At the beginning of August 1966, my wife Mercedes and I went to San Angel post office, in Mexico City, to send the original manuscript of One Hundred Years of Solitude to Buenos Aires. The packet contained 590 sheets of paper and was addressed to the literary director of Editorial Sudamericana, Francisco (Paco) Porrúa. The post office employee placed the packet on the scale, did his mental arithmetic, and said: "That'll be 82 pesos."
Mercedes counted the notes and loose change in her purse and confronted me with the reality of the situation: "We've only got 53."
We were so accustomed to these daily setbacks after over a year of penury that we did not give much thought to the solution. We opened the packet, divided it into two equal parts and sent half of it
to Buenos Aires, without even asking ourselves how we were going to find the money to send the rest. It was six in the evening on Friday and as the post would not be opened until Monday, we had the whole weekend to reflect. There were already few friends left to squeeze money from and our best possessions were lying in eternal rest at the pawnshop. We did, of course, have the portable typewriter, with which I had written the novel in over a year of six-hour days but we could not pawn it because we needed it in order to eat. After a thorough overhaul of the house, we found two other things that were not very suitable for pawning either: my study heater, which must have been worth very little by then, and a mixer that Soledad Mendoza gave us in Caracas when we got married. We also had our wedding rings that we only used for the
wedding and had never dared to pawn because it was believed to be an ill omen. This time, Mercedes decided to take them anyway, as an emergency reserve.
First thing on Monday morning we went to the nearest pawnshop, where we were already regular customers, and they lent us - without the rings - a little more than what we needed. It was only when we were packaging the rest of the novel in the post office that we realised we had sent it the wrong way round: the last pages before the first ones. However Mercedes did not find it funny because she never trusted fate.
"The only thing we need now," she said "is for the novel to be bad."
The sentence was the perfect culmination of the 18 months that we had been battling together to finish the book on which all my hopes were founded. Until that point, I had published four in
seven years, for which I had earned very little more than nothing. Except for In Evil Hour, which won the $3,000 prize in the Colombian Esso competition and was sufficient for the birth of Gonzalo, our second son, and to buy our first car.
We lived in a middle-class house in the hillocks of San Angel Inn, property of the chief clerk of the governorship, the lawyer Luis Coudurier who, among other virtues, possessed that of looking after the house rental in person. Rodrigo, aged six, and Gonzalo, aged three, had a good garden here for playing when they were not at school. I had been general co-ordinator of the magazines Sucesos and La Familia where, for a good salary, I fulfilled the obligation of not writing a single word in two years. Carlos Fuentes and I had adapted El Gallo de Oro for the cinema, an original story by Juan
Rulfo that was filmed by Roberto Gavaldón. Again with Carlos Fuentes, I had worked on the final version of Pedro Páramo for the director Carlos Velo. I had written the script for the film of Chronicle of a Death Foretold, and that of Presagio with Luis Alcoriza. In the few hours I had left, I took on a broad variety of incidental jobs - advertising texts, television commercials, some song lyrics - which gave me sufficient in order to live decently but not to continue writing stories and novels.
However, I had been tormented for some time by the idea of an enormous novel, not only different to everything that I had written to date, but also to everything that I had read. It was a kind of terror with no source. Suddenly, at the beginning of 1965, I went to Acapulco for a weekend with Mercedes and my two sons and I was struck by a cataclysm of the
soul so intense and crushing, that I almost missed avoiding a cow that was crossing the road. Rodrigo gave a cry of happiness: "When I'm grown up, I'm going to kill cows on the road too."
I did not have a moment's rest on the beach. On Tuesday, when we returned to Mexico, I sat down at my typewriter to write an opening sentence that I could not keep inside me: "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." From that moment onwards, I did not rouse myself for a single day from a kind of overwhelming dream, until the last line in which Macondo was whisked off to hell.
In the initial months, I held on to my best sources of income, but I became increasingly short of time to write as much as I wanted. I ended up working very late nights
in order to fulfil my outstanding commitments, until life became impossible for me. Little by little, I began to abandon everything until the incorruptible reality forced me to make a plain choice between writing or dying.
The choice was crystal clear, since Mercedes - more than ever - took care of everything when we ended up tiring our friends. She obtained unimaginable credit from the local shopkeeper and the butcher on the corner. From the first moments of anguish, we had resisted the temptation of interest loans until we seized our courage and made our first incursion into the pawnshop. After the ephemeral relief that came from certain mundane objects, I had to turn to the jewellery that Mercedes had received from members of her family over the years. The branch expert examined them with the precision of a surgeon. With his
magic eye, he weighed and checked the diamonds in the earrings, the emeralds of a necklace, the rubies in the rings and finally, he turned to us with a great bullfighting pass of the cape: "This is nothing but glass!"
We never had the inclination or time to check when it was that the original precious stones had been replaced by fakes because the black bull of misery assailed us on all sides. This will seem like a lie, but one of my most pressing problems was paper for the typewriter. I was badly brought up to believe that typing, language and grammatical mistakes were in fact mistakes in creation and each time I detected them, I would tear up the page and throw it into the wastepaper basket to start again. Mercedes spent half the household budget on pyramids of reams of paper that did not last out the week. This was perhaps one of my reasons for not using carbon paper.
Simple problems such as these came to be so pressing that we did not have the courage to elude the final solution: pawning the recently purchased car, without suspecting that the cure would be more serious than the illness, because we diminished the overdue debts, but when it came to paying the monthly interest, we were left hanging in the abyss. Fortunately, our long-standing and good friend, Carlos Medina, insisted on paying it for us, not only the interest for one month but for several more, until we succeeded in recovering the car. It was only a few years ago that we learnt that he too had been forced to pawn one of his cars in order to pay the interest on ours.
Every night our best friends took turns in coming round to visit us. They appeared as if by chance and, under pretexts of books or magazines, they brought us baskets of food that appeared incidental. Carmen and Alvaro Mutis, the most persistent, encouraged me to recount the current chapter of the novel to them. I managed to invent emergency versions for them, because of my superstition that relating what I was writing chased away the magic.
Carlos Fuentes, in spite of his fear of flying at that time, travelled to and fro over half the world. His homecomings were a perpetual party for discussing our current books as if they were one. María Luisa Elío, with her clairvoyant dizziness and Jomi García Ascot, her husband, paralysed by his poetic amazement, listened to my improvised stories like coded signals of divine providence. So I was never in any doubt, from their first visits, that I was going to dedicate the book to them. Moreover, I very soon realised that all their reactions and enthusiasm illuminated the threads of my real novel for me.
Mercedes did not speak to me about her credit tricks again until March 1966 - one year after I had started the book - when we owed three months rent. She was speaking on the telephone to the owner of the house, as she often did to encourage his hopes, and suddenly she covered the mouthpiece with her hand and asked me when I hoped to finish the book.
Given the rhythm that I had acquired over a year of practise, I estimated that I needed six months. Mercedes then made her astral calculations, and told the landlord without the slightest tremor in her voice: "We'll be able to pay you everything in six months' time."
"Excuse me, madam," he asked
her in amazement, "Do you realise that it will be an enormous sum by that time?"
"I do realise ," said Mercedes, unmoved, "but by that time, we'll have everything sorted out. Don't worry."
The voice of the good lawyer, one of the most elegant and patient men that we have ever known, did not tremble either when he replied: "Very well, madam, your word is good enough for me." And he made his mortal calculations:
"I'll expect you on the seventh of September."
He was wrong. It was not the seventh but the fourth, with the first unexpected cheque that we received for the rights to the first edition.
We lived the remaining months in total delirium. My closest group of friends, who were well aware of the situation, visited us more frequently than before, always laden with miracles to carry on living. Luis Alcoriza and his Austrian wife, Janet Riesenfeld Dunning, were not frequent visitors, but they used to organise legendary parties at their house, with their learned friends and the most beautiful women in the world of film. Very often, they were simply pretexts for seeing us. He was the only Spaniard outside Spain who was capable of making tortillas on a parallel with those of Valencia and she had the ability of keeping us up in the air with her skills as a classical dancer. The García Riera couple, cinema fanatics, dragged us to their home on Sunday nights and infused us with happy insanity for facing the week ahead.
At this point, the novel was so far advanced that I allowed myself the luxury of continuing to enrich the false plot that I improvised during our friends' visits. I often heard them recounted by others, to whom I had never related them, and I was surprised at the speed with which they grew and ramified from mouth to mouth.
At the end of August, from one day to the next, I saw the end of the
novel around the corner. I did not use carbon paper and there were no photocopiers around the corner, so there was just one original of some two thousand pages. It was food of the gods for Esperanza Araiza, the unforgettable Pera, a good typist who worked for Manuel Barbachano Ponce in his Dracula's castle for poets and film makers in the suburb of Cuauhtémoc. In her spare time over the years, Pera had typed fair copies of great works of Mexican authors. Among these were La Región Más Transparente by Carlos Fuentes, Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo and several original Luis Buñuel film scripts. When I suggested that she type a fair copy of the final version of the novel, it was a draft peppered with corrections, firstly in black ink and then in red to avoid confusion. But this was nothing for a woman who was used to everything in a cage of lunatics. Not only did she accept the draft out of curiosity to read it, she also accepted that I pay her what I could afterwards and the rest when I was paid the first royalties.
Pera copied one chapter a week while I corrected the following one, with all kinds of emendations in ink of varying colours to avoid confusion - and not simply with the aim of making it shorter, but of giving it the highest possible level of density. Up to the point where it was reduced to almost half of the original.
Years later, Pera confessed to me that when she was taking home the only copy of the third chapter with my corrections, she slipped while getting off the bus in a torrential downpour and the sheets of paper were left floating in the quagmire of the street. She picked them up, drenched and almost illegible, with the help of other passengers and dried them at home with a clothes iron.
My greatest emotion at this time occurred one Saturday when I did not have the corrections for the following chapter ready and I called Pera to tell her that I would I would take it round to her on
Monday. After lengthy hesitation, she was bold enough to ask me if Aureliano Buendía would end up sleeping with Remedios Moscote. When I answered yes, she heaved a sigh of relief.
"Thank God," she exclaimed "if you hadn't told me, I wouldn't have been able to sleep until Monday."
I never knew why it was that during this period, I received an untimely letter from Paco Porrúa, - of whom I had never heard - in which he asked me on behalf of Editorial Sudamericana for the rights to my books, with which he was very familiar in their first edition. My heart broke because they were all with different publishing houses under long-term contracts and it would not be easy to release them. The only consolation that occurred to me was to tell Paco that I was on the point of finishing a very long novel that had no commitments, the first finished copy of which I could send him in a few days time.
Paco Porrúa accepted it by telegram and sent me a cheque for $500 as an advance by return post. It was just enough for the nine month's rent that we had promised to pay at that time and we did not know how, due to my poor calculation, we were going to finish the novel.
Anyway, Pera's fair transcription with three carbon copies was ready two or three weeks later. Alvaro Mutis was the first reader of the definitive copy, even before it was sent to the printers. He disappeared for two days and on the third, he called me in one of his hearty rages after discovering that my novel was not really the one I related to entertain our friends and that he repeated with delight to his close circle.
"Shit! You've made me look like a rag," he shouted. "This book has got nothing to do with the one you related to us."
Then, splitting his sides with laughter, he said: "Just as well that this one's much better."
I do not remember if I had the title of the novel at that point, or
where or when or how I thought of it. None of our friends of the time have been able to clarify this. Will there be some imaginative historian who will do me the favour of inventing this fact?
The copy that Alvaro Mutis read was the one that we sent by post in two parts and another was the guarantee that he himself took shortly afterwards on one of his trips to Buenos Aires. The third circulated in Mexico among the friends who had stood by us through the hard times. The fourth was the one I sent to Barranquilla so that three dearly loved protagonists of the novel could read it: Alfonso Fuenmayor, Germán Vargas and Alvaro Cepeda, the daughter of whom, Patricia, still guards it like a treasure.
When we received the first copy of the printed book, in June 1967, Mercedes and I tore up the much-marked original that Pera used for the copies. We did not even conceive for a second that it could be the most valuable of all, with the third chapter scarcely legible because of the rain and the ironing marks. My decision was not at all innocent or modest; we tore up the copy so that no one could discover the tricks of my secret carpentry. Nevertheless, there may be other copies in some corner of the world, particularly the two sent to Editorial Sudamericana for the first edition. I always thought that Paco Porrúa - quite justifiably - had kept them as a relic. But he denied it and his word is golden.
When the publishing house sent me the first copy of the printing proofs, I took them already corrected to a party at the Alcorizas' house, primarily because of the insatiable curiosity of the guest of honour, Luis Buñuel, who wove all manner of masterly speculations about the art of correcting, not for improving but for concealing. I saw Alcoriza so fascinated by the conversation that I fully determined to dedicate the proofs to him: for Luis and Janet, a repeated dedication but the only true one: "From the friend who loves them most in the world". Next to my signature I wrote the date: 1967. The mention of the repeated signature and the commas in the final phrase were due to a previous dedication that I had signed in a book for the Alcoriza family. Eighteen years later, when One Hundred Years of Solitude had succeeded in its career, someone remembered that episode in the same house and expressed the opinion that the proofs with the dedication were worth a fortune. Janet took them out of her trunk and showed them round the room, until everyone joked that they could use them to stop being poor. Alcorizo then made one of his very typical scenes, beating his chest with both fists and shouting in his loud and highly indignant voice and with his terribly Spanish determination: "Well I would rather die before selling this treasure dedicated by a friend!"
To the fitting ovation of all, I took out the same pen again as the first time, and wrote beneath the dedication dated 18 years previously: "Confirmed, 1985". And I signed this 180-page document, with 1,026 corrections in my own hand, again as the first time: Gabo. Luis Alcoriza died in 1992, in his Cuernavaca retreat. Janet continued to live there and died six years later, reduced to a small nucleus of her friends. The most faithful of all was Héctor Delgado, and Janet named him as her legitimate heir. An American university recently offered $521,300 for their proof copy. The only thing that I find unfair in this story is that Luis and Janet lived their last years with hundreds of thousands of dollars kept safe from time and the moths in the bottom of the trunk, as a result of their invincible Iberian dignity of not selling the gift from the friend who loved them most in the world.
