Solitude & Company

by Silvana Paternostro

  WILLIAM STYRON: I think that every writer who has created a work that in the eyes of the world is his most distinctive wishes that the world would focus on his other work too. I think it distracts from the other works and it isn’t fair to the rest of his work to have all this attention lavished upon one book. So that is probably the reason—or one of the reasons—that he has these reservations regarding One Hundred Years.

  JOSÉ SALGAR: He has the journalistic sixth sense to know where the public’s interest lies, their literary interest. He knows what the public that reads him expects. That’s why he attempted to write something strange, just as James Joyce wrote, without periods or things like that. That’s how he wrote The Autumn.

  HÉCTOR ROJAS HERAZO: A great novel from the technical point of view. I love it. He handles the narration, he especially has a great ability to capture an entrance. He grabs the reader. I used an example the other day. For example: “The world woke up sad on Tuesday.” Then you become interested. What happened? It’s a way of entering. Well. I don’t remember in which novel. The great novel for me is The Autumn. As a novel, as a technique, because it’s handled extraordinarily well. How would the technical handling of the novel be that treats this man with a tenderness that makes one, at the end, let’s say, sad because of the passing of the leader. Of course, every authentic narrator has great tenderness. Just look at the tenderness of the girl falling asleep and talking to her grandmother. Innocent Eréndira is extraordinary. The character who rides the bicycle. Everything, everything.

  RAFAEL ULLOA: The Autumn is a brick because it’s a runaway horse without periods or commas. Papapapapapapapa. Then you get bored. The fact is that the manner of writing that, I don’t know, it’s like a terrible pain, it’s like a . . . It’s a strange way of narrating, but, of course, here he’s recounting the excesses of dictators. But in any case one doesn’t know, one hasn’t lived that . . . As I told you, I read that book in parts, but not . . . The style is different. He wanted to write an extraordinary work. You know that fame makes people crazy.

  GUILLERMO ANGULO: At a certain moment Gabo threw himself to the floor in desperation, in Barcelona, because he couldn’t find the ending for The Autumn of the Patriarch.

  GREGORY RABASSA: I knew a doctor on Long Island who was from Barranquilla and a friend of Gabo’s. I’d call him occasionally to ask him about the meaning of a word. I forget his name. A nice guy. Translating The Autumn of the Patriarch was more difficult because it’s more savage and there’s something untamed in the language. But what an entertaining book.

  When The New Yorker was going to publish an excerpt from the book they told me they didn’t print the word “shit.” I told them that if they took out that word, it would be better not to publish anything. Because that word is the whole story. Now it’s used more in English, but not so much earlier. I remember I lived in the Village, and in the world of jazz they liked the word because it had so many connotations. Some of them positive. You would hear them playing and you would hear them say: Man, that riff is shit. That word was the spirit of the spirit. The word was in the spirit, in the Village of Fourth Street. I had a friend who made jewelry and worked in silver. We would sit and talk and one day a black man came in the door and we heard him say shiiiit. And my friend Bob says: “There goes the zeitgeist.” At the end, The New Yorker came around and it was the first time they published the word shit.

  FERNANDO RESTREPO: When he wrote The Autumn of the Patriarch . . . As I said, one of the connections with him was music. He enjoyed music a great deal, from vallenatos and ranchera music to classical music. And I took part in that because I’m also a melomaniac. So there were always conversations around the subject of music. For example, he thought Bruckner was boring. He didn’t listen to Bruckner because it bored him . . . Then one day we sat down to talk about his two fundamental works, which are One Hundred Years and The Autumn of the Patriarch, and he himself created a very nice simile that says: “Look, One Hundred Years of Solitude is the Ninth Symphony and The Autumn of the Patriarch is the Fourteenth Quartet,” which was a quartet we all loved and that, according to the melomaniacs, is the most profound quartet Beethoven wrote.

  26

  “Shit, He Died”

  In which Gabriel García Márquez wins the Nobel Prize in Literature, 1982

  GUILLERMO ANGULO: Gabo invited Fernando Gómez Agudelo and me to a party, and we went from Bogotá to Mexico City via New York. We were in a cab in New York when they announced that the Nobel Prize in Literature had gone to Gabriel García Márquez. We didn’t hear it clearly, did we? We didn’t believe . . . That wasn’t in the range of the possible. Then we changed the station and they confirmed it.

  FERNANDO RESTREPO: Do you know the story about Alejandro Obregón, when he went to restore a painting of his in Gabo’s house in Mexico City? Well, in Gabo’s house we saw the famous painting, which is by Blas de Lezo, the Stubborn Man*. The story is that one day he goes to Alejandro’s house in Cartagena, and after a few rums, I don’t know why, at a certain moment (I heard this personally from Gabo when he showed us the painting in his house in Mexico City) he takes out the rolled-up canvas and it’s of Blas de Lezo, “Cool Dude,” with a hole from a bullet that he [Alejandro] shot in his eye. And he says that it was because his children began to fight over the painting, disputing who owned the canvas, and in a fury he shot out the good eye in the painting. I believe Alejandro had a certain obsession with blindness; I think his father had a vision problem. At a certain moment he says to him: “I don’t want that damn painting. It’s for you.” And he raises his hand, like this, “For Gabo,” and he gives it to him. Gabo leaves very happily with his painting. And he has it the whole time. Obregón promised to restore it for him, but he never did. And one fine day Alejandro goes to Mexico City.

  JUANCHO JINETE: There’s a good story. I don’t know whether you’ve heard it. When Maestro Obregón was at the filming of the picture Quemada in Cartagena, this man who was Marlon Brando wasn’t going around with anybody. You know those guys are strange, and he saw Maestro Obregón in some scenes. He came out on a horse. He was a nobleman with his sideburns. Then he met the maestro and they became friends. Afterward Marlon Brando would go every day to the maestro’s house to drink white rum. What was the name of that rum? Tres Esquinas.

  The filming continued in Morocco, and when he was on his way back, Gabito told him to stop in Mexico City. He was coming by way of London, and he made all the connections and arrived in Mexico City. So the address he had for the house where he lived, where the rich people lived, the movie stars in Mexico City . . . Well, long story short, a house he had. So the maestro took a taxi, arrived there, and saw the terrace of the house filled with flowers and things. He arrived and said: “Damn, he died.” Those flowers were the ones used for tributes. That’s a good story. And when he arrived here in Barranquilla, that was the first thing he told me: “Juancho, listen to what happened to me. When I’m ready to get out I see all these flowers and think he died. ‘Shit, he died.’” It was the day they had given him the Nobel Prize.

  GUILLERMO ANGULO: When we arrived, well, the party was in full swing, and we wondered (Gabo always denied it) whether he had known earlier. Yes, he invited us to a party, but his insistence was far bigger than an invitation to a regular party. It did seem as if he had known.

  MARÍA LUISA ELÍO: I find out because friends call me from Spain saying they had heard the news. They call me from Spain at about four in the morning here. Then I put on pants and a sweater and I rush out to his house. When I get there Mercedes has all the phones off the hook; she’s talking. “Here comes the woman One Hundred Years of Solitude is dedicated to. Talk to her.” She’s holding the telephone so that we can hear what they’re saying. On a big sign on the door of their house, here in Pedregal, they had written in yellow: CONGRATULATIONS, GABO. His eyes were shining.

  García Márquez greeting a cumbia dancer in Stockholm.

  * Blas de Lezo, the “Cool Dude,” is a folk f
igure in the Caribbean Coast. A Spanish admiral during colonial days, he is known for his victory in the Battle of Cartagena de Indias in 1741 when Colombia was part of the Spanish Viceroy and for all his missing body parts. He arrived in Cartagena having already lost his left eye, his left leg, and use of his right arm and is known as Half-Man. Alejandro Obregón loved Blas de Lezo’s heroism and loved to exaggerate when recounting his version of the one-eyed admiral’s resistance to the siege commanded by British admiral Edward Vernon. “Because of him,” a Colombian saying goes, “we don’t speak English.” When Obregón painted his portrait, he wrote in the left-hand bottom corner: “Blas, the cool dude of Lezo, half a gaze and half a hug, seven balls and seven seas bringing victories and gangrene. A bullet hole for history and a silence made of copper for Blas de Lezo.”

  27

  “I Don’t Want to Be in Stockholm by Myself”

  In which the entire nation travels to the Nobel celebration

  GUILLERMO ANGULO: [The then president] Belisario Betancur told him: “Make a list of your eleven closest friends so that they go with you to Sweden,” and he said: “No, then numbers twelve and up are going to hate me. So I won’t do that.” Then I said: “Mr. President, it is up to you to do it,” and he said: “I won’t do it either. You take care of it.” And I did. I chose the ones I thought were Gabo’s best friends and we took them, at the government’s expense.

  GLORIA TRIANA: I was the one who coordinated the delegation of musicians who traveled to the celebration of the prize. The idea came from Gabo, though he surely said it not thinking they would do it but just as a way of expressing himself. “I don’t want to be in Stockholm by myself. I’d like to have cumbias and vallenatos with me,” was what he said. I went immediately to the director of Culture, what’s called the Ministry of Culture today, and I said to her: “If he says he wants this, then let’s organize it.” The boss, Consuelo Araujo Noguera, chooses the vallenatos and the rejection begins; our ambassador in Sweden thought it was terrible that we were going to do that. That was playing the fool, acting like an imbecile. There’s an article by a Colombian reporter, D’Artagnan, who’s dead now, called “An Act of Silly Tackiness.” He used the Bogotan popular slang, “hacer el oso,” which means to do something embarrassingly tacky, uncouth. So that was the attitude of people except for Daniel Samper, who defended the idea.

  NEREO LÓPEZ: The director of Colcultura, Aura Lucía Mera (we called her la Mera) tells me to go as the photographer for the delegation. And so we went. And so we got there. Certainly very late. We left Colombia at about five. One hundred and fifty people in the delegation. Folkloric groups. La Negra Grande. Totó la Momposina. A group from Barranquilla. A group from Valledupar. Special guests went by another route. It was in December ’82 that we went.

  RAFAEL ULLOA: The old man, Gabriel Eligio, Gabito’s father, loves to talk. In Cartagena he always went to the park to talk to people and there they congratulated him. But more than anything he was a simple man. He’s not like Gabito. Gabito threw a dimwitted party with that Nobel Prize thing, taking even vallenatos groups there with him. Well, they were extravagant with strange things.

  QUIQUE SCOPELL: It was a few people. They suggested I go but I said: “No sir, I’m not spending all that money, what did you think!” Alfonso went. And Germán went.

  JUANCHO JINETE: Álvaro had already died.

  NEREO LÓPEZ: In any case we reached Stockholm at dawn. It was so cold!

  QUIQUE SCOPELL: They brought along some vallenatos. The ones who wrote those songs about yellow butterflies, lying vallenatos, lies to sing there.

  NEREO LÓPEZ: They told the vallenatos that Swedish women were very loose and so the men were ready to devour all the Swedish women they ran into, and on the third day one of the men says: “They haven’t called us yet.” So that night we went out. Seeing that the mountain didn’t come to us, we went to the mountain. To some damn striptease! Striptease for nuns. There was more covered up, a little bit of nipple uncovered, and that was it. Then the vallenatos said: “No more of this!” We were there for something like two weeks.

  After two or three days the folkloric groups rebelled because they took us to eat in a typical Swedish restaurant. That is, food full of fat for the cold. Codfish. And these people used to yucca, plantains . . . they didn’t like it. So they rebelled. A real rebellion. So much so that they had to give in to them. “What do you want?” [they asked them]. They said: “No, we want the money for food.” So they gave them the money. Then they ate hamburgers . . . I was with them and we were living on a boat. It was nicely fixed up and cheaper, because the special guests were staying in a first-class hotel.

  PLINIO APULEYO MENDOZA: I see the Grand Hotel, its huge façade with flags waving up high. I see corridors carpeted in purple: a suite as big as a royal chamber, its high windows looking out on the Nordic night. I see thin slices of smoked salmon and disks of lemon on a tray, bottles of champagne chilling in a metal bucket, and beautiful, large, fresh roses; yellow roses exploding on every table above porcelain vases. In the middle of the salon I see Gabo and Mercedes, calm, unconcerned, talking, completely removed from the coronation ceremony that’s approaching, as if they were still in Sucre or Magangué on a Saturday afternoon thirty years earlier, in the house of Aunt Petra or Aunt Juana.

  GLORIA TRIANA: As an official I had an allowance for staying in the Grand Hotel, where everybody was, but I was responsible for sixty-two people. I had to pay attention to all those Colombians who had been against it and report on our foolishness.

  NEREO LÓPEZ: They asked me where I wanted to stay and I was interested in being with the folkloric delegation. My roommate was the doctor. So the doctor told me that one night a girl from Barranquilla came up to him and says: “Listen, Doctor, now when we get to Barranquilla you’ll give me a laxative so I can get rid of all this junk I’ve eaten here.” And a man from the plains comes and says to me:

  “Don Nereo, you up there . . . I don’t know. I want to go back.”

  “Go back? Do you know where you are?”

  “No, I’m going no matter what.”

  “The plane took twenty-four hours to get here. Look. Remember that the plane left Bogotá at five in the afternoon and we arrived here at two in the morning. Look at how far we’ve traveled. And we got here at two in the morning. That means eight in the morning in Colombia. Why do you want to go?”

  “No, it’s just that I have a problem. And I want you to resolve it for me and talk to Doña Aura Lucía.”

  “And what’s the problem?”

  “No, it’s a men’s problem. Well, I go out to urinate and I don’t find my willie.”

  “Well, and where do you go to urinate?”

  “No, I go to the deck.”

  Of course, the deck with one or two inches of snow.

  “Find the bathroom, that’s why it’s hiding from you,” I tell him. “And what’s the problem? That happens in the cold.”

  “No, it’s that . . . How will I go back to my country if I have . . . three wives there. How do I respond to them?”

  “No, man, for God’s sake, the very idea. No. Look, there’s a bathroom down here.”

  “No, but I’ve taken off all those layers of clothing and I don’t know where they are.”

  Then I had to take him to the bathroom. He wanted to go back! Another case I remember was in that restaurant. Just imagine, winter, heavy food. Suddenly the woman at the counter screams. A scream. Nobody understood. The only thing we understood was the scream. Well Rafael Escalona was going to take a glass of what apparently was fruit juice and it was what they put on salad. The dressing. In a glass. Escalona thought it was juice. First, the harm it could have done him, and then . . . he’d ruin the salad we were all going to eat! Then Escalona said: “What happened?” Somebody said to him: “Don’t you see that you’re drinking the salad dressing?” Aracataca came to the world! They were expecting the Nobel Prize winner but they weren’t expecting a show. The entire nation arrive
d. They didn’t know where to put the show.

  GUILLERMO ANGULO: One of the two Nobel speeches wasn’t written by him but by Álvaro Mutis. He wrote the official speech, but the other one, which might be something about poetry—I can’t really remember—Mutis wrote because the moment arrived and there was no time. Gabo told him “You write it.” Yes. The man sat down and wrote it. Afterward he told the story. I knew that as a secret and I didn’t tell anybody until I saw that Gabo told it one day.

  PLINIO APULEYO MENDOZA: In Suite 208 of the Grand Hotel there’s an atmosphere of great preparations . . . It’s three in the afternoon, but the cold night of the Swedish winter, peppered with the lights of the city, colors the windows black . . . A photographer has come exclusively to take the picture of Gabo with his friends. And it’s at that moment that Mercedes remembers the yellow flowers. When she begins to put them in our lapels. “Let’s see, compadre.”

  I know the secret reason for that ritual. Gabo and Mercedes believe, as I do, in what is called pava, what I explained earlier . . . There are adornments, behaviors, individuals, articles of clothing that are not worn for this reason, kind of superstitious reasons. Tails, for example. That’s why Gabo decided to wear a liquiliqui at the ceremony, a traditional suit in Venezuela, and in another time, throughout the Caribbean . . .

  And now Gabo’s friends, who came to Stockholm to have a photograph taken with him minutes before he receives the prize, have arranged ourselves, our backs to the high windows. Mercedes officiates at this rite too. “Alfonso and Germán beside Gabo,” she has said, referring to Alfonso Fuenmayor and Germán Vargas, her husband’s oldest friends.