The material found in the drawers of Mutis' widow, the Catalan Carmen Miracle, contains letters, photographs and even a caricature drawn by Gabriel García Márquez (see image) of Maqroll el Gaviero's father.
From Barcelona, on September 27 of a year to be determined (probably 1969), García Márquez writes: “Mutises del alma, I had to return to Rome to the interview with Magnani (...) and there something happened to me that already It burns your fingers, because it seems to have been made especially for you: the producers had reserved a room for me at the Grand Hotel, but since I arrived 24 hours in advance, they had to give me the wonderful suite where King Alfonso XIII died. The next day, at breakfast, the waiter asked me for my room number, and since I didn't remember it, I told him: 'In the room where the king died.' The waiter, imperturbable, replied: 'I'm sorry, sir, but so many kings have died in this hotel that I don't know which one you're referring to.' How are you?".
There is another letter from Gabo addressed to Mutis (he calls him “Alvaricoque”), also from his time in Barcelona, specifically with a postmark of September 1970. After requesting a copy of the script for Tiempo de muerte, a Mexican western directed in 1966 by Arturo Ripstein, with a libretto by Gabo himself and Carlos Fuentes – since it had been published in a magazine –, asks him for documentary help for the novel he is writing at that time, The Autumn of the Patriarch. Specifically: “It may seem like nonsense to you, but it is very urgent for my novel that I see even for a minute that ashtray that you have in your house: a black man who sells flowers after mass. From that image I have to build the dictator's first city, which was devastated by a hurricane. Would it be too much of a hassle if you put it in your suitcase, let me see it, and took it back to Mexico?” There is also a press clipping with an engraving that shows an image similar to the one described and a handwritten note for Carmen Miracle, wife of Mutis: “Teacher Carmen, do me the favor of looking closely at the lithograph and send me to tell you what kind of flowers They are the ones that the black man sells at the church door. Kisses, Gabo.”
In the first letter to Mutis, to conclude, Gabo states: “Today is a humid day and that puts my morale on the floor, so I am not going to write more but I will play Bartok's Divertimento for orchestra, which is my last obsession. A book of short stories by Milan Kundera has just come out in Paris that I don't know yet. Did I tell you that One Hundred Years comes out in Czech with a prologue by him?”
In this legacy that scholars have yet to explore, there are also photos of the Mediterranean cruise that the two families undertook; In one, the Parthenon can be distinguished. Gonzalo García Barcha remembers that trip well: “I was about 12 years old. Mutis was an encyclopedia, he explained everything to the guides, he knew much more than them about Naples or Istanbul. In Egypt he spoke about Napoleon, one of his favorite characters, the people of the ship gathered in the dining room to listen to him. His poem Quote from Him begins: 'And now that I know I will never visit Istanbul, / I find out that they are waiting for me on Shidah Kardessi Street, / in the room above the eye doctor's shop.' My father told him that we were going on a trip with him 'to screw up that verse'. I remember him riding the camel, he also rode in a balloon, glider, he lived intensely.” Regarding his limitless curiosity, he remembers that “the first Arabic music I heard was from his records, he also had a recorded collection of muezzin calls to prayer.”
“We don't know what time Mutis wrote his poems,” he continues, “probably on airplanes because he spent his time traveling around Latin America due to his work as an executive. He was a man with a secretary and employees, who got up early to go to the office. "That's so different from the atmosphere at my father's house, all day writing his things."
The editor of Nocturna highlights Mutis's generosity with young poets, whom he “read, received and prefaced. He also helped them financially: when he managed budgets – at the multinational Esso –, part of that money mysteriously ended up in the hands of writers in need. My own father confessed that he had benefited from Álvaro's system. And he paid for it with prison, in Mexico, in Lecumbeeri, a period that turned out to be very productive. In the exhibition we show the cultural work he did in the prison: literary workshops, he wrote, organized and directed plays... As a child, I was very morbid that he had been imprisoned and I asked him: 'Did you have a lot of time? to read and write?' and he answered me: 'All that is true, Gonzalo, but at the end of the day you couldn't go home.'”
