Solitude & Company

by Silvana Paternostro

  GUILLERMO ANGULO: There’s a writer, a friend of ours, who says that Gabo at this moment is the best-known writer in the world. And of course, there’s never been a Colombian in the history of the world who’s been as well known as him. I mean, in China they probably haven’t heard of Bolívar, but they have heard of Gabo.

  29

  Damaged Goods

  In which the history of Chronicle of a Death Foretold* is discussed and a Colombian magistrate gives us his version of events

  MARGARITA DE LA VEGA: It’s something that had occurred in Sucre when his father was a pharmacist. That killing happened and those boys, the twins, were studying in Cartagena at the School of Medicine.

  PATRICIA CASTAÑO: We went to Sucre with Gerald Martin. We looked over the whole story. We went to the place where the Italian they killed is buried. The one from the Crónica. We saw the gravestone, one of those gravestones that has a photo of the deceased. And everybody tells you a version. “They came in through this door and went out through this one,” and yadayadayada.

  CARMELO MARTÍNEZ: Gabito wasn’t in Sucre when they killed Cayetano [Gentile]. He was studying in Barranquilla. His father and mother were there. So I told Gabito what I knew. What I had witnessed. He came here to my house and I told him about it right here on this terrace. Look, that happened on Monday, February 21 or 22 of 1951, in Sucre, a town on the water. Cayetano and I had been together the previous Saturday, when the wedding of Miguel Reyes Palencia, a Sucreño who lived in San Marcos, and Margarita Chica, took place. That’s Ángela Vicario in the novel. We went to the port with Cayetano to watch the departure of the newlyweds. I haven’t forgotten that I almost became a criminal because I took my father’s gun to pursue the Chicas. The Chicas took refuge in a house across from the Palencia family’s house as you pass the church. When I saw Víctor, who was brandishing a knife, claiming grief as his reason for stabbing Cayetano, I ran out with a gun in my hand. When he saw where I was going, he went inside and locked the door.

  JAIME GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: I was ten years old when they killed Cayetano Gentile. When I heard about it, I ran out to see, and there in the living room I saw him, lying on a cot, very pale, of course, because he had already lost a great deal of blood; there was mud on his shirt along with blood, and at that moment the doctor was removing the stethoscope and declaring him dead. Sometime later, when Gabito was working on his Chronicle of a Death Foretold, he confronted a doubt: whether or not it had rained in January, when they killed Cayetano. He’s always had the idea that tragic events have to do with the weather. Somebody said that in Sucre it never rains in January. Then I said to him: “Well, it did rain, because I remember Cayetano’s shirt splattered with mud.” Doubts remained. After the novel came out, talking about this with my sister Margot, she remembered another interesting fact, which was that shortly before the death of Gentile, my brother Luis Enrique and she were talking to him in the port, and it was raining, and a boy tripped and fell in front of them, and Cayetano picked him up and his shirt was covered with mud. In other words, it was definitely raining that day, which is why I remembered the shirt covered with mud.

  CARMELO MARTÍNEZ: When Miguel Reyes brought Margarita back, it caused a scandal in the neighborhood farther down. Everybody there knew what had happened. But where we lived, near the plaza, we didn’t.

  She gets married on Saturday night, and they kill Cayetano on Monday. At eight in the morning. Eight. Eight-thirty. Sunday night he slept in his house and went out to run an errand. He never knew they were looking for him. And I was with him that morning. We went to the port that morning. He was in love with a girl whose last name was Nasser. Her father was from Egypt. Her mother’s family was Italian. Her name was Nidia. Nidia Nasser. They had an appointment to meet at the port, and since the sweethearts were talking, what was I going to do there. So I left them alone. The plan was to meet back at the port to take our dugout out to the farm.

  We were outside waiting for Cayetano to come back. He had to go look for a maid he had to take back to the farm. He was coming to meet us in our dugout when the Chicas arrived and attacked Cayetano. So then the first thing I did was run to the second floor in my house for a gun, a .38 by the way, my father’s white star, and ran out of there. Like a madman. I don’t know why, but I went out holding the revolver. I didn’t know yet what had happened. Then, when I got to Cayetano’s house, I found out that the Chicas had knifed him, that they were already in the house across the street where Víctor Palencia lived. Then I went out heading there. When I came out, they barred the door. They surrendered. The others came in and handed them over to the police.

  RAFAEL ULLOA: Gabito’s mother didn’t want him to tell that story. She felt sorry for Cayetano’s mother. He wrote it after she died.

  CARMELO MARTÍNEZ: The wedding was on Saturday, the supposed honeymoon that night, and on Monday the sweethearts would go to San Marcos. But it didn’t happen that way, because that night, after the incident that kept them from consummating the marriage, Miguel Reyes returned Margarita to her mother, as if she were damaged goods. Well, he realized she wasn’t a virgin. So he returned her to her mother ceremoniously, because he was of Santanderean origin. Then the trouble started because Margarita’s family put her in the confessional so she’d say who the man was who . . . Well, who had been the one . . . Well, who was the husband. So she said it was Cayetano. Cayetano Gentile had been engaged to her. But Cayetano broke the engagement because, while he was studying at the Javeriana University, she found a sweetheart from Guaranda. Another town. Possibly for that reason, Cayetano didn’t marry her. When I reached the door, he was already clutching his guts so they wouldn’t spill out. They had knifed him. Víctor Chica, especially. Víctor is the killer. He was the killer. Not Joaquín. Joaquín went to help his brother. He didn’t take part in the killing. He intervened, calming down his brother. Víctor was a butcher, he slaughtered cattle. He’s the one who takes them to market, and he had a knife. A knife for killing cattle was used to kill Cayetano.

  MARGARITA DE LA VEGA: When Gabo brought out the book, the twins wanted to sue him.

  CARMELO MARTÍNEZ: Then, what is it that happens to me? Margarita denounces him, taking her revenge because Cayetano’s social and economic position in town was higher than hers. Then, when Cayetano abandoned her, what she did was a typical act of vengeance by a woman who’d been wounded. What I think is that she took her revenge on Cayetano because Cayetano didn’t marry her. Now, it’s very possible, I think it’s almost one hundred percent true, that she was Cayetano’s woman. That she did have sexual relations with him. Now, Cayetano left her, and her pointing him out as the one who had taken her virginity, is her revenge on Cayetano.

  MARGARITA DE LA VEGA: One of the things that Gabo wanted was information about the trial. The murder trial took place in Cartagena, and another of my uncles, whose name is Antonio de la Vega, was the judge. He had access to the papers and my uncle went to get them. They were in the basement of the Palace of Justice in Cartagena and were covered with damp, like the scene in the movie; I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie, which is pretty bad. It evokes the place but the actors are pretty bad, even if they’re great actors. Rupert Everett should be hanged. The same thing that happened with Love in the Time of Cholera. I never thought I’d say that the Chronicle film was better than something else. So my uncle is the judge. Do you remember that they’re going to look for the papers and everything’s flooded? Gabo takes that from reality and uses it for the novel.

  CARMELO MARTÍNEZ: At that time there was an idea in the penal code, which was the defense of honor. There’s no defense of honor there. Since we always lived in an up-to-date way, that was true under Benito Mussolini’s Italian penal code, from which the Colombian was copied. Copied. Copied. So there it is. Under the penal code of the year 1936, one could claim defense of honor, but a murder took place there because there was observation. Observation is when I begin to watch the victim to find out his movements, what he does and does
n’t do to facilitate the attack.

  Miguel Reyes Palencia was from a Conservative family on his mother’s side. Liberal on his father’s side. But a refined man. A correct man. Miguel Reyes lives in Barranquilla now. Margarita lives in Sincelejo. She wasn’t as pretty as the girl in the movie.

  MARIELA DE MARTÍNEZ: She’s a dressmaker.

  CARMELO MARTÍNEZ: There’s gossip. I’m telling it to you as gossip. Miguel Reyes came back afterward to Margarita and they had something. They were husband and wife again. But sporadically. That’s like living for a while on the ashes of a dead man because those two killed him. Those two are the intellectual authors of Cayetano’s death. Why? For one of two reasons: either she’d had previous sexual experience, which is most likely, with some men from Guaranda, boyfriends she had in Guaranda, which is why Cayetano broke it off with her; or else, Cayetano really was her first husband.

  MARGARITA DE LA VEGA: He’s very interested in the theme of honor. And the theme of honor placed on the woman, because he does that in his early stories and he’s done it in other screenplays that he’s written. It’s part of the film Time to Die.

  CARMELO MARTÍNEZ: In the villages, everybody has his own version. The story is the death of a man stabbed by some other men for reasons of honor. In my opinion, what happens is that this girl was already an older woman. If she had been a minor, a child, a girl younger than fifteen or twelve years old, there might have been a charge of corruption of minors or carnal violence. But if she’s a woman in her twenties, what carnal violence can there be? She went to bed with the man because she liked him. She was in love with Cayetano. Now, I believe that the business with Miguel was a lifesaver, because a woman in her twenties is almost a spinster. Because in a village, a girl that age is already over the hill.

  So Cayetano died saying he was innocent. I believe Cayetano because a man who’s going to die tells the truth. Cayetano, when I came in, said: “I’m innocent, I’m innocent. I die an innocent man. These people have killed me.” So I went out to kill Víctor . . .

  PATRICIA CASTAÑO: Sucre . . . Sucre is an incredible city. A tale he wrote also comes from there; it’s called “Isabel Watching It Rain in Macondo.” That story he gave to a lady named Tachia Quintana, his girlfriend in Paris, and he gave her the rights to that story.

  GERALD MARTIN: How could I not include Tachia in the biography? Tachia is woman number two in his life. Tachia’s the one who appears in his books. She’s in The Colonel (they were living together in Paris, suffering from hunger, when he wrote it), in One Hundred Years of Solitude, in The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow.

  PATRICIA CASTAÑO: The year before last, Tachia put on a piece for theater about that story in Cartagena, for the first time, and in Bogotá, for something like three days. And it’s very impressive because that story is about a flood in Sucre, Sucre. And the day after Tachia completed her presentation in Bogotá, which was Saturday night, and we were having the worst winter in Colombia, a super photograph appeared that said that Venice is in Sucre. It shows that day’s flooding in Sucre. I mean, what’s incredible is to think that fifty years after Gabo’s description, the people in Sucre, Sucre, continue to live the same drama.

  CARMELO MARTÍNEZ: The fundamental fact is true. Afterward, on top of that, comes the magic of Gabito, the style of Gabito. Now, the facts are true, they’re certain. What happens is that Gabito has a great imagination, and besides that, a great pen. The work is his and the literary work is his, but the facts are exact. There’s no exaggeration or any invention. Those were the facts. Now, when I tried right here to tell Gabito, to give him my explanation, he said: “If you give me your explanation you’ll ruin the idea I have. What I want to do is write a novel.”

  GREGORY RABASSA: Many things that I translated have become clichés. Now they call everything “Chronicle of a so-and-so foretold.”

  * García Márquez wrote Chronicle of a Death Foretold in 1981 based on real events that occurred in 1951 in Sucre when his parents lived there. A groom returns his bride hours after the wedding claiming she was not a virgin. Her brothers go out and murder the man they thought to be her first lover. It is said he waited so long to write it because his mother had asked him not to write about it and he only did after she died. His mother, Luisa Santiaga, has a cameo in the novella.

  30

  Dreams of Power

  In which García Márquez dines with dictators and presidents

  GUILLERMO ANGULO: Do you know what happened? Gabo has a very curious tendency, which is that he adores power. Whether it’s economic power or political power. Yes, he loves all that. That was a change in him for the worse. General Omar Torrijos* from Panama told him: “Listen, you like dictators.” Gabo sticks out his chest when they tell him things like that. And he asks Torrijos: “Why?” And Torrijos says: “Fidel’s friend and mine.” Gabo boasts that there are nine heads of state who take his calls, and he calls himself a friend of Clinton’s.

  ARISTIDES ROYO: Their first encounter, which was only supposed to last a few hours, became a delightful dialogue in his beachside retreat in Farallón, from which a tight friendship was born. It was the early seventies and the general sent a plane to pick him up at the Cartagena airport. The writer was interested in meeting Omar, because both Fidel and López Michelsen had told him about the fights that the Panamanian leader was spearheading for the recuperation of the canal and the complete sovereignty of our territory. They were supposed to talk for a few hours but that first conversation lasted days and turned into a lifelong friendship.

  On September 5, 1977, Gabriel García Márquez was aboard the Air Panama plane as a member of the Panamanian delegation attending the signature of the Torrijos-Carter Treaty. He and Graham Greene were traveling without visas to enter the USA but neither had any difficulty because as the trip was presided over by Omar Torrijos, the chief of state, the US authorities let go of the usual immigration process.

  The next day, in a meeting with Jimmy Carter, a day before elections and after all of the agenda of the official mission was completed, Torrijos asked the US president to explain the reasons why two important writers, a British one, Graham Greene, and a Colombian one, Gabriel García Márquez, were denied entry. Carter passed the question to his national security advisor, Professor Zbigniew Brzezinski, who left the room for about fifteen minutes while the two chiefs of state kept chatting.

  He returned to the meeting saying that Gabriel García Márquez frequently visited Cuba and would meet for many long hours with Fidel analyzing political matters in the American hemisphere. Later, when they realized that the Colombian author was neither a spy nor a conspirator, they gave him a visa that he used when he was given a PEN award. With regards to Greene, they explained that he was denied the visa because he traveled annually to Moscow and stayed with his friend Kim Philby, a British spy at the service of the Soviet Union. Soon after, Greene also got a visa. It must have been made clear that Greene and Philby spent their time together under Communism simply drinking very good vodka.

  WILLIAM STYRON: Our connection to presidents, Gabo’s and mine, extended very singularly with François Mitterrand, who we both became friendly with because Mitterrand had an enormous love for literature in general. We became friends of his, and in fact, we were present, he and I, at Mitterrand’s inauguration. In fact, he and I shared the first luncheon ever served in the Palais de l’Élysée under Mitterrand’s administration on the day of his inaugural. Mitterrand invited us separately but together, in the end, because he had read our work. And this is another president who fascinated Gabo and whom he has written about. We both received the Légion d’honneur. We weren’t at the same ceremony but he gave it to us roughly at the same time, back in the mid-eighties.

  HÉCTOR ROJAS HERAZO: So this is what I want to tell you. He ran away every time they were going to pin an award or something on him, give him a medal here in Colombia. He would run to catch that plane out. But a moment comes when, because of how seriously the world takes this, he
became transcendental, transcendental, and of course, he surrendered to the glory.

  WILLIAM STYRON: We had a very interesting talk about heads of state. We agreed that we both were almost fatally attracted to presidents. We admitted to each other that we frequently dreamed about them. But we said: “And what’s bad about that?” You see . . . I’ve had a kind of long-term mental love affair with presidents. I’ve dreamed about Truman. I’ve dreamed about John F. Kennedy. I’m talking about the good presidents. I’d even include Eisenhower, who in my opinion was one of the least harmful Republican presidents. I confessed, then, my fatal attraction for powerful political leaders and, as you know, I’ve stated that one of the objects of my attraction was Bill Clinton. And we told each other that there was almost a metaphysical element in this attraction toward powerful men because, in his case, these men, who almost always had mercilessly climbed to power, have an enormous effect on the lives of others. This is a central aspect of national life. A man, let’s say, like Castro, like so many Latin American leaders, the presidents of Mexico, the presidents of Central American countries, for example, they exercise control over the entire nation. Which is why they are people who legitimately fascinate writers.

  JAIME ABELLO BANFI: In ’94, for example, he was very enthusiastic, ready to return to Colombia. It was the César Gaviria government. He had agreed to be part of what they called the Commission of Scholars, a group of thinkers, scientists, commissioned to work on topics of education, science, and development. But he was also thinking about the creation of the foundation [for journalism], and meeting with us. He was publishing his novel Of Love and Other Demons. That year he was meeting with Clinton on Martha’s Vineyard along with Fuentes and the Styrons. He was considering building his house in Cartagena, but he also decided to buy in Barranquilla in order to have an apartment there. He bought it in a building designed by his goddaughter Katya González Ripoll. Let’s say it’s a period when he’s prepared to return. ’94 is a key year.