So the problem is not how to write a novel—or a short story—but how to write one seriously, even if afterward it doesn’t win any prizes or sell any copies. That is the answer that does not exist, and if anyone is in a position to know that it’s the same guy who’s writing this column with the secret aim of finding his own solution to the enigma. For I have returned to my study in Mexico, where a year ago I left several unfinished short stories and the beginnings of a novel, and I feel as if I can’t find the thread to unravel the ball. With the stories, there were no problems: they’re in the garbage. After reading them at the healthy distance of a year later, I venture to swear—and maybe it’s true—that it wasn’t me who wrote them. They were part of an old project of sixty or more short stories on the lives of Latin Americans in Europe, and their principal defect was the basis for tearing them up: not even I believed them.
I will not be so arrogant as to say my hand didn’t shake as I tore them to shreds and then dispersed the strips to keep them from being reconstructed. I trembled, and not just my hand, since I have a memory about ripping up paper that might seem encouraging but I find depressing. It’s a memory that goes back to July of 1955, the eve of my trip to Europe as El Espectador’s special envoy, when the poet Jorge Gaitán Durán arrived at my room in Bogotá to ask me to leave him something to publish in the magazine Mito. I had just gone through my papers, had put the ones I thought worth keeping away safely and had ripped up the ones I thought beyond recovery. Gaitán Durán, with his insatiable voracity for literature, and most of all at the possibility of discovering hidden values, began to go through the wastepaper basket, and all of a sudden he found something that caught his attention. “But this is very publishable,” he said. I explained why I’d thrown it away: it was a whole chapter that had been cut from my first novel, Leaf Storm—already published by then—and it could have no other honest destination than the garbage can. Gaitán Durán did not agree. He thought that in reality the text would have been superfluous to the novel, but had a different value on its own. More to try to please him than because he’d convinced me, I authorized him to tape the torn strips back together and publish the chapter as if it were a story.
“What title shall we give it?” he asked, using a plural that had rarely been as appropriate as in that case. “I don’t know,” I said. “Because it is nothing more than Isabel’s monologue as she watches it rain in Macondo.” Gaitán Durán wrote across the top of the first page almost as I was saying it: “Monologue of Isabel Watching It Rain in Macondo.” That’s how one of my stories that has received the most praise from critics and, especially, from readers came to be published. However, that experience did not prevent me from continuing to rip up manuscripts I didn’t think were publishable, but rather taught me that it’s necessary to tear them in such a way that they can never be pieced back together.
Tearing up stories is inevitable, because writing them is like pouring concrete. Whereas writing a novel is like laying bricks. What this means is that if a story doesn’t set in the first attempt it’s best not to insist. A novel is easier: you start over again. This is what has happened now. Neither the tone nor the style nor the personalities of the characters were right for the novel I’d left half finished. But here too the explanation is singular: not even I believed it. Trying to find the solution, I reread two books I supposed would be useful. The first was Sentimental Education, by Flaubert, whom I hadn’t read since my remote insomnias of university, and only served now to avoid some analogies that would have been suspicious. But it did not resolve my problem. The other book I read again was Yasunari Kawabata’s The House of the Sleeping Beauties, which had struck me to my core three years ago and continues to be a beautiful book. But this time it was of no use, because I was looking for clues about the sexual behavior of the elderly, but what I found in the book was that elderly Japanese sex, which seems to be as odd as everything Japanese, has nothing to do with the sexual behavior of elderly Caribbeans. When I told of my worries at the table, one of my sons—the one with more common sense—said, “Wait a few more years and you’ll find out firsthand.” But the other, who is an artist, was more concrete: “Go back and reread The Sorrows of Young Werther,” he said, without the slightest trace of mockery in his voice. I tried, in effect, not only because I am a very obedient father, but also because I sincerely thought Goethe’s famous novel could be useful to me. But the truth is that on this occasion I did not end up weeping at his miserable burial, as happened the first time, but rather I didn’t get past the eighth letter, which is the one where the suffering young man tells his friend Wilhelm how he’s starting to feel happy in his solitary cabin. This is where I find myself, so it’s not a rare occurrence that I have to bite my tongue to keep from asking everyone I meet: “Tell me something, brother: how the hell do you write a novel?”
HELP
I once read a book, or saw a film, or someone told me about a real event, with the following plot: a navy officer smuggles his lover into his cabin aboard a warship, and they experience a boundless love within that oppressive enclosure, without anyone discovering her for several years. I beg anyone who knows the author of this lovely story to let me know urgently, as I’ve asked so many people who don’t know that I’m starting to suspect that maybe I made it up myself and now I don’t remember. Thank you.
January 25, 1984, El País, Madrid
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The Scandal of the Century Page 32
