The Novel behind the Novel

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Abstract

Sometime during August in 1966 my wife Mercedes and I made our way to the San Ángel post office in Mexico City to send the manuscript of One Hundred Years of Solitude to Buenos Aires. It was a package of 590 typewritten, double-spaced pages on plain paper, which I was to send to Francisco (Paco) Porrúa at Editorial Sudamericana. The postal clerk put the package on the scale, made his calculations, and said: “That will cost you 82 pesos.” Mercedes counted out the bills and loose change she had in her bag and confronted me with reality: “We only have 53 pesos.” After over a year of penury, we were so used to these daily contretemps that we didn’t think too hard about finding a solution. We opened the package, divided the manuscript in half and sent only one half to Buenos Aires, never even asking each other how we were going to get the money to send the rest. It was Friday and six o’clock in the afternoon: the post office would be closed until Monday, so we had the whole weekend to figure things out. There were very few friends left from whom we could borrow money, and our best possessions were already sleeping the sleep of the just in the pawn shop. We still had, of course, the portable typewriter I’d used to write the novel during the past year at the rate of six hours a day, but we couldn’t pawn that because we’d need it if I was going to earn any kind Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, Issue 95, Vol. 50, No. 2, 2017, 235–241