by Ilan Stavans
García Márquez was excited to be back in South America. One of the reasons for his return was Mercedes Barcha Prado. He had pledged eternal love to Mercedes four years earlier and he was eager to marry her. She had waited for him all this time. Three months into his Venezuelan stay, he traveled to Barranquilla, where, at the church of the Perpetuo Sepulcro, the wedding took place on March 21, 1958.
Married life was full of promise. He told Mercedes about his dream of writing a novel called La casa, and he swore to her that when he reached the age of forty he would write his masterpiece. He was committed to his dreams, but he needed to support his wife. Thankfully, he was on staff at Momento—but not for long. A couple of months later, he and Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, who was jefe de redacción, roughly equilavent to managing editor, resigned from Momento in protest after the visit of Richard Nixon, then vice president of the United States, to Caracas, on May 13, 1958. There was rioting in the streets of Caracas, but the periodical wanted to distance itself from those events. Momento published an editorial note that claimed that the civil unrest didn’t represent the feelings of most Caracas dwellers and that Venezuela and the United States were nations eager to explore their natural connections. Mendoza disagreed with the statement and published the text not as an editorial but as a news piece. This angered the editor in chief, Carlos Ramírez MacGregor, who reprimanded his jefe de redacción. Mendoza resigned abruptly and so did García Márquez.
His resignation was a fortuitous event. At the time, García Márquez was looking to concentrate on finishing a series of stories that would become part of the collection Los funerales de la Mamá Grande (Big Mama’s Funeral); his departure from Momento gave him an unexpected six weeks off. He devoted them to “La viuda de Montiel” (Montiel’s Widow), “La maravillosa tarde de Baltazar” (Balthazar’s Marvelous Afternoon), and “Rosas artificiales” (Artificial Roses). According to Dasso Saldívar, the title story would be written by the middle of the following year in Bogotá.10 But García Márquez couldn’t afford to be unemployed for long.
Again with the support of his friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, he was named jefe de redacción at the frivolous magazine Venezuela Gráfica. But at least he had a paycheck. He continued writing fiction. He devoted his energy to a novella about a military veteran whose pension was forgotten by the government. The only item of value the Colonel and his wife own is a rooster left behind by their son, whose fate isn’t clear but whose memory the couple keeps alive through conversations and by preparing the rooster for an upcoming cockfight. The couple’s destitution was a reflection of García Márquez’s own financial situation. Entitled El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (No One Writes to the Colonel), the novella was first published in Mito.
Mercedes gave birth to the couple’s first son, Rodrigo, on August 24, 1959. He was baptized by Father Camilo Torres, and Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza was the child’s godfather. The couple enjoyed their newborn, who made them feel grounded. Around that time, García Márquez wrote a short story that, in its mythical ambition, opened the door to the Buendía saga: “Big Mama’s Funeral,” about a larger-than-life female political icon whose death generates much pomp and circumstance. Approximately 5,000 words (in the English translation by Gregory Rabassa), it has the feel of a lengthier narrative. Some critics have suggested that in its scope as well as in the way it conveys the violence at the heart of Colombia’s life, the story is proof of the huge step, in terms of quality and maturity, García Márquez took at the end of the fifties. I beg to differ. Although “Big Mama’s Funeral” is impressive in the daring manner in which it presents a broad picture of the intersection between the national and the popular realms, I’ve always felt that it is somewhat stale, even unfocused.
In 1958, a group of guerrilla fighters led by Fidel Castro staged an insurrection in Cuba. They landed secretly in the middle of the night and for the next few months, from the Sierra Maestra, they orchestrated a military campaign that concluded with the taking of Havana at the end of the year. The government of President Fulgencio Batista, which was backed by the United States, was overthrown. A few months later Fidel Castro arrived in the Cuban capital, an event that had enormous repercussions throughout Latin America. In a continent defined by extreme poverty and military dictatorships, hope suddenly materialized in the form of a bearded messianic figure who had previously tried to introduce socialism without success. In his exile in Mexico, Castro had met other revolutionary fighters, including the Argentine doctor Ernesto “Che” Guevara, who eventually joined the struggle for the liberation of Cuba.
According to Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, he and García Márquez first heard about Fidel Castro in Paris, from Afro-Cuban poet and activist Nicolás Guillén, author of Sóngoro Cosongo and West Indies, Ltd: “There is a lawyer, un muchacho medio loco . . .” a half-crazy young man.
“Some mornings, from our respective rooms, we would hear the poet’s sonorous voice screaming from the street: ‘García Márquez! Plinio!’ We would stick our heads outside the window (our hotels faced each other) and bellow, in the fog that covered the Rue Cujas, we would see a dark winter jacket and rowdy white hair. They were the poet’s. ‘The young men engaged in a shootout with Batista. In the very same Presidential Palace!’”11
News of Castro’s triumph spread quickly throughout the world. Among Latin American intellectuals it was the equivalent of a seismic quake. Like other supporters, García Márquez dreamed of witnessing the transformation firsthand. His wish came true when he and Mendoza were invited to Cuba to witness “Operación Verdad,” the public trial of Sosa Blanco, who had been in Batista’s entourage and was accused of war crimes. The two Colombian journalists attended the proceedings in a sports arena. The Castro regime quickly established a new news agency, the brainchild of Argentine journalist Jorge Ricardo Masetti. The hope was that it would break the monopoly on the news held by international agencies. It was called Prensa Latina.
Through his connections in the publishing world, Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza opened the Bogotá office of Prensa Latina. When a large sum of money arrived in his bank account for the new office, he asked García Márquez to join him there.
One of the primary initiatives of Prensa Latina was to set up branches in different parts of the world. García Márquez was offered the opportunity to open and run the Montreal office. He accepted. He traveled to New York City en route to Canada with Mercedes and Rodrigo, but upon arriving in New York (the office was located in Rockefeller Center), it became clear that the office was understaffed, so he stayed. The job description required some travel, and on one occasion he went on assignment to Washington, D.C., to report from the White House.12
He and his family lived in a hotel near Fifth Avenue. Those months were defined by his work on the novel In Evil Hour and by the Bay of Pigs invasion, ordered by President John F. Kennedy. Initially, García Márquez, who was close to the Cuban regime, was appalled. But the outcome of the invasion—the poor planning by U.S. troops and the Cuban defense of their own sovereignty—brought him tremendous satisfaction.
However, the internal situation in the New York office wasn’t a hopeful one, and García Márquez resigned when his boss, Jorge Masetti, was pushed out by the old Stalinist guard. It was a difficult decision because it suggested a parting of ways with the Cuban regime but not a renunciation of its socialist ideals. Years later, he stressed that the decision to leave the agency was the right one: “If [Mendoza and I] had stayed on, with our views, we’d have ended up being slung out with one of those labels on our forehead—counter-revolutionary, imperialist lackey and so on—that the dogmatists of that day used to stick on you.” He believed the best thing to do was to move to the sidelines and watch the evolution of the Cuban ideological debate from afar, which is what he did over the years.13
This break is important in light of García Márquez’s future closeness not only with the Cuban Revolution as ideology and as a system of government but with Fidel Castro as a long-term friend. His view at the time
was that Cuba was not a satellite of the Soviet Union. This is an important point. Castro didn’t officially define his political relationship with the Kremlin in Moscow until a couple of years after he assumed power in Havana. During his first months in office his loyalties oscillated, even though it was clear that his position toward Washington was nothing if not antagonistic, a clear response to the hostilities initiated by the White House against the Caribbean island. On February 7, 1962, the United States imposed a trade embargo on Cuba. García Márquez perceived the Cuban Revolution of that period to be in a “constant state of emergency” because the United States would not tolerate “an alternative system of government ninety miles off the Florida coast.”14
With the New York doors closing behind him, García Márquez pondered an invitation from Álvaro Mutis to join him in Mexico City. García Márquez’s English was still poor, and he had few contacts in New York. Staying would be difficult. What made the invitation attractive was the growing Mexican movie industry. Mutis knew how passionate his friend was about el séptimo arte: filmmaking. But García Márquez didn’t leave directly for Mexico City. With two hundred dollars in his pocket, he and his family took a Greyhound bus to the Deep South. He wanted to personally experience the landscape that defined the work of one of his literary idols: William Faulkner.
The landscape of Macondo was taking shape in his imagination. He had begun surveying it in different stories. Carlos Fuentes once explained the impact of Faulkner on Latin American literature: “So I feel that Faulkner had and has a great lesson for us, and it is not only a formal lesson, of the modern use of the baroque, it is a profound historical lesson on how to face defeat, to admit the tragic possibility in history, it is a profoundly literary lesson, which is the discovery of the novel through the novel, the discovery of the story by telling the story, the discovery of the characters by letting the characters act, all these magnificent lessons which I think had a profound influence on the literature of Latin America.”15 García Márquez agreed, and he wanted to see the inspiration for Yoknapatawpha County.
The two-week trip took place in May 1961. They passed through Montgomery, Alabama, where they spent hours looking for a hotel for the night. The Civil Rights Movement was still in the future, and racism was rampant. Blacks were not its only targets; Mexicans were also persecuted. The family came across signs on windows that read: “No dogs or Mexicans allowed.” No one offered to help them, thinking they were Mexicans. From Montgomery, they went to New Orleans and from there to Laredo, Texas. On June 2 they arrived in Mexico City. Ironically, his experience in the Deep South didn’t affect the genuine affinity he felt for its people. But the Bay of Pigs invasion was something else entirely. Regarding this, García Márquez would say years later: “The people in the United States are one of the people I most admire in the world. The only thing I don’t understand is why people that manage to do so many things so well cannot do better in choosing their presidents.”16
Chapter 5
Lo real maravilloso
In the sixties, the Argentine journalist Rita Guibert illustrated a frustration with the way Latin Americans were perceived as second-rate citizens. “For example, when at a New York party [if] someone notices my accent I’m usually asked, ‘Are you French?’ ‘No, I’m from Argentina,’ I say, watching the charm of foreign glamour fade from their eyes as my social stock takes a plunge. Americans frequently ask me if Argentines speak Portuguese, or—as I was asked by the principal of one of the largest high schools in Westchester—‘How big is Rio de Janeiro, the capital of your country?’”1 From the perspective of Western civilization, the region existed in deep shadow. Octavio Paz said at the time that “the Latin American is a being who has lived in the suburbs of the West, in the outskirts of history.” García Márquez raises a similar complaint in a scene in No One Writes to the Colonel: “To the Europeans, South America is a man with a mustache, a guitar, and a gun . . . They don’t understand the problem.”2
To a large extent, this frustration was the engine behind El Boom— a Hispanicization of the English term describing “a period of rapid economic expansion.” The debate on the origins and proper definition of El Boom started in the early sixties. Only once before in the history of Latin American literature had something similar taken place, although the scope of that earlier phenomenon was dramatically narrower. The poet Rubén Darío, born in Metepa, Nicaragua, was barely twenty-two years of age in 1885, when he published his book Blue . . ., a collection of poems and prose, and launched the Modernista movement. The name is sometimes confused with its English-language equivalent, an aesthetic shared by Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce. The Spanish-language Modernistas preceded them by about three decades. Led by Darío, their goal was not only to renew Spanish-language poetry but to do it in the Americas, a continent where literature was still the domain of a small elite influenced by European (i.e., Iberian) mores.
Their poetry was a response to French Parnassianism, a style in the nineteenth century, at a time when positivist philosophy, which was allergic to metaphysics, stressing instead the importance of factual information acquired through the senses, was in vogue. They were interested in gothic, grotesque imagery. Some were travelers and diplomats; others remained in their respective locales. The Modernistas—José Martí, Enrique González Martínez, José Asunción Silva, Delmira Agustini, and Leopoldo Lugones, among them—were read as “Latin Americans” for the first time, if only in the Iberian Peninsula, where a few intellectuals responded with appreciation and others with disdain. For many, though, the movement never quite coalesced; it remained a foggy enterprise. What was the revolution about? What were its principal concerns? How did it achieve its objectives? In 1918, when the movement was way past its prime, Miguel de Unamuno complained: “I don’t exactly know what this business of Modernistas and Modernismo is. Such diverse and opposing things are given these names that there is no way to reduce them to a common category.”3
In spite of the Modernistas, the idea of the Americas as a unified cultural front remained a distant dream. It wasn’t until the sixties that things began to change. It’s essential to situate the shaping of One Hundred Years of Solitude and its author in the literary landscape of the time. After World War II, the novel as a literary genre was in a depressed state. The military campaigns that swept Europe, killing millions of people, and the machineries of death such as the one organized by Nazi Germany in labor, concentration, and annihilation camps had pushed the population of the continent to realize that the post-industrial society, armed with sophisticated technological devices, had reached a dead end. The proletarian regime in the Soviet Union and the bloc of countries in Central and Eastern Europe that had joined the Russians, mostly by coercion, in embracing a Marxist-Leninist philosophy, made fiction an instrument of politics. The style of so-called Social Realism forced writers to transform the novel into a means to educate people about the class struggle and the evils of a bourgeois society.
While Stalinism reigned unabated in the Soviet Union, the West read the works of Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and others. Kafka’s novels The Metamorphosis, The Trial, and The Castle were cautionary tales about the evils of a pervasive government bureaucracy and the suffering of a middle class trapped by authoritarianism. On the other side of the spectrum, Proust’s multivolume À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), brilliant in its use of introspection, was an example of a self-serving, narcissistic genre. Proust didn’t seem to care about plot. As the latest practitioner of an art that focused on the human experience, he appeared to have forgotten a crucial player in the literary equation: the reader. His novel was described as indulgent, hyperpsychological, and individualistic to a fault.
Joyce’s novel Ulysses was not about reality but about language. A retelling of the Odyssey through a day in the life of Dublin as seen through the eyes of a young Irishman, Stephen Dedalus; a Jewish antihero, Leopold Bloom; and Bloom’s unsatisfied wife, Moll
y, Joyce’s narrative was an extraordinary example of the novel pushed to its extremes. In Finnegans Wake, Joyce took the novel further. Finnegans Wake was about nothing; it was about itself. Successors like Samuel Beckett, who was Joyce’s student, assistant, and friend, followed the same path.
By the time García Márquez began publishing books such as No One Writes to the Colonel, both Europe and the novel, which is a distinctly European literary genre, appeared to have run their course. As if forced to revitalize the novel, a fresh chorus of voices began to be heard from what was considered the periphery of Western civilization: Africa, Asia, the South Pacific, and Latin America. For centuries, these parts of the globe had been deemed secondary, reactors to rather than producers of culture. The renewal of the novel as a genre took place precisely in these regions because they were unencumbered by the guilt that resulted from the military destruction in the Old World. There was a sense of freedom and inventiveness that was conducive to a literary rebirth.
Participants of that renewal were Nadine Gordimer in South Africa, Chinua Achebe in Nigeria, Kenzaburō O – e in Japan, Naguib Mahfouz in Egypt, Amos Oz in Israel, Jorge Luis Borges in Argentina, Juan Rulfo in Mexico, and the writers of El Boom, with García Márquez as the prime example. To some literary historians, this was “the return of the savage,” a movement by subordinate artists in an effort to take control of their own destinies. Others describe this narrative effulgence as “the rise of the postcolonial mentality.” What characterized the collective effort was the conviction that the concept of “Western civilization” was too narrow, too confining. The world was more open and elastic, its talent was no longer concentrated in a single geographic spot. It was democratic, egalitarian, and spread out across nations.