Solitude & Company

by Silvana Paternostro

  All of Aracataca is in the novel. There’s the river of crystalline water, the Aracataca River, a really beautiful river. Because it’s like this: it has little beaches. And almond trees. Almond trees all around the main square in Aracataca. There’s the heat. The afternoon siesta. There are all the people who travel through Aracataca, which is a travel center. It’s the place the Indians from the Sierra Nevada come to. Many people passing through. There’s the train. And, well, ideas. For instance, during the banana bonanza in Colombia, people danced the cumbia using bundles of bills as candles. That’s in the novel.

  You realize that in Gabo’s narrative the environment has a great deal of influence. Superstition plays a great part. Things of those towns. Natural phenomena. The rain. The heat. They had to have that influence. And you know that the rainstorms there can last two or three days, when it seems that pellets were falling from the sky because they’re downpours, rivers, and that must have had a big influence on him. He begins to absorb all these things that happen around him while there are natural phenomena with tropical intensity. Aracataca didn’t have electricity until a short while ago. It had a small generator.

  All of this area that goes from Ciénaga to Aracataca to Fundación, all of this is the banana zone. It’s very fertile land because it’s the alluvial deposit from the mountains that comes down to this little valley, a broad valley. Aracataca was an agricultural town. It was beginning to see the inroads of bananas. All the banana plantations were here in this region. At first the owners lived there, there were plantations.

  My grandfather, Antonio Daconte, comes there from Italy, and he’s an impressive figure in the town. He opens a store that was called Antonio Daconte’s Store. He isn’t just anybody. My grandfather emigrated from Italy toward the end of the nineteenth century and came to Santa Marta. He was one of the first colonizers in Aracataca; he comes there and practically helps to found the town. When he arrived, and when the Turks arrived, and the Italians, Aracataca was barely a tiny hamlet.

  IMPERIA DACONTE: Three young siblings arrived: Pedro Daconte Fama, María Daconte Fama, and Antonio Daconte Fama, who remained in Aracataca. Very young people when they arrived. Things went very well for him in Aracataca. Oh yes. He had three farms there. And most of the houses in Aracataca belonged to my father. He traveled to Europe, my father. The rest didn’t travel.

  EDUARDO MÁRCELES DACONTE: He arrives, and I don’t know, either he brought money with him or made some deals that went very well, because from the time when he arrives he sets up a tremendous store and organizes the movie theater. He had one of the biggest houses on what they call Four Corners, which is, in a manner of speaking, the Times Square of Aracataca. It’s called Four Corners. It was an immense corner house. It took up a quarter of a block, I’d say, because in the courtyard is where he set up the theater. The movie theater. In the courtyard of his house. There were chairs, and he brought the machines, and then by train they sent him films from Santa Marta. He had his people who fetched and carried, and there was a projectionist and everything. He brought the movies and the jukebox. All the new things that were appearing, he brought them to Aracataca because he would travel to Santa Marta.

  IMPERIA DACONTE: My father would take us to the farm very early so that we’d have the morning air. There were a lot of bananas and they would fall, then they would cover them up and I would pick from this bunch and then from another.

  EDUARDO MÁRCELES DACONTE: Later on the United Fruit Company arrives, and it acquires many of the farms. Although all the original owners were kept on, United Fruit is practically turned into a banana monopoly there. They’re the ones who buy the bananas, process them, export them. They have their own ships.

  RAMÓN ILLÁN BACCA: But of course moving up wasn’t so difficult at a given time because all the people came and set up a store and then bought land. The value of land increases again in ’47, after the Second World War. And people found themselves rich. That’s what they call the banana bonanza. My aunts, the Nogueras of Santa Marta, had been rich from before.

  ELIGIO GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: In order to protect top management, the United Fruit Company had built its encampments, far from town, in the middle of the plantations. The one in Aracataca was a kind of neighborhood called El Prado, wooden houses with burlap windows with wire gauze as a protection against the mosquitoes, and pools and tennis courts in the middle of an unbelievable lawn. And so, on one side, separated by the train tracks, in the middle of the coolness of the plantations, the citadel of the gringos, the “electrified chicken house” as García Márquez calls it, immune to heat and ugliness and poverty and foul smells. On the other side, the town. With wooden houses and tin roofs or simple cane and mud huts with straw roofs. The town where, attracted in a certain sense by the bonanza, the Márquez Iguarán family had come to live in August 1910.

  19

  BOOM!

  In which the Latin American novel explodes and some people think it’s because of Gabo and others don’t agree

  RAMÓN ILLÁN BACCA: Then came the business of the Boom and I read Carlos Fuentes’s The Good Conscience. I tried to retrieve Carpentier a little, but Gabito wasn’t in that thing. The explosion happens in ’67 with One Hundred Years of Solitude. I’m talking about this whole period when you didn’t assimilate García Márquez with magical-fantastic literature. When you talked about magical-fantastic you thought a little about Carpentier, in Écue-yamba-ó!, in The Kingdom of This World. You didn’t associate it with García Márquez. That came later. Much later. For people like me, who tended to read in spurts, but in a steady way.

  WILLIAM STYRON: It was a very important contribution, but I don’t think it was alone. I think that all of the writers of the so-called Boom including Carlos [Fuentes] and Vargas Llosa, and one or two others contributed something. Cortázar, of course, was very important. I think all together their collective impact could be what it was because these writers each added something. There was the force of their works that brought Latin American literature to the fore in the consciousness of non-Latin American readers. I would say that. I think the important fact is that Spanish-language literature was almost nonexistent, as Carlos has pointed out himself in various writings. There was practically nothing after Don Quijote. The novel was not a compelling art form. I’m not including Spanish-language literature in the drama form by García Lorca and others. I’m talking about the novel, purely and simply. It just did not exist in the world’s consciousness until this boom almost miraculously gained the attention of readers in Europe and the United States.

  SANTIAGO MUTIS: Yes, he’s the one who breaks the barrier.

  WILLIAM STYRON: Many were living in exile. Often this was due to the fact that their works were not only criticized but attacked by the establishment in each of the countries they came from. I think that Gabo’s work was preeminent, but I don’t think he could have existed by himself. I believe his work needed the work of the others I mentioned.

  JOSÉ SALGAR: I remember when he came to do publicity for One Hundred Years. They come to do publicity and try to make a lot of sales. They were public relations guys . . . The Boom begins!

  WILLIAM STYRON: Yes, I think that is absolutely true: he was the crown’s jewel. But he wouldn’t have existed without the others.

  GREGORY RABASSA: I don’t know whether he was the paladin or whether things were already changing. Vargas Llosa came later but Julio Cortázar and Borges were already there. Benito Pérez Galdós* was also there, for example, a solid but forgotten writer. Doña Pefecta. Nazarín. None of them was a follower. They were all writing their own things. Nobody writes like Julio. He’s the most international. Paris has a great deal to do with this. He writes better than any Frenchman. He parodies all the French intellectuals.

  WILLIAM STYRON: It’s a fact that he was representative of this multinational literature, so to speak. So I don’t believe it would be quite accurate to say that Gabo alone brought Latin American literature to the world’s consciousness. Althou
gh probably the most famous single work of the Boom is One Hundred Years of Solitude.

  SANTIAGO MUTIS: It’s a Bible. It recounts life from the beginning to the end. A version of human beings told with the truth of people who are very Colombian, which is what is lived here . . . What Gabo has, and what the whole world has thanked him for, is humanity. That’s it precisely.

  GREGORY RABASSA: My word is going to be a word that’s no longer used. In my day, in the swing era, the jazz era, we would say I dig that shit. The Brazilians have the word jeito. It can also be duende, but I like the concept of the ángel. One Hundred Years has duende, and duende brings the reader to the ángel. Of course I think that Gabo is Cervantean. What exactly does he have? Why doesn’t the moon leave its orbit? He has the jeito of a writer.

  HÉCTOR ROJAS HERAZO: I’ve been asked many times which of those who participated with him in the boom, which of the Latin American writers and novelists share the Boom with him. And I say none of them. After him, the rest are mediocre. He’s the real creator there; the rest are individuals, men who have had good publicity, among other things. Because the creation of the Boom is an invention of the publishers. Publishers created that because the writer can’t. So, who deserves the title of best? He is . . . the best writer . . . that’s undeniable.

  SANTIAGO MUTIS: But, for example, Juan Rulfo isn’t part of the Boom and neither is José María Arguedas. I think because in Arguedas and Rulfo they saw something very hard. And most of the media, compelled to demonstrate that poverty has to do with salvation, that we can all be rich, that happiness lies in certain objectives in which you play the lottery of life. But Rulfo is the opposite of all that. He’s a being trapped among his own dead. But that wasn’t so easy to digest either because Rulfo is the greatest of them all. It was Rulfo, Argueda, Guimarães, Gabo . . . Now, I think Europe was dazzled too. For very valid reasons. Because Spain too, that knew how to tell a story, forgot how. And all these people were magicians in telling stories . . . Spain was shattered. It was in its own terrible spiritual story. And you have to recognize that sometimes literature changes countries, and the people who were telling stories and saying things were here. And that brought him attention too.

  GREGORY RABASSA: It seemed Latin American because it was Latin American. But it didn’t seem like any other book. It seemed original. Denser, but also easier. It was going out of bounds, playing off the court. Melquíades! I loved it. I gave it to my friends from India to read, that part when he says that Sanskrit looks like clothing put out to dry in the sun. That moment when he realizes that the Gypsies originally come from India. I don’t believe Melquíades came from India because the Gypsies didn’t maintain roots in India. But obviously the strongest Gypsy roots were in Spain. You see it in García Lorca. In Alberti too. And in the great bullfighter Belmonte, in Mexico.

  ROSE STYRON: I had read it three or four years before I met him, when it came out in English. It was published in Spanish in the late sixties, but it didn’t come out in English until 1970. I read it when it came out.

  GREGORY RABASSA: I translated it by chance. It was also by chance that I became a translator. I was finishing my doctorate at Columbia, and with a couple of friends from Columbia and another from Brooklyn College we put out a literary magazine called Odyssey. I was responsible for finding new work from Spain and Latin America. In each issue two countries were chosen: two from Europe and two from Latin America. I would go to the public library at 42nd Street to look through all the magazines for things that might interest us. We chose four or five stories and then we had to translate them. Among them I remember Onetti, the Uruguayan. They all had Italian names. Onetti. Alberti. I translated them, and since I translated all of them, I used different pseudonyms.

  Sara Blackburn was Julio Cortázar’s publisher in New York. Her husband, the poet Paul Blackburn, was his agent. Julio was unknown here, though he was well known in Argentina. Hopscotch had come out with great éclat in the early sixties. Sara called me, since she knew Odyssey and knew I was the translator. She asked if I’d like to take a look at this Argentine novel and translate it. I told her yes, and she sent it to me. She wanted me to translate a chapter as a sample. I did the first chapter and another one. I sent them out. She liked them. Then Julio liked them. And said he’d like for me to do the book. I said I would, but I hadn’t even read it. Then I made the case that this was the best way to translate. Without having read the novel.

  MARÍA LUISA ELÍO: From here he writes to the famous writers of the day. One was Vargas Llosa and the other was the Argentine, what was his name? . . . Cortázar. He writes and sends them the novel to see what they think. It was finished but hadn’t been published yet. And they both answered, amazed, astonished, as if they were saying: “What can we say? We’re going to have to ask him ourselves.”

  GREGORY RABASSA: Then Julio and Gabo got together in Paris. They were friends, and Gabo needed a translator for One Hundred Years. They met because of politics. They were Latin American exiles in Paris, working for certain leftist causes. And they also read each other’s work. He wanted me as a translator, but I was busy with another translation. I told them: “Let me finish with Asturias.” I think it was Asturias, though it might have been Clarice Lispector. I had just come back from Río, from having been divorced, I remarried, and it was when I returned that they gave me the news that Hopscotch had won the National Book Award. In those years they gave prizes to translations. Not now. And I won it. I don’t recall their giving me any money.

  In short, José Guillermo Castillo, a Venezuelan sculptor who was also involved with literature, was the literary adviser at what is today the Americas Society. He waged a great campaign with the publishers here, and obtained the money to translate Latin American books. He was the one who obtained the money for Gabo’s book with Cass Canfield Jr., who was the publisher and son of Cass Canfield, one of the founders of Harper & Brothers, later Harper & Row. They had bought One Hundred Years and put up the money for the translation. They gave it to the Center and the Center paid me. Without royalties. Translators didn’t receive royalties. It didn’t even occur to me. I didn’t have an agent. I suppose I should have had an agent, but that complicated everything. When it came out, that was the end of it.

  PLINIO APULEYO MENDOZA: In March of 1968, Gabo tells me about his impression of witnessing, almost with surprise, the enormous success of One Hundred Years of Solitude in Italy.

  GREGORY RABASSA: I don’t think it was more than ten thousand dollars. Of course, back then, that was worth more than it is now, but they certainly could have given me more. But that’s how it was done. Cass did get me royalties for the edition of the Book-of-the-Month Club, which no longer exists, which amounted to small payments of three or four hundred dollars a year, not much. But then I woke up. For the last translation I did, I skillfully got a dead author: Machado de Assis. So I’m Machado de Assis. All the royalties come to me.

  MARGARITA DE LA VEGA: When I came to the United States in ’74, I would go to the bookstores to see where García Márquez was and have them place him where he belonged. Because he was always under the letter M, and nobody understood that he had to be under the letter G. I think that even in a library I saw him in the M’s. In the United States they think García is his second name and that Márquez is his first surname.

  GREGORY RABASSA: I think the translation took me less than a year. I was living in Brooklyn Heights and we had a beach house in Hampton Bays. We had a very pleasant porch there, and I would sit there with the book. It was the edition with the purple, white, and red designs. I worked on my Olympia, which I still use, though it takes me a little longer now than it used to. I worked with the book and a dictionary. I made one copy. I sent finished pages to Cass so he could begin to edit them. No, it wasn’t as if I thought I had written it. But I did think the translation read well. That was all I thought. Afterward you begin to think, but while you’re doing it you concentrate only on the words. It was fairly easy. I can be a little mysti
cal now and tell you that he was telling me what to write through the word he had chosen. For the word he had chosen in Spanish, there was only one perfect equivalent in English. It’s not that I’m praising him, I don’t give praise. But he did it well. It came out right away and he became famous. Very quickly. I think the continent was pleased that someone had finally begun to represent it. He was the first writer to receive worldwide attention, and he brought a whole group of people with him.

  SANTIAGO MUTIS: How old was Gabo during all that? It was in ’67. Gabo was born in ’27, ’28. In other words, he was forty. After One Hundred Years another person begins to appear.

  GREGORY RABASSA: I met him once when he was in New York. His children were very young. The book had just come out, he had to attend some meeting, and we saw each other for a little while in the hotel. I don’t recall which one. One of those traditional midtown hotels. Clem, my wife, came a little late because she was teaching that day. We didn’t have much to say to each other. It was very hot, and the moments of friendship came and went, but I didn’t know him the way I knew Julio. He isn’t like Julio, who’s an open person. Gabo is more reserved. And there was another difference. Julio was a few feet taller.

  SANTIAGO MUTIS: One can’t think that fame doesn’t have an influence, but if you’re isolated, you’re alone with your problem. So I believe that Gabo submitted to that. No! Not submitted, no. He was gored by it. It attacked him like an animal, like a bull. And then gradually, slowly, another person begins to appear. He’s no longer there.

  * Benito Pérez Galdós is a leading literary figure in nineteenth-century Spain, second only to Miguel Cervantes Saavedra.