Álvaro Mutis (1923-2013) and Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014) were inseparable friends, almost brothers. And, once dead, they continue to celebrate things together. This year, the centenary of the first is commemorated and, in the house of the second, in Mexico City, an exhibition has been opened that makes known letters and unpublished images from the Mutis archive. As if this were not enough, Gonzalo García Barcha (Gabo’s son) publishes a book of Mutis’s poems and announces in La Vanguardia the project to convert his father’s two houses (in Mexico and Cartagena) into cultural centers open to the public.
On Thursday, the poetry collection Nocturna (Zalipoli/Kultrum), an anthology of the galleries of lucid nights in which Mutis reflects on time, guilt, history, nature, defeat, oblivion or civilization For years, its editor, Gonzalo García Barcha, in a videoconference conversation from Mexico City, has been working, in his designer capacity, on the Nocturna typeface, “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 typeface that I have, Enrico”, in which we read things like: “The fever attracts the song / of an androgynous bird / and abre caminos a insatiable pleasure / that branches out and crosses the body of the earth…”.
The children of García Márquez have decided, explains Gonzalo, that “their two houses, the one in Mexico and the one in Cartagena, will be opened to the public and that they will host exhibitions around the universe of my parents; nor would we want everything to be Gabo and more Gabo, but for the flexibility to talk about the subjects that interested my parents: cinema, journalism, books, poetry, political current affairs…”.
The house on Carrer Fuego, in the Pedregal gardens in the Mexican capital, has already been named, for the time being, the García Márquez House of Literature, in an “attempt to build it 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 grandsons, Nicolás Guerrero, we were doing archeology and things appeared that we loved them”. The exhibition Intacta materia (only on weekends until November 5) includes never-before-seen correspondence (with Gabo, Vargas Llosa, Botero…), photographs, drawings, scraps… “We found the first poem he wrote Mutis, at the age of 18, when he was an announcer on Colombian radio. He threw it in the trash, regretted it 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 him re-convince: “Álvaro, don’t scare the children!” Currently, with 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 – affirms his son -, 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 museisation of the space.
More advanced is the Gabo house project in the old town of Cartagena, “with the idea that it will be a cultural center open to the public”, also taking into account that this coastal city is the seat of the Gabo Foundation, devoted to journalism . “They are also preparing – explains García Barcha – a series of tours in different cities that had a lot to do in his life, such as Cartagena or Bogota itself”. In this sense, Barcelona joins the tributes to Mutis on Monday, with an event (7 p.m.) at Casa América Catalunya, with the participation of the poet Juan Manuel Roca, the writer Jordi Soler, the actor Maurici Serra and the musical group Como it was in the beginning
Mutis, unlike Gabo, was an outstanding poet and his beginnings as a writer are in this genre. “Poetry was very important to both of them – adds García Barcha – although as an author only Álvaro cultivated it. In any case, if you didn’t know him very well, or didn’t know that he was a poet, I knew it when I was growing up; rummaging through my parents’ library I found an edition of his complete work. He never in his life spoke of himself as a poet, what he did do was talk about literature and poetry all the time, very eloquently. I was part of the people who teach you the practical use of poetry, that it’s not about writing it or showing off, or necessarily that it’s something you do to hook up – although it is too -, but it is in the habitat. In reality, the arts are resources for capturing poetry, but poetry is not in books or paintings or buildings, but all around us, and we need to know how to recognize it. For some it stimulates us, for others it depresses us, but it accompanies us all the time. It must be recognized not in the works, but in life”.
In this sense, “the two of them had a poetry club, with Luis Feduchi or the Cuban Eliseo Diego… they also sang rancheras, they took poetry very seriously but with laughter. They lit up on the table and recited poems for the sheer pleasure of doing it.” And, when Gabo’s memory was failing due to illness, “the curious thing is that he didn’t forget the poems, nor the songs of Brassens in French; I don’t know what mechanism works, but I kept a total memory of poetry when I was losing everything else”.
The Mutis-Gabo friendship is literary history. Above all, following the moment when, in Mexico, García Márquez tells him: “I’ve decided, Álvaro, I’m leaving everything and I’m going to write. I have collected 5,000 dollars and with that I have enough to write the novel in six months”. It took much longer to finish Cien años de soledad but his friend Mutis made sure that he didn’t miss anything.
