Tribute: The ‘Magician’ Guillermo Dávila dies, the first linotype player that García Márquez had – Other Cities – Colombia

If through his novels the American author William Faulkner gave Gabriel García Márquez the literary technique, Between binge and bohemian, in Cartagena, Ma El Mago Dávila ’taught Gabito the secrets of conjuring, an art that the Nobel Prize applied in his letters, with which he enchanted humanity.

Guillermo Antonio Dávila Peñalosa, ‘El Mago Dávila’, died at the Reina Sofía Clinic in Bogotá at 3:30 in the morning on Wednesday April 22.

“In February he had been hospitalized due to a urinary infection. His legs also hurt. In the last days he had been in the emergency department due to internal bleeding, he had several stomach surgeries, and despite the fact that he had come out ahead of the surgeries, he did not endure the postoperative procedures and this morning they informed us at the clinic of his death, “he confirmed. to EL TIEMPO, Gloria Wanumen, wife of the Magician Dávila.

Dávila, who would turn 91 on June 29, was constantly seen in Cartagena remembering those iconic places where he was happy next to Gabriel García Márquez, his great friend, whom he met in the 50s, of the last century .

Unforgettable days of revelry and literature of a Nobel and a magician

Guillermo Dávila and García Márquez met in the newspaper El Universal, when the first was a linotype operator (he handled the linotype, a machine that allowed composing texts in lead ingots to mechanize their printing, which was replaced in the media years later by the modern rotary presses).

The second had arrived in Cartagena to practice journalism for the first time in his life and fleeing the violence of April 9 in Bogotá, where he studied law.

TIME had traveled with Dávila those places in old Cartagena that marked his friendship with Gabo.

“La Cueva was the old market in Cartagena, where the Convention Center is today. There we would arrive to eat after 6 in the afternoon – the magician had told EL TIEMPO. The cooks filled the tables with food: turtle, fish of all kinds; a gastronomic feast where the best were the beneficial prices for all budgets. Gabriel was always curious about the fags who attended the mesons, but never with morbid or disrespect, he admired the noise of the patent leather shoes that all wore, “recalled Dávila, who was always a lucid and vital man, and honored in Cartagena in several opportunities.

A magician in the newsroom

“When I was 22 years old everything was fascination and hypnotism. I was going to a plaza in Cartagena and caught a pigeon. He hid it in a pocket. I arrived at the editorial office of El Universal and some movement invented me to make the dove that flew through the offices appear. That Gabriel loved, “said the magician.

Don Guillermo Dávila always dressed elegant and old-fashioned: in white, with a hat, but above all with a giant smile and blue eyes, like the infinite sky that lulls him today.

“With Gabriel we agreed on something, life is like magic: to big problems, small and elementary solutions”, He said.

‘Compressed’, the smallest newspaper in the world

As a young man, in his spare time as a linotypist, and hidden among plates, Dávila devoted himself to studying magic by correspondence, in courses that reached him from Mexico and the USA. USA

But the most pleasant memory of the friendship between the man from Dávila and Gabo was in 1950, when together they founded ‘Comprimido’, a two-page evening newspaper, which García Márquez wrote in its entirety and Dávila printed and then gave away in the squares from Cartagena.

Despite the fact that the journalistic project only lasted seven days, it served to forge a friendship that marked García Márquez, and of which the Nobel gave faith in his book Vivir para contala, where he reviews his days with the blue-eyed magician and creation. of ‘Compressed’.

The idea came up on those bohemian Friday nights when the editor and linotipista left after finishing the Sunday edition of the newspaper El Universal and went in search of a bottle of Ron Blanco, to the Bóvedas sector of Cartagena, where the canteens were located. and today they are craft shops in front of the Salesian school.

“You had to work until one or two in the morning, because the director was late writing the editorial. So we were going to the vaults, and in one of those I said to Gabriel ‘why don’t we make a newspaper?’. El Fígaro, an evening watch, had disappeared in the city, and that opened up a space for us ”, remembered Dávila, who spoke a perfect and slow Castilian.

“I chose Gabo because of that confidence that he had: that security, that verraquera of knowing who he was going to be. It’s hard to find a guy who at 22 is convinced of what he wants to be in life. When I met him he already had written ‘The Leaf Litter’And his dream was to send it to Buenos Aires to be published,” recalled the magician Dávila in December 2013 in an interview with EL TIEMPO.

One day, the young Dávila made use of 124 pesos that he had as savings in the Caja Social and exchanged ink jobs for Domingo López Escauriaza, owner of El Universal, as long as he was allowed to take out the lead to print the two sheets of the nascent daily. On the ‘Comprimido’ flag, of which Dávila carried some old photocopies in a briefcase, only two names of Dávila appear, as manager, and García Márquez, director.

“Comprimido is not the smallest newspaper in the world, but it aspires to be so with the same industry as others aspire to be the largest. Our philosophy is to take advantage of the calamities that collude in modern journalism: the shortage of paper and the shortage of advertisements; factors that favor our progress since we will have to reduce our proportions in this initiative more and more; and like interest-bearing loans, it has the privilege of prospering at the cost of its own time, ”reads the first editorial for‘ Comprimido, ’which dates from September 20, 1950.

Gabo began to write the newspaper at 11 in the morning and ended late in the afternoon when he passed the originals to Dávila who printed and then gave away the thousand copies a day in the Plazas de La Proclamation, San Pedro, La Aduana, Los Coches and in the Bolívar Park.

“When I returned to the newsroom that was on Calle San Juan de Dios, Gabriel told me ‘how did it go?’; and I would answer him: todo everything was sold, ’and we both laughed because the newspaper was free,” Dávila recalled.

Manager and director aspired for the project to be maintained from the sale of a guideline that had a cost of 10 cents per notice. However ‘The Magician’ would remember that he never sold a single advertisement.

The size of the newspaper was half a letter and consisted of two pages, but his greatest achievement was an eight-page edition.

‘Compressed’ also shone through the witty headlines: tetra Tetracedulado Buses ’, among the most remembered.

“We were in full elections and according to the journalist (Gabo) a bus with five plates had been found; which was actually a way of saying that there were problems in the cédulas of the chocorazos. Did the bus exist? That was only known by García Márquez who was the one who wrote the news ”, asked ‘El Mago’, who was always escorted by his wife, Gloria Wanumen, 40 years his junior, and who had fallen in love with that power of the word, who It was always his deadly weapon in love and business.

In one of the news published in ‘Compressed’ it reads:

“Two citizens read the second issue of Comprimido yesterday, and one of them commented: you need to be lazy to do a thing like this.”

García Márquez wrote the entire newspaper. According to ‘El Mago’, and with the power of synthesis, his newspaper was ahead of Twitter.

A pity, because the ‘Comprimido’ company only lasted a week after which he said goodbye to his readers declaring himself the first metaphysical newspaper of humanity.

Linotype nostalgia

Occasionally, with his giant, white, freckled hands, ‘El Mago’ caressed the old linotype machine that still stands in the modern facilities of the El Universal newspaper in front of the Castillo de San Felipe.

The black machine, full of levers, keyboards, gears and rollers, is preserved as a relic by the newspaper, but it came to life when the old linotypist, with his slow speech, visited them and explained to new generations of journalists how operated.

“This machine had been built with the idea of ​​making a newspaper and it gave me work from the age of 13 when I learned to drive it,” recalled the man with the unmistakable and perfectly polished white beard, in front of the old machine.

The invisible old men

“A journalist once asked me: cómo How do you see old age in Colombia?’ And I replied that old people in this country make our children’s dreams come true: we become invisible. When we are little we want to be the invisible man, and when we get old without realizing it we are. The old man is no longer respected, he is not taken into account, and so we become invisible”Pointed out Dávila who, like García Márquez, was also the son of a telegraph operator.

Guillermo Antonio Dávila Peñalosa, who always knew how to reinvent himself, became an equestrian chronicler in the 1960s, when horse racing competed shoulder to shoulder with Colombian football for radio harmony.

In his last years he was editor-in-chief of the Congress magazine, of which he was also a co-founder.

Peace in his grave to a fantastic man, who knew how to tell magical stories, like a real magician.

John Montaño
Editor of EL TIEMPO
Cartagena
On twitter: @PilotodeCometas