The Scandal of the Century

by Gabriel García Márquez

  The irruption of transvestites in that world of exploitation and death has only managed to make it more sordid. Their revolution consists of carrying out two jobs at once: that of prostitutes and that of their own pimps. They are autonomous and fierce. Many nocturnal territories that women have left as too dangerous have been taken over by them and their concealed weapons. But in most cities they have confronted the women and their pimps with hammer blows, and are exercising their right of conquest over the best street corners in Europe. The fact that many Latin Americans are participating in this apotheosis of machismo is nothing to boast of. It is yet another proof of our social disturbances and shouldn’t alarm us any more than other weightier ones.

  The majority, of course, are homosexuals. They have splendid silicon busts, and some of them end up realizing the gilded dream of a drastic operation that leaves them forever installed in the opposite sex. But many are not, and they have taken to the life with their weapons—borrowed or usurped by force—because it is a bad way to earn a good living. Some are peaceful family men who spend the day in charitable work and at night, when the children are asleep, take to the streets in their wives’ Sunday dresses. Others are poor students who are thus able to pay for their studies. The most able make up to five hundred dollars on a good night. Which—according to my wife, here at my side—is a better wage than writing earns.

  December 2, 1980, El País, Madrid

  Yes, Nostalgia Is the Same as It Ever Was

  It has been a worldwide victory for poetry. In a century in which the winners are always those who hit hardest, who take the most votes, who score the most goals, the richest men and the most beautiful women, the commotion caused all over the world by the death of a man who has done nothing but sing to love is encouraging. It’s the apotheosis of those who never win.

  For forty-eight hours no one has talked of anything else. Three generations—ours, that of our children, and that of our oldest grandchildren—have for the first time the impression of living through a collective catastrophe, and for the same reasons. The reporters on television asked an eighty-year-old woman in the street what her favorite John Lennon song was, and she answered, as if she were fifteen, “Happiness Is a Warm Gun.” A boy who was watching the program said, “I like them all.” My younger son asked a girl his age why John Lennon was killed, and she answered, as if she were eighty years old, “Because the world is ending.”

  That’s how it is: the only nostalgia you can have in common with your children are Beatles songs. Each for different reasons, of course, and with different pain, as always happens with poetry. I’ll never forget that memorable day in 1963, in Mexico, when I heard a Beatles song for the first time in a conscious way. From that moment on I discovered they had infested the whole world. In our house in San Ángel, where we barely had room to sit down, there were only two records: a selection of Debussy preludes and the Beatles’ first album. In every city, at all hours, crowds were heard shouting, “Help, I need somebody.” Someone brought up the old idea that all the best musicians began with the second letter of the catalog: Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and Bartók. Someone said with the same silliness as usual that Mozart had to be included. Álvaro Mutis, who like all great erudites of music has a weakness for symphonic bricks, insisted on including Bruckner. Someone else tried to repeat again the battle in favor of Berlioz, which I waged on the opposing side because I couldn’t overcome the superstition that he’s a oiseau de malheur, that is, a bad-omen bird. Whereas I insisted, ever since then, on including the Beatles. Emilio García Riera, who agreed with me and is a film critic and historian of almost supernatural lucidity, especially after the second drink, said to me back in those days, “I listen to the Beatles with a certain amount of fear, because I think I’m going to remember them for the rest of my life.” It’s the only case I know of someone clairvoyant enough to realize he’s witnessing the birth of his own nostalgias. We used to walk into Carlos Fuentes’s study and find him typing with a single finger of one hand, as he always has, in the middle of a dense cloud of smoke and isolated from the horrors of the universe by the music of the Beatles at full blast.

  As always happens, we thought we were very far from being happy then, and now we think the opposite. It’s the trick of nostalgia, removing bitter moments from their place and painting them another color, and putting them back where they no longer hurt. As in old portraits, which seem illuminated by the illusory brilliance of happiness, and where we only see with astonishment how young we were when we were young, and not only those of us who were there, but also the house and the trees in the background, and even the chairs we were sitting on. Che Guevara, talking with his men around the fire on an empty wartime night, once said that nostalgia begins with food. It’s true, but only when you’re hungry. However, it always starts with music. Actually, our personal past moves away from us starting from the moment we’re born, but we only feel it when a record ends.

  This afternoon, thinking all of this while watching snow fall outside a mournful window, more than fifty years old and still not knowing very well who I am, or what the hell I’m doing here, I have the impression that the world was the same from my birth until the Beatles started to sing. Everything changed then. Men let their hair and beards grow, women learned to take their clothes off naturally, styles of dressing and loving changed, and thus the liberation of sex and of other drugs for dreaming began. They were the clamorous days of the Vietnam War and university rebellion. But, most of all, it was a tough apprenticeship of a different relationship between parents and their children, the beginning of a new dialogue that had seemed impossible for centuries.

  The symbol of all this—at the front of the Beatles—was John Lennon. His absurd death leaves us a different world populated by beautiful images. In “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” one of their most beautiful songs, newspaper dogs wear looking-glass ties. In “Eleanor Rigby”—with an obstinate bass line of baroque cellos—a desolate girl is left to pick up the rice in a church where a wedding has been. “All the lonely people, where do they all come from?” is the unanswered question. Father McKenzie is also left writing sermons that no one will hear, wiping his hands as he walks from a grave, and a girl takes off her face and leaves it in a jar by the door when she goes in the house and puts it back on again when she goes out. These creatures have caused people to say that John Lennon was a surrealist, which is something said too easily of everything that seems odd, as people who don’t know how to read him tend to say of Kafka. For others, he is the visionary of a better world. Someone who let us understand that old people aren’t those of us who’ve lived for many years, but those who didn’t get on board their children’s train in time.

  December 16, 1980, El País, Madrid

  Horror Story for New Year’s Eve

  We arrived in Arezzo a little before noon, and we wasted almost two hours looking for the medieval castle that the writer Miguel Otero Silva had bought at that idyllic bend in the Tuscan countryside. It was a burning and bustling Sunday near the beginning of August, and it was not easy to find anyone who knew anything in the streets invaded by tourists. After many futile attempts we went back to the car, left the city by an un-signposted track, and an old woman who was herding geese showed us precisely where the castle was. Before she said goodbye she asked us if we were planning to sleep there, and we answered—as we had planned—that we were only going there for lunch. “Thank goodness,” she said, “because that house is full of frights.” My wife and I, who do not believe in apparitions in broad daylight, made fun of her credulity. But the children were delighted at the idea of meeting a ghost in the flesh.

  Miguel Otero Silva, who as well as a good writer is a splendid host and an exacting gourmet, was waiting for us with an unforgettable lunch. Since we were late, we didn’t have time to see the interior of the castle before sitting down at the table, but from outside it didn’t look at all terrifying, and any concern was mitigated by a
view of the entire city from the summer terrace where we had lunch. It was difficult to believe that on that crowded hill of houses piled on top of each other, with barely enough room for ninety thousand people, so many of lasting genius had been born, such as Guido d’Arezzo, who invented musical notation, or the splendid Giorgio Vasari and the foul-mouthed Pietro Aretino, or Julio II and Gaius Cilnius Maecenas himself, the two great patrons of the arts and literature of their day. However, Miguel Otero Silva told us with his habitual sense of humor that such high historical figures were not the most distinguished of Arezzo. “The most important,” he told us, “was Ludovico.” Just like that, without need of any surnames: Ludovico, the great gentleman of the arts and of war who had constructed that castle of his misfortune.

  Miguel Otero Silva told us about Ludovico during the whole lunch. He told us about his immeasurable power, his unhappy love, and his dreadful death. He told us how it was that, in a heartbeat of madness, he had stabbed his lady in the bed where they had just been making love, and then sicked on himself his ferocious war dogs, who tore him to pieces. He assured us, very seriously, that after midnight the specter of Ludovico wandered through his castle in darkness, trying to get a moment’s serenity from his purgatory of love. Nevertheless, in the light of day, with a full stomach and contented heart, that could not seem like anything other than a joke, like so many others that Miguel Otero Silva told to entertain his guests.

  The castle, in reality, was immense and somber, as we discovered after a siesta. Its two upper floors and eighty-two rooms had suffered all kinds of alterations by its successive owners. Miguel Otero Silva had restored the whole ground floor and had a modern bedroom constructed with marble floors and a sauna and exercise facilities, as well as the terrace with its intense flowers where we’d had lunch. “They’re things from Caracas to mislead Ludovico,” he told us. I had heard it said, in fact, that the only thing that confuses ghosts are labyrinths of time.

  The second floor was untouched. It had been the one most used over the course of the centuries, but now it was a succession of characterless rooms, with abandoned furniture from different eras. The top floor was the most abandoned of all, but one room was conserved intact, where time had forgotten to pass. It was Ludovico’s bedchamber. It was a magic moment. There was the canopy bed, with its curtains embroidered with golden thread and the bedspread with its marvelous trimmings still spattered with the blood of his slaughtered lover. There was the fireplace with the cold ashes and the petrified last log, the wardrobe with its well-primed weapons, and the portrait in oils of the pensive gentleman, painted by one of the Florentine masters who was not fortunate enough to survive his times. However, what most struck me was the scent of fresh strawberries that lingered, with no possible explanation, in the room’s air.

  Summer days are long and unhurried in Tuscany, and the horizon stays in its place until nine at night. After showing us the interior of the castle, Miguel Otero Silva took us to see the frescos of Piero della Francesca, in the Church of San Francisco; then we lingered over a very conversational coffee under the trellises of the market square enhanced by the early-evening breezes, and when we returned to the castle to pick up our luggage we found dinner on the table. So we stayed to eat. While we did so, the boys lit some more torches in the kitchen and went to explore the darkness upstairs. From the table we heard them galloping like wild horses up the stairs, the mournful creaking of door hinges, the happy shouts calling Ludovico in the abandoned rooms. They were the ones who came up with the bad idea that we should stay the night. Miguel Otero Silva encouraged them with delight, and we didn’t have the heart to say no.

  Contrary to what I feared, we slept very well; my wife and I in a bedroom on the ground floor, and my sons in an adjacent room. While I was trying to get to sleep I counted twelve insomniac chimes from the pendulum clock in the sitting room, and for an instant I remembered the woman with the geese. But we were so tired that we fell asleep very quickly, and slept soundly and continuously, and I woke up, after seven, to bright sunshine. At my side, Mercedes was sailing on the peaceful sea of the innocent. “How silly,” I said to myself, “that some people still believe in ghosts these days.” Only then did I realize—with a slash of horror—that we were not in the room where we’d laid down last night, but in Ludovico’s bedroom, lying in his bloody bed. Someone had changed our room while we slept.

  December 30, 1980, El País, Madrid

  Magic Caribbean

  Surinam—as not everyone knows—is an independent country on the Caribbean Sea, which was until a few years ago a Dutch colony. It covers 64,000 square miles and has just over 384,000 inhabitants of multiple origins: Indians from India, local Indians, Indonesians, Africans, Chinese, and Europeans. Its capital, Paramaribo—which they pronounce with a stress on the antepenultimate syllable—is a clamorous and sad city, with a spirit more Asian than South American, where four languages and numerous aboriginal dialects, as well as the official tongue—Dutch—are spoken and six religions professed: Hinduism, Roman Catholicism, Islam, Moravian, Dutch Reform, and Lutheran. Currently, the country is governed by a regime of young military officers, about whom very little is known, even in the neighboring countries, and nobody would remember it if it weren’t for a weekly stopover by a Dutch plane that flies from Amsterdam to Caracas.

  I had heard of Surinam since I was very small, not as Surinam—which was then called Dutch Guyana—but because it was on the border with French Guyana, in whose capital, Cayenne, was until recently the terrible penal colony known, in life and in death, as Devil’s Island. The few who managed to escape that hellhole, who might be vicious criminals as easily as political idealists, scattered across the numerous islands of the West Indies until they managed to return to Europe or establish themselves with new identities in Venezuela or the Caribbean coast of Colombia. The most famous of all was Henri Charrière, author of Papillon, who prospered in Caracas as a restaurant promoter and in other less clear jobs, and who died a few years ago at the crest of an ephemeral literary glory, as deserving as it was undeserved. That glory, in reality, belonged to another French fugitive, with better qualifications, who described the horrors of Devil’s Island long before Papillon, but who does not figure anywhere in the literature today, not even his name can be found in the encyclopedias. He was called René Belbenoît, and had been a journalist in France before being sentenced to life for a cause no journalist today can remember, and he continued to be one in the United States, where he was granted asylum and where he died at a venerable old age.

  Some of those fugitives found refuge in the Caribbean Colombian town where I was born, in the times of the banana fever, when cigars were not lit with matches but with five-peso bills. Several of them assimilated into the population and became very respectable citizens, always distinguished by their difficult speech and the hermeticism of their past. One of them, Roger Chantal, who had arrived with no other trade than pulling teeth without anesthesia, became a millionaire overnight with no explanation whatsoever. He held Babylonian parties—in an implausible town that had very little to begrudge Babylonia—would get deadly drunk, and shout in his happy agony, “Je suis l’homme le plus riche du monde.” In the midst of his delirium he would fancy himself a benefactor, an aspect no one had seen up till then, and presented the church with a full-size clay saint, who was enthroned with three days of revelry. One ordinary Tuesday three secret agents arrived on the eleven o’clock train and went straight to his house. Chantal wasn’t home, but the agents performed a thorough search in the presence of his native wife, who put up no resistance, except when they wanted to open the enormous wardrobe in the bedroom. Then the agents broke the mirrors and found more than a million dollars in counterfeit bills hidden between the glass and the wood. Nothing more was ever heard of Roger Chantal. Later the legend circulated that the million fake dollars had entered the country inside the clay saint, which no customs agent had been curious enough to inspect.
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  All this came back to my memory in a sudden jolt just before Christmas of 1957, when I had to make a stopover in Paramaribo. The airport was a flattened runway with a palm-thatch hut, on the central prop of which was a telephone like the ones in cowboy movies, with a crank handle you have to turn with great effort and many times before getting a response. The heat was searing, and the air, dusty and still, had the smell of a sleeping caiman by which one recognizes the Caribbean when arriving from another world. On a stool leaning against the telephone post was a very beautiful, well-built, young black woman, with a multicolored turban like the ones women wear in some African countries. She was pregnant, about to give birth, and was smoking a cigar in silence and in a way I’ve only seen people do in the Caribbean: with the lit end inside her mouth and puffing smoke out the stub end, like a tugboat funnel. She was the only human being in the airport.

  After a quarter of an hour a decrepit jeep arrived surrounded by a cloud of burning dust, from which descended a black man in shorts and a cork helmet with the papers to dispatch the plane. While he completed the formalities, he was talking on the phone, shouting in Dutch. Twelve hours earlier I was on a seaside terrace in Lisbon, in front of the enormous Portuguese ocean, watching the flocks of seagulls going inside the port saloons fleeing from the glacial wind. Europe was then a decrepit land covered in snow, daylight lasted no more than five hours, and it was impossible to imagine that a world of hot sun and rotting guavas, like the one where we’d just landed, truly existed. However, the only image that persists from that experience, which I still conserve intact, was that of the beautiful, aloof black woman, who had a basket of ginger roots on her lap to sell to the passengers.