Juan Villoro
One proof of the decline of journalism is that it gives little news from the afterlife. Although millions of sentient beings verify daily that ghosts carry out their functions, it is not fashionable to believe in them.
In the eighteenth century, G. E. Lessing dealt in his capital play, The Hamburg Dramaturgy, with those appearing in the theater. For centuries, the problem was not to make them plausible but to convince the public that they were actors and not real specters. Faced with Hamlet’s father’s ghost, Shakespeare’s contemporaries felt a fright that was not due to makeup but to the conviction that the dead return.
Electric light, and the tendency to believe verifiable things, took away opportunities for ghosts. The empirical signs of its activity do not stop happening, but now they are attributed to electromagnetic causes.
A few days ago, I participated in a virtual meeting with the writers who will visit the One Hundred Years of Solitude Study House where Gabriel García Márquez wrote his famous novel. As the author dedicated chronicles to people who pedaled bicycles and did paperwork after death or were preparing to resuscitate “in full exercise of their powers,” the conversation revolved around the possible ghosts of the Study House. García Márquez lived with those presences in his childhood insomnia. When already a famous writer, he decided to buy a property in Cartagena de Indias but refused to settle in a colonial mansion, fearful of coexisting with tenants who had napped and peeled onions in ancient times.
Although superstition attributes bad intentions to those who return to the world for unfinished business, sometimes we long for supernatural contact with someone who achieved mysteriously real wonders in life. In the gathering at the Study House, we wondered if it would be possible to feel the shadow hand of the maestro.
I am in a position to give a piece of news that belongs to this world but is explained by another. Last Wednesday, the 17th, I spoke about La mala hora (The Evil Hour) in the course on García Márquez that I teach from the office where he wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude. I remembered that The Evil Hour’s working title had been Este Pueblo de Mierda (This Shitty Town). When García Márquez had to choose a definitive name, he found three suggestive words in his story “En Este pueblo no hay Ladrones” (There are no thieves in this town.”)
La Mala Hora (The Evil Hour) is a splendid title, but it doesn’t quite fit the novel’s scattered plot, where there is no decisive event. I spoke until 9:30 pm, the time to finish. Then a sudden wind shook the room; then, a book fell behind me as a reminder that my time was up.
García Márquez christened his study La Cueva de la Mafia (The Cave of the Mafia) and Miguel Limón, director of the Foundation for Mexican Letters, renamed it with prophetic enthusiasm La Cueva de la Magia (The Cave of the Magic). On a shelf are the novelist’s books. Which one of them fell apart? La Mala Hora!
The coincidence could not be more exact: a title on the time’s abuses signaled the end of the class. But there was something else. In that session, I mentioned the role that the painter Vicente Rojo had in the life of García Márquez. They were good friends; Rojo published it in ERA and designed the cover of One Hundred Years of Solitude using popular craft votive offerings and talismans and a sign painter’s typeface. In this regard, Dasso Saldívar wrote: “Not only had he captured the background and the popular message of the novel, but, without intending to, he had approached the original design of the old game of Macondo, which was so popular in the banana zone during the first decades of the century […] The cover of Rojo, which invaded the continent with more than a million copies, naturally became as popular as the novel, exceeding the limits of the bookish and becoming an image of cultural identity “.
At the end of class, I heard devastating news: Vicente Rojo had just died. The session was recorded on video. At the end, there is a sudden and remote wind, and a book collapses. The Evil hour signals the end of the class and the one of an exceptional life.
The ghosts’ witnesses can be called into question; However, the story I have just told is about something incontrovertible: the immortality of García Márquez and Vicente Rojo.