The Scandal of the Century

by Gabriel García Márquez

  MARKET NÚMERO UNO: CARACAS

  The Cazals case has brought a related problem to the front pages of the newspapers: the white slave trade. It is now a much-discussed question. The police believe in it. All the newspapers that have investigated the matter agree that the main South American market in the white slave trade is the city of Caracas.

  But it has been difficult to alarm society, despite the substantial amount of coverage: in recent years, thirty thousand girls have been kidnapped in Paris and sold to numerous cabarets and public places all over the world. The principal markets, according to these investigations, are in North Africa and South America.

  For the first time since the existence of this murky trade in human flesh began to be periodically raked up, French public opinion is showing militant concern. This afternoon I attended a public meeting, mostly made up of mothers, who were requesting a more energetic intervention from the French government to deal with the problem. The French justice system knows of many cases. But unfortunately, whenever the newspapers have taken up the issue, public opinion seems to think it is simply journalistic speculation. Now things are different. In the National Assembly, Deputy Francine Lefevre has put all the international and internal political problems to one side in order to raise this question desperately. No doubt remains: the white slave trade exists, and it is run by powerful organizations with agents and clients all over the world, operating in all the great capital cities. Especially in Paris.

  TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS FOR A FRENCHWOMAN

  For a start, the police have begun to take rigorous control over certain apparently innocent and tempting classified advertisements: “Simple job, 40,000 francs, for young ladies, eighteen years of age.” An eighteen-year-old girl does not easily resist temptation. In many cases it might be an honest job. But the exceptions are tremendous: the applicants are roped into a contract, flown to North Africa, and sold there like any piece of merchandise. It is a business that produces a one hundred percent profit.

  The way the agents of the organization operate resembles a fictional film. At the beginning of this year, on the Champs-Élysées, a car stopped at seven in the evening in front of the big illuminated shop windows. A man got out of the car, grabbed a student by the arm, and shoved her into the vehicle. She was never heard from again.

  But in reality, the first contacts are usually more ingenious than brutal. A magazine recounts the case of Yvonne Vincent, who one lazy Sunday afternoon was at home in the company of one housemaid. Her mother had gone to the pictures. At dusk, a kind nun had knocked on the door with bad news: her mother had been in a car accident. The nun showed up with false news and false intentions. Parked outside the door, there was a car driven by an accomplice. It was the last time Yvonne Vincent was ever seen.

  Another case, told without proper names, is that of a girl who was on her way to catch the Metro after having spent the whole afternoon with her friends in the Bois de Vincennes. While she was waiting for a red light to change, an elderly blind woman asked her to help guide her across the street. Nobody knows what happened on the opposite sidewalk, for that happened on September 18, at quarter after six, and the girl still hasn’t arrived home. The police have reason to believe that these two girls—like the majority of the thirty thousand missing girls in recent years—are in some part of the world, working as prostitutes by reason or by force.

  The mechanism seems to be very simple: once persuaded, the girls are taken to North Africa or South America. A beautiful, young, compliant Frenchwoman can cost up to half a million francs, almost two thousand dollars. But the person who pays that sum feels he has the right to exploit the merchandise to multiply his investment. Once a girl has been imprisoned by the mechanism, she has very few possibilities of ever returning home. The organization can pursue her to the ends of the earth. However, some have had the courage and luck to escape. One of them was Suzanne Celmonte, who at twenty-one years of age told her incredible adventure on television a few months ago. She was a singer in a modest nightclub in Paris. One night, fate introduced himself to her elegantly disguised as an impresario. He hired her for a cabaret in Damascus for two thousand francs a night. The girl needed to be on the ground before she realized that she was expected to do much more than sing. Without losing her sangfroid she got in contact with the French consul through the authorities and was repatriated. The international police used this case as a springboard in order to dismantle a ring, which is now leading some pretend impresarios to prison.

  ONLY ONE EXPORTER WAS ARRESTED…

  Pretenses are so well kept up and the agents of the operation so skillful that the police cannot break their solid appearance of legality. They need a stroke of luck, almost a coincidence, like the one that jailed Francis Raban, a comfortable Frenchman who appeared to be as honorable as can be. One night, when he was at Orly preparing to board a flight to South America with a woman who was not his wife, a detective had an impulse to examine their papers closely. The woman’s were fake.

  That detail disclosed Francis Raban’s true personality. He was set up in Paris as a large-scale exporter. He periodically received succulent checks in U.S. dollars from Venezuela. Now he is accused of having exported girls for several years.

  The newspapers that point to Caracas as the principal market in South America do not quote many concrete cases. But a popular magazine recently linked Raban’s case to that of a servant kidnapped in Paris and sold in Venezuela. According to that source, the girl was hired as a waitress in a bar. But she roundly refused “to be more than nice to the clientele.” As punishment, she was driven out to the deserted San Félix ranch, five hundred miles away from Caracas. She managed to escape with the help of two French explorers who arrived by chance. How many cases like that might be found right now in Venezuela?

  January 12, 1957, Elite, Caracas

  “I Visited Hungary”

  (Fragment)

  János Kádár—prime minister of Hungary—made a public appearance on August 20, in front of the six thousand farmworkers who gathered on a soccer field in Újpest, eighty-two miles away from Budapest, to commemorate the anniversary of the socialist constitution. I was there, on the same stage as Kádár, with the first delegation of Western observers that arrived in Hungary after the events of October.

  For ten months Budapest had been a forbidden city. The last Western plane that took off from its airport—on November 6, 1956—was an Austrian twin-engine plane chartered by the magazine Match to evacuate special correspondent Jean Carles Pedrazzini, mortally wounded in the Battle of Budapest. Hungary has been closed since then and only opened its borders to us again ten months later due to the influences of the committee in charge of preparations for the Moscow festival, which managed to get the Hungarian government to issue an invitation to Budapest for a delegation of eighteen observers. There were two architects, a German lawyer, a Norwegian chess champion, and just one other journalist: Maurice Mayer, a diabolically likable Belgian, with a red mustache, a beer drinker and teller of stupid jokes, who began his career in the Spanish Civil War and was wounded in Liège during the German occupation. I didn’t know any of them. At the border, after the customs authorities examined our papers for three hours, an interpreter gathered us together in the restaurant car, made the introductions, and gave a brief welcome speech. Then he read the program for the next two weeks: museums, lunches with youth organizations, sporting events, and a week of relaxation at Lake Balaton.

  Maurice Mayer thanked them for the invitation on behalf of us all, but let it be understood that we were not very interested in tourism. We wanted something else: to know what happened in Hungary, for certain and without political mythifications, and to comprehend the country’s actual situation. The interpreter responded that Kádár’s government would do everything possible to oblige us. It was three in the afternoon on August 4. At 10:30 that night we arrived at the deserted Budapest station, where a group of perp
lexed, energetic men waited, who escorted us for the whole two weeks and did everything possible to prevent us from forming a concrete idea of the situation.

  We had not finished unloading our luggage when one of those men—who introduced himself as an interpreter—read the official list of our names and nationalities and made us answer as if we were in school. Then he invited us to board the bus. Two details caught my attention: the number of our escorts—eleven, for such a small delegation—and the fact that all of them had introduced themselves as interpreters despite the fact that the majority of them spoke no language other than Hungarian. We crossed the city through somber, deserted streets, saddened by the drizzle. A moment later we were at the Hotel Liberty—one of the best in Budapest—sitting at a banquet table that took up the whole dining room. Some of them had difficulties managing the cutlery. The dining room, with a mirror, large chandeliers, and plush red furniture, seemed made out of new materials but with antiquated taste.

  During the course of the meal a disheveled man with a certain romantic disdain in his gaze gave a speech in Hungarian that was translated simultaneously into three languages. It was a brief, absolutely conventional welcome followed by a series of concrete instructions. He recommended that we not go out on the streets, always carry our passports, not speak to strangers, leave our key at reception each time we left the hotel, and remember “Budapest is under martial law and it is therefore forbidden to take photographs.” By then there were seven more interpreters. They moved with no objective around the table, talking to each other in Hungarian, in very low voices, and I had the impression that they were frightened. I was not alone in that appraisal. A moment later, Maurice Mayer leaned over toward me and said, “These people are scared to death.”

  Before we went to bed they collected our passports. Tired from the trip, but not sleepy and a little depressed, I tried to see a piece of the city’s nightlife from the window of my room. The gray and crumbling buildings of Rakoczi Avenue looked uninhabited. The limited public lighting, the drizzle falling on the lonely street, the streetcar that grated past amid blue sparks, all contributed to creating a sad atmosphere. When I got into bed I noticed that the walls of my room still showed signs of the impact of projectiles. I couldn’t sleep, shuddering at the idea that this room lined with yellowish wallpaper, with old furniture and a strong smell of disinfectant, had been a barricade in October. That was how my first night in Budapest ended.

  LONGER LINES FOR LOTTERY TICKETS THAN FOR BREAD

  In the morning the view was less somber. Prepared to outwit the vigilance of the interpreters—who wouldn’t arrive until ten—I put the keys in my pocket and walked down the stairs to the lobby. I didn’t take the elevator, because it was located right in front of the reception desk and I wouldn’t have been able to leave without being seen by the manager. The revolving glass door opened right onto Rakoczi Avenue. Not just the hotel, but all the buildings on the avenue—from the floral pediment of the station to the banks of the Danube—were covered in scaffolding. It’s difficult to avoid the sensation created by a commercial avenue whose crowds move among wooden skeletons. A fleeting sensation, for I barely took two steps outside the hotel before someone put a hand on my shoulder. It was one of the interpreters. In a cordial manner, but without letting go of my arm, he guided me back inside the hotel.

  The rest of the delegation came down at ten, as planned. The last one was Maurice Mayer. He entered the dining room in a splendid sports jacket, with his arms wide open, singing “The Internationale.” With an exaggerated effusiveness, still singing, he embraced each and every one of the interpreters, who hugged him back with a disconcerting joy. Then he sat down beside me, tucked his napkin into his collar, and nudged me with his knee under the table.

  “I’ve been thinking since last night,” he said under his breath. “All these ruffians are armed.”

  From that moment on we knew what to expect. Our guardian angels accompanied us to museums, historical monuments, official receptions, jealously preventing us from any contact with people in the street. One afternoon—our fourth in Budapest—we went to see the beautiful panorama of the city from atop the Fishermen’s Bastion. Near there is a church that had been converted into a mosque by the Turkish invaders that is still decorated with arabesques. A group of delegates detached ourselves from the interpreters and went inside the church. It was enormous and tumbledown, with high, small windows through which shone streams of yellow summer light. On one of the front pews, sitting in an absorbed posture, an old woman in black was eating bread and sausage. Two interpreters came into the church a moment later. They followed us in silence through the naves, without saying anything to us, but they made the woman leave.

  By the fifth day the situation had become untenable. We were utterly fed up with visiting old things, historical monstrosities, and with feeling that the city, the people who lined up to buy bread, to board the streetcars, seemed like unreachable objects on the other side of the glass windows of the bus. I made the decision after lunch. I asked for my key at reception, where I told them I was very tired and planned to sleep all afternoon, then I went up the elevator and immediately down the stairs.

  At the first stop I hopped on a streetcar, not caring where it was going. The jammed crowd inside the vehicle looked at me like an emigrant from another planet, but there was no curiosity or surprise in their gazes, rather a distrustful reserve. Beside me, an elderly lady in an old hat with artificial fruits was reading a Jack London novel, in Hungarian. I spoke to her in English, then in French, but she didn’t even look at me. She got off at the next stop, elbowing her way through the crowd, and I was left with the impression that was not where she should have gotten off. She was frightened too.

  The driver spoke to me in Hungarian. I let him understand that I didn’t speak the language, and he in turn asked me if I spoke German. He was a fat old man with a beer drinker’s nose and glasses mended with wire. When I told him I spoke English, he repeated a phrase I couldn’t understand several times. He seemed desperate. At the end of the line, as I was getting off, he handed me a little slip of paper with a phrase written in English: “God save Hungary.”

  Almost a year after the events that stirred the world, Budapest is still a provisional city. I saw extensive sectors where the streetcar tracks have not been replaced and which are still closed to traffic. The crowds, badly dressed, sad, and concentrated, stand in endless lines to buy basic necessities. The stores that were destroyed and looted are still being rebuilt.

  In spite of the boisterous publicity the Western newspapers gave the events in Budapest, I hadn’t believed the havoc wreaked was so terrible. Very few central buildings have their façades intact. I later learned that the people of Budapest took refuge in them and fought for four days and four nights against the Russian tanks. The Soviet troops—eighty thousand men ordered to crush the revolt—employed the simple and effective tactic of parking the tanks in front of the buildings and firing straight at them. But the resistance was heroic. The children went out into the streets, climbed onto the tanks, and dropped flaming bottles of gasoline inside. Official information indicates that in those four days five thousand people were killed and twenty thousand injured, but the substantial damage leads one to think that the number of victims was much higher. The Soviet Union has not supplied any figures of their losses.

  Dawn broke on November 5 over a destroyed city. The country was literally paralyzed for five months. The population survived during that time thanks to trainloads of provisions sent by the Soviet Union and the people’s democracies. Now the lines are not so long, the grocery stores are beginning to open their doors, but the people of Budapest are still suffering the consequences of the catastrophe. At the lottery ticket kiosks—which are a source of revenue for the Kádár regime—and at pawnshops—which are owned by the state—the lines are longer than the ones at the bakeries. A government official told me that, in effect,
the lottery is an inadmissible institution in a socialist regime. “But we can’t do anything else,” he explained. “It solves one problem for us every Saturday.” The same thing happens with the pawnshops. I saw a woman lined up in front of one of them with a baby carriage full of kitchen equipment.

  Fear and distrust appear everywhere, in the government as much as in the general population. There are quite a few Hungarians who lived abroad until 1948, and they and their children speak all the languages of the world. But it’s difficult for them to speak to foreigners. They think that these days there cannot be a foreigner in Budapest who is not an official invited guest, and that’s why they don’t dare risk a conversation with any of us. Everybody, in the street, in the cafés, in the tranquil gardens of Margaret Island, distrusts the government and its guests.

  The government, for its part, feels that dissent continues. On the walls of Budapest there are notices written with a broad brush: “Hidden counterrevolutionary, fear the power of the people.” Others blame Imre Nagy for the October catastrophe. That is an official obsession. While Imre Nagy suffers enforced exile in Romania, Kádár’s government daubs the walls, publishes pamphlets, and organizes demonstrations against him. But all the people with whom we’ve managed to speak—workers, employees, students, and even some communists—are waiting for Nagy’s return. At dusk—after having traveled all over the city—I found myself at the Danube, in front of the Elisabeth Bridge, dynamited by the Germans. There was the statue of the poet Petofi, separated from the university by a little square filled with flowers. Ten months earlier—on October 28—a group of students crossed the square shouting for the expulsion of the Soviet troops. One of them climbed the statue with the Hungarian flag and gave a two-hour speech. When he came down, the avenue was teeming with men and women of Budapest singing the poet Petofi’s anthem under the bare autumn trees. That’s how the uprising began.