Gabriel García Márquez

by Gerald Martin

  Now that his long journey was over, García Márquez could return briefly to Barranquilla and survey this entire conquered space—conquered, at last, by him—from its very centre, located at the apex of the entire backward-looking territory but not itself of that territory. Not only was Barranquilla a gateway, it was also a twentieth-century, modern town, with neither colonial pretensions nor guilts, where one could escape from the weight of the past and its ghostly generations and make oneself anew. By now it had almost done its job.

  The whole period of drift was about to end at a time when political change was again looming, menacingly, in the background. García Márquez was on a bus back to Barranquilla on 13 June 1953 when he learned that General Rojas Pinilla, Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, had taken over the government in a coup against the regime of Laureano Gómez. Gómez, sufficiently recovered from the illness that had forced him to hand over to his Vice-President even before the coup, was trying to return to power but the military had decided that his return was not in the national interest and that they would serve out the rest of his term, with Rojas Pinilla at their head. There was overwhelming national support for this coup; even the editors of some national newspapers serenaded the new leader. García Márquez remembers having a violent political argument with Ramiro de la Espriella in Villegas’s bookshop—Villegas would shortly be thrown in prison for alleged fraud—the day after Rojas Pinilla moved against Gómez. García Márquez had even allowed himself to provoke his friend by saying, “I do, I feel identified with the government of my General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla.”88 His position was essentially that anything was better than Gómez’s falangist regime whereas de la Espriella wanted outright revolution, feared that a military dictatorship might prove worse than a reactionary dictatorship and argued that the military could not be trusted. Both men had a point; this was a significant disagreement and a prophetic one. García Márquez would several times in the future argue that a progressive dictatorship was better than a fascistic government doing mischief under the cover of a false democracy.

  Despite his reluctance to return to El Heraldo, García Márquez only managed to keep out of that frying pan by tumbling into a different fire. Alvaro Cepeda Samudio, who had been working in car sales, had long nurtured the desire to compete with El Heraldo and build a better newspaper which would dominate the Costa. Around October he was given a chance to run El Nacional, hoping to turn it into the kind of modern paper he had learned about in the USA. He hired his newly unemployed friend as his assistant. García Márquez later remembered it as one of his worst times. The two young men spent entire days and nights at the newspaper office, yet very few editions actually came out, and hardly any of them on time. Unfortunately there are no collections extant so it is impossible to judge their efforts. All we really know is that Cepeda directed the morning edition, which he sent to the interior, and García Márquez directed the evening edition, which sold in Barranquilla. They concluded that at least part of the problem was the old-timers on the payroll trying to sabotage an innovatory newspaper.89 Unfortunately the truth appears to be that Cepeda proved incapable at that time of the discipline and subtlety required to manage such an operation. García Márquez recalls discreetly that “Alvaro left with a slam of the door.”90

  García Márquez himself still had a contract and carried on for a time, trying desperately to survive by using old material, but he was also provoked into writing a new story, “One Day After Saturday,” another of the few early tales of his which he would later admit to actually liking. It is most interesting for the fact that, although still reminiscent of “The House,” it was set in a place called “Macondo.” Not only that: anyone who had been there could have worked out that “Macondo” was clearly based on Aracataca, with, somehow, a transparency of focus despite the air of mystery, and open skies instead of the grim darkness that seems to characterize both “The House” and “the town” (el pueblo), based on Sucre. Why, there was even a railway station! At the same time the story—really a short, highly condensed novella—was no longer confined within a house, like most of the earlier stories and published fragments, and was overtly political, focusing on the mayor and the local priest. Moreover Colonel Aureliano Buendía and José Arcadio Buendía were named, as was their relative Rebeca, “the embittered widow.” There was also a poor boy from outside the town, treated with a quite new sympathy that was clearly tinged with social and political critique. At the same time the story displayed a whole range of what would later be García Márquez’s favourite themes, beginning with the topic of plagues (in this case a plague of dead birds) and the concept of human solitude.91

  Alvaro Mutis, who was now Head of Public Relations with Esso, returned to Barranquilla close to the end of the year and, seeing his friend’s predicament, tried again to persuade him to move to Bogotá. He told him that he was “rusting away in the provinces.”92 Mutis had good reason to believe that García Márquez could get a job with El Espectador. Nothing in the costeño wanted to go and he flatly refused. Mutis said, “Well, I’ll send you an open ticket and you can come when you’re ready.”93 Finally García Márquez had second thoughts but realized that he couldn’t go to Bogotá even if he wanted to, because he had no clothes. He scraped his last pesos together and bought a business suit, a couple of shirts and a tie. Then he took the air ticket out of his drawer and looked at it. Then he put it in the pocket of his new suit. He had tried his very hardest but there was no way a poor boy without a degree could earn a decent living on the Costa. Maybe one day he would be able to marry Mercedes, to whom he had now committed himself, at least in his own mind. His friends said, “Fine, but don’t come back a cachaco.” Then they took him down to celebrate his departure in one of their favourite down-market bars, The Third Man. And that was that.

  8

  Back to Bogotá:

  The Ace Reporter

  1954–1955

  GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ ARRIVED back in Bogotá in early January 1954. He came in by plane, despite an already pathological fear of flying that would only deepen over the years. Alvaro Mutis, whose life had long been full of planes, and automobiles and even ships, greeted him at the airport. The new arrival had a suitcase and two hand-carried packages, which he gave to his friend to stow in the boot of the car: the manuscripts of “The House” and Leaf Storm, both still unpublished. Mutis drove him straight to his office in the centre of the city; back into the cold and the rain, back into a world of tensions and alienations which he thought he had left behind for ever when he flew out of the city almost six years before.1

  At this time the Esso headquarters in Bogotá was in the same building on Avenida Jiménez de Quesada as the new premises of El Espectador, which had moved from its previous site just a few blocks away. Mutis’s office in public relations was four storeys above that of the editor of the newspaper, Guillermo Cano. Mutis was vague and ambiguous about how they should proceed during the early days of García Márquez’s stay—even the prospect of a job with El Espectador was left in limbo—and García Márquez’s already gloomy and anxious mood began to grow. He was never confident in new situations or with men and women he didn’t know; people were rarely impressed by him on first appearance and he only gained confidence through intimacy and familiarity or by showing what he could do. However, Mutis, in whose personality the entrepreneur and the aesthete seemed to be combined in ways that few had seen or even imagined, was not a man to take no for an answer. He was a master salesman even when he was not sure of the quality of his product; when he had a commodity as valuable as this almost unknown writer he was usually irresistible. And Alvaro Mutis cared deeply about literature and was an unusually generous man.

  Physically the two could hardly have been more different—Mutis tall, elegant, vulpine; García Márquez short, skinny, scruffy. García Márquez had been writing novels and stories since he was eighteen; in those days Mutis was exclusively a poet and would only start writing novels in his mid-sixties, after his retirement from
a succession of jobs in the employ of U.S.-based international companies. Even now, when both are internationally famous novelists, the two Colombians are separated by the whole history of Latin American literature. And they have always stood at opposite poles of the political spectrum: Mutis, almost theatrically reactionary, a monarchist in a country which has been a republic for almost two hundred years, has always had, in his own words, “a complete lack of interest in all political phenomena later than the fall of Byzantium into the hands of the infidels,” that is, later than 1453;2 while García Márquez’s post-1917 predilections would later become well known—though never a communist, he would be closer to that world-view in its broadest sense than to any other ideology in a long life of practical commitments. Theirs would be a long, close relationship but never a confessional one.

  For the first couple of weeks García Márquez sat around not in El Espectador but in Mutis’s office, smoking and shivering, as he always did in Bogotá, talking to Mutis’s recently appointed “assistant”—none other than his old friend Gonzalo Mallarino, who had first introduced them that stormy night in Cartagena—or simply twiddling his thumbs. Sometimes, especially in Latin America and other parts of the so-called “Third World,” where most people are completely powerless, you just have to wait for situations to evolve. (This is why so many of García Márquez’s novels and stories are about waiting and hoping—it is the same verb in Spanish: esperar—for things that may never come and usually don’t.) Then, near the end of January, El Espectador suddenly offered him a staff position and the incredible sum of 900 pesos a month. To earn that in Barranquilla he would have had to write three hundred “Giraffes”—ten a day! It would be the first time he had ever had any spare money and it meant he could help out the family in Cartagena, sending enough for both rent and utilities.

  He had been living temporarily in Mutis’s mother’s house out in Usaquén. Now he moved into a “boarding house with no name” near the Parque Nacional, the home of a French woman who had once put up Eva Perón in her dancing days. He had his own suite of rooms, an undreamed-of luxury, though he would spend little time there. Occasionally in the months to come he would find the time and energy to smuggle some transient female into his apartment.3 Mainly, however, he would spend the next year and a half between the newspaper, the boarding house, Mutis’s office and Bogotá’s gothic cinemas carrying out his duties as staff writer, cinema critic and, eventually, star reporter.

  Surprisingly, perhaps, newspaper warfare in Bogotá was mainly about competition between the two great Liberal newspapers. El Espectador had been founded in 1887 by the Cano family of Medellín (it moved to Bogotá in 1915), and was thus older than its bitter rival, El Tiempo, founded in 1911 and bought by Eduardo Santos in 1913. The Santos family still owned and ran El Tiempo right up to 2007, when the Spanish publishing house Planeta took a majority stake. The director of El Espectador when García Márquez arrived that January was Guillermo Cano, the myopic, unassuming grandson of the founder; he had only recently taken over this position because, incredibly, he was still in his early twenties. He and García Márquez would be in touch for more than thirty years.

  García Márquez already had two solid contacts among the leading writers: Eduardo Zalamea Borda, who had discovered him six years before, and his cousin Gonzalo González, “Gog,” who had begun to work on the paper while a law student in 1946. It was Zalamea Borda who baptized him with the name by which the whole planet would later know him, “Gabo.” A well-known photo from those days shows a new and wholly unfamiliar García Márquez, slim and elegant, with refined features, eyes at once questioning yet already knowing, with the merest whisper of a smile beneath his Latin moustache. Only the hands betray the permanent state of tension in which this man lives.

  The news editor at El Espectador was José “Mono” (“Blond” but also “Monkey”) Salgar, a demanding, no-nonsense manager whose slogan was “news, news, news.” García Márquez would say that working for him was “the exploitation of man by monkey.”4 He had been employed by the paper since he was little more than a boy and had thus been educated both in the school of journalism and that of life; he was to become an institution in his own right. From the start he was unimpressed by García Márquez’s reputation and deeply suspicious of his unmistakable literariness and incorrigible “lyricism.”5

  After a couple of weeks, however, García Márquez showed his worth with two articles on monarchical power and solitude, myth and reality: the first, highly amusing, was “Cleopatra,” a piece which fervently prayed that a new statue reputedly of the Egyptian queen would not modify the romantic image men have had of her for two thousand years; the second, “The Queen Alone,” was about Elizabeth the Queen Mother of England, recently widowed. It may be García Márquez’s single most striking elaboration in that era of certain themes—especially the conjunction of power, fame and solitude—which would reach their culmination twenty years later in The Autumn of the Patriarch:

  The Queen Mother, who is now a grandmother, is truly alone for the first time in her life. And as she wanders, accompanied only by her solitude, along the immense corridors of Buckingham Palace, she must remember with nostalgia that happy age in which she never dreamed nor wished to dream of being a queen, and lived with her husband and their two daughters in a house overflowing with intimacy…Little did she know that a mysterious blow of fate would turn her children and the children of her children into kings and queens; and her into a queen alone. A desolate and inconsolable housewife, whose house would fade into the immense labyrinth of Buckingham Palace, its endless corridors and that limitless backyard which extends to the bounds of Africa.6

  This article in particular convinced Zalamea Borda, who somewhat bizarrely had a soft spot for the young Queen Elizabeth II, that García Márquez was ready to move on to bigger things.7 Guillermo Cano said that when García Márquez arrived he naturally had to adapt to the newspaper’s cautious and somewhat anonymous house style; but after a while the other writers began to adjust to the newcomer’s brilliant improvisations and then to imitate him.8

  García Márquez remembers that he would be sitting at his desk writing a piece for the paper’s “Day by Day” column and José Salgar or Guillermo Cano would tell him, across the noisy room, with just a thumb and forefinger, how much was needed to fill the space. Some of the magic had gone out of his journalism. Worse, Bogotá did not provide him with the vital stimulation he found everywhere on the coast. In late February, already bored to tears, he managed to persuade the management to let him try out as a film critic and publish his review on Saturdays. It must have been a wonderful relief to escape several times a week from the tensions of living under a dictatorship in “the gloomiest city in the world,” and under an irksome and unnecessary apprenticeship in the newspaper office, and to take refuge in the fantasy world of the movies. He was in fact something of a pioneer, because no other journalist had written a regular movie column in any Colombian newspaper before this time; they confined themselves to providing plot summaries and naming the stars.

  From the start his view of cinema was literary and humanistic, rather than specifically cinematographic.9 In fact García Márquez’s fast-evolving political ideology at the time must have sharpened his sense that he had a chance to “educate the people” and perhaps relieve them of the false consciousness that made them prefer the prepackaged Hollywood product to the more aesthetically crafted works from France and, especially, those “authentically” conceived and executed works from Italy which he particularly favoured. But in any case the film-goers of 1950s Bogotá were unlikely to appreciate avant-garde evaluations of the movies they went to see and García Márquez was from the beginning obsessed with the idea of viewing reality from the standpoint of “the people” whilst going on, of course, to modify it in progressive directions. Certainly his film reviews took up aesthetically and ideologically questionable “common-sense” positions; but one of the qualities of García Márquez, always, is that hi
s version of “common sense” is invariably “good sense” and is almost never “non-sense.”10

  From the very beginning he was hostile to what he perceived to be the shallow commercial and profoundly ideological values of the Hollywood system—he considered Orson Welles and Charlie Chaplin exceptions—and he routinely defended European cinema, whose production and moral values he sought for the development of a national cinema in Colombia. This, with an added Latin American dimension, would become a permanent obsession down the years. He was surprisingly preoccupied with technical questions—script, dialogue, direction, photography, sound, music, cutting, acting—which perhaps gives insight into what he would later call the “carpentry” of his literary works: professional “tricks of the trade” that he has never been fully willing to share, at least not in terms of the novel.11 He insisted that scripts should be economical, consistent and coherent; and that close-ups and long shots should receive the same attention. He was concerned from the beginning with the concept of the well-made story, an obsession which would remain with him for the rest of his career and would explain his continuing reverence for The Thousand and One Nights, Dracula, The Count of Monte Cristo and Treasure Island—all brilliantly narrated works of popular literature. This was what he looked for in the cinema too. Objective reality should predominate but the inner world, even the fantastic world, should not be neglected. He noted that the outstanding feature of Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thieves was its “human authenticity” and its “lifelike method.” These central ideas would dominate his perspective for the next few years, and were not far removed from the central tenets of both bourgeois and socialist realism which found classic fusion in Italian neo-realism. Avant-garde they were not. He showed little awareness of the theories of the nascent French New Wave to be found among Brazilian, Argentine or Cuban cinematographers at this time. Indeed, his selections for best films of the year on 31 December demonstrate unequivocally that for García Márquez in 1954 Italian neo-realism was the way of making movies. Certainly it is ironic to consider that De Sica, his favourite film-maker in this era, and Cesare Zavattini, the incomparable scriptwriter, would never have got involved in filming a script like the plot of Leaf Storm. Which is why, for the moment, García Márquez would not be writing any more novels like Leaf Storm.