by Gary Soto
Three years later, I published my first poetry collection, The Elements of San Joaquin. I so much wanted to write in the vein of García Márquez, so why not a title that suggested his work? How young I was! My second book was titled The Tale of Sunlight. More García Márquez in the shape of several poems, including “How an Uncle Became Gray,” dedicated to the master.
One day his room fluttered
Like a neon
With the butterflies
That followed him,
A herd of vague motion
He came to think
Was a cloud spread thin
And bearing
A blank message of rain.
If these initial lines, written when I was twenty-two, do not suggest García Márquez, then I must’ve been very clever at pulling the wool over the reader’s eyes.
Little did I know then that a novel such as One Hundred Years of Solitude does not appear annually, or even once in a decade — nor did I understand that the genius that produced such a novel parallels the best of William Shakespeare — quote me on this, good people.
García Márquez’s personal history begins with a haphazard childhood, raised by grandparents and fussy aunts. Then came university life, journalism, starvation in the real sense, boisterous friends that kept him from work, an apprenticeship as a serious writer through his first years of marriage and his own slow temperament — followed by the lightning strike of imagination that became magical realism.
That lightning struck in 1965, while he was driving away from Mexico City (he and his family were off to a coastal vacation). García Márquez heard within himself the phrase, “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad.” The tone of the line struck him, tone being just about everything at the moment, tone being equivalent to an identifiable writing style. His literary duty forced him to turn the car around, head back to Mexico City, and begin work — how his family must have groaned at their return home, without seeing the ocean!
García Márquez began with that first sentence. Immediately, however, he faced a difficulty akin to writer’s block. In an interview, he confessed that getting started was terrifying. He had the first line and the tone, but what should come next? Such terror is not unusual among writers, or the poverty that creeps at its side. During the stress of writing the novel, his family became poor. The car, an Opel, was sold, and the items inside his apartment were pawned — television, radio, fridge, his wife’s jewelry.
Did García Márquez really fear this novel? I mean, his books — this first one included — are so prodigiously long that it’s easy to believe that storytelling was second nature to him. Perhaps he was embroidering a yarn about his writing habits and his creative fears. We know that he spent eighteen months on the novel, which involved four generations and many improbable moments, including the grand appearance of the most beautiful butterflies, the discovery of ice by Maconda’s puzzled citizens, and a wholesale memory loss that required the labeling of animals with their names.
It’s possible that García Márquez anticipated his own death. He had been in ill health. Though his cancer was in remission, his lungs gave him trouble — gave every Chilango trouble. Here we now lament a great writer who elevated South American literature, one whose unpredictable anecdotes, seemingly familiar stories, and improbable premonitions produced the most fabulous and inventive descriptions. He learned from Cervantes and he learned from Faulkner. His tone was pitch-perfect, and his people imbued with both comedy and deep sadness, the yin and yang of complicated and compelling characters. His talent halted other writers in their tracks. Didn’t one Japanese writer read his great novel, then stop writing for a decade? His feeling: I can’t do better than this. Why even try?
We are better for García Márquez’s output: No One Writes to the Colonel, Leaf Storm, The Autumn of the Patriarch, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Love in the Time of Cholera, The Story of the Shipwrecked Sailor — the titles themselves are poetry! At one point he aroused the suspicion of our government, which denied him a visa because of his friendliness toward Castro. That situation changed, however, when President Clinton pronounced One Hundred Years of Solitude his favorite novel. Good move, Mr. President.
García Márquez was a man of letters, a humanitarian, the most righteous among all Colombians, a leftist in world politics. He was a husband and father. His nickname was Gabo. His territory was all of Latin America. He was a winner of prizes, a man who said of his beginnings, “I have never renounced the nostalgia of my hometown: Aracataca, to which I returned one day and discovered that between reality and nostalgia was the raw material for my work.”
García Márquez stirred within us — the poets and writers of my generation — a desire to lift the ordinary into the fabulous, to decorate it boldly, to speak of its beauty — even if it was just some feral cats peeking from behind the weeds. To me, those feral cats were saying, “OK, young poet, paint us! Do what you will!” I tried then and have been trying ever since.
García Márquez, I feel nostalgia for your departure. That a mighty cloud of butterflies led your spirit to another place is certain. But your departure is as permanent as your books. My regret is that I never touched the hand that wrote them. If I could become a musical instrument, let it be an accordion whose lungs breathe sighs of melancholia.
