40 years of the Nobel to Gabo

Next October 21 will be the 40th anniversary of the day Colombians woke up to the good news of Gabriel García Márquez winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. I remember that it was said on the stations in Barranquilla that the 18 lifetime juries of the Swedish Academy of Letters had unanimously chosen the cataquero writer, who finally received the long-awaited prize on December 10, in Stockholm, with the speech “The loneliness of Latin America”. That same December 10, many Colombians learned of the existence of the famous “Caribbean” clothing with which García Márquez received the award: Liquiliqui. The RAE writes it as “Liquilique”, – with an e at the end – and defines it as “Cotton cloth blouse that fastens from the neck”, and places it in the Colombian-Venezuelan plains.

I think it was Thursday, very early I was on my way to the university, and at the corner of Murillo Street and Olaya Herrera Avenue I found myself face to face with a classmate from Sucre and we devoted ourselves to commenting on the news of the moment. In that decade of the eighties, of the 20th century, two newspapers circulated in Barranquilla, El Heraldo and Diario del Caribe. The first was and still is a well-known newspaper, then directed by Juan B. Fernández Renowitzky; the second, owned since 1961 by Mario Santo Domingo, father of the industrialist Julio Mario Santo Domingo, was a newspaper run by intellectuals, aimed at intellectuals, and those intellectuals were precisely the friends of the new Nobel: Francisco “Pacho” Posada de la Peña, Alfonso Fuenmayor – who was the director when the award was announced -, Julio Roca Baena, Eduardo Posada Carbó and Armando Benedetti Jimeno, among others. It so happens that Fernández Renowitzky and Julio Mario Santo Domingo belonged to the famous Barranquilla Group. The fact that García Márquez does not mention them in One Hundred Years of Solitude, as he does in others, does not mean that they did not belong. The truth is that, as Fuenmayor recalls in his Chronicles about the Barranquilla group, Santo Domingo always had resistance, due to his wealthy origin.

A group of students from the Universidad Libre arrived that day at those facilities of Diario del Caribe, in Barrio Abajo, and we were well received by managers, and what was my surprise when I saw that there were familiar faces in the newsroom, because they studied at the Libre and, furthermore, because we were partners in what was called “JUCO” and the “PC”, at the time of the Cold War. We were encouraged by the Xaverian lawyer Juan Bautista Arteta de la Hoz, a multifaceted person, my professor of sociology, general secretary of the Communist Party – PC – in the Atlantic and nephew of the famous Luis Eduardo Nieto Arteta. Juan B. Arteta and his brothers-Gilberto, Tito and Ariel-were classmates of García Márquez in the first years of high school at the San José school, now abandoned. In his Memoirs of him, García Márquez affectionately refers to the Arteta brothers as “The tribe of the Arteta”, “with whom I used to escape to the bookstores and the cinema”, adds Gabo. He refers to the Mundo Bookstore and the Rex Cinema. The bookstore was owned by Jorge Rondón Hederich, who, in the words of the writer Juan Dager “…the Rondón family came from the very hero of the Vargas Swamp battle…”; and the Rex Cinema, opened in 1935 in the center, was recently converted into a restaurant and closed its doors due to Covid-19. In short, if there is a deserved and admired Nobel Prize in Colombia, that is Gabriel García Márquez.