7
Barranquilla, a Bookseller
and a Bohemian Group
1950–1953
“MAN, I THINK he went to Barranquilla looking for fresh air, more freedom and better pay.”1 Thus, more than forty years later, did Ramiro de la Espriella explain his friend’s decision to move from the historic city of Cartagena to the bustling seaport of Barranquilla, eighty miles to the east. When García Márquez left Cartagena towards the end of December 1949 the curfew was in place again and it was not easy to reach Barranquilla by the late afternoon before it came into effect. He had 200 pesos secretly smuggled to him by his mother Luisa in his pocket and an unspecified sum from one of his university professors, Mario Alario di Filippo. He was carrying the draft of “The House” in the leather briefcase he had looted in Bogotá and, as usual, was much more anxious about losing that than he was about the possibility of losing his money. And he was euphoric, despite the fact that he would be spending yet another Christmas holiday alone. After all, as even a Cartagena aficionado would later concede, “Arriving in Barranquilla, in those days, was like returning to the world, the place where things were really happening.”2 And García Márquez had a promise from Alfonso Fuenmayor that he would move heaven and earth to get him a job on El Heraldo.
Barranquilla was a place with almost no history, with almost no distinguished buildings; but it was modern, entrepreneurial, dynamic and hospitable, and far from the Violencia which was ravaging the interior of the country. Its population was approaching half a million. “Barranquilla enabled me to be a writer,” García Márquez told me in 1993. “It had the highest immigrant population in Colombia—Arabs, Chinese and so on. It was like Córdoba in the Middle Ages. An open city, full of intelligent people who didn’t give a fuck about being intelligent.”3
The spiritual founder of what would later be known as the Barranquilla Group was the Catalan Ramón Vinyes, destined to become the wise old Catalan bookseller of One Hundred Years of Solitude.4 Born in the mountain village of Berga in 1882, he was brought up in Barcelona and established a minor reputation in Spain before migrating to Ciénaga in 1913. Rumours that he was homosexual persist in Barranquilla to this day and appear well founded. Thus it turns out that both García Márquez’s crucial mentors during his Caribbean period, Zabala and Vinyes, were probably homosexuals. When García Márquez got to know him—and it was only briefly—Vinyes was in his late sixties. He was slightly portly, had a shock of white hair and an uncontrollable quiff like that of a cockatoo. He managed to look both intimidating and benevolent. Though not himself a great drinker, he was a great conversationalist and had a delicate but acid humour; on occasion he could be brutally frank.5 He had huge prestige among the group. He knew he was not a great writer but he was widely read and had a view of literature which was both catholic and shrewd. He never had much money but was always relaxed about it. It was Vinyes who gave the group cohesion and the confidence to believe that even in an unknown, apparently uncultured city, with no history, no university and no cultivated ruling class, it was possible to be educated. And easy to be modern. One of his sayings that García Márquez never forgot was, “If Faulkner lived in Barranquilla he’d be sitting at this table.”6 It was probably true. One of his key themes was that the world was becoming a “universal village,” many years before Marshall McLuhan came up with the idea.
Alfonso Fuenmayor, born in 1917, and son of the respected writer José Félix Fuenmayor, was the quietest and perhaps the most serious of the younger members, but he was also the most pivotal. First, because of his direct connection to the older generation. Second, because he was the one who had brought all the others together through his own prior relationships. Third, because it was he who had first suggested to García Márquez that he should move to El Heraldo, where Fuenmayor himself worked for twenty-six years. Widely read in Spanish, English and French, he was myopic in appearance, quiet and judicious, but a well-practised drinker like the rest of them, and a determined lubricator of the collective wheels. He had a serious stutter which rum or whisky tended to ameliorate. And he had a penchant for classical literature and for dictionaries, and was, without doubt, the most genuinely erudite and the most widely read of the group.
Germán Vargas was Fuenmayor’s close friend and associate, born in Barranquilla in 1919. Tall, with piercing green eyes, he was an insatiable reader, but slow and careful in everything he did, and with a hard edge to him. If Fuenmayor, despite his seriousness, was unavoidably bumbling, untidy, funny, Vargas was always neat, white-shirted, prudent—though occasionally savage—in his judgements,7 and reliable. (He was the one García Márquez would later send his manuscripts to for a first impression and he was the one García Márquez would write to for relief packages of books or for money.) He smoked heavily, the blacker the tobacco the better, and he and Fuenmayor, despite being the most sedentary, were the biggest drinkers among the gang, specializing in a potion whose main ingredients were “rum, lemons and rum.”8
Alvaro Cepeda Samudio was the energetic motor of the group, handsome, rakish, with the widest flashing smile in the world, irresistible to women—he had well-publicized affairs with some of the leading female artists in Colombia—yet a man’s man; and, because of his early death in 1972, he has become a Barranquilla legend.9 He was born in the city on 30 March 1926, though he always claimed to have been born in Ciénaga, where the banana massacre had taken place, because he wished his birth to be associated with that tragic historical event in which the abominable cachacos had murdered innocent costeños. His father, a Conservative politician, went insane and died when Alvaro was a child, leaving a whiff of tragedy about the boy, belied by his expansive and unforgettable adult personality. Cepeda was a mass of contradictions which he resolved with uproarious bluster. He looked like a vagabond but had come into money while away in America in 1949–50 and always had close links with local aristocrats, including Barranquilla businessman Julio Mario Santo Domingo, briefly a member of the group and later the wealthiest man in Colombia and one of the wealthiest in Latin America.
Even more suicidally turbulent was Alejandro Obregón. He too was away from Barranquilla when García Márquez arrived and indeed Obregón was in Europe most of the time García Márquez was in Barranquilla; nevertheless he made occasional visits and he was an essential member of the group both before and after García Márquez’s sojourn. Obregón was a painter, born in Barcelona in 1920. His family owned the Obregón textile factory in Barranquilla and the city’s luxury hotel, the Prado. Married and divorced several times, and as much of a magnet for women as Cepeda, Obregón was the archetype of the impassioned painter and by the mid-1940s his reputation was on the rise.10 In the second half of the century he became the best-known painter in Colombia, before the rise of Fernando Botero, and undoubtedly the most loved and admired. His usual dress was a pair of shorts and nothing else. His exploits are legendary in Barranquilla: taking on several U.S. marines single-handed after they had mistreated a prostitute; eating a fellow drinker’s large trained cricket in one mouthful; breaking open the door of his favourite bar with an elephant hired from a local circus; playing William Tell with his friends and using bottles instead of arrows; shooting his favourite dog in the head when it became paralysed after an accident; and dozens more.
These, then, were the central players in what would later be known as the Group of Barranquilla, organizers of the permanent fiesta to which García Márquez was invited in early 1950. There were many others, almost all of them colourful and individualistic. Germán Vargas, writing in 1956 and referring to the group’s heterogeneous enthusiasms, talked about his friends in terms that were “postmodern” avant la lettre: “They can consider with the same interest and without prejudice phenomena as different as Joyce’s Ulysses, Cole Porter’s music, Alfredo di Stefano’s skill or Willie Mays’s technique, Enrique Grau’s painting, Miguel Hernández’s poetry, Réné Clair’s judgement, Rafael Escalona’s merengues, Gabriel Figueroa’s photography or the v
itality of Black Adán or Black Eufemia.”11 They considered friendship even more important than politics. As for the latter, they were almost all Liberals though Cepeda tended towards anarchist postures and García Márquez towards socialist ones. García Márquez would later say that between them his friends had every book you could wish for; they would quote one at him in the brothel late at night and then give it to him the next morning and he would read it while he was still drunk.12
The group seemed anti-bourgeois but really they were more anti-aristocratic; Cepeda and Obregón were linked to some of the most important political, economic and social interests in the city. Their most striking posture—extraordinarily rare in Latin America at this time—was their sympathy for many things North American; while Bogotá, and most of Latin America, was still in thrall to European culture, the Barranquilla Group identified Europe with the past and with tradition, and preferred the more straightforward and modern cultural example of the United States. Naturally this preference did not apply to political questions, nor was it uncritical; but, for good or ill, it placed the group a good twenty-five years ahead of almost every other significant literary or intellectual movement in Latin America.
Of course the posture also made them anti-cachaco, none more so than Cepeda, who was both a great believer in Caribbean—as against Andean—popular culture and a great modernizer. He would later advocate the creation of a Caribbean Republic. In a 1966 interview with the Bogotá journalist Daniel Samper he would assert that costeños “are not transcendentalists … don’t invent mysteries. We are not liars and hypocrites like the cachacos.”13 Samper, a cachaco, had no idea any of his fellow Colombians could be like that and was infatuated with such a larger-than-life personality. Cepeda was one of the first enthusiasts for cut-the-crap North American writers like Faulkner and Hemingway and the number one exponent of the Group’s favourite pastime, mamagallismo.
Their stamping ground was a few blocks in central Barranquilla. García Márquez would later say that “the world began in San Blas Street” or 35th Street as the more recent denomination has it.14 In fact, on just one block of San Blas, between Progreso (Carrera 41) and 20 de Julio (Carrera 43) was where the Librería Mundo stood, the Café Colombia, the Cine Colombia, the Café Japy and the Lunchería Americana; a block to the north stood América Billares and a block to the east was the Café Roma, on Paseo Simón Bolívar. And just beyond was the Colón Park, where Vinyes lived, by the open street market, with a view of San Nicolás church, known as the “cathedral of the poor,” a few steps away from the offices of El Heraldo.15
The Librería Mundo belonged to an ex-communist called Jorge Rondón Hederich and was seen as the spiritual successor of Vinyes’s own bookshop, which had been destroyed by fire in the distant 1920s.16 It was the place García Márquez headed for whenever he arrived in the city and the place where his mother would find him when she came to look for him a few weeks after his arrival.17 If the drinking went on to midnight or beyond, the group would usually adjourn to one of Barranquilla’s many brothels, often in the so-called Chinese Quarter, though the favourite destination was Black Eufemia’s place, then on the edge of the city more than thirty blocks away.18
García Márquez was the youngest of the entire group, the most naive and inexperienced—according to Ibarra Merlano, García Márquez not only did not swear in Cartagena but didn’t like others swearing either. He was never a great drinker and certainly no fighter, though there is evidence that he was a discreet but regular fornicator. Germán Vargas later remarked, “He was shy and quiet, like me and Alfonso; that was understandable because he was the most small-town of all of us … He was also the most disciplined.”19 He was still, as he would be for many years, the one without a house, the one without money, the one without a wife or even, for most of these years, a proper girlfriend. (His semi-fictional relationship with Mercedes saved him from the fate of having to find a real, steady girlfriend.) He was like some eternal student or bohemian artist. He would say later that although he was happy at the time, he never expected to survive it.20
He could not afford to pay a proper rent. He ended up living for almost a year in a brothel which went under the name Residencias New York, in a building nicknamed “The Skyscraper” by Alfonso Fuenmayor, because it was four storeys high, unusual for Barranquilla at that time. Situated in the Calle Real, known popularly as “Crime Street,” it was almost opposite the El Heraldo office and very close to where Vinyes lived in the Plaza Colón. The ground floor of the building was given over to notaries and other offices. Up above were the prostitutes’ quarters, tightly administered by the madam, Catalina la Grande.21 García Márquez rented one of the rooms at the very top of the building, for one peso fifty a night. The room was three square metres, more like a cubicle. A prostitute called María Encarnación used to iron his two pairs of trousers and three shirts once a week. Sometimes he would not have the money to pay the rent, and then he would give the doorman, Dámaso Rodríguez, a copy of his latest manuscript as a deposit.22
He lived in those conditions, between the uproar from the street and the diverse noises, business discussions and catfights of the brothel, for almost a year. He made friends of the prostitutes and even wrote their letters for them. They lent him their soap, shared their breakfast with him, and occasionally he would reciprocate by singing them the odd bolero or vallenato. He was especially grateful when, a few years later, his one-time idol William Faulkner declared that there is no better place for a writer than a brothel: “In the mornings there is peace and quiet, and in the evenings there are parties, liquor and interesting people to talk to.”23 García Márquez heard many illuminating conversations on the other side of his insubstantial wall and would make much of them in literary episodes to come. Other times he would take aimless nocturnal rides with a taxi driver friend, “El Mono” Guerra. Thereafter he would always consider taxi drivers to be paragons of common sense.
He continued with the pseudonym “Séptimus” which he had assumed in Cartagena, and he entitled his daily column “The Giraffe” (“La Jirafa”), a secret tribute to his adolescent muse, Mercedes, noted for her long slim neck. From the very start these columns carried a new radiance, even if—there was still a censorship regime in place—they were often very low on content.
García Márquez nevertheless maintained his political perspective—and impertinence—as far as possible. At the very start of his career in El Heraldo, he showed that he was not susceptible to the Peronist populism which was tempting other Latin American leftists. Of Eva Perón’s visit to the old continent he wrote: “The second act was Eva’s foray into Europe. In an ostentatious act of international demagoguery, she squandered on the Italian proletariat—more as a spectacle than as an act of charity—almost an entire ministry of finance. In Spain the state comics welcomed her with the enthusiasm of magnanimous colleagues.”24 On 16 March 1950 he got away with an article that noted the extraordinary opportunity open to the barber who shaved the President of the republic every day with an open razor;25 on 29 July 1950 he would write nonchalantly, as if he were a personal acquaintance, about a visit to London by Ilya Ehrenburg, one of the Soviet Union’s most effective propagandists;26 and on 9 February 1951 he would state baldly that “no political doctrine is more repugnant to me than falangism.”27 (At the time Colombia was run by a regime, under Laureano Gómez, which was the first in Latin America to restore full relations with Franco’s Spain, despite United Nations warnings to the contrary, and which would clearly have liked to run a similar administration to Franco’s.)
If one of his main problems was censorship, one of his main topics was the search for a topic. And both concerns are humorously addressed in an article entitled “The Pilgrimage of the Giraffe” about his daily chore:
The giraffe is an animal vulnerable to the slightest editorial movement. From the moment the first word of this daily column is conceived—here, at the Underwood … until six in the morning the next day, the giraffe becomes a sad, de
fenceless animal who can break a joint as he turns any corner. In the first place, one has to bear in mind that this business of writing fourteen centimetres of foolishness every day is no joke however temperamentally foolish the writer may be. Then there’s the matter of the two censors. The first, who is right here, at my side, blushingly sitting by the fan, ready to stop the giraffe having any colour other than the one he is naturally and publicly allowed. Then there is the second censor, about which nothing can be said without danger of the giraffe’s long neck being reduced to the absolute minimum. Finally the defenceless mammal reaches the dark chamber of the linotypists where those much-maligned colleagues labour from sun to sun converting what was originally written on light and transitory leaves into lead.28
In many of these articles we can feel not only the “joy of living” but the joy of writing. It was in these early weeks of 1950 that he first experienced this pleasure over a sustained period of time.
Just as García Márquez was getting used to his new life, he received an unexpected visit. At lunchtime on Saturday 18 February, on the eve of Carnival, his mother Luisa Santiaga, who had travelled down-river from Sucre, found him in the Mundo Bookshop. His friends had been discreet enough not to direct her towards the “Skyscraper.” This moment is the one that would be chosen by García Márquez to initiate his autobiographical narration in Living to Tell the Tale. The family were running short of money again and Luisa Santiaga was on her way to Aracataca to begin the process of selling her father’s old home. The journey the mother and her son were about to make was exactly the same journey Luisa had made alone more than fifteen years earlier when she went back to Aracataca to meet a small boy she had left several years before and who had forgotten her. Now she was back again, a couple of weeks before Gabito’s twenty-third birthday.29
Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez Page 18