Solitude & Company

by Silvana Paternostro

  GUILLERMO ANGULO: And he has his life divided with his friends. Work in the morning. In the afternoon he’s with his friends. But in the morning he doesn’t talk to anybody. He’s just working. He’s in his element.

  JUANCHO JINETE: When he wrote that thing about Bolívar . . . What’s it called? [The General in His Labyrinth.] So one day Alfonso says to me: “I need to take a trip to Soledad, maestro. I know you have connections in that town.” So then we went there and he said to me: “I have to do this and that and the other. Take me to the city hall, I understand that Simón Bolívar slept there.” I have entrance privileges at the city hall because I helped out when I was manager of the Banco Popular in Soledad. I gave them a few gifts to the guards there. So then they let me go in. Listen to this story. So then I say to him, “Maestro, what do you want to find out?” “You’ll see.” Finally I got to the city hall and I said: “This is Maestro Fuenmayor. Look, I need to know which is the room where Bolívar slept.” So then I swear, the guy says: “Here they say it was this one, this one, this one.” We went up there. “Aha, and what is it that you want, Alfonso?” He says to me: “No, I need to see if when Bolívar would hang his hammock here he could see the square, the square that’s in front of that church there.”

  We made two trips like that. Finally I told him: “Well, what is it, what do we come here for?” “No, hombre, it’s just that Gabo’s writing.”

  Gabito relied on Alfonso, and Alfonso was the one who corrected all those things for him. What you say is true: in his novels, the things that appear can’t be contradicted. It’s true that Alvaro got down to Soledad and that he looked out from the room so that Gabito could say that Bolívar thought who knows what. Whew! All that was missing was our hanging up his hammock!

  JOSÉ SALGAR: He calls and asks me: “Don’t you remember? Where can I get that thing?” So then he gets people to go to the library, to go and get this, and see where that negative is. And he has to have it perfect. Things like the colors, the atmosphere, the music, it has to be exact. If he says: “There was a murmur of Vivaldi,” it was Vivaldi. So my conclusion has always been—and I’ve said this—that it was a human privilege to have successfully beautified journalistic reality, which is so harsh, every day; beautify it with those devices of literature, of music and poetry.

  EDUARDO MÁRCELES DACONTE: There’s an example he gives that I think is the best one to illustrate this for us. He says that when he was little, the cook in the house, the maid, once disappeared. Somebody asked: “And what happened to So-and-so?” “Imagine, she was hanging the sheets there outside.” It occurred to someone to say that to mislead him. Do you understand me? “And then . . . uuuhhh . . . she went flying away.” That image was etched in his mind.

  RAFAEL ULLOA: Gabo has some marvelous things that leave me surprised. Not long ago he was talking with some friends and we were remembering that thing about the mourners, the old women they hire to cry over the dead. The weepers. And so Pachita Pérez came up, the champion weeper, and he says that old woman was so good at crying that she was capable of synthesizing the entire history of the dead person in a single howl. His words captured the idea of the weeps perfectly. Brilliant. So I like these things.

  EDUARDO MÁRCELES DACONTE: That’s true, definitely, García Márquez’s memory is incredible. Because I’ll tell you something: do you remember the stories they told you when you were eight years old? He’s been working on them in his mind for his whole life. This isn’t a question of something coming out just like that . . . It’s an entire process.

  JOSÉ SALGAR: Life magazine, when it was still in circulation . . . When Pope John Paul II had just been elected . . . Gabo was in Cuba and they gave him the assignment of going to talk to the Pope so he’d go there to free some prisoners in Cuba. So he couldn’t arrange the visit with the Pope and some very strange tricks were devised. A Polish countess in Rome appeared and called him and said: “Be ready, at any moment I’ll call you to come to Rome, and I’ll arrange your visit with the Pope.” To make a very long story short, the countess calls Gabo at five in the morning when Gabo is in Paris and says: “Come immediately, I have an appointment for you with the Pope at seven in the morning.” And so the man left Paris for Rome and the first thing that occurred to him was to get some decent clothes, a blazer. So he went to a friend who lent him one, but it was too small. Well, the key moment finally came and he arrives there and . . . Brother, let me tell you. The Pope, in white, up there, and the man didn’t know what to do except motion like this with his right hand. The Pope, up there, motions like this and Gabo motioned back. They make a connection, but the Pope didn’t know all the secrets. He came in, and there was a very shiny wooden floor there, and in the middle a table. They both went in. The Pope closed the door and they were alone. Gabo says that at that moment, he thinks: “What would my mother say if she could see me now?” And the story begins and they talk. What’s true is that he managed to raise the question of the men with the Pope, and he left the interview. That night, Mercedes asks him: “Well, how was it?” “The thing with the Pope was perfect. It went very well.” “Nothing strange happened?” “Wait. Since I had to go to something else, I don’t remember, but wait . . . Of course, the button!” “What about the button?” “Wait, because I went in with the blazer I had bought, and we both went in, and at the moment we went in I went up in the air and bam! The button fell off the blazer and went clattering under the table in the middle. Then the only thing I saw was that the Pope went ahead of me, kneeled down, and I saw his slipper. The Pope stood up, took the button, and gave it to me.” And then another few details like, for example, that when they went out, the Pope didn’t know how to open the door or call the Swiss Guards, so the two of them were locked in and couldn’t get out. But at that moment he couldn’t remember all the details. It turned into a very long story because now he remembered all about the countess and everything. So, on the basis of something that passes in the moment, the man turns it into another Hundred Years of Solitude.

  ROSE STYRON: His characters are extremely romantic, and even when you end up in an excavation, in a convent, or in something like News of a Kidnapping, there’s still that purely romantic part that remains. In other words, he’s a man who loves people. Who loves life!

  JOSÉ SALGAR: I think there aren’t people these days who spend so much money on the telephone, because he doesn’t care how much the phone call costs. Wherever he was, in all those times, he would call. He says so himself. When he had some special thing to tell, he would call Guillermo Cano* or me for any reason. And it was a long conversation. He doesn’t measure the time. But he has a way of paying for the phone. He doesn’t pay the bill, but surely Mercedes must pay it, or that old woman, his agent. So then he says: “Listen, we didn’t realize we were talking for a long time.” From Europe it must be a fortune. He realizes about the time but isn’t happy until he gets to the bottom of the last detail about that button.

  ROSE STYRON: I remember that he says it’s his job to be a magician for his readers, but that magicians always begin with reality and return to reality. Though as a novelist he might fly between them and be as magical, as surreal, as he likes, as long as he writes well enough and with enough magic to convince the reader.

  SANTIAGO MUTIS: Gabo has a background of alchemical knowledge. And alchemy is what they call magical realism. When the boy goes into the kitchen and says to his mother: “That pot’s going to fall.” The pot’s firmly placed on the table but it slips and breaks when it falls. Colombia has a lot of that, it’s a country where the people believe in that. When you go to a party at a fair or market in Villa de Leyva, the people sprinkle holy water on the bus so it doesn’t drive out of control on the road. That’s how he was. There’s a huge religious background. That is, it’s a religious culture . . . In Gabo it’s the culture. Before that, it was religion.

  IMPERIA DACONTE: In Aracataca they say that one night they saw him driving around town in a car with some friends. But he says he h
asn’t gone back there.

  SANTIAGO MUTIS: I think this happens with Gabo: the country had its oral tradition. I mean, literature didn’t occupy an important place and the oral tradition begins to be pushed back a little. Cities begin to have great importance, things begin to appear that come from a totally different place, and as popular culture begins to rust, to feel threatened, to stop being oral, Gabo takes it in. And it begins to turn into literature.

  RAMÓN ILLÁN BACCA: With García Márquez the world has come to know things that everybody knew here. What happened is that they were internationalized. Everybody handled them. The story about the capon . . . that’s something that’s always belonged to us.

  RAFAEL ULLOA: What I think is that his greatness is in his imagination. Without that imagination, he would throw a few topics out into the world that would seem unbelievable. But the way he says them . . . Like when he says: “A metal grasshopper leaping from town to town along the banks of the Magdalena,” to describe those anvils. And he calls them metal grasshoppers. That is, things that connect technical things and crickets. The simpler the better.

  RAMÓN ILLÁN BACCA: In the story about the curlews, García Márquez puts in Terry and the Pirates and everybody says: “Look, that’s an invention of García Márquez.” No, it isn’t. That’s a lie. Terry and the Pirates was the comic strip that came out in the Sunday papers. The first Sunday papers in color were printed in Barranquilla, in 1929, and they were the Sunday papers that practically everybody bought on Saturday for five cents. I remember that I bought them. There was Little Orphan Annie. Winnie Winkle. Tarzan. He puts Terry and the Pirates into a story.

  JOSÉ SALGAR: The story of the Beautiful Remedios* in One Hundred Years of Solitude: an image, a symbol he gave to an ordinary girl which must have been like what happened with the Virgin Mary at first. He made her sublime through literature. It’s not exactly the Beautiful Remedios ascending to heaven, but it’s an image he created that, in the concept of the characters in the novel, had that meaning. It’s a way of beautifying the story. Of telling the story well when the facts fall short. Same thing in Love in the Time of Cholera . . . He knew the characters directly. Basically, it’s the story of Gabo’s father and mother, but it’s the story he heard from his grandfather. And he begins to remember and to assimilate, and then he starts to put it together. Things his grandfather never thought about again or anything, but he reconstructs it, like the Pope’s button. So then, the real genius of the man lies in having a prodigious memory and in confirming the facts responsibly so he won’t stray too far from reality. And in the beauty of his language. Because the man has mastery. First he devoted himself to the classics in order to write well. And to realism. And to poetry. And to music. Gabo is also fanatical about music. So with music and poetry in his head, a nice story comes to him and he knows how to tell it. And he tells the story without straying too far because there’s also his journalistic responsibility. You can’t start creating fantasies. You have to say exactly what’s there.

  ROSE STYRON: It’s fantastic, because having begun as a reporter, I think he always takes that into account. He sees journalism as a literary genre. Just like fiction. The way he writes, everything seems like a news item, even when people go flying away.

  RAMÓN ILLÁN BACCA: Magical realism makes up only half of his work. Perhaps scholars study that aspect of magical realism in García Márquez a great deal. The only thing I can tell you about magical realism is that here on the coast, one hears so many things that really are magical realism and that grow very well around here. For example, I’m going to tell you the story of Professor Darío Hernández, in Santa Marta. I tell it in Deborah Kruel and I’ve told it to everybody. Professor Darío Hernández was in Brussels, as is proper for all decent people from Santa Marta. He wasn’t very rich, but there he was, in Brussels. He studied piano. He played for Queen Astrid. He comes back because in ’31, ’32, I don’t really know how, in what year, there’s agitation because of the stock market crash in New York, that whole story. So then a lot of people had to come running back because banana shipments fell, all those things that made up the Great Depression. So then Darío came, he returns to Santa Marta. Naturally, in the recently opened Santa Marta Club, they say: “Play something, Darío.” So then he comes and plays Moonlight Sonata by Beethoven. “Aha, Darío, play something else.” Chopin’s Polonaise. Liszt’s Liebestraum. “Listen, is that what you went there to learn? You don’t know how to play the cumbia Puya Puyarás, for example?” Then Darío, indignant, slammed down the piano lid and said: “This town is never going to see me play a single note again.” Darío lived to the age of ninety. When this happened, he was thirty. So then he lived sixty more years. He was conductor of the municipal band. Then he was the director of Fine Arts, and pianists like Carol Bermúdez and Andrés Lineros came out of there, and they’re very popular pianists. And nobody ever heard him play another note. And those who passed his house, which was an old house where he lived with two mummified aunts, older than he was, said he had put cotton between the piano strings; that is, people heard nothing but a clap clap clan clan when he practiced every morning. If that isn’t a story of magical realism, I don’t know what is. And it was Darío, and we saw him every day.

  MARGARITA DE LA VEGA: I used to give paperback editions of One Hundred Years of Solitude with an awful cover as gifts. Later on it was the naked couple in the flowers. It was also very gaudy. I bought five or six copies, and when I was invited to dinner, instead of bringing a bottle of wine, some cookies, whatever, I would bring One Hundred Years of Solitude. I remember that one lady I had given it to called and invited me to lunch. She presented it to me with fifteen annotated pages, such and such a page, such and such a line, detailing all the things in One Hundred Years of Solitude that couldn’t exist for scientific reasons, like the duration of the rains. And the first Aureliano, the one who founds Macondo with Úrsula, lives a very long time. And besides that, he survives tied to a papaya tree in the courtyard. But I knew people who tied up idiots in the courtyard.

  And the fact is that the word “marvelous” and the word “magical” are not the same. Carpentier talks about marvelous realism with a very clear explanation, because Carpentier, who is a great writer and does that kind of thing, is also a theoretician. He had studied. He was an ethnomusicologist. And he, one of his things, is that marvelous realism is produced because in Latin America— to use the term that’s, well, popular today—what happens is that not only several climates, several civilizations, but also several periods all meet at the same time, in the same situation, and in the same era. So that feudalism is right beside modernism.

  The airplane is beside the burro. There’s the chain saw and the Uzi machine gun and arrows, too. All at the same time. So then, there’s this interweaving that many people, especially Cuban theoreticians like Fernando Ortiz, have worked on: he does so in his book Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, where he explains transculturation, a term he coined that comes about when you mix the three cultures: the indigenous, the Spanish, and the African. And just like this lady made me the list of what didn’t work, I remember that I sat down and said: “I should have told her point by point everything that is true, but then how boring. The magic is reading it and entering that world and not questioning this side or the other.”

  RAMÓN ILLÁN BACCA: Generally on Tuesday I would go to have lunch with Germán [Vargas]—some coffee, some cheese, whatever—and we’d talk a long time about literature. But whenever Gabo came to Colombia, Germán became nervous that day. One day he said to me: “You can’t come for lunch today because today I’m going to eat with Guillo Marín.” On that day he was more nervous than ever. His wife Susy was nervous. Tita Cepeda arrived in her big car and sounded her horn—in their agreed way. Paparapapá! I already knew that Guillo Marín was Gabo, and I disappeared. Well, so then something like nine years went by. Then he says to me once: “But, haven’t you met Gabriel García Márquez?” I tell him: “But you’ve introduced h
im to every gringo professor who’s passed through here and you haven’t wanted to introduce him to me.” So then he says: “No, now when we go to Cartagena I have to introduce you to him. The two of you would get along.”

  And then Germán and I happen to be in Cartagena at the same time, because I was at the premiere of My Macondo, a film some Englishmen made, and García Márquez appeared in it. And I had a small speaking part. And so on and so forth. So then I was with Guillermo Henríquez, who hates García Márquez now, and Julio Roca. We were there when the Englishmen say to us: “Well, then, let’s go to the birthday party, it’s a vallenato party.” So then, for the whole day, all the papers in Cartagena had been dedicated to saying let’s hope there are no party crashers, no party crashers accepted, and I don’t know what about party crashers. Then Guillermo says: “No, Ramón and I aren’t going. We don’t like vallenato parties.” And then, not to be left behind, I said: “We don’t like vallenato parties.” And when I go back Germán says to me: “Faggot, why didn’t you go? It would have been perfect. Well, some other time.” And wham! Germán died. I couldn’t meet him.

  MIGUEL FALQUEZ-CERTAIN: He’s already met him, but the time he was put on display was when Tita Cepeda gave a party in her house when García Márquez returned to Barranquilla. That was in the eighties, and so she had a party with a waiter and everything. And when Ramón came to the door, the porter stopped him and said he couldn’t go up. “But what do you mean? I’ve been invited.” “No, sir.” He got sick that day. Oof! He almost cried. He left with his tail between his legs. I imagine that it was very exclusive to have García Márquez in your party then because he had just returned to Colombia. It was like: only intimate, intimate, intimate friends. So from that time on it was a joke: “Poor me, I’m the only person left in Barranquilla who doesn’t know García Márquez.” Every lizard, everybody gave a party and invited him. He was the only one left to meet him.