Another happy event of those days was that I became the only copilot of Mono Guerra, a taxi driver so blond he seemed albino, and so intelligent and good-natured he had been elected honorary councilman without running for office. His dawns in the red-light district were like movies, because he himself took charge of enriching them--and at times making them crazy--with inspired detours. He would let me know when he had a slow night, and we would spend it together in the lunatic red-light district where our fathers and the fathers of their fathers had learned how to make us.
I never could discover why, in the middle of so simple a life, I sank without warning into an unexpected apathy. My novel-in-progress--La casa--begun some six months earlier, seemed like an uninspired farce to me. I talked about it more than I wrote it, and in reality the small amount of coherent writing I had were fragments that I published earlier and later in "La Jirafa" and in Cronica when I did not have a topic. In the solitude of my weekends, when the others took refuge in their houses, I was lonelier than my left hand in the empty city. My poverty was absolute, and I had the timidity of a quail, which I tried to counteract with insufferable arrogance and brutal frankness. I felt I did not belong anywhere, and even certain acquaintances made me aware of this. It was most critical in the newsroom at El Heraldo, where I would write for as many as ten hours straight in a remote corner without talking to anyone, enveloped in the dense smoke from the rough cigarettes I smoked without pause in unrelieved solitude. I wrote at top speed, often until daybreak, on strips of newsprint that I carried everywhere in my leather briefcase.
In one of my many acts of carelessness during those days, I left it in a taxi, and I understood this without bitterness as one more dirty trick played on me by my bad luck. I made no effort to recover it, but Alfonso Fuenmayor, alarmed by my negligence, wrote and published a note at the end of my column: "Last Saturday a briefcase was left in an automobile for hire. In view of the fact that the owner of the briefcase and the author of this column are, coincidentally, the same person, both of us would be grateful if the person who has it would be kind enough to communicate with either one of us. The briefcase contains absolutely no objects of value: only unpublished 'jirafas.' " Two days later someone left my rough drafts at the porter's office at El Heraldo, without the briefcase and with three spelling errors corrected in green ink in a very fine hand.
My daily salary was just enough to pay for my room, but what mattered to me least in those days was the abyss of poverty. On the many occasions when I could not pay for the room, I would go to read in the Cafe Roma as if I were what in reality I was: a solitary man adrift in the night on the Paseo Bolivar. Anyone I knew would receive a distant greeting from me, if I deigned to look at him, and I would walk along to my habitual place, where I often read until I was startled by the sun. For even then I was still an insatiable reader without any systematic formation. A reader above all of poetry, even bad poetry, because even in the worst of spirits I was convinced that sooner or later bad poetry leads to good.
In my pieces for "La Jirafa" I showed a great sensitivity to popular culture, in contrast to my stories, which seemed more like Kafkian riddles written by someone who did not know what country he was living in. But the truth of my soul was that the drama of Colombia reached me like a remote echo and moved me only when it spilled over into rivers of blood. I would light a cigarette without finishing the one before, I would breathe in the smoke with the longing for life seen in asthmatics gulping down air, and the three packs I consumed each day were evident on my nails and in an old dog's cough that disrupted my youth. In short, I was shy and sad, like a good Caribbean, and so jealous of my intimate life that I would answer any question about it with a rhetorical digression. I was convinced my bad luck was congenital and irremediable, above all with women and with money, but I did not care, because I believed I did not need good luck in order to write well. I did not care about glory, or money, or old age, because I was sure I was going to die very young, and in the street.
The trip with my mother to sell the house in Aracataca rescued me from that abyss, and the certainty of the new novel indicated to me the horizon of a different future. It was decisive among the many I have taken in my life because it showed me in my own flesh that the book I had tried to write was pure rhetorical invention with no foundation at all in poetic truth. The project, of course, shattered when it confronted reality on that revelatory journey.
The model for an epic poem like the one I dreamed about could not be anything but my own family, which was never a protagonist or even a victim of anything, but only a pointless witness and a victim of everything. I began to write it at the very moment I returned, because an elaboration by artificial means was no longer of any use to me, only the emotional weight I had carried without knowing it and that was waiting for me intact in my grandparents' house. With the first step I took onto the burning sands of the town, I had realized that my method was not the happiest for recounting that earthly paradise of desolation and nostalgia, though I devoted a good deal of time and effort to finding the correct one. The problems associated with Cronica, which was about to come out, were not an obstacle but just the opposite: they reined in my disquiet.
Except for Alfonso Fuenmayor--who caught me in a creative fever just hours after I began to write it--the rest of my friends believed for a long time that I was still working on the old project of La casa. I decided it should be this way because of a childish fear that people would discover the failure of an idea I had talked about as much as if it had been a masterpiece. But also because of the superstition I still cultivate of telling one story and writing another so that nobody knows which is which. Above all in press interviews, which in the long run are a dangerous kind of fiction for shy writers who do not want to say more than they should. German Vargas, however, must have found out with his mysterious shrewdness, because months after Don Ramon's trip to Barcelona he told him about it in a letter: "I believe that Gabito has abandoned the project of La casa and is involved in another novel." Don Ramon, of course, knew that before he left.
From the first line I was certain that the new book ought to be based on the memories of a seven-year-old boy who had survived the public massacre in the banana zone in 1928. But I rejected this very soon because it limited the narrative to the point of view of a character without sufficient poetic resources to tell it. Then I became aware that my adventure in reading Ulysses at the age of twenty, and later The Sound and the Fury, were premature audacities without a future, and I decided to reread them with a less biased eye. In effect, much of what had seemed pedantic or hermetic in Joyce and Faulkner was revealed to me then with a terrifying beauty and simplicity. I planned to diversify the monologue with voices of the entire town, like a narrative Greek chorus, in the style of As I Lay Dying, with the reflections of an entire family interposed around a dying man. I did not feel able to repeat his simple device of indicating the names of the characters at each speech, as in theatrical texts, but it gave me the idea of using no more than the three voices of the grandfather, the mother, and the boy, whose tones and destinies were so different they could be identified on their own. The grandfather in the novel would not be one-eyed like mine, but lame; the mother, absorbed but intelligent, like mine; the boy immobile, frightened, and pensive, as I always had been at his age. It was not in any way a creative discovery but a simple technical device.
The new book had no change in background during its writing or any version different from the original, except for excisions and corrections that went on for some two years before its first edition because of my vice of continuing the corrections until death. I had visualized the town in reality--very different from the one in the earlier project--when I returned to Aracataca with my mother, but this name--as the very wise Don Ramon had warned me--seemed as unconvincing as the name Barranquilla, because it too was lacking in the mythic air I wanted for the novel. And so I decided to call it by the name I no doubt had known as a boy but whose magical charg
e had not been revealed to me until then: Macondo.
I had to change the title La casa--so familiar by then to my friends--because it had nothing to do with the new project, but I made the mistake of noting in a school copybook the titles that occurred to me as I was writing, and I came up with more than eighty. At last I found it without looking for it in the first version that was almost finished when I succumbed to the temptation of writing an author's prologue. The title sprang to my eye, as the disdainful and at the same time compassionate name with which my grandmother, in the fragments of her aristocratic self, baptized the desolation left behind by the United Fruit Company: Leaf Storm.
The authors who stimulated me most in the writing of it were North American novelists, in particular those whose books my friends from Barranquilla had sent to me in Sucre. Above all because of the affinities of all kinds that I found between the cultures of the Deep South and the Caribbean, with which I have an absolute, essential, and irreplaceable identification in my formation as a human being and as a writer. After I became aware of this, I began to read like a real working novelist, not only for pleasure but out of an insatiable curiosity to discover how books by wise people were written. I read them forward first, then backward, and subjected them to a kind of surgical disemboweling until I reached the most recondite mysteries of their structure. In the same way, my library has never been much more than a working tool, where without delay I can consult a chapter by Dostoevsky, or verify a fact about Julius Caesar's epilepsy or the mechanism of an automobile carburetor. I even have a manual on how to commit perfect murders in the event one of my defenseless characters should ever need it. The rest of it was created by friends who guided me in my reading and at the right moment lent me the books I had to read, and by those who have made pitiless readings of my originals before they are published.
Examples like these produced a new self-awareness in me, and the Cronica project gave me wings. Our morale was so high that in spite of insurmountable obstacles we even had our own offices on the third floor of a building without an elevator, surrounded by the shouts of the women peddling food, and the lawless buses on Calle San Blas, which was a tumultuous fair from daybreak until seven at night. There was almost no room for us. The telephone had not yet been installed, and an air conditioner was a fantasy that could cost us more than publishing the weekly, but Fuenmayor had already had time to fill the office with his ragged encyclopedias, his press cuttings in any language, and his celebrated manuals of strange trades. On his publisher's desk was the historic Underwood he had rescued at grave risk to his own life from a burning embassy, which today is a jewel in the Museo Romantico in Barranquilla. I occupied the only other desk, with a typewriter lent to us by El Heraldo, in my brand-new capacity as editor-in-chief. There was a drawing table for Alejandro Obregon, Orlando Guerra, and Alfonso Melo, three famous painters who had agreed in their right minds to illustrate the contributions, and they did, at first because of their congenital generosity, and in the end because we did not have a centimo to spare even for ourselves. The dedicated and self-sacrificing photographer was Quique Scopell.
Aside from the editorial work that corresponded to my title, it was also my job to supervise the typesetting and help the proofreader in spite of my Dutchman's spelling. Since my commitment to El Heraldo to continue "La Jirafa" was still in effect, I did not have much time for regular contributions to Cronica. I did, however, have time to write my stories in the idle small hours of the morning.
Alfonso, a specialist in every genre, placed the weight of his faith in detective stories, for which he had a burning passion. He translated or selected them, and I subjected them to a process of formal simplification that would help me in my own work. It consisted of saving space through the elimination not only of useless words but also of superfluous actions, until the stories were reduced to their pure essence without affecting their ability to convince. That is, deleting everything unnecessary in a forceful genre in which each word ought to be responsible for the entire structure. This was one of the most useful exercises in my oblique research into learning the technique for telling a story.
Some of the best ones by Jose Felix Fuenmayor saved us on several Saturdays, but circulation was immovable. The perpetual life raft, however, was the temperament of Alfonso Fuenmayor, who had never been recognized for his talents as a man of business, and with a tenacity superior to his strength he persisted in ours, which he himself tried to wreck at every step with his terrible sense of humor. He did everything, writing the most lucid editorials or the most trivial notes with the same perseverance he brought to obtaining advertisements, unthinkable amounts of credit, and exclusive pieces from difficult contributors. But they were sterile miracles. When the newsboys came back with the same number of copies they had taken out to sell, we attempted personal distribution in our favorite taverns, from El Tercer Hombre to the taciturn bars in the river port, where we had to collect our scant profits in ethylic kind.
One of the most reliable contributors, and no doubt the one who was read the most, turned out to be El Vate Osio. Beginning with the first issue of Cronica he was unfailing, and in his "Diary of a Typist," written under the pseudonym Dolly Melo, he succeeded in conquering readers' hearts. No one could believe that so many different kinds of jobs were performed with so much flair by the same man.
Bob Prieto could prevent the shipwreck of Cronica with some medical or artistic find from the Middle Ages. But in questions of work he had a transparent standard: if you do not pay there is no product. Very soon, of course, and with sorrow in our hearts, there was none.
We managed to publish four enigmatic stories by Julio Mario Santodomingo, written in English, which Alfonso translated with the eagerness of a dragonfly hunter in the foliage of his strange dictionaries, and Alejandro Obregon illustrated with the refinement of a great artist. But Julio Mario traveled so much, and with so many contrary destinations, that he became an invisible partner. Only Alfonso Fuenmayor knew where to find him, and he revealed it to us in an unsettling phrase:
"Every time I see a plane fly over I think Julio Mario Santodomingo is on it."
The rest were occasional contributors who in the last minutes before going to press--or before payment--kept us in suspense.
Bogota approached us as equals, but none of those useful friends made any kind of effort to keep the weekly afloat. Except Jorge Zalamea, who understood the affinities between his magazine and ours and proposed an agreement for exchanging material, which had good results. But I believe that in reality no one appreciated what Cronica already had of the miraculous. The editorial board consisted of sixteen members chosen by us according to each one's recognized merits, and all of them were flesh-and-blood creatures but so powerful and busy that it was easy to doubt their existence.
For me, Cronica had the lateral importance of obliging me to improvise emergency stories to fill unexpected spaces in the anguish of going to press. I would sit at the typewriters while linotypists and typesetters did their work, and out of nothing I would invent a tale the size of the space. This was how I wrote "How Natanael Pays a Visit," which solved an urgent problem for me at dawn, and "A Blue Dog's Eyes" five weeks later.
The first of these two stories was the origin of a series with the same character, whose name I took without permission from Andre Gide. Later I wrote "The End of Natanael" in order to resolve another last-minute drama. Both formed part of a sequence of six, which I filed away without sorrow when I realized they had nothing to do with me. Of those I remember in part, I recall one but do not have the slightest idea of its plot: "How Natanael Dresses Like a Bride." Today the character does not resemble anyone I have known, and it was not based on my own or other people's experiences, and I cannot even imagine how it could be a story of mine with so equivocal a subject. No question, then, that Natanael was a literary risk with no human interest. It is good to remember these disasters in order not to forget that a character is not invented from zero, as I tried to do with N
atanael. It was my good luck that I did not have enough imagination to go too far away from myself, and my bad luck that I was also convinced that literary work had to be paid as well as laying bricks, and if we paid typographers good salaries, and on time, with even more reason we had to pay writers.
The greatest resonance we had from our work on Cronica came to us in Don Ramon's letters to German Vargas. He was interested in the most unexpected news, and in events and his friends in Colombia, and German would send him newspaper clippings and tell him in endless letters the news prohibited by the censors. That is, for him there were two Cronicas: the one we produced and the one German summarized for him on weekends. Our most rapacious desire was for Don Ramon's enthusiastic or harsh comments on our articles.
People proposed several causes to explain Cronica's difficulties, and even the uncertainties of the group, and I found out by accident that some attributed these to my congenital and contagious bad luck. As lethal proof they would cite my article on Berascochea, the Brazilian soccer player, with which we had wanted to reconcile sport and literature in a new genre, and which was a categorical disaster. When I learned about my infamous reputation it was already widespread among the patrons at Japy. Demoralized down to the marrow of my bones, I mentioned it to German Vargas, who already knew about it, as did the rest of the group.
"Take it easy, Maestro," he said without the slightest doubt. "Writing the way you write can be explained only by a kind of good luck that no one can defeat."
Not all nights were bad. July 27, 1950, in the sporting house of La Negra Eufemia, had a certain historical value in my life as a writer. I do not know for what good reason the madam had ordered an epic stew with four kinds of meat, and the curlews, excited by the untamed aromas, shrieked without restraint around the fire. A frenetic patron grabbed a curlew by the neck and threw it alive into the boiling pot. The animal just managed a howl of pain and a final flap of its wings, and then it sank into the depths of hell. The savage killer tried to grab another one, but La Negra Eufemia had already risen from her throne with all her power.