In this mythical house in Mexico City where Gabriel García Márquez wrote “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and where he spent the last days of his life, two young people walk through the green garden that Mercedes Barcha left as one of her many legacies . They are Nicolás Guerrero (Mexico City, 33 years old) and Emilia García (Mexico City, 33 years old), the grandchildren of the Colombian writers Álvaro Mutis and Gabriel García Márquez. They are accompanied by their father and the youngest son of the Nobel Prize winner for literature Gonzalo García Barcha, a kind of patriarch of this green space, which bears a great resemblance to a small urban settlement in Macondo in Chilango. They came together, as García Márquez and Mutis did in this place, to celebrate the 100th birthday of Álvaro Mutis and to share with the public an intimate part of their memories through a personal archive consisting of various objects, photos and correspondence sharing and press clippings as well as the publication of two books that together tell part of the Colombian’s story.
Álvaro Mutis Jaramillo (Bogotá, 1923 – Mexico City, 2013) never made a living from his books. In his native Colombia he worked in an aviation company; at the oil company Esso – where he worked as head of public relations and from which he left for Mexico after legal problems -; After settling in this country, after a stint in Lecumberri prison, he worked in advertising companies and then in film. He was also a radio announcer and manager; He devoted himself to public and economic work until his retirement at the age of 60 and then began writing and publishing his novels. His grandson, Nicolás Guerrero, always revisits the poems that his grandfather wrote at a young age: “He was a poet all his life, the first poem he wrote was when he was 19 years old. The story only came to his mind much later,” he remembers, talking about the objects he chose for the “Intacta materia” exhibition.
Nicolás Guerrero, grandson Álvaro Mutis and Emilia García, granddaughter of García Márquez, observe part of the “Intacta Materia” exhibition. Silvana Flores
Also remember that the day that Álvaro Mutis’ first volume of poetry, La Balanza, went on sale in Bogotá was also the day that one of Colombia’s most important politicians at the time was assassinated: Jorge Eliecer Gaitan. The year was 1948, and that date, April 9th, will henceforth be remembered as Bogotazo. Unrest over the assassination spread throughout the capital and several cities across the country. Guerrero assures that the copy his grandfather kept may have been the only one that survived the fires that ravaged the bookstores where the copies arrived: “They were all burning,” he says.
For Emilia García and Nicolás Guerrero, who were born and grew up together, surrounded by the memories of the lives of their grandfathers and grandmothers, it was not so easy to choose the objects that would make up the exhibition – which officially opens this Thursday at the Gabriel The García Márquez Literary House will open its doors to the public this weekend. They are used to constantly looking at the photos hanging on the wall and the books that occupy the entire room and have realized that they are actually surrounded by a universe full of treasures that they want to share with readers. García assures that part of the work to preserve and maintain this entire material heritage is due to his grandmother Mercedes Barcha and Carmen Miracle, Mutis’ partner: “It was very easy because the archive was very well organized. I feel like it’s a little bit of the power of wives too. I think they’re doing a great job at that. I find it very interesting how all of this is preserved in a very specific and very beautiful way.”
The two new books: verse and prose by Mutis
In his youth, in the darkness of his room and after meeting his father and Mutis while they were chatting and drinking whiskey at home, Gonzalo García Barcha discovers that Álvaro Mutis is a poet. “There are already enough reasons to want it; “He is Carmen’s husband, to whom you only have to say a sentence in Catalan for his eyes to shine with tenderness, and he is Francine’s father, who is like our sister …,” he says in the prologue of the book Nocturna., that Compendium of poems that he compiled to pay tribute to the person who accompanied him almost like another father figure, whom he admired and loved too much at all stages of his life. “During the day, Álvaro is already admirable to us (…), but at night it turns out that, like Batman, he takes off his business suit to write verses and stories. With this representation of his Nocturnes, how could we not honor the one who did so much to give meaning to the night?
Nocturna brings together poems about the night that Álvaro Mutis wrote throughout his life, long before he also decided to write a novel. “We wanted to pay tribute to his poems and novels,” says García Barcha. The second new title to hit stores is De Readings and Other Celebrations (El Equilibrista), based on journalistic articles Mutis wrote throughout his career for publications in Spain, Mexico and Colombia. “Readers will find their taste in these texts; there is no critical text,” he wrote in praise, hence the title. Everything is a party. Whoever reads it will learn something about Álvaro’s taste and spirit,” explained Diego García Elío, editor of the edition.
The two new books for the 100th birthday of Álvaro Mutis: “Nocturna” and “Of Readings and Other Celebrations”. Silvana Flores
The material archive of memory
“This was my first attempt at poetry, which I wrote around 1943 when I was a news anchor for the National Radio of Colombia. I wrote it right before I got on the microphone, at 11 o’clock at night. When I came back from reading the news, I read it again, I didn’t like it and I threw it in the trash. That night at home I realized there was something there. The next morning, miraculously, it was still in the trash. I saved him and here he is. Some fragments were used in later poems,” Nicolás Guerrero found this small text when he began collecting the objects that would make up Intacta Materia. He liked it very much, because for him it was almost like a kind of footnote to whoever found the crumpled sheet with his grandfather’s first poem.
In addition to this first exercise in their long journey through poetry, Guerrero and García have selected the letters that Mutis and García Márquez have exchanged, with topics as diverse as music or the travel requests they have asked each other. There is a special part where only the letters are exchanged between the two. For example, one of the letters is read there in which García Márquez tells Mutis that he dreamed that he and his family came to visit and that he had nothing to drink at home in order to receive them properly. Or when he almost desperately asks her to bring him an ashtray, the image of which inspired him in a scene from one of his works: “It may seem like nonsense to you, but it is very urgent for my novel that I see this ashtray, “that you have in your house even for just a minute” (…). From this picture I have to build the dictator’s first city, which was destroyed by a hurricane. Would it be too much of a hassle if you put it in your suitcase, show it to me, and bring it back to Mexico?”
Some documents from the archives about Álvaro Mutis, which are part of the exhibition at Casa Gabriel García Márquez.Silvana Flores
The correspondence accessible in this exhibition is also that which Mutis maintained with close friends such as the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa; the Cuban poet Eliseo Diego – with his perfect and beautiful calligraphy on carefully written sheets, as if following an invisible command – the painter Fernando Botero, the Mexican Octavio Paz. There are also photos that he treasured, such as this , which shows him standing next to Borges with obvious emotion on his face when he met him at a conference in Ecuador. And even a letter full of deep admiration that Mutis sent to the Spanish director Luis Buñuel after he was amazed by Viridiana: “I wanted to write to you about the impression that Viridiana made on me, especially because of the words that appeared in the middle Film said emotions and the enthusiasm of mutual friends always sound quite conventional and secondly because it pains me a little that the cruel routine that takes up a large part of life, even in so many other expensive things, swallows up this opportunity to tell him what what his film meant to me,” says the letter signed on August 18, 1961.
The affection and admiration of his friends is present in all the letters that Mutis received or sent on display there. A tenderness of ink that permeates the papers and reveals the personality of one of the great Spanish-language writers and poets, creator of the novel saga Maqroll el Gaviero and winner of the Cervantes Prize in 2001.
When asked if his father and Mutis ever fought, Gonzalo García Barcha answers without the slightest doubt that they did not. “They were completely opposite politically and had different ideas, but that wasn’t their mechanism, they just didn’t talk about what they disagreed with. Now that the world, and this country in particular, is so polarized, many could learn from his example.”
The letters are accompanied by postcards, photographs that until recently hung on the walls of Mutis’ house, press clippings that he himself carefully preserved, and other objects that tell of his life, but above all of the moments that he cherished most and in which he always found poetry. “Almost everything is something else, and this other thing, poetry, will show it,” he said with deep conviction in a 2010 interview.
A letter from the Cuban poet Eliseo Diego to Álvaro Mutis. Silvana Flores
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