Gabriel García Márquez

by Ilan Stavans

  The growth of the film industry led to the opening of new, state-of-the-art theaters in middle- and upper-class neighborhoods in El De Efe and in major provincial cities, such as Monterrey, Guadalajara, and Puebla. But ticket prices were affordable for the lower class, beneficiaries of el milagro mexicano. There was a voracious audience who closely followed the industry and bought tickets on a weekly basis.

  This movie fever was far from being an exclusively local affair. Mexican movies were distributed all over the Spanish-speaking world—from Montevideo, Uruguay, to San José, Costa Rica—and pleased these audiences more than Hollywood could. But Hollywood wasn’t far away. There were constant collaborations: Dolores del Río, the star of María Candelaria, traveled to Los Angeles to do some projects, and Emilio “El Indio” Fernández directed La perla, an adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novella.

  The idea of making a career in the movies was tempting to García Márquez. He was ready to settle down and have more children. Until then he hadn’t received a single royalty check for his books. The film industry allowed him to nurture dreams of stability.

  Perhaps García Márquez’s love of film is rooted in his childhood passion for comics and drawing. In Colombia he had been involved, however peripherally, with the making of El grupo de Barranquilla’s short, La langosta azul. During his European sojourn, he stayed briefly in Italy and enrolled in some film classes at Cinecità.

  García Márquez went to the movies “almost every day.” His newspaper columns were regularly devoted to film reviews. His favorite filmmakers were Orson Welles (he especially admired The Immortal Story) and Akira Kurosawa (whom he met in 1990 in Tokyo). He followed French New Wave and Italian Neorealism and was an enthusiast of François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim and Roberto Rossellini’s Il generale della Rovere. If one wished to collect everything García Márquez ever wrote about el séptimo arte, as filmmaking is known in Spanish, it would easily fill a couple of three-hundred-page volumes.*

  García Márquez’s life-long passion for film is in sharp contrast to his ambivalence to sports. Colombia, Venezuela, and Cuba are known as fertile baseball cradles, yet none of his columns—or his novels—contain a single reference to the sport, although Living to Tell the Tale does mention, in passing, some games of soccer he played when he was a child.3 Soccer is the most popular sport in Europe, as well as Mexico and other parts of Latin America. Again, there is absolute silence about it in his work. The sole exception is a serial in El Espectador of Bogotá entitled “The Triple Champion Reveals His Secrets,” about Ramón Hoyos, a Colombian bicycle champion. The story was based on one-on-one interviews with the athlete, but was written by García Márquez in the first person as though the installments were part of Hoyos’s autobiography.

  Álvaro Mutis had arrived in Mexico City in 1956. He had worked in public relations for Esso, Standard Oil, Panamerican, and Columbia Pictures, but Esso accused him of misappropriating the company’s money. Apparently, Mutis had at his disposal a fund for charitable endeavors, but he spent the money rather capriciously on other projects, most of which were cultural endeavors. Esso judged the behavior to be unacceptable and sued Mutis. Before any action could be taken, he flew to El De Efe on an emergency trip arranged by one of his brothers and some acquaintances. He settled there, thriving in the city’s intellectual atmosphere.

  At the age of thirty-three, Mutis had moved from Bogotá. He had brought with him a couple of letters of recommendation, one of which was addressed to Luis Buñuel, the Spanish filmmaker who lived in exile in Mexico. Like most young intellectuals in Latin America, Mutis had been hypnotized by Buñuel’s surrealist style. Un chien andalou, released in 1929, was an epoch-making experiment in which dreamlike images allowed audiences to see el séptimo arte as a conduit to the unconscious. Buñuel’s Los olvidados (The Young and the Damned), which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1950, dissected the Mexico City slums with astonishing power. Intellectuals such as Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes were effusive about the daring way in which Buñuel used the camera to create a documentary-like fictional account of neglected street children, the failure of schools and government institutions to help them, and the resulting violence from this social problem. Mutis applauded the connection between cinema and politics that Buñuel achieved in his movie.

  Eventually, his problem with Esso caught up with him and in 1959, Mutis was arrested for having misappropriated company funds while he was an employee in Colombia. The process was rather quick. In spite of the support of his friends Juan Rulfo, Octavio Paz, poet and editor Ali Chumacero, scholar José Luis Martínez, Colombian painter Fernando Botero, and García Márquez, Mutis’s legal fortunes worsened. Faced with extradition, he was instead sent to the Mexican prison of Lecumberri, known as “El Penal,” el palacio negro, the black palace. He was in prison for fifteen months, a time he wrote about in an extraordinary document entitled Diary of the Lecumberri.4

  By the time the García Márquezes arrived in El De Efe, Mutis had been out of prison for months. He had kept his friend aware of his dramatic incarceration and the efforts to free him. Once released, he continued to keep him abreast of the latest on various intellectuals and artists. The Lecumberri episode had not diminished Mutis’s gratitude toward his host country. The love for Mexico he expressed to García Márquez no doubt served to lure the writer and his family.

  At this point, Mutis was working for Producciones Barbachano Ponce, a film company at the heart of the Mexican movie boom. He first housed the García Márquezes in one of the Apartamentos Bonampak on Calle Mérida, then at Renán #21, in the Anzures neighborhood. Eventually, the family moved to the well-to-do neighborhood of San Ángel Inn, in the southern part of the city, not too far from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, the oldest and largest institution of higher learning in Latin America. Their first child, Rodrigo, was still a baby. They had a mattress, a crib, a table and two chairs. Still, Mutis did everything possible to make them feel comfortable.

  For García Márquez, Mutis served as a key to the Mexican intelligentsia. He was acquainted with important figures of the time, including the crème de la crème of the Mexican cultural scene: novelist Carlos Fuentes; poet, essayist, and diplomat Octavio Paz; fiction writer Juan Rulfo; editor and anthropologist Fernando Benítez; short-story writer and public intellectual Juan José Arreola, and journalist and novelist Elena Poniatowska, as well as expatriate filmmaker Jomí García Ascot and his wife, María Luisa Elio.

  García Márquez’s friendship with Carlos Fuentes dates to this period. One year García Márquez’s junior, Fuentes was born in Panama City in 1928. His father was a Mexican diplomat, and the family lived in Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro, Washington D.C., Santiago, and Buenos Aires. This diasporic existence contributed not only to Fuentes’s universalist view of Hispanic civilization, which he perceived as a sponge that absorbed elements from every other important culture, but to his pitch-perfect command of both English and Spanish. In 1959, Fuentes published his magnum opus, the Balzakian saga La region más transparente (Where the Air Is Clear) and Las buenas conciencias (The Good Conscience). Aura, a Henry James-inspired novella about the young biographer of a caudillo, a military figure active during the Mexican Revolution of 1910, is arguably his most popular, perhaps his most successful, work. Published by the Spanish refugee-sponsored Ediciones Era in 1962, the narrative uses the second-person singular (“You wake up . . .”) as an experimental device. Fuentes’s fascination with the revolution is at the heart of his masterpiece, The Death of Artemio Cruz, also released in 1962. These works are set in Mexico City, where Fuentes returned as an adolescent and lived until 1965. Although he spent many years abroad, he always considered the metropolis his center of gravity.

  Mutis gave Carlos Fuentes some of García Márquez’s work which had been published in Bogotá’s periodical Mito. Fuentes was then co-editor, along with Emanuel Carballo, of the prestigious Revista Mexicana de Literatura. He reprinted some of the stories in his m
agazine, including “Monólogo de Isabel viendo llover en Macondo” (Monologue of Isabel Watching It Rain in Macondo). When the second edition of No One Writes to the Colonel was published, Fuentes wrote a review in La Cultura en México, the supplement of the magazine Siempre!

  Referred to by the Mexican press as el duo dinámico, Fuentes and García Márquez remained friends into their eighties, long after other members of El Boom had died and the few remaining ones had become distant, largely as a result of ideological differences. In 2007, the Royal Spanish Academy published a commemorative edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude to celebrate García Márquez’s eightieth birthday and the book’s fortieth anniversary, for which Carlos Fuentes wrote an affectionate piece praising their friendship and ratifying the novel’s standing among the classics. And he was next to García Márquez when, in April of that year, the volume was presented to the public during the IV Congreso Internacional de la Lengua Española, in Cartagena. Likewise, in 2009, when the Royal Spanish Academy published a commemorative edition of Where the Air Is Clear to coincide with its fiftieth anniversary, García Márquez joined Fuentes in Mexico City to present it to the public.

  The empathy they shared went beyond an emotional bond. The left-wing ideological persuasion that defined Fuentes and García Márquez when they were young remained strong as they matured while other Latin American writers shifted in different political directions. They remained supportive of Fidel Castro’s regime, sympathized with the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, and sharply criticized neoliberalism as a veiled marketing strategy in the eighties. It is important to remember that upon meeting Fuentes in El De Efe, García Márquez was the less accomplished of the two. Fuentes was a polyglot (his English and French were impeccable) and an extraordinarily dynamic intellectual. Known for his looks, he was also intimately connected to the film world. His first wife was actress Rita Macedo, whom he married in 1957. He claimed to have had an affair with actress Jean Seberg, iconic for, among other reasons, her role in Jean-Luc Goddard’s 1959 film À bout de souffle, known to American audiences as Breathless. The relationship appears to have been imagined by Fuentes. In part to refute accusations that it never took place, he wrote the 1994 novella, Diana, The Goddess Who Hunts Alone, in which the lead female character is modeled after Seberg.

  García Márquez’s sojourn in Mexico was a period of fresh encounters. In addition to Fuentes—with whom he spent part of his Sundays having tea—he and Mercedes became close with Jomí García Ascot and María Luisa Elío, to whom the Spanish edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude is dedicated. (The French edition has a different dedication: “Pour Carmen et Álvaro Mutis.”) García Márquez also befriended the Catalan filmmaker García Ascot, who was born in Tunis, Morocco, in 1927. The son of a diplomat who spent his childhood in Portugal, France, Belgium, and Morocco, García Ascot arrived in Mexico City in 1939 as a refugee from the Spanish Civil War. He studied at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and was a founder of the institution’s film club. He directed the movies Un día de trabajo (A Day of Work, 1960) and El viaje (The Journey, 1976), and a short documentary on surrealist painter Remedios Varo.

  María Luisa Elío and her husband were the García Márquezes’ neighbors in the San Ángel Inn section of Mexico City. The Colombians lived in Loma #19 and the Spaniards in Cárpatos #14. The connection was fruitful. Not only would the couples go to the movies together but Elío later recalled how García Márquez would regale them with extraordinary stories he would tell, even an entire plot, which he improvised in front of them. One Hundred Years of Solitude was taking shape.5 In the essay “La odisea literaria de un manuscrito” (The Literary Odyssey of a Manuscript), published in the Spanish newspaper El País in 2001, García Márquez wrote: “María Luisa Elío, with her clairvoyant drive, and Jomí García Ascot, her husband, paralyzed with poetic stupor, listened to my improvised stories as if they were ciphered signals from the Divine Providence. Thus, I didn’t doubt for a second, from their early visits onward, that I would dedicate the book to them.”6

  On April 16, 1962, García Márquez’s second son, Gonzalo, was born.7 The family moved to a larger apartment at Calle de Ixtaccíhuatl #88, in Colonia Florida. At the time, García Márquez’s principal source of income was screenplays. Mutis had introduced him to Miguel Barbachano Ponce, and, through him, García Márquez met other screenwriters, directors, and actors. His reputation as an exemplary fabulist began to earn him commissions. Writing for the screen was exciting but frustrating. He would spend weeks drafting a script only to find out, after a long process, that it would be shelved, sometimes forever. García Márquez worked on various scripts simultaneously, if only to make ends meet for his growing family.

  A few of them did see the light of day, albeit not immediately. He made the adaptation, along with Barbachano Ponce, for Lola de mi vida (Lola of My Life, 1965), but the screenplay was credited to Juan de la Cabada and Carlos A. Figueroa. En este pueblo no hay ladrones (No Thieves in This Town, 1965) was based on one of his stories and adapted by Emilio García Riera, who would become one of Mexico’s most distinguished film critics, together with Alberto Isaac. Isaac’s brother, Jorge, directed the film. There were others, too, such as the two-part Juegos peligrosos (Dangerous Games, 1966), based on another of his stories—directed by Arturo Ripstein, Buñuel’s one-time assistant (who would adapt other García Márquez material for the screen, including the 1999 coproduction among Mexico, Spain, and France, No One Writes to the Colonel), and Luis Alcoriza—and Patsy mi amor (Patsy My Love, 1969), directed by Manuel Michel.

  Although it was a cornerstone of his career, García Márquez’s work for film never produced first-rate movies, neither did the ones for which he wrote an original screenplay, nor those for which he adapted his own or others’ fiction. It wasn’t for lack of trying. His filmography (always in connection with the screenplay; he never acted or directed) is long. The reason for this handicap may be intrinsic: García Márquez is a visual writer who fills the page with vivid, baroque images that resist adaptation. No screenwriter, no film director, no matter how dexterous, has been able to match the Colombian’s fertile imagination. It may be argued that the best screen adaptations of his work are those in which the director uses a subtle, naturalistic style, and gives up any attempt at competing with literature. In an interview with Rita Guibert, García Márquez said that the starting point of his novels is “a completely visual image. I suppose that some writers begin with a phrase, an idea, or a concept. I always begin with an image.”8 In another interview years later, he was asked if cinema had treated him badly. García Márquez responded: “No, cinema hasn’t treated me badly as far as what has been screened, but for other reasons. Things have gone badly because although I’ve worked more for cinema than for literature, I don’t manage to do all I would like to. I would like cinema as a form of artistic expression to have the same value in Latin America that literature has at the moment.”9

  In 1965, Carlos Fuentes and García Márquez embarked on what is arguably the most inspiring and fruitful cinematic endeavor of the period. Together, they developed the plot for a story for which García Márquez wrote his first original screenplay, Tiempo de morir (A Time to Die). Shot in Pátzcuaro, in the state of Michoacán, from June 7 to July 10, 1965, it was the first feature film directed by Arturo Ripstein. García Márquez was present on location, and assisted with the production. The cast included Marga López, Jorge Martínez de Hoyos, Enrique Rocha, Alfredo Leal, and Blanca Sánchez. Inspired by the Western, it is the story of a man who returns to town after eighteen years in prison for murder. He intends to get on with his life, but the victim’s son won’t allow it.

  It was through García Márquez’s friendship with Fuentes and his involvement in the film industry that one of the most significant moments in his Mexican period took place: his discovery of Juan Rulfo’s oeuvre. By the time García Márquez arrived in El De Efe, Rulfo was already a popular writer and a cult figure. Later, García Márquez would s
ay that during his first six months in the city, everyone frantically spoke to him about Rulfo. It isn’t difficult to guess why he reacted positively to the buzz.

  Juan Rulfo was born in 1917 (although the exact date is under dispute, because he might have given the wrong year in order to avoid the military draft), in the small town of Sayula, Jalisco, Mexico. His father was killed when he was little, and his mother died when he was around ten. Rulfo came from a family of landowners ruined by the Mexican Revolution and the Cristero war. He was strongly attached to the countryside, especially to the indigenous population. He moved to Mexico City, where he audited classes at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México but never enrolled as a full-time student. Largely self-taught, he read voraciously (though he was never bookish) and began to put pen to paper. In the end, he published only two, equally slim, books: the collection of stories El llano en llamas (The Burning Plain, 1953) and the novel Pedro Páramo (1955). They were enough to turn him into one of the most influential figures in Latin American literature.

  Rulfo’s language is sparse, Hemingwayesque. Although brief, his stories are powerful explorations of the human response to despair. They focus on the ordeal of campesinos deprived of a means to survive. “Do You Hear the Dogs Bark?” for instance, is structured as a monologue by a father carrying on his back his wounded son as he tries to find a doctor for the boy. In “Luvina,” a visitor plans to go to a ghost town inhabited only by women, children, and the elderly. All the men had left long ago. Many of García Márquez’s famous stories were being crafted in those years, between the time just prior to his arrival in El De Efe and the late sixties. Among them, “There Are No Thieves in This Town,” “Tuesday Siesta,” and “One of These Days” have a genuine Rulfo feel: a similar concern for the indigent, an emphasis on the little disturbances that comprise life, and an attraction to the countryside.