Why I Don't Write Children's Literature (17 page)

SNARKY

When I told a poet friend that I was a card-carrying member of the Northern California Daffodil Association — and had won six ribbons for my little beauties — he was seated at the dining table, his fingers working on an unstrung abacus of pills. He looked up, showing me the flatness of his judgmental eyes.

“Daffodils?” he grumbled. “You should wear the ribbons in your bonnet. Fuck, Gary.”

As he looked back down, a smile was building on my face. I pictured myself wearing a bonnet, tooling around Berkeley in an old lady's Buick, one hand pushing the ribbons out of my face. I was glad I hadn't mentioned my involvement in flower arranging.

Thirty-five years earlier, while drunkenly watching a football game on television, I had declared to this same friend that I sported a hefty tool in my pants. He had looked at me while guiding a beer bottle toward his face. His puckered lips met the bottle. He swallowed an ounce or two of foamy brew, then remarked, “Soto, you're the only guy I know who can fit his dick inside a drinking straw.”

What am I to do? This poet visits again in two weeks. Together we'll troll a David Hockney exhibit in San Francisco, among other activities. The last time I saw this poet I greeted him on the front walk and began with a snarky, “Hey, the mail just came. You want to see what a royalty check looks like?”

He laughed as he walked penguin-like toward the front door, carrying a suitcase that looked like a doctor's black bag. Indeed, it contained his medications. I would not have been surprised if he'd pulled out a stethoscope or a roll of gauze to wrap himself like a mummy. He's a big guy, and I wondered if the bag could contain enough gauze.

But these days, we're not laughing. We're older now and the trees are trimmed of leaves. Bird nests are visible, but the nests are cold. How much longer do we have to walk and gab? Friends of ours have died already. He has lost his cat, a little beast with a heart-shaped spot on his back. It saddened him that the cat had to be put down. I wish I could unscrew the top of his head and fill it with flowers. I want my friend to be happy.

How old will we be when the pen rolls from my fingers? Do I have time to write a novel about a man whose three watches stopped when his wife passed away? A novel about a once snarky poet who is now full of gloom the color of ash? The poet possesses one cat, a white-whiskered fellow as old as he. One day, the poet considers his own hands, which have written thirteen books and dozens of articles on English porcelain. Unlike the cat, the poet never had much of a bite. His tail wagged, but women didn't prance in front of him. He never possessed much in the way of manly armor, even in youth — no ripple of muscle moving like a trout when he flexed his biceps.

Forget the novel and the novel's sidekick, poetry. I'll plant my trumpet-faced daffodils and tap the soil until they come up in February. I'll wait for my friend, who'll arrive with his medicine bag and sit at the dining table, his fingers counting out pills. If I tell him that I've won more ribbons, he might look up and consider another comedic line. Then again, he might be too busy counting: one for heart, one for memory, two for bones. If I begin a joke, say the ditty about the pony that got a half-price ticket to the zoo, he'll become confused and tell me to shut my trap. He'll shake his head at me. Starting over, he'll stare at the pills lined up like soldiers, and begin again . . . one for memory, one for bones, two for heart.

I'm tenderhearted for this friend. I would shake the whole bottle of heart pills down his gullet to keep him going. At our age, the best medicines are the quiet nature of clouds as they paddle east and the rain that dampens the ground around the apple tree. When we look down, we can see our wet footprints glistening in the everlasting sun.

HOMAGE

In late summer of 1974, I was reading
One Hundred of Years of Solitude
in an apartment that felt like solitude. I didn't have much in the way of furniture — bed, stove, noisy refrigerator. I would soon be off to graduate school, off to an intellectual shore as foreign as Europe, namely classes in unfathomable literary theory, which was like looking up at a bank of buzzing neon instead of the natural sunlight filtered through trees. I would read Michel Foucault and think, “People get what he means?”

I read the novel in front of a frantically spinning fan in Fresno's intense summer heat. I was twenty-one, slender but not starving, and so transfixed by the story that I didn't fully grasp the grand experience or the remarkable nature of García Márquez's descriptive energy and wildly inventive settings. Wasn't most literature like this? In graduate school I discovered the answer — no.

As an English major at Fresno State College, I had been pointed toward such writers. Still, I didn't realize at the time that García Márquez was like no other, that he would take his place among the greatest — but what would that realization have meant to me, anyway? I was just looking for a good book to read while the summer roasted us to the color of raisins, Fresno's main product.

I recall gazing up from the novel, sizing up the blank walls of my apartment, and then returning to the pages of
One Hundred Years of Solitude
— the floral landscapes, the rivers with miraculous fish, the exotic birds like fruit in the trees. I read slowly, with quiet appreciation. I was swept away by the narrative, traveling to the fictional town of Macondo, where the citizens had a penchant for both melancholia and nostalgia. And the birds? There were birds galore.

Fresno is definitely not Macondo. Nevertheless, I went in search of my own fabulous territory. I biked to south Fresno, where I grew up, discovering the vacant lots where homes had been torn down in the name of urban renewal. Weeds grew in feisty bunches; feral cats peeked from behind the weeds; and dogs, thin as shadows, loped about abandoned cars, their rims and tires gone. I rolled my bike tire over a squad of chinaberries, and the scent of their broken skins evoked my childhood. My own sense of melancholia built up inside me like one large tear. Wasn't this the plum tree that I climbed when I was six? And this stream of shattered glass, didn't it look familiar? I rolled down the alley, the broken glass like a trail, leading to the 7-Up Bottling Company. That was the place where I, a child as feral as any cat, had once stood gazing at the mouth of the open building, until a kind employee handed me a soda.

Some of this is fabricated, of course, though the essence is true. It is the stuff of a young poet in search of a subject, a sense of place. It is his own Byronic posturing, his own Macondo — minus the lush jungle; Fresno is a hot, flat place, its dry river choked with tumbleweeds and dumped tires.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
woke inside me a dedication to place. It evoked in me the value of the seemingly valueless. Under this pile of rotting boards could be the story of a large rat with a long tail — no, let's make that the shortest rat with the longest tail. García Márquez did that to me, did that to all young poets. He allowed us to enhance the world as we saw fit.

Three years later, I published my first poetry collection,
The Elements of San Joaquin
. I so much wanted to write in the vein of García Márquez, so why not a title that suggested his work? How young I was! My second book was titled
The Tale of Sunlight.
More García Márquez in the shape of several poems, including “How an Uncle Became Gray,” dedicated to the master.

If these initial lines, written when I was twenty-two, do not suggest García Márquez, then I must've been very clever at pulling the wool over the reader's eyes.

Little did I know then that a novel such as
One Hundred Years of Solitude
does not appear annually, or even once in a decade — nor did I understand that the genius that produced such a novel parallels the best of William Shakespeare — quote me on this, good people.

García Márquez's personal history begins with a haphazard childhood, raised by grandparents and fussy aunts. Then came university life, journalism, starvation in the real sense, boisterous friends that kept him from work, an apprenticeship as a serious writer through his first years of marriage and his own slow temperament — followed by the lightning strike of imagination that became magical realism.

That lightning struck in 1965, while he was driving away from Mexico City (he and his family were off to a coastal vacation). García Márquez heard within himself the phrase, “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad.” The tone of the line struck him, tone being just about everything at the moment, tone being equivalent to an identifiable writing style. His literary duty forced him to turn the car around, head back to Mexico City, and begin work — how his family must have groaned at their return home, without seeing the ocean!

García Márquez began with that first sentence. Immediately, however, he faced a difficulty akin to writer's block. In an interview, he confessed that getting started was terrifying. He had the first line and the tone, but what should come next? Such terror is not unusual among writers, or the poverty that creeps at its side. During the stress of writing the novel, his family became poor. The car, an Opel, was sold, and the items inside his apartment were pawned — television, radio, fridge, his wife's jewelry.

Did García Márquez really fear this novel? I mean, his books — this first one included — are so prodigiously long that it's easy to believe that storytelling was second nature to him. Perhaps he was embroidering a yarn about his writing habits and his creative fears. We know that he spent eighteen months on the novel, which involved four generations and many improbable moments, including the grand appearance of the most beautiful butterflies, the discovery of ice by Maconda's puzzled citizens, and a wholesale memory loss that required the labeling of animals with their names.

It's possible that García Márquez anticipated his own death. He had been in ill health. Though his cancer was in remission, his lungs gave him trouble — gave every
Chilango
trouble. Here we now lament a great writer who elevated South American literature, one whose unpredictable anecdotes, seemingly familiar stories, and improbable premonitions produced the most fabulous and inventive descriptions. He learned from Cervantes and he learned from Faulkner. His tone was pitch-perfect, and his people imbued with both comedy and deep sadness, the yin and yang of complicated and compelling characters. His talent halted other writers in their tracks. Didn't one Japanese writer read his great novel, then stop writing for a decade? His feeling:
I can't do better than this. Why even try?

We are better for García Márquez's output:
No One Writes to the Colonel, Leaf Storm, The Autumn of the Patriarch
,
Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Love in the Time of Cholera
,
The Story of the Shipwrecked Sailor
— the titles themselves are poetry! At one point he aroused the suspicion of our government, which denied him a visa because of his friendliness toward Castro. That situation changed, however, when President Clinton pronounced
One Hundred Years of Solitude
his favorite novel. Good move, Mr. President.

García Márquez was a man of letters, a humanitarian, the most righteous among all Colombians, a leftist in world politics. He was a husband and father. His nickname was Gabo. His territory was all of Latin America. He was a winner of prizes, a man who said of his beginnings, “I have never renounced the nostalgia of my hometown: Aracataca, to which I returned one day and discovered that between reality and nostalgia was the raw material for my work.”

García Márquez stirred within us — the poets and writers of my generation — a desire to lift the ordinary into the fabulous, to decorate it boldly, to speak of its beauty — even if it was just some feral cats peeking from behind the weeds. To me, those feral cats were saying, “
OK
, young poet, paint us! Do what you will!” I tried then and have been trying ever since.

García Márquez, I feel nostalgia for your departure. That a mighty cloud of butterflies led your spirit to another place is certain. But your departure is as permanent as your books. My regret is that I never touched the hand that wrote them. If I could become a musical instrument, let it be an accordion whose lungs breathe sighs of melancholia.