Guillermo Angulo tells of wonderful stories that for him are of brotherhood and affection and for his readers a testimony of how rich and valuable Colombian cultural life has been.
I can’t walk past a bookstore window without stopping. There are sometimes books in them that look like magnets for the eyes. This was the case a few days ago at the National Library of the Andean Center. The cover of a book with a beautiful photo of what Gabo looks like in his labyrinth, in the middle of a dense garden like a living statue, is García Márquez in profile looking into infinity and beyond, with a suggestive layout that, in addition to the name of the book and its author, they made him go in to look for it, read the back cover and the index and then queue up at the box.
A hymn to friendship? A journey through the best of the cultural life of Colombia in the second half of the 20th century? All of the above? The author, from multiple professions, from diplomat to gardener, going through the one that best portrays him in this book, that of photographer (without the book being in any way a photography book), multiple accomplice and confidant, Guillermo Angulo gives an account of wonderful stories that for him are of brotherhood and affection and for his readers a testimony of how rich and valuable Colombian cultural life has been, especially the time in question, which I would call the golden age of our culture, and that the author calls the ” Myth Generation”.
Photographing people is not easy, as the author says: “I consider the photographer to be an intruder and the permanent presence of a camera distorts relationships”. Nothing more true, as true as that we all like to appear in portraits, even when many deny it, I do not believe them, just as it is also true what an unknown snooper with a camera in hand can bother in any situation. I once read that one of the many factors that could have contributed to the depression that led to Marilyn Monroe’s suicide was not being able to take a step in her life without being crossed by a photographer. I find it credible. What then is the key? Making photography part of the party, of friendship and affection, conditions that rarely occur and when they do, the result is wonderful, as in the photos that Angulo has taken of his friends. In this book he shows us the antioqueño philosopher par excellence, the great Fernando Gonzales, Manuel Mejía Vallejo, Alberto Aguirre, Rogelio Salmona or Jorge Zalamea, or his friends from the Cave in Barranquilla, among others. The above to present as proof the love and trust that Gabo and his eight friends here present had in the author of the book.
Angulo – or Anguleto as Gabo called him – complains that his Nobel photos have been profusely pirated, instead of boasting about this tribute that pirates pay him, since they give proof of photos that no one other than the heart of the portrayed could have taken. What a regret for these pirates, they have to be content with photos of Gabo shooting a gun or sticking his tongue out at the photographer, and convince themselves that they are very funny photos.
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Reading the book happened to me what happened to our first-born, almost two decades ago, while reading the first volume of Harry Potter: “Dad, I don’t want it to run out.” I always wanted to continue reading and discovering delicious anecdotes of the intellectual life of that Colombia that the book portrays. My only regret is that many of the characters presented here today are totally unknown to those who were not their contemporaries. A couple of giants such as Jorge Zalamea or Hernando Valencia Goelkel were mentioned in some faculties of literature in Colombia and of whom unfortunately their reissues are scarce. Discoveries such as that García Márquez had among the best writers the author of that masterpiece of Colombian art, the homage to the 14 spearmen from the Vargas swamp, Rodrigo Arenas Betancur. For my part, as soon as I can, I will run to the Luis Ángel Arango Library to look for his texts and to put it in the words of the poet Rafael Pombo: “I want to try those pastries”. (Thank you, Master Angulo). From Hernando Valencia, to whom I must introduce myself to the excellent Stanidian writer Thomas Pynchon – whom my father greatly admired – I always heard him say that García Márquez claimed that he had the best prose in Spanish in Colombia, but what Arenas Betancur is about is quite a revelation, like so many others in the book.
It is relieving to know that the cultural magazine most cited among Colombian intellectuals and most desired among collectors is digitized on the website of the National Library, thanks to the management of the then director Consuelo Gaitán, and Angulo also tells where the name came from of the magazine, which is the simplest and least pretentious that one can imagine, hardly worth the intelligence of those who were part of it. Names like Jorge Gaitán Durán, Pedro Gómez Valderrama, Jorge Eliécer “the monster” Ruiz, or Valencia Goelkel himself.
There are unforgettable and typical anecdotes of the human condition, such as when he tells that Gabo, before the computer, wrote a book every seven years and then it took him only three years and the intelligent character of those of those comes out: “all past times were better”, that notes: “that’s why they don’t look so good now.” Or, the phrase of his mother, Doña Luisa Santiaga Márquez, who attributed her son’s intelligence to the fact that every day she gave him a spoonful of Scott’s Emulsion, which in passing they gave it to me too and I don’t think anymore I won the Pritzker for architecture. (I am an architect, and that award is the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for Literature).
Anyway, from the cover, a delightful book. Through its pages, in addition to the eight great friends that give the book its title, wonderful men and women parade with their delicious stories. Of the women, the most representative and undoubtedly a person with a magical presence, Mrs. Carmen Balcells, one of those that I would have been fascinated to meet or the English spouse of photographer Rodrigo Moya, Susan Flaherty. Presences such as that of Nicolás Guillén, Manuel Puig; of characters such as Pedro “el Negro” Bonnet, Alejandro Obregón, Rojas Herazo, Enrique Grau, Ernesto Volkeing, Nicolás Suescún, Jorge Child. Brilliant exponents of our women such as Emma Reyes, María Victoria “la Toya” Uribe, Cecilia Fonseca de Ibáñez, Alicia Baraibar, Freda Sargent, Débora Arango, Graciela Samper to whom we owe the Artesanías de Colombia that we know today, or that unforgettable one, for intelligent and beautiful, human being who was Rita Restrepo de Agudelo, among others.
(You may also want to see: Photos of ‘Gabo’ that you have probably never seen )
In my view, of the eight portrayed in the texts with whom he achieves a most heartfelt and intimate closeness -of those that cannot be felt by more than two people in life-, it is with his countryman Manuel Mejía Vallejo with whom, Among others, in Venezuela he shared a very beautiful friendship with a prostitute from Medellín, “a very intelligent, sensitive and funny woman,” says Guillermo Angulo, and whom Mejía Vallejo referred to as: “one of the people I loved the most in my life. lifetime”. The other dear friend was the Mexican-Paisa photographer – his disciple – Rodrigo Moya.
Another great writer and beautiful person, the doctor Manuel Zapata Olivella, one more with whom Colombia is in debt of recognition of his work, of which he tells an anecdote that would be preferred as ingenious if it was invented, but experienced first-hand by the author. of the book and in the world of magical realism, we are forced to take for granted, and it is when Zapata Olivella arrives in Mexico, with one hand in front and the other behind after a trip on foot from Colombia and his intellectual friends the only thing that they achieve to make life easier for her is a job as Doctor Corazón in Impacto magazine. Work in which he was so successful that one day a great and handsome northern gentleman came to the newspaper office to say that he wanted to marry Doctor Corazón, since it is she who has given him the best advice to lead his love life. Poor Zapata, with the help of his friends, had to go into hiding to the point of being forced to leave the country.
We have, therefore, a great bibliographic success – and above all timely – in our bookstores. I say opportune because I consider that we should not let more time pass to make known to our new generations the cultural legacy left to us by the eight friends portrayed in words in this book by Guillermo Angulo, with the great ñapa of the nobel Gabriel García Márquez.
