Gabriel García Márquez (23 page)

Vargas Llosa, Fuentes, and Cortázar, along with a loose cadre of others, including Juan Carlos Onetti (Uruguay, 1909– 1994), João Guimarães Rosa (Brazil, 1908–1967), José Lezama Lima (Cuba, 1910–1976), Adolfo Bioy Casares (Argentina, 1914–1999), Augusto Roa Bastos (Paraguay, 1917–2005), José Donoso (Chile, 1924–1996), Guillermo Cabrera Infante (Cuba, 1929–2005), Manuel Puig (Argentina, 1932–1990), and, later, women such as Luisa Valenzuela (Argentina, born in 1938) and Isabel Allende (Chile, born in 1942), produced avant-garde work about Latin America that awakened readers beyond their national borders to the political, social, economic, and religious reality of a continent defined by the ghosts of colonialism centuries after it had entered modernity.
¹
El Boom
was as much an aesthetic phenomenon as it was a commercial endeavor. From Barcelona—which considered itself the literary capital of the Spanish-speaking world, especially when it came to the acquisition, production, and distribution of commercial books—came an infusion of refreshing, provocative ideas that were ingrained on a heterogeneous yet hungry readership in the vast Hispanic world.

Bursting with references to García Márquez's early literary influences,
One Hundred Years of Solitude
is filled with
echoes of other Latin American writers and their fiction. In chapter ten, there is an outburst of rabbits, a clear homage to Julio Cortázar's story “Letters to Mother.” Elsewhere, there are characters in Macondo who perform in front of a passing train, just as Cortázar's protagonists had done in “End of Game.” The important Latin American figure, baroque Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier, is mentioned, as are Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa.

In and of itself, the
rezeptiongeschichte
of García Márquez's book is intriguing. Toward the middle of April 1967, Francisco Porrúa of Editorial Sudamericana phoned Tomás Eloy Martínez “in an exalted voice,” asking him to come immediately to his house and read an extraordinary book. Porrúa said: “It's so exhilarant—in Spanish,
delirante
—that I don't know if the author is a genius or is crazy.”
²
Years later, Martínez recollected that it was raining heavily that day. “On the sidewalk of the street where Porrúa lived there were some loose pavers. Trying not to stumble, I got soaked. The long hallway that went from the apartment entrance to the studio was carpeted with rows of papers that appeared to be inviting the guest to clean his shoes. That's what I did: I stepped on them. They were the originals of
One Hundred Years of Solitude
that Porrúa, excited with his reading, had left on the floor. Fortunately, the shoe prints didn't erase any of those sentences that readers of García Márquez continue to repeat devotedly, as if they were prayers.”
³

Martínez recalled that the following day he and Porrúa invited García Márquez to Buenos Aires to be part of a three-member committee that Editorial Sudamericana and the weekly
Primera Plana,
of which Martínez was in charge, organized annually to judge a literary prize. In the June issue, the cover of
Primera Plana
was dedicated to
One Hundred Years of Solitude,
which it described, interestingly, as “
la gran novela de América,
” the great American novel—not as the great Latin American
novel but as the great novel of the Americas, regardless of language. The cover story was written by Martínez himself and is arguably the very first, or one of the first, enthusiastic reviews of the novel ever to appear.

The colophon of the Editorial Sudamericana edition, on page 352, contained the following information: the
edición príncipe,
first edition, was printed on May 30, 1967, by Talleres Gráficos de la Compañía Impresora Argentina, at Calle Alsina No. 2049, in Buenos Aires. A few days later, the novel appeared in bookstores and on newspaper stands throughout the city. It was placed alongside other titles published by Emecé and Minotauro, with whom Sundamericana shared distribution. The publishing house didn't do any publicity, which makes its instant success all the more astonishing.

The publication day was set for May 30, but the original cover, which García Márquez had asked his friend the painter Vicente Rojo to design, was late. Rojo had not received the manuscript in time, so the first edition was printed with another cover. Ultimately, Rojo's cover, which was used for a subsequent edition and became an icon in Latin America when the novel sold millions, would be as recognizable as the novel itself. It is a simple geometrical design that includes what appear to be lottery motifs (four bells, four moons, three stars within squarish octagons); according to some, the design approximates a children's game played in the banana region of Colombia's coast, where the novel takes place.
⁴

Rojo's design is in sharp contrast to the covers of the first edition and subsequent foreign editions, including the American translation published in 1970. These covers, awash in greens and yellows, showcase sunken boats in a jungle landscape or an assortment of parrots, prostitutes, and generals. The imagery showcases the erotic, mythical nature of the plot as perceived outside Latin America. This type of design successfully marketed the novel and—especially for audiences
in Europe—became synonymous with the literary themes of
El Boom.

Rojo's cover was somewhat controversial. Just like other prepublication readers, the artist fell in love with
One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Amazed by its baroque style, he had purposely taken the opposite approach in his design, which, in essence, was uncomplicated. He preferred for the reader to encounter the novel's labyrinthine quality directly. The font he used for the author's name, title (in a slightly larger point size), and publisher was in all capitals and appeared slightly distressed. At the last minute, Rojo opted to invert the E of SOLEDAD, for no apparent reason. That inversion generated much debate. The E looked as if perceived through a mirror. Did the design contain a hidden meaning through which one could unravel the mysteries in the storyline? According to one biographer, Editorial Sudamericana received a number of letters from booksellers complaining that it looked like a typographical error that needed to be corrected in a future edition. Some actually made the correction themselves.
⁵

After much delay, the novel's publication was rescheduled to Monday, June 5. The date didn't carry the weight that it did in New York publishing: for publicity departments, it's the target date for reviews and other media to come out. In Buenos Aires, it was simply the moment the book was made available to readers. On June 5, Argentine newspapers (including the principal ones,
La Nación, Clarín,
and
La Razón
) devoted their headlines to the conflict in the Middle East. The Israeli army, led by Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan, had invaded the Sinai desert, which is Egyptian territory, through the Gaza Strip. There was enormous tension in the air. Jordan and Syria were ready to join other Arab countries in opposition to the Zionist attack.
⁶

The book sold about 800 copies in the first week, which, according to Martínez, was unusual for a novel by an unknown
author. The following week that number tripled, largely due to the
Primera Plana
cover story. The first two printings—approximately 11,000 copies—sold out in a month. By the time García Márquez arrived in Buenos Aires, his novel had been on the best-seller list for a month and a half.
⁷
Martínez remembers that García Márquez's plane landed at 2:30 A.M. He and Porrúa “were the only people in the airport, tormented by the inclement cold of that end of winter. We saw him descend with his indescribable plaid jacket, in which sparkling reds were intertwined with electrifying blues. He was accompanied by a gorgeous woman, of big oriental eyes, that looked like a Colombian-coast version of Queen Nefertiti. It was his wife, Mercedes Barcha.” According to Martínez, the two were ravenously hungry. “They pretended to look at the rising sun coming out against the infinite Pampa, near a bonfire where beef was cooking. And that's how it was. Dawn surprised us in a restaurant on the banks of the River Plate in which García Márquez entertained waiters with endless stories. Neither he nor I have forgotten the name of that
fonda,
which no longer exists. It was called
Angelito el insólito,
the astounding little angel. García Márquez left us hypnotized and exhausted that sunrise. It was the first time Porrúa and I saw the tropic in the act of exploding.”

Martínez's recollection of those days is an invaluable source that allows us to determine the moment in which García Márquez's life changed forever. His description of the Colombians' stay in Buenos Aires ranges from equanimity to exhilaration. “García Márquez and Mercedes spent two or three days in an unfair state of anonymity,” he recalled. Argentine readers devoured the novel by the millions but “had forgotten the photograph on the cover of
Primera Plana
and, thus, didn't recognize him on the street.” That soon changed. On the third morning, the García Márquezes were having breakfast on Avenida Santa Fe when they saw a housewife, coming
back from the market with shopping bags of lettuce and fresh tomatoes, pass by with a copy of
One Hundred Years of Solitude.
According to Martínez,

That same night we went to the theater. At the Di Tella cultural center the play
Los siameses,
one of the best plays by the Argentine playwright Griselda Gambaro, had its debut. We went into the theater a few minutes before the curtain went up, with the room lights still on. García Márquez and Mercedes appeared to be disoriented by the parade of needless leather and shining feathers. I was following closely only three steps away. They were about to sit down when an unknown person screamed “Bravo! Bravo!” and started applauding. A woman added, “For your novel, García Márquez!” Once his name was uttered, the entire theater stood up and ignited in a long ovation. In that precise moment, I felt as if fame was descending from heaven, as if a living creature.

Three days later I lost track of them. Secretaries were needed for the phone calls trying to reach them to be screened and to move him to another hotel so that readers would allow him to rest. The one before last time I crossed paths with him in Buenos Aires was in order to point to him on a map a secret corner in the park of Palermo were he could finally kiss Mercedes without being interrupted. The last time was at the airport, when the two were returning to their home in Mexico City, overwhelmed with flowers. He was covered with the kind of glory that since then has become his second skin.
⁸

García Márquez's experience in Buenos Aires in June 1967 was the beginning of a new chapter in his life. It was there where he acquired his newfound fame, but the shock of
becoming a public figure overnight didn't sit well with him. His natural shyness, his sense that privacy was something to be protected, had been challenged by the insatiable hunger of readers eager to learn as much as possible about his life: his family, his past, his craft as a writer, and the inception of
One Hundred Years of Solitude.

The García Márquezes returned to Mexico, but they did not stay for long. They moved to Barcelona, where the writer hoped to find a suitable, quiet environment in which to write another novel he already had in mind, about a Latin American dictator. It would be called
The Autumn of the Patriarch.
Its plot would fit into what has come to be known in
El Boom
as “
la novela del dictador,
” long narratives with tyrants as the protagonist. Aside from García Márquez's novel, which would be published in 1975, there are Miguel Ángel Asturias's
El Señor Presidente
(Guatemala, 1946), Augusto Roa Bastos's
I, the Supreme
(Paraguay, 1974), Alejo Carpentier's
Reason of State
(Cuba, 1974), Luisa Valenzuela's
The Lizard's Tale
(Argentina, 1983), Tomás Eloy Martínez's
The Perón Novel
(Argentina, 1985), and Mario Vargas Llosa's
The Feast of the Goat
(Peru, 2000).
⁹

In 1967, Pablo Neruda met García Márquez during the poet's brief stay in Barcelona.
¹⁰
In
Fin del mundo,
a collection of Neruda's poetry from 1968 and 1969, he includes, in section X, a bouquet of five pieces that functions as a personal chronicle of the enormous interest
El Boom
writers were generating worldwide. Neruda praises Julio Cortázar, César Vallejo, Mario Vargas Llosa, Juan Rulfo, Miguel Otero, Augusto Roa Bastos, Carlos Fuentes, and others. But García Márquez is the only one about whom Neruda writes an entire poem, a section within the series, never rendered into English. In the thirteen-line poem, Neruda sings to the author of
One Hundred Years of Solitude.
The poem is simply called “García Márquez.”

The poem, although simple, records the epoch-making events of his age. Although it includes some imagery that may evoke the Buendía saga, it isn't concrete enough to allow the reader to understand Neruda's vision of the novel itself—beyond that he celebrates it as being extraordinarily vivid in its depictions of the life of the indigent in Colombia.

There are photographs of Neruda and García Márquez in Barcelona, accompanied by, among others, Carlos Fuentes and Emir Rodríguez Monegal, the latter responsible for the 1966 biography of Pablo Neruda,
El viajero inmóvil
[The Unitinerant Traveler]. It isn't difficult to understand the empathy between Neruda and García Márquez. The latter sometimes said unflattering things about the former—for instance, that Neruda was loyal to his wife Matilde, rather than faithful—but he admired the Nobel laureate and nurtured affection for him as a person. In 1992, García Márquez said: