(Almost) Meeting García Márquez, Part 1

A meandering reflection on my quest to meet one of the great writers.

I would be lying if I didn’t admit that one of the first things that ever intrigued me about my wife was that she grew up in Mexico—and more intriguing still, that she attended high school with, was, and continues to be good friends with Gonzalo Gárcia (now my friend as well), son of Gabriel García Márquez. Yes, Nobel Prize winning, master of magical realism, García Márquez. 

As I got to know her, her connections to the great master became all the more incredible. She referred to him as Gabo, had been to his house (in Mexico City) on numerous occasions. She met the great Cuban singer/songwriter, Silvio Rodriguez there…Gonzalo once got the visiting Juan Rulfo to sign a book for her…Still, for her, though, he was on one level just an old friend’s dad.

At the time I met my wife, and still to this day, he remains a writer for whom my admiration knows no bounds. I don’t remember exactly how I had discovered García Márquez. Perhaps a literature or creative writing prof had recommended him to me. Perhaps it was my older brother, who introduced me to so much good writing. It likely began with the collection of stories, Labyrinths, by the great grandfather of Latin American fiction, Jorge Luis Borges, which I believe was on my brother’s big shelf of books, (which I’ve written about recently here). I do know that Borges had pulled me in deep. “The Garden of Forking Paths,” an especially powerful story (Google it. Read it if you haven’t already), urged me to take notice of what Latin American writers were doing—taking my mind to places it had never been, places essential to an English and Philosophy major bound and determined to become a writer. 

“The Garden of Forking Paths” set me on a forking path of my own in many ways, seeking, as the protagonist of that story, Yu Tsun, does, to discover and give voice to the many perplexing aspects of being human spooling out in front of me. That story pays close attention to the beguiling attributes of time. Yu Tsun’s grandfather had written a novel that was itself a labyrinth, and a character’s choices in that work are described as “when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of the others. In the almost unfathomable [novel] he chooses—simultaneously—all of them. He thus creates various futures, various times which start others that will in their turn branch out and bifurcate in other times.” I vividly remember coming to the end of that story and feeling shaken, paths “bifurcating” infinitely in front of me.

For my senior thesis, I wrote my own nod to (shameless imitation of) García Márquez and Borges, a story about a boy who attempts to ride throughout all of Mexico on his bicycle. He winds up jailed, in love with a lovely Mexican woman, contemplating the many intersecting paths of his own labyrinth of time’s branching paths. It won the St. Lawrence University short fiction prize and was published in the school magazine (the first time I ever saw my name, as an author, in print). 

Having recently discovered Borges and García Márquez, meeting the woman who would become my wife, inviting her to go to a lecture by my Shakespeare professor, Tom Berger, on “Ovid, Shakespeare, and the Tyranny of Sexuality” (what a first date!), it seemed as though my time-line in this specific strand of my forking universes had veered in a certain direction, one that would lead me to fall more and more in love with this woman while concurrently leading me, like Borges’s Yu Tsun knocking on the door of a man he assumed to be a stranger, to me knocking at the door of Gárcia Márquez himself. 

While Borges had shown me that fiction could be more outwardly philosophical, that authors could be more playful and forceful all at once, and fictions could become the perfect tools to present and find ways to contain and help contend with even the most nuanced of concepts, García Márquez awakened my mind to the endless possibilities of the imagination—to allow narratives to merge with dream-magic, to ignore the limitations of science and history and what we call “normative reality,” to see fiction and artistic expression as tools to explore the subconscious, the profoundly magical facets of reality we immerse ourselves in each night in our dreams, helping us to rediscover the mundane as the primary source of this magic. 

Those first few sentences of A Hundred Years of Solitude really got me, get me every time (and I now know by heart these opening sentences in two languages):

Many years later as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice…The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.

I was thrown into a world where language, plot, imagery, characterization—all the fundamental components of story telling—had been utterly recast and used in wholly novel and thrilling ways. That first sentence inverts the classical story beginning—doesn’t look to something in the past, something “once upon a time,” but rather forces us to contend with a new approach to “story time,” a flash-forward not a flash-back. Then that flash-forward to “many years later,” flashes far, far back, impossibly, to even the earliest of all human time, when the “world was so recent,” we hadn’t  even invented words for all things. My sense then, as now, was that García Márquez shows us we are perhaps still in such a place, and it is the writer’s job to find ways to give voice to things we still don’t have specific-enough words for.  

In those first few utterances of the novel, my mind—the mind of someone trying to learn how to write—was sent soaring. Reading, writing, two things I had always loved to do, became more delightful still, mesmerizing labyrinths of words, possibilities. 

Many years later…having learned a good deal of Spanish, I would become still more enamored of those opening passages and see that there was even more to discover, lost in the translation into English, despite the impressive work of the translator, Gregory Rabassa. Take, for instance, the third sentence, “The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.” In Spanish we find: “El mundo era tan reciente, que muchas cosas carecían de nombre, y para mencionarlas había que señalarías con el dedo.” The phrase “indicate them” translates “mencionarlas,” whose cognate would more commonly be “mention them,” though “mention” in English may well not retain enough of what it expresses in Spanish…. The English “point” replaces “señalarías con el dedo” (literally “would point out”), though “señal” is also the word for “signal,” and the phrase “point out” in English lacks the visual image of fingers—“dedos”—one possible, literal interpretation of the Spanish being, “to signal with the finger.”

Certainly the translation does a good job of capturing the essence of the Spanish and putting it into ordinary, colloquial English, but in creative expression, the extra dimensions and parallel meanings of words are as essential as first-order meanings, making the job of translators ultimately impossible. Something always gets left behind—in this case, we also lose even just the musicality and rhythm of the words. The dull, dry series of equally stressed syllables in English—“in order to indicate them it was necessary to point”—is no match for the musical, pulsating rise and fall of "mencionarlas había que señalarías con el dedo.” Here are the the stunning opening three sentences in Spanish. Read them aloud if you can, just to feel their momentum and musicality: 

Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo. Macondo era entonces una aldea de veinte casas de barro y cañabrava construidas a la orilla de un río de aguas diáfanas que se precipitaban por un lecho de piedras pulidas, blancas y enormes como huevos prehistóricos. El mundo era tan reciente, que muchas cosas carecían de nombre, y para mencionarlas había que señalarías con el dedo.

Flash-forward. We have graduated from college. Perhaps we are living together in a small apartment in Saratoga Springs a few blocks up from the Cafe Lena, or up a small, twisty dirt road in northern Vermont very near Frost’s farm, me waitering, my wife working in a bookstore, me writing stories, trying to prepare applications for graduate writing programs. Perhaps we are already in Amherst, me studying fiction writing with John Edgar Wideman at UMass, my wife working for a scientist at Amherst College doing research on the often baffling genetics of slime molds, me still waitering, always waitering, living at the end of another small, twisty dirt road where we can see far down and out across the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts. Perhaps I have already been to Mexico for the first time ever, driving a 1979 Saab with my now wife all the way from upstate New York to Mérida on the Yucatan peninsula to retrieve my wife’s recently deceased mother’s belongings, a trip tinged with deep sadness and for someone who had never traveled outside the borders of this country, countless encounters with things utterly new and unexpected, a trip that would include a tremendous accident on a jungle road covered with a slick of oil, hitting some large topes (speed bumps), our car flipped and bent, its windshield shattered, us stranded in Mexico City, staying with my wife’s friends, quickly all becoming my friends too, driving a friend’s 1969 Bocho (VW Beetle) through the many-laned chaos of Mexico City traffic, waiting for a race-car mechanic to repair our exotic car with its bomba inyección (fuel injection), its hood that opens backwards, the father of one friend laughing so hysterically he nearly fell out of his chair when he found out we had driven a Saab to Mexico…

…In one of these early trips of the now many-years-later many trips I have taken to Mexico, which I now consider a kind of second home, I was to befriend Gonzalo, meeting him for that first time ever just down the road from his home, sitting on a park bench in the central shaded, tree-filled island of a long, lovely Colonial parkway watching his children play, his maid showing us the way as she brought out tortas and tall, sweating glassses of chela, (beer). And in one of those early trips we would be invited to a party at Gonzalo’s, his father very likely to attend….

(To be continued).

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Find books referenced in this post at my Bookshop.org affiliate page: One Hundred Years of Solitude, Labyrinths

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