A despedida for Gabo

Yes, we were close in a thick way. Thanks very much to his books. It was my late journalism professor Raul Rafael Ingles who lent me his copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude in the late '70s when I was newly graduated. It was from my editor Rosario A. Garcellano that I was able to borrow her copy of Chronicle of a Death Foretold. I remember her miming that scene where the target of assassins walked stoically, trying to stanch the flow of blood from his deadly wound with his hands and to find a place where he could bleed to death with some dignity.

As for the periodic sentences in Autumn of the Patriarch, they intimidated me so, but I'll pick up where I left off one of these days.

But it was Living to Tell the Tale, a secondhand copy of which I bought either at Book Sale or Mt Cloud that made me fully appreciate Gabo (or Tito Gabo, as fictionist Geraldine C. Maayo and I secretly call him).

In it he tells of how his long stint in the burrows of journalism gave him all the materials he needed for his fiction. He was present at civilian uprisings, he covered crime and politics, was at the scene immediately after a massacre, interviewed the mighty and the lowly, reviewed books and film, put out supplements, wrote editorials, filled up space when advertisements were pulled out at the last minute, missed some deadlines, got berated by editors. He experienced all these everyday stuff in the life of a journeyman. In between he learned how to listen to music attentively and to read the masters from Dostoevsky to Faulkner.

I emerged from that book with a realization that all the training a writer needed could be found in old-fashioned journalism.

Here are some of Gabo's words, excerpts from "The Art of Fiction," an interview Peter H. Stone did for The Paris Review.

Garcia Marquez (1927-2014) Photo from Esquire


INTERVIEWER

Do you think the novel can do certain things that journalism can’t?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

Nothing. I don’t think there is any difference. The sources are the same, the material is the same, the resources and the language are the same. The Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe is a great novel and Hiroshima is a great work of journalism.

INTERVIEWER

Do the journalist and the novelist have different responsibilities in balancing truth versus the imagination?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

In journalism just one fact that is false prejudices the entire work. In contrast, in fiction one single fact that is true gives legitimacy to the entire work. That’s the only difference, and it lies in the commitment of the writer. A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it.

INTERVIEWER

In interviews a few years ago, you seemed to look back on being a journalist with awe at how much faster you were then.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

I do find it harder to write now than before, both novels and journalism. When I worked for newspapers, I wasn’t very conscious of every word I wrote, whereas now I am. When I was working for El Espectador in Bogotá, I used to do at least three stories a week, two or three editorial notes every day, and I did movie reviews. Then at night, after everyone had gone home, I would stay behind writing my novels. I liked the noise of the Linotype machines, which sounded like rain. If they stopped, and I was left in silence, I wouldn’t be able to work. Now, the output is comparatively small. On a good working day, working from nine o’clock in the morning to two or three in the afternoon, the most I can write is a short paragraph of four or five lines, which I usually tear up the next day.

Gabo, Bela Bartok and Feliz Cumpleaños, Pareng Rolly

That stormy, tearful woman named "Maring" kept me cloistered and in bed for a week, infecting me with something I have  low resistance for--seasonal affective disorder, with its apt acronym of SAD. Without sun and all the bright promises it always makes to me, I'm a mess, good only for following a narrative to conclusion. For as long as I could follow a story to its end, I knew I was sane. More importantly, I was hopeful that I would recover from a temporary condition as soon as the weather cleared up. It did, and I did.

That week I went through the half-read or unread books in my library: Mark Helprin's comic novel Memoir From an Antproof Case, subsequently bequeathed to Alex and Barbara Dacanay one rainy evening when they drove me home, Michael Wallner's love story set in wartime France April in Paris, Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge (an unforgettable fictive character who appears even in the end-of-the-book Reading Guide, inserting her opinions ahead or after the real author), Anthony Bourdain's first novel Bone in the Throat (with so much "f_ck you!"  I wondered if the food prepared in many scenes wilted from all those expletives un-deleted in almost every dialogue; maybe this was Bourdain's warm-up exercise leading towards Kitchen Confidential). I capped the marathon with Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Living to Tell the Tale.

While reading the last, I remembered my husband Rolly who continues to toil unheralded to help put out a newspaper, a job Garcia Marquez also did during peaceful and tumultous times in his Colombia. Many times, I had to call Rolly in Baguio just to say, "There's this scene in a newsroom where Gabo..." and he'd yell on the other line, like the editors of old, to bring up the damn book and stop giving him the synopsis. Today, he's on page 49 of the autobiography.

Wait till he gets to pages 452 and 453 of this first edition where Garcia Marquez wrote about music and how he learned to write to it:

Garcia Marquez

"In Mexico, while I was writing One Hundred Years of Solitude--between 1965 and 1966--I had only two records, which wore out because they were played so often: the Preludes of Debussy and the Beatles' Hard Days' Night. Later in Barcelona, when at last I had almost as many as I had always wanted, alphabetical classification seemed to conventional, and I adopted for my own convenience in instrumental order: the cello, which is my favorite, from Vivaldi to Brahms; the violin, from Corelli and Schoenberg; the clavichord and the piano, from Bach to Bartok. Until I discovered the miracle that all things that sound are music, including the dishes and silverware in the dishwasher, as long as they fulfill the illusion of showing us where life is heading.

"...[W]ith time and the possibilities of having good music at home, I learned to write with a musical background in harmony with what I am writing. Chopin's nocturnes for quiet episodes, or sextets by Brahms for happy afternoons. On the other hand, for years I did not listen to Mozart after I was assaulted by the perverse idea that Mozart does not exists, because when he is good he is Beethoven and when he is bad he is Haydn.

"During the years in which I have evoked these memories, I achieved the miracle, and no kind of music interferes with my writing, though perhaps I am not aware of other virtues, for the greatest surprise was given to me by two very young and diligent Catalan musicians who believed they had discovered surprising affinities between my sixth novel, The Autumn of the Patriarch, and Bela Bartok's Piano Concerto No. 3. It is true that I listened to it without respite while I was writing the book, because it created a very special and somewhat unusual state of mind in me, but I never though it could have influenced me to the point where it would be noticed in my writing. I do not know how the members of the Swedish Academy discovered that weakness when they played it as background to the awarding of my prize. I was grateful in almost profound way for that, of course, but it they had asked me--with all my gratitude for them and for Bela Bartok--I would have preferred one of Francisco el Hombre's spontaneous romanzas from the fiestas of my childhood."

Bartok

The maestro's method has just infused me with a desire to return to The Autumn of the Patriarch, reread it with Concerto No. 3 in the background. Meanwhile, feliz cumpleaños, Rolando. And may that dementia threatening the great Gabo's memory be halted by the force of his genius. After all, wasn't it he who wrote: "Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it"?

Images from the World Wide Web