Álvaro Mutis (1923-2013) and Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014) were inseparable friends, almost brothers. And, once dead, they continue celebrating things together. This year, the centenary of the first is commemorated and, in the second’s house, in Mexico City, an exhibition has opened that reveals unpublished letters and images from the Mutis archive. As if that were not enough, Gonzalo García Barcha (Gabo’s son) edits a book of poems by Mutis and announces to La Vanguardia the project to convert his father’s two houses (in Mexico and Cartagena de Indias) into cultural centers open to the public.
This Thursday the collection of poems Nocturna (Zalipoli/Kultrum) went on sale, an anthology of those galleries of lucid nights in which Mutis reflects on time, guilt, history, nature, defeat, oblivion or civilization. Its editor, Gonzalo García Barcha, speaking by videoconference from Mexico City, has been working for years, in his role as designer, on the Nocturna typography, “a fantasy inspired by Álvaro to design things that have to do with the night. Since it is not ready yet, for this book I chose a version of another font that I have, Enrico”, in which we read things like: “Fever attracts the song / of an androgynous bird / and opens paths to an insatiable pleasure / that is branches and crosses the body of the earth…”
García Márquez’s children have decided, explains Gonzalo, that “their two houses, the one in Mexico and the one in Cartagena de Indias, be open to the public and that they will host exhibitions about my parents’ universe, nor would we want everything “It was Gabo and more Gabo but that there was the flexibility to talk about the topics that interested my parents, cinema, journalism, books, poetry, current politics…”
The house on Fuego Street, in the Pedregal Gardens in the Mexican capital, has already been baptized, for now, as the García Márquez House of Literature, in an “attempt to build it up as a cultural center. On the occasion of Álvaro’s centenary, his widow, Carmen Miracle, agreed to open her archive, so, with the support of one of Álvaro’s grandchildren, Nicolás Guerrero, we were doing archeology and things appeared that we loved. The exhibition Intacta materia (only on weekends, until November 5) includes never-before-seen correspondence (with Gabo, Vargas Llosa, Botero…), photographs, drawings, clippings… “We found the first poem that Mutis wrote , at the age of 18, when he was an announcer on Colombian radio. He threw it in the trash can, repented and got it back the next day.”
Mutis and Gabo’s houses were always very close, in the same neighborhood, and Mutis’s loud laughter, “like the roar of a tiger,” made them reprimand him: “Álvaro, don’t scare the children!” Currently, under the pretext of the exhibition, you can visit, for the first time, the entire ground floor of García Márquez’s house, although some parts can only be seen through glass. “Gabo’s study arouses a lot of interest,” says his son, “and his books in the library… it’s moving to see how people react.” At the moment, two events a year are planned to progressively gain muscle in the museumization of the space.
The Gabo House project in the old town of Cartagena de Indias is more advanced, “with the idea of ??it being a cultural center open to the public,” also taking into account that this coastal city is the headquarters of the Gabo Foundation. , dedicated to journalism. “A series of tours are also being prepared – explains García Barcha – in different cities that had a lot to do with his life, such as Cartagena itself or Bogotá.” In this sense, Barcelona joins the tributes to Mutis this Monday, with an event (7 p.m.) at Casa Amèrica Catalunya, with the participation of the poet Juan Manuel Roca, the writer Jordi Soler, the actor Mauricio Sierra and the musical group Como It was in the beginning.
Mutis, unlike Gabo, was an outstanding poet and his beginnings as a writer were in this genre. “Poetry was very important to both of them,” García Barcha explains, “although as an author only Álvaro cultivated it. In any case, if you didn’t know him very closely, or knew that he was a poet, I already knew it when I grew up; Rummaging through my parents’ library I found a complete edition of his work. He never ever talked about himself as a poet, what he did do was talk about literature and poetry all the time, very eloquently. He was part of those people who teach you the practical use of poetry, that it is not about writing it or showing off nor is it necessarily something that one does to flirt – although that is also – but it is in the habitat. In reality, the arts are resources to capture poetry, but poetry is not in books or paintings or buildings, but around us, and we must know how to recognize it. It stimulates some of us, it depresses others, but it accompanies us all the time. “We must recognize it not in works, but in life.”
In this sense, “the two of them had a poetry club, together with Luis Feduchi or the Cuban Eliseo Diego… they also sang rancheras, they took poetry very seriously but with some laughter. They became inflamed after dinner and recited poems for the pure pleasure of doing so.” And, when Gabo’s memory was already failing due to the illness, “the curious thing is that he did not forget the poems, nor did he forget the songs of Brassens in French, I don’t know what mechanism works there, but he kept a total memory of the poetry when he was losing everything else.”
The Mutis-Gabo friendship is the history of literature. Above all, as a result of that moment when, in Mexico, García Márquez tells him: “I have decided, Álvaro, I am leaving everything and locking myself in to write. “I have raised $5,000 and that is enough for me to write the novel in six months.” It took him much longer to finish One Hundred Years of Solitude but his friend Mutis made sure that he did not lack anything.
