Gabriel García Márquez

by Gerald Martin

  Immediately after those implicitly committed and campaigning pieces, Leaf Storm finally appeared in Bogotá at the end of May under a little-known imprint owned by the publisher Lisman Baum and produced by Sipa Editions at five pesos a copy. García Márquez’s friend the painter Cecilia Porras designed the cover, which depicted a little boy sitting on a chair with his legs dangling, waiting for something: the little boy that García Márquez had once been in the dreaming time before his grandfather died and which he had now transposed into his first published novel. The printers claimed to have produced 4,000 copies, few of which were ever sold.25 Its publication made a strange counterpoint to his current status as a hard-hitting, high-profile journalist, for it belonged not only to an era but to a narrative mode that García Márquez had left behind: at once static and time-tormented, fatalistic and mythical.

  Still, a book in print at last. Although it had by no means resolved or even assuaged his obsessions, it was a book based directly on his own childhood, something which had suddenly “dropped off” “The House” after he had made his fabulous return to Aracataca with Luisa Santiaga, now five years before. The title had been rapidly improvised in 1951 in order to be able to send the novel off to Buenos Aires; and some time in the months before publication García Márquez composed a sort of prologue or coda dated “1909,” which made more sense of the title and gave the novel a perspective, both historical and mythological at one and the same time, clarifying its social meaning and adding a clearer sense of decadence, loss and nostalgia. All this is conveyed by a narrative voice similar to that of the Colonel’s in the novel, a voice which laments the arrival of the “leaf-trash,” the migrant workers—rather than lamenting the arrival of capitalism and imperialism—and then reluctantly accepts what has happened in the town as part of the “natural” state of affairs, the cycle of ups and downs inherent in life itself. Here we have a man in his mid to late twenties writing with the voice of a seventy-year-old but viewing him with just a trace of irony. The book was dedicated to Germán Vargas, and was well received by Colombian critics, though inevitably many of the reviews were by García Márquez’s close friends and associates.

  He was exhausted, tired of Bogotá and drained by the cumulative effort of researching his reports, the responsibility of meeting growing expectations, and the well-grounded fears that the government might take reprisals against him for his evidently antagonistic positions. Thus when the chance came to get away—and to Europe—he seized it with alacrity, despite many subsequent protestations to the contrary. As ever there is uncertainty about the reasons for his journey. Legend has it that he needed to get out of the country to avoid threats from the government; legend also has it that this explanation is itself one of many examples of García Márquez’s alleged instinct for self-dramatization. But the political explanation cannot be simply discounted: he had made several trips down to the Costa simply to lie low after some of his most provocative stories; and several other El Espectador journalists had received threats or been beaten up by unknown assailants. The trip may well have been intended as a brief self-exile in the guise of a journalistic mission. Or as a jaunt to Europe in the guise of a politically motivated self-exile. Or it may have been intended simply as what the newspaper said it was: a brief foreign assignment beginning with the meeting of the “Big Four” powers—the USA, the USSR, the UK and France in Geneva.

  He left his apartment in Bogotá and gave away most of his possessions. He had also saved a tidy sum of money in Bogotá and, despite the family’s continuing straitened circumstances in Cartagena, took it with him.26 Clearly he had agreed to go for a few months at least—in some stories he claims he had expected to be away as little as “four days”—but had it at the back of his mind that he might stay even longer.27 On the other hand, even he cannot have imagined he would be away for two and a half years. The least charitable but most likely explanation for the different versions in this case is that he could not bring himself to confess either to his impoverished family or to his future wife that he was wilfully abandoning them for a significant period of time after having already spent eighteen months away in Bogotá. His sense of responsibility was strong but the lure of Europe and the unknown was even stronger.

  On his last evening in Bogotá, 13 July, there was a riotous farewell party in Guillermo Cano’s house which made García Márquez miss his early morning plane to Barranquilla, but he got another flight at midday. The family is said to have reluctantly agreed they could do without his subsidies for a time but of course they had no inkling of how long he would actually be away. He must have been utterly overwhelmed and exhausted but there was Mercedes, now twenty-two, to see—but what could he say to her?—and of course another round of festivities, with his local friends and ex-colleagues. Mercedes had been his “intended” for more than a decade in his own mind but now it was to be decided whether she would finally become his “fiancée”—that is to say, whether he would also become her “intended.” It was actually ten years since he had asked her to marry him, back in Sucre. No one has ever asked the question about other loves in her life—she told me categorically there had never been any—or why García Márquez felt able to leave her loyalty—or rather, her fate—to chance. Perhaps he reconciled the implications of his own fear of rejection, and the fact that he had no material security to offer her, with the thought, like Florentino Ariza in Love in the Time of Cholera, that no matter how long it took to get his woman and no matter what she did in the meantime, one day they would be together and she would be his. This entire departure has been told in several different ways and is shrouded in mystery.

  His eventual proposal to Mercedes, if such it was, may suggest not only an anguished fear of losing the woman he loved even though he was playing a long—a very long—game but also an unconscious fear of losing Colombia and thus a way of securing his future connection to the country. Mercedes was from his own region and background and guaranteed he would have someone at his side who would understand where he was “coming from” for the rest of his life. In short, she was not only a kind of platonic ideal on the Dantean model—not that he did not find her extremely attractive physically—but also a highly practical strategic choice: the perfect combination. He, though, unlike Dante, would actually marry his unattainable “lady of my mind,” the woman he had chosen when she was nine years old.28 It seems certain, then, that he proposed now precisely because he was intending to be away from her for a long time. Perhaps he felt better able to take the risk of rejection now that he was a celebrated journalist travelling to Europe on a glamorous mission; perhaps she was more inclined to accept for the very same reason. But the truth is that Mercedes hardly features in the memoir and the details of this extraordinary relationship have never been filled in by either of the two parties. Before he left Barranquilla for Bogotá in 1954, they had hardly spoken in any concrete way but he felt they had a sort of understanding.29

  In fact, typically—perversely—the woman who will most feature as a romantic interest in the 2002 memoir is not Mercedes, the love of his life, but another woman, Martina Fonseca, his first love, the married woman with whom he had carried on that frenzied affair in Barranquilla when he was a stripling of fifteen—until she put an end to it. He mentions her several times during the Bogotá chapter.30 Did she even exist? Apparently, because one day, towards the end of 1954, he hears her “radiant voice” on the phone and meets her, in the bar of the Hotel Continental, for the first time in twelve years. She is showing the first signs of “an undeserved old age” and asks him if he has missed her. “Only then did I tell her the truth: that I had never forgotten her but her goodbye had been so brutal that it changed my way of being.” She behaved sportingly but he was resentful and somewhat spiteful; she had had twins but assured him they were not his. She said she had wanted to see how he was, so he asked, “And how am I?” She laughed and said, “That you’ll never know.” He ends the episode by stating—teasingly—that he had been longing to see M
artina once she’d phoned yet also terrified that he might have spent the rest of his life with her, “the same desolate terror I felt many times after that day whenever the telephone rang.”

  This is an intriguing confessional episode and it is interesting to ask how revealing it is meant to be and why. Is it a confession about him and women? And also a justification of some unspoken attitude towards them? It seems odd that Martina should appear again, quite gratuitously, just before García Márquez finally commits himself to Mercedes. Does it confirm, in some coded fashion, in a culture where men could have no sexual relations with the women they intended to marry while having frequent relations with prostitutes and servants, or indeed other men’s wives, that he had decided to separate his feelings between the unofficial Don Juan, open to “crazy loves,” and the official husband in a stable—somehow “arranged”—marriage to a woman who would be a lifelong “virgin” (as far as other men were concerned) and a loyal, reliable wife, the object of “good love”?31 If the anecdote about Martina Fonseca is true—or if it is invented but some other woman had this chastening effect on him at this or some other time—it would explain why he is so frequently concerned in his fiction and his essays to separate love from sex, why he would cling for so many years to the idea of his self-arranged marriage with someone significantly younger than himself, why he doesn’t bother to express any feelings for Mercedes in the memoir (those feelings can and must be taken for granted, for ever), and possibly also why, when I asked her about this time in their lives in front of her good friend Nancy Vicens, Mercedes—who, García Márquez had already informed me, “never tells me she loves me”—assured me with grim meaningfulness (though not a trace of bitterness) that “Gabo is a very unusual person; very unusual.”32 It was clear to me that a request for clarification would be unwise.

  Of course much of this is a game played out between two very strong, very ironic and very private people. Despite other versions down the years which speak of agreements being made before his departure,33 García Márquez assures us in his memoir that he did not “see” his sweetheart before he left for Europe—unless it is really true that he saw her in the street through the window of a taxi and did not stop. And so, in the absence of a meeting with Mercedes, there was—inevitably—another violent farewell celebration in “The Cave” to add to the alcoholic overdose he had brought with him from Bogotá. The next day the group members able to get out of bed saw him off at the airport. His well-deserved hangover was the worst possible preparation for what turned out to be a thirty-six-hour journey across the Atlantic Ocean to the Old World. Still, he was more than ready for the experience: he was twenty-eight years of age, a successful journalist and a respected writer who had published his debut novel. It was an appropriate moment for such a journey. The splendours of European civilization awaited him but those who knew him best could be certain that he would view those splendours entirely from his own hard-earned perspective. Needless to say, his memoir makes no mention of either Ulysses or Penelope.

  PART II

  Abroad: Europe and

  Latin America

  1955–1967

  9

  The Discovery of Europe: Rome

  1955

  THE AVIANCA AEROPLANE The Colombian, one of the Lockheed Super Constellations famously conceived by millionaire eccentric Howard Hughes, made a weekly journey to Europe stopping several times in the Caribbean, including Bermuda, and then the Azores, before flying on to Lisbon, Madrid and Paris. García Márquez would comment in his first despatch from the Old World that he had been surprised that such a spectacular flying machine could have been designed by Mr. Hughes, “who designs such terrible movies.”1 As for himself, and despite a monumental hangover, García Márquez was lucid enough to write a brief letter to Mercedes, which he posted in Montego Bay. It was a do-or-die effort to formalize their relationship. He says in the memoir that its motive was “remorse” for not letting her know he was leaving but maybe he had simply lacked the courage to ask her to write, with all its implications.

  When the aircraft finally reached Paris it descended with warnings of possible undercarriage problems and the passengers had to prepare for the worst. But they landed safely. García Márquez had arrived in the Old World.2 It was almost exactly ten years since the end of the Second World War in Europe. There was no time for sightseeing and early the next morning he took the train to Geneva and arrived in the afternoon, two days after leaving Barranquilla. The only thing he would bother to tell his readers about his brief stopover in Paris was that the French were far more interested in the Tour de France than in what was happening in Geneva; and when he got to Geneva on 17 July, he discovered that the Swiss too were more interested in the Tour de France than what was happening in Geneva. In fact, he remarked, the only people who seemed interested in what was happening in Geneva were the journalists who had been sent to cover it. With the exception, he intimated slyly, of Colombian journalist Gabriel García Márquez.3

  He dived into the first hotel he found, changed his clothes and set about sending this first, anti-climactic story through All American Cable. After this he would have to content himself with registered airmail. There was a heatwave that summer in snowy Switzerland and he was disappointed by that and by the fact that, as he recalled years later, “the grass I saw through the train window was exactly like the grass I’d seen through the train window in Aracataca.”4 He spoke no foreign languages, and had no experience of finding his way around in foreign countries. He rushed off to look for the United Nations building with the providential help of a German pastor who spoke Spanish and then met up, to his immense relief, with members of the Latin American press corps including the haughty cachaco Germán Arciniegas, representing El Tiempo, all of them there to report on the negotiations between the representatives of the “Big Four” nations—Nikolai Bulganin of the Soviet Union, Anthony Eden of the United Kingdom, Dwight D. Eisenhower (“Ike”) of the United States and Edgar Faure of France. All in all, there were two thousand journalists present from around the world.

  The Big Four were the countries most actively engaged in the Cold War. They had each negotiated control of a part of the defeated city of Berlin; they were also the countries with a veto at the United Nations Security Council and the countries that possessed or were well on the way to possessing nuclear weapons. Understanding between them was crucial if the world was to survive the unfamiliar and terrifying new era lived out under the shadow of global nuclear catastrophe which had begun with the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Thus they began, for a time, to meet one another separately from umbrella organizations like the United Nations, NATO or the soon to be created Warsaw Pact. Later, following the Suez Crisis in 1956, France and the UK would lose much of their influence and the game would be concentrated on the relationship between the USA and the USSR. But at this time the meetings of the Big Four were considered to be the first chink of light in the post-Second World War period—with constant speculation about a possible “thaw in East—West relations”—and were greeted with loud fanfares and intense newspaper and television coverage in the West.

  García Márquez’s first cable must have disappointed the bosses who had financed his trip across the Atlantic and must have disconcerted the newspaper’s readers. The article appeared under the title “Geneva Indifferent to the Conference.” Surely this was not the way to sell a story. Later titles were equally anti-climactic in intention—and clearly the work of García Márquez himself—including “The Big Four in Technicolor,” “My Nice Customer Ike,” “The Four Happy Pals” and “The True Tower of Babel.” Needless to say, the Big Four conferences—the one the previous January had been held in Berlin—engaged the interest of the world because the world was genuinely terrified of nuclear holocaust; but García Márquez, who understood better than most people what was at stake, given his political education over the previous eighteen months as a reporter in Bogotá, reduced this meeting to the status of a Ho
llywood event reported on by a social columnist. Eventually, many years later, he would often enough travel through the looking glass of high politics himself—probably he was already longing to do so—but he was never deceived by the fanfares or by any naive illusions about the mystificatory role of the international press in reporting on political affairs. Entertaining though his reports are about “Ike,” Bulganin, Eden and Faure, not to mention their wives—all carefully polishing their images, like film stars, with the connivance of the world’s newspapers—this was not García Márquez’s favourite kind of journalism.

  Sobered by the material and cultural difficulties of his enterprise, he set about finding his journalistic feet. Most of his articles would remain wilfully superficial and humorous—as if, since he could not cover the news seriously, he refused to take it seriously himself. He soon faced the fact that he was never, during his time in Europe, going to be able to carry out the direct investigation which had made him celebrated in Colombia nor, therefore, to achieve any spectacular scoops. But gradually he would learn how to make the best of his circumstances, how to make it seem as if his material was original, how to look for “the other side of the news,”5 and, equally to the point, how to shape his stories to best impress the folks back home. He became much more aware, almost immediately, of the way in which, in the “advanced” countries, the news was concocted. So he went in for his own journalistic cuisinerie; if the Bogotá articles had already shown the power of the informed imagination to add not only the missing piece of information but also the literary dash to bring out its flavour as part of a professional expertise, long before the emergence of the “New Journalism” in the 1960s, now, when he needed it more than ever, this professional know-how would save him time and again. That is why from the start his pieces were as much about him, both implicitly and explicitly, as they were about the events he was meant to be reporting; and from the start he showed that the news was made not by the rich and famous themselves but by the journalists who followed them around and turned them into “stories.”6