Riding the Yellow Trolley Car: Selected Nonfiction
Page 27
The book is the story of the seven deadly sins, the mysteries of Christianity and black magic, the wisdom of man that somehow is transmitted to others even when civilizations vanish. It concerns the lives of the harlot, the saint, the general, the beauty, the glutton, the fairy, the priest, the aristocrat, and all the mad nuts of every stripe who are everywhere always. Every myth, legend, fable, and fairy tale, every piece of revered dogma and received wisdom and scientific fact, seems represented or at least implied in some way that is relevant to the Buendías. A daughter, Remedios, is assumed bodily into heaven, taking two bedsheets with her. Men remember their origin in the sea. An illegitimate child is said to have been found floating in a basket.
Though told as allegory, the book gives the reader an enormous sense of reality, of a genuine family saga. Mr. García Márquez has done nothing less than to create in the reader a sense of all that is profound, meaningful, and meaningless in life. His success is one of the best things that has happened to literature in a long, long time.
1970
The Yellow Trolley Car in Barcelona: An Interview
“Do you speak English?” I asked him.
“Nada,” he said on the phone. “Nada, nada.”
Well, it isn’t true, but he likes to insist that it is, and so I dug up some rusty Spanish and asked when we’d get together and where he lived. “In a house,” he said, and added he’d pick me up at five at my hotel on La Rambla, the great thoroughfare of Barcelona’s old city. I told him my wife, Dana, was a puertorriqueña, so we could get through the fine points of language in either direction and he said bueno and that was that.
Ten minutes later he’d changed his mind and said he’d come by at noon. And at precisely noon on the Day of the Book, Gabriel García Márquez came down the crowded, noisy Rambla in a double-breasted navy-blue sports jacket, gray slacks, an open-collared blue shirt with a brown and white paisley design, a full head of curly black hair, and with a less than lush goatee, begun recently when he’d gone away for a month and forgotten his razor.
Hallo, hello, greetings, how are you, cómo está, a pleasure, handshakes, and then he asked: “Have you bought a book yet?”
“Of course. Yours.”
His book means his big book, Cien Años de Soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), the semi-surreal saga of a hundred years of life among the Buendías, a family of mythical achievements and absurdities in the mythical South American town of Macondo. García’s dramatic comedy of Macondo’s century, acclaimed a masterpiece again and again, seems to suggest every human high and low point from post-Genesis to the air age. The Times Literary Supplement described it as “a comic masterpiece and certainly one of Latin America’s finest novels to date.” It won the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in France in 1969 and won Italy’s Premio Chianciano the same year. It has been published in twenty-three countries, has sold a million copies in the Spanish language during twenty-one printings since Editorial Sudamericana in Buenos Aires brought it out in 1967. It has been translated into eighteen languages, sold sixty thousand copies in Brazil, fifty thousand in Italy, thirty thousand in Hungary, 18,650 in hardcover and 46,650 in paper in the United States, where it made the best-seller list. All of this gives him the economic and literary freedom he long sought, but also burdens him with what he now sees as a “persecution” by newsmen and editors.
In a letter to a friend he bemoaned the waste of two hours of self-revelation to reporters who reduce it to a page and a half of copy. As for the editors, one came and asked García’s wife, Mercedes, for his personal letters. A girl appeared with the idea for a book called “250 Questions to García Márquez.” Wrote García to his friend: “I took her for coffee and explained that if I answered 250 questions the book would be mine.” Another editor asked him to write a prologue to the diary of Che Guevara in the Sierra Maestra and García answered he would gladly do it but it would take him eight years, because he wanted to do it right.
And so when any outlander calls, he does not invite him home but meets him elsewhere, in front of a hotel on Las Ramblas, for instance, stays long enough to be civil, then excuses himself. If the interview goes well, he might keep it going. His problem, he says, is to see as few people as possible. Even friends are a complication at times. He accepts a luncheon date with a friend and finds twenty strangers invited to meet him.
“Then I can’t make jokes,” he said. “I have to be intelligent for them. This is horrible.”
But life in Barcelona is not out of control, despite these pressures. “I have accomplished one thing,” he said. “I have not become a public spectacle. I know how to avoid that.”
As we walked inconspicuously along the crowded Rambla, seeing flowers everywhere, García had another question: “Did you buy a rose when you bought the book?”
Dana showed him a rose to prove we had. It is the custom on the Day of the Book for the city’s publishing houses and bookstores to sell books in temporary wooden stalls on the main streets. By tradition, you buy a rose for your lady and she buys you a book.
“We ought to go someplace where it’s quiet,” I said, barely able to hear García above crowd noises.
“It’s hard to find a place like that in Spain,” he said, but then he pointed. “Look, we could go to that bar. It’s American. Nobody goes there.”
So at a Formica-topped table in a bar-restaurant memorable now for its plainness and near emptiness, García ordered coffee for himself and red wine for the visitors, specifying Imperial 1956 to the waiter so that our taste would not be offended by the ordinary tinto, which he does not drink. He apologized for not having wine himself. Too early. He likes to drink when it’s dark. Also, he had only one coffee in the two hours we talked. Weight-watching. And balancing values.
“Coffee now,” he said, “less whiskey tonight.”
I told him the last writing I had done before leaving for a European trip was a short review of his last book published in the United States, Leaf Storm (La Hojarasca), actually his first short novel, published in Colombia in 1955. I explained that even though another short novel and many short stories had been published in the United States, very little personal information about him was available. He agreed.
Moreover, despite a critical reception in this country that for a Latin has been second only to the Borges boom of the 1960s, the literary magazines have been rather unconcerned with the man who wrote a masterwork. This is less strange than it seems. I remember a conversation in an Irish bar in Albany, New York, some years ago, when revolutions were erupting in two Latin American nations. The bored bartender ended a discussion of both upheavals with the observation that “neither of them countries is worth a cat’s titty,” and this has stood ever since in my mind as a most lucid summary of United States attitudes—literary, political, military, it doesn’t matter—toward the lands and people of the subcontinent.
It has been suggested that this less than enthusiastic reception of García as a literary personage has a political basis: the consequence of his work as a Communist newsman from 1959 to 1961 for Fidel Castro’s Prensa Latina in Bogotá, Havana, and New York. He left the United States in 1961, and not until he was given an honorary degree by Columbia University in 1971 was he allowed to return. But if his Communist past ever did percolate down to the level of assignment editors, which is doubtful, it is likely that the Cat’s Titty syndrome, rather than anticommunism, was the dampening agent. Another literary Latin leftist. Ho-hum.
The Spanish-speaking literary world behaves differently toward García. At Columbia University last April, Pablo Neruda referred to Cien Años as “perhaps the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since the Don Quixote of Cervantes.” García is already the subject of an excellent critical biography, Historia de un Deicidio (“The Story of a Deicide”) by Mario Vargas Llosa, published in 1971 by Barral Editores, Barcelona. Vargas, a teacher and novelist (The Time of the Hero, The Green House), wrote the book with García’s full cooperation, and García says it
is the best book about him to date; and there are several. But he vouches for the authenticity of only the first eighty-four biographical pages, paying Vargas the compliment of being afraid to read the rest.
“Mario’s book may have the key to me,” he said.
Why should he be afraid of somebody else’s analysis?
“It’s a gamble,” he said, “a game. It’s possible I would not be harmed by change if I read it. But why should I take the risk?”
There are instructive literary ironies in García’s becoming both a critical success and a best-seller. (“If I hadn’t written Cien Años,” he said, “I wouldn’t have read it. I don’t read best-sellers.”) He had given up writing and for more than five years did not write a word. This was overreaction to his negative feeling about his early books, to a disorienting change he’d made in his style and approach to his material, and to the influential but frustrating hold that film had on him.
He says he was always a writer, for as long as he can remember. He was born on March 6, 1928, in the small northern Colombian town of Aracataca, which is the prototype in García’s imagination for the mythical village of Macondo, where life rages and sighs for one hundred years in his masterpiece. His first published stories did not appear until 1947, when he was at the University of Bogota, studying law and hating it: Political violence closed the university and he transferred his studies to Cartagena and continued writing. Then during a visit to Barranquilla, he became involved with a small group of other writers and newsmen who knew his work. He quit law school, moved to Barranquilla, and took a job as a newspaper columnist. In 1954 he returned to Bogota as a film critic and reporter for El espectador.
“As a reporter,” he said, “I was the lowest on the paper and wanted to be. Other writers always wanted to get to the editorial page, but I wanted to cover fires and crime.”
His biographer compares his career as journalist-into-novelist to Ernest Hemingway’s, and there are similarities. But there are also substantial differences. Hemingway was the realistic, impressionistic, serious-minded reporter. García, much less solemn about his job, more inclined to see it as a source of experience rather than as an outlet for opinion, seems to have had as much Ben Hecht as Hemingway in him. At least that is the impression one gets after reading a letter García wrote to a friend, recollecting a story he once covered in the Colombian town of Quibdó. An El espectador correspondent had cabled reports of wild fighting in Quibdó, and García and a photographer traveled far and with great difficulty to reach the action, only to find a sleepy, dusty village, and no fighting whatsoever. They did discover the correspondent beating the heat in a hammock. He explained that nothing ever happened in Quibdó and that he’d sent the cables in protest. Unwilling to go back empty-handed after such an arduous trip, García, his photographer, and the correspondent, with the help of sirens and drums, gathered a crowd and took action photos. García sent back action stories for two days, and soon an army of reporters arrived to cover it all. García then explained the Quibdó scene to them and directed the creation of a new and even larger demonstration they could report on.
A high point of his newspaper career came in 1966 when a sailor named Luis Alejandro Velasco came to El espectador with the offer to tell the whole story of his famous survival at sea.
Velasco had lived ten days on a life raft after a Colombian naval destroyer, en route home from New Orleans, was struck by a storm. Eight sailors were lost overboard and only Velasco survived. This had already made him a national hero, and quite wealthy. But only the newspapers favored by Colombian dictator Gustavo Rojas Pinilla had been allowed to talk to him. His offer to El espectador to tell the tale anew, long after public interest had peaked, was first received, says García, as “una noticia refrita”—a rehashed story—but one editor had second thoughts, and turned Velasco over to García.
The result was a fourteen-chapter, first-person narration, signed by the twenty-year-old seaman, which revealed that the destroyer had not encountered a storm at all—and meteorologists verified this—but had been carrying contraband cargo, badly packed on the deck. The vessel almost keeled over in some high winds, the cargo broke loose, and the eight crewmen were knocked overboard. The public found this story delicious and El espectador’s circulation climbed. The embarrassed dictatorship denied all, but the paper subsequently proved its case with photos from other crewmen, showing men standing on the destroyer’s deck alongside clearly labeled boxes of TV sets, refrigerators, and washing machines from the United States. The Rojas Pinilla government initiated reprisals against the paper and months later, when García was in Paris as El espectador’s roving European correspondent, closed it down.
The articles were republished in paperback in Barcelona under García’s name in early 1970, the first time he was publicly connected with them. He entitled the book: The Tale of a Shipwrecked Sailor who was adrift ten days on a life raft without food or water, who was proclaimed a hero of the nation, kissed by beauty queens and made rich by publicity, and then loathed by the government and forgotten forever. In a prologue to the unaltered reprint, García credits Velasco with a natural gift for narrative and an astonishing memory for detail, and adds: “It depresses me that editors are not interested in the merits of the text as much as they are in the name of the author, for much to my regret, this makes me out to be a fashionable writer. Fortunately, there are books that belong not to those who write them but those who suffer them and this is one of those.” And he states that the rights of the book belong to Velasco, not García.
It was Hemingway who argued against journalism, adjudging it a good training ground if you get out in time, but one that could spoil a writer who stayed at it too long. García could not accept such a dictum, for he was writing journalism to live, and he stayed at it from 1948 to 1961. He was much more in tune psychologically with William Faulkner, who felt that nothing could destroy a good writer. Like so many serious writers at mid-century, García was deeply influenced by the work of Faulkner, and so much has been made of this that he now draws the curtain on extended talk about the relationship. Nor can he read Faulkner anymore, perhaps because of this, although he ascribes it to the effusion of Faulknerian rhetoric that put him off when he went back to him in 1971. But in the late 1940s, when García was writing Leaf Storm, Faulkner was of major importance to him.
Leaf Storm was finally published in 1955, the same year as the shipwreck articles, after almost seven years of searching for an editor who would accept it. One critic rejected the book for an Argentinian publisher, advising García that he was not talented as a writer and ought to dedicate his life to something else. The story of Leaf Storm is told alternately by a father, his daughter, and his grandson, who are the only mourners at the burial of a doctor who once lived with them. The doctor later became a recluse and by a single act earned the enmity of the whole town, which now wants to humiliate his corpse. Faulknerian phrasing is evident and the doctor bears some resemblance to Reverend Gail Hightower of Light in August.
But despite Faulkner’s influence, Leaf Storm is not a derivative work. Its own language is rich, dense, but without the difficulty that goes with much of Faulkner. It is occasionally surreal in a way that Faulkner’s work is not. And though it establishes Macondo in emulation of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, it does so with such originality and relevance to Latin American life that by the time Macondo matured into the fully appointed village in Cien Años, multitudes of Latin readers recognized it as the dwelling place of their communal spirit.
The world García imagines is always solidly grounded in the real world, but it is deceptive, for the real is also frequently surreal.
In Leaf Storm, the old doctor sits down to a pretentious, bourgeois dinner and startles everybody by saying to a servant: “Look, miss, just start boiling a little grass and bring that to me as if it were soup.” “What kind of grass, doctor?” the servant asks. “Ordinary grass, ma’am,” the doctor says. “The kind that donkeys eat.”
He believes that Faulkner differs from him on this matter in that Faulkner’s outlandishness is disguised as reality.
“Faulkner was surprised at certain things that happened in life,” García said, “but he writes of them not as surprises but as things that happen every day.”
García feels less surprised. “In Mexico,” he says, “surrealism runs through the streets. Surrealism comes from the reality of Latin America.”
About two weeks before we talked, a newsman had called to ask García for his reaction to an occurrence in a rural Colombian town. About ten in the morning at a small school, two men pulled up in a truck and said, “We came for the furniture.” Nobody knew anything about them, but the schoolmaster nodded, the furniture was loaded onto the truck and driven off, and only much later was it understood that the truckmen were thieves.
“Normal,” says García.
“One day in Barcelona,” he continued, “my wife and I were asleep and the doorbell rings. I open the door and a man says to me, ‘I came to fix the ironing cord.’ My wife, from the bed, says, ‘We don’t have anything wrong with the iron here.’ The man asks, ‘Is this apartment two?’ ‘No,’ I say, ‘upstairs.’ Later, my wife went to the iron and plugged it in and it burned up. This was a reversal. The man came before we knew it had to be fixed. This type of thing happens all the time. My wife has already forgotten it.”