Gabriel García Márquez (11 page)

Through
El grupo de Barranquilla,
García Márquez met other young writers, including the poet Meira Delmar, with whom
he would share a long-lasting friendship.
¹⁵
The center of gravity and inspirational figure around whom the group revolved was Don Ramón Vinyes, immortalized in
One Hundred Years of Solitude
as
el sabio catalán,
the Catalan wise man. Born in 1882 in Berga, a village in the Pyrenees, Catalonia, Vinyes later became an icon to García Márquez, Cepeda Samudio, Germán Vargas Cantillo, and Alfonso Fuenmayor.
¹⁶
A voracious reader, he was a European expatriate who cut an elegant figure. He had immigrated to the Americas in 1911, arriving in Puerto Colombia on June 16. What brought him to Colombia? An adventurous spirit, no doubt. He first worked as a bookkeeper for Correa Hermanos, a cocoa exporting company. Vinyes wrote an autobiography that includes the following segment: “I arrived in Colombia fleeing from literature. The influence of Catalonia over me may be seen in my verses, ‘
La ardiente cabal-gata
' and ‘
Consejas a la luna.
' I tore up the last copies because they were overwhelmed with pretentious symbolism during an ocean crossing that took me from Barcelona to the Colombian beaches. I had also written a play,
Al florecer de los manzanos,
which was awarded a prize. I had believed naïvely in literature with almost mystic candor. Thus, the disappointment I suffered was violent. Violent enough to make me not want anything to do with it. And believe me, I did need courage. Anyway, on the ship an Italian woman lent me a copy of
The Divine Comedy.
Due to the fact that I would never return the book to her, a new lasting alliance with literature was established.”
¹⁷

Vinyes moved to Barranquilla in 1914, and, in partnership with another Catalan immigrant, Xavier Auqué i Masdeu, opened the bookstore Librería Ramón Vinyes y Cía. Known as a superb
anfitrión,
a host and erudite entertainer, he was an amicable, entertaining host to his clientele, always recommending new books.

In Europe, World War I was raging. At the time, Barranquilla had a population of approximately one hundred
thousand. It was a thriving, if chaotic, city. Vinyes's bookstore became a watering hole for artists and intellectuals. Soon, with the backing of friends and supporters, Vinyes launched a literary magazine,
Voces,
which quickly made a name for itself both in Colombia and the rest of Latin America. In Barranquilla, people referred to the publication as
“la revista de Vinyes,”
Vinyes's magazine. Contributors included Julio Gómez de Castro, José Félix Fuenmayor (father of Alfonso Fuenmayor), Rafael Carbonell, and Enrique Restrepo. Its approach was liberal, cosmopolitan, and democratic: “We battle against the negative, against those that find darkness in the work of art when darkness resides in them; against those that don't accept any other manifestation of sensibility but their own, narrow and dark.” The magazine folded in 1920.

It isn't known exactly when García Márquez met Vinyes, but the encounter probably took place between September 1948 and June 1949, while García Márquez was in Barranquilla. Vinyes wrote in his diary: “A good Colombian storyteller. Gabriel García Márquez. ‘
La otra orilla de la muerte
' is a good story. A brother whose twin has just died. Nightmare, end of story. He has died of a tumor. The putrid matter will reach the one alive. They complemented each other. The story is strong. A rainy night. A leak in the middle of the bedroom, with a drop that falls insistently. A scent of violets and formaldehyde. The persistent nightmare. Pus, night, philosophy.”
¹⁸

In the early twenties, Vinyes went back and forth between Barranquilla and Barcelona. He married a Colombian woman, María Salazar. His bookstore mysteriously burned down. Rather than rebuilding it, he took the opportunity to switch careers and began writing editorials and reviews for the newspaper
La Nación.
He continued writing for the theater. In September 1948, Vinyes met Alfonso Fuenmayor and Germán Vargas Cantillo, who idolized him. They enjoyed many conversations, mostly in La Cueva, which Vinyes recorded in his diaries.
Fuenmayor said, “Vinyes came from rejecting the dull Spanish poetry revolving around Rubén Darío's modernism. He could cite in their respective languages the Latin classics as well as Chaucer, Rabelais, Boccaccio, Villon, Auden or a buffoon from the Middle Ages. He knew where William Blake's madness began and why Picasso had not continued painting boxes for the raisins; he could distinguish fourteen thousand shades of green and he noticed when the mayonnaise had an extra drop of oil.”
¹⁹
Vinyes was a relentless dissident who embraced the ideas of the enlightenment while questioning their ideological dogmas.

Vinyes is credited with reintroducing García Márquez to Joyce, among other writers. García Márquez once said that whatever
El sabio catalán
recommended to him, he would devour.
²⁰
To the extent possible, Vinyes followed the careers of his friends. In 1950, García Márquez, Cepeda Samudio, Vargas Cantillo, and Alfonso Fuenmayor launched the magazine
Crónica.
In
Living to Tell the Tale,
García Márquez relates: “For me,
Crónica
had the later importance of allowing me to improvise emergency stories to fill unexpected spaces in the anguish of going to press. I would sit at the typewriter while linotypists and typesetters did their work, and out of nothing I would invent a tale the size of the space. This is how I wrote ‘How Natanael Pays a Visit,' which solved an urgent problem for me at dawn, and ‘Blue Dog's Eyes,' five weeks later.”
²¹
Unfortunately, no copies of
Crónica
seem to have survived. The magazine was quite important in his growth as a writer. For eight months it featured a foreign short story, often translated from the French by García Márquez. And it was in
Crónica
where he wrote an early piece, published in 1950, called
“La casa de los Buendía”
(The Buendía House), in which he first presented some of the material he would later develop in
One Hundred Years of Solitude.

In the article
“El cuento del cuento,”
García Márquez revealed that his friend Cepeda Samudio, just before dying, gave him the
plot of
Chronicle of a Death Foretold.
Don Ramón Vinyes told him: “
Cuéntala mucho . . . Es la única manera de saber lo que una historia tiene por dentro
” (Tell it many times over . . . It's the only way to know what a story has in its insides).
²²
Vinyes himself died on May 5, 1952. His influence and that of
El grupo de Barranquilla
on García Márquez is undeniable. Thirteen years later, when García Márquez sat down to write the expanded version of
La casa,
he included, in chapter nineteen, a humorous tribute to
El sabio catalán
and the folks of
El grupo de Barranquilla,
in which the last Aureliano meets the real-life characters: One afternoon Aureliano “went to the bookstore of the wise Catalan and found four ranting boys in a heated argument about the methods used to kill cockroaches in the Middle Ages. The old bookseller, knowing about Aureliano's love for books that had been read only by the Venerable Bede, urged him with a certain fatherly malice to get into the discussion.” What follows is a disquisition on the cockroach's survival mechanism throughout history, a message that resonates in a novel concerned with the durability of a species: the Buendías.

The narrative then focuses on Aureliano's friendship with the group. “Aureliano continued getting together in the afternoon with the four arguers, whose names were Álvaro, Germán, Alfonso, and Gabriel, the first and last friends that he ever had in his life. For a man like him, holed up in written reality, those stormy sessions that began in the bookstore and ended at dawn in the brothels were a revelation. It had never occurred to him until then to think that literature was the best plaything that had ever been invented to make fun of people, as Álvaro demonstrated during one night of revelry. Some time would have to pass before Aureliano realized that such arbitrary attitudes had their origins in the example of the Catalan wise man, for whom wisdom was worth nothing if it could not be used to invent a new way of preparing chick peas.”
²³

The use of the “plaything,” (in the Spanish original, “
que la literatura fuera el mejor juguete que se había inventado para burlarse de la gente
”) appears to mirror Cervantes's narrative strategy in his satire of chivalry novels, in which few of his contemporaries emerge without a kick in the butt. Similarly, the tantalizing
mise en abysme
of García Márquez's scene (where he refers to himself), in which fictional characters interact with real people, echoes the recurrent metaliterary devices in
Don Quixote.
Among them, in Part II, are the moments in which the knight and his squire encounter people who have either read or heard about Part I and who compare the flesh-and-blood Don Quixote and Sancho with their literary counterparts. The essence of this playfulness is the art of being a
mamador de gallos:
not to take any aspect of life, no matter how serious, without cracking a joke.
²⁴

When García Márquez moved to Cartagena de Indias, he knew his own career as a student was at an impasse, maybe even at an end. His dream of becoming a writer occupied most of his attention, and journalism was intimately connected to it. “Journalism keeps you in contact with reality,” García Márquez stated in 1982. “Literary people have a tendency to take all sorts of detours into unreality. Besides, if you stick to writing only books, you're always starting from scratch all over again.”
²⁵
To write and to do it well and under a deadline suited his aspirations. Plus, how else could he make ends meet?

In Cartagena, García Márquez had a fortuitous street encounter with the writer and doctor Manuel Zapata Olivella, who took him to the editorial offices of
El Universal,
a liberal newspaper founded just a few months earlier, in March 1948, by Domingo López Escauriaza. The offices were in the Plaza de San Pedro, on the corner of Calle San Juan. In May, García Márquez started writing a column called “
Punto y aparte.
” These pieces were produced rapidly. They had a poetic quality to them, and they explored the enchanting,
thought-provoking elements of daily life that would capture a reader's attention. In total, he wrote forty columns, the last one at the end of 1949.
²⁶

García Márquez led a bohemian life during his Cartagena years. He spent his evenings at the office, his nights in bars getting drunk with close friends, and his dawns in whore-houses. As a reporter, he needed to be able to move around, talk to people, and navigate Cartagena's treacherous neighborhoods, from the poorest to the most luxurious. He not only covered the city, he turned it into a larger home of sorts. With the exception of Aracataca and its tangible influence on the shaping of Macondo's mythical qualities, the Colombian place that is easiest to recognize—and to celebrate—in García Márquez's fiction is Cartagena. In his view, it was a place to experiment with the possibilities of love. For instance, at the Paseo de los Mártires he had spent the night sleeping on a bench while drunk when a biblical deluge soaked him to the bone. He caught a terrible case of pneumonia, spent a couple of weeks in the hospital, and was given a heavy dose of antibiotics, which, as he relates in
Living to Tell the Tale,
were said to have atrocious side-effects, such as early impotence. In his memoir, García Márquez recalls the Torre del Reloj, a bridge that in ancient times linked the Old City with a poor neighborhood known as Getsemaní, and the Plaza de los Coches, the site of a slave market in the colonial period, a reference that appears in
Of Love and Other Demons.
In his newspaper columns García Márquez often wrote about the Plaza de la Aduana, where there is a church that houses the remains of the Spanish priest Pedro Claver, who the people of Cartagena consider a saint.

In 1953, García Márquez worked as a book salesman. It allowed him to travel around the Magdalena River area and the Guajira peninsula. The following year, he returned to
Bogotá and became a staff writer at
El Espectador,
where he started writing
entre cachacos,
that is, for Bogotá readers. It appears that his job at the newspaper resulted from a visit García Márquez paid to Álvaro Mutis, then in charge of the publicity department at Esso, located on Avenida Jiménez. The offices of
El Espectador
were in the same building. His first surviving piece, dated February 1954, is a review of various movies, including
Testimonio de una amante,
starring Edward G. Robinson and Paulette Goddard. Whenever the newspaper was short on
redactores,
or news writers, his colleagues asked him to write a few words. He complied with pleasure. But García Márquez was planning to return to the Atlantic coast. Before he could do so, the newspaper editors offered him a full-time job for a monthly salary of 900 pesos. That was more money than he received at
El Heraldo,
so he decided to stay. He would be able to live better, and he wanted to send his parents some money.

In
El Espectador,
he helped with the daily section,
Día a día.
What distinguished García Márquez's work was the emphasis he placed on film criticism, a fledgling exercise in Colombia and Latin America. But the most exciting aspect, in terms of his literary development, was his interest in reportage. His desire to use his journalistic tools to produce expansive nonfiction pieces capable of looking objectively at a phenomenon in its entirety without sacrificing the stylistic component—in the fashion of New Journalists such as Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, and Norman Mailer in the United States in the sixties and seventies—convinced García Márquez that newspaper serials would bring him more satisfaction than his regular dispatch.