In the Dictionary of Imaginary Places, first published in 1980, Alberto Manguel and Giovanni Guadalupi catalog the nonexistent geographies invented by literati, such as Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky Wood, Daniel Defoe’s Crusoe Island, Jonathan Swift’s Brobdingnag, J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, and Jules Verne’s Saknussemm’s Corridor. Each of these places is surveyed in a succinct, provocative entry. The following describes Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude:
Macondo, a Colombian village founded in ancient times by José Arcadio Buendía, whose boundless imagination always stretched farther than the inventiveness of nature. The founder had placed the houses in such a way that the inhabitant of each could reach the river and then fetch water with exactly the same degree of effort as his neighbor; and the streets had been planned in such a manner that all houses received the same amount of sunshine throughout the day. For the benefit of the population he built small traps to catch canaries, robins, and nightingales and in very little time the village was so full of their singing that the gypsy tribe which every year visited Macondo to show the inhabitants the newest eighth marvel of the world would let themselves be guided by the music.
Toward the east Macondo is protected by a high and forbidding range of hills; toward the south by marshes covered with a kind of vegetable soup. The marshes rise toward the west and become a large body of water in which cetaceans of delicate skin, with the face and torso of a woman, lure sailors with their firm and tempting breasts. To the north, many days’ march away through a dangerous jungle, lies the sea.
From a small village of some twenty mud and bamboo huts, Macondo became a town with shops and a marketplace. The prosperity made José Arcadio Buendía free all the birds he had carefully trapped and replace them with musical clocks which he had obtained from merchants in exchange for parrots. These clocks were so synchronized that every half-hour the town would shake with a sound of ringing bells and every midday a musical explosion of cuckoos and waltzes would glorify the beginning of the siesta. Buendía also replaced the acacias lining the streets with almond trees and found a system of giving them eternal life. Many years later, when Macondo became a city of wooden houses and zinc roofs, ancient almond trees still bloomed in the older streets, though there was no one in the town who could remember having witnessed their planting.
Among the most notable events which form the history of Macondo is the unusual insomnia epidemic that struck the town. The most terrible thing about it was not the impossibility of sleep—because the body would not tire itself either—but the gradual loss of memory. When the sick person became accustomed to staying awake, memories of his childhood would start to vanish, followed by the names and concepts of things; finally he would lose his own identity and consciousness of his own being, sinking into a calm lunacy without a past. Bells were set up around the village and whoever passed them would give them a tug to prove that he was still sane. Visitors would be advised not to eat or drink in Macondo, because the illness was supposed to be contagious. The inhabitants soon became accustomed to this state of affairs and dispensed with the useless activity of sleep. In order not to forget what the different objects around them were, they labeled each thing with its proper name: “pail,” “table,” “cow,” “flower.” However, the inhabitants realized that even though the names of things could be remembered in this fashion, their utility could nevertheless be forgotten and a more extensive explanation was added on the labels. For instance, a large placard on the cow informed the onlooker: “This is a cow; it is necessary to milk her every morning to produce milk and the milk must be boiled and then added to coffee to produce coffee with milk.” At the entrance to the village the inhabitants erected a sign that said “Macondo” and, a little farther on, another saying “God exists.”
The inhabitants of Macondo also invented an ingenious system to counteract the effects of their strange illness and learned to read the past in the cards, as before the gypsies used to read the future. Buendía also created a memory machine into which every morning he would record the past events of his life. In this way, at any point, he would make the machine work and recall his whole past day by day. The epidemic reached an end when the gypsy Melquíades—who had been dead but had returned because he could not stand the loneliness of death—brought to Macondo an insomnia antidote in the form of a sweet liquid in little bottles. The inhabitants drank the potion and immediately were able to sleep.
Another important event in the history of Macondo was the proposed building of a huge temple organized by Father Nicanor Reyna, who was traveling throughout the world with the intention of establishing a sanctuary in the center of impiety and envisioned a temple full of life-sized saints and stained-glass windows. However, the people of Macondo, who had lived for so many years without a priest, had established a personal contact with God and were free of the stain of the original sin. They could levitate some twelve centimeters off the ground after drinking a full cup of chocolate. Seeing that Macondo was not the center of impiety he was searching for, Father Reyna continued on his travels.
In more recent years Macondo saw the creation of an American banana plantation on its land, and the town was linked to the rest of the world by a railway. But due to a strike, heavy rains and then drought, the plantation was abandoned and it is said that Macondo’s prosperity was wiped off the surface of the earth by a violent cyclone.
Its inclusion in the Dictionary of Imaginary Places affirms that Macondo is not quite a parallel reality that imitates our own world in appearance and sophistication but is an extension of that world, with its own flora and fauna, its continents and nations, its record of social, political, and economic upheaval—in other words, its own metabolism. In their foreword, Manguel and Guadalupi described how they came upon the idea of putting together their encyclopedic volume: “We agreed that our approach would have to be carefully balanced between the practical and the fantastic. We would take for granted that fiction was fact, and treat the chosen texts as seriously as one treats the reports of an explorer or chronicler.” They were interested in places that, while imaginary, actually exist, “that they can indeed be visited and are mapped in the real world, that the authors looked upon real landscapes and installed on these landscapes their visions.”1
García Márquez’s Macondo possesses that immediacy. After reading the novel, one feels that the town isn’t an escapist’s dream but is within reach. And its metabolism, in my view, carries in it the DNA of Latin America.2 Or, as critic Edna Van der Walde put it, its imprint on the region’s psyche has turned “el macondismo como latinoamericanismo.”3 Mario Vargas Llosa, in his doctoral dissertation García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio, defended at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and published in 1971, called One Hundred Years of Solitude a “total” novel. “The process of edification of the fictitious reality achieved is a culmination: this novel integrates in a superior synthesis the previous fictions [created by the author], builds a world of extraordinary richness, exhausts that world and is exhausted by it.”4
In the mid-sixties, García Márquez reached the conclusion that an author and a book are matched at birth. Work for the cinema helped him support his family, but it wasn’t altogether rewarding. He felt empty, in debt to his own talent. For years, he had been dreaming of writing a novel that could sum up not only his childhood experiences but his overall vision of the world. The more he let his imagination free, the faster he realized that no matter how many short and long stories he produced, they were all part of a single book, what Mallarmé had visualized as an all-encompassing volume that mirrored, even competed, with reality in all its complexity.
He told Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza that in general, he thought “a writer writes only one book, although the same book may appear in several volumes under different titles.” García Márquez considered Balzac, Conrad, Melville, Kafka, and Faulkner as models of the one-book author. One of their books often stands out above the rest, giving the impression that the author is connected to a primordial work. He asked: “Who remembers Cervantes’s short stories? Who remembers The Graduate Who Thought He Was Made of Glass, for instance? But that can still be read with as much pleasure as any of his major works. In Latin America, the Venezuelan writer Rómulo Gallegos is famous for Doña Barbara which is not his best work, and the Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias is known for El Señor Presidente, a terrible novel, not nearly as good as Legends of Guatemala.”5
In his mind, his magnum opus wasn’t a summing up. He perceived himself as “a slave to a perfectionist’s exactitude,” as he put it, decades later, in Living to Tell the Tale. He polished every sentence, ensured the arc of a plotline in any given piece was well-rounded, looked at each character as if he or she were an autonomous entity, and reduced dialogue to the bare essentials; these were all representative of what he conceived to be his supercilious dedication as a writer. His book of books needed to be at once sumptuous, abundant, baroque, but straightforward, distilled, and self-sufficient.
There is much debate about exactly when García Márquez started writing One Hundred Years of Solitude. It’s unquestionable that its essence had been with him for a long time. In June 1950, he had published “La casa de los Buendía: Apuntes para una novela” (The Buendía House: Notes for a Novel) in Crónica.6 But no copies of the magazine exist, so until one manifests itself, what the piece contained is the subject of mere speculation. This is the period when García Márquez got sick in Barranquilla; he was writing his newspaper column, “La Jirafa,” for El Heraldo. He asked to take a leave of several weeks to return to Sucre, where he convalesced with his family. His illness was described as pneumonia. But his friends knew he used the time to work on a novel.
“It was supposed to be a drama about the Thousand-Day War in the Colombian Caribbean,” García Márquez said later, “about which I had talked to Manuel Zapata Olivella on an earlier visit to Cartagena. On that occasion, and with no relation at all to my project, he gave me a pamphlet written by his father about a veteran of the war whose portrait was printed on the cover, and who, with his liquiliqui shirt and his mustache singed by gunpowder, reminded me somehow of my grandfather. I have forgotten his name, but his surname would stay with me forever after: Buendía. That was why I thought I would write a novel with the title La casa, the epic tale of a family that could have in it a good deal of our own history during the sterile wars of Colonel Nicolás Márquez.”7
Judging by the description of its content, if not by its prophetic title, it is clear that, seventeen years before One Hundred Years of Solitude was published, García Márquez was already defining its parameters. La casa was his working title, which he used any time he referred to the project. It is important to note that the house is a ubiquitous symbol in Latin American fiction, appearing in a number of novels by or related to El Boom, such as Vargas Llosa’s The Green House, Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, and Álvaro Cepeda Samudio’s La casa grande.8 Yet for years García Márquez has said that the true beginning was a trip he took with his mother on a yellow train back to Aracataca in 1950 or 1951; this journey serves as the opening of his memoir Living to Tell the Tale. It was then, he says, looking at the place where he had grown up, invaded by the ghosts of the past, that the idea of writing a book about the house, the family, and the town came to him. In an interview, he stated: “When I got there it was at first quite shocking because I was now twenty-two and hadn’t been there since the age of eight. Nothing had really changed, but I felt that I wasn’t really looking at the village, but I was experiencing it as if I were reading it. It was as if everything I saw had already been written, and all I had to do was to sit down and copy what was already there and what I was just reading. For all practical purposes everything had evolved into literature: the house, the people, and the memories.”9
Dasso Saldívar, author of the biography El viaje a la semilla, believes that the novel’s inception took place when the movie producer Antonio Matouk proposed that García Márquez and Luis Alcoriza, who had worked as a screenwriter with Luis Buñuel, write a series of screenplays for a regular salary. Ten years García Márquez’s senior, Alcoriza was originally from Badajoz, in Extremadura, Spain. He lived in exile in Mexico, where he wrote the screenplays for Buñuel’s The Brute, The Exterminating Angel, and what became the defining movie about Buñuel’s political engagement, Los olvidados. They both collaborated with other filmmakers and went into seclusion in order to work. They wrote at least three screenplays and came up with a number of other ideas, but the producer kept on rejecting their output. This, Saldívar argues, was the excuse García Márquez needed to focus his concentration away from the uncertain profession of screenwriting and on his magnum opus, which had been taking shape in his imagination for quite some time.10
All in all, the composition of One Hundred Years of Solitude took eighteen months, from 1965 to 1967. García Márquez has told friends, acquaintances, and reporters that it was while driving from Mexico City to Acapulco in his Opel with Mercedes for a family vacation that he had an epiphany. (In some versions of the story, the automobile is a Volkswagen.) In any case, the legend behind the work isn’t unlike that behind Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan: or, A Vision of a Dream,” an example of how the muse of inspiration takes over an artist at a particular time. Coleridge, an English Romantic, claimed to have “received” the poem about the Mongol and Chinese emperor Kubla Khan during an opium-induced dream in the fall of 1787, at a farm house in Exmoor, England. When he awoke, he proceeded to write down the lines, which have since become famous: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/ A stately pleasure-dome decree;/ Where Alph, the sacred river, ran/ Through caverns measureless to man/ Down to a sunless sea.”
The key point is that Coleridge didn’t struggle to compose the poem; it simply came to him from a higher power. The idea is fitting to the nineteenth-century Romantic movement, which perceived the poet as a conduit with inspiration coming from the celestial sphere. As Coleridge wrote, he was interrupted by a knock on the door by “a person from Porlock.” He attended to it, but when he returned to his task, the remainder of the poem had vanished from his mind. He couldn’t remember the rest. “Kubla Khan” was left unfinished, with only fifty-four lines.
It may appear farfetched to link Coleridge to García Márquez. Their historical contexts couldn’t be more different. The Romantic vision of the poet in communion with the sublime belongs to another period in Latin American culture: the Modernista movement. One of its leaders, the Nicaraguan homme des lettres Rubén Darío, described poets as “towers of God.” Darío’s legacy lived on among intellectuals in the early part of the twentieth century. But by the time García Márquez came along, Modernismo emitted only a distant murmur. By then the autor, in a land marked by the wound of colonialism, was a belligerent, an agent of change, committed to giving voice to the voiceless. His inspiration didn’t come from a divine source but from the injustice that surrounded him. His profile was of a committed, nonspiritual, down-to-earth man of the people, a foe of the status quo.
That was certainly García Márquez’s profile, but the legend that surrounds the writing of One Hundred Years of Solitude, one fanned by the author himself—of the artist as an instrument of the muses—is surely Romantic in tone. García Márquez has described the process as less like writing and closer to taking dictation. While he struggled to find the right narrative tone, there is an element of alchemy to his creation. When he was ready to put pen to paper, García Márquez secluded himself from the world for months until the product was ready to be seen.
The García Márquezes lived at Calle Lomas #19 in the neighborhood San Angel Inn. The writer called his study La Cueva de la Mafia. It was a smoked-filled place where he battled his demons.
During those eighteen months, the García Márquezes were overwhelmed with debt. He tapped into savings from his journalism and screenplays. Mercedes was in charge of the family finances and used the scant resources to buy food and clothes for the boys. But when the money ran out, she needed to look for alternatives. Álvaro Mutis, as usual, came to the rescue and lent her some money, as did other friends. Later, García Márquez would recall that he didn’t even have enough to photocopy and post the manuscript. They were $10,000 in debt (roughly 120,000 Mexican pesos) when he finished the manuscript. Mercedes, always a source of strength for her husband, persuaded their landlord to let them fall behind with the rent for seven months. “She has helped construct walls around him that protect his privacy, ensure his creative comforts, and allow him to write,”11 suggested Pete Hamill in a profile.
Even though legend has it that García Márquez remained in La Cueva de la Mafia for the duration of the writing, he ventured far out, to Cartagena, in March 1966, to attend the premiere of Tiempo de morir at the Cartagena Film Festival. He boarded a ship in Veracruz and sailed to his old Caribbean town, where he had found his voice as a reporter. It was an opportunity to visit family and friends, to take a respite from the project. Although García Márquez wasn’t fully satisfied with Arturo Ripstein’s direction of the movie, it nonetheless received first prize at the festival. He traveled to Bogotá and Barranquilla. Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza received a phone call at his office in Barranquilla from García Márquez, who surprised him by telling him he was having a whisky in Mendoza’s own home.12 He spoke with him and with Álvaro Cepeda Samudio about the novel, suggesting it was a departure. “Either I’m going to succeed big time or fall miserably on my face.”13
The manuscript was 1,300 pages long. He had written in eight-hour stretches every day. García Márquez calculated that he had destroyed maybe twice or three times that amount of paper.14 In twenty symmetrical chapters, each approximately twenty dense pages, a third-person narrator—is it Melquíades the gypsy?—chronicles, with frightening precision, the rise and fall of Macondo, exploring its geographical, temporal, ideological, and cultural dimensions. In spite of the title, the narrative time spans more than a century. The Buendía genealogy consists of dozens of archetypical figures surrounded by a cast of thousands.
The need to belong shapes each of the Buendías and their entourage, from Colonel Aureliano Buendía, modeled after the real-life military hero General Rafael Uribe Uribe, who fought in Colombia’s Thousand-Day War, to Remedios the Beautiful, whose beauty is so overwhelming she ascends to heaven. There’s a rainstorm of small yellow flowers, a woman who eats soil, a clairvoyant, and a character obsessed with photographing God. The novel’s matrix is Úrsula Iguarán, a patient, down-to-earth woman, the closest one gets in Macondo to Mother Nature, who keeps the family afloat for almost a century. Afloat but not together: Úrsula’s progeny don’t know how to love healthily.
The word Macondo is the name of a finca, a piece of land in the countryside that García Márquez saw when he returned with his mother to Aracataca on the yellow train. The word was written prominently on a gate. He talks about it in Living to Tell the Tale: “This word had attracted my attention ever since the first trips I had taken with my grandfather, but I discovered only as an adult that I liked its poetic resonance. I never heard anyone say it and did not even ask myself what it meant.” Later, he discovered in the pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica that in Tanganyika, Africa, there are a nomadic people called Makonde. He believed this was likely the origin of the word.15 To what extent did these inspirations define the setting of One Hundred Years of Solitude? Arguably at the most unconscious level. At the beginning of the novel, Macondo is a small, nondescript town on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, comprised of twenty houses built on the edge of a river with clear water running over large stones that resemble prehistoric eggs. The word—Ma-con-do—rings stridently in that opening paragraph: the name and the place it refers seem intimately connected. It suggests a primitive, Edenic quality, as if the place was located at the edge of the world and remained untouched by Western civilization.
Ours is the age of mediated kitsch. A single episode of a Mexican telenovela is watched by far more people on a single evening than all the readers of García Márquez’s novel, maybe of his entire oeuvre. A soap opera perishes almost the second it stirs up its audience’s passion. One Hundred Years of Solitude is imperishable. Yet, when read closely it’s clear that first and foremost the novel is a melodrama, albeit a glorious one, with syrupy scenes of unrequited love, sibling animosity, and domestic backstabbing. García Márquez’s original title could have been Blood & Passion. But isn’t that what all good novels are about, a rollercoaster of emotions that request from the reader a suspension of disbelief?
The novel’s central motif is incest: the Buendías don’t seem capable of targeting their sexual desire at anyone but each other. This Hieronymus Bosch—like Garden of Earthly delights—is narrated in a flamboyant style but with equanimity, as if nothing were out of the ordinary. There are references to buccaneers and adventurers such as Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh, as well as accounts of Spanish explorers and missionaries to the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. One Hundred Years of Solitude is full of tricks. García Márquez himself shows up toward the end, and he makes coded references to his friends and colleagues, including Carpentier, Julio Cortázar, and Carlos Fuentes. The novel may all be a joke, the reader finds himself thinking as the novel reaches its climatic conclusion.
For Spanish-speaking readers, one of the most astonishing aspects of the book is its lavish, baroque language. There is not a word out place; everything is exactly where it should be. This is all the more impressive when one realizes that in the Spanish-speaking world at the time—and to a large extent, still today—there were no such things as developmental editors and copyeditors. Instead, there are correctores de estilo, style editors, in charge of correcting slight grammatical lapses. Their work is unintrusive as compared to what editors do—asking an author to flesh out ideas, rewrite sections, and reconfigure chunks of the plot—or copyeditors, for that matter, who standardize a manuscript by ensuring its orthography and factual components are in place. There were no such professionals in Buenos Aires when the manuscript arrived at the offices of Editorial Sudamericana. What García Márquez wrote is what the reader got—minus a few corrected typos.
In the last chapter of One Hundred Years of Solitude, there is a plethora of inside jokes. “I was having fun,” said García Márquez about the chapter. “It was the end of my eighteen-month siege, and the book was advancing nicely at that point; I had the feeling nobody could stop it, that I could do anything I wanted with it, that the book was in the bag. In that state, I was so happy, especially after the early agonies, that I started to make those private jokes. There are many more jokes in that section that are apparent to the casual reader. Friends see them and they die laughing, because they know what each one refers to. That was a book that had to be finished with great joy—because, otherwise, it is a very sad book.”16
In spite of the Romantic idea of inspiration, finding the right tone for the narrative was a challenge. Iberian interviewer Miguel Fernández-Bermejo observed to García Márquez that “some grunt work” must have taken place “as far as enriching your language was concerned, because in One Hundred Years of Solitude there’s a luxuriant handling of the prose.” García Márquez responded that the novel was written that way “because that’s how my grandmother talked. I tried to find the language that was most suitable for the book, and I remembered that my grandmother used to tell me the most atrocious things without getting all worked up, as if she’d just seen them.”
He realized that that imperturbability and that richness of imagery with which his grandmother told stories was what gave verisimilitude to his. He added: “And my big problem with One Hundred Years of Solitude was credibility, because I believed it. But how was I going to make my readers believe it? By using my grandmother’s same methods. You’ll notice that in One Hundred Years of Solitude, especially in the beginning, there are a huge amount of deliberate archaisms. Later, halfway through the book, I was swimming like a fish in water and in the last parts there aren’t only archaisms, there are neologisms and invented words and whatever. ’Cause I believe the final parts reflect the joy I felt at having found the book.”17
Since its original publication, there have been innumerable discussions about García Márquez’s writing technique. For instance, rumors circulated early on that One Hundred Years of Solitude was longer and that García Márquez had burned a thousand pages of it. “False,” he stated, “. . . but it’s strange how in all legends there are elements of truth. After I finished [it], I threw out all the notes and documentation so there wouldn’t be any trace of them left. That way, the critics would have to take the book on its own merits and not go looking in the original papers. Whenever I write a book, I accumulate a lot of documentation. That background material is the most intimate part of my private life. It’s a little embarrassing—like being seen in your underwear.”18
Unsurprisingly, on a continent where success is a source of unveiled envy and resentment, García Márquez was accused of plagiarism. At a writer’s conference in Bonn in 1970, Günther Lorenz leveled the accusation that One Hundred Years of Solitude was a veiled rewriting of Balzac’s La recherche de l’absolu. In Paris, Marcelle Bargas compared the two novels and suggested that some elements of one appeared in the other. And in Honduras, the magazine Ariel ran an article by Luis Cova García entitled “Coincidence or Plagiarism?” García Márquez recalled that someone who had heard about the allegations sent Balzac’s book to him. “I had never read [it],” he said. “Balzac doesn’t interest me now, although he’s sensational enough that I read what I could of him at one time—however, I glanced through it. It struck me that to say that one book derives from the other is pretty light and superficial. Also, even if I were prepared to accept that I had read it before and decided to plagiarize it, only some five pages of my book could possibly have come from La Recherche, and in the final analysis, just a single character, the alchemist.”
He added: “I think the critics ought to have gone on and searched two hundred other books to see where the rest of the characters come from. Besides which, I’m not at all afraid of the idea of plagiarism. If I had to write Romeo and Juliet tomorrow I would do it, and would feel it was marvelous to have the chance to write it again. I’ve talked a lot about the Oedipus Rex of Sophocles, and I believe it has been the most important book of my life; ever since I first read it I’ve been astonished by its absolute perfection. Once, when I was at a place on the Colombian coast, I came across a very similar situation to that of the drama of Oedipus Rex, and I thought of writing something to be called Oedipus the Mayor. In this case I wouldn’t have been charged with plagiarism because I should have begun by calling him Oedipus. I think the idea of plagiarism is already finished. I can myself say where I find Cervantes or Rabelais in One Hundred Years of Solitude—not as to quality but because of things I’ve taken from them and put there. But I can also take the book line by line—and this is a point the critics will never be able to reach—and say what event or memory from real life each comes from. It’s a very curious experience to talk to my mother about such things; she remembers the origins of many of the episodes, and naturally describes them more faithfully than I do because she hasn’t elaborated them as literature.”19
The accusation of plagiarism ought to be read in context. García Márquez belongs to the generation of El Boom, which was defined by Borges’s “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” a short story structured as an essay that was first published in May 1939 in the Buenos Aires magazine Sur. In it, the protagonist, a nineteenth-century French symbolist, seeks to rewrite—not to copy word for word, but to rewrite without having access to the primary text—Cervantes’s masterpiece, Don Quixote of La Mancha, written four centuries prior and published in two parts, the first in 1605 and the second in 1615. The idea is ingenious: Borges offers a meditation on the art of reading and on the concept of plagiarism. Can an author “write” a book that belongs to someone else? In Borges’s story, that is the deliberate intention. In the end, although the versions by Cervantes and Menard are identical, their meaning varies because of the context in which the respective pieces were drafted.
Borges’s implicit statement is that anything produced by Latin American authors is, in some way, a recreation, a rewriting of a European model. García Márquez isn’t an exception. One Hundred Years of Solitude, while utterly original, fits within the Latin American literary tradition, which is heavily indebted to Europe. Without the European literary models, the Colombian author would never have been able to craft his Macondo saga. His contribution lies in his capacity to upset and expand that foreign tradition, that is, to renovate the novel as a literary genre, infusing it with ingredients indigenous to the Americas. In that sense, its embrace by writers of the so-called Third World is a form of appropriation, a theft. García Márquez’s rejection of the charge of plagiarism is a comment on the novel’s postcolonial nature.
During those eighteen months of writing, Mutis, Jomí García Ascot, and María Luisa Elío visited the García Márquez family frequently. When the three first chapters of the novel were ready, they began to circulate them among friends. García Márquez sent them to Fuentes, who was in Europe at the time and who wrote an ecstatic notice in the cultural supplement of Siempre!: “I have just read the first seventy-five pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude. They are absolutely magnificent . . . The entire ‘fictitious’ history coexists with the ‘real’ history, what has been dreamed with what has been documented, and thanks to the legends, the lies, the exaggerations, the myths . . . Macondo becomes a universal landscape, an almost biblical story about foundations and about generations and degenerations, in a story about origins and the fate of human time and dreams and desires with which men survive and destroy themselves.”20
Some sections of García Márquez’s novel were published as advance serials in periodicals such as Mundo Nuevo in Paris, edited by Emir Rodríguez Monegal; Amaru in Lima, edited by Adolfo Westphalen; and Eco in Bogotá, edited by Hernando Valencia Goekel. There were early pieces discussing the material in El Espectador. The buzz was intense. Mutis stated, “One Hundred Years of Solitude is everything except a novel according to the nineteenth-century literary canon, as established by the principal novelist of that time . . . it’s a masterful book, a book without limits, impossible to fit—happily! fortunately!—any preconceived classification.”21 After reading a section, Mario Vargas Llosa remarked, “If everything is like this fragment, the novel must be a marvel.”22
According to Tomás Eloy Martínez, García Márquez’s friend and a prominent Argentine journalist known for his novel Santa Evita, García Márquez had to sell a food processor “that was his most cherished wedding gift in order to be able to pay the postal charge to send the five hundred pages of the book from Mexico to Buenos Aires.” Yet the claim that García Márquez had barely enough money to send one copy is contradicted by the fact that, according to Germán Vargas Cantillo and Alfonso Fuenmayor, after he finished the manuscript, he sent a copy to his friends from El grupo de Barranquilla. It first went to Vargas Cantillo, along with a request from García Márquez: “I want you to tell me how you find the fact that I have involved people from real life inside the novel. After you both read it, talk to Alfonso and tell me about your discussion.” According to Heriberto Fiorillo, “both responded that they were very happy to be the friends of the last of the Buendías.”23
How many copies of One Hundred Years of Solitude existed? Apparently, there were four. In his article “La odisea literaria de un manuscrito,” García Márquez said that the manuscript he and Mercedes placed in the mail had 590 double-spaced typewritten pages. The paper he used was “ordinary.” He specifically stated that they put los originales [the originals] in the mail. The postage was eighty-two pesos, but the couple only had forty-three. The opened the package they had just prepared, divided the manuscript in two, and sent the first half by mail. Subsequently, they went to El monte de piedad, a pawn shop. They thought of pawning García Márquez’s typewriter but decided against it because it still could earn them money. So they sold some home appliances, returned to the post office, and mailed the second half to Buenos Aires.
Of the four copies, Mutis read the original, the same one the García Márquezes divided in two and sent to Argentina. Mutis had another copy, which he took with him to Buenos Aires on a trip not long after. The third copy circulated among García Márquez’s Mexican friends, and the fourth was sent to Barranquilla, to Alfonso Fuenmayor, Germán Vargas, and Álvaro Cepeda Samudio, whose daughter Patricia, according to García Márquez, cherished it like a treasure.24 That fourth copy, by all accounts, is the only surviving manuscript.
The other three have vanished. And there are no galley proofs in existence. Amazingly, García Márquez told Rita Guibert that “I only changed one word [in them], although Paco Porrúa, editor of [Editorial] Sudamericana, told me to change as many as I liked.” He added: “I believe the ideal thing would be to write a book, have it printed, and correct it afterwards. When one sends something to the printers and then reads it in print one seems to have taken a step, whether forward or backward, of extreme importance.”25
The connection to Editorial Sudamericana was established at the beginning of 1966. Luis Harss and Barbara Dohmann, who had interviewed him for their book Into the Mainstream, recommended García Márquez to Francisco (Paco) Porrúa.26 García Márquez received a letter from Porrúa requesting permission to reprint his earlier books. He replied that he had already made arrangements with another house, Ediciones Era, for reprints, but he offered Porrúa the novel he was currently working on.
In any event, for the short time the manuscript was in transit, he and Mercedes felt at once a sense of freedom as well as a growing uncertainty. She wondered if the novel was good enough, if all the time he had invested those solitary months would pay off. For about two weeks the couple didn’t receive any news. Could the book have been lost in the mail?
The book’s publication was inauspicious. Editorial Losada had rejected it. Carlos Barral, the padrino, the godfather of El Boom, had brushed it aside. Barral had discovered Mario Vargas Llosa and Guillermo Cabrera Infante, which in turn made his connection with García Márquez easy. Barral felt guilty about failing to recognize the quality of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Eventually, he explained that he had been on vacation when the manuscript arrived and the novel was dismissed by a member of his staff. He didn’t have enough time to get to it; Editorial Sudamericana had already sent it to the printer.
Gerald Martin had access to a letter García Márquez wrote to Apuleyo Mendoza during this period. In it, García Márquez says that after years of “working like an animal I feel overwhelmed with tiredness, without clear prospects, except in the only thing that I like but which doesn’t feed me: the novel.” He dreamed of spending quality time writing. He speaks of the early response to One Hundred Years of Solitude with excitement, but also feels that—as he said to Mendoza when he last saw him in Barranquilla—he “embarked on an adventure that could as easily be catastrophic as successful.” But he didn’t have much choice other than to embrace his dream. “My conclusion from all of this is that when you have a topic that pursues you it starts growing in your head for a long time and the day it explodes you have to sit down at the typewriter or run the risk of murdering your wife.”27