Solitude & Company

by Silvana Paternostro

  GLORIA TRIANA: He was wearing a liquiliqui and not tails. He was the one who gave the most poetic and beautiful speech heard at the Nobel prizes: “The Solitude of Latin America.” He was the one who had a banquet party in the Royal Palace accompanied by all the musicians.

  NEREO LÓPEZ: The banquet was where that presentation took place. The nice thing about the dance at the banquet is that with so many people, the chief of protocol was worried. Naturally permissions were required, but the guy who organized all of it dedicated himself to having a good time. He picked up a sailor somewhere. He enjoyed his sailor and forgot about the rest of the world. He didn’t look at my credentials. Then I had to disguise myself as a dancer to go up onstage. And the detectives saw. What kind of dancer is this who goes around with a camera hanging around his neck! The day of the banquet. The presentation of the prize was in the morning and the banquet was at night. The show we had prepared was two hours long. And then the guy said: “Come here, this isn’t on the program. You can’t do this.” Another one said: “You can’t place that cable. Because the King (they’re like gods), the King can’t see the cable.” The King can’t see . . . And on and on: the King and the Queen this, the King and the Queen that, like gods. And the spectacle can’t last more than fifteen minutes.

  When they come down those steps with the drums thundering . . . What an emotional thing! But really emotional! The spectacle they had given fifteen minutes to lasted forty-five. Because these guys applauded like madmen, like madmen. Very emotional. Very emotional. So much so that the guy who had put pressure on us said: “This isn’t programmed either but the King has ordered us to invite you to lunch and have the palace cook hurry up and prepare lunch for one hundred and fifty people. So please excuse us.” They gave us a meal and these guys are begging our pardon. They gave us a lunch much better than anything we could dream, of course, but for them no, they were apologizing for its simplicity. But the King, the King had them attend to us. That was very emotional. Very emotional.

  MARÍA LUISA ELÍO: When they give him the Nobel I’m in my house. My son Diego is in their house with their son Rodrigo. They’re watching television, they’re seeing the Nobel. I’m in my house talking to them on the phone, my son Diego and his son Rodrigo and I are watching at home in Mexico City. I was crying like a hysteric.

  GLORIA TRIANA: The next day the most important paper in Sweden had a four-column headline: GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ’S FRIENDS SHOW US HOW TO CELEBRATE A NOBEL.

  NEREO LÓPEZ: Rafa [Escalona] was with us. Gabito couldn’t get out of the celebration. He was a prisoner of the moment. He went to all the dance presentations the delegation was doing but they were part of his organized agenda. When we were having a short party, he joined in for a while. We couldn’t really party with him. I bumped into him, for example, in the cumbia. “What happened? What’s up?” and he took me by the chin. “This goatee? How long have you had a goatee?” I haven’t seen him since.

  GLORIA TRIANA: The next day all of the international press went to the ship except the Colombians. D’Artagnan, who had been so critical, did a very noble thing. He wrote an editorial saying it was a success, that it had to be acknowledged that it had been a success and we had moved the icy inhabitants of Sweden.

  RAFAEL ULLOA: They were really proud. You can say whatever you want, but even when Gabito isn’t part of your family like in my case, he has roots in your family, everybody knows that Gabito is a cool dude. That imagination of his . . . not just anybody has that. Suddenly I believe what the old man there says: that he has two brains . . . So when they gave him the Nobel Prize I wrote an article with the information I had. I sent it to El Espectador. They published it on October 10, 1982, and the next day El Heraldo published it. Someone faxed it to Gabito. And he said to me: “Send me something else.” I like to tell stories about towns. There’s a lady who was a secretary where I work. She knows I’m related to García Márquez and told me: “You inherited that thing from Gabito because those stories are Gabito’s.”

  GLORIA TRIANA: That year the Nobel was thirty-one years old, and nothing like our ceremony has happened since, and I’m still tracking it down. There have been African writers, writers from the Caribbean, a Chinese writer, and nothing like the way we did it has happened again.

  HÉCTOR ROJAS HERAZO: When he won the Nobel, we were in Spain. The ambassador, who was a novelist too, invited us. The Colombian ambassador invited us in order to greet him. Gabo, who’s smiling a lot, laughed at everything. Then I arrive, very happy, and we gave each other a big hug.

  Carlos Fuentes, William Styron, and García Márquez in the US.

  28

  Ex Cathedra

  In which García Márquez confronts fame

  MARÍA LUISA ELÍO: I don’t know how it is in Colombia, but here in Mexico it’s amazing. Women throw themselves at him on the street to kiss him. As if he were Robert Redford.

  QUIQUE SCOPELL: What do you call that thing when the Pope doesn’t make a mistake? Extreme unction. What is it? Ex cathedra. When the Pope speaks ex cathedra. He can be wrong when he speaks but not when it’s ex cathedra. That’s how it is here: Gabito said so, and that’s it. First with that book, which, if you ask me, is bad, and then with the Nobel. Shall I tell you the truth? I don’t understand it, because it’s a bad novel. A bad, folkloric novel. Because you say, for example: Romeo and Juliet is a love story, but One Hundred Years of Solitude is . . . I don’t understand how the hell they can translate that thing into Russian to tell the Russians that yellow butterflies jerk off. How do you translate that into Russian? Now everything’s whatever Gabito says and that’s it. So after the Nobel, everything began to change. Life is divided into Gabo before the Nobel and Gabo after the Nobel.

  CARMEN BALCELLS: The Nobel didn’t change him at all.

  WILLIAM STYRON: I’d put it this way, in a rather perverse negative way. I’d say this: the extraordinary influence and affection and power that he enjoys because of his talent, that gives him such an appeal to Latin Americans, is something that could not exist here in the United States. The admiration that exists in Latin America for a great writer like Gabo has no parallel here. Because we live in a country that has very little regard for its writers. Most writers are marginalized in this country. Even the best ones. To a degree that’s inconceivable. I think that Gabo could not have existed in an Anglo-Saxon world. We have no real tradition. It’s not that writers aren’t respected in some way in this country. They are. But not to the degree of not only being respected, but venerated.

  EDUARDO MÁRCELES DACONTE: Now you’ll see: I met García Márquez in Cuba. I met him in Havana. I was invited by Casa de las Américas to take part in a conference, and Gabo was one of its organizers. For Latin American sovereignty and policy. That was in ’81. So the day after I arrive in Havana, I come down in the elevator in the Hotel La Habana Riviera and see Gabo talking to the receptionist. Gabo in a gas-station attendant’s coverall, and sandals, the newspaper under his arm, talking to the receptionist. I see him and say: “What’s up, Gabo?” First time I saw him in person, but as soon as I saw him, imagine. “My name is Eduardo Márceles” and I emphasized the Daconte. Then he says to me “Damn! Then whose son are you?” I tell him Imperia’s. “Damn! Another Aracataquero here in Havana. Now the thing is really fucked up . . . Somebody else from Aracataca here in Havana. No, no, no. This is really fucked up. Let’s sit down over there, we have a lot to talk about, damn!” Listen, he begins to tell me things. One of the first anecdotes I remember is that he says to me: “Imagine, caramba, Antonio Daconte, how well I remember your grandfather. Imagine: when I was writing One Hundred Years of Solitude, the Italian who appears there is your grandfather. His name was Antonio Daconte, that’s what the Italian’s name was. I wrote him thinking of your grandfather, but as I wrote the character was becoming effeminate.” Then he says that the character was turning into a fag because of circumstances of the plot and so forth. And then he says: “I had to go through the whole manuscript and erase A
ntonio Daconte and write in Pietro Crespi, who was a piano tuner my mother had known in Barranquilla. She had told me there was a piano tuner who passed through there, and he was a very beautiful man, and I don’t know what else.” So the two ideas stayed with him. On the one hand my grandfather, and on the other the Italian piano tuner who had passed through Barranquilla. He says: “I started to think and said to myself that your uncle Galileo Daconte, when he read the novel, would have a heart attack, you know, because, well, your uncle (all the Dacontes) seeing a character like that, an effeminate man . . .” And we talked about Aracataca and I don’t know what else and people he knew. And we talked as two people do who are recalling the same town. “Listen, and the so-and-so family, what happened to them? And what happened to such-and-such, to your uncle? What happened about the other thing?” We talked about town things, about what he remembered. Then I say to him: “And so, it seems you’ve used my family’s name in some of your stories.” He says: “Damn! You’re going to ask me for millions of dollars.” I tell him: “No, no, take it easy . . .”

  HÉCTOR ROJAS HERAZO: So the thing had already begun when the Nobel business came along. Colombia eats it up. You can’t say anything that doesn’t have to do with Gabito. So the thing is here and the thing is there. I mean, the country became distorted. What that famous man [the poet Porfirio Barba-Jacob] from Cali said, that it’s “a garage with an archbishop.” That’s what Colombia is.

  MARGARITA DE LA VEGA: When he won the Nobel, Mercedes got her revenge on Cartagena. Everybody wanted Gabo to invite them to the house and she didn’t invite them or go to the parties of people who had treated them badly before. They had rejected Mercedes much more because she was from a town that was much closer and because women are women, right? In certain circles they were snubbed, and in other circles, not. Never by the men, but by the women. And Mercedes was pretty, but she was different, too. She had lived in Mexico and in Europe. More sophisticated in a certain sense, and in a certain sense not. Do you understand what I’m saying? She belonged to that class that has no class, you see, that isn’t marked by its social class. I believe it’s one of the advantages one can have in life.

  SANTIAGO MUTIS: I believe that the people who left Colombia don’t return because they can’t. Because there’s a dimension so large that it’s as if they don’t fit. Because it isn’t possible. But I think that the nostalgia of someone who has been isolated from his childhood, well, it’s like that, it’s like not having access. As if the crowd doesn’t allow him to return to his former life. So then they became big. And then they no longer fit in anywhere.

  JOSÉ SALGAR: With Gabo what happens is that it’s wonderful to sit down and chat. Ask. Tell. He listens. So I say to him: “Listen, why do you say it that way?” At a get-together a curious thing happened. My son was little and very excited because Gabo was coming to the house. And he said: “I’m going to put a tape recorder under a chair and record everything Gabo says.” That was clever. He recorded him. Then, when it was over, I said to Gabo: “I’ll be frank with you. The little devil recorded this. Let’s see if we can do something with it. Let’s see if there are some things worth saving and we’ll publish them.”

  HÉCTOR ROJAS HERAZO: They don’t let him live. He even had to go around with a bodyguard. He feared for his life.

  JOSÉ SALGAR: “In fact we have to get rid of many things in Castilian,” Gabo said. “Like what?” “The H. We have to get rid of the H.” We talked about that during one of those long meetings in my house. Osuna was there, Argos, Mercedes. Then we started to talk about how the Gabo phenomenon might even change the Spanish language itself.

  MARGARITA DE LA VEGA: After the Nobel he keeps living in Cartagena, in an apartment, for a long time. I remember having gone in ’83, ’84, when they celebrated Cartagena’s four hundred and fiftieth anniversary. He lives there and they celebrated him so much . . . I remember pulling his leg and telling him he had turned into an oracle in Colombia, they would call to ask him if it was going to rain, and who was going to be elected beauty queen. And I tell him: “What are you going to do?” And he said: “No, I still write every morning, four or five hours, and I’m writing the novel about Cartagena,” which is Love in the Time of Cholera. And it’s very inspired, of course, by Balzac, and I believe, up to a certain point, that this is a personal contribution of mine, that my father’s love of Balzac played a part.

  JOSÉ SALGAR: It seems to me that this business of fame is very strange. Gabo loves it, of course, when people recognize him and tell him so.

  ROSE STYRON: Yes, he’s spoken to me about how fame brought great responsibility, and how each time he sits down in front of paper and writes, he has to be very careful because he’s writing for the people out there. And, of course, when he speaks the same thing happens. Because when we were in Cartagena, I think it was at the end of the nineties, he was more famous and was pursued more than the stars who were there for the film festival. And there were always reporters hanging on to his every word . . . I think it’s a terrible burden. In ’74, ’75, it wasn’t like that. I mean, he has always been light-hearted and he is very funny, but he had more freedom to speak out and be an activist. And, you know, to curse Pinochet. He said he would never write another word of fiction until Pinochet was defeated and left Chile. He could make wilder statements back then probably than he would now. Now he’s still very political and very effective and very much an activist, but he does it in a quieter way. Certainly, if not more cautious, he is more thoughtful and circumspect.

  ODERAY GAME: I was living in Madrid. He’d call me and say: “I’m coming to Madrid but don’t tell anybody. I don’t want to see anybody.” Then, after three days he’d call and say: “Come with me to a bookstore, I need to be recognized.”

  RAFAEL ULLOA: When he was already famous, I saw him again in Cartagena. You know, when he came, the people went out to greet him. Gabito at a distance. Because famous people . . .

  JAIME GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: One Sunday morning Gabo and I were in our pajamas on the balcony, playing Crazy Corner, which was the name we gave to the very long talks we would have when we saw each other, and all of a sudden the president arrives, because he wants to see Gabo.

  MARGARITA DE LA VEGA: My father and Gabo talked about anything. I think they saw each other in any social situation, in any get-together, in a restaurant, in my parents’ house. But, for example, I remember going to have breakfast in an apartment his family had on Avenida San Martín, when he didn’t live in Cartagena and didn’t have the Nobel or any of that, and I was fascinated because hearing Gabo talk was a delight. About anything. About food. “Why does the corn bread pair so well with sour cream?” And from there they’d start to talk about X’s book or Y’s poetry. Or: “Why did Guy de Maupassant die in an institution?” “Why did he have syphilis?” And my father would give him all the details about it, which was what he was writing about: the diseases of writers. My father publishes his first book, called This Was How They Suffered, and in a sense he publishes it internationally because Gabo sends it to Carmen Balcells and she gets it published.

  CARMEN BALCELLS: All my life I’ve tried to do what he wanted me to do, which in reality was my job and how I spent my days.

  FERNANDO RESTREPO: By the time he was a famous man, you didn’t notice it so much, but he was a withdrawn, timid man. I do have that perception of him. Privately he was very pleasant and had that marvelous sense of humor.

  HÉCTOR ROJAS HERAZO: Naturally, all that changed him. It had to change him. That’s terrible. He has a great sense of humor, so he laughs at anything, but the time comes when he has to be faithful to the success pouring over him, and then come the comic transformations.

  MARÍA LUISA ELÍO: It must be very annoying. People don’t let you live. It’s a phenomenon that doesn’t happen . . . because I’ve gone out with Octavio Paz a thousand times, not once, but a thousand, and I’ve never seen them falling all over Octavio Paz so easily, kissing him and asking: “Are you Octavio Paz? Sign
this for me.” No! The phenomenon of García Márquez is very special. He is totally attractive to people . . . It’s as if he were, I’m telling you, Robert Redford.

  ELISEO “LICHI” ALBERTO: Gabo and I were walking along the walls of Cartagena one afternoon and we saw a couple of young lovers. The boy sees Gabo and begins to signal him to come over. When we get there, he says to Gabo: “Gabo, please, tell her I love her, because she doesn’t believe me.”

  JOSÉ SALGAR: Somebody asks me and I say there’s no difference, because as soon as you meet up with Gabo it’s as if no time had passed. You go back to a thread broken by distance and time, and it’s the same. The same energy, the same connection. There’s no difference at all. That’s the great advantage among Gabo’s friends, the ones he calls friends, and there aren’t many, as opposed to the quantity of people who’ve met him. He’s very different with other people. But not with you. Now, he’s out of the country a lot, he comes back, here nothing’s happened. To the rest of the world he’s a different Gabo. It’s natural.

  GUILLERMO ANGULO: You want me to speak badly about him? There’s something that seems bound to happen. People change with fame and with money. Besides, they almost always come together. I mean, you can’t compare the earlier Gabo to present-day Gabo. He’s much more distant now. He doesn’t give himself to you the way he did before.

  MIGUEL FALQUEZ-CERTAIN: At the time of that important journal that Plinio edited with Goytisolo, Libre, García Márquez arrives in Paris, and he’s already famous. Plinio and Marvel organized a private party at the Colombian embassy, which was next door to the Russian. They hired a vallenato group and a cook to prepare egg arepas, pork sausage sandwiches, stuffed yucca . . . Food from the coast that he liked. They had white rum. And he arrived and said: “Ay, no, what a drag. What I like is caviar with champagne.”