Gabriel García Márquez by Ilan Stavans

Fuenmayor. 16 A voracious reader, he was a European expatriate who cut an elegant figure. He had immigrated to the Americas in 1911, arriving in Puerto Colombia on June 16. What brought him to Colombia? An adventurous spirit, no doubt. He first worked as a bookkeeper for Correa Hermanos, a cocoa exporting company. Vinyes wrote an autobiography that includes the following segment: “I arrived in Colombia fleeing from literature. The influence of Catalonia over me may be seen in my verses, ‘
La ardiente cabal-gata
’ and ‘
Consejas a la luna.
’ I tore up the last copies because they were overwhelmed with pretentious symbolism during an ocean crossing that took me from Barcelona to the Colombian beaches. I had also written a play,
Al florecer de los manzanos,
which was awarded a prize. I had believed naïvely in literature with almost mystic candor. Thus, the disappointment I suffered was violent. Violent enough to make me not want anything to do with it. And believe me, I did need courage. Anyway, on the ship an Italian woman lent me a copy of
The Divine Comedy.
Due to the fact that I would never return the book to her, a new lasting alliance with literature was established.” 17
    Vinyes moved to Barranquilla in 1914, and, in partnership with another Catalan immigrant, Xavier Auqué i Masdeu, opened the bookstore Librería Ramón Vinyes y Cía. Known as a superb
anfitrión,
a host and erudite entertainer, he was an amicable, entertaining host to his clientele, always recommending new books.
    In Europe, World War I was raging. At the time, Barranquilla had a population of approximately one hundredthousand. It was a thriving, if chaotic, city. Vinyes’s bookstore became a watering hole for artists and intellectuals. Soon, with the backing of friends and supporters, Vinyes launched a literary magazine,
Voces,
which quickly made a name for itself both in Colombia and the rest of Latin America. In Barranquilla, people referred to the publication as
“la revista de Vinyes,”
Vinyes’s magazine. Contributors included Julio Gómez de Castro, José Félix Fuenmayor (father of Alfonso Fuenmayor), Rafael Carbonell, and Enrique Restrepo. Its approach was liberal, cosmopolitan, and democratic: “We battle against the negative, against those that find darkness in the work of art when darkness resides in them; against those that don’t accept any other manifestation of sensibility but their own, narrow and dark.” The magazine folded in 1920.
    It isn’t known exactly when García Márquez met Vinyes, but the encounter probably took place between September 1948 and June 1949, while García Márquez was in Barranquilla. Vinyes wrote in his diary: “A good Colombian storyteller. Gabriel García Márquez. ‘
La otra orilla de la muerte
’ is a good story. A brother whose twin has just died. Nightmare, end of story. He has died of a tumor. The putrid matter will reach the one alive. They complemented each other. The story is strong. A rainy night. A leak in the middle of the bedroom, with a drop that falls insistently. A scent of violets and formaldehyde. The persistent nightmare. Pus, night, philosophy.” 18
    In the early twenties, Vinyes went back and forth between Barranquilla and Barcelona. He married a Colombian woman, María Salazar. His bookstore mysteriously burned down. Rather than rebuilding it, he took the opportunity to switch careers and began writing editorials and reviews for the newspaper
La Nación.
He continued writing for the theater. In September 1948, Vinyes met Alfonso Fuenmayor and Germán Vargas Cantillo, who idolized him. They enjoyed many conversations, mostly in La Cueva, which Vinyes recorded in his diaries.Fuenmayor said, “Vinyes came from rejecting the dull Spanish poetry revolving around Rubén Darío’s modernism. He could cite in their respective languages the Latin classics as well as Chaucer,