PLINIO APULEYO MENDOZA: When I decided to leave Venezuela and return to Colombia, I intended to become fully connected to political activity inspired by what was then, for me, the fascinating Cuban experience.
Gabo planned to go to Mexico and continue writing.
We said goodbye one night at the door to his house in the San Bernardino district in Caracas; our Venezuelan experience was coming to an end.
We didn’t know that in less than a month we’d be reunited in Bogotá. Thanks to Cuba.
GUILLERMO ANGULO: One day a Mexican came to Bogotá. Gabo has never told this because he says it’s more important to say it was a guerrilla who came. He’s been cultivating his image. But the truth is this: a Mexican came whom I knew—I had lived in Mexico for five years—and he called me. He was in the Hotel Tequendama, and I said to him: “No, bro, you come stay in my house.” I was a bachelor. I brought him home, and the guy, whose name is Slim Rodríguez, always had his valise with him. He went to the bathroom with the valise. He never left the valise. And I thought: “A novel.” Of course, who’s going to leave a novel lying around? And I said to him: “Listen, why don’t you ever put that fucking suitcase down?” “Because I’m carrying dough.” (He was carrying dough. Dough!) He was carrying money to set up Prensa Latina. And he was carrying a sum that today may even sound ridiculous but which was a lot of money then. Ten thousand dollars. “Wow, what? What’s that for?” “To set up Prensa Latina here and you’ll be the first manager.” I told him I’m not a journalist or a manager. “You’re the only person I know. The only one I have confidence in, so you’ll be the first manager.” So then I started Prensa Latina. Afterward I met Fidel and I said to him: “You people owe me a statue because I’m the founder.” Fidel thought that was funny. Then I called these two guys [Plinio and Gabo] and said to them: “Look, this is for you two. This isn’t for me. What should I do?” That was when the two of them began working for Prensa Latina.
PLINIO APULEYO MENDOZA: I called Caracas: “Listen, Gabo, there’s something important happening here that I can’t talk about on the phone. Come to Bogotá. A press office, I’ll tell you all about it . . . we’ll be the bosses.”
I was already talking like the Mexican.
In four or five days, Gabo and Mercedes come down the airplane steps. Mercedes was expecting.
RAFAEL ULLOA: That Castro loves him to death.
PLINIO APULEYO MENDOZA: Of course, that period has a dramatic connotation seen from the perspective of the years, when one looks at the implications of the Cuban Revolution, its illusions, the rhetorical notions that were developed around it (Régis Debray’s unfortunate “foco theory”), the influence they had on many individual destinies that touched ours.
But on the margin of this political excitement we led an organized, easy life, circling around our daily news dispatches, and in the apartment of Gabo and Mercedes, where I, still a bachelor, was a daily guest: at breakfast, lunch, and supper.
With Gabo we had bought identical blue raincoats, and everywhere (editorial rooms, cafés, the houses of mutual friends) they would see us come in at the same time, like two boys dressed by the same mother.
When Gabo (who, with admirable discipline, was writing the final version of In Evil Hour at night) stayed home working, I would take Mercedes to the movies.
GUILLERMO ANGULO: Afterward they went to Cuba to work there.
PLINIO APULEYO MENDOZA: Still, each time I returned to Havana (García Márquez would go later), the growing intervention in everything by party members was revealed to me and the demarcation between them and the rest of the agency reporters was accentuated.
Now they were organizing vague indoctrination meetings and letting the idea of collective management of Prensa Latina circulate in the corridors.
JUANCHO JINETE: A Communist from Prensa Latina kept showing up in Barranquilla from time to time.
PLINIO APULEYO MENDOZA: The appearance in Bogotá of one José Luis Pérez as a special visitor from the agency was the first alarm signal for García Márquez and for me.
GUILLERMO ANGULO: Then Gabo leaves for New York.
PLINIO APULEYO MENDOZA: Gabo returned after a few weeks of training in Havana. Instead of Montreal, he’d be sent to New York. He was boiling over with information . . .
GUILLERMO ANGULO: The gusanos begin to call Gabo to accuse him. His first child had just been born and then, too, Gabo is very fearful.
PLINIO APULEYO MENDOZA: In case of any attack, Gabriel worked with an iron bar within reach.
GUILLERMO ANGULO: Plinio retires.
PLINIO APULEYO MENDOZA: Mercedes turns to me with a smile, while the child she is holding onto jumps around beside her:
“So then, compadre, the Reds took over the Prensa?”
“They did, comadre.”
When I tell her of my resignation, she, placid and calm as always, remarks:
“Gabito already wrote his. But he was waiting for you to turn it in.”
GUILLERMO ANGULO: He travels to Mexico City by land. But it felt like he had already seen that, because Leaf Storm is like Faulkner. It’s As I Lay Dying. He sees the true Faulkner. He sees him in images. But he already knows Faulkner as a twin soul. I think he’s his most important influence from a technical point of view because afterward he invents an entire world. I don’t know whether he helped or harmed literature, because although Gabo is very good, Gabo’s imitators are very bad.
PLINIO APULEYO MENDOZA: Now Gabo intends to finally carry out his long-standing and postponed project of going to live in Mexico City. Without any money, it’s an adventure as mad as the one years earlier, when he decided to stay in Paris without the means to do so.
WILLIAM STYRON: Well, I think that’s the reason for his great admiration for Faulkner, because Faulkner without the tag of magic realism nonetheless visualized and created an entire world, a universe based on an actual world, which was the Mississippi he made his own and called Yoknapatawpha. Macondo is the equivalent of Yoknapatawpha. And I think that was an important contribution of Faulkner to Gabo’s own sense of a literary creation.
EMMANUEL CARBALLO: Well, how did Gabo get to Mexico City? I’m thinking Álvaro Mutis must have said to him: “Come to Mexico City.” Mutis came to Mexico City running from a fraud he had committed in Colombia, and here in Mexico he was in Lecumberri.* He has a book about Lecumberri, which is the most famous prison in Mexico. When he got out, he worked in television. He was the voice of a character in a very famous North American series. When Gabo arrived in Mexico City, he went to see his friend, who had been his friend in Colombia and introduced him to all of us who were writing literature at the time.
DANIEL PASTOR: It was The Untouchables. A black-and-white television program about Eliot Ness’s team, the ones who put Al Capone in prison. Mutis was the off-camera voice that came on at the start of the program.
EMMANUEL CARBALLO: His voice was very famous and he earned money and prestige. He met the most interesting people in Mexico. When Gabo arrived, Mutis introduced him to everyone.
* In 1958, at age thirty-six, Álvaro Mutis spent fifteen months in prison in Mexico City, facing embezzlement charges that were later dropped. The Mexican magazine Letras Libres wrote about Mutis’s experience: “He came out of Lecumberri, which had imprisoned such others as the murderer of Trotsky, Ramón Mercader, the painter David Alfaro Siqueiros, the writer José Revueltas, the novelist José Agustín, and William Burroughs, a different man, convinced that ‘we may not judge our fellow man,’ an essential certainty that guided the voyages and efforts of his literary alter ego, Macqroll, the lone sailor.”