His novella Leaf Storm attracted a bit more interest. Some critics praised what members of the award committee liked about his short story: for the first time, a work of Colombian literature applied the writing techniques and themes present in Faulkner’s novels. Critic Alonso Ángel Restrepo wrote, “Leaf Storm will divide the history of our national novel into two stages: the one before this work and the one that will follow.” Other critics believed the opposite. An anonymous reviewer criticized it harshly. For him, it reflected the poor state of national literature: “prizes have been given to vulgar and despicable books such as one entitled Leaf Storm in which words repeat again and again in each chapter because of the shortage of materials. . . . It is not fair that this shitty novella is qualified as the last word.” And, regarding its contents, critics saw the novella as a rural, local story from the country’s backward banana region. In reality, the book had little impact beyond art circles in Bogotá. Poor distribution, not surprisingly, did not help. The publication and trajectory of the novella was typical for the average literary book produced in Latin America before the publishing boom of the 1960s. Ediciones S.L.B., the small publisher in Bogotá that released Leaf Storm, disappeared shortly after its creation. By contract, S.L.B. agreed to publish four thousand copies. Most likely, it ended up cutting the print run to a quarter of that or less. By contract, too, the publisher was responsible for distributing the book in Colombia and in any Spanish-speaking country. But the truth was that García Márquez had to rely on friends for distribution and sales.32
In short, by 1955, only journalism, not literature, had improved García Márquez’s professional standing. His reportage on the shipwrecked sailor succeeded not just because of the formidable story of the sailor’s odyssey at sea, but also because it actually uncovered a case of corruption and smuggling in the navy. This discovery proved to be politically dangerous. President and military dictator Gustavo Rojas Pinilla had decorated the surviving sailor. Fearing retaliation from the government, El Espectador sent García Márquez to Europe for a few weeks as a foreign correspondent. A few weeks turned into years.
Becoming a Latin American Writer in Paris
García Márquez worked as a correspondent for El Espectador in Europe from July 1955 until January 1956, when the military government closed the newspaper down for political noncompliance. He decided to stay in Paris until the end of 1957. To survive, he worked as a freelance writer for media in Colombia, Peru, and Venezuela. He also collected used bottles and newspapers for cash, performed as a street singer, and received money and food from friends. Sometimes he went days without eating. Once, as he confessed to one of his siblings, he took party leftovers from a friend’s garbage can. This kind of economic hardship, as the Barranquilla and Cartagena Groups taught him, was the perfect real-life experience that, if imagined as a literary plot, could be the basis of a powerful fiction story. So, he found the inspiration for his next story in his daily life, especially as he obsessively awaited for paychecks in the mail for his freelance writing. This theme of waiting for a letter that may never arrive became the basis of the plot for No One Writes to the Colonel. His second novella tells the tragic story of a retired and impoverished colonel. He fought in the civil war alongside Colonel Aureliano Buendía, and for years he waited in vain for his war pension to arrive.33
Before García Márquez imagined the plot for this novella in Paris, he worked for El Espectador from Rome between July and December 1955. He managed to do so before the newspaper closed down and he ran out of money. There, he also studied scriptwriting and montage at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (Experimental Film Center). This center was then under the influence of screenwriter Zavattini, one of the leading proponents of the neorealist movement in Italian cinema. No One Writes to the Colonel, which García Márquez started after his stay in Rome, was the first of his literary works in which the conventions of cinema were key to crafting the story. To imagine it, he opted for direct and unadorned language, a trademark of neorealism’s cinematic language. As mentioned earlier, he first studied the narrative techniques of cinema in his film reviews for newspapers. Before he left for Europe, he also collaborated with members of the Barranquilla Group in the production of The Blue Lobster, a silent short movie based on a script by García Márquez and Cepeda Samudio.34 When he arrived in Rome, he was convinced that the narrative techniques of cinema would allow him to communicate his ideas to larger audiences, and he desired to make movies. (On his interest in filmmaking, he was no different from other members of his generation, especially Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and Manuel Puig.) For this reason, he tried to extend his stay in Rome and sought contacts with Cinecittà, then one of the world’s leading and largest film studios. But this project fell through and he moved to Paris.
A few weeks later, in January 1956, he found out about the closure of El Espectador in Colombia. Out of a job, instead of returning to his home country, he decided to commit to literature as a full-time professional writer. He was motivated to do so. Like previous generations of Latin American writers, living in Paris was a mandatory rite of passage. For them, Paris was the place where writers could nurture their literary imagination. They absorbed themes and motives from the life of a city that had influenced the imagination of classic works of the Western literary tradition, from François Rabelais’s The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel to Honoré de Balzac’s The Human Comedy to Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.
In Paris, García Márquez worked on the manuscript of “The House” and the story for In Evil Hour. But another story developed and grew into No One Writes to the Colonel. As in Cartagena and Barranquilla, he did not write in isolation; collaborators gave him feedback as he wrote. Among the collaborators who helped him in Europe were, in particular, Colombian artists Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza and Guillermo Angulo. (They became life companions and gave García Márquez emotional and professional support during the writing of One Hundred Years of Solitude.) For feedback on No One Writes to the Colonel, he also reached out to the Barranquilla Group. He knew little about cockfighting, which is central to the story, so he sent a questionnaire to group member Enrique Scopell, a cockfighting aficionado, who helped him with fact checking. García Márquez continued to rely on this kind of research assistance during the writing of One Hundred Years of Solitude.35
His time in Paris shaped his imagination in another way. For the first time in his life, he was exposed to cosmopolitan Latin Americanism. He met with Latin American writers and artists from different generations, and they sometimes gathered around Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén. In his conversations with peers from different countries in the region, García Márquez started to comply with a belief shared by his peers: Latin American literature was not a collection of national literatures but rather a literary tradition built on the existence of a Latin American nation. He also realized that there was an audience for this kind of region-spanning literature. In short, in Paris, he began to convert to “Latin American ‘continental nationalism,’ ” which he fully embraced after arriving in Mexico City a few years later.36