The journalist Silvana Paternostro was born in Barranquilla, Colombia, the place where Gabriel García Márquez congregated with friends and fellow writers, several of whom became characters in his novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” Paternostro had moved to the United States as a teenager before she grasped García Márquez’s towering importance for herself. Later, she would attend a three-day journalism workshop led by the author. In writing “Solitude & Company,” her oral history of the Nobel Prize winner’s life before and after he found fame, she learned that several people closest to the author (his friends called him Gabo) had essentially taken a vow of silence to protect his privacy, “as if you were in the mafia.” Below, Paternostro talks about finding plenty of other people who would talk, García Márquez’s superstitions and discipline, and more.
W
hen did you first get the idea to write this book?
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| Silvana Paternostrotill |
I got the idea to do the book in 2010, and it came out in Spanish in 2014. But it had been gestating without me being aware of it in many ways. I was born and grew up in the exact geographical area where “One Hundred Years of Solitude” takes place. I would hear stories about him and his friends; they were a crazy bunch, like our own Beat poets. My uncle knew them. I went to school with some of their children.
When Tina Brown started Talk magazine, she did a section of oral history. I got a call from the magazine in 2000, saying “We want to do an oral history of García Márquez, would you be interested?” I was, of course.
It was a magazine piece, 2,000 words, but I just couldn’t stop my tape recorder. I knew there was this pact among people who would not betray his friendship. But there were others — everyone had an encounter with García Márquez.
Talk closed before the oral history appeared. I published it in The Paris Review.
In 2010, by chance, I saw García Márquez at the inauguration of a museum in Mexico City. He didn’t look so well. There were thousands of people there: the president of Mexico; the richest man in Mexico. And I saw how thousands of people, instead of going up to them, all went to García Márquez. With love. My heart skipped a beat, and I was curious: Who was this who had turned into our Latin John Lennon? So I think the book was born that day. I realized that I needed to give it more of a structure, so I went out and did a second round of interviews.
What’s the most surprising thing you learned while writing it?
I was really surprised that he was as superstitious as he was — that he didn’t attend funerals, even of his friends. Some people maybe begrudged the fact that he didn’t go, but he was really superstitious and panicked by it. These are little things, but they’re very telling.
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