Dear Readers: One of the pleasures of retirement is the freedom to do exactly as I choose. Gabriel García Márquez died almost a week ago. The Mexican press has been full of personal recollections of the "best South American novelist of all time," but most are merely anecdotes relating "this is how I met Gabo." Many mention Gabo's wit and conversational skill, but none illustrate it.
Ariel Dorfman's piece is different. A renowned literary personage himself, Dorfman had known Gabo for decades, and he set out to write his piece with a specific literary purpose in mind; specifically, "... to provide some clues about how Gabo's life and his art mutually fed each other, some clues about the man behind so many words that are never going to perish."
Along the way, Dorfman has produced a literary piece in its own right. The writing is simply superb. Translating it into English was a delightful challenge. I present it to you with the hope that you will enjoy the many levels of pleasure that it has delivered to me.
- Jenny
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| Admirer Paints Gabo's Portrait in his Birthplace, Aracataca, Colombia (Photo: AP) |
Mexico City - At the age of 25, it was my privilege to be one of the first readers of One Hundred Years of Solitude. In 1967 I was the literary critic for Ercilla, the Chilean magazine. Because I had reviewed with great enthusiasm La mala hora [The Evil Hour] and El coronel no tiene quien le escriba [The Colonel Doesn't Have Anyone Who Might Write to Him], the head of the culture section had no doubt that I would handle what was already rumored to be a great work of García Márquez.
Nothing, however, that I had previously read or written prepared me for what happened when I opened that South American first edition (on the cover I still have the ironic, stamped words NO COMMERCIAL VALUE on the book [Published May 1967] that would come to have more commercial value—and not just commercial value—than any other book in the history of our South American continent).
I had already announced to my wife, Angélica, not to rely on me until I had finished the novel—an attitude that was, in a modest way, a pale imitation of Gabo himself. According to persistent rumors, he had been locked up for eighteen months in order to write, while his beloved Mercedes pawned or sold all the family's assets.
My reading certainly took less time than that. I began to read in the evening, and I read until dawn. Much like the last of the Buendía dynasty, I could not help but devour the text with the hope that the world that had begun with a little boy playing with a magical piece of ice in Paradise would not succumb to that other constellation of ice that is death. I despaired at this possible outcome because I realized how the extinction was going to haunt every generation of the family, every act of joy and exuberance, and I feared that not just that family line, but the same lineage throughout Latin America would end up being devastated by the whirlwind of history.
My only problem upon arriving at the last sentence—where reading and action, history and fiction, subject and object were fused—was that then awaiting me was the titanic task of writing the first chronicle on the planet—may Gabo forgive me if I exaggerate—about that more than titanic work.
Destiny brought me (to use a phrase that García Márquez himself showed us) a sad solution: on this same day, I discovered that my interview with Nicolás Guillén for Ercilla had been censored; thus, my resignation at the magazine freed me of the need to write the review. I could become an ordinary reader of this masterpiece, and I did not have to write a thousand words about those hundred years of solitude.
My only problem upon arriving at the last sentence—where reading and action, history and fiction, subject and object were fused—was that then awaiting me was the titanic task of writing the first chronicle on the planet—may Gabo forgive me if I exaggerate—about that more than titanic work.
Destiny brought me (to use a phrase that García Márquez himself showed us) a sad solution: on this same day, I discovered that my interview with Nicolás Guillén for Ercilla had been censored; thus, my resignation at the magazine freed me of the need to write the review. I could become an ordinary reader of this masterpiece, and I did not have to write a thousand words about those hundred years of solitude.
When I related this story to Gabo in Barcelona several years later—in March of 1974, six months after the coup against Salvador Allende—, he laughed ironically and said that it was fortunate for me and for him that I had become, with no other choice, an ordinary reader, since it was for them that he wrote and not for the critics, who always looked as foolish as a fifth foot on every cat:
"... and, you know," this great storyteller told me, "sometimes cats have no more than four feet."
At the conclusion of that neverending lunch, I had another sample of how Gabo, lover of myths and excesses, is always rooted in the daily and trivial.
"I'm going to take you," he said, "to where Mario is"—referring to Mario Vargas Llosa [Peruvian writer, politician, journalist essayist, college professor; 2010 recipient of Nobel Prize in Literature], who was, by then, his best friend, "because we need to converse with him about resistance to Pinochet."
When I answered that it was a long way to the house of the author of La ciudad y los perros [The City and the Dogs], Gabo put me in his car, assuring me that
"if I had not been a writer, I would have wanted to be a taxi driver. Instead of sitting behind a desk day and night, I would be cruising the streets and listening to the stories of the passengers."Ten days later I discovered another of his traits. We were in Rome for the Russell Tribunal, and Julio Cortázar [seminal Argentine novelist, short story writer, essayist] brought me to a get together with Gabo and a number of other artists in solidarity with Chile in a trattoria on the Piazza Navona. For a young thirty-one year old writer, this was a dream: Roberto Matta [renowned Chilean painter], Glauber Rocha [influential Brazilian filmmaker], Rafael Alberti [Spanish poet, called 'one of the greatest literary figures' of the Silver Age of Spanish literature] and his wife Maria Teresa who, at the end of the night, announced that she was about to enter Madrid before Franco died, mounted naked, she swore, on a horse as white as the hairs on her husband's head.
My fascination was somewhat diminished by the certainty that my impoverished exile's wallet was empty. I could not afford my share of the considerable bill. How did Gabo know that this was worrying me? Before the bill arrived, he came up to me, winked and confided that he had already paid everything.
In the years that followed, he would show a similar generosity with more important and urgent causes. In the constant conspiracy against Pinochet and so many other Latin American dictatorships, he never refused to offer support, advice, contacts, even when it occurred to me, in a bizarre and reckless manner, to get hold of a merchant ship in which we could bring aboard all the exiled Chilean musicians, artists and writers and set out from Valparaiso to challenge the generals and prove that we had a right to live in our country.
García Márquez, who usually had his feet on the ground, was enthusiastic about this incredible folly, which was worthy of his own literary inventions, and arranged an audience with Olof Palme. Angélica and I set out for Stockholm, where the Swedish Prime Minister listened to me with Scandinavian equanimity, telling me that he would contact me if he believed that my plan could succeed. It was a call, by the way, that—quite rightly—never came.
"Let's hope, then," Gabo said, "that Mitterrand might win, and we'll get the ship there."But in 1981 when that happened, I had come to my senses, given up such desires, and Gabo and his family were no longer living in Europe, but had settled in Mexico.
I transcribe these memories now, now that the hurricane that wiped out Macondo has come for him. Now that we can no longer talk and laugh and scheme. I transcribe them because I feel that perhaps they may contain some clues about how his life and his art mutually fed each other, some clues about the man behind so many words that are never going to perish.
If I am left with a personal story of him, it is this. One day we were having lunch at his home on the Pedregal de San Ángel in Mexico City, and Gabo said to another guest:
"You know, Ariel called me at three in the morning to tell me some project against Pinochet. And you know what? He called me Collect!"When the guest left, I told Gabo that it was certainly true that I had called him at three in the morning and at other soulless hours, but he knew very well that I had never called him collect. At that time, Angélica and I were living on practically nothing, without anywhere to drop either alive or dead, but we always paid for those calls ourselves.
Gabo looked at me very seriously and immediately smiled:
"Forgive me if I erred, but you have to admit that it is much more interesting and amusing if you called me Collect."Of course, I forgave him, I return to forgive him. The root of his genius was to take something real, very common and ordinary and, almost journalistically, to exaggerate it up to the colossal. The same as Colombia, the same as our América [South America], the same as our incredible humanity that no one except him, the taxi driver of eternity, knew how to conquer and express and return to the immortal. Spanish original
*Ariel Dorfman is an Argentine-Chilean novelist, playwright, essayist, academic, and human rights activist. A U.S. citizen since 2004, since 1985 he has been a professor of literature and Latin American Studies at Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina.
Related translation:
too long
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