The Absurdities of Teaching Art During a Pandemic

By Steve Teare, THE NEW YORKER, Daily Shouts

May 27, 2021

Children Are Bored on Sunday

“If the sight of someone so peripheral, so uninvolving as Alfred Eisenburg could scare her so badly, what would a cocktail party do?”

Jean Stafford, THE NEW YORKER, Fiction

February 13, 1948

Photograph by Ralph Morse / Pix Inc. / The LIFE Images Collection / Getty

Through the wide doorway between two of the painting galleries, Emma saw Alfred Eisenburg standing before “The Three Miracles of Zenobius,” his lean, equine face ashen and sorrowing, his gaunt frame looking undernourished, and dressed in a way that showed he was poorer this year than he had been last. Emma herself had been hunting for the Botticelli all afternoon, sidetracked first by a Mantegna she had forgotten, and then by a follower of Hieronymus Bosch, and distracted, in an English room as she was passing through, by the hot invective of two ladies who were lodged (so they bitterly reminded one another) in an outrageous and expensive mare’s-nest at a hotel on Madison. Emma liked Alfred, and once, at a party in some other year, she had flirted with him slightly for seven or eight minutes. It had been spring, and even into that modern apartment, wherever it had been, while the cunning guests, on their guard and highly civilized, learnedly disputed on aesthetic and political subjects, the feeling of spring had boldly invaded, adding its nameless, sentimental sensations to all the others of the buffeted heart; one did not know and never had, even in the devouring raptures of adolescence, whether this was a feeling of tension or of solution—whether one flew or drowned.

In another year, she would have been pleased to run into Alfred here in the Metropolitan on a cold Sunday, when the galleries were thronged with out-of-towners and with people who dutifully did something self-educating on the day of rest. But this year she was hiding from just such people as Alfred Eisenburg, and she turned quickly to go back the way she had come, past the Constables and Raeburns. As she turned, she came face to face with Salvador Dali, whose sudden countenance, with its unlikely mustache and its histrionic eyes, familiar from the photographs in public places, momentarily stopped her dead, for she did not immediately recognize him and, still surprised by seeing Eisenburg, took him also to be someone she knew. She shuddered and then realized that he was merely famous, and she penetrated the heart of a guided tour and proceeded safely through the rooms until she came to the balcony that overlooks the medieval armor, and there she paused, watching two youths of high-school age examine the joints of an equestrian’s shell.

She paused because she could not decide what to look at now that she had been denied the Botticelli. She wondered, rather crossly, why Alfred Eisenburg was looking at it and why, indeed, he was here at all. She feared that her afternoon, begun in such a burst of courage, would not be what it might have been; for this second’s glimpse of him—who had no bearing on her life—might very well divert her from the pictures, not only because she was reminded of her ignorance of painting by the presence of someone who was (she assumed) versed in it but because her eyesight was now bound to be impaired by memory and conjecture, by the irrelevant mind-portraits of innumerable people who belonged to Eisenburg’s milieu. And almost at once, as she had predicted, the air separating her from the schoolboys below was populated with the images of composers, of painters, of writers who pronounced judgments, in their individual argot, on Hindemith, Ernst, Sartre, on Beethoven, Rubens, Baudelaire, on Stalin and Freud and Kierkegaard, on Toynbee, Frazer, Thoreau, Franco, Salazar, Roosevelt, Maimonides, Racine, Wallace, Picasso, Henry Luce, Monsignor Sheen, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the movie industry. And she saw herself moving, shaky with apprehensions and Martinis, and with the belligerence of a child who feels himself laughed at, through the apartments of Alfred Eisenburg’s friends, where the shelves were filled with everyone from Aristophanes to Ring Lardner, where the walls were hung with reproductions of Seurat, Titian, Vermeer, and Klee, and where the record cabinets began with Palestrina and ended with Copland.

These cocktail parties were a modus vivendi in themselves for which a new philosophy, a new ethic, and a new etiquette had had to be devised. They were neither work nor play, and yet they were not at all beside the point but were, on the contrary, quite indispensable to the spiritual life of the artists who went to them. It was possible for Emma to see these occasions objectively, after these many months of abstention from them, but it was still not possible to understand them, for they were so special a case, and so unlike any parties she had known at home. The gossip was different, for one thing, because it was stylized, creative (integrating the whole of the garrotted, absent friend), and all its details were precise and all its conceits were Jamesian, and all its practitioners sorrowfully saw themselves in the role of Pontius Pilate, that hero of the untoward circumstance. (It has to be done, though we don’t want to do it; ’tis a pity she’s a whore, when no one writes more intelligent verse than she.) There was, too, the matter of the drinks, which were much worse than those served by anyone else, and much more plentiful. They dispensed with the fripperies of olives in Martinis and cherries in Manhattans (God forbid! They had no sweet teeth), and half the time there was no ice, and when there was, it was as likely as not to be suspect shavings got from a bed for shad at the corner fish store. Other species, so one heard, went off to dinner after cocktail parties certainly no later than half past eight, but no one ever left a party given by an Olympian until ten, at the earliest, and then groups went out together, stalling and squabbling at the door, angrily unable to come to a decision about where to eat, although they seldom ate once they got there but, with the greatest formality imaginable, ordered several rounds of cocktails, as if they had not had a drink in a month of Sundays. But the most surprising thing of all about these parties was that every now and again, in the middle of the urgent, general conversation, this cream of the enlightened was horribly curdled, and an argument would end, quite literally, in a bloody nose or a black eye. Emma was always astounded when this happened and continued to think that these outbursts did not arise out of hatred or jealousy but out of some quite unaccountable quirk, almost a reflex, almost something physical. She never quite believed her eyes—that is, was never altogether convinced that they were really beating one another up. It seemed, rather, that this was only a deliberate and perfectly honest demonstration of what might have happened often if they had not so diligently dedicated themselves to their intellects. Although she had seen them do it, she did not and could not believe that city people clipped each other’s jaws, for, to Emma, urban equalled urbane, and ichor ran in these Augustans’ veins.

As she looked down now from her balcony at the atrocious iron clothes below, it occurred to her that Alfred Eisenburg had been just such a first-generation metropolitan boy as these two who half knelt in lithe and eager attitudes to study the glittering splints of a knight’s skirt. It was a kind of childhood she could not imagine and from the thought of which she turned away in secret, shameful pity. She had been really stunned when she first came to New York to find that almost no one she met had gluttonously read Dickens, as she had, beginning at the age of ten, and because she was only twenty when she arrived in the city and unacquainted with the varieties of cultural experience, she had acquired the idea, which she was never able to shake entirely loose, that these New York natives had been deprived of this and many other innocent pleasures because they had lived in apartments and not in two- or three-story houses. (In the early years in New York, she had known someone who had not heard a cat purr until he was twenty-five and went to a houseparty on Fire Island.) They had played hide-and-seek dodging behind ash cans instead of lilac bushes and in and out of the entries of apartment houses instead of up alleys densely lined with hollyhocks. But who was she to patronize and pity them? Her own childhood, rich as it seemed to her on reflection, had not equipped her to read, or to see, or to listen, as theirs had done; she envied them and despised them at the same time, and at the same time she feared and admired them. As their attitude implicitly accused her, before she beat her retreat, she never looked for meanings, she never saw the literary-historical symbolism of the cocktail party but went on, despite all testimony to the contrary, believing it to be an occasion for getting drunk. She never listened, their manner delicately explained, and when she talked she was always lamentably off key; often and often she had been stared at and had been told, “It’s not the same thing at all.”

Emma shuddered, scrutinizing this nature of hers, which they all had scorned, as if it were some harmless but sickening reptile. Noticing how cold the marble railing was under her hands, she felt that her self-blame was surely justified; she came to the Metropolitan Museum not to attend to the masterpieces but to remember cocktail parties where she had drunk too much and had seen Alfred Eisenburg, and to watch schoolboys, and to make experience out of the accidental contact of the palms of her hands with a cold bit of marble. What was there to do? One thing, anyhow, was clear and that was that today’s excursion into the world had been premature; her solitude must continue for a while, and perhaps it would never end. If the sight of someone so peripheral, so uninvolving as Alfred Eisenburg could scare her so badly, what would a cocktail party do? She almost fainted at the thought of it, she almost fell headlong, and the boys, abandoning the coat of mail, dizzied her by their progress toward an emblazoned tabard.

In so many words, she wasn’t fit to be seen. Although she was no longer mutilated, she was still unkempt; her pretensions needed brushing; her ambiguities needed to be cleaned; her evasions would have to be completely overhauled before she could face again the terrifying learning of someone like Alfred Eisenburg, a learning whose components cohered into a central personality that was called “intellectual.” She imagined that even the boys down there had opinions on everything political and artistic and metaphysical and scientific, and because she remained, in spite of all her opportunities, as green as grass, she was certain they had got their head start because they had grown up in apartments, where there was nothing else to do but educate themselves. This being an intellectual was not the same thing as dilettantism; it was a calling in itself. Emma, for example, did not even know whether Eisenburg was a painter, a writer, a composer, a sculptor, or something entirely different. When, seeing him with the composers, she had thought he was one of them; when, the next time she met him, at a studio party, she decided he must be a painter; and when, on subsequent occasions, everything had pointed toward his being a writer, she had relied altogether on circumstantial evidence and not on anything he had said or done. There was no reason to suppose that he had not looked upon her as the same sort of variable and it made their anonymity to one another complete. Without the testimony of an impartial third person, neither she nor Eisenburg would ever know the other’s actual trade. But his specialty did not matter, for his larger designation was that of “the intellectual,” just as the man who confines his talents to the nose and throat is still a doctor. It was, in the light of this, all the more extraordinary that they had had that lightning-paced flirtation at a party.

Extraordinary, because Emma could not look upon herself as an intellectual. Her private antonym of this noun was “rube,” and to her regret—the regret that had caused her finally to disappear from Alfred’s group—she was not even a bona-fide rube. In her store clothes, so to speak, she was often taken for an intellectual, for she had, poor girl, gone to college and had never been quite the same since. She would not dare, for instance, go up to Eisenburg now and say that what she most liked in the Botticelli were the human and compassionate eyes of the centurions’ horses, which reminded her of the eyes of her own Great-Uncle Graham, whom she had adored as a child. Nor would she admit that she was delighted with a Crivelli Madonna because the peaches in the background looked exactly like marzipan, or that Goya’s little red boy inspired in her only the pressing desire to go out immediately in search of a plump cat to stroke. While she knew that feelings like these were not really punishable, she had not perfected the art of tossing them off; she was no flirt. She was a bounty jumper in the war between Great-Uncle Graham’s farm and New York City, and liable to court-martial on one side and death on the other. Neither staunchly primitive nor confidently au courant, she rarely knew where she was at. And this was her Achilles’ heel: her identity was always mistaken, and she was thought to be an intellectual who, however, had not made the grade. It was no use now to cry that she was not, that she was a simon-pure rube; not a soul would believe her. She knew, deeply and with horror, that she was thought merely stupid.

It was possible to be highly successful as a rube among the Olympians, and she had seen it done. Someone calling himself Nahum Mothersill had done it brilliantly, but she often wondered whether his name had not helped him, and, in fact, she had sometimes wondered whether that had been his real name. If she had been called, let us say, Hyacinth Derryberry, she believed she might have been able, as Mothersill had been, to ask who Ezra Pound was. (This struck her suddenly as a very important point; it was endearing, really, not to know who Pound was, but it was only embarrassing to know who he was but not to have read the “Cantos.”) How different it would have been if education had not meddled with her rustic nature! Her education had never dissuaded her from her convictions, but certainly it had ruined the looks of her mind—painted the poor thing up until it looked like a mean, hypocritical, promiscuous malcontent, a craven and apologetic fancy woman. Thus she continued secretly to believe (but never to confess) that the apple Eve had eaten tasted exactly like those she had eaten when she was a child visiting on her Great-Uncle Graham’s farm, and that Newton’s observation was no news in spite of all the hue and cry. Half the apples she had eaten had fallen out of the tree, whose branches she had shaken for this very purpose, and the Apple Experience included both the descent of the fruit and the consumption of it, and Eve and Newton and Emma understood one another perfectly in this particular of reality.

Emma started. The Metropolitan boys, who, however bright they were, would be boys, now caused some steely article of dress to clank, and she instantly quit the balcony, as if this unseemly noise would attract the crowd’s attention and bring everyone, including Eisenburg, to see what had happened. She scuttered like a quarry through the sightseers until she found an empty seat in front of Rembrandt’s famous frump, “The Noble Slav”—it was this kind of thing, this fundamental apathy to most of Rembrandt, that made life in New York such hell for Emma—and there, upon the plum velours, she realized with surprise that Alfred Eisenburg’s had been the last familiar face she had seen before she had closed the door of her tomb.

In September, it had been her custom to spend several hours of each day walking in a straight line, stopping only for traffic lights and outlaw taxicabs, in the hope that she would be tired enough to sleep at night. At five o’clock—and gradually it became more often four o’clock and then half past three—she would go into a bar, where, while she drank, she seemed to be reading the information offered by the Sun on “Where to Dine.” Actually she had ceased to dine long since; every few days, with effort, she inserted thin wafers of food into her repelled mouth, flushing the frightful stuff down with enormous drafts of magical, purifying, fulfilling applejack diluted with tepid water from the tap. One weighty day, under a sky that grimly withheld the rain, as if to punish the whole city, she had started out from Ninetieth Street and had kept going down Madison and was thinking, as she passed the chancery of St. Patrick’s, that it must be nearly time and that she needed only to turn east on Fiftieth Street to the New Weston, where the bar was cool, and dark to an almost absurd degree. And then she was hailed. She turned quickly, looking in all directions until she saw Eisenburg approaching, removing a gray pellet of gum from his mouth as he came. They were both remarkably shy and, at the time, she had thought they were so because this was the first time they had met since their brief and blameless flirtation. (How curious it was that she could scrape off the accretions of the months that had followed and could remember how she had felt on that spring night—as trembling, as expectant, as altogether young as if they had sat together underneath a blooming apple tree.) But now, knowing that her own embarrassment had come from something else, she thought that perhaps his had, too, and she connected his awkwardness on that September day with a report she had had, embedded in a bulletin on everyone, from her sole communicant, since her retreat, with the Olympian world. This informant had run into Alfred at a party and had said that he was having a very bad time of it with a divorce, with poverty, with a tempest that had carried off his job, and, at last, with a psychoanalyst, whose fees he could not possibly afford. Perhaps the nightmare had been well under way when they had met beside the chancery. Without alcohol and without the company of other people, they had had to be shy or their suffering would have shown in all its humiliating dishabille. Would it be true still if they should inescapably meet this afternoon in an Early Flemish room?

Suddenly, on this common level, in this state of social displacement, Emma wished to hunt for Alfred and urgently tell him that she hoped it had not been as bad for him as it had been for her. But naturally she was not so naïve, and she got up and went purposefully to look at two Holbeins. They pleased her, as Holbeins always did. The damage, though, was done, and she did not really see the pictures; Eisenburg’s hypothetical suffering and her own real suffering blurred the clean lines and muddied the lucid colors. Between herself and the canvases swam the months of spreading, cancerous distrust, of anger that made her seasick, of grief that shook her like an influenza chill, of the physical afflictions by which the poor victimized spirit sought vainly to wreck the arrogantly healthy flesh.

Even that one glance at his face, seen from a distance through the lowing crowd, told her, now that she had repeated it to her mind’s eye, that his cheeks were drawn and his skin was gray (no soap and water can ever clean away the grimy look of the sick at heart) and his stance was tired. She wanted them to go together to some hopelessly disreputable bar and to console one another in the most maudlin fashion over a lengthy succession of powerful drinks of whiskey, to compare their illnesses, to marry their invalid souls for these few hours of painful communion, and to babble with rapture that they were at last, for a little while, no longer alone. Only thus, as sick people, could they marry. In any other terms, it would be a mésalliance, doomed to divorce from the start, for rubes and intellectuals must stick to their own class. If only it could take place—this honeymoon of the cripples, this nuptial consummation of the abandoned—while drinking the delicious amber whiskey in a joint with a juke box, a stout barkeep, and a handful of tottering derelicts; if it could take place, would it be possible to prevent him from marring it all by talking of secondary matters? That is, of art and neurosis, art and politics, art and science, art and religion? Could he lay off the fashions of the day and leave his learning in his private entrepôt? Could he, that is, see the apple fall and not run madly to break the news to Newton and ask him what on earth it was all about? Could he, for her sake (for the sake of this pathetic rube all but weeping for her own pathos in the Metropolitan Museum), forget the whole dispute and, believing his eyes for a change, admit that the earth was flat?

It was useless for her now to try to see the paintings. She went, full of intentions, to the Van Eyck diptych and looked for a long time at the souls in Hell, kept there by the implacable, impartial, and genderless angel who stood upon its closing mouth. She looked, in renewed astonishment, at Jo Davidson’s pink, wrinkled, embalmed head of Jules Bache, which sat, a trinket on a fluted pedestal, before a Flemish tapestry. But she was really conscious of nothing but her desire to leave the museum in the company of Alfred Eisenburg, her cousin-german in the territory of despair.

So she had to give up, two hours before the closing time, although she had meant to stay until the end, and she made her way to the central stairs, which she descended slowly, in disappointment, enviously observing the people who were going up, carrying collapsible canvas stools on which they would sit, losing themselves in their contemplation of the pictures. Salvador Dali passed her, going quickly down. At the telephone booths, she hesitated, so sharply lonely that she almost looked for her address book, and she did take out a nickel, but she put it back and pressed forlornly forward against the incoming tide. Suddenly, at the storm doors, she heard a whistle and she turned sharply, knowing that it would be Eisenburg, as, of course, it was, and he wore an incongruous smile upon his long, El Greco face. He took her hand and gravely asked her where she had been all this year and how she happened to be here, of all places, of all days. Emma replied distractedly, looking at his seedy clothes, his shaggy hair, the green cast of his white skin, his deep black eyes, in which all the feelings were dishevelled, tattered, and held together only by the merest faith that change had to come. His hand was warm and her own seemed to cling to it and all their mutual necessity seemed centered here in their clasped hands. And there was no doubt about it; he had heard of her collapse and he saw in her face that she had heard of his. Their recognition of each other was instantaneous and absolute, for they cunningly saw that they were children and that, if they wished, they were free for the rest of this winter Sunday to play together, quite naked, quite innocent. “What a day it is! What a place!” said Alfred Eisenburg. “Can I buy you a drink, Emma? Have you time?”

She did not accept at once; she guardedly inquired where they could go from here, for it was an unlikely neighborhood for the sort of place she wanted. But they were en rapport, and he, wanting to avoid the grownups as much as she, said they would go across to Lexington. He needed a drink after an afternoon like this—didn’t she? Oh, Lord, yes, she did, and she did not question what he meant by “an afternoon like this” but said that she would be delighted to go, even though they would have to walk on eggs all the way from the Museum to the place where the bottle was, the peace pipe on Lexington. Actually, there was nothing to fear; even if they had heard catcalls, or if someone had hooted at them, “Intellectual loves Rube!,” they would have been impervious, for the heart carved in the bark of the apple tree would contain the names Emma and Alfred, and there were no perquisites to such a conjugation. To her own heart, which was shaped exactly like a valentine, there came a winglike palpitation, a delicate exigency, and all the fragrance of all the flowery springtime love affairs that ever were seemed waiting for them in the whiskey bottle. To mingle their pain, their handshake had promised them, was to produce a separate entity, like a child that could shift for itself, and they scrambled hastily toward this profound and pastoral experience. ♦

Jean Stafford, a novelist and short-story writer, died in 1979. Her “Collected Stories” won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

The Challenge

A young writer proves himself.

By Gabriel García Márquez, THE NEW YORKER, Personal History

September 29, 2003

Illustration by Edward Sorel

“I suppose you realize the trouble you got yourself into,” a friend said. “Now you’re in the showcase of recognized writers, and there’s a lot you have to do to deserve it.”

Inever imagined that, nine months after I had completed secondary school, my first story would be published in Fin de Semana, the weekend literary supplement of El Espectador, in Bogotá, and the most interesting and demanding literary publication of the time. Forty-two days later, my second story was published. The most surprising thing for me, however, was an introductory note by the editor of the supplement, Eduardo Zalamea Borda (whose pen name was Ulises), the most lucid Colombian critic at the time, and the one who was most alert to the appearance of new trends.

The way in which all this happened was so unexpected that it is not easy to recount. In February of 1947, I matriculated in the faculty of law at the Universidad Nacional of Bogotá, as my parents and I had agreed. I lived at the very center of the city, in a pensión on Calle Florián which was occupied for the most part by students who were, like me, from the Atlantic Coast. On free afternoons, instead of working to support myself, I read either in my room or in the cafés that permitted it. The books I read I obtained by chance and luck, and they depended more on chance than on any luck of mine, because the friends who could afford to buy them lent them to me for such limited periods that I stayed awake for nights on end in order to return them on time. But, unlike the books I had read at school, in Zipaquirá, which belonged in a mausoleum of consecrated authors, these were like bread warm from the oven, printed in Buenos Aires in new translations after the long publishing hiatus caused by the Second World War. In this way, I discovered, to my good fortune, the already very much discovered Jorge Luis Borges, D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene and G. K. Chesterton, William Irish and Katherine Mansfield, and many others.

For the most part, these new works were displayed in the unreachable windows of bookstores, but some copies circulated in the student cafés, which were active centers of cultural dissemination for university students from the provinces. Many of those students reserved their tables year after year and received mail and even money orders at the cafés. Favors from the proprietors or their trusted employees were instrumental in saving a good number of university careers, and quite a few professionals in the country may owe more to their café connections than they do to their almost invisible tutors.

My favorite café was El Molino, the one frequented by older poets, which was only two hundred metres or so from my pensión, on the corner of Avenida Jiménez de Quesada and Carrera Séptima. Students were not allowed to reserve seats at El Molino, but we could be sure of learning more from the literary conversations we eavesdropped on as we huddled at nearby tables and learning it better than in textbooks. It was an enormous café, elegant in the Spanish style, and its walls had been decorated by the painter Santiago Martínez Delgado with episodes from Don Quixote’s battle against the windmills. Though I did not have a reserved place, I always arranged for the waiters to put me as close as possible to the master León de Greiff—bearded, gruff, charming—who would begin his tertulia, his literary talk, at dusk with some of the most famous writers of the day, and end it with his chess students at midnight, awash in cheap liquor. Very few of the great names in the country’s arts and letters did not sit at that table at least once, and we played dead at ours in order not to miss a single word. Although they tended to talk more about women and political intrigues than about their art or work, they always said something that was new to us.

The most attentive of us were from the Atlantic Coast, united less by Caribbean conspiracies against the Cachacos—people from the sierra—than by the vice of books. One day Jorge Álvaro Espinosa, a law student who had taught me to navigate the Bible and made me learn by heart the names of Job’s companions, placed an awesome tome on the table in front of me and declared, with the authority of a bishop, “This is the other Bible.”

It was, of course, James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” which I read in bits and pieces and fits and starts until I lost all patience. This was premature brashness. Years later, as a docile adult, I set myself the task of reading it again in a serious way, and it not only resulted in the discovery of a genuine world that I had never suspected inside me but also provided me with invaluable technical help in freeing language and handling time and structure in my own books.

One of my roommates at the pensión was Domingo Manuel Vega, a medical student who had been my friend ever since our boyhood days in the town of Sucre and who shared my voracity for reading. One night, Vega came in with three books that he had just bought, and he lent me one, chosen at random, as he often did, to help me sleep. But this time the effect was just the opposite: I never slept with my former serenity again. The book was Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”—in the translation published by Losada in Buenos Aires—and it determined a new direction for my life from its opening line, recognized today as one of the great devices in world literature: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”

These were mysterious books whose dangerous precipices were not only different from but often contrary to everything I had known until then. They showed me that it was not necessary to demonstrate facts: it was enough for the author to have written something for it to be true, with no proof other than the power of his talent and the authority of his voice. It was Scheherazade all over again—not in her millenary world, where everything was possible, but in an irreparable world, where everything had already been lost.

When I finished reading “The Metamorphosis,” I felt an irresistible longing to live in that alien paradise. The new day found me at the portable typewriter that Domingo Manuel Vega had lent me, trying to write something that would resemble Kafka’s tale of a poor bureaucrat turned into an enormous cockroach. In the days that followed I did not go to the university for fear the spell would be broken, and I continued, sweating drops of envy, until Eduardo Zalamea Borda published in his pages a disconsolate article lamenting the lack of memorable names among the new generation of Colombian writers, and the fact that he could detect nothing in the future that might remedy the situation. I do not know with what right I felt challenged, in the name of my generation, by the provocation in that piece, but I took up the story again in an attempt to prove him wrong. I elaborated on the plot idea of the conscious corpse in “The Metamorphosis,” but relieved the story of its false mysteries and ontological prejudices.

Still, I felt so uncertain that I did not dare talk it over with any of my tablemates at El Molino. Not even with Gonzalo Mallarino, my fellow-student at the faculty of law, who was the only reader of the lyrical prose pieces I wrote to help me endure the tedium of my classes. I reread and corrected my story until I was exhausted, and at last I wrote a personal note to Eduardo Zalamea—whom I had never seen—of which I cannot recall even a single word. I put everything in an envelope and took it in person to reception at El Espectador. The concierge authorized me to go up to the second floor and hand the letter to Zalamea himself, but I was paralyzed at the mere idea. I left the envelope on the concierge’s desk and fled.

This happened on a Tuesday, and I was not troubled by any presentiments regarding the fate of my story. I was certain that, in the event it was published, it would not happen very soon. In the meantime, for two weeks, I rambled and roamed from café to café to allay my Saturday-afternoon apprehension, until September 13th, when I went into El Molino and collided with the title of my story printed across the full width of El Espectador, which had just come out: “The Third Resignation.”

My first reaction was the devastating realization that I did not have five centavos to buy the paper. This was the most explicit symbol of my poverty, because, in addition to the newspaper, many basic things in daily life cost five centavos: the trolley, the public telephone, a cup of coffee, a shoeshine. I rushed out to the street with no protection against the imperturbable drizzle, but in the nearby cafés there was no one I knew who could give me a charitable coin. And I did not find anyone in the pensión at that dead hour on a Saturday except the landlady, which was the same as not finding anyone, because I owed her seven hundred and twenty times five centavos for two months of room and board. When I went out again, prepared for anything, I encountered a man sent by Divine Providence: he was getting out of a cab, holding El Espectador in his hand, and I asked him straight out if he would give it to me.

And so I read my first story in print, with an illustration by Hernán Merino, the official sketch artist for the paper. I read it in a single breath, hiding in my room, my heart pounding. In each line I discovered the crushing power of print, for what I had constructed with so much love and pain as a humble imitation of a universal genius was revealed to me as an obscure, weak monologue, barely sustained by three or four consolatory sentences. Almost twenty years went by before I dared to read it a second time, and my judgment then—untempered by compassion—was even less indulgent.

The most difficult thing was the avalanche of friends who invaded my room with copies of the newspaper and glowing praise for a story that I was sure they had not understood. Among my fellow-students at the university, some appreciated it, others were puzzled by it, and others with more reason did not read past the fourth line, but Gonzalo Mallarino, whose literary judgment it was not easy for me to question, admired it without reservation.

My greatest uneasiness had to do with the verdict of Jorge Álvaro Espinosa, whose critical blade was dangerous even beyond our immediate circle. I had contradictory feelings: I wanted to see him right away to resolve my uncertainty once and for all, but at the same time the idea of facing him terrified me. He disappeared until Tuesday, which was not unusual for an insatiable reader, and when he reappeared at El Molino he began talking to me not about the story but about my audacity.

“I suppose you realize the trouble you got yourself into,” he said, fixing his green king-cobra eyes on mine. “Now you’re in the showcase of recognized writers, and there’s a lot you have to do to deserve it.”

His was the only opinion that could affect me as much as that of Ulises, and I was petrified. But before he finished speaking I decided to preëmpt him with what I considered then, and have always considered since, to be the truth: “That story is a piece of shit.”

He replied with immutable control that he could not say anything yet because he had had time only to glance at it. But he explained that, even if it was as bad as I said, it was not bad enough for me to sacrifice the golden opportunity that life was offering me.

“In any case, that story already belongs to the past,” he concluded. “What matters now is the next one.”

I was flabbergasted and foolish enough to look for arguments to the contrary, until I understood that no advice I heard would be more intelligent than his. He expounded on his unshakable idea that you had to conceive of the story first and then the style, but that each depended on the other in a kind of mutual servitude that was the magic wand of the classics. He also spent some time on his opinion, which he had often repeated, that I needed to read the Greeks in a profound, unbiased way, and not just Homer—the only one I had read, because I was required to for the baccalaureate. I promised I would, and I wanted to hear other names, but he changed the subject and began to talk instead about André Gide’s “The Counterfeiters,” which he had read that weekend. I never found the courage to tell him that our conversation might well have determined the course of my life. I stayed up all night making notes for my next story, which would not have the meanders of the first.

Isuspected that those who talked to me about the story were impressed less by the story itself—which they had perhaps not read and had, I was sure, not understood—than by its being published with such unusual fanfare on so important a page. To begin with, I realized that my two great defects were the two greatest defects possible: the clumsiness of my writing and my ignorance of the human heart. And both were more than evident in my first story, which was a confused, abstract meditation made worse by my abuse of invented emotions.

Searching my memory for situations from real life for the second story, I remembered that one of the most beautiful women I had known as a child had told me she wished she could be inside the very handsome cat that she was caressing on her lap. I asked her why, and she answered, “Because it is more beautiful than I am.” This gave me a point of departure for the second story, as well as an attractive title: “Eva Is Inside Her Cat.” The rest, like the previous story, was invented out of nothing and, for the same reason—as we liked to say in those days—it carried within itself the seeds of its own destruction.

This story was published with the same fanfare as the first, on Saturday, October 25, 1947, and illustrated by the painter Enrique Grau, a rising star in the Caribbean sky. I was struck that my friends accepted this as a routine occurrence and me as a renowned writer. I, on the other hand, suffered over the errors, doubted the successes, but managed to keep my hope alive. The high point came a few days later, when Eduardo Zalamea, employing his usual pseudonym, Ulises, wrote a note in his daily column in El Espectador. It went straight to the point: “Readers of Fin de Semana, the literary supplement of this newspaper, will have noted the appearance of a new and original talent with a vigorous personality.” And farther on: “In the imagination anything can happen, but knowing how to show with naturalness, simplicity, and without fuss the pearl produced there is not something that all twenty-year-old boys just beginning their relationship with letters can accomplish.” And he concluded without hesitation: “In García Márquez a new and notable writer has been born.”

The note brought me a shock of happiness—how could it not!—but at the same time it disturbed me that Zalamea had not left himself any way out. Now that he had said what he had said, I was obliged to interpret his generosity as a call to my conscience that would last the rest of my life.

In spite of my chronic absenteeism and judicial negligence, I passed the easy first-year law courses thanks to overheated last-minute cramming, and the more difficult ones by using my old trick of eluding the question with clever devices. The truth is, I was not comfortable in my own skin and did not know how to continue groping my way along that dead-end street. I understood the law less and had much less interest in it than in any of the subjects I had studied at the liceo, and I felt I was enough of an adult to make my own decisions. In short, after sixteen months of miraculous survival, all I had gained was a group of good friends for the rest of my life.

My scant interest in the law was even scantier after the note by Ulises appeared. At the university, some of the other students began to call me Maestro and to introduce me as a writer. This coincided with my resolve to learn how to construct a story that was both credible and fantastic but had no cracks. I had several ideal distant models, such as Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex,” whose protagonist investigates the murder of his father only to discover that he himself is the murderer; “The Monkey’s Paw,” by W. W. Jacob, the perfect story in which everything that happens is accidental; Maupassant’s “Boule de Suif”; and so many other great sinners, may God keep them in His holy kingdom.

I was involved in this one Sunday night when at last something happened to me that deserved to be recounted. I had spent almost the entire day venting my frustrations as a writer with Gonzalo Mallarino at his house on Avenida Chile, and when I was returning to the pensión on the last streetcar a flesh-and-blood faun got on at the Chapinero station. No mistake: I said a faun. I noticed that none of the few passengers on the streetcar at midnight seemed surprised to see him, and this made me think that he was just one of the men in costume who sold a variety of things on Sundays in the children’s parks. But reality convinced me that I should have no doubts: his horns and beard were as wild as those of a goat, and when he passed by me I could smell the stink of his pelt. With the manners of a good paterfamilias, he got off before Calle 26, the street where the cemetery was, and disappeared among the trees in the park.

After half a night of being awakened by my tossing and turning, Domingo Manuel Vega asked me what was wrong. “It’s just that a faun got on the streetcar,” I told him, half asleep. He was wide awake when he replied that if it was a nightmare it must be due to the poor digestion typical of Sundays, but if it was the subject for my next story he thought it was fantastic. The next morning, I did not know if I had seen a faun on the streetcar or if it had been a Sunday hallucination. I began by admitting to myself that I had fallen asleep, tired at the end of the day, and had a dream that was so vivid I could not separate it from reality. But, in the end, the essential thing for me was not whether the faun had been real but that I lived the experience as if he were. And for the same reason, real or dreamed, it was not legitimate to consider this as a bewitchment of the imagination; it was, in effect, a marvellous experience in my life.

I wrote the story the next day in one sitting, put it under my pillow, and read it and reread it for several nights before I went to sleep and in the mornings when I woke up. It was a bare, literal transcription of the episode on the streetcar, just as it had occurred and in a style as innocent as that of a baptism announcement on the society page. At last, hounded by new doubts, I decided to submit it to the infallible test of print, not in El Espectador but in the literary supplement of El Tiempo. Perhaps this was a way for me to face a judgment different from that of Eduardo Zalamea, and not involve him in an adventure that he had no reason to share. I sent the story with a friend from the pensión, along with a letter for Don Jaime Posada, the new and very young editor of the Suplemento Literario of El Tiempo. But the story was not published and my letter was not answered.

The publications in El Espectador, on the margins of literary success, created other, more terrestrial and amusing problems for me. Misguided friends would stop me in the street to ask for the loans that would save them, since they could not believe that a writer presented with so much prominence had not received enormous sums for his stories. Very few believed me when I told them the truth: I had never been paid a centavo for the stories and had not expected to be, because that was not the custom in the country’s press. Even more serious was my papa’s disappointment when he realized I could not take over my own expenses at a time when three of his eleven children were in school. The family sent me thirty pesos a month. The pensión alone cost me eighteen, with no right to eggs at breakfast, and I always found myself obliged to dip into that money for unforeseen expenses. I do not know where I had acquired the habit of making unconscious sketches in the margins of newspapers, on the napkins in restaurants, on the marble tables in cafés. But a casual acquaintance from El Molino, who had enough influence at a ministry to be placed as a draftsman without having the slightest idea how to draw, proposed that I do his work for him and we divide the salary. Never again in my life was I so close to being corrupted, but not so close that I repented.

My interest in music also grew at this time, as the popular songs of the Caribbean—which I had taken in with my mother’s milk—were making their way into Bogotá. The radio program with the largest audience was “The Coastal Hour,” hosted by Don Pascual Delvecchio, a kind of musical ambassador from the Atlantic Coast. It aired on Sunday mornings and became so popular that we students from the Caribbean would go to the offices of the radio station to dance until late in the afternoon. That program was the origin of the immense popularity of our music in the interior of the country, and later in its most remote corners; it even provided students from the coast with a means of social advancement in Bogotá.

The only disadvantage for Caribbean students in the capital was the spectre of forced marriage. I do not know what wicked precedents had advanced the coastal belief that the girls in Bogotá were loose with boys from the coast and set traps for us in bed so that we would be obliged to marry them. And they did this not for love but because they hoped to live with a window facing the sea. I never believed it. On the contrary, the most disagreeable memories of my life are of the sinister brothels on the outskirts of Bogotá, where we would go to drain away our gloomy bouts of drunkenness. In the most sordid of them, I almost left behind the little life I had in me when a woman I had just been with appeared naked in the corridor, shouting that I had stolen twelve pesos from a drawer in her dressing table. Two thugs from the house knocked me down, and, not satisfied with emptying my pockets of the two pesos I had left after a session of ruinous lovemaking, they stripped me of everything, including my shoes, to search every inch for the stolen money. They had decided not to kill me but to turn me over to the police when the woman remembered that she had changed her hiding place the day before, and she found the money there, intact.

Not long after that, I decided at last not to go on wasting time in the faculty of law, but I did not have the courage to confront my parents once and for all. They told me they were so satisfied with the results of my baccalaureate and my first year as a law student that they sent me—in the care of my brother Luis Enrique, who had come to Bogotá and found a good job in February, 1948—the most lightweight and modern typewriter on the market as a surprise gift. It was the first typewriter I ever owned, and also the most unfortunate, because that same day we pawned it for twelve pesos in order to continue a welcoming party with my brother and my friends from the pensión. The next day, with aching heads, we went to the pawnshop to make certain that the typewriter was still there with its seals unbroken, and to insure that it would remain in good condition until the money to redeem it rained down on us from Heaven. We had a good opportunity with what my friend the false draftsman paid me, but at the last minute we decided to put off redeeming it. Each time my brother and I passed the pawnshop, together or alone, we would confirm from the street that the typewriter was still there, wrapped like a jewel in cellophane paper with an organdy bow, among rows of well-protected household appliances. After a month, the joyous calculations we had made in the euphoria of our drunkenness were still unfulfilled, but the typewriter was safe and sound in its place and could remain there for as long as we paid the quarterly interest. ♦

(Translated, from the Spanish, by Edith Grossman.)