QUIQUE SCOPELL: What else shall I tell you about Gabito? Let’s have another to keep talking about this. (He realizes that the bottle of whiskey is empty. Holding up his glass, he calls to a waiter who is passing.) Hey, hey! The same again. I drink whiskey on the rocks but with ice and a little water on the side . . . When Gabito wasn’t yet . . .
JUANCHO JINETE: He’d show up here at different times.
QUIQUE SCOPELL: The guy has the persistence of that business. He drank with us every day with a notebook under his arm . . . and he sent his manuscript to Argentina, to Mexico, to Spain, and from Argentina they wrote back: “Señor García Márquez, do something else because you’re no good as a writer. This is a terrible novel. This isn’t worth a damn.” And the only one who said the novel was good was Alfonso Fuenmayor. Among other things, Álvaro said: “This is shit. This . . . don’t fuck around.”
JUANCHO JINETE: Gabito would send the originals of the stories to Fuenmayor.
Alfonso was a scholar in syntax and things like that . . . He’d come with his big notebook, and since Alfonso would come wearing a jacket, he’d put the papers in his pockets. I don’t know how he didn’t lose them.
QUIQUE SCOPELL: Every day he’d write a new chapter and then he’d say to us: “Read this.” Álvaro would say: “Don’t fuck around, you have a lot of balls, this is shit!” I didn’t read One Hundred Years of Solitude after it was published, but I read it two hundred thousand times because every day that madman would read it to us; he’d read the damn chapter he had written the night before. It wasn’t called One Hundred Years yet. He’d bring it, along with the same damn fifty centavos he’d gone to bed with. He has a persistence . . . because he insisted, insisted, and insisted until a madwoman showed up, that woman . . . What was the name of that Spanish woman?
CARMEN BALCELLS: Who was Carmen Balcells? I was the same as I am today but less known or not known at all. I was an unassuming girl from a working-class family, educated in a nuns’ school, who wanted to be emancipated and earn her living before anything else. And a friend of mine named Joaquín Sabria recommended a job that he said was called literary agent and he brought me some books and a roll of paper. And I began this job before receiving that mandate from Caballero Bonald with the recommendation of García Márquez.
JAIME ABELLO BANFI: Those years in Barranquilla always loomed large in his life. In 1994, he decides to return so he buys an apartment, and decides to come stay in it for a few weeks. And then he dedicated himself to playing tennis at the Hotel El Prado with my brother Mauricio the doctor, who was his tennis buddy. It was in ’94. A key year in García Márquez’s life. It’s the year when he’s ready to come back to the country. And then sometimes we went out to look around the city. He told me a few things there. We went with his driver. At that time he had a kind of air-conditioned van, sort of silver-colored. The two of us would go. He was taking notes for his memoirs. He went around with a mixture of memories and writing, I think. At one time he talked about writing three short novels, one of them turned out to be Memories of My Melancholy Whores. At that time he had even asked me to make a few inquiries, which I did. He sent me a questionnaire and I went into the periodical archive.
QUIQUE SCOPELL: He always sent questionnaires to me. To Alfonso. Things he wanted to clarify.
JAIME ABELLO BANFI: A questionnaire that asked about when the first ship entered Bocas de Cenizas; like what was the ship’s name; when was the Atomic Match played, which was a soccer game; which people were on the field; what was the name of the then manager of the Junior, the city’s team, and how . . . Very amusing. There was a question about whorehouses in Barranquilla. I was personally checking the periodicals in the Nieto Arteta Archive. And, among other things, I found a number of amusing items that I also sent to him. References to the Diva Sagibi, who was a famous occultist in Barranquilla during the 1950s. I looked at the newspaper La Prensa at that time, and I looked at the other papers, and so I passed information on to him. And then he comes to Barranquilla to take possession of his new apartment. He stays there for quite a few days. I think it was two weeks, something like that, and among other things it was my job to accompany him on that tour around the center of town. And the tour was looking for things (here’s such and such, so-and-so building, the bookstore was here, this was here, the other was here), and taking notes. It was one day. A Saturday.
Saturday at eleven in the morning. From time to time he lowered the window and the people saw him and yelled: “Aha, Gabo. García Márquez!” And he joked back in turn.
ALLIANCE PINZÓN: I am working here at the Romantic Museum in Barranquilla as part of my military service. I give the tours. Here, we house all the important things about the history of Barranquilla since 1620, when it was called Sabanita de Camacho. It consists of twenty-six rooms. The material about García Márquez is down below. We have some things from García Márquez but they are taken out only when there’s a García Márquez event. Then they take out all the paintings of García Márquez and place them there, outside. We have a García Márquez typewriter. The fact is that while giving you this tour I didn’t attribute much importance to him, but there it is. His typewriter. It was his. He wrote Leaf Storm on that typewriter. (The lights go out all over the museum.) Ah, that happens almost every day. Don’t worry. They’ll come back on right away.