest levitate?” and I said to him: “If you write this, you’ve written the Bible, you can write a Bible.” And he said to me: “Do you like it?” And I answered: “It’s marvelous.” He said: “Well, it’s for you.” And I said: “Don’t do that to me, please, don’t do that to me!” I think he saw me as so innocent that he said: “I’ll dedicate it to this fool.”

  GUILLERMO ANGULO: I remember a famous ad that Gabo did. There was a brand called Calmex. Calmex is California-Mexico. Calmex is a brand of canned fish and things like that. So what Gabo did was something like this: “If you’re not expecting a visitor, and your mother-in-law or someone else stops by without letting you know beforehand: Calmex, señora, Calmex.” He did very clever things.

  MARÍA LUISA ELÍO: And then Jomí, Mercedes, Gabriel, and I went to the house by car, with Jomí driving . . . And Gabriel said to Mercedes: “Do you think it’s a good idea for me to dedicate my next novel to María Luisa?” And Mercedes says: “Of course.” “And do you think it’s a good idea, Jomí?” “Yes, of course.” And that’s how it happened . . .

  EMMANUEL CARBALLO: Well, I think they became great friends. Besides, it’s a very nice dedication. Jomí García Ascot and María Luisa Elío. A very beautiful, very intelligent, very receptive woman, she made films with her husband. Jomí was charming, handsome, and he rode around on a motorcycle. I managed the magazine of the University of Mexico and he would go to my house to drop off an article on his motorcycle. María Luisa is very interesting, very intelligent, with very bold opinions, and she always hit the target, in other words, it’s a very good dedication. A woman with a lot of talent. Very pretty, good-looking. She dressed very well. The friend of the best people at that time in Mexico City, and everywhere. She attracted attention wherever she went because of her beauty and her talent. She was very nice to García Márquez, and García Márquez repaid her by dedicating the book to her.

  María Luisa and Jomí.

  CARMEN BALCELLS: I was triumphant with my contract in the United States for five books. I don’t remember but I believe it was an advance of a thousand dollars, and when I showed it to Gabriel García Márquez in triumph, he made a memorable comment and said: “It’s a shit contract.” A few days ago, as a consequence of his death, I gave an interview on Peruvian television, and the commentator on the program asked me if that story and that answer were true. And he said to me: “What did you think of that answer?” And I said: “At the time I thought it was arrogant, but after many years, and having dealt with great, highly esteemed writers, I’ve d
iscovered that the highly esteemed writer is the first to know that he is, and that the esteem is legitimate.” So now I don’t think it an arrogant answer but an answer appropriate to the magnitude of the literary project he was working on at that time.

  16

  Solitude and Company

  In which the desperate writer endures eighteen months of solitude and some company

  MARÍA LUISA ELÍO: Gabo said: “I have to retire for a year and I’m not going to work. You see how you can arrange things,” he said to Mercedes. “We’ll see how you do, but I’m not working for a year.” And Mercedes arranged things the best she could.

  GUILLERMO ANGULO: She got credit.

  MARÍA LUISA ELÍO: Borrowing the meat from the butcher.

  GUILLERMO ANGULO: She got money from one place and another. And he began to write. To write with that discipline that only he has. Like the architect Rogelio Salmona, who lives in the apartment next to mine. Like him. Salmona doesn’t have a cent (he’s done the greatest buildings in Colombia) because he says: “I don’t like it” and he does the building all over again, paying for it out of his own pocket. They’re very good friends, besides. He designed Gabo’s house in Cartagena, and the presidential guesthouse there too.

  EMMANUEL CARBALLO: He left everything. He worked. He saved. He borrowed money and began to write One Hundred Years of Solitude like a desperate man. Like a madman. He didn’t do anything else. He stopped seeing friends. Doing things. Working on things that paid him some money. He borrowed money so he could sit down and write One Hundred Years.

  MARÍA LUISA ELÍO: He had written notes but nothing else because that room Mercedes made so he could go in and write the whole blessed day wasn’t made yet. They lived in a little house on Calle de la Loma. In the living room Mercedes had a wall built with a wooden door that went all the way up so there’d be no noise, and a pine table like a kitchen table with an old typewriter. Gabo went in there and spent the whole day, all day, writing. The room was a very tiny thing, tinier than this, which is very small, like from here over to that point. There was room for his table, a chair, a small armchair, everything that fit was very small. Above the armchair was a painting and something like a calendar. But a very tacky calendar.

  EMMANUEL CARBALLO: He dressed like a peasant. He dressed very badly. Very ugly. Shabby, a peasant trying to be elegant who ends up being just the opposite. That’s what dressing like a peasant means.

  MARÍA LUISA ELÍO: Then we would go there every night. Since Gabo wasn’t going out, we would go to see them every night. We’d arrive around eight o’clock. One day with a bottle of whiskey. The next day with a piece of ham. And there we’d stay, drinking a little and eating things Mercedes made. We’d see one another every day. We would also see the Mutises there. The kids upstairs, in their rooms, doing wild things.

  EMMANUEL CARBALLO: And now here comes something that only I can tell you about. When Gabo began to work on this novel, he asked me if I could read the pages he wrote every week. So every Saturday he’d come see me with what he had written during the week.

  MARÍA LUISA ELÍO: I stayed home a good deal, reading all afternoon, not doing anything, and he would call me. Gabriel would say: “I’m going to read you a little bit, let’s see what you think.” And he would read me a passage. He would call me and say: “I’m going to tell you how the aunts are dressed. What else would you put on them? What color do you think the dress is?” And we would talk. Or he’d say to me: “Look, I’ve put this word here but I don’t know what it means. Did your aunts say it? Because mine did.” Like that. It was marvelous. We spent time talking on the phone. How the women are dressed, I don’t know which one, just a minute, when she goes to catch the train . . . I think it’s from a magazine I had in the house about things from the 1920s.

  MARGARITA DE LA VEGA: You know the story when he’s writing One Hundred Years of Solitude and I heard him telling it. He needed the Encyclopaedia Britannica to verify the things he wanted to use that were part of the world. Because that’s the really nice thing about One Hundred Years for me, that it’s a vernacular, universal, and encyclopedic book all at the same time. That’s why One Hundred Years of Solitude sells so much and is read so much: because you can be a Colombian janitor (not a gringo janitor who goes to Columbia and graduates, like the one who was in the paper yesterday or the day before, but a Colombian), read One Hundred Years of Solitude, and understand it on a level different from the level of the scholar who looks up all the references and all that nonsense. He lives the story, the tragedies, the family, the evolution, the historical context, because he’s somebody who has lived it and suffered it and heard it talked about in his family. It isn’t something they read in books. It’s part of their culture.

  EMMANUEL CARBALLO: From the beginning I admired García Márquez a great deal. I liked his stories and novels very much. I thought he was a great writer. I mean, he brought me the first installment of what he was writing; he brought it punctually every Saturday. Every Saturday he brought me the novel until he finished it and said to me: ‘What defects do you find in it? Tell me the things you don’t like, why you don’t like them.’ And I said: “Yes, well, yes I like it. The novel’s stupendous. Keep doing what you’re doing. I have nothing to tell you and nothing to criticize you for. On the contrary, I praise you.” And that’s how it went until he finished the novel. At the most, I deleted two or three things and added something. That’s what my work on One Hundred Years of Solitude was reduced to. It was perfect. I didn’t have anything to do except tell him: “It’s wonderful, this character is growing, this one you’re moving to the side, I don’t know why, but in the next few weeks you’ll tell me what that’s due to.” We talked about the characters. They were our friends. We talked for two or three hours, but not as teacher to pupil but as friend to friend, and I was a fan. I use that word that perhaps belongs more to soccer than to literature. It’s a novel made almost with a superhuman gust of wind. I’ve been a literary critic for sixty years, and I’ve never seen a novel written with so much skill, so much talent, so much dedication as I saw in Gabo writing One Hundred Years of Solitude.

  He chose me, then, because I’m very talented. If not, he wouldn’t have chosen me. I don’t believe in modesty. I had written about all the novels he had previously published. He knew I was implacable, that if I didn’t like something I would say so, I would tell him why it was bad or why it was good. And that’s why he chose me. And he found in me a person excited by a talent I hadn’t seen before in literature in Spanish, that boy’s talent was larger than him. I say “boy” because he’s a little younger than I am, but only a little. We’re almost the same age, old men by now.

  MARGARITA DE LA VEGA: Gabo needed the encyclopedia and so they bought the encyclopedia. At that time one bought the encyclopedia and collections of classic books. They were sold throughout Latin America, in my day Aguilar sold them. There were people who came and offered you the books for a monthly payment, so you bought the entire collection. That was in ’65 or ’66. Gabo said that he was using them, and Mercedes said to him: “You don’t need this volume anymore,” because the man was coming to pick it up for lack of payment. Then Mercedes would give him the ones he had already used. Because Mercedes was always the more practical one. That’s why in his first interviews, especially the one in Playboy, which is very good, he said that men are the dreamers, the poets, and that women are the practical ones; without them the universe would not exist. What he said infuriated me and I even asked him about it once. Of course, he didn’t answer me. He answered only what he felt like answering. But I think that Mercedes is the model for Úrsula, the wife of the first founder of Macondo, Úrsula, the wife of the founder, she invents the business of the little sugar animals; she’s the one who makes the family survive.

  EMMANUEL CARBALLO: I’m a pretty old man now, my dear girl. I don’t remember a lot of things, but I’m going to tell you what I do remember. So, we had lunch, we had supper, we talked, we got drunk
for months. When he began to write One Hundred Years of Solitude he told ERA: “I’ve given you all my books because, well, you’re my friends. This is the most interesting publisher in Mexico, but too young; the book I’m writing now, and I have a lot of hopes for it, I plan to give it to an important Spanish-language publisher.” And then it was between Spain and Buenos Aires. He forgot about Ediciones ERA, telling us it was very small for the hopes he had for the novel.

  GUILLERMO ANGULO: Then Ms. Gabo, when they finally got the money to mail the manuscript (money they didn’t have, since their car was in hock and they owed money to the butcher and to everybody), what she says is: “Now all we need is for that novel to be a piece of shit.”

  EMMANUEL CARBALLO: He was totally certain he had written a very important work.

  RAFAEL ULLOA: Then he sent it to be published by Editorial Sudamericana, in Argentina. And he spent everything he had to mail the fucking book. Then he said to his wife: “Now all we need is for that fucking book not to be worth a damn.” And just think what the situation was like . . .

  EMMANUEL CARBALLO: There were three of us in my house who were close to him. At Comercio and Administración, No. 4, next to University City, and we’d see one another there on Saturdays at about five and work until seven. Then we’d talk, drink, gossip, do what young friends do. He spoke about his mother, his friends, his brothers and sisters, his life as a journalist in Bogotá, in Barranquilla . . . He talked about all that very enthusiastically. Our friendship was a literary one. He respected me. I respected him. I was enthusiastic about his novel and he was enthusiastic about my having spent time reading it. I would read the chapter two or three times (it took me a week) in order to talk about it to him the following week. The work ended and our friendship ended. The year we were working was a very beautiful year. We’d wait for Saturday to come in order to talk to this man.