García likes the principles of surrealism but not the surrealists themselves. Given a choice, he prefers the painters to the poets, but he does not think of himself as being like any of them. And it is true that his work is based more in the anecdote than in the symbolic or random flow of events so important to the surrealists; true also that his aim is to be accessible, not obscure. And yet, a surreal quality, a rendering of the improbable and impossible as real, pervades his work. And its importance to him has obviously intensified since the tepidly surreal grass-eating of Leaf Storm. In Cien Años he made the leap to earth-eating, to a plague of insomnia, to ghosts that grow old, to a young woman who ascends bodily into heaven and takes two bedsheets with her. His improbability usually extends an everyday reality. In Cien Años, for instance, José Arcadio, son of Ursula, enters his bedroom, closes the door, and a pistol shot is heard. Then:
A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendía house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining-room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta’s chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano José, and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Ursula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread.
“Holy Mother of God!” Ursula shouted.
She followed the thread of blood back along its course, and in search of its origin she went through the pantry, along the begonia porch where Aureliano José was chanting that three plus three is six and six plus three is nine, and she crossed the dining room and the living rooms and followed straight down the street, and she turned first to the right and then to the left to the Street of the Turks, forgetting that she was still wearing her baking apron and her house slippers, and she came out onto the square and went into the door of a house where she had never been, and she pushed open the bedroom door and was almost suffocated by the smell of burned gunpowder, and she found José Arcadio lying face down on the ground on top of the leggings he had just taken off, and she saw the starting point of the thread of blood that had already stopped flowing out of his right ear.
We talked of this passage in connection with the surreal aspect of the book, but García all but dismissed the improbable quality of it, saying only: “It is the umbilical cord.” And we moved on to something else.
After Leaf Storm, García encountered some heady influences that would change his fictional style and bring him as close to socialist realism as he would ever come. The Communists in Bogota wooed him after Leaf Storm was published; but while they wanted him as a writer and a mind, they rejected his style as too artistic to convey the stringent socialist realities. On this point Mario Vargas Llosa writes: “Although he never fell into the coarse conceptions of socialist realism, García Márquez nevertheless reached a similar conclusion about his narrative language some months later, at the beginning of his second novel.” The change in his writing that followed could hardly be adjudged a bad one, for working in his new style García produced three highly regarded works. But he was not satisfied, because the change restricted his imagination.
He had a flurry of party militancy in Bogota, but it faded quickly and he then went to Europe for El espectador. He found himself in Rome covering Pope Pius XII’s hiccups, and he enrolled at the Centro Sperimentale de Cinematografía, with plans to become a director and film his own version of Leaf Storm. After some months of study, he moved to Paris and learned there that the Rojas dictatorship had closed his paper and that he was out of a job.
He stayed in Paris, beginning a short story about some violence he remembered from childhood, changing the locale from Macondo to “El Pueblo” (the town), a shift which has generated confusion about the settings of his various works. His language became more staccato, with dialogue playing a larger role. The short story he had begun expanded quickly and took shape as a novel, then two novels. The last offshoot he completed first and it became El Coronel No Tiene Quien Le Escriba (No One Writes to the Colonel), the story of an old military man who waits endlessly for his military pension, long after he and the war that he fought in have been forgotten by the government.
“He had written a small masterwork,” Vargas Llosa writes, “but not only did he not know it, he also experienced the same sensation of failure as when he finished Leaf Storm.”
He then completed his novel about violence in the same small town, the violence provoked by pasquines—anonymous signs that appear mysteriously on the walls of public places. The book is called La Mala Hora (“The Evil Hour”).
García’s life in Paris while writing these works was memorable but not happy. He lived, he said, on “daily miracles,” deeply impoverished, as a foreigner not allowed to work, unable to speak the language very well, at one point turning in empty bottles for cash. When his money ran out, his landlord let him live in an attic, where he wrote steadily. When he returned to Paris in 1968 as a success and looked back on his three years of poverty, he concluded: “If I had not lived those three years, probably I would not be a writer. Here I learned that nobody dies of hunger and that one is capable of sleeping under bridges.”
My wife and I had just come from Paris to Barcelona, and we told of the extraordinary time we’d just had in the city.
“I had money when I went back there,” García said. “I wanted to eat all the things I had not eaten, drink all the wine I could not afford to buy. And I hated it. I hate Paris.”
He lifted himself out of his poverty there in 1957 by selling newspapers in Bogota and Caracas on the idea of a series of ten articles about the Iron Curtain countries. A newsman who went with him on that tour, Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, later in the year became editor of Momento, a Caracas magazine, and hired García immediately. It was in Caracas, confronting his fictional world only on his days off, and reporting meanwhile on the last days of the Pérez Jiménez dictatorship, that he wrote some new short stories. These he called Los Funerales de la Mamá Grande (Big Mama’s Funeral) when he published them in Mexico in 1962. These, too, have the staccato quality, except for the title story, which is written in dense language that satirizes Colombian political and editorial-page rhetoric. It is the only story set in Macondo, another point of confusion. The others in the collection, all set in El Pueblo, make no mention of Macondo.
The assumption by many casual readers of García’s work is that all his fiction is set in Macondo. But when he broke with the lush style of Leaf Storm and took up with the Communist party realists, he not only adopted a kind of Hemingway realism but he also left his fictional hometown. He returns to his natural style, an exalted but not overblown prose, only in the title story, in which he returns to Macondo.
García said he has a problem convincing people about El Pueblo. “Leaf Storm and Cien Años are in Macondo, nothing else,” he said emphatically of his books. “The other three [Colonel, Mala Hora, Mamá Grande] are in El Pueblo.” He opened the United States edition of the Colonel to page 42 and cited internal evidence where the Colonel remembers Macondo and mentions when he physically left it, in 1906.
“But some people,” he said, “do not accept any evidence, and I leave them so I don’t have to discuss it.”
Another rumor is that he is through writing about Macondo, but of this he says, “It is a lie. I don’t tamper with the future.” During the past year, in fact, he completed a short novel which develops the lives of characters he created in Cien Años. It is called The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother, and is now being translated into English by Gregory Rabassa, who translated both Cien Años and Leaf Storm.
García’s career as a fiction writer remaine
d publicly static during his time in Venezuela, but journalistically he took an odd turn: he left Momento and went to work for Venezuela Gráfica, a magazine commonly called Venezuela Pornográfica in Caracas. Solemn fictionists might be put off by such work, but García accepted it then and still accepts it.
“I’m interested in personal life,” he said, explaining that at the moment in Barcelona he was reading the memoirs of Jackie Kennedy’s chauffeur. “I read all the gossip in all the magazines. And I believe it all.”
The Cuban revolution lifted him, for the first time in his life, out of journalistic fluff and fun and into advocacy. He opened the Bogota office for Prensa Latina, went to Havana later, and in 1961 became assistant bureau chief in New York. He quit in mid-1961 during a wave of revisionism, in solidarity with his disgruntled boss; and with his wife, Mercedes, the Barranquilla girl who had waited for him for three years until he married her in 1958, and his two-year-old son, Rodrigo, he left New York, but not without a tropical memory of the city.
“It was like no place else,” he said. “It was putrefying, but also was in the process of rebirth, like the jungle. It fascinated me.”
The Garcías headed for New Orleans by Greyhound, passing through Faulkner country. García duly noted one sign advising DOGS AND MEXICANS PROHIBITED and found himself barred from hotels where clerks thought him Mexican. He had planned to return to Colombia, but Mexico, being a film capital, lured him, and on the urging of Mexican friends he changed plans and began slowly, and with much difficulty, a new career as a screenwriter. He wrote one short story in Mexico and then lapsed into a silence that lasted several years.
The screenwriting was partially the cause of the silence, but so was what he considered his failure as a writer of fiction. He wrote film scripts, some in collaboration with Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, and several became movies, memorable now mainly because he worked on them. In dry periods he worked again as an editor and at one point did publicity for the J. Walter Thompson office in Mexico City.
“It was a very bad time for me,” he said, “a suffocating time. Nothing I did in films was mine. It was a collaboration, incorporating everybody’s ideas, the director’s, the actors’. I was very limited in what I could do and I appreciated then that in the novel the writer has complete control.”
His friends remembered him as being blocked and in a period of severe self-criticism, dissatisfied with all he had done, not wanting to return to anything like it.
It was in January 1965, while driving from Mexico City to Acapulco, that he envisioned the first chapter of the book that was to become Cien Años. He later told an Argentinian writer that if he’d had a tape recorder, he could have dictated the entire chapter on the spot. He then went home and told Mercedes: Don’t bother me, especially don’t bother me about money. And he went to work at the desk he called the Cave of the Mafia, in a house at number 6 Calle de La Loma, Mexico City, and working eight to ten hours a day for eighteen months, he wrote the novel.
“I didn’t know what my wife was doing,” he said, “and I didn’t ask any questions. But there was always whiskey in the house. Good Scotch. In that respect my life hasn’t changed much since those days. We always lived as if we had money. But when I was finished writing, my wife said, ‘Did you really finish it? We owe twelve thousand dollars.’ She had borrowed from friends for a year and a half.”
At one point, he said, his wife was given the option by the butcher shop, where she was a good client, to pay by the month. She refused, but later, when getting money every day was more difficult, she accepted the offer and paid monthly installments to the butcher. At another point there was no money for the rent, so she told the landlord she couldn’t pay for six months and somehow he said all right; so they didn’t have to worry about that.
“She is stupendous,” García said.
We had been talking in the Rambla bar for almost two hours and now García had to leave for an appointment. But he said we should come to his home at five and continue the talk, and we did.
He and Mercedes both greeted us. She is a slender, serene beauty, her dark, shoulder-length hair parted in the middle, an Indian quality in her face that is reminiscent of some of Gauguin’s Tahitian women. She speaks softly and said that the Spaniards tell her she speaks a sweet Spanish, as contrasted with the cacophonies of Castilian. She employs a day maid to help with the housework, in notable contrast to the time when García was writing Cien Años. She lived those days, she said, trying not to dwell on the precarious quality of their life, for when she did, she became very nervous.
“I would not want to go through that again,” she said.
It is not at all likely she will have to.
The Garcías’ apartment is modern in its furnishings, with wall-to-wall carpeting, floor-to-ceiling drapes, the color scheme beige, brown, and orange. The hi-fi, which García, and no one else, operates, is a significant object in the room, and in García’s life. He treats his records as if they were fine crystal, wiping each one after use. His sons Gonzalo, ten, and Rodrigo, now twelve, have their own phonograph, so that Papa’s will not be disturbed. Reading as he listens to music forms the second part of his day and regularly follows his morning work period, which usually begins at ten and lasts until about two. (One page a day, of twenty-four lines, is his average output, five pages his record.) Apart from the records—he played Leonard Cohen for the visiting North Americans—a large and orderly collection of classical works on cassettes occupies a shelf beside the sofa.
“There were no records where I grew up,” he said, “and now all this on cassettes. Imagine!”
A discussion of some of García’s literary tastes was prompted by the living-room shelves which held some of his books.
“He left most of his books in Colombia when he moved to Barcelona,” Mercedes said, “but the Conrad, Plutarch, and Kafka he takes with him wherever he goes. And the Virginia Woolf he always buys when he gets there, if he can find it.”
The shelves had all of these, plus the complete works of Stefan Zweig and A. J. Cronin, fourteen volumes of Borges, Rabelais’s works, and among other items, The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth. Ah ha! A best-seller.
“Literarily,” García said, “it is of no importance. But things happen. It is good false reporting.”
From the blue he asked: “What do you think of Graham Greene?” His manner implied that I would be judged by my response. I said I had a high opinion of Greene.
“He teaches you how to write,” García remarked. “His technique of narration is so good. He also taught us to see the tropics in books like The Power and the Glory, The Comedians, and A Burnt-out Case, which is set in Africa, but which is like Latin America. People think of life in the tropics as being exuberant, happy, rich. But Greene shows its elements—the heat, the plants, the rain, the animals, the sea. And he shows life is poor and sad. And that is the truth about that place.”
Greene brought to García’s mind one of his prejudices. “The intellectuals would like to like Greene,” he said, “but they don’t think they should. He writes a good book like A Sort of Life and then confuses them by writing Travels with My Aunt. The intellectual is the worst thing there is. He invents things and then he believes them. He decides the novel is dead but then he finds a novel and says he discovered it. If you say the novel is dead, it is not the novel. It is you who are dead.”
He talked of liking Ray Bradbury, but selectively. “There are two Ray Bradburys. One writes the science fiction and one is human. I don’t like the science fiction.”
He said that he has read no great American writers since what he called “the Lost Generation”—meaning Faulkner and Dos Passos, and Erskine Caldwell and Hemingway for their short stories. He liked none of the Hemingway novels. “The Sun Also Rises was a lengthened short story,” he said. Of the Faulkner works, he was most captivated by Absalom, Absalom!, but added, only half facetiously, that he thought The Hamlet was “the best South American novel ever written.�
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“Until you’re about the age of twenty,” he said, “you read everything, and you like it simply because you are reading it. Then between twenty and thirty you pick what you want, and you read the best, you read all the great works. After that you sit and wait for them to be written. But you know, the least known, the least famous writers, they are the better ones.”
Of contemporary Latin American novelists, two in particular, and both of them known in the United States, were early boosters of Cien Años: Carlos Fuentes and the Argentine, Julio Cortázar. García sent his first three chapters to Fuentes, who was so impressed that he wrote for a Mexican magazine:
I have just finished reading the first seventy-five pages of Cien Años de Soledad. They are absolutely magisterial.… All “fictional” history coexists with “real” history, what is dreamed with what is documented, and thanks to the legends, the lies, the exaggerations, the myths … Macondo is made into a universal territory, in a story almost biblical in its foundations, its generations and degenerations, in a story of the origin and destiny of human time and of the dreams and desires by which men are saved or destroyed.
Cortázar, one of the first readers of the completed book, and equally enthusiastic, said García’s imagination had redeemed the South American novel from its boring ways. Cortázar’s novel Hopscotch had won the National Book Award for its English translator, Gregory Rabassa, in 1967. García was dissatisfied with the English translation of No One Writes to the Colonel and, after reading Rabassa’s version of Hopscotch, he asked his publisher to have Rabassa, a professor of Romance languages at New York’s Queens College, translate Cien Años. The publisher found Rabassa tied up for a year.
“I’ll wait,” García said, a decision for which anyone attuned to the English translation must be grateful.
Rabassa describes García’s Spanish as “classical, very clear. He doesn’t fool around with syntax. Certain local words do creep in, in dialogue, but he is not an experimenter. He uses the right word in the right place. I would compare his language to Cervantes’.”
Riding the Yellow Trolley Car: Selected Nonfiction Page 28