Living to Tell the Tale (58 page)

I do not remember a more intense emotion. Editorial Losada was one of the best in Buenos Aires, filling the publishing
vacuum created by the Spanish Civil War. Its editors nourished us on a daily basis with new books that were so interesting and unusual we almost had no time to read them. Its salespeople were punctual in
bringing us the books we had ordered, and we welcomed them as messengers of joy. The mere idea that one of them might publish
Leaf Storm
almost drove me mad. As soon as I said goodbye to Mutis in a plane filled with the correct fuel, I ran to the paper to do a thorough revision of the original.

In the days that followed I dedicated all my time to the frantic examination of a text that very well
might have gotten away from me. There were no more than one hundred twenty double-spaced pages, but I made so many adjustments, changes, and inventions that I never knew if I left it better or worse. Germán and Alfonso reread the most critical parts and had the kindness not to make irredeemable observations. In that state of apprehension I revised the final version, my heart in my hand, and made
the serene decision not to publish it. In the future, this would become a mania. Once I felt satisfied with a completed book, I was left with the devastating impression that I would not be able to write another one that was better.

It was my good fortune that Álvaro Mutis suspected the reason for my delay, and he flew to Barranquilla to take the only clean copy and have it sent to Buenos Aires,
not giving me time for a final reading. Commercial photocopiers did not exist yet, and the only thing I had was the first rough draft corrected in the margins and between the lines with inks in different colors to avoid confusion. I threw it in the trash and did not recover my tranquility for the two long months it took to receive their answer.

One day I was handed a letter at
El Heraldo
that
had been mislaid on the desk of the editor-in-chief. The imprint of Editorial Losada of Buenos Aires froze my heart, but I was too shy to open it there and I went to my private cubicle. And so I faced without witnesses the unadorned notification that
Leaf Storm
had been rejected. I did not have to read the entire verdict to feel its brutal impact and know I was going to die then and there.

The
letter was the supreme judgment of Don Guillermo de Torre, president of the editorial board, and it was supported by a series of simple arguments resonant with the diction, emphasis, and smugness of white men from Castilla. The only consolation was the surprising final concession: “One must recognize in the author his excellent gifts as an observer and a poet.” Even today, however, it surprises
me that beyond my own consternation and shame, even the most acidic objections seemed relevant.

I never made a copy of the letter or knew what happened to it after it circulated for several months among my friends in Barranquilla, who summoned all kinds of soothing reasons to try to console me. Of course, fifty years later, when I tried to obtain a copy in order to document these memoirs, not
a trace of it was to be found in the publishing house in Buenos Aires. I do not remember if it was published as a news item, though I never intended it to be, but I do know that I needed a long time to recover my spirits after losing my temper and writing a furious letter that was published without my authorization. This breach of trust caused me even greater sorrow, because my final reaction had
been to take advantage of what was useful to me in the verdict, correct everything that in my judgment was correctable, and move ahead.

The opinions of Germán Vargas, Alfonso Fuenmayor, and Álvaro Cepeda gave me the greatest encouragement. I found Alfonso at a food stand in the public market, where he had discovered an oasis for reading in the bustle of trade. I asked him if I should leave my
novel as it was or try to rewrite it with a different structure, because it seemed to me that the second half lost the tension of the first. Alfonso listened with a certain impatience, and gave me his verdict.

“Look, Maestro,” he said at last, like a complete teacher, “Guillermo de Torre is as respectable as he believes himself to be, but I don’t think he’s very up-to-date on the modern novel.”

In other conversations that I had at the time, I was comforted by the precedent of Guillermo de Torre rejecting the original of Pablo Neruda’s
Residence on Earth,
in 1927. Fuenmayor
thought my novel might have met a different fate if the reader had been Jorge Luis Borges, but then the devastation would have been worse if he had rejected it too.

“So don’t fuck around anymore,” Alfonso concluded.
“Your novel is as good as we thought it was, and the only thing you have to do, starting right now, is to go on writing.”

Germán—faithful to his prudent ways—did me the favor of not exaggerating. He thought the novel was not so bad that it should not be published on a continent where the genre was in crisis, and not so good that it was worth provoking an international scandal in which the only
loser would be an unknown novice writer. Álvaro Cepeda summarized the opinion of Guillermo de Torre with another of his florid memorials:

“It’s just that Spaniards are very stupid.”

When I realized I did not have a clean copy of my novel, Editorial Losada let me know by a third or fourth party that it was their practice not to return originals. It was a stroke of luck that Julio César Villegas
had made a copy before forwarding mine to Buenos Aires, and he sent it to me. Then I began another correction based on my friends’ conclusions. I eliminated a long episode in which the female protagonist contemplated a three-day rainstorm from the hallway of the begonias, which I later turned into the “Monologue of Isabel Watching It Rain in Macondo.” I dropped a superfluous dialogue between the
grandfather and Colonel Aureliano Buendía a short time before the slaughter of the banana workers, and some thirty pages that interfered in form and substance with the unified structure of the novel. Almost twenty years later, when I believed they were forgotten, parts of those fragments helped me sustain nostalgic memories throughout the length and breadth of
One Hundred Years of Solitude.

I had almost overcome the blow when the news was published that the Colombian novel selected instead of mine for publication by Editorial Losada was
Christ with His Back Turned,
by Eduardo Caballero Calderón. It was an error, or a truth falsified in bad faith, because it was not a question of a contest but rather a scheme of Editorial Losada to enter the Colombian market with Colombian authors,
and my novel was
not rejected in competition with any other but because Don Guillermo de Torre did not consider it publishable.

My consternation was greater than I recognized at the time, and I did not have the courage to endure it if I did not convince myself. And so I dropped in unannounced to see my childhood friend, Luis Carmelo Correa, on the Sevilla banana plantation—a few leagues from
Cataca—where he worked as a part-time comptroller and fiscal auditor. We spent two days recapitulating once again our shared childhood, as we always did. His memory, his intuition, and his frankness were so revelatory that they caused a certain terror in me. As we spoke, he used his toolbox to make repairs on the house, and I listened to him from a hammock rocked by the tenuous breeze of the plantations.
Nena Sánchez, his wife, weak with laughter in the kitchen, corrected our wild ideas and lapses of memory. At last, in a stroll of reconciliation through the deserted streets of Aracataca, I understood to what extent I had recovered my good spirits, and I had no doubt at all that
Leaf Storm
—rejected or not—was the book I had intended to write after the trip with my mother.

Encouraged by that experience,
I went to find Rafael Escalona in his paradise in Valledupar, trying to dig into my world down to the roots. It did not surprise me, because it was as if I had already lived everything I found, everything that happened, all the people I encountered, not in another life but in the one that I was living. Later, on one of my countless trips, I met Colonel Clemente Escalona, Rafael’s father,
who impressed me from the first with his dignity and old-fashioned patriarch’s bearing. He was as slim and straight as a reed, with weather-beaten skin, prominent bones, and perfect dignity. From the time I was very young I had been pursued by the subject of the anguish and decorum with which my grandparents waited until the end of their long lives for the veteran’s pension. But four years later,
when at last I was writing the book in an old hotel in Paris, the image I always had in mind was not my grandfather but Don Clemente Escalona as the physical replica of the colonel who had nobody to write to him.

I learned from Rafael Escalona that Manuel Zapata Olivella
had set up practice as a doctor to the poor in the town of La Paz, a few kilometers from Valledupar, and that was where we
went. We arrived at dusk, and there was something in the air that made it difficult to breathe. Zapata and Escalona reminded me that only twenty days earlier the town had been the victim of an assault by the police who were sowing terror in the region in order to impose the will of the government. It was a night of horror. They killed at random and set fire to fifteen houses.

Because of the iron
censorship we had not learned the truth. But at the time I did not even have the opportunity to imagine it. Juan López, the best musician in the region, had left never to return after that black night. In his house we asked Pablo, his younger brother, to play for us, and with intrepid simplicity he said:

“I’ll never sing again in my life.”

Then we learned that not only he but all the musicians
in the town had put away their accordions, their bass drums, their
guacharacas,
^*
and had not sung again out of grief for their dead. It was understandable, and Escalona himself, who was the teacher of many of them, and Zapata Olivella, who was beginning to be the physician to all of them, could not persuade anyone to sing.

Faced with our insistence, the neighbors came to give their reasons, but
at the bottom of their hearts they felt that the mourning could not go on any longer. “It’s like having died along with the dead,” said a woman who wore a red rose behind her ear. People supported her. Then Pablo López must have felt authorized to wring the neck of his grief, for without saying a word he went into his house and came out with his accordion. He sang as never before, and as he sang
other musicians began to arrive. Someone opened the store across the way and offered drinks on the house. The other stores started to open after a month of mourning, and the lights were turned on, and we all sang. Half an hour later the entire town was singing. On
the empty square the first drunk in a month came out, and at the top of his lungs he sang one of Escalona’s songs, dedicated to Escalona
himself in homage to the miracle of his having resuscitated the town.

It was fortunate that life went on in the rest of the world. Two months after the rejection of the manuscript I met Julio César Villegas, who had broken with Editorial Losada and been named the representative in Colombia of Editorial González Porto, which sold encyclopedias and scientific and technical books on the installment
plan. Villegas was the tallest and strongest man, the most resourceful when faced with the worst dangers of real life, an immoderate consumer of the most expensive whiskeys, an ineluctable conversationalist, and a salon fabulist. On the night of our first meeting in the presidential suite of the hotel in El Prado, I staggered out carrying a traveling salesman’s case filled with advertising brochures
and samples of illustrated encyclopedias and books on medicine, law, and engineering from Editorial González Porto. After the second whiskey I had agreed to transform myself into a seller of books on the installment plan in the province of Padilla, from Valledupar to La Guajira. My earnings were an advance in cash on a twenty-percent commission, which I had to earn in order to live without
difficulties after paying my expenses, including the hotel.

This is the trip that I myself made legendary because of the incorrigible defect of not weighing my adjectives in time. The legend is that it was planned as a mythic expedition in search of my roots in the land of my elders, following the same romantic itinerary as my mother when her mother took her away to save her from the telegraph
operator in Aracataca. The truth is that mine was not one trip but two, which were very brief and bewildering.

On the second trip I returned only to the towns around Valledupar. Once there, of course, I anticipated continuing on to Cabo de la Vela on the same route as my enamored mother, but I only got as far as Manaure de la Sierra, La Paz, and Villanueva, a few leagues from Valledupar. At that
time I did not know San Juan del César, or Barrancas, where my grandparents
married and my mother was born, and where Colonel Nicolás Márquez killed Medardo Pacheco; I did not even visit Riohacha, which is the embryo of my tribe, until 1984, when President Belisario Betancur sent a group of invited friends from Bogotá to inaugurate the coal mines in Cerrejón. It was my first trip to my imaginary
Guajira, which seemed as mythic as the one I had so often described without knowing it, though I do not think it was on account of my false recollections but because of the memory of the Indians my grandfather had purchased for a hundred pesos each for the house in Aracataca. My greatest surprise, of course, was my first glimpse of Riohacha, the city of sand and salt where my people had been born
since my great-great-grandparents, where my grandmother saw the Virgen de los Remedios put out the flame in the oven with an icy breath when the bread was about to burn, where my grandfather fought his wars and suffered prison for a crime of love, and where I was conceived on my parents’ honeymoon.

In Valledupar I did not have much time at my disposal for selling books. I was staying at the Hotel
Wellcome, a stupendous, well-preserved colonial mansion on the main square, which had a long bower of palm in the courtyard with rustic tables at the bar and hammocks hanging from hooks. Víctor Cohen, the proprietor, was as vigilant as Cerberus about the order of his house, as well as his moral reputation when it was threatened by dissipated strangers. He was also a purist concerning the language,
and he would declaim Cervantes from memory with a lisping Castilian accent, and place García Lorca’s morality in dispute. I got along well with him because of his knowledge of Don Andrés Bello and his rigorous recitations of Colombian romantics, and did not get on with him because of his obsession with stopping infractions of the moral codes within the pure environs of his hotel. All this began
in a very simple way because he was an old friend of my uncle Juan de Dios, and took pleasure in evoking his memories.