Solitude & Company

by Silvana Paternostro

  ALBINA DU BOISROUVRAY: I met Gabo García Márquez when we founded the journal Libre in Paris in the year ’71. I knew Juan Goytisolo, the Spanish writer who was very avant-garde, and that year he came to me because he had this idea of gathering together all the writers of the Latin American boom, whether they were leftists or rightists, in a literary magazine. Many of them lived in Paris, others didn’t, but they visited the city frequently because Paris was the intellectual and literary center at the time. Goytisolo wanted its purpose to be not so much different national politics but ending North American imperialism in Latin America at every level: economic, intellectual, cultural. He came to me because I was already involved in many movements that were very 1968 and I gave them some money, and he asked me to finance the magazine that didn’t cost very much. I thought the idea was fantastic, not only to promote Latin American culture and literature but to bring together well-known writers—like Gabo—with those who were not well known, like a Paraguayan whose name I can’t remember. Juan chose Plinio Mendoza, whom I didn’t know, as editor. Plinio worked at the Colombian embassy in Paris, in other words, he was already there, and besides, Plinio is a very meticulous person, very precise in everything, in that Colombian, Bogotan way of his; that English-dandy way. Juan thought he was the perfect person. The idea was to put out four issues that year. Plinio made a list of writers and the committee would decide whether to include them in the edition. I was on the committee. I remember there was one who was not approved because he was on the extreme right. If I remember correctly, it was Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Yes, Cabrera Infante. But there were two whom Plinio said we absolutely had to include. Gabo and Octavio Paz. If we got those two, fabulous, because we’d get the rest. They were the two. And it was true. After them came Vargas Llosa and Cortázar, who lived in Paris. There weren’t many women. I remember Claribel Alegría.

  It all began perfectly. Plinio informally asked the writers for essays, and it was at that time that I met Gabo. For me, Gabo was the great author of One Hundred Years of Solitude that du Seuil had published, I think it was Severo Sarduy who had brought him to the publisher so that they’d translate One Hundred Years, that is, I was clearly very moved to meet him.

  Plinio brought the writers for me to meet. Besides, in the beginning the offices of the magazine were in the living room of my apartment on the rue du Bac. Then we moved them to the rue du Bièvre. Since in those days we didn’t have so much access to images of people, I had no idea what García Márquez looked like, and I remember that when I saw him I thought he was a combination of a hedgehog and a teddy bear. Vargas Llosa and Cortázar always looked impeccable. Not him. Nothing to do with the writers I knew like Bill Styron. He was not the image I had of what one expects of a great writer. Besides, I felt he was extremely shy. I remember that when I spoke to him the first time he was not at all open, I’d say, in fact, that he was fairly cautious. As if he were asking Plinio: “Who is this woman? Where have you brought me?” I don’t know, but he wasn’t very communicative. Gabo was never very extroverted and I always felt that there was a good amount of timidity in him. I felt that he was a contradiction, there was a certain insecurity regarding his place and at the same time he had a huge ego, he knew very well the person he had become as a writer. So he was a great contradiction. He wasn’t someone with whom you could feel totally comfortable. You had to zigzag around his sensitive areas, you had to be careful not to wound hidden feelings, which were there but which he didn’t show. He was precisely solitude and company. A solitary person with a feeling about who he was, but at the same time he needed his friends, and sought out affection and admiration.

  MAURICIO MONTIEL: When García Márquez decided to found the magazine Cambio in Mexico City in the mid-eighties, I was the editor of the section on culture. Several times we went to lunch, and he never, ever let me pay. One day I told him that if he didn’t let me pay, I wouldn’t eat with him anymore. And he said fine. And he chose where he wanted to go. At the end of the meal, when the bill came, he pulled it out of my hand and said: “Look, since we sat down at this table I’ve sold thousands of copies of One Hundred Years of Solitude. How many books have you sold?”

  JUANCHO JINETE: I remember that I moved away from Gabito because he said that Kid and I were the lackeys of Santo Domingo and things like that. But you know something: Gabo is a good person because my niece ran into him on a flight not long ago and went up to him and said she was my niece, and Gabo invited her to travel with him in first class.

  * Costumbrista refers to the depiction of everyday life in Spanish and Latin American art.

  22

  The Death of Five Kings

  In which various theories are discussed regarding the relationship of García Márquez to the dead

  FERNANDO RESTREPO: He had endless situations that worried him very much. Very, very much. Very nervous. Those phobias and fears that he displayed. Like not wanting to stay in a house where anyone had died. There wasn’t the slightest chance it would happen.

  GUILLERMO ANGULO: I don’t know if you know what pava is. Pava is very complicated . . . The intellectuals in Venezuela invented the expression: “That’s really pavoso, my friend,” when Venezuelans were oil-rich—naturally, that wealth of the new rich meant they had things in very bad taste. The intellectuals would say that to protect themselves so they wouldn’t have things or do things in bad taste.

  Do you know what the height of pava is? Serving tripe in a goblet. So pava has two connotations. It’s what we call lobo here. Colombian lobo, Bogotan lobo is a little classist. To use the word lobo here is very well educated; very, very educated in its origins because there has always been a well-educated bourgeoisie here. It comes from lupanar, the low-rent brothels in Rome. So lobería has to do with the cheap girls offered by the madam. When the upper class talks about these things they refer to them as lovers and there’s nothing bad about it. But saying that a girl is a loba is putting her down, minimizing her. So obviously that loba’s taste is at the level of her education, at the level of her class, that’s what became lobo. In Cuba it’s picúo. In Mexico it’s . . . what is it? I ought to know because my children call me that name. It’s something that sounds as if it’s Indian. Naco. Well, as I was saying, Gabo wrote about pava. So the Venezuelan connotation is that things in bad taste bring bad luck, and that’s pava. Some of his characters have pava. In his daily life, he believes in pava. He fears death more and more and believes in a series of things that one doesn’t believe in. In salt and in every kind of omen. He believes in all that.

  FERNANDO RESTREPO: He stayed several times at our farm in Zipaquirá. Our farm is above the salt mines in Zipaquirá. It is relatively large, more than three hundred acres and the house is relatively old, more than eighty or ninety years old; my father-in-law built it. So Gabo was there because he wanted to retrace the steps of his stay there when he was a student.

  The first thing he demanded was that we tell him its entire history because he was supremely superstitious. But he considers all those things terrifying, as he told us, and it was incredible how superstitious he was about that kind of thing. “Had people died in that house?” he asked. Because he said that if there had been dead people, he wouldn’t stay. Then I guaranteed that nobody had died in that house. I was absolutely new to that kind of situation. But he took it seriously. I thought it was a joke but he was very serious. If I had told him that someone had died there, he wouldn’t have stayed in the house. That really surprised me, because I thought, at first, that he was making a kind of ironic comment. Not at all. His superstition about that kind of thing was very deep.

  MIGUEL FALQUEZ-CERTAIN: Pava leads to pathological extremes. When Alfonso Fuenmayor was dying, he didn’t go to see him, the friend who took bread out of his own mouth to give to him.

  QUIQUE SCOPELL: In my opinion, whoever dies is already fucked. That’s a phrase of Álvaro Cepeda’s: “The one who died was fucked.” Why remember anything else? My mother died, and you go to the ce
metery . . . What flowers or what shit! If she died, she died. What else are you going to bring?

  JUANCHO JINETE: Let’s say, when Álvaro Cepeda died in ’72, Julio Mario Santo Domingo wasn’t in Colombia but he came right away. He arrived one day before the funeral. Everybody came, the president of the republic and all of that. And Gabito said he couldn’t come back because he was in Bolivia (extending his arm, trying to get the waiter): Maestro . . .

  QUIQUE SCOPELL: The one who died, what does he care about flowers? Or cemeteries, or funerals, or the Day of the Dead . . . You have to give people whatever it is you want to give them while they’re alive, whatever you want, and not get all upset when they die.

  JUANCHO JINETE: Afterward, with what happened with Fuenmayor, who was talking to him a couple of days before he died, he also had an excuse for not coming to the funeral.

  GERALD MARTIN: Well, about Alfonso Fuenmayor, what I can tell you is that Gabo made no exceptions. You know what he says: “I don’t bury my friends.” He’s terrified of death and sickness. He didn’t go to any funeral. Not his mother’s or his brother Yiyo’s, the number-two writer in the family. The only important exception, curiously, was his father’s funeral. Strange, don’t you think?

  GUILLERMO ANGULO: I have a story for you. There’s a very good film director in Venezuela. Her name is Margot Benacerraf. Do you know who Margot Benacerraf is? Margot Benacerraf was a famous woman. She made only two films. The two films were very successful, and afterward, when you talk to Margot Benacerraf, she tells you: “I was in Antibes with Pablo.” Pablo is Pablo Picasso. “And then Henri took me dancing.” Henri is Cartier-Bresson. “And Pablo painted my thigh.”

  Then she decided one day that she wanted to make a movie about Gabo, and Gabo told her: “Look, there’s a short paragraph this small in One Hundred Years, which is the story of Innocent Eréndira. It can be made in La Guajira. It’s very nice.” “Ah yes, let’s do it!” So he wrote the script for her. Then she began to get the money. She went to Europe. She took me to Europe. At a certain moment Gabo and I arrived at one of the most elegant hotels. The hotel where Nixon stayed, which was the Grand Hotel in Rome. And so the reservation for Guillermo Angulo was fine. For Gabriel García Márquez, who wasn’t famous yet, not so famous (One Hundred Years had just come out) they hadn’t made a reservation, even though in Rome, in Italy, they really like him. So they said to him: “No, forgive us, but we’ll give you the Royal Suite. You can sleep there tonight and tomorrow we’ll find a room for you.” They take us to something full of brocade. A marvelous palace, and suddenly Gabo said: “Shit, maestro, Alfonso XIII died here.” “What shall we do?” “Let’s take a walk.” We walked the whole night through Rome. We saw everything. I was dead tired. “No, look, let’s go to the Fontana dell’Esedra.” We went to the Fountain dell’Esedra. “Let’s go to the Fontana di Trevi.” We went to the Fontana di Trevi. Damn!

  The next day . . . It was a very elegant hotel where you didn’t have to sign the bill. Gabo, when it was time to pay the bill, since you don’t sign, but they just ask you for your room number, Gabo says he was there, in that room where a king died. The desk clerk says: “Excuse me, señor, but five kings have died in this hotel!”

  23

  “Excuse Me, What’s Your Name?”s

  In which the hick is transformed into a slick sex symbol

  FERNANDO RESTREPO: Gabo bought an apartment near the Boulevard Montparnasse and he invites us to go there because he wants to see the possibility of our forming a company to make films with a friend of his, a French producer, and a Portuguese-speaking film director from Madagascar, an extremely nice man, in whom he had a great deal of confidence. I don’t know whether he had already done some things, I don’t think so, but he had made some attempts to produce a film with him. So he decides that we’ll form a company with Fernando Gómez and with me, with this friend, the Frenchman . . . I don’t remember his name . . .

  By the way, something very nice occurred. By now Gabo was Gabo, and we went to have lunch, to talk about business, to talk about the movie project, at the Closerie des Lilas on the Boulevard Montparnasse, up there, that place famous for its artists and so forth. The four of us were eating lunch and a very pretty girl, in a corner, was looking at him and looking and looking. He realized that she was looking at him. At a certain moment an employee of the restaurant or café comes over and says: “Are you Señor García Márquez?” “Yes, that’s right.” “Well, the girl who’s looking at you wants to know if it’s you, and if it is, she wants an autograph.” Then he takes out a piece of paper and Gabo says: “No, look. I don’t sign autographs on blank papers.” He took out a fifty-franc bill, I remember, and said: “Tell the girl to go and find a bookstore near here, the closest one she can find, and buy a book by García Márquez. When she buys it, I’ll be very happy to dedicate it to her.” And we continued chatting. In ten minutes the girl left the restaurant, went and bought a book by Gabo, and brought it over to him. The man signed it. “To . . . your name? What’s your name?” Just like that. Very bold, because knowing that in any bookstore near the Boulevard Montparnasse there would be books by Gabo was something pretty . . . Well, I don’t know how sure he was, but it made an impact. This is, for example, an incident about impressive confidence because, caramba, I don’t know how many authors can say: “Go to such-and-such bookstore, in Paris, and buy one of my books.” That happened. I saw it with my own eyes when the guy came over to talk to us. He dedicated the book to the girl and she, of course, was delighted.

  HÉCTOR ROJAS HERAZO: Once he went to Barranquilla and they took him to dance where there were some girls. And he changed his name. The thing had already begun: not the Nobel but before that, when he was beginning to have a name. So he was dancing with her and suddenly she says to him, when they finish dancing: “Listen, tell me something. What’s your name?” Gabo says: “Okay, I’m going to come clean with you. My name is Gabriel García Márquez. Why?” And she says: “Oh, because you’re a damn fine dancer!”

  ROSE STYRON: I love all the things he says about love, about being possessed by love. I asked him about Of Love and Other Demons and he said love is the demon that possesses you, that love is a personal disaster you can’t live without, that it starts out very purely, as I’m sure he sees his parents’ love or the first love of his life. But as one gets older society sort of confuses that, but love is still the moving force.

  I’ve always been fascinated by the young girls in his books, like Fermina, who was about fifteen years old, and then there’s that girl who is about twelve in Of Love and Other Demons. And how he associates with them, and sees that sort of purity of love. Then, as you know, in Love in the Time of Cholera he’s more interested in Florentino’s view of love, because he is always falling in love, again and again and again, searching for the pure love he had with Fermina. I’m very curious to see how he sees his mother and father’s love from a child’s point of view.

  JUAN CARLOS CREMATA: I took a film workshop with him in San Antonio de los Baños, the film school he started in Cuba, and he said that he feels more comfortable with women than with men. In the workshop he paid much more attention to the female students.

  ROSE STYRON: And, of course, he is so wonderful with women, not only the women in his books but the women in his real life. He is a man who loves women . . . It’s just a totally sensual and spiritual feeling. I don’t know how you sense it. It’s just the way he behaves with women, as if he loves and appreciates them, and understands them. And has a good time with them. He is so fun to be with . . . I’m expressing this as a woman. In his books, you know, women are pretty sensual and a lot of what he writes is seen through the eyes of female characters. It’s a man writing, but a man who you know understands and cares about women enough to put himself inside their heads. And I think that just as he gets inside the head of his male characters, he does the same with his female characters. And as I said: he treats dictators the same as lovers or killers or, you know, whoever i
t is . . . But the fact is that I’m a woman, and as such, it’s wonderful to be in his company.

  GUILLERMO ANGULO: La Gaba, that’s what we called Mercedes, a woman of incredible intelligence and serenity. That’s a woman. She’s much more intelligent. Gabo has more talent, no doubt about it. I mean, Gabo has the talent, but as for intelligence and strength, she’s the one who dominates. Not in the sense that Gabo wouldn’t have been a writer without Gaba, nothing like that, but she is a very, very strong support. So strong. More than maternal. She’s a fortress. She’s in command. She commands. No doubt about it.

  MARÍA LUISA ELÍO: The two of them have a very nice relationship. Besides, I never saw her looking upset because there was no money. Never. Or in a bad mood because he spent the whole day in that room. Never. Not once. Yes, I believe that one doesn’t do things by oneself. You have to be with someone.

  EMMANUEL CARBALLO: A woman in her house. I never spoke about literature with her. With Gabo, yes. I never spoke with his wife. Gabo would go alone to the meetings we had on Saturdays. No one accompanied him. Just the two of us.

  FERNANDO RESTREPO: Marvelous. An enchanting woman and she was really the one who organized everything. I have the feeling that she organized his daily life because he gave the impression that he wasn’t very ordered in his daily habits. She coordinated and straightened him out, let’s say, and so they have a very nice relationship, very nice, because I imagine it can’t be at all easy to live together in that way and to mix with all the people he was friendly with. But she managed very well and was very well liked by all of us. A very nice friendship between Elvira Carmen, my wife, and Mercedes. She was often here, and when she came here we saw each other, even if Gabo was absent.