GUILLERMO ANGULO: Look, I can tell you my part and it’s tremendously disheartening. I haven’t found anything based on me in all of Gabo’s work, except for one thing he said in an article. It turns out I had a friend who was building a water tank in Aracataca. He told me: “The heat was so bad we had to work at night and pick up the metal sheets wearing gloves because they were still too hot to touch.” [Gabo] recounted that in an article.
EDUARDO MÁRCELES DACONTE: Once there was a writers’ conference in Sincelejo. I’m talking about ’84, ’85, somewhere in there. And García Márquez was living in Cartagena at that time, and I was in Barranquilla, and I was going to Sincelejo. And when I passed through Cartagena, I stopped and called him on the phone. I say: “Gabo, I’m here.” He says: “Come for lunch.” Okay, so I go for lunch. At that time he usually stayed in his sister’s house, in Bocagrande, because he had barely settled in. And I went to have lunch with him and he says: “Eduardo, what’s the news? What’s happening in Aracataca?” And I say: “Well, no, about Aracataca no, but what I can tell you is that my uncle Galileo Daconte . . .” My uncle Galileo Daconte had just died. “Ay, damn it!” And he was his best friend in my family; when they were little he and that uncle of mine had been the same age. And then he dies. I ask him what he was writing and he tells me a little of what he was writing, which was Love in the Time of Cholera. So then, what happens? When I’m reading Love sometime afterward . . . One of the characters is named Galileo Daconte. He’s, what do you call it? The coachman of that character, the doctor who falls and kills himself. The coachman’s name is Galileo Daconte. So then I imagine that since he was writing that part at the time I visited him . . . and since I told him he had died, bam! He put him in. And even more in The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow, where the character is named Nena Daconte, who’s my mother’s sister who was always called the Nena, Nena Daconte.
When we told her: “Look, aunt, Gabo . . .” and she: “Ah yes, that Gabito . . . Look. That Gabito has a memory . . .” No. She really doesn’t resemble the character. She’s simply the name and idea of what she could be.
MARGARITA DE LA VEGA: He writes Love between ’82 and ’85. García Márquez presents a person from the old families of Cartagena who leaves the country to study and returns. Gabo takes the experience of my father, who left Cartagena to study in Paris and returned, and how he survived. He’s Juvenal Urbino. Now, the love story has nothing to do with my father. It’s the part about being a person from Cartagena from a traditional family, insofar as the families of Cartagena were traditional, because when I look at the families of my friends and others, there was always a little bit of everything. When I saw him, I said: “No, but that character from Love in the Time of Cholera isn’t my father.” Then he said to me: “No, Florentino is my father. We won’t take that away from him.” Then he said to me: “I was interested in somehow transforming the love story of my father and mother.” And I think that’s the time when his father’s sick. Florentino Ariza is his father and the lady he places as the doctor’s wife is his mother, Fermina Daza. Juvenal, my father, marries Fermina, his mother. My mother doesn’t go out for the afternoon promenade. He transformed all that with the love story and that comes from nineteenth-century stories. That’s why I say that I see my father’s influence more in the style of the novel, which is a nineteenth-century novel with lots of characters, written in the style of Balzac. It has a huge number of characters. It’s the portrait of an age. The love story is important, but it isn’t fundamental. It was his source of inspiration. He always wanted to write something new and different.
My father didn’t die like Dr. Urbino because of a parrot, but he absolutely would have risked his life for an animal, because people gave him parrots and parakeets and whatever as presents. We had a macaw that wandered through the house and was named Gonzalo; he danced and everything.
GUILLERMO ANGULO: Somewhere his literary agent tells me that the photograph in Innocent Eréndira is of me, but no . . . I mean, the only thing is that I’m a photographer and he was a photographer, but there’s nothing I said, or told him, no. So the elaboration has to exist, but it’s so complex that, as I’ve said, you can’t follow it.
CARMELO MARTÍNEZ: I appear as Cristo, a friend of Cayetano’s, but Gabito doesn’t describe him in the novel, he leaves some doubt. He could have been me or a cousin of Cayetano’s who died of brain cancer.
GUILLERMO ANGULO: You have to be very careful when you think: “I inspired the work.” You have to discount all that because I think his great inspiration was his grandmother and his mother and his family. I remember the things he would tell me, that the family talked about, that are written by Gabo. Of course, Gabo is telling them to you. About how a female relative of his was combing her hair and the grandmother said: “Don’t comb your hair at night because ships get lost when you do . . .” The colonel’s in his family. It’s an entire family fortune that he accumulates and keeps spending for his whole life.
I haven’t found anything directly having to do with his friends, and I think I know them very well, all of them very well. He’s stolen ideas from them, but openly. I mean, Mutis began to write The General in His Labyrinth. He took one thing and then he said: “No, you’re not going to do anything with that. I’m going to steal it from you.” But that’s all. I mean, it’s circumstantial because the other man also talks about Bolívar when he’s going to die, is going toward death, but you can read both things, the two things coexist, and you can’t say: “Look, Gabo, you copied this.” The elaboration is so complex that it’s no longer an elaboration.
RAFAEL ULLOA: That guy he presents there, that Gypsy who arrives and changes, that guy resembles his father, who did all those things. Or that other madman he presents in the story about Blacamán. I’m telling you it was Jorgito, from there in Sincé, who would have a snake bite him. And there’s one in “Blacamán, Seller of Miracles,” who has something of Jorgito. Because Jorgito, as I say, would smear himself with pomade . . . “And now you’ll see that a fer-delance . . .” Of course, the serpent’s fangs had been removed.
JOSÉ SALGAR: One Hundred Years isn’t a newspaper story but it has a newspaper background, which is the tragedy of La Guajira, which is the life of coastal people, which is the imagination of the people, because all the characters are real. Because the Gypsy sold things there. Úrsula. All the characters have a real background that makes them newspaper characters. And it ends with the tragedy of the banana plantations, and basically, many of the characters of One Hundred Years must have died on the banana plantations. Then too, he puts in many people from La Cueva and uses their real names. He gathers together. It’s a kind of compilation of the most beautiful memories of his youth.
EMMANUEL CARBALLO: I thought it was something . . . I knew it was how they talked in Barranquilla, but he had invented a way of putting words together and making a style different from the different styles at that time. And he brought in a new fashion with that language. And not only that language: that ability to imagine! A power of creation. For me it was invention. For me there was no Colombian word or Mexican word; there were words that sounded good and said important things.
ROSE STYRON: I think he’s a man of great, great profundity, that he’s a creative man. I’ve heard him say that to explain the mystery of creation, he would do anything. And so he sits down to talk with a film student or whoever. He says you never get to the heart of the mystery of creation, but that he’s always ready to rummage around and go deeper into it.
JOSÉ SALGAR: He’s a tape recorder, but a magnificent one. Everything stays with the man. A subject emerges and he turns it around. He has a certain cadence, a very pleasant something for telling stories. He’s listening and suddenly he asks you a question. There’s always an exchange. He goes back to the central facts in the life of the person who is his interlocutor, I believe. He asks you: “Aha, do you remember Sánchez?” (A photographer.) “Where did he come from? Who gave him the name Dog? Why is he the Dog?”
And he begins to find out about his life. I don’t know if he does it unconsciously, but he’s creating the novel of the el Perro Sánchez. He’s a tremendous presence.
SANTIAGO MUTIS: The Gabo of today is a Gabo who works things out. He tells his story. Which is literary. It doesn’t mean it isn’t true. It’s literary.
GUILLERMO ANGULO: He’s a character in search of an author. And he found him.
GERALD MARTIN: The first time I saw him was in Havana in the year 1990. In his house in Havana. I felt I had lived for that moment. It was out of this world how well we got along. We talked for four straight hours. When he wants to be, he’s marvelous. A delicious conversationalist. At the end of the day he said: “And what time will you be here tomorrow?” Imagine! I left there flying with happiness. The next day I returned and found a different person. When I sat down he said: “Do you know something? I couldn’t sleep last night, I was traveling through the labyrinth of Latin American literature.” I realized right away, and was very frightened, that he was talking about my book Journeys Through the Labyrinth that had been published the year before, and that some friend (in English we’d say, ironically, a well-wisher) must have lent it to him; in it I criticize Autumn of the Patriarch. “I’m the patriarch,” he said to me. “It’s my self-portrait. If you don’t understand that and if you don’t like the patriarch, how will you be my biographer?” Gabo had realized that night that it’s difficult to be friends with your biographer, but even so we continued to get along well, but we were no longer soul brothers. We never again had the relationship we’d had at that first meeting; but we never forgot it either, it was always there.
SANTIAGO MUTIS: Yes, Gabo has had really lovely people. Generous and beautiful, and that’s why Gabo is a person filled with gratitude. Because he has people to be grateful to. And being grateful isn’t anything different from being humane, but a torrent of humaneness. And Gabo, I believe, is humane. And his books are humane.
CARMEN BALCELLS: When he brought me a copy of the manuscript for Of Love and Other Demons in the year ’94, it was a little difficult for me to understand that he had dedicated the book to me. And the dedication said: “To Carmen bathed in tears.” That dedication was the one he had put in my copy of Autumn of the Patriarch because of the story of the publication of that book, which was a disaster. He put that dedication in the presentation copy of the first edition, which was falling apart. When I saw that text I didn’t understand completely, or with the speed that would have been necessary, that he was dedicating the book to me. To Carmen Balcells. And it was so special a moment that today I still remember physically the details of his presence, of the manuscript, of everything just as it happened, and the truth is I don’t know whether I was capable of expressing or translating the emotion I felt. I don’t think so. And I didn’t. I didn’t express it well.
GUSTAVO GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: I said at the start that Gabito and I have a rivalry as to who has the better memory. For example, he doesn’t remember when, in Cartagena, around 1951, a representative of Losada Publishers came looking for writers and he asked Gabito if he had a novel. So then Gabito said to me: “Listen, help me out here,” and he took out the originals of Leaf Storm to read them. We were in the middle of reading them when Gabito stopped and said: “This is good, but I’m going to write something that people will read more than the Quijote.”
MARÍA LUISA ELÍO: Here in this photograph I’m with Gabriel and Diego. He’s my son. In Gabo’s house. A very amusing day. He was writing and he had us come in; something very unusual for him. I don’t know which novel he was writing at that moment. He says to me: “I’ve written the whole book on this thing, this machine.” It was a computer. And he says: “But, just in case, look.” He opens a drawer and he had it all typed out.
Álvaro Mutis and García Márquez.
* Guillermo Cano, son of Fidel Cano Gutiérrez, founder of El Espectador. When García Márquez started working there as a reporter, he was twenty-seven at the most and the paper’s editor. When Guillermo Cano was murdered in 1986 by two hit men linked to drug cartels in reprisal for denouncing the ties between traffickers and politicians, García Márquez wrote a heartfelt and hyperbolic column describing how young Cano had a visceral sense of what made news. He recalls the time Cano made them cover a three-hour-long rainfall; his insistence that he interview the sailor that ended up giving García Márquez his first scoop and is now News of a Shipwreck, part of the canon. It was under Cano that the paper started doing film reviews, many written by García Márquez, who was then seriously considering becoming a filmmaker.
** Beautiful Remedios, or Remedios la bella, is one of the most iconic characters of One Hundred Years of Solitude. The innocent girl-woman, unaware that she is the most beautiful woman in the world, leaves behind a trail of men who die after trying to seduce her. Remedio’s story of ascension to the heavens while laying out bedsheets to be dried is one of the most studied cases of García Márquez magical realism. He claims that image has been in his head because that’s how the women around him explained the disappearance of a young woman who eloped.
33
The Start
In which Quique and Juancho are already drunk but insist on having “the start,” as they call the last whiskey in Barranquilla, which is always one too many
JUANCHO JINETE: Maestro Obregón called me one day and said: “Juan, come over, because tomorrow I’m going to a dinner and someone who’s here and I want you to come.” So I went and it was Gabo there with Mercedes and their two sons. So then I don’t know what happened and he said to me: “I got the Nobel Prize,” and like that. Damn! I got up and left and Alejandro went out with me.
QUIQUE SCOPELL: In Cartagena, when Alejandro was alive, I saw him. Later, when Alejandro died, not anymore . . . The pranksters from La Cueva: one is Alfonso Fuenmayor and another is Álvaro Cepeda. The other is . . .
JUANCHO JINETE: Germán . . . He names them a lot. When he says that Big Mama died, he says they went there, that the mamagallistas from La Cueva were there. So look: Álvaro died so long ago. He died young. He was forty-two. Alfonso Fuenmayor: from La Cueva to heaven. Alejandro, another buddy. Gabriel García Márquez—Gabito—turned them into characters in One Hundred Years of Solitude.
QUIQUE SCOPELL: Alfonso, for me . . . Let’s define the word “friend.” A friend is . . . There are very few. You may have four or five friends, you won’t have more. And Alfonso was one of the few true friends that Gabito had. Because Alejandro and Álvaro and Germán weren’t Gabito’s friends the way Alfonso was. Alfonso was Gabito’s friend. You’re a person’s friend, why? Because . . . When you fall in love, you fall in love with a person, why? Because you fell in love. Why did you fall in love? You don’t know. You fell in love.
JUANCHO JINETE: It’s what I was saying. Listen, Quique: he heard our stories and ra, ra, ra he wrote them down. That’s why Cepeda would say to me: “Fuck me, fuck me.” In one of them there’s even a saying I had that came from my grandfather: “To hell with a fan, for time is a breeze.” That’s in the book about the loves of old people. When the old man walks through the town. “To hell with a fan, for time is a breeze.”
Before he used to come a lot, because of Fuenmayor. When Fuenmayor died, not anymore. Whenever they say something about Fuenmayor, they put in Gabo. He died in ’94. “Gabo’s friend died.” This is something from El Tiempo. It says: “Fuenmayor along with García Márquez, Álvaro Cepeda Samudio, Germán Varas Cantillo, the painter Alejandro Obregón, and also the industrialist Julio Mario Santo Domingo were in the habit of going to La Cueva to talk and learn about literature.”
QUIQUE SCOPELL: Because at that time Gabito was flat broke, he didn’t have means, he didn’t have shit, he didn’t have culture. Because nowadays he has a lot of culture, it’s true, but he wasn’t born with that culture; because of something that isn’t reproachable in life. Because he was a poor man. He has too much merit to have reached the top by his own merits. Because the man has gotten there by
his own merits. Nobody gave him a toothpick so he could live. He’s earned that position through his own efforts, through obstinacy. Because he’s as obstinate as a sonuvabitch. That man earned his position through obstinacy. He deserves it because he earned it. Because when a man works the way he’s worked, he deserves it. He deserves it because he’s worked for that thing his whole life. And he’s been . . .
GERALD MARTIN: This fight that Quique Scopell and Juancho Jinete have about his stealing things from Álvaro [Cepeda Samudio] is simply because they were closer to Álvaro than to Gabo. Álvaro had an irresistible personality and he was a very talented writer, but he obviously isn’t a more important writer than García Márquez. What happens is that they were both feeding on the same thing. Gabo absorbs it all. All. I’m sure he took from Álvaro and from Rojas Herazo. He takes what has to be taken and makes it his own. That isn’t called plagiarism; it’s called genius.
QUIQUE SCOPELL: Nowadays they go so far as to compare him to Shakespeare and to Cervantes. With that, you don’t fuck around! So what else do you want? No! No! I’ll have this drink and we’re leaving.
Epilogue
The Day We All Woke Up Old
GLORIA TRIANA: When he turned eighty, we were having lunch at the house of Alberto Abello, the Samarian. He was on a sofa and we were on cushions on the floor. He hadn’t said anything in all that time, and someone mentioned that Santiago Mutis, the son of Álvaro Mutis, his lifelong friend, was negotiating his pension. So then that was the subject and I said: “The fact is that when you stop seeing people, they freeze in the moment that you last saw them.” I said: “Santiago, so young, already on a pension.” Then he, who in those last days didn’t maintain a long dialogue or argue or anything, but he would say . . . they were like proverbs. Of course the proverbs he said were all in his style and the style of his books. Then when he commented on that he says in that tone of his, the way he talked: “The truth is I don’t know what happened but from one day to the next we all woke up old.”
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