Solitude & Company

by Silvana Paternostro

  MARÍA LUISA ELÍO: I recall that Aureliano Buendía’s first death hurts him so much that he revives him. He gives the story another direction so that he doesn’t die.

  RODRIGO MOYA: He lived in the Colonia Florida. He was married and had the two boys. Sometimes I’d go to his house with Angulo. I remember one or two visits we made to Gabo’s house because Angulo visited him a great deal and Gabo was writing One Hundred Years of Solitude. We’d arrive early, at about seven, and everything was dark, and Mercedes tells us: “Gabo’s working but he’ll be down soon.” We waited an hour and Gabo didn’t come down, so then we started to smoke marijuana and in a while Gabo comes down and joins us. And we were talking and I never can remember what we said. Imagine, it’s fifty years ago. But we were very happy next to the fireplace, where there was a fire burning, and he talked to us about One Hundred Years of Solitude, and what I do remember is that he was swollen. Then Mercedes told us that when he was writing a very intense part or moment, he would swell up. His face swelled up. The process of a work like that is a little superhuman, and so those things happen.

  17

  “There Was a Blinding Light”

  In which One Hundred Years of Solitude is launched, causing an earthquake throughout the world and elevating its author to other spheres

  CARMEN BALCELLS: I already represented Gabo when One Hundred Years of Solitude came out, and I read it in manuscript. I was enthusiastic. But it was sent directly to Paco Porrúa by the author. The author sold it to Editorial Sudamericana and only many years later did García Márquez tell me to also take care of that sector that was out of my hands because of the direct contract he had made with Sudamericana.

  MARÍA LUISA ELÍO: I remember that day. He comes in, very friendly, bringing me the first copy. I read: “A Jomí García Ascot y María Luisa.” With a pen he adds a comma and signs: “Gabo.” He doesn’t write Gabriel. He writes Gabo. It’s clear. It can’t be more dedicatory. Then we go from bookstore to bookstore. I’m buying books for my friends and having him dedicate them. Like crazy people. Gabo said to me: “You’ll go bankrupt!” because I was going to bookstores in his car. I bought one so he would dedicate it to Diego, my son. In it he writes something like: “For Diego, an uncle of yours wrote this book when you were just learning to talk.” That is, very small. We pick up Jomí, we go to their house and get Mercedes, and we all have supper. The next day, I . . . You remember that there’s a moment in One Hundred Years of Solitude when it rains yellow flowers. Then I buy a very large basket, it’s immense, the biggest one I could find, and I fill it with yellow daisies. Back then I wore a gold bracelet. I take it off and put it in the basket, and look for one of those little gold fishes and a bottle of whiskey. I put everything in the basket and Jomí and I go to the Gabos’ house. That’s where we go. Jomí took his book and I took mine, and back home we didn’t go anywhere until we had finished reading it.

  MIGUEL FALQUEZ-CERTAIN: And when he comes to Bogotá in ’67 to introduce his novel, nobody pays any attention. In Colombia they ignore him completely. In Bogotá, because he’s with Vargas Llosa, who comes to introduce The Green House, and everybody wanted to be with the young, good-looking man. Everybody crowding round him, the reporters and so forth, and Gabo was in a corner. Nobody even noticed him or gave him the time of day. Look at the photograph. García Márquez is there in a corner dressed in a tie and jacket like a wannabe Bogotá dude with his little mustache and his curly hair. Vargas Llosa is out front.

  Then he goes back to Barranquilla. That’s when he meets in person, after many years, with his buddies from Barranquilla. This is what happens: García Márquez stayed in touch with his group of friends from Barranquilla, principally the literary group, which was Germán, Kid Cepeda, and Alfonso Fuenmayor. He corresponded with them wherever he was, Europe, Mexico. All those years, in the fifties and sixties, he was always in touch with them.

  RODRIGO MOYA: Before the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude he went to my house with Mercedes so that one of my photographs would illustrate the first edition, but unfortunately for me, the designer was Vicente Rojo, whom I considered for a long time a terrible designer; I would say that he was public enemy number one of photography, and here they adored him, said that he was an innovator in graphic design. And it was a fairy tale. He was never a graphic designer. He would copy things a little, mostly North American, newsprint, Warhol, but in my opinion he was a bad designer. He mistreated photography. You’d give him a photo, he’d make it tiny, he’d make it grainy, he’d make it a negative, he’d put a color over it. The photographer would say: “What’s this?” In that style of doing things, he thought the photo wasn’t appropriate, wasn’t necessary. And so the first edition of One Hundred Years appears without my photograph. I was happy that my photograph was going to appear. It’s in the first North American edition, in Penguin Books, and it made me happy, but I would have been happier if it had appeared in the edition in Spanish. I didn’t even show up when it came out. I was very elusive back then, I didn’t go to see him when it came out. I bought One Hundred Years of Solitude in a bookstore, and it’s not dedicated. My sister Colombia said to me: “Let’s go see Gabo so he can sign the book.” I never asked him to dedicate a book to me and yet I have several with dedications. My mother died recently, and in her house I found one dedicated to her by Gabo. It said: “To Alicia Moya, for the love I have for her because I didn’t marry her.”

  MIGUEL FALQUEZ-CERTAIN: In Colombia that first edition was never available, with that ship abandoned in the middle of the jungle, the Sudamericana edition. I was studying medicine in Cartagena, and I saw a woman in Cartagena who had it, and my friend Braulio and I hated her because the novel wasn’t available. Later the first edition arrived, early in ’68, and I bought it. The edition I have was printed “April 25, 1968, in the Graphic Workshops of the Compañía Impresora Argentina, S.A., Calle Alsina 2049, Buenos Aires, for Sudamericana Publishers (Calle Humberto I 545, Buenos Aires).” I bought it on June 15, 1968, in the Nacional Bookstore. The cover is by Vicente Rojo.

  In those days I had money because I put on magic shows. I bought the book in the Nacional and it was the edition with playing cards. I rescued it and brought it with me from Colombia. It’s not the first edition but something like the third reprint. But that was the Colombian edition.

  MARGARITA DE LA VEGA: I had already read some other things, but what’s curious is the letter my mother wrote when she sent me One Hundred Years from Bogotá. And she sent me a clipping of the interview of Gabo’s father. She didn’t send me social notes or anything like that, but she was fascinated by One Hundred Years of Solitude because she said that at last she understood this damned country. My mother was French. I was already expecting my son Mario Henrique, who was born in January of ’68, and I was feeling very sick. They kept me in bed for something like eight months, and that’s where I read it.

  MIGUEL FALQUEZ-CERTAIN: Before I could read the book I ran into him in Barranquilla, when he came there to see his friends, his closest friends at that time. I’m walking along 72nd and I recognize him from his photograph. Nene Cepeda I knew, and I had seen Alfonso Fuenmayor in photographs; I knew who he was. I saw them at their table and went up to them. That was at a hotel on the corner, across from the Mediterráneo. It was called the Hotel Alhambra and they were sitting on the terrace. There were something like five people at the table and the table was covered with empty bottles of Águila beer. He was in Barranquilla meeting his friends whom he hadn’t seen for ten years because he certainly didn’t have the money to travel back then. That’s why he wrote that book, Cuando era feliz e indocumentado (“When I Was Happy and Undocumented”).

  I was drunk, staggering. I interrupted the conversation he was having with the others. I said: “Are you García Márquez?” He said: “Yes. What can I do for you?” “I’d like you to give me an autograph because I have two of your books.” Then he was weak with laughter because I was drunk. Then he said to me: “Come to the Naci
onal Bookstore on Monday and it will be my pleasure if you buy a book and I’ll sign it for you.” Then I said: “The thing is I’m leaving Sunday night because I’m a student in Cartagena.” Then I stretched out my arm and took the napkin that was under a beer. I gave him the napkin and said to him: “Sign this for me.” And he said to me: “What, do you think I’m María Félix?”*

  RAFAEL ULLOA: I bought One Hundred Years at the Nacional Bookstore, which was in the center of town back then. Right across from the Club Barranquilla.

  MIGUEL FALQUEZ-CERTAIN: The Nacional had delicious fruit juice that they made right there. Tamarind juice. And with air-conditioning. And then there was a part where one looked at books. They were very expensive and they permitted lots of people to take them to read there at the table. It was a meeting place. It replaced the Mundo Bookstore.

  RAFAEL ULLOA: I bought it there . . . I must have the date when I bought it and the title page with that boat. You don’t have that? I’ll give it to you and get myself another one. If you love Gabo, and I love Gabo, then, as they say: “Two things equal to a third thing are equal,” so yes: I’ve begun to love you too.

  MARÍA LUISA ELÍO: One Hundred Years changed the world’s view of Latin American literature.

  SANTIAGO MUTIS: And I think that’s when many things begin to weaken. But because real contact with things is lost. It’s awful. That title’s like a premonition.

  MARÍA LUISA ELÍO: He was shy but I think he almost, almost still is, right? A very strange, marvelous human being. He dedicated himself to running away all his life. Running, running, running away.

  RAMÓN ILLÁN BACCA: Everybody was dazzled, weren’t they? There were people who learned by heart entire paragraphs, entire pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude. I liked it. I thought it was a great novel, but I wasn’t dazzled because I felt it was very close to the things I knew. When he talked of life in the banana plantation and the mister so-and-so . . . Yes, terrific, but since I had seen it growing up with my aunts, at all the parties . . . it continued to be the same life I already knew. I had that feeling to some extent.

  MARÍA LUISA ELÍO: More than Latin American, Spanish-speaking . . .

  SANTIAGO MUTIS: You can’t say that One Hundred Years of Solitude is a work with a structure, that it follows a path. There’s no path to anything, to anything literary, what’s there is a distinct vision of Colombia, not the one seen in the capital.

  JOSÉ SALGAR: Twenty, thirty years later, what Gabo did was never to abandon journalism but to apply his love of literature to his journalistic work. All his works have a journalistic base of exactitude.

  EDUARDO MÁRCELES DACONTE: In fact, everything—in One Hundred Years of Solitude I saw nothing but familiar people, people I knew. Besides, I had a geographical space very clearly in my head. I imagined their movements when they spoke, about the river and the irrigation ditches, and where they lived, and I don’t know what. I imagined the town because I was walking physically with the town in my head. And I knew the town well. He mentions lots of places. El Prado, for example, where the gringos lived. The train. The river. Now, of course, it’s a microcosm.

  SANTIAGO MUTIS: I read One Hundred Years of Solitude in secondary school, and for me it really was a revelation. A revelation not because of literature but because he was recounting the country you were in. Then I read it, I don’t know how old I was, fifteen or sixteen, and it turns out that you read it and thought: “Colombia isn’t Bogotá.” Colombia exists, and that’s a marvelous life. He opened up a different life that you didn’t respect in Bogotá where I’m from.

  GREGORY RABASSA: When I was translating it, I was also teaching a class on Cervantes. I saw in the narration—of course, not the same words—the same modes as in Cervantes. You can take a sentence out of the paragraph and it turns into a parable. Gabo and Cervantes did that. Besides, Macondo is an imaginary place and that’s what Cervantes did too. Perhaps he did it more furtively, like when the duke and duchess promise Sancho Panza the island and play with that. That’s where the novel comes from. If somebody wants to write a novel the best thing to do is read the Quijote.

  QUIQUE SCOPELL: And now they dare to compare that Hundred Years to the Quijote.

  * María Félix, one of Mexico’s iconic movie stars from the forties and fifties, the golden age of Mexican cinema, is like a Mexican Elizabeth Taylor.

  18

  Geography Lesson

  In which the region that gave rise to Macondo is discussed

  EDUARDO MÁRCELES DACONTE: Aracataca has about five thousand people. I don’t know how many, but a lot of people there have read the novel. Well, reading is more emotional when a person can recognize things. Perhaps in another person it would be more intellectual. But I’m referring to the case of someone who recognizes the town, the place, and the people, isn’t that right? There’s a more emotional relationship, even a sentimental one, if you prefer . . . For the people from there many of the things are no surprise; in fact, for the people from the Coast. You know, we exaggerate a lot of things, and we say things, many things that, well . . . So I think things are taken more naturally.

  Let me draw it for you here on this napkin. This is the coast: here’s the Magdalena River, here’s Barranquilla. Santa Marta is here. All this is the Sierra Nevada. Then Aracataca is here. Fifty miles to the south is Aracataca. It’s on the spurs of the Sierra Nevada. The Magdalena River. Here’s Fundación and here’s the road to Bucaramanga and the interior of the country. Do you see? According to this, Mompox is more or less here, on the banks of the Magdalena River that comes through here. The departments of Atlántico and Bolívar are here. Riohacha is over here.

  One Hundred Years of Solitude is from the river to here, from the Magdalena River to the east, the northeast of the coast. That is, everything that would become the region of Santa Marta, Ciénaga, the banana zone, and then from the Sierra Nevada to Riohacha, which is where the founders of Macondo come from. You know that Aureliano Buendía killed Prudencio Aguilar in La Guajira; then there’s a kind of exodus, and the ones who leave are the ones who found Macondo. He takes this from his grandfather’s story.

  PATRICIA CASTAÑO: On the trip we made to retrace the journey of One Hundred Years of Solitude, his English biographer Gerald Martin and I went from Maicao to Barrancas, Guajira, which is an important town today because of the coal mines in El Cerrejón. It must have had something then as well because Colonel Márquez left Riohacha for Barrancas. I think it was an area of colonization, like an opening of the frontier. And it must have been a town rich in cattle, maybe. Then we go there looking for the history of the family, the arrival of Colonel Márquez in Barrancas. And Doña Tranquilina doesn’t arrive right away. That is, he goes first. Then when Doña Tranquilina comes and they move into the house, he’d already had a series of lovers (it seems he was dreadful). And one of those lovers seems to be Medardo’s mother, who was a lady of rather easy virtue.

  Map of the region that was originally Macondo.

  We interviewed a lot of people there who were either relatives or who knew the story. In other words, that history and its relationship to the town is very vivid. Here’s something very interesting. We met a little old man, very very old, who says he witnessed the death of Medardo. He says he was very little, a boy of seven or eight, and at that moment he was delivering something. He reached the corner just as Colonel Márquez fired his revolver and killed Medardo. But the marvelous thing about the oral tradition is that on the night we were there in Barrancas, on the street, on those benches that rock back and forth, and the granddaughter of one of the ladies, who must have been about twelve years old, showed up and said: “My grandfather told me the story of that death.” And then, standing in the middle of the street, she began to recount the story, and you can’t imagine how delicious it was.

  I don’t know why I didn’t have a camera with me. Well, at that time cameras were very heavy: “And then Colonel Márquez was waiting for Medardo. He knew that because it was the day of t
he town’s patron virgin . . .” Medardo lived on a farm. “He would come with feed for the animals because he was going to stay there for a few days, for the fiestas. The colonel said to him: ‘I have to kill you, Medardo.’” And then Medardo said something about the bullet of honor, I don’t remember. But the girl told it as if it had happened yesterday. I think it’s in Gerry’s book, but what impressed me was the oral tradition. This little girl. It was as if she were narrating Euripides, as if she had learned it by heart in a book. That really impressed me because it happened in 1907 I think, and in this town, in 1993, the story was still alive.

  EDUARDO MÁRCELES DACONTE: Even though Aracataca is hot, it’s a town that’s on the spurs of the Sierra Nevada. That’s why it has “a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs,” as he says in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Why? Because it’s a river that comes from the Cristóbal Colón and Simón Bolívar snow peaks. It’s the Frio river, the Fundación river. It’s hot, but at the same time, at night the weather’s cool because of the mountain and the rivers and streams that come down from the Sierra. The vegetation’s very dense. In other words, it’s really beautiful around there.

  There’s a dry season and a rainy season, the typical climate along the coast. So if you go there in the dry season, you’ll see that it’s dusty. But it had to be rainy because bananas need a lot of moisture. When there are rainstorms, they’re tremendous downpours, like the ones in “Isabel Watching It Rain in Macondo,” which are interminable.