Solitude & Company

by Silvana Paternostro

  ROSE STYRON: It came up more than once. I don’t remember whether it was in New York or on the phone or just through Carlos [Fuentes], but we’d talked for a long time about him coming to the Vineyard and because Clinton came every summer, you know. It was one or the other, or maybe it was Carlos who said: “Why don’t you plan your visit for when Clinton’s there and then we can all meet?”

  WILLIAM STYRON: What’s certain is that by the time he came to supper in 1994, by that date he could come into the country freely. The act had already been repealed.

  ROSE STYRON: Carlos visits every year and stays with us. We told Gabo to come, and that year—it must have been ’94—was the first time he came to stay with us. In reality he slept in a hotel very close to our house, but he spent the day with us.

  WILLIAM STYRON: Well, Carlos, who is one of my oldest and closest friends, we saw each other in New York in 1994, in the spring, and I told him that Clinton had made it a point to schedule a trip to the Vineyard and he was sure to do it that summer. Carlos had been fretting, like so many other Latin Americans and like many other people, about the embargo on Cuba. Gabo wanted to meet Clinton, and so did Carlos. And wouldn’t it be an interesting thing and profitable if indeed Gabo and he could meet Clinton and lean on him about the Cuban embargo. They thought Clinton would meet with them because he had already said he was a great admirer of One Hundred Years of Solitude. In fact, his daughter Chelsea had just read it and loved it very much. And so I told Carlos we’d be able to do it that summer, and that Clinton would come to our house. I said why not invite Gabo to the island. This happened in August, late August 1994, and so the dinner was arranged. Gabo came. It was a very small dinner at my house with the Clintons, Vernon Jordan and his wife, and the ex-foreign minister of Mexico, Sepúlveda, and his wife, my friend Bill Luers and his wife. Bill Luers had been the United States ambassador to Venezuela and Czechoslovakia. And so it was a small gathering. Oh, and I should add Gabo’s goddaughter, Patricia Cepeda, and her husband John. She’s married to John O’Leary, who was recently the American ambassador to Chile. A prominent lawyer in Portland, Maine. Anyway, they were there too. Patricia to translate. You know Gabo . . . His English is quite good really, but I think he doesn’t like to use it because it isn’t perfect. Whenever I’ve been with him we’ve spoken English because I don’t know enough Spanish to speak it at all. But like a lot of people who don’t have perfect command of a language, he prefers to speak in his mother tongue. But Patricia is a very capable interpreter, so she was sitting at the table with Gabo and Clinton. I was sitting on the other side of the table with Hillary and could tell, though I wasn’t listening closely to them, that Gabo and Carlos were engaging him in a talk about the Cuban embargo. At that time they were both very passionate about the embargo. Well, I think this was one of the reasons they approached him. But interestingly enough—and I’ve reconstructed this with Bill Luers, who was sitting closer to them than I was—I could tell, and Bill confirmed this, that Clinton was resisting this conversation. I suppose the reason was that his mind was already made up about Cuba and he wasn’t about to be budged, even by people he admired as much as Gabo. And so Bill Luers, seeing Clinton’s eyes glazed over with what I suppose was rejection—and like a complete ex-diplomat—spoke out firmly enough to change the subject of the conversation from politics in Cuba to literary matters, and that was fascinating . . . The breakthrough came when someone, I forget who, perhaps Bill Luers or perhaps Clinton, changed the conversation to ask the name of everyone’s favorite novel and at this point Clinton’s eyes lit up rather pleasurably and we had a sort of literary parlor game around the table. I mean politics was abandonded and everyone began to say their favorite novel. Well, I think it was because they couldn’t make any headway in the Cuba matter.

  GUILLERMO ANGULO: I think that basically you always want to boast about what you don’t know. Gabo wants to seem a great politician and he doesn’t know about politics. I think it bothers Gabo a great deal when they tell him he’s a very good writer, because why should they? It’s something that’s very clear to him and he knows it and you don’t have to tell him about it.

  WILLIAM STYRON: Clinton led this sort of quiz, and I recall that Carlos said that his favorite novel was Don Quijote. Gabo said that among all the books, he chose The Count of Monte Cristo, and then he explained why. He said it was a perfect novel. It was spellbinding. It wasn’t just a costume melodrama. It had great depth and was really a universal masterpiece. I said Huckleberry Finn, just of the top off my head. And finally Clinton said Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, and immediately, to everyone’s amazement, he began to recite a long, long passage from the book, word by word. And it was truly magical to see him do this because afterward he did give a little interesting lecture on the power of Faulkner and how much Faulkner had influenced him. I remember that he then had this two-way conversation with Gabo, and Gabo said that, without Faulkner, he wouldn’t have been able to write a single word. That Faulkner was his direct inspiration as a writer when he was just beginning to read world literature in Colombia. And that he had made a pilgrimage to Oxford. I remember that he mentioned it to Clinton. If there was disappointment because he hadn’t made any headway with Cuba, he hid it. He was animated and even exhilarated; I noticed it when they began this conversation about great novels. And so the evening was basically a great success. But it was a total failure as far as politics went.

  ROSE STYRON: I recall that Bill Luers felt that perhaps Clinton had heard enough about Cuba so he switched the conversation to go from being led by Gabo to being led by Clinton, who wanted to talk about writing and literature . . . Carlos also was in the mix of that conversation about the writers Clinton had read. I mean, they were quite interested in Clinton’s knowledge of Latin American literature. He began to talk about a young Mexican novelist he had been reading and thought was very good. I remember that Carlos and Gabo were quite taken aback because they both knew this young man. I don’t remember his name but they were surprised that Clinton had read him. And of course Clinton quotes everything, too. They were impressed by, you know, Clinton’s literary knowledge. Not necessarily of Gabo’s books but of literature in general. And then I know that Chelsea was a great fan of Gabo and was reading one of his books. Later on, Gabo was invited to the White House. I think it was that same year. Or it might have been later. I think it might have been that winter that Chelsea in particular wanted him there.

  WILLIAM STYRON: I think Márquez truly wanted to meet Clinton, whom he admired very much, and wanted to talk about Latin American political relations, Cuba and Colombia and Mexico and so forth, and Clinton wanted to talk about literature. So it was a wonderful evening, and Clinton seemed to have read everything, so it was very fruitful. Then, during dinner, he received a call from Mayor about trying to make peace in Ireland. So we had Cuba, Ireland, and Mexican literature sort of going, and that was the end of that. But I guess it had reverberations, because I heard about that dinner several times when I was in Latin America after that.

  SANTIAGO MUTIS: That’s Gabo’s huge desire: to help Latin America. Intervene for Cuba and the people studying film. Intervene in political problems, help the people going through whatever. He thinks perhaps something can be resolved from there.

  WILLIAM STYRON: Exactly. But that’s a fairly common phenomenon in Latin America. It’s not just Gabo; Carlos Fuentes too. I remember that he and I went when Salinas was president of Mexico to see him. Gabo is this kind of phenomenon par excellence, you see. Writers in general. Octavio Paz had that effect in Mexico. Hell, Vargas Llosa was close to becoming president. But as I think I said earlier, and not that it matters or anything, but the idea of a writer having this profound political and cultural influence in the United States that Gabo has in Latin America is inconceivable here.

  JAIME ABELLO BANFI: Remember that after the Belisario government, he had been here during the entire time of the bombs, from ’82 to ’86. He was in Colombia a great deal because Belis
ario would call him, search him out, bring him, but something happened there, in that very complicated Belisario government, with the taking of the Palace of Justice, Armero, the abrupt end in Tlaxcala to the peace process with the FARC. Then the Barco government comes in. And the Barco government was also complicated: the struggle against narco-trafficking, the subject of extradition, the bombs. Then comes the Gaviria government. And Gaviria renews the effort to attract Gabo again. And Gaviria, in fact, asks Gabo to revise the final text of the constitution of ’91. Gabo corrects it.

  WILLIAM STYRON: Our dinner didn’t receive a single line of ink in the North American press, but it was front-page news in every major Spanish-language newspaper in the world. I suppose for all the reasons I mentioned earlier. Yes, and that’s why I think there’s a huge distinction between writers in the United States and writers in Latin America. A writer in the United States might receive the respect of, to my mind, an exceptional president like Bill Clinton who himself is fascinated by writers and who has read a great deal, including my own work. I find that fascinating, but the idea that I could in any sense influence him in any major way I think is a delusion. Writers in this country are marginal. If we had been three rock stars who cornered Clinton, we would have been on the front page.

  ROSE STYRON: He’d been telling us for years that we had to go to Cuba: “Please, try to come when I’m there, we can all be there together.” That was just a litany of his. The pleasure, of course, was being with Gabo, who is marvelous company and a warm and affectionate human presence. You know, full of great, adventurous ideas.

  We had wanted to go to Cuba and mentioned it to Arthur Miller. We thought it would be something we could do together, and we learned that Gabo would be there. He hadn’t been there for years, though, because he’d been sick, for at least a year and a half. And when he heard that we would be there, he said he’d come too. I don’t know whether it was pure accident that we were all there at the same time, or whether he maneuvered to be there when we were and we were encouraged to be there when he was. I don’t know exactly how it happened. I don’t know whether it was fortuitous or not, but I do know that the moment we knew we were going, he knew it too. And when we let him know we were going to Cuba, he already knew it and said he would be there. And in Cuba we were together, and he arranged things while we were there. He was very interested in taking us to Hemingway’s place, taking us out there. He wanted us to become involved in Cuba and see the potential it had, what it had been and what it could be. He wanted to do everything he could to strengthen relations between Cuba and the United States, especially among the writers he respects. And he wanted us to have a good time.

  SANTIAGO MUTIS: I don’t know whether that friendship with Fidel has turned into good things for many people. I’m sure it has. But now that forms part of what the press says, that things come out of it. How much life that’s not made public goes on there? One no longer knows. One’s left simply as a reader of what’s published.

  ARISITIDES ROYO: That friendship with Fidel also allowed him to help detained people be freed and others to leave Cuba.

  ROSE STYRON: He studies both real and fictitious characters very closely. This past spring when we were all in Cuba and in Castro’s presence and you could see that it worried him that he wouldn’t be there if we went to see Castro. And he reflected on the visit we had with Castro. He understood him so perfectly, and from every angle. I mean, he saw the good and the bad, and the reason for both. I could see this in his reactions to Castro.

  WILLIAM STYRON: The fact that Gabo was there was clearly our entrée to those fascinating moments we spent with Castro.

  ROSE STYRON: He wanted us to meet Castro. He wanted us to understand Castro as a human being. Castro gave us a dinner in the presidential palace. We were in Havana with Arthur Miller and his wife and a couple of other people. The Luerses and the Janklows. Eight of us had gone, and we were all invited to the dinner. And when we walked in, Castro came out to welcome us.

  And it was clear that he knew everything about each one of us because he asked each of us something a little personal, and let us know that he knew exactly who we were and what we did, things like that. And I could see Gabo simply standing there smiling behind him. But Gabo was just as interested in having Castro like us or be easy with us as in having us feel comfortable with him, so that we could understand the situation. There were no words in particular at that moment, but I remember that during the dinner I was sitting beside Gabo and he would make little drawings and, you know, pass me a note ocassionally. That was fun. That dinner lasted quite a few hours.

  And then, at a certain moment, it was very late and Castro talked the way he does, wonderfully, about wars and battles. We had some funny political stuff going on but he was giving us a marvelous run-down of historical battles that had really happened. From the Peloponnesian War to the Gulf War: who the generals were and what had been their maneuvers, their successes and mistakes. And then he continued with what he thought his own errors had been, I mean, as a guerrilla, a fighter, and a leader. Gabo turned toward me and whispered: “Oh, he is really wound up now. This will go on for a long time but it’ll be very good.” He was also very pleased with what was happening, and without being critical he was observing, more than anything he was paying attention to everyone’s reactions. I think that what I like is to observe him while he’s observing others. You see what’s going through his head and you can see his kindness and generosity, but no lack of judgment. This doesn’t mean that he’s sitting there approving or disapproving of the politics of the moment.

  SANTIAGO MUTIS: But, for example, when Gabo wrote the book on Cuba, I remember he was told not to publish it because it might do harm to Cuba. It never came out. Some sections were published here in the journal Alternativa, and it was a book where you could see how people were living in Cuba. Gabo does it because that’s how life is, but when he was about to bring it out they tell him: “Politically this is against us because you can see all the difficulties.” Gabo doesn’t think so, since he wrote the book. But, I don’t know, you’d think it’s a wonderful book, but you see a reality where they haven’t been able to fix a lot of things. And it isn’t advantageous politically. I think that perhaps it doesn’t suit the government, but in a human way . . . Let’s say it’s what Gabo has to reconcile or resolve internally. And that as a reader you have to accept. Because in my opinion there are no political reasons that don’t let you recount the lives of some people. Because what you want is to see what is, not how the government has made it. That’s where you have to say that you no longer buy into what’s politically correct.

  WILLIAM STYRON: I think it’s a very simple matter. It sounds complex but it really is basically very simple. I believe Gabo has become a very close friend of Castro’s, and I believe it’s the kind of friendship that was molded fairly early in the years of Castro’s ascent. I’m using the word “ascent” here as a climb to power in Cuba. A process that has caused such a shower of violent criticism to fall on García Márquez’s head. But I think their friendship is very solid and that Gabo is determined to make the best of it.

  SANTIAGO MUTIS: In any case, you can’t judge Gabo morally. You can judge him politically. Not judge, but show disagreements. But not morally. So if you move from literature to having a political opinion that you share publicly, people are going to give you a public response. That will lead to your having opponents. And there will be fights and awful things. Yes. Cabrera Infante has a really terrible quarrel with Gabo. And a whole stream of writers. Politically they’re there because he’s entering a territory where they discuss those things and it’s a problem of power. Power is there to be disputed. Whether you think a writer ought to do it or not is another question.

  ROSE STYRON: He is such an activist on one hand and a romantic on the other and a realist in both senses. I mean that he always really sees the injustice of the moment and goes for it, whether it’s a personal injustice or a political one, whether it’s Pi
nochet, Clinton, or Castro. Whatever it is, whether it’s a person or a government driving it, he has a very grounded sense of what’s just and what isn’t. Besides, he’s totally dedicated to fiction and to activism. Whether it’s from the point of view of his fiction or his activism, I think—I’m just thinking out loud now—he has such a sense of character, such an insight into characters, which is what makes him create the reality of his own characters in his fiction. They’re unforgettable. I think he sees into the character of both the good and the bad guy.

  SANTIAGO MUTIS: That he’s been able to contend with that . . . I don’t understand. Because I believe they’re things that in any case demand everything from you. I mean, when you’re political, you’re concerned with that and that way of living. In any case, Gabo is really a strong man. I believe they put one of those strings on other people and they burn up like rockets. How many people don’t follow that? How many people? Everybody . . . competitions . . . inventing themselves to make money. Gabo continues to be untouchable, even if one says: “I don’t like this or that about him.” And I think that the old Gabo is much more interesting than the earlier Gabo . . . He’s much more interesting because it has to do with how he became who he is and how he maintains himself. On what human values does he maintain that? And you find that in the young Gabo. It’s all revealed there. From then on he begins to develop it because Gabo finds himself obliged to recount all that.

  WILLIAM STYRON: I think he admires Fidel for his intellectual brilliance. And I do think Castro has an eccentric aspect that sets him apart from other dictators. He has got a fascinating and supple and intricate mind, and I think that attracts Gabo, that part of Castro. I remember an interesting anecdote that Gabo told me. He said once, during a very, very delicate crisis that brought the world’s journalists to Cuba, he flew to Havana. I believe from Mexico City. There were hundreds of reporters gathered at the airport. And Fidel met Gabo and they walked together to an anteroom in the airport, and were there for half an hour or more while the reporters from all the agencies in the world clustered around, waiting to see what Fidel had said to Gabo, and vice versa. Finally they came out, and the reporters confronted them. The first question was for Gabo: “May we ask what you were talking about?” Gabo answered: “We were talking about the best way to cook red snapper.”