JOSÉ SALGAR: Gabo had a great desire to see Europe, to go and make movies, and write something, and then came the coincidence of the Big Four Conference [happening in Geneva]. Then he obtained an invitation to go and take some film courses in Italy. There were some coincidences and the paper paid for his trip. I don’t know how much because the paper has never been rich, but some possibility, in any case, got him the ticket . . . Nobody was happier at going to see Europe. And he didn’t realize the danger of his being stranded there, no. That they’d close the paper, he had no idea, none. Besides, that enriched him a good deal too. Because it pushed him toward absolute reality.
FERNANDO RESTREPO: Fernando Gómez Agudelo and Gabo meet on the flight to Europe. He was going to cover the famous meeting of Eisenhower and Khrushchev. He was sent by El Espectador to cover the famous summit and my buddy, Fernando, goes to carry out some investigations into European television to try to select equipment and other things, because Rojas Pinilla had ordered him to initiate television in Colombia. Fernando, in his twenties, was the director of National Radio of Colombia at the time of General Rojas Pinilla. The general ordered him to carry out an investigation in order to establish television, something that was accomplished in a very short time, less than eight months. And for that reason he’s traveling to Europe and on the plane he meets Gabo, who is, at the time, a reporter for El Espectador. That was the year 1954. Gabo doesn’t return to El Espectador because he stays. It’s my understanding that he sells his return ticket and stays to live in Europe.
JOSÉ SALGAR: He’s totally fascinated by the new world he discovers: he had already been a figure on a newspaper, he already had his title of journalist, he was going to represent an important Colombian newspaper in Europe, he was already the man and had his image as a writer, a successful writer who had published a novel. Leaf Storm is the beginning of One Hundred Years.
GUILLERMO ANGULO: I went to El Espectador and they told me: “No, he went to Europe as our correspondent and is going to study film at the Centro Sperimentale in Rome.” And I said: “Ah, that’s good, because I’m going to study film at the Centro Sperimentale.” And he left me a letter telling me where I could find him. I could find him on Piazza Italia, No. 2, second floor. It said: “You get there, go up to the second floor, and a lady will come out singing opera with a towel around her head, then you ask her for . . .” I forget the name of the guy, the director, he’s an Argentine film director who then became director of the film school Gabo started in Havana. What’s his name? Well, maybe I’ll remember it soon. The fact is that Alzheimer’s really is a mess. Anyway, when I got to Rome, I went to the Centro to look for him and I ran into the editing teacher, what the Italians call montaggio, and she said with good reason that Gabo was the best student she’d ever had. Why? Because what Gabo does is editing. In his works, no. That is, it’s something he learned from American novels but that he handles very well. He’s a great editor. So then I arrive at Piazza Italia and the lady comes out, and I laugh. The lady is annoyed at my laughing, but the fact is she comes out singing opera with her head wrapped in a towel. I asked for this friend, whose name I can’t remember, who’s a director and was studying film and afterward did a lot of things in Argentina, he even acted in A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings. Oh yes, Fernando Birri. Eh, and she said: “No, he went back to Argentina.” And I say: “And Gabriel García Márquez?” And she says: “Chi lo conosce?” Of course, no one knew him then. Then Gabo sent me a letter through a mutual friend and said: “Look, I had to go to Paris.”
SANTIAGO MUTIS: Because Gabo says Paris, but what did Paris give him? Gabo is pulled out of the Colombian coast with forceps. Gabo’s from there: it’s his father, his family, his town, his people. It’s his friends. It’s everything. No need to go to Paris for inspiration. Gabo goes to Paris for something else . . . What happens is that he gets stuck there, since the paper is closed because of political problems here.
GUILLERMO ANGULO: Our mutual friend Pupa, he sent her to me. “Allora,” the story about Pupa, is very nice because Pupa was in love with a Romano named Romano who played the guitar. And Romano took no notice of her, he didn’t notice her at all. So she decided to go to bed with every Latin American she could find. She was Costa Rican, and they had sent her there so she wouldn’t create a scandal by going to bed with everybody, or at least she’d make a scandal over there in Europe, where that isn’t considered bad. She was the daughter or granddaughter of a former president. He was a very important person, so she was first secretary of the Costa Rican embassy in Rome, but she lived in Paris. Naturally, they hadn’t sent her over to work.
I still have it around somewhere [the edition of The Colonel that Gabo sent me]. On yellow paper. He sends it to me in Rome so I’ll read it, and I told him that I liked it; I wrote to him and made some commentary or something. He said: “I’ll be in Paris. I’ll be at seize on the Rue Cujas.” That was where Gabo lived with this famous lady. What was her name? Madame. Madame La Croix I think was her name. So then I said: “Well, I have to go to Paris. I’ll be in Paris for about six months, so we’ll see each there. I’ll come to the hotel.”
SANTIAGO MUTIS: What Paris gave him was a woman who kept him for a year, the owner of a boardinghouse, an older woman, and a person who wasn’t Paris either. I mean, yes, well, she’s the profound Paris, let’s say, but Paris doesn’t give him Leonardo da Vinci. What Paris gives him is brutal confinement, and he uses that to say: “Well, who am I? What am I doing here?” And it obliges him to define himself. And what he decides to be is what he has always been: a man who comes from Barranquilla, from Cartagena, from Aracataca, and who loves [the music of ] Escalona, who loves Alejandro Durán, who loves La Guajira, who saw the most beautiful women in the world there. That’s the thing.
GUILLERMO ANGULO: The hotel was called Hôtel de Flandre, on the Rue Cujas, and in front of it was this black Cuban poet, Nicolás Guillén. He was exiled in a hotel poorer than the one on the Rue Cujas. He went out every day and came back with bread under his arm, the way all the French carry it, so that you think it’s very strange that they use bread like a deodorant. Afterward Guillén was ambassador in Paris, and of course, there’s a very nice story. They asked him: “Well, what about . . . Diplomacy, so, is it very hard?” And he said: “Yes, yes, yes. Diplomacy is hard, but working is much, much harder.”
So then I come to seize on the Rue Cujas and the lady tells me: “No, García Márquez went for a little trip around the Iron Curtain.” When he made his reports about the Curtain with Plinio. I had decided that I’d never see him again. Then I said: “Señora, I need a room, the cheapest one you have.” And she says: “How long will you stay?” I said at least three months. And she said: “Ah, good,” and she gave me a room on the top floor, which was very uncomfortable because the roof was there. You hit your head when you got up.
One day there’s a knock at the door and I see a guy in a blue sweater and a scarf wrapped around a few times, and he says: “Maestrico, what are you doing in my room?” It was Gabo. And that’s how we met. I have a photograph made there, right at that time.
SANTIAGO MUTIS: He can’t pay and he stays there writing, going hungry. The days go by . . . What could he be to La Croix? Nothing. He was the journalist who’s there, poor, working.
GUILLERMO ANGULO: Gabo was very, very poor then. While I was there, he would come every day to eat with me. He would come, I kept five metro tickets, he was living in a maid’s room in Neuilly, a very elegant area, but in a maid’s room. It was a tiny room with an outside bathroom, and he had a small stove where he heated water and fixed coffee and eggs. That was all he could eat. He was very, very poor. So I invited him to supper every night. He would say to me: “What do you have to read? Remember that it’s a forty-five minute trip on the metro.” I’ve been a magazine reader my whole life. I had Cahiers du Cinema. I had Paris Match. He chose whatever there was and said: “I’ll bring it back tomorrow,” and he’d take a double ticket, round-trip. That was when we became very very good friends.
JOSÉ SALGAR: The other day he says to me: “Tell me about when I went to Europe and they closed El Espectador and I was left stranded and without a newspaper. Then I sat down to tell all my troubles, to tell you all the adventures I was having in Paris in some very long letters, and I ended up begging you to get me the check that the paper was going to send me.” It was the only income he counted on. “Do you remember anything from those letters I sent to you?” And then my answer is, it’s the saddest thing, that like all the things that are sent to a paper and aren’t published, they were tossed out. Please! What that was! Of course, he’s reconstructed all those changes of fortune throughout his work.
But those letters were firsthand and very, very personal. Stupendous letters, because the man doesn’t venture to sit down and write something if he doesn’t do it very well. It’s another mania. He told me he was writing about that time the two of us lived through, and that’s why he asked me for some facts for the first volume of his memoirs. He’s reconstructing everything in minute detail, and he’s surely going to talk about things I didn’t know about.
JUANCHO JINETE: There was a Society of Friends to Assist Gabito, the SOFTAG. But it was a fraud, a fraud because the society never existed as such. SOFTAG collected money to send to him. I didn’t give even five cents. But Julio Mario and Álvaro, they did.
GUILLERMO ANGULO: Then I’ll go on with the story, I didn’t finish telling about Pupa. When I had already met him, I said: “Listen, how did you meet Pupa?” And he says: “Ah, that’s a long story. Look, I was very bad off for money and one day I receive a card from Barranquilla, from my friends at La Cueva, signed by Vilá, by the Kid Cepeda, by Alejandro, it was covered with palm trees and sun, and they said: ‘You fool, you’re there putting up with the cold and we’re here terrific in the sun. Come here.’ Then I said: ‘Assholes, damn it, you could have sent me money!’”
HERIBERTO FIORILLO: They made that postcard here on the bar of La Cueva. The one who knew how to make that sandwich was Jorge Rendón, owner of the Mundo Bookstore. Germán Vargas sent the telegram that alerted Gabito to the existence of the hundred-dollar bill inside the postcard.
GUILLERMO ANGULO: Then after a while he received a special delivery letter from Barranquilla that said: “Since you’re very dense, you surely haven’t realized that the card is a sandwich with a hundred dollars inside.”
QUIQUE SCOPELL: In the old days the image would detach from postcards. The glue was bad, you put it in water, and the image would detach. Álvaro put in the hundred dollars. Back then it was illegal to send money by mail, which is why he didn’t send it on the outside.
GUILLERMO ANGULO: Then Gabo went down to look through the hotel’s trash—imagine, condoms, everything. Searching. He finds the card and there really is a hundred dollars.
QUIQUE SCOPELL: Álvaro put in ninety and I put in ten. And we fastened them inside.
GUILLERMO ANGULO: But it was Saturday and it was the time when the dollar was like black market, it was very difficult because you didn’t change them in a machine like today, and he was desperate because he was hungry. Then he began to ask where he could change money and somebody told him: “Look, there’s a friend of ours named Pupa. She arrived yesterday from Rome after changing her salary, so she must have lots of money, so go see her.”
He left, wrapped up as always, dying of the cold. We were in winter, and Pupa opened the door. A tidal wave of heat came out of a room that was ben riscaldata, vero? And Pupa was completely naked. Pupa wasn’t pretty but she had a marvelous body. And at the slightest provocation, or even without one, she would strip. You’d say to her: “Look, what pretty spectacles. Ah, and where did you buy them?” Then she would strip and in all her splendor she’d show off her eyeglasses. And, well, Gabo entered and then Pupa sat down. “What bothered me most,” says Gabo, “no, not bothered, surprised, is that she behaved as if she were dressed. Very naturally. She crossed her legs and began to chat, and she talked to me about Colombia, the Colombians she knew, and I said to her: ‘Look, this is my problem.’ And she said: ‘Yes, of course.’ Then she stopped with great elegance. She went to the other side of the room, where there was a small chest. She opened it. She took out some money. She said . . . and I saw that what she wanted was to go to bed with me, but I wasn’t thinking about that. What I was thinking about was eating. And she said: ‘Listen, why don’t we have something to drink?’ ‘If I drink anything now’”—Gabo told me—“‘I won’t be able to help getting drunk.’ I said to her: ‘No, no, no, look, we’ll see each other later.’ Then I went to eat and I ate so much that I was sick with indigestion for a week, I had been hungry for so long.”
HÉCTOR ROJAS HERAZO: He’s had great friends who loved him a great deal. Most friends betray you at some point. They do you enormous harm. But friends have been extraordinarily faithful to him. Man, that’s a beautiful essence of a destiny. Why is it that he’s never complained that his friends hadn’t valued him or done something . . . No, no. They always wanted to work for him. That’s indisputable.
PLINIO APULEYO MENDOZA: Every night Gabriel wrote until dawn, working on a novel that would become In Evil Hour. He had just begun when he had to interrupt it: a character, the old colonel waiting in vain for his pension as a veteran of the civil war, demanded his own sphere. A book. He wrote Nobody Writes to the Colonel in part to clear the way for In Evil Hour and in part to exorcize literarily his ordinary troubles at the time: like his character, he didn’t know how he would eat the next day and was always waiting for a letter, a letter with money that never arrived.
QUIQUE SCOPELL: At that time I was living in Havana. He knew I was living in Havana. My father was Cuban. I had my parents as a base in Havana, but I bought pieces of alligator skin here in Barranquilla, took them to Havana, tanned them in Havana, made wallets and shoes in Havana, and went to Miami and sold everything in Miami. In other words, I’d spend two or three months here in Barranquilla, one in Havana, and two or three months in Miami. I left after the revolution, the year that Fidel came in my daughter was born in Havana . . . He knew I was involved with roosters, and he sent me a questionnaire. Gabito personally asked me questions. He called me and said: “Quique, I’m going to send you a questionnaire, man, because I’m writing a chapter . . .” about I don’t know what damn thing about roosters. Then he asked me: “What are roosters like?” “What color are roosters?” “How do you catch a rooster?” “When do you wring a rooster’s neck?” Well, something like two thousand questions.
JUANCHO JINETE: Quique has been a fan of cockfights his whole life.
RAMÓN ILLÁN BACCA: I heard about García Márquez in ’58. I didn’t know Leaf Storm or García Márquez’s first stories, I had no idea. When the Barranquilla Group appears here, I was studying for my bachelor’s degree at a seminary very far from any of these things. Then in ’58 I still remember that Nobody Writes to the Colonel was published in Mito.
PLINIO APULEYO MENDOZA: Nobody Writes to the Colonel was published in a literary magazine without its editors asking for prior authorization or paying for any rights at all: they thought, in good faith, that it was a generous enough gesture to bring out a manuscript turned down by publishers.
SANTIAGO MUTIS: One can’t say that Nobody Writes to the Colonel is a political book though it is an immense denunciation of the deception the government perpetrated in this country. And yet, the amount of humanity in that book is so strong.
RAMÓN ILLÁN BACCA: I liked Nobody Writes to the Colonel, but it didn’t produce the kind of upheaval in me that you get when you’re reading Thomas Mann; it wasn’t The Magic Mountain. I was reading Demian, Steppenwolf. Those were the things I was reading, the things that impressed me.
CARMELO MARTÍNEZ: He hears stories and he takes hold of them and puts them in his books. In Montería there was a woman named Natalia. Lame Natalia. She was lame, they had cut her ankles, she walked on crutches, and when she didn’t have anything to eat, she’d put stones in the pot so the neighbors would say: “Natalia’s eating.” That’s what she told my father; Natalia was a friend of my father’s. Her house was near the cemetery, a little house . . . She would put the pot outside and put in water and put in stones. “So nobody would think that Natalia was hungry.” Do you remember that detail from the book about the colonel? His wife boils stones to save face with the neighbors.
Mercedes Barcha.