My name is Steve Enniss, I'm director of the
Harry Ransom Center and it's a great delight to add my words of welcome to those you've
just heard. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s life story reads
something like a series of wondrous incidents we encounter in his own novels. The stories
that sprang from his imagination lifted him up and carried him the world over, far beyond
his native Colombia, and beyond his adopted home of Mexico. It is fitting that we open
this symposium this evening with an address by one equally well-traveled—by one whose
novels perform a similar alchemy. It is a pleasure and an honor to welcome Salman
Rushdie to the University of Texas to open this year’s Flair Symposium on Gabriel García
Márquez: His Life and Legacy. The biennial Flair Symposium is generously
supported by an endowment established by Fleur Cowles and celebrates creativity and the arts
in the tradition of the cultural magazine, Flair, which Fleur founded in 1915. Through that bequest,
her love of literature and the arts continues to be supported, in ways she would surely
approve of and delight in. In addition to the Fleur Cowles Endowment, I want to acknowledge
as well the generous financial support from LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections,
Suzanne Deal Booth, IBC Bank, and Alfred A. Knopf Publishers. We gather here tonight to hear one of our most accomplished writers
speak about another, and this occasion is a reminder that the rich literary tradition
we celebrate is larger than the singular artist. We gather this evening to celebrate a literary
tradition still in the process of becoming. A tradition still growing and extending its reach in the world. There is, in fact, a creative DNA that runs through the University’s research
collections, a creative DNA that García Márquez himself would have recognized. When asked
about his own literary antecedents, he would name Dickens, Kafka, and Faulkner, skipping
freely across nations, languages, and cultures. If García Márquez opened a door on Latin
America for many English language readers, myself included, one could say much the same
about Salman Rushdie and India. Whether we come from north or south, east or west, we gather here to celebrate
the protean flight of the imagination. Salman Rushdie is the author of ten novels,
as well as short stories and books for children, and numerous essays and reviews. In one original
and compelling novel after another, he has given us fables for our time that confront
the power of history and myth, the power of story, to shape our present world. As with Garcia Marquez, the origin often lies
in childhood. Garcia Marquez traced his origin as a writer to the memory of his grandmother’s
stories, while Salman Rushdie has embraced the imaginative possibilities of The Arabian
Nights. Both writers found their fictional worlds shaped by strong political forces,
whether it be the colonial legacy in South America or on the Indian subcontinent, and
both found highly original forms to explore that violent history and its meaning in the
present. Midnight’s Children has been universally recognized as one of the twentieth century’s
most important novels, and I can’t help but wonder if it could have been written without
the example of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Due to his own peculiar experience following the
publication of The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie found himself with a nearly unique
vantage point on our world’s cultural conflicts. Of necessity, he has become one of our most
articulate writers on the persistent conflict between fundamentalism and secularism, a theme
he continues to explore in his most recent novel Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight
Nights. Both writers have created fictional worlds
in which the particular has been made universal and in that recognition taught us something
of the forces shaping our still evolving story. It is this power and achievement which we
gather to acknowledge and honor tonight. Please join me in welcoming Salman Rushdie
. . . Thank you. How nice it is to be here with so many of you to celebrate this great writer. When I published my first and now justly obscure
novel Grimus a friend of mine read it, called me and said, “You’ve
obviously been deeply influenced by Gabriel García Márquez.” The year was
1975 and I was twenty-seven years old and I had never heard that name
before. The English edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude - translated
by Gregory Rabassa - had been published five years earlier, three years
after the original Spanish edition, but it had not crossed my path. “Who is
Gabriel García Márquez?” I asked my friend and he looked at me with a mixture
of disbelief, pity and contempt. “He is the author of a book you
are going to go out and buy right now,” he told me. “Today, this afternoon,
at once.” He told me the book’s title and I replied dubiously, “Really?
One hundred years? Of solitude? That’s a good book?” “Don’t be a moron,”
my friend said, only he used a ruder word. “Just go and get it.” For some reason I meekly did as he said. In
a London bookstore I found a Penguin Modern Classics paperback edition
with its grey jacket and, on the cover, a detail from J.C. Orozco’s mural
The Misery of the Peasants. This was dispiriting. Not only was I going to have
to sit through an entire century of solitude, but in that interminable isolation
I would have to be told about miserable peasants. I opened the book right
there in the bookstore, frankly expecting to encounter an insufferable tedium,
and for the first time I saw, and seemed to hear, these now world-famous
words: “Many years later, as he faced the firing
squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when
his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe
houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water
that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like
prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names,
and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.” I wrote the date on which I bought the book
on the first page below the author’s biodata and so I know for sure
that this happened on March 13th, 1975, the same month in which my first novel
was published. I still have that copy, though I have since bought many
others, to keep and to give away, because of course what happened to me
that day is what happened to millions of people when they read those words.
I fell deeply in love, and that love has lasted, now, for forty years,
without diminishing in the least. These peasants were anything but miserable,
and the title on the jacket, which had at first seemed so forbidding to
me, now seemed like a promise of long delight, a promise which the pages that
followed would amply fulfill. I knew almost nothing about the Latin-American
literary world I had entered, nor of the reality from which it
sprang. At the moment of that first encounter, I didn’t care. I responded with
the simple openness, the happy innocence, of the reader appalled and illumined
by the beauty and comedy of the text: “The children would remember for the rest
of their lives the august solemnity with which their father, devastated
by his prolonged vigil and by the wrath of his imagination, revealed his
discovery to them: ‘The earth is round, like an orange.’
Úrsula lost her patience. ‘If you have to go crazy, please go crazy all
by yourself!’ she shouted. ‘But don’t try to put your gypsy ideas into the
heads of the children.’” The comedy of the moment prefigures what will
become a trademark of the novel’s brand of magic realism, which was
present even in the famous first sentence about the miracle of the ice. In
Macondo it is the world of technology and science that feels “marvellous,”
that is to say, unreal; while the village realities of superstition and
faith seem “natural” and therefore true. An ice machine is magical. The discoveries
of science are crazinesses. The scholar-gypsy Melquíades - whose mother
tongue, we learn almost at the very end of the novel, was Sanskrit, a
revelation which contains, perhaps, the author’s homage to the wonder
tales of the East - is received in Macondo as a kind of ragged sorcerer-king,
able to transcend most earthly norms, death included. And the arrival of
the first railway train drives at least one woman mad with fear. “It’s coming,”
she cries. “Something frightful, like a kitchen dragging a village
behind it.” Nor is this vision of technology as essentially
surreal limited to the village. In The Autumn of the Patriarch the power of
American know-how results in the literal loss of the Caribbean. After the
dictator, the Patriarch, sells the Caribbean to the Americans, the American ambassador’s
nautical engineers “carried it off in numbered pieces to plant
it far from the hurricanes in the blood-red dawns of Arizona… they took it
away with everything it had inside general sir, with the reflection of
our cities, our timid drowned people, our demented dragons.”
By contrast, when the pure and saintly Remedios the Beauty achieves
transcendence so that one day when the women are folding sheets she rises
up into the sky and presumably all the way to Heaven, nobody in Macondo
turns a hair. Even the matriarch Úrsula, whose practicality and good sense
anchor the Buendía dynasty and the novel itself as well, even Úrsula accepts
the miraculous nature of the event, and so Remedios is lost, without
argument, “in the upper atmosphere where not even the highest-flying birds
of memory could reach her.” “Outsiders,” we are told, disbelieved the tale
of levitation, but in Macondo “most people believed in the miracle and they
even lighted candles and celebrated novenas.” What we have here is something extraordinary:
the creation, by a reversal of the expectations of the modern world, of
a tone of voice which nobody in the long history of literature had quite found
before. It owes something to many people, of course; no writer is entirely
sui generis. Even Shakespeare got Lear and Macbeth from Holinshed’s Chronicles
and Hamlet from Saxo- Grammaticus’ History of the Danes, and who
knows what he owed to Thomas Kyd’s lost Hamlet that came before
his own? So also in García Márquez we see traces of the great writers
from whom he learned, we see Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha somewhere in the
neighborhood of Macondo, and Juan Rulfo’s Comala is in the near vicinity
also; and the town loomed over by Kafka’s Castle is there too, as
also is Kafka’s use of metamorphosis, which in his turn Kafka derived from Ovid’s
Metamorphoses and Apuleius’s Golden Ass. We can see traces of Machado de
Assis’s Braz Cubas and Dom Casmurro in the many José Arcadios and Aurelianos
(and Arcadios and Aureliano Josés) of the Buendía dynasty.
Machado's “anti-melancholy plaster” could easily have migrated into Ursula Iguarán’s
medicine cabinet, and Braz Cubas’s useful trick of narrating his story
from beyond the grave by a process too complex and tedious to describe
could have been learned from Melquíades. Or the other way around.
And of course - parenthetically - the golden hearted and melancholy whore
is one of the most beloved and recurring character types of Latin American
literature. If I may be permitted to introduce one discordant note, I am
reminded that the great British fabulist and feminist Angela Carter - a great
admirer of García Márquez - used to say, wistfully but sharply, that she
wished that just one of García Márquez’s glorious prostitutes was shrewish
by temperament and looked like a wall-eyed goat.
It is in the nature of literary criticism to seek to place a great writer in the
context of his own literature, in the context of the times in which he lived
and worked, and in the case of the greatest, in the context of world
literature too, and in a minute I want to discuss the links between magic
realism and other literature from other lands that also moves beyond the borders of naturalism. But to do this is not
to diminish the singularity of the artist. And the singularity of García Márquez
lies, I believe, in the precise note he strikes, a note somewhere on the scale
between sweetness and bitterness, between a gentle acceptance of
one’s fate and an anger about it - “the wrath of his imagination” - from
which note proceeds the music of solitude, of human beings locked, alone, in
destinies they cannot escape, moving towards deaths foretold. The power
of this music, with its unique tone, has proved both great and enduring,
its influence widely pervasive. I’ve quoted in the past, but I’ll quote here
again, the joke Carlos Fuentes once made to me. “I have the feeling,” Fuentes
said, “that writers in Latin America can’t use the word ‘solitude’
any more, because they worry that people will think it’s a reference to Gabo.
And I’m afraid,” he added, mischievously, “that soon we will not be
able to use the phrase ‘one hundred years’ either.”
I’m reminded of something García Márquez’s fellow Nobel Laureate, the
great German writer Heinrich Böll, once said about humor. The Latin word
humor, Böll reminded us, means “dampness,” and he recommended a way
of writing - a way of seeing - that used a human eye, “that normally is not
quite wet and not quite dry, but damp,” which is to say, humorous. Böll was
describing the manner in which he and his post-war German
contemporaries were trying to rebuild German literature from the rubble
left behind by Nazism, but the “eye” of which he speaks, neither
sentimentally wet nor cynically dry, but damp, has something to do with
García Márquez’s way of seeing as well. At the time of that long-ago first reading
of One Hundred Years of Solitude I responded to its story as pure story, to its
characters simply as characters in a book. My interest in the world from which
it sprang came later. We live in one of the great ages of literary translation,
thanks to which the world’s literatures arrive in our backyard, speaking
our languages, giving us the feeling that they belong to us too, and not
only to the soil from which they grew. Any discussion of the global impact
of the writing of Gabriel García Márquez must also include a salute to his
translators. I remember meeting, once, long ago, the translator
Gregory Rabassa who told me that García Márquez had once said,
publicly, that he considered Rabassa’s English version to be superior
to the Spanish original. This is probably not true, but the generosity
of the remark touched the great translator deeply and he told the story (probably
not for the first or last time) with immense pride. It is a great translation
which gives the reader the impression of perfect transparency - it makes
one feel one is experiencing the full beauty of the original. Rabassa’s
version of The Autumn of the Patriarch, a work whose immensely complex
and convoluted sentences makes it an even greater challenge than the
limpid clarity and straight-faced comedy of One Hundred Years, is perhaps an
even greater achievement. To see how translation can either illuminate
or damage the original text, one need only compare the recent, largely dreadful
re-translations of the work of Borges to the previous versions. To take
just one example: Borges’s famous story Funes el Memorioso uses, in its
title, a word (“memorioso”) which the author made up, and which was perfectly
rendered in the English version as Funes the Memorious, “memorious”
being an invention that exactly captured the feeling of Borges’s
original. In the new translation the title has ben changed to Funes, His Memory,
which does dreadful damage to the original text. The re-translation of Günter
Grass’s masterpiece The Tin Drum is similarly leaden-footed when compared
to Ralph Manheim's marvelous original. I hope nobody is planning
to re-translate any of the books of García Márquez. They will have
an army of disgruntled readers to contend with if they do.
It is tempting to see the world of translated fiction - translated from
whatever language - as a parallel world to our own, a magic realm of
otherness in which the self can wander, and I suspect that for many non-
Latin American readers of García Márquez this “wonderland illusion” may
be a part of the initial appeal. Something of the same sort happened to my
own novel Midnight’s Children, whose first Western readers saw it as a
straightforward fantasy, while its Indian readers read it almost as a history
book. What happened to me was a little different. For me, that first reading
of One Hundred Years of Solitude opened the door to the Latin-American
literature world and, thanks to one bookstore and one publisher, I plunged in. The publisher was Avon Books, which in the
1970s issued a remarkable series of the best Latin-American books - Mario
Vargas Llosa’s The Green House, Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela (Hopscotch),
Jorge Amado’s Doña Flor and her Two Husbands, Alejo Carpentier’s Explosion
in a Cathedral, Manuel Puig’s Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, and many
more. The series was not widely available in London. However, a small
independent store in North London, Compendium Books in Chalk Farm, not
far from Camden Lock, where you could find all manner of other-worldly
stuff, science-fiction and occultist texts, books that taught you numerology
and explored black magic, novels such as the paranoid fantasy Illuminatus
and art books about the mysticism of the spiral, also specialized
in interesting imported editions, and there was just about the whole of the Avon
list for me to explore. By the time I had devoured those books, I began to
understand that the “realism” part of magic realism was as important as
the “magic” - to see that these books were this way because the world the
writers lived in was this way as well. And so I began to see how great my own
affinity was, not only to the books, but to the then-never-visited country
from which they had travelled to the post-hippie eccentricity of that long-gone
bookstore near Camden Lock.
We live in an age of invented, alternate worlds. Tolkien’s Middle-earth,
Rowling’s Hogwarts, the dystopic universes of the Hunger Games, the places
where vampires and zombies prowl, these places are having their day. Yet in
spite of the vogue for straightforward fantasy fiction, in the finest of
literature’s fictional microcosms there is more truth than fantasy. In William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, R.K. Narayan’s
Malgudi, and, yes, the Macondo of Gabriel García Márquez, imagination is
used to enrich reality, not to escape from it; the wonderful has deep roots
in the real, and for that reason is able to use the surreal to create metaphors
and images of the real that come to feel more real than reality, more
truthful than the truth. This is the trouble with the term “magic
realism” - that when people say or hear it they are really hearing or saying
only half of it, “magic,” without paying attention to the other half, “realism.”
But if magic realism were just magic, it wouldn’t matter. It would be mere
whimsy - writing in which, because anything can happen, nothing has affect.
It’s because the magic in magic realism has deep roots in the real,
because it grows out of the real and illuminates it in beautiful and unexpected
ways, that it works. Consider the following:
“As soon as José Arcadio closed the bedroom door the sound of a pistol shot
echoed through the house. A trickle of blood came out under the door,
crossed the living-room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight
line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs,
passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and
another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendía house, went in under
the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to
stain the rugs,…and came out in the kitchen, where Úrsula was getting
ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread. ‘Holy Mother of God!’ Úrsula shouted.”
In this famous passage from One Hundred Years of Solitude, something
utterly fantastic is happening. A dead man’s blood acquires a purpose,
almost a life of its own, and moves methodically through the streets of
Macondo until it comes to rest at his mother’s feet. The blood’s behavior is
“impossible,” yet the passage reads as truthful, the journey of the blood
feels like the journey of the news of his death from the room where he shot
himself to his mother’s kitchen, and its arrival at the feet of the matriarch
Úrsula Iguaran reads as high tragedy: a mother learns that her son is dead.
José Arcadio’s life-blood can and must go on living until it can bring Úrsula
the sad news. The real, by the addition of the magical, actually gains in
dramatic and emotional force. It becomes more real, not less.
Sometimes, in these books, more is more. García Márquez has a deep
fondness for hyperbole, as can be seen from the passage I just quoted.
“Úrsula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread.” That’s a
lot of eggs. The same sort of numerical inflation is present in the celebrated
description of Colonel Aureliano Buendía: “Colonel Aureliano Buendía
organized thirty-two armed uprisings and he lost them all. He had
seventeen male children by seventeen different women and they were
exterminated one after the other on a single night before the oldest one had
reached the age of thirty-five. He survived fourteen attempts on his life,
seventy-three ambushes, and a firing squad. He lived through a dose of strychnine in his coffee that was enough to
kill a horse.” Most literary characters would be content with one or maybe
two uprisings, a smaller family, fewer wives, not quite as many assassination
attempts and a more moderate dose of poison to swallow. The characters
of García Márquez have to work harder, fight more frequently, marry
more often, sire more children, survive more murder attempts, ambushes and
firing squads, and drink more strychnine than ordinary folk. It must be
exhausting for them. Reading the works of García Márquez and
the other writers I discovered at Compendium Books, I found myself thinking,
in response to almost every page, how much of these worlds I recognized
from my own experience in India and Pakistan. In both places - Latin
America and South Asia - there was and still is a conflict between the city
and the village, and there are similarly profound gulfs between rich and
poor, powerful and powerless, the great and the small. Both are places with
powerful colonial histories - different colonialists, same results - and
in both places religion is of great importance, and God is alive, and so, unfortunately,
are the godly. I knew García Márquez’s colonels and generals,
or at least their Indian and Pakistani counterparts; his bishops were my
mullahs; his market streets were my bazaars. His world felt to me like mine,
translated into Spanish. It’s little wonder I fell in love with it - not for its
magic, though, as a writer reared on the fabulous “wonder tales” of the East,
that was appealing, too - but for its realism. Long before I ever visited Latin
America, its writers had made me feel that it would be familiar. And when at
last I did go - to Nicaragua first, and then Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Chile and Brazil
- I thought, what do you know, these places are exactly as crazy as
their writers told me they were, and they are crazy in the same way that my places
are. The same tropical vegetation, the same garish billboards and
storefronts, the same sidewalk life, the same rich tradition of oral storytelling, the excess,
the odours, the sensuality, the heat. Driving in Managua on my first ever
day in the region I found myself thinking, I know this place. And that was
partly because of García Márquez and his colleagues, and partly because our
worlds were, and are, genuinely alike. García Marquez himself always asserted the realism of his work rather than
its fabulism. “I invent nothing," he once told the BBC about
his literary style. "People always praise my imagination, but I believe I am a
terrible realist. Everything I invent was already there in reality.”
The writer Daniel Alarcón told the BBC, “a couple of years ago when I
was in Cartagena I was in a cab and the cabbie was like, ‘This is Gabo's
house,’ and he added, ‘Here in the Caribbean we all have great stories,
Gabo is just a good typist.’ We do not live in magical times. The world
is dark and literature responds to it with dystopias. Many of the most highly
praised new fictions are remarkable for their bleakness. There is,
it seems, little joy to be found. In literature as in all things, fashion exists,
and the current fashion is for a kind of writing that is almost the antithesis of
García Márquez. The vogue term for this new kind of work is autofiction,
a literature that shies away from everything invented, that trusts only the
deeply autobiographical, the nakedly personal. Nonfiction outsells fiction
in the bookstores and so fiction becomes nonfictional as well. It seems that
for many readers the imagination is a thing that must not be trusted,
and so they turn towards the work of the French novelist Amélie Nothomb, or
the pseudonymous Italian Elena Ferrante and the Norwegian Karl Ove
Knausgaard, the second author to call his book, slightly oddly, Min Kamp, which is
to say, Mein Kampf. It is not my purpose in this piece to criticize these writers in any way. I appreciate their talent and it is plain that
they have captured the rapt attention of many readers in many countries.
And in many ways it is a great thing to become unfashionable. It removes
the work from the glare of the world’s attention and allows it simply
to be there, greeting what readers do come, and waiting for the great wheel to
turn, as it must, as it always does.
There’s no doubt that in Latin America, and beyond Latin America too, the
grand moment of magic realism has passed, and the new writers want to do
almost anything but that kind of work. The most highly regarded writer of
the generation after García Márquez, the late Roberto Bolaño, notoriously
declared that magic realism “stinks,” and jeered at García Márquez’s fame,
calling him “a man terribly pleased to have hobnobbed with so many Presidents and Archbishops.” It was a childish
outburst, but it showed that for many Latin American writers the presence
of the great colossus in their midst had become more than a little burdensome.
With the great man’s passing, and the change in the literary wind,
that burden has been lifted, and it becomes possible to appreciate the
oeuvre not just as the phenomenon it was, but as the work.
It needs to be said, clearly, that while literary fashions come and go - and
autofiction with its rejection of the fictional may well be no more than a
current fashion - what in Latin America became known as magic realism is
not a passing fad. It is a recent manifestation of what I think of as the other
“great tradition” in world literature - the tradition which manifests itself in
every language in every age and which is at least the equal of the realist
tradition. Milan Kundera once wrote that the novel has two parents, Clarissa
Harlowe and Tristram Shandy, and he argued that the realist tradition which
descended from Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa was - to paraphrase Kundera -
exhausted by over-use, while the antic, ludic line that descends from Sterne
was the tradition in which most fresh new work remained to be done. I
might argue that Tristram Shandy owes an obvious debt to Cervantes, The characters of Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim being more or less directly drawn from Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. It
might be better to say that the “other great tradition” is composed of the
heirs of Don Quixote, but let’s not quibble about parenthood. My point is
that whatever local name and coloring this tradition acquires, whether it’s
French surrealism or American fabulism, these different bodies of work are
all a part of the same river. Kafka’s dung-beetle in The Metamorphosis,
Bulgakov’s devil making mayhem in the Moscow of The Master and Margarita, and Charles Dickens, too, flow
alongside García Márquez. The Circumlocution Office in Bleak House - a government
department whose entire purpose is to do nothing - and the
gigantic dust heaps in Our Mutual Friend, a city dwarfed by its mountains of its own garbage, are images which any self respecting
magic realist would be proud to have created. On my first readings of García
Márquez the name that most often came to mind was that of Luis Buñuel,
a surrealist whose masterpieces, such as The Exterminating Angel,
come closer to the unique tone of García Márquez than anyone else’s.
This other great tradition is inspired by the idea of the fictionality of
fiction, its made-up-ness, an idea which unshackles literature from the confines
of the naturalistic, and allows it to approach the truth by wilder, and perhaps
more interesting, routes. García Márquez knew very well that he belonged
to a far-flung literary family. William Kennedy quotes him saying,
“In Mexico, surrealism runs through the streets.” And again: ”The
Latin American reality is totally Rabelaisian.”
There is a thing that Shakespeare knew, and before him Homer also knew:
the world is not one thing but many, not singular but multiform, Protean,
not constant but infinitely mutable. Hamlet is by turns a ghost story, a
murder story, a love story, a tale of political intrigue, a saga of family
betrayal. It’s comedy and tragedy and history as well. And when Helen of Troy
goes to see the wooden horse standing at the gates of the city and raises her
hand to caress its belly, the men hidden inside are helplessly aroused (even
though naturalism would decree that they couldn’t even be aware of her
presence, let alone feel its erotic power through the wood). One Greek is so violently excited that Odysseus has to strangle
him lest he cry out and give the game away.
The Buendía dynasty, and the Patriarch, and the innocent Érendira, and the
sad Colonel to whom nobody writes, are the inheritors of this tradition,
whose parents may be Cervantes, or Shakespeare, or Homer, or all three.
From this tradition come many of the most durable works ever created,
including the work of Gabriel García Márquez, which will continue to
endure, while fashions come and go. I never met him, and I greatly regret that,
but we did have one long conversation. I was in Mexico City at a friend’s
house and Carlos Fuentes came to dinner. I told him I’d been disappointed
to learn that García Márquez was out of town, in Cuba, visiting
his friend Fidel. Fuentes said something like, “It’s ridiculous that
you two have never met,” and shortly afterwards he left the room for a few minutes,
returning to summon me into another room where he handed me a telephone
receiver. “There’s somebody you have to talk to,” he said, and left
me alone with Gabo’s voice in my ear. The conversation began awkwardly. He claimed
not to know any English but it quickly became clear that he knew plenty,
but preferred not to speak it. My Spanish is very poor. I don’t speak it
at all but I understand a little. And we both had some French. So we proceeded trilingually
and things got better. In fact, in my memory of the conversation,
there is no language problem. In my memory we are just talking
to each other and understanding one another perfectly.
It was quite a long conversation. We covered a lot of ground. I remember
telling him that I’d read about his grandmother’s stories and their
importance in helping him to formulate his own, and I told him about the
family stories my mother told me, and their importance in my work. He was
very kind about my writing. We talked about the differences between us,
the difference between Macondo and Bombay, the village and the city. I told
him that I had written about the Chronicle of a Death Foretold and also
about his nonfiction work Clandestine in Chile, in which he told the story of
the filmmaker Miguel Littín making his secret film under the very
dangerous nose of the tyrant Pinochet, and I noted that he responded with
more enthusiasm to my interest in his journalism than in my review of his
fiction. Once a journalist, always a journalist. He was interested in my own
foray into reportage, my little book about Nicaragua during the Contra War.
I told him the story of a dinner at the home of Daniel Ortega with almost
all the Sandinista leadership present, during which I had been reluctant to
produce a tape recorder or notebook, knowing it would change the nature of the dinner
table conversation. Instead, I pretended to have a stomach upset, and
retreated every ten or fifteen minutes to the toilet, where I scribbled
furiously in the notebook in my pocket, writing down dialogue and other
observations. He found that amusing and he told me, You see, you are a
reporter, too. Many years later, when I became president
of PEN American Center, I tried many times to get him to come to New York
as our guest, and he always replied politely, and declined. It was New
York’s loss, and mine. I never met Borges either, but in my early
twenties I saw him lecture in London, and much later, in Buenos Aires, thanks
to the kindness of Maria Kodama, I met his library, which was almost
as good. And though I never met García Márquez, I have the memory of
our conversation, and I have, we all have, his books, and they are more
than enough. I offer my congratulations to the Ransom Center on acquiring
this landmark archive, and my thanks for the invitation to speak
here to celebrate the achievement of a giant of modern literature. The occasion
of the arrival of his archive here in Austin is perhaps comparable to that
fictional American acquisition of the Caribbean. You, too, have “carried
it off in numbered pieces
to plant it far from the hurricanes in the blood-red
dawns” of in this case Texas, not Arizona… “with everything it had inside…
with the reflection of our cities, our timid drowned people, our demented dragons.”
As that great sea of literature is transported to Austin, I would
like to end by giving the last words to the creator of that sea, by reading the last sentences of
One Hundred Years of Solitude, in which the last of all the Aurelianos is reading
Melquíades’s parchments, which contains the story of his family, and
of himself as well, and which are therefore the book we are reading as he reads
it, and whose true author is the gypsy created by the author of the book. He was so absorbed that he did not feel the
second surge of wind either as its cyclonic strength tore the doors and windows
off their hinges, pulled off the roof of the east wing, and uprooted the
foundations. Only then did he discover that Amaranta Ursula was not his
sister but his aunt, and that Sir Francis Drake had attacked Riohacha only so
that they could seek each other through the most intricate labyrinths
of blood until they would engender the mythological animals that would
bring the line to an end. Macondo was already a fearful whirlwind of
dust and rubble being spun about by the wrath of the biblical hurricane
when Aureliano skipped eleven pages so as not to lose time with facts he
knew only too well, and he began to decipher the instant he was living, deciphering
it as he lived it, prophesying himself in the act of deciphering
the last page of the parchments, as if he were looking into a speaking
mirror. Then he skipped again to anticipate the predictions and to
ascertain the date and circumstances of his death. Before reaching
the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave
that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would
be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise
moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments,
and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time
immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years
of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth. Thank you.
