20
Gabo Is Adjective, Substantive, Verb
In which García Márquez is transformed into the famous author of One Hundred Years of Solitude
RAMÓN ILLÁN BACCA: There’s gabolatría on the part of critics, commentators, journalists, and they create a crushing, definitely overwhelming presence. Especially for those of us who came later and were trying to write. Everybody aspired to writing the other novel that would define an epoch. I even recall that in the novel of Aguilera Garramuño—A Brief History of Everything, it was called—there was a strip of paper, a sticker, that said: “The Successor to One Hundred Years of Solitude.” Everything was sold like that. Ay! The ravages of garcíamarquismo.
JOSÉ SALGAR: I believe he influences everything. He had a bad influence on the generation immediately following his. Something similar to what happened with Watergate. After Watergate all the professional journalists felt obliged to bring down their presidents. When Gabo had the great success of the Latin American literary boom, all the journalists believed they were obliged to write better than he did in order to succeed. And many of them thought Gabo was a poor writer and that they wrote better and they began to imitate him.
RAMÓN ILLÁN BACCA: I remember Juan Gossaín, a journalist who acquired a good deal of prestige writing like García Márquez. It was very clear that he garcíamárquezed all the time.
QUIQUE SCOPELL: I remember one day in Kid Cepeda’s house when Gabito told Gossaín to stop imitating him.
JOSÉ SALGAR: It’s a normal development. I lose the thread with Gabo and he begins to make his own character different, but he quickly returns to Colombia. He never lost the connection to journalism except for those five years. Until we all suddenly convinced him, especially Guillermo Cano, to write his columns. He began with one about a brilliant minister; he wrote from wherever he was, and he sent it in on time, but now he was a different Gabo.
RAMÓN ILLÁN BACCA: Then came the overflow about him. That’s when he becomes Gabriel García Márquez. And it’s when everyone is trying to know things about the man, right? There were even gabolaters. Gabolatry began, which still exists, of course. Universally. Here there were people like Carlos Jota who was involved in gabolatry, he began to write down facts about García Márquez, to collate things; if he was here, if he was there. It was a little later, when Jacques Gilard, the Frenchman, arrived . . .
MIGUEL FALQUEZ-CERTAIN: Jacques Gilard arrived in Colombia maybe in 1977. When he arrived, he communicated immediately with Álvaro Medina, since he already knew about him from references, and he helped him find all the necessary research materials to write his doctoral thesis on García Márquez and his friends from La Cueva, whom Gilard would later baptize the Barranquilla Group.
RAMÓN ILLÁN BACCA: That’s when I become involved in the complicated story. I come back from the interior, I return to the coast, and then I hear things about him, I meet Jaime García Márquez, his brother, yes, but I wasn’t one of the gabolaters. I didn’t have much interest in looking for information.
FERNANDO RESTREPO: When I return to Colombia, the figure of Gabo always appears among us, and the first thing we did when I came back was to produce In Evil Hour for television. And that’s when Gabo’s real interest in visual media is born. We began to talk a lot, a great, great deal, about the possibilities of his plots being transferred to television. In Evil Hour was the first work by Gabo brought to television, to the screen.
RAMÓN ILLÁN BACCA: Well, every great author really arouses a great deal of interest, not only in his work but in his person. What hasn’t been written about Thomas Mann? The other day I read a very long biography.
Even in minor authors, a great deal of interest is suddenly awakened.
For example, there’s a character who attracts my attention, that is, Somerset Maugham, and I, for example, read almost all the pieces I see about Somerset Maugham. If you do that for a minor author, how will it be for the authors whose presence is so imposing?
NEREO LÓPEZ: He wasn’t made in Colombia. He lived in Paris and in Mexico City but Colombia . . .
FERNANDO RESTREPO: I come back to Bogotá in ’68 from Europe. So I encounter the presence of Gabo everywhere.
QUIQUE SCOPELL: I assure you that if you ask one of those types from the capital, they won’t understand half the novel. They don’t understand it because it’s a regional novel about Barranquilla, about the coast. Because Colombia has three regions: the Paisa region; the Cachaco region around the capital; and ours, the region of the ignoramuses to them. That book, half of the Cachacos don’t understand it because they can’t imagine that a man would do the things the novel says. It’s a completely regional novel. Nothing’s imagined.
SANTIAGO MUTIS: That’s a world lived by him, which I don’t have. I’m from the city. I have a family life that’s totally different. My education was different.
EDUARDO MÁRCELES DACONTE: It’s difficult. Not only for a person from Aracataca but for any writer. What Gabo marked out in literature is a very high point, so one often feels . . . What shall I say? He’s a figure that somehow has weight within the literary trajectory, not only of the coast but of Colombia. Of course, of the world too, but let’s leave it there. So it’s a very high fee we writers from that region paid, but filled with admiration in any event.
SANTIAGO MUTIS: Gabo has traversed almost all of my life. The first books I read were by Gabo, and Gabo still continues to be an important influence; so the relationship with him has been real. For any person of my generation who has written it is permanent, because ever since I began to read until I became a man, until I became a writer, Gabo is there. One cannot deny that. He is a tremendous presence. But it’s also very different, let’s say, to reread him now than when one read him as a boy. As a boy, Leaf Storm or The Colonel is the truth. What an intense way of approaching life and literature! From then on you began to make your own way. The only thing that’s an influence is that one attempts to have the same intensity with things, but with one’s own things. That’s the lesson. His intensity. How much one can demand of oneself. But with things that are one’s own. And each person has his own.
ROSE STYRON: Bill had met Gabo with Carlos Fuentes in Mexico City. At a very, very large party where they both were, but I didn’t have the chance to meet him and talk to him until ’74. I really didn’t know that he was going to be there. I had been in Chile at the time of the coup and returned early in ’74. I think this was later in the year, in ’74. It may have been in ’75. It was during one of Bertrand Russell’s tribunals and a conference of some prominent Chileans who had been imprisoned by Pinochet had finally gotten out: singers and diplomats, all kinds of people. The tribunal brought them to Mexico. So I flew to Mexico City to meet Orlando Letelier, who had just arrived, not knowing that Carlos and García Márquez would be there too. We were all activists at the time, and we were all anti-Pinochet. We had all been involved the previous year in the Chilean fiasco. So that’s how we happened to meet, and then the three of us became very good friends, and since then we’ve spent a good deal of time together.
QUIQUE SCOPELL: Besides, a person who had his beginnings, so humble . . . As I’ve said, for me that’s no sin or offense. On the contrary. He’s a tenacious guy. Honest. Because he’s been honest his whole life. A working man. Persistent in his work. What else can you ask of a man? One can be furious with him as a person. Not as a literary man, but as a person. He deserves it. That place he has in life, he’s worked it.
EMMANUEL CARBALLO: There are two García Márquezes: before One Hundred Years he was a common, ordinary person, and after One Hundred Years he began to be another person . . .
A.C.
AFTER CIEN AÑOS DE SOLEDAD
This has all gone to hell. An average of three lizards fall in on me every day, from all over Latin America, and so after the summer we’ll move to a secret apartment. They all come to tell me about their connection to the anguish of the world, and then they leave me 800-page originals. If thi
s is glory, I prefer to enjoy it when I’m a statue.
Gabriel García Márquez, in a letter to Alfonso
Fuenmayor from Barcelona
Gabo and Fuentemayor in Barcelona.
21
Rich and Famous
In which García Márquez pays his debts and distributes money
MARÍA LUISA ELÍO: They go to Spain and spend a few years there. When he comes back and I see him, you can’t go outside with him. I, who hadn’t gone back to Spain, go back and see them. And yes, he was already famous. In Spain he was already a celebrity.
CARMEN BALCELLS: Starting in ’67 he settled in Barcelona, and there I saw him practically every day and participated in his ideas and all his projects. He would put on like a private rehearsal to see how I responded and how I reacted.
GUILLERMO ANGULO: When he’s about to write Autumn of the Patriarch he decides to go to a place where an important patriarch still ruled; that is, he went in pursuit of Franco. To Barcelona. Being in Franco’s environment, seeing how he was, how Franco was. After that, he also studied other dictators a great deal. That is, Autumn is probably more centered on Venezuela’s Juan Vicente Gómez. But he studied all the dictators in America, Rafael Léonidas Trujillo from the Dominican Republic in particular. And he told me something about Trujillo that he never used, because, of course, he has so much more information than what he ends up using. It turns out that Trujillo was once walking with his bodyguards and he saw an old man, a classmate, but older than him, and he remarked: “So-and-so is still alive.” Later his bodyguards told him: “Not anymore.”
MIGUEL FALQUEZ-CERTAIN: He misses the Caribbean and returns to Barranquilla supposedly to find the smell of rotting guava.
JUANCHO JINETE: Quique rented him his house. He went there with Mercedes and the kids. He wrote . . . But as I’m telling you, he was withdrawing.
QUIQUE SCOPELL: No, we weren’t so angry that we’d never talk to each other again no matter what, but we grew distant for the reasons everybody grows distant: either because of money or women. That’s the only reason why you grow distant from a person, because of money or because of women. There’s no other reason.
JUANCHO JINETE: He was already García Márquez. He wasn’t a Nobel winner yet.
QUIQUE SCOPELL: He wasn’t García Márquez yet. He was halfway to García Márquez. Not yet. I was living in that house and Álvaro says to me: “Don’t fuck around, Quique, Gabito is stranded. Move out of your studio, you can go to your mother’s. He’ll pay you. He’s going to earn big bucks with that book he’s publishing. He’s going to earn big bucks and he’ll pay you.” That’s why I left my house and rented it to Gabito. Then, when I made the mistake of charging him, he became angry with me because I was charging him. “Don’t fuck around, but pay me, you sonuvabitch, if you owe me the money. You’ve lived in the house for two years and you haven’t paid me.” In the end he paid me. We were both angry, but we didn’t stay angry.
MARÍA LUISA ELÍO: When he became rich, he finally paid the butcher for all the meat he had given him on account.
CARMEN BALCELLS: The relationship with money is fundamental, not only for Gabo but for the whole world. So that when you don’t have anything you do everything to have money. When you have some you hardly suffer at all because of money, and when you have enough, maybe more than enough, you can indulge your whims and not do anything anymore just for money.
In fact he liked the best restaurants and the finest-quality champagne. We had many memorable dinners. I don’t recall who paid the bill. I certainly paid for just one reason, because Gabo didn’t like to pay bills and he would say to me: “Kame, pay the bill and add it to what I owe you.”
ARMANDO ZABALETA: I learned in El Espectador that García Márquez had won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, worth a hundred thousand bolívares, and had given the prize money to some political prisoners. Then he won another prize worth ten thousand dollars and gave that money to another prisoner. And I . . . I’m very fond of the town where García Márquez was born and I knew the house where he was born very well: the courtyard was full of weeds and brambles. The only difference was the front, there was a half a façade there. I saw the condition of the house where he was born—abandoned—and the town too needing an aqueduct, needing a hospital, a secondary school . . . And him giving the money to others. Because of that I wrote a song. The song says:
The writer García Márquez
The writer García Márquez
We have to make him understand
That the land where one is born
Is the greatest love of all
And not to do as he did
When he abandoned his town
And let the house tumble down
The house where he was born.
JUANCHO JINETE: He came to Colombia and said that he had given the money from the Venezuela prize to the guerrillas, to the revolution. When that thing with the guerrillas started here, there was a disagreement with a boy there in Bogotá, at a demonstration. A photograph that went around the world of them setting a fire in the university; he ran out and they threw things at him. And Gabo wrote that he was taking part in the revolution. Then Pacho Posada, who was a Conservative and the editor of Diario del Caribe, came and discovered this and wrote an editorial that said it was easy to come and make the revolution this way. From a distance. Now he had money. Now he was famous. He had a flat, as they call it in Barcelona, and I don’t know what else. Pacho crammed an editorial down his throat. Pacho said to him: “And why don’t you come and make the revolution here? Come on, come here.” He even said to me: “You’re going to Mexico City, you’re going with a camera and you’re going to photograph that house he has there. Damn! What is that? Have you seen it?” Finally Alfonso Fuenmayor went to see Pacho and said: “No, Pacho, leave that alone now.” But Pacho hit him hard. He wrote, “He writes to all the dictators . . . Like that, yes, delicious . . . They host him at the presidents’ house.”
EMMANUEL CARBALLO: His friendship with Fidel Castro bothered me very, very much.
WILLIAM STYRON: I think Fidel admires Gabo because he’s a great writer. And this isn’t a strange phenomenon. It’s a mutual attraction and respect. Not only because of his great literary work, but because he has a fascinating mind and because he understands the respect and admiration that Gabo has for Fidel’s revolutionary principles. In a sense, Fidel represents The Autumn of the Patriarch. They have a mutually inspired relationship based on shared principles, and that has shaped a kind of friendship that doesn’t require an explanation.
EDUARDO MÁRCELES DACONTE: Aracataca did change, of course. García Márquez put it on the map. Life changed there because tourists began to go there. So then they had to build a new hotel. They had to open more restaurants. The town’s economy improved. One way or another people who go there spend money, they eat lunch, they stay in a hotel. All of this resulted in the house where he was born being declared a museum. They rebuilt the back of the house. The front is like one of those reconstructed houses because the first house (it seems it was made of cane and mud) collapsed. Then they built one of solid materials, in the front. In the back they left the kitchen and many other things like that just as they had been when he was born. I always go and visit Aracataca. My aunts and cousins are there. I have so many cousins by now that on the street they call me “Cousin!” and I answer “Cousin!” without knowing who they are because they’re the cousins of cousins. As many as the Buendías.
JUANCHO JINETE: All kinds of gringos fell all over us, foreigners too, so we’d take them around in a jeep and show them the region. Some would ask us to get them marijuana; it was around the time of the bonanza.
ARMANDO ZABALETA: After I composed the song, I ran into him in Valledupar and he greeted me and said: “I liked it. Your song was very good, congratulations. I was very annoyed for about three months, with how restless people were, but after three months the furor over the thing began to pass and I began to calm down. I wanted to reply to yo
ur song with my own vallenato but I didn’t find a composer in Colombia who could write a song that was any better. And so then it all passed.” Then he congratulated me and invited me to lunch one day when they were celebrating. And he was very happy with me, yes he was. We sang in Darío Pavajeau’s house, in Valledupar. They had a party there because of our reunion. He likes vallenato music very much. I met him in Aracataca when he wasn’t as famous as he is now. And after One Hundred Years of Solitude I saw him again. He’s always the same. A smile and everything. He always tells me: “Maestro, this is good, this is elegant.”
There in Valledupar he said: “I’m inviting you to spend some time with me, to accompany me these two days here in Valle.” Then I accompanied him and one of the Zuleta brothers was also with us. That was a two-day party. A great party. Wherever they invited him to have lunch or dinner, he invited Emiliano Zuleta, the old man, and he invited me. It was his program and we came along. They would prepare a meal, a typical meal. Goat. Stew. Fish. Chicken. They always did it as if it were a party, singing along with a box, a guacharaca, and an accordion. And singing in the real vallenato party way. Vallenato is not for dancing but for listening. The elegant thing is that they improvise. When the party’s at its best, you improvise and listen to the verses. Nobody dances. Because that music, its brilliance, is for listening, listening to the words, who the words are directed to. Because the music there is costumbrista.* It tells the story of a character from the department of Cesar. In the region at least, the song is composed to an individual.
EMMANUEL CARBALLO: The García Márquez I knew was a modest boy not interested in having people speak marvels about him, and when he published the novel and experienced the amazingly great success of One Hundred Years, I didn’t see him again. I haven’t seen him for years. He became famous and pedantic, and pedantry and feeling important bother me a great deal. I didn’t seek him out again, and he didn’t seek me out. Once when he came from overseas, when he was already very elegant, he came to see me in my office, at a publishing house I had, and he wasn’t the same. We had met at a certain moment in life and had been very good friends. Not afterward. He was looking for other things, and so was I. Fame, recognition, his going in and people saying: “There’s García Márquez.” But what I’m telling you is nice because, without having a friendship, I still have good memories of that moment in life.
Solitude & Company Page 15