The Scandal of the Century

by Gabriel García Márquez

  A PROPOSAL, MAO’S BEST JOKE

  An insignificant-looking woman, Mrs. Liu Chi-Jean, showed up one June morning at the doors of the United States embassy in Taiwan, with a sign in English and Chinese, calling American Sergeant Robert Reynolds a murderer and calling on the population of the island to demonstrate against the decision of the court-martial that had declared him innocent. A few weeks earlier, the wife of that same Sergeant Robert Reynolds, whom Mrs. Liu Chi-Jean called a murderer, was taking a shower in her house in Taipei. All of a sudden she started shouting in protest because, according to her, a man was looking through a crack in the window. Mrs. Reynolds’s husband, who was reading the newspaper in the living room, went out in the yard with his revolver, with the intention, according to what he told the court, “to keep the individual at bay until the police arrived.” The next morning a corpse was found in the garden, riddled with bullets from Sergeant Reynolds’s revolver. The corpse was that of Mrs. Liu Chi-Jean’s husband. A court-martial made up of three sergeants and three colonels judged the American sergeant and gave its verdict: “Legitimate defense.”

  The demonstrations provoked by this event, which the population of Taiwan considered a simple judicial comedy, were the first serious incidents between the Republic of China and the United States, since Mr. Chiang Kai Shek, president of the Republic of China, was expelled from the continent by the communists and took power in Taiwan, with the favor and financial and political support of Washington. Liu Chi-Jean’s protests unleashed a storm of anti-American protests in Taiwan that the prime minister of Red China, Chu En-Lai, knew exactly how to evaluate. Convinced that things were not going well between Taiwan and the United States, the rulers of communist China made a proposal to Chiang Kai Shek: that he could stay in Taiwan, with his armies, his people, and his ninety-two private cars, but as administrator of the island on behalf of the government of Mao Tse-Tung. Chiang Kai Shek, who must have considered the proposal as a joke in bad taste, did not even make the effort of replying. Mao Tse-Tung shrugged his shoulders. “In any case,” he said, “time will take care of the problem of Taiwan: Chiang Kai Shek’s armies are getting old. Within ten years they’ll have an average age of forty-five. Within twenty that average will be fifty-five. Communist China has patience and prefers to wait for the armies of republican China to die of old age in Taiwan.”

  KHRUSHCHEV, STAR OF AMERICAN TV

  Television viewers of the United States were just watching the news of the events in Taiwan on their domestic screens, when a completely bald head made an appearance and began to say a string of unintelligible things in Russian, which a moment later a newscaster began to translate into English. That unknown star on U.S. television was a man who provided more to talk about in 1957—personality of the year Nikita Khrushchev, secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The fact that Nikita Khrushchev could have leaned into all the homes in the United States was not much less than a maneuver prepared by the Soviet espionage service. It was achieved, in a year of diplomatic steps, by the Columbia Broadcasting Corporation, and the clip had been filmed at his own desk in the Kremlin, where Khrushchev lent himself to everything the American journalists demanded, except for makeup. “It’s not necessary,” an official Soviet spokesman declared. “Mr. Khrushchev shaves every day and uses talcum powder.” Inside their own American homes, Khrushchev’s voice began the disarming offensive, the first in-depth step of a campaign that would last all year and that without doubt was the essence of the diplomatic and political activity of the Soviet Union in 1957.

  After Khrushchev’s interview, the world’s attention inevitably turned toward the socialist hemisphere. In the preparations for the celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the revolution, the enigmatic Mr. Khrushchev—who practically didn’t let a day go by without making his voice heard in the West—unfurled a colossal range of activities, as much on interior problems as on exterior policies. In a single day, after a stormy meeting of the central committee of the Soviet Communist Party, four of the highest-ranking personalities in the Soviet Union were knocked out of action: Molotov, Malenkov, Shepilov, and Kaganovich. A few days later, at the moment when the prime minister of Tunisia, M. Burguiba, ousted a decrepit and obsolete monarch and proclaimed the youngest republic in the world, the representatives of the four world powers were discussing in London the provisions for world disarmament. Mr. Stassen, representative of the United States, had to leave the sessions urgently to attend his son’s wedding. He was drinking his first celebratory whiskey when he learned that the disarmament conference was not going to get anywhere, but that Mr. Khrushchev had released a piece of news of the heaviest caliber: the Soviet Union had at its disposal “the ultimate weapon,” a long-distance rocket that could reach any objective on the planet. The West, anticipating the imminent delivery of Gina Lollobrigida’s firstborn, did not pay much attention to the news. But it was true. From that moment on, the superiority of the Soviet Union’s attack was accepted as an indisputable fact. The West tried to swallow that bitter blow with the consoling news that Gina Lollobrigida had had a baby girl in perfect health: six pounds and ninety-nine grams.

  THE ASIAN FLU: THE WORLD WITH A FEVER OF 102

  The small, redheaded John A. Hale, professor at Malaysia University, in Singapore, peered into the microscope, in spite of the stultifying 104-degree heat, on May 4, to examine a sample of microbes he had been sent that morning from Hong Kong. Five minutes later, in shock, the professor telephoned BOAC airline and they told him that fifteen minutes later a plane was leaving for London. Professor Hale sent on that plane, urgently, a very carefully wrapped glass cylinder, to Dr. Christopher Andrews, director of the global influenza center, in London. The cylinder contained the samples of an extremely rare microbe that the frightened investigator in Singapore had just identified and that, in spite of his precautions, would provoke the illness of the year: the Asian flu. When the BOAC plane landed in London, several marines on a ship that had left Singapore forty-eight hours earlier began to sneeze. An hour later their bones began to hurt. Five hours later, they had temperatures of 104 degrees. One of them died. The others, hospitalized in Taiwan, contaminated the doctors, nurses, and the other patients. By the time the global influenza center in London raised the alarm, the Asiatic flu was arriving in Europe. Four months later, the night when Charlie Chaplin’s latest film, A King in New York, premiered in London, it had gone all the way around the world.

  President Eisenhower was too busy those days to think about the danger of microbes. He’d had to study the problems of the powder keg of the Orient, think about compromising solutions that would allow him to be on good terms with the Arab world without displeasing his European allies, trying to decipher the indecipherable remarks of the indecipherable Mr. Khrushchev, and he barely had three days to go and play golf in the tepid New England summer, at his house on Narragansett Bay. He hadn’t even gotten down the stairs from his private airplane, Columbine III, when his press secretary Hagerty came to tell him that in Little Rock, Arkansas, where Governor Faubus opposed integration—black students attending schools with white students—the situation was taking on gravely dramatic proportions. The problem had begun a week earlier: Opposing a Supreme Court decision, Governor Faubus had stationed the Arkansas National Guard at the doors of Central High School, under the pretext that the presence of negro students would provoke disturbances among the population. The racist population, evidently an insignificant minority, gathered at the door to the building and made it understood, with impassioned screams and at some moments with physical actions, that Governor Faubus was right. President Eisenhower, an enemy of using force, tried by every means possible to dissuade the rebel governor. But, in spite of his dialogue with the president, Faubus persisted in his attitude. Comments on General Eisenhower’s weakness flew around the world much faster than the Asiatic flu. The socialist world exploited the situation. “We need a Truman in the White House,” they said in the United
States, especially in the north, where the memory of the energy, dynamism, and decisive spirit of the former president had not been forgotten. Pressured by the seriousness of the circumstances, seeing his authority in danger, President Eisenhower decided, on September 24, at 12:30 in the morning, to send a thousand elite paratroopers to Little Rock to enforce compliance with the Supreme Court ruling. At 3:15 on the same day, the problem was resolved: protected by the soldiers urgently sent from Washington, the fifteen black students sat with the white students at Central High and absolutely nothing happened.

  SPUTNIK: THE WORLD LEARNS ASTRONAUTICS

  Sofia Loren had dressed up as a bride, in Hollywood, to film a scene in a movie—on September 21—when a court in Mexico—three thousand miles away—declared her married by proxy to the Italian producer Carlo Ponti, who at that very instant was in Los Angeles talking business by phone with an impresario in New York. That marriage, which had something futuristic about it, a bit like an interplanetary legend, did not awake the expected interest in Italy. Nor did it in the United States, where the Italian actress has not managed to thoroughly interest the baseball stadium public. New York fans shoved each other to get the best seats in the stands for the most highly anticipated game of the season, on October 4, when the world had already forgotten to argue about the legitimacy or illegitimacy of Sofia Loren’s marriage. At that very instant, “some place in the Soviet Union,” an anonymous scientist pressed a button: the first artificial satellite of Earth: Sputnik 1 (which in Russian means “companion”) was sent into orbit around the globe. The sphere, constructed using an as-yet-unknown material, but able to withstand the very elevated temperature provoked by the speed of the launch, weighing 184 pounds, with a diameter of 23 inches, four antennae, and two radio transmitters, was placed into orbit, at an altitude of 600 miles and a speed of 18,000 miles per hour, by a rocket with unimaginable precision and pushed by an unsuspected force. Due to the spectacular publicity this event earned, one of the most important in the history of humanity from the scientific point of view, readers of all the newspapers in the world did an intensive and complete course in astronautics over the next four days. The only thing not known about Sputnik 1, as well as the material it’s made of, is the fuel used for the launch and the exact time it went into orbit. The Soviets had a reason to keep this secret: if they knew the launch time, scientists in the United States would have been able to calculate the exact launch site.

  “It’s an unimportant piece of junk,” declared an American military officer when he heard that Earth had a Soviet-made satellite. But that “unimportant piece of junk,” whose scientific significance is incalculable, was at the same time the demonstration that Khrushchev hadn’t been lying when he said his country had a rocket able to reach anywhere on the planet. If the Russians were able to launch Sputnik, it was because, in reality, they had at their disposal the super rocket Khrushchev had threatened the West with two months earlier.

  CHRISTIAN DIOR’S LAST HAND OF CANASTA

  A man had found the way to attend his journalistic astronautics course without ignoring his many occupations: the dressmaker Christian Dior, who in his gigantic establishment on Montaigne Avenue, in Paris, worked fifteen hours a day before taking his annual vacation. On October 18, Christian Dior finished work and drove to the Italian beach resort of Montecatini, accompanied by a seventeen-year-old girl called Maria Colle, and Madame Raymendo Zanecker, his closest collaborator. The most precious object in his luggage of seven cases is a briefcase of emergency medicines, to which the highest-earning designer of 1957 must have recourse in case of emergency. On the 23rd, at 10:35 at night, after playing canasta with a group of friends at the Hotel de la Pace, Christian Dior felt weary and retired to his room. An hour later, awakened by a premonition, Madame Zanecker knocked three times on his door, with the briefcase of medicine. It was too late. A French doctor, staying in the same hotel, in his pajamas, at twenty-three minutes past eleven, confirmed that Christian Dior, a man who didn’t know how to do anything eleven years ago and who was now the best-known and richest designer in the world, had died of a heart attack.

  In Moscow, where those in charge of fashion resolved six months ago to do everything possible to get the Soviet people—who dress very badly—to dress better, they were expecting a visit from Christian Dior at the beginning of the new year. The news of his death arrived at a moment when the Soviet people were preparing to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the revolution. The Western world, in its turn, was preparing a spectacular revelation. They knew that the Soviets, when they launched the first Sputnik, had only released a trial, a free sample of the mysterious and colossal event they were saving for November 4. In the expectation, as if to keep world attention awake, the Soviets granted an indefinite leave to General Zhukov, the minister of defense, the conqueror of Berlin, and personal friend of President Eisenhower. “I have just seen Zhukov,” Khrushchev said that night, laughing his head off, at a reception in the Turkish embassy in Moscow. “We were looking for a post that might be suited to his abilities.” Seventy-two hours later, to the beat of the martial anthems with which the Soviet Union was celebrating the eve of the anniversary of the revolution, the second Sputnik—as big and heavy as an automobile—completed its first orbit around the Earth.

  IKE LOSES THE VANGUARD, BUT NOT HIS SENSE OF HUMOR

  The United States, which had already had time to react to the public opinion commotion caused by the first satellite, parried the blow this time with a magisterial idea: almost officially, but without anyone claiming responsibility for its authenticity, the news was published that on November 4, at noon, a Soviet projectile would reach the moon. That propaganda maneuver meant that on November 4, while the first living being—the dog Laika—was circling the Earth every ninety-six minutes, the West was feeling a little disappointed: they had the impression that really absolutely nothing had happened.

  On November 5, in his rose-colored office in the White House, President Eisenhower, dressed severely in gray, received the learned men of the United States. In that meeting, which lasted exactly one hour and forty-three minutes, the man who fabricated the first long-range missile, Werner von Braun, originally German, now naturalized, spoke most of the time. In 1932—when he was barely eighteen years of age—Von Braun was chosen by Hitler to design a rudimentary rocket, the precursor of the famous V-2 and the venerable grandfather of Sputnik. This enthusiastic, bald, and round-bellied man who shares a taste for bandit novels with President Eisenhower convinced the head of state that the United States has a system of defense and attack much more advanced than that of the Soviet Union, concretely in the control of long-range rockets. But the president was not very reassured. A few weeks later—when Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini severed by common accord their shaky matrimonial links—the president suffered a mild stroke when he returned to the Washington airfield, where he received the King of Morocco. In Paris, a commission of FBI detectives was studying every square inch of the hybrid Palais de Chaillot to be sure that nobody could shoot Mr. Eisenhower from behind the numerous pale statues, during the course of the imminent NATO conference. When the news of the president’s ill health reached them, the detectives returned to Washington, sure they’d been wasting their time. Surrounded by the best doctors in the United States, prepared to find the strength to attend the NATO conference no matter what, Mr. Eisenhower suffered another blow. A blow that this time was not directed against his brain, but against his heart, and against the very heart of the American nation: the minuscule satellite of the United States, a grapefruit of heat-resistant metal the photograph of which had already been published by all the newspapers in the world, rolled melancholically over the dry, stony ground of Cape Canaveral after the enormous and costly launch device of the Vanguard rocket blew up in pieces in an ostentatious failure of smoke and disappointment. A few days later, with his extraordinary capacity to absorb shocks, with a wide smile of a good sport and his
long and sure Johnnie Walker strides, President Eisenhower disembarked in Paris to inaugurate the final international event of the year: the NATO conference.

  January 3, 1958, Momento, Caracas

  Only Twelve Hours to Save Him

  It had been a bad Saturday afternoon. Caracas was starting to get hot. The Avenida de Los Ilustres, not ordinarily overcrowded, was impossible because of the car horns, the stampede of scooters, the reverberation of the pavement under the sweltering February sun, and the many women with children and dogs who were searching without luck for a cool afternoon breeze. One of them, who left her house at 3:30 intending to go for a short walk, returned annoyed a minute later. She was expecting to give birth the next week. Because of her condition, the noise, and the heat, she had a headache. Her oldest son, eighteen months old, who was walking with her, kept crying because a playful and excessively mischievous little dog had given him a superficial nip on his right cheek. In the evening she dressed it with mercurochrome. The boy ate normally and went to bed in a good mood.

  In her pleasant penthouse in the Emma building, Señora Ana de Guillén found out that same night that her dog had bitten a child on the Avenida de Los Ilustres. She knew Tony very well, the animal she had raised and trained herself, and she knew he was affectionate and harmless. She didn’t think anything of the incident. On Monday, when her husband came home from work, the dog went to greet him. With unusual aggression, instead of wagging his tail, he tore his pant leg. Someone came up to tell her, in the course of the week, that Tony had tried to bite a neighbor in the stairwell. Señora de Guillén blamed the heat for her dog’s behavior. She locked him in the bedroom during the day, to avoid problems with the neighbors. On Friday, without the slightest provocation, the dog tried to bite her. Before going to bed she locked him in the kitchen, until she could think of a better solution. The animal, scratching the door, whined all night. But when the housemaid went into the kitchen the next morning, she found him floppy and calm, with his teeth bared and covered in froth. He was dead.