{"id":121396,"date":"2018-02-09T11:00:19","date_gmt":"2018-02-09T16:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=121396"},"modified":"2018-02-12T18:21:23","modified_gmt":"2018-02-12T23:21:23","slug":"gabriel-garcia-marquezs-road-trip-alabama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/02\/09\/gabriel-garcia-marquezs-road-trip-alabama\/","title":{"rendered":"Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez\u2019s Road Trip Through Alabama"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez in his home in Mexico in 2003. Photo: Indira Restrepo.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

In the summer of 1961, Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez lived with his family in the Webster Hotel on West Forty-Fifth\u00a0Street in New York City. They paid two hundred dollars a month for a room. The thirty-three-year-old Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez had moved to the city a few months earlier to join Prensa Latina, the fledgling Cuban state news agency with offices at Rockefeller Center. While he worked, his wife, Mercedes, and infant son Rodrigo spent their days strolling Central Park. The FBI was monitoring the newsroom, which was itself consumed with subterfuge and rumors over who among the journalists were counterrevolutionaries. Before long, Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez\u2019s friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, who worked at the agency\u2019s Havana bureau, heard of impending mutiny and flew to the States to warn him. By the time Mendoza arrived, Gabo, as he was affectionately called, had already quit. He had enough money to get his family to New Orleans aboard a Greyhound bus. Mendoza returned to Bogot\u00e1 and wired the cash the family would need to reach Mexico City. There, Gabo had friends and the prospect of part-time journalism work to sustain him while he wrote his next novel,\u00a0One Hundred Years of Solitude<\/em>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Learning about this trip was like a puzzle piece sliding into place for me. I read One Hundred Years of Solitude <\/em>for the first time during graduate school. Back then, I knew little about the book or its author. Something about the way it was written struck me as Southern, though. It echoed my home in rural Alabama, regional writers I admired, and the novel I was at the time desperately trying to finish. I was still figuring out my identity as a writer, and One Hundred Years of Solitude <\/em>became an outsize and formative influence for me. Reading Solitude<\/em>, I felt like the novel\u2019s Aureliano Segundo when he unexpectedly comes upon the ghost of the gypsy Melqu\u00edades alone in a room:<\/p>\n

One burning noon, a short time after the death of the twins, against the light of the window he saw the gloomy old man with his crow\u2019s-wing hat like the materialization of a memory that had been in his head since long before he was born.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When I first read Solitude, <\/em>I wanted to understand how a fictional village in South America, imagined by a Colombian writer living in Mexico City, could so strongly recall my home in the American South. I searched for clues in those four-hundred-plus masterful pages. But the bus trip Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez took straight through the South, I thought, might reveal more. Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez must have paid close attention during all those hours\u2014more than three hundred total\u2014spent traveling through my homeland. After all, the superintendent of the banana company that comes to Macondo is a Jack Brown from Prattville, Alabama\u2014a town just outside Montgomery. Perhaps, I thought, things Gabo experienced on this trip might appear throughout the masterpiece he wrote five years after he arrived in Mexico City.<\/p>\n

As I read Solitude<\/em> yet again, I kept noticing how Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez wrote about the land. He describes the earth as \u201cthe original food.\u201d Overcome by \u201ca tear of nostalgia\u201d one rainy afternoon, the novel\u2019s Rebeca hides handfuls of dirt inside her pockets and eats them, little by little, in secret. To borrow an idea from Eudora Welty\u2019s essay \u201cPlace in Fiction,\u201d place confines and defines characters. Take this passage from early on:<\/p>\n

The men on the expedition felt overwhelmed by their most ancient memories in that paradise of dampness and silence, going back to before the original sin, as their boots sank into pools of steaming oil and their machetes destroyed bloody lilies and golden salamanders. For a week, almost without speaking, they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief, lighted only by the tenuous reflection of luminous insects, and their lungs were overwhelmed by a suffocating smell of blood. They could not return\u00a0because the strip that they were opening as they went along would soon close up with a new vegetation that almost seemed to grow before their eyes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As a child, I spent countless hours wandering the forty-some acres my maternal grandparents owned in northern Alabama, deep hardwood forest cut by clear creeks and broken up by the occasional untended pasture. It seemed possible to walk all day without reaching the property\u2019s borders. Like the characters in Solitude<\/em>, I existed within nature rather than in spite of it. Often I tromped along in a fugue state, entranced by the beauty I encountered even as my family\u2019s presence had altered, if not destroyed, this place\u2019s appearance. Here, the land, as in\u00a0Garc\u00eda Marquez\u2019s Macondo, was a repository for all of creation. I was taught by my grandmother the importance of knowing local flora and fauna and geology and myths, as if this information might in some way protect me or at least bring me closer to the knowledge that in the eternal history of the world, I was the equivalent of a speck on a fly\u2019s back.<\/p>\n

Like Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez, I left the inalienable place of my youth\u2014he for Mexico City, myself for the Rockies and then the Northeast. In 2016, my partner and I traveled to Mexico City during an especially smoggy spring. Limits had been placed on how many vehicles were allowed on the streets each day. One morning, we took a taxi south from the Centro Hist\u00f3rico, where we were staying, past the Universidad Nacional Aut\u00f3noma de M\u00e9xico, where students openly smoked joints on the lawn, beyond the sunken bowl of Estadio Ol\u00edmpico Universitario, to a quiet residential neighborhood on a hill. The homes there were well-kept, and luxury cars were parked along the curb. It was a weekday, and the only people moving about were domestic workers and a private security guard. My partner and I began walking down the gently sloping street, trying to appear inconspicuous as we counted house numbers.<\/p>\n

I recognized the towering bougainvillea first. I had seen the vine in photographs of 144 Fuego, spreading across the stone facade of the two-story colonial house where, two years prior, Gabriel\u00a0Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez had taken his last breath. When the security guard rounded a corner, my partner and I crossed the street and doubled back toward the house. The bougainvillea had shed some of its bright-pink flowers onto a manicured patch of lawn. I grabbed three in stride. Back home, we preserved, framed, and carefully hung these flowers on our wall like a totem. I walk past them every time I go down to my office to write.<\/p>\n

Three people with memories of the bus trip to New Orleans are alive today. I contacted Rodrigo, but he declined an interview. I mailed a letter to Mercedes Barcha but did not hear back. Meanwhile, I set up a Skype call with Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza. A Colombian author, journalist, and diplomat, Mendoza was a lifelong friend to Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez. I grew anxious about the call. It would bring me much closer to Garc\u00eda Marquez, I thought, than a few fading flowers hanging on the wall.<\/p>\n

Mauricio Mendoza, Plinio\u2019s nephew, agreed to translate our conversation. By the time they called, it was raining outside my house like I imagine it would rain in the jungle village of Macondo. The rain made it difficult to hear Plinio, murmuring in Spanish on speakerphone, but easier to picture him and his nephew, sitting at a table in the dining room of a fourth-floor apartment overlooking a main thoroughfare on Bogot\u00e1\u2019s northern end. Mauricio was familiar with many of the stories that his uncle told. After I asked a question, he often said, \u201cI know this.\u201d I did not know whether this meant Mauricio was excited or bored to hear the tales told again.<\/p>\n

After introducing myself, I confirmed that Plinio had indeed loaned Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez money to get from New Orleans to Mexico City. \u201cAll [I] could muster was one hundred and fifty dollars,\u201d he said. Gabo later remembered the amount as\u00a0a hundred. I asked if Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez ever brought up the trip in their many conversations. Was it important to him?\u00a0Plinio mentioned a letter Gabo had sent after the trip but could not recall its specifics. Later, I found a remembrance of the trip\u00a0Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez wrote, which details encountering what he\u2019d previously only read about in William Faulkner\u2019s books:<\/p>\n

At the end of that heroic journey we had confronted once more the relation between truth and fiction: the immaculate parthenons amidst the cotton fields, the farmers taking their siesta beneath the eaves of the roadside inns, the black people\u2019s huts surviving in wretchedness, the white heirs to Uncle Gavin Stevens walking to Sunday prayers with their languid women dressed in muslin; the terrible world of Yoknapatawpha County had passed in front of our eyes from the window of a bus, and it was as true and as human as in the novels of the old master.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It was a grueling fourteen days on the road. In the biography Gabriel\u00a0Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez: A Life<\/em>, Gerald Martin describes the diet of \u201cendless \u2018cardboard hamburgers,\u2019 \u2018sawdust hot dogs\u2019 and plastic buckets of Coca-Cola.\u201d This so disagreed with Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez and Mercedes that they began sharing Rodrigo\u2019s baby food. Even had the couple been wealthier, their dining options still would\u2019ve been limited. This was the segregated South. In this way, it remained much like the place Faulkner immortalized as Yoknapatawpha County. Years later, in an essay for El Espectador<\/em>, Garc\u00eda\u00a0<\/em>M\u00e1rquez acknowledged that \u201cas a literary experience, [the trip] was fascinating, but in real life\u2014even though we were so young\u2014it was unlike anything else.\u201d Traveling through Maryland, Virginia, both Carolinas, into the deep states of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, the family encountered racial discrimination.\u00a0Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez wrote about the ignominy of drinking from \u201ccolored\u201d water fountains. While in Montgomery, where just five years prior the now famous city-bus boycott had unfolded, the family was turned away by one motel owner. They were mistaken for Mexicans, who were no more welcome than black guests.<\/p>\n

I asked Plinio whether he thought seeing the American South firsthand had influenced Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez. He said no\u2014then, maybe sensing my disappointment, told me that Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez had introduced him to Faulkner\u2019s work. \u201c[Gabo] went through several towns where Faulkner lived and moved around,\u201d Plinio said. \u201cSo that inspired him.\u201d<\/p>\n

Based on common bus routes at this time, Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez most likely traipsed in Faulkner\u2019s footsteps in New Orleans. While there, he spent part of the money Plinio had sent on a sit-down meal. According to Martin\u2019s book, Gabo and Mercedes dined at \u201cLe Vieux Carr\u00e9, a high-class French-style restaurant\u201d best known for its bouillabaisse. Tom Fitzmorris, who, since 1977, has been tracking and compiling menus from New Orleans restaurants, told me that Le Vieux Carr\u00e9 was located on the corner of Bourbon Street and Bienville Street in the building where Brennan\u2019s\u2014a French Quarter icon\u2014once operated. One block over and a short stroll down Royal Street, with its photogenic iron balcony railing and painted window shutters, Faulkner once lived in a first-floor apartment\u2014now a bookstore \u2014while writing a draft of his novel Soldier\u2019s Pay<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez ordered steak. How luxurious after two weeks eating baby food and greasy meals at segregated bus stations and department-store counters. When the steaks arrived, though, the couple was disturbed to see fresh peach sliced atop the meat. Particular as this seems, Fitzmorris told me the garnish wasn\u2019t original to Le Vieux Carr\u00e9. \u201c[It] was borrowed from a well-known local chain called the Buck Forty-Nine Steakhouse, which served every entr\u00e9e with half of a canned peach.\u201d Likely someone\u2019s idea to balance savory and sweet. \u201cIn fact,\u201d Fitzmorris told me, \u201cthere was a branch of the Buck Forty-Nine right across the street from the Vieux Carr\u00e9. Maybe they confused the two?\u201d<\/p>\n

From New Orleans, Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez and his family traveled to the border town of Laredo, Texas. The first thing they did was hunt down a fonda, a small family restaurant. \u201cThey served us to start, as a soup, a yellow and tender rice, prepared in a different way than in the Caribbean,\u201d Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez wrote. \u201c\u2018Blessed be God,\u2019 exclaimed Mercedes as she tried it. \u2018I would stay here forever if only to continue eating this rice.\u2019\u201d A train carried them the rest of the way to Mexico City and they arrived, according to Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez, \u201cwithout a name and without a nail in our pockets.\u201d<\/p>\n

He and Plinio continued a regular correspondence, writing to each other, Plinio said, every week. In one of these letters, Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez again makes light of the trip:<\/p>\n

We arrived safe and sound after a very interesting journey which proved on the one hand that Faulkner and the rest have told the truth about their environment and on the other that Rodrigo is a perfectly portable young man who can adapt to any emergency.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I knew Plinio was close with Mercedes, and I asked whether she had ever said anything about the trip.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo,\u201d he said. \u201cNot really. Other than personal things about Rodrigo, who was a child. Three years old, more or less. So he was uncomfortable on the bus. You know, personal things. Nothing really important from a literary point of view.\u201d<\/p>\n

Plinio did not understand that I wasn\u2019t chasing literary importance. I, like countless others, had felt a personal connection to Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez. More so, I had imagined a personal connection he may or may not have made with my home. I wanted to believe, like Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez had with Faulkner, that we had set foot in the same places. It felt almost as if this might bestow a protection similar to the ones I was raised to believe emanated from my grandparents\u2019 land.<\/p>\n

Perhaps I asked too much of the eighty-five-year-old Plinio, expecting him to pull conversations from a fifty-plus-year fog of memory. Still, I pressed on. He told me about how, when he and Gabo were young men, they had frequented Bogot\u00e1\u2019s cafes to flirt with waitresses and hold court among other writers. He told me about Paris and about seeing their first snow. I understood Plinio\u2019s desire to remember these times and why the memories would be more vivid than those of a bus ride he did not take. I thought of the moment in Solitude <\/em>when the inhabitants of Macondo are overcome with a plague of memory loss. They begin marking everything within eyesight using an inked brush:<\/p>\n

At the beginning of the road into the swamp they put a sign that said MACONDO and another larger one on the main street that said GOD EXISTS.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I asked once more whether Plinio thought the trip influenced One Hundred Years of Solitude<\/em>. \u201cNo,\u201d he told me plainly. The experiences that shaped this book were buried in the author long before he boarded that bus. After our conversation, I reconsidered what I\u2019d seen in Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez\u2019s masterpiece. I became more, not less, enthralled by his ability to imagine a jungle village that transcends geographical and cultural boundaries\u2014a place unconstrained, where I found memories of my past in Alabama that were so powerful I refused to believe they were not intentionally put there for me by the author himself.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Caleb Johnson is a writer from Alabama. His debut novel, <\/em>Treeborne, will be published by Picador in June.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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