Solitude & Company

by Silvana Paternostro

  MARÍA LUISA ELÍO: I can’t say he’s one of those people who gives himself entirely to another person. No. He can even be a little distant at times. You talk to him and you know you’re talking to someone very intelligent. And that’s very pleasant: talking to someone who’s very intelligent, isn’t it? You’re talking to someone exceptional and you know it. I knew he was someone very distinctive. The proof is that I left all the rest (it was a very select group) and stayed exclusively with him, listening to him. I think that’s why he said: “The book is yours,” because there was no motive. We barely knew each other. I always tell him: “Gabo makes me, I haven’t existed. I’m going to be an invention of yours. That’s what I’ll be. I’ll appear in encyclopedias tomorrow. María Luisa Elío, a character invented by García Márquez.”

  GUILLERMO ANGULO: Then I said to him: “Well, you’ve told me how you met la Pupa but not why you broke it off.” Because he sent her to me almost as a gift. He said: “No, some women are strange.” “But why?” I asked. And he: “No, well, you tell them things and they have their own way of understanding it . . .” “But you, what did you say to her?” And he says: “Pupa, you fuck so much, why haven’t you learned how?” La Pupa was famous among us for being the worst lay in the world. But no, it wasn’t her. We were the bad lays! One day she got a Tuscan and that man made her climb the walls, she shouted too, and that was some incredible fucking. So good and bad don’t exist. Two people who at a certain moment understand each other. There’s nothing else.

  KAREN PONIACHIK: This is the letter I wrote to Gabo:

  My dear Señor García Márquez:

  I feel embarrassed just asking to request an interview with you. I’m afraid I won’t impress you enough for you to be willing to receive me. Even worse, I’m even afraid that you’ll be willing to receive me because I wouldn’t know what questions to ask you. You intimidate me, señor. The only time I saw you, a couple of years ago when you came to New York to open a cycle of Latin American films, I didn’t even dare to greet you. It was you who approached me. I don’t believe you remember: I was dressed in green. It was the first time I wore something that color. Since I was a little girl, for some reason I still can’t explain, I had avoided green. The day before the launch, I found a very pretty dress on sale, and in spite of its being the forbidden color, I bought it. I’m in the habit of wearing a new outfit the day after I buy it, and so I put on the dress to go to the cocktail party at the Mexican Consulate. I felt tremendously uncomfortable, and for that reason I tried desperately to go unnoticed. I stood in a corner, far from the celebrities. You must have noticed my anguish because you approached, and citing someone I don’t know, you said something like: “The lady must be very certain of her beauty for green to flatter her.” That was all. You turned and left. Since then I no longer avoid green. Since then I’ve also reread your One Hundred Years of Solitude several times; I devoured your Strange Pilgrims and was in anguish over the one about the girl who only wanted to use the phone. I ought to confess that I broke off with a gringo I was dating because he told me he hadn’t liked your book. No, señor, I’m not going to write to request an interview. Furthermore, I don’t even want to interview you. Your books are enough. And the green dress, of course. I wear it each time I’m going to do an interview.

  GUILLERMO ANGULO: The saying is: “Whoever wears yellow is certain of her beauty.” There’s a story I’m going to tell you. It’s a story that happened to him and he had to give it away. Who did he give it to? Carlos Fuentes. Fuentes published it in a book called Blind Men’s Song because Gabo thought he’d be found out. He sees a very beautiful woman at a cocktail party and loses sight of her. He sees her again and loses sight of her again. Suddenly he realizes that the woman was noticing him. Then—Mexican women are outstanding; Mexicans and Brazilians—she goes up to him and says: “Would you like to have coffee with me?” He said he would. When they get into his car the woman says: “Shall we have the coffee before or afterward?” They go to a hotel and with such bad luck Gabo falls asleep. When he wakes it is already morning, the sun is already shining through the window. “And now what do I do?” he wonders. They leave the hotel, he drops her off and he’s left thinking what is he going to do and decides one thing that’s very important: one shouldn’t go home so late—or early, in this case—and not smell of drink. So he takes a beer, or half a beer, and spills it on himself so that the smell is very strong. He buys a peasant hat, takes the car, and drives it into a pole. He smashes up the car. When he arrives home, La Gaba is waiting for him. “I almost killed myself . . . I’ll tell you about it later.” He goes to sleep. And it was never discussed again.

  ODERAY GAME: We met at a film festival in Cartagena. I was dressed in white. So was he. He wore a white watch, white shoes. He didn’t detach himself from me for the entire festival. But always with Mercedes. I’m a girlfriend who has Mercedes’s blessing. In my case it was an adoption. I felt like a daughter. When I returned to Madrid they often called and told me: “We’re coming to your house to have some of the fish soup that Juanita makes.” They were fascinated by Juanita, my cook, worked wonders in the kitchen. And they would arrive and spend the evening with me. Or they’d call from Paris and tell me to go see them there: “Come see this film with us.” When I had to go back to Ecuador to live he gave me a hand. I would have wanted to stay in Europe but it was impossible. He called to ask how I was. And then Mercedes would get on the phone: “How are you, my dear? Go out, don’t be depressed.” He gave me an affectionate hand. I remember the first time he called Quito. My mother almost fainted. She answered the phone and since her voice is identical to mine, he began talking to her, thinking it was me, and my mother said: “Who is this?” “Gabriel García Márquez.” And so each time the phone rang and it was him, she would almost die. She would drop the cup, the tray, or whatever she had in her hand. “Honey, it’s García Márquez for you.” And so I was accompanied by him on my return. I haven’t known anyone who isn’t a relative, who isn’t in the family, who’s been more generous to me than Gabo.

  MARGARITA DE LA VEGA: He didn’t get along with his father because he was a bad husband, but the fact is that Gabo hasn’t been like an innocent boy at first communion. Mercedes has put up with a lot in terms of fidelity. That is, he has the traditional fidelity of the coast.

  GUILLERMO ANGULO: There’s a friend of ours who is Goytisolo, one of the Goytisolos, I don’t remember which one, who had a girlfriend in New York: he would write to his girlfriend and she would answer him. One day they decided that they would see each other, something very romantic, see each other in Manhattan, go to Staten Island and come back, all of that. So he goes on the trip and leaves all the letters in his locked desk. He tells his wife: “I have a meeting with an editor about publishing some things of mine in the United States, let’s see if the thing works out.” As soon as he catches the plane, his wife (all women with a pin, with a hairpin, can open any lock) opens that desk and sees all the letters. They’re telling the story to Gabo and Gabo says: “What an idiot to have left the letters there.” And Gaba says: “No, she’s the idiot for having opened the drawer.” So that demonstrates a little of Gaba’s philosophy: don’t open the drawer.

  24

  Persona Non Grata

  In which García Márquez becomes an enemy of the United States

  FERNANDO RESTREPO: He was very critical of the United States and the crisis with Cuba and all of that. He took a very radical position and for a long time they didn’t give him a visa to enter the United States. Now I think he has one, permanent and everything.

  ROSE STYRON: He was on that list for so many years . . . I organized the Committee for Free Expression at PEN, and we were trying to bring to the United States, for our own edification, various prominent writers whom the American government, especially the Nixon–Kissinger administration, considered dangerous leftists. And García Márquez, like Graham Greene—and Carlos Fuentes for a time—couldn’t enter the country. There were a lo
t of writers who couldn’t. And then suddenly, and very quietly, they let him come to New York. He wanted to go to Mississippi and pay homage to Faulkner, go to his house, and the first time he entered the country they didn’t allow him to. He had to wait. The whole business of their not letting him enter the country angered him and amused him at the same time. Fuentes came in every year because he taught at Pennsylvania and at Brown, and he spent several months at a time in various universities in the United States.

  But each time Fuentes had to request permission and each time he did they authorized him.

  If García Márquez made the request, he was turned down.

  JUANCHO JINETE: Everything we did here in Barranquilla, all the petitions we signed asking that they give him that visa. We were friends of those gringos from the consulate who went around with us here. Later we learned that some of them were even in the CIA.

  WILLIAM STYRON: The McCarran-Walter Act was a delicate subject with Gabo for a long time. This awful embargo on intellectuals like Gabo. A time in 1985 comes to mind, I recall. It’s a particularly memorable moment for me because it’s connected to the depression I suffered from and that I wrote about, and I remember I was flying from New York to Martha’s Vineyard. He called and said he would be at the house of a mutual friend, Tom Wicker, who at the time was still writing his column for the New York Times. He told me he was going to have a get-together at his house and I remember it was the beginning of that colossal depression. I remember flying to New York, going to the party, and being profoundly sick. Gabo’s extremely amusing comments on how he had managed to enter this time with the McCarran-Walter Act, which still prohibited his coming in, scarcely registered in my mind. I remember that he took it with a mixture of anger, good humor, and cynical acceptance.

  FERNANDO RESTREPO: At a certain moment he was invited to teach a class, a seminar, at Columbia University, and he was issued a special visa so that he could go. At that moment Fernando Gómez Agudelo and I were in Paris on some television business. We called Gabo and decided: “Let’s go to New York.”

  WILLIAM STYRON: We shared recollections of his love for New York, and what I want to say is that he came and went very quickly because of the immigration problem. The time they allowed him to spend in this country was limited. But I think that one of the many things that acted as a catalyst for our friendship, though it would have existed all the same without it, was the war in Nicaragua at the beginning of the eighties. The war was a delicate subject, almost a painful one, for him and for me. Later I went with Carlos Fuentes to Managua, at the most heated point in the war, because it was a cause of great sorrow for many people in this country, myself included. And then there was the fact of his friendship with Castro, which has always been an uncomfortable subject. Many Latin American intellectuals have been concerned, of course, about his relationship with Castro.

  PLINIO APULEYO MENDOZA: Fidel is a myth from the confines of his recovered childhood, a new representation of Aureliano Buendía. If anyone’s looking for a key to his Castroite fever, here it is in eighteen carats.

  FERNANDO RESTREPO: Gómez Agudelo and I decided to take the Concorde, since they had recently initiated the supersonic flights of the Concorde. We told Gabo we were traveling on the Concorde, and Gabo says: “I’ll meet you at the airport.” When we landed, there he was, and Gabo asks: “Well, and how’s the Concorde?” Fernando says: “A fast-as-shit DC-3.” Gabo wrote that description in one of his columns.

  CARMELO MARTÍNEZ: His father, a Conservative, and him, a communist. With the money he has he can’t be a communist. He has a lot of money.

  BRAM TOWBIN: The scene is the 1982 Cannes Film Festival. I was ensconsed aboard the Sumurun, the most beautiful sailboat in the harbor that year, which belonged to my father. I was spending my spring vacation from Dartmouth in Europe. I was on deck alone while the crew and a good number of cosmopolitan European and American guests were down below. A South American gentleman in his forties appeared on the dock and came up the gangplank. He behaved with determination and authority, but with a low profile. I didn’t think he was an intruder, but rather one of those minor actors. When he came on board he asked for one of the guests, saying only her first name, Albina. I told him in English that she was busy but would soon be up and invited him to the table, in the middle of the ship, which was set to receive guests. We sat there.

  In my defense for what I’m going to relate, I should make it clear that at this time Gabriel García Márquez wasn’t the recognized name that it is today for most people in the United States. Our dialogue begins here. He claimed not to know English. I don’t know Spanish. We decided on French, which I speak very badly. Taciturn and obviously unimpressed by my qualities as a host, he put me in a bad humor and I imagined him acting, reciting the usual phrases, but he was our guest and I rushed to show him the marvelous benevolence and good manners of the ultra-privileged gringo college student. It may be that we don’t have the panache of the French or that old-world overconfidence of the English, but we do have our strong points:

  I: Where were you born?

  He: In Colombia.

  I: Is it nice in Colombia?

  He: Yes.

  (Uncomfortable silence)

  I: Do you want something to drink?

  He: No.

  (Uncomfortable silence)

  I: The chef is preparing cheeses and bread. They’re terrific. Do you want cheese and bread? It’s delicious.

  He: No, thank you.

  (Uncomfortable silence)

  I: Do you have a film in the festival?

  He: No.

  I: I heard that Annie Hall and E.T. are super fine . . . but to each his own.

  (Uncomfortable silence)

  I: It’s a nice day . . . a very nice climate . . . a little hot but much better than in New York. I live in New York.

  He: Yes.

  I: Have you liked any of the films they’ve shown this year here in Cannes?

  He: Missing.

  I: I haven’t seen that one yet.

  (Uncomfortable silence)

  I: I didn’t like Annie Hall at all. It’s pretty stupid. Really.

  At this point people began to come up. I realized immediately that he was no second-rate actor. For all these people adulation is as sinful as wearing velour, but there they all were, fairly servile and tittering like embarrassed children. Who the devil was this guy? Well, then, for the next few days I didn’t do anything but hear them all preach to me about One Hundred Years of Solitude . . . And I said to myself what the hell, another writer. I return to the United States and it seemed as if the whole country was reading that novel, and I begin to realize its significance. In a few months, he’s awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Wherever I go I hear everybody talking about García Márquez. And I’m silent. I return to my university and decide to take a course on William Faulkner. The first day of class, the professor, very well versed in the subject matter, who had spent years teaching Faulkner, begins: “This year the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the great Gabriel García Márquez. Of all our contemporary authors, he is one of those who share with William Faulkner the sense of place. I want all of you to know that at this moment this formidable talent is not allowed to visit the United States thanks to our antiquated immigration laws. This is an embarrassment. What I wouldn’t do to spend a few minutes with this man.” I didn’t raise my hand.

  25

  Something New

  In which we come to understand why he writes The Autumn of the Patriarch

  SANTIAGO MUTIS: The other Gabo appears. Lots of luminaries. Lots of things.

  RAFAEL ULLOA: They praised him to the skies when he wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude . . . All the world’s press. So the venom of pride grew in him and made him get involved in that Autumn of the Patriarch. He wrote it as if he wanted to write something better than One Hundred Years of Solitude, but since the man wasn’t sober but emotionally in the clouds . . .

  MIGUEL FALQUEZ-CERTAIN: H
e said that after he became famous with One Hundred Years of Solitude, in ’67, he fought with that novel and didn’t write anything; he couldn’t write anything. He talked about dismantling his style. You can quote me because I remember it as if it were yesterday: “I have to dismantle my style.” That means that he had to destroy it. Return to the beginning and find a new style for writing a new novel. Not keep doing the same thing; I’m saying that, he didn’t say it. Like in painting: for me, I don’t like a painter who repeats his painting because he doesn’t look for other alternatives, like Picasso did. Picasso tried everything and not everything he did was good. Gabo wanted to dismantle his style, and he spent seven years in the process. And then he decides to write this novel that is The Autumn of the Patriarch. Really I admire him because he wants to do something new. Probably he’s reading Joyce and Woolf, the great stylists and modernists in the twentieth century, to write a new novel. And what happens is that the critics destroy it. But in my opinion it’s one of García Márquez’s most valid efforts.

  GUILLERMO ANGULO: That’s one of the most beautiful things there is . . . And there’s a very curious thing: even critics have said that it has no punctuation, but it has all the punctuation in the world. The only thing it doesn’t have is separation of chapters, so some people feel as if they’re drowning.

  HÉCTOR ROJAS HERAZO: The thing is that The Autumn of the Patriarch was against the dictator of Venezuela, who was Juan Vicente Gómez. The dictator Gómez. He spoke in general about the dictator. But, of course, he had triumphed with One Hundred Years until he had become a myth. That’s why he had enemies in Spain. Then he thinks that he has to write a novel against One Hundred Years and so he writes Autumn. His detractors say: “Let’s read it first to see what happens.” Then they were impressed because García Márquez’s best novel is The Autumn of the Patriarch. Something very typical of him. There were even people who said: “It isn’t the autumn of the patriarch, it’s the autumn of García Márquez.”