Gabriel García Márquez

by Gerald Martin

  Inevitably he was more impressed than he let on—as well as more nervous and more intimidated. He may have become a feared reporter in Bogotá but that image belied what was still a timid and self-conscious personality. Despite the costeño “piss-taking,” these first weeks in Europe made a profound impact on García Márquez, as his frequent references back to the experience in articles written a quarter of a century later—appropriately enough, in El Espectador—would demonstrate. Curiously, the one thing García Márquez did conspicuously lack when he arrived in Europe was a Latin American consciousness. He was more than content with his own costeño—rather than Colombian—culture; but he had not yet converted this cultural awareness into a fully Latin American “continental nationalism.” What he would most discover in Geneva, Rome and Paris was not “Europe” but “Latin America.”7 But in him this remained tentative and he would have to go back to Latin America itself in order to discover what it was that he had discovered in Europe.

  Before he left Geneva, perhaps to his surprise, certainly to his delight, he received a letter back from Mercedes. This undoubtedly changed his entire perspective—though paradoxically, despite his pleasure and relief, it probably made him even more determined to make the most of his European experience and his now temporary freedom than he already was. In tying him to her she gave him the confidence to go further away—and for longer.

  After the excitement of Geneva while the Big Four circus was in town, Garcia Márquez travelled on to Italy where he was scheduled to cover the 16th Exhibition of Cinematographic Art in Venice, better known as the Venice Film Festival, at the beginning of September. This was undoubtedly his idea rather than that of his bosses at El Espectador. He would later tell his friends that he had rushed off to Italy because the newspaper had cabled him with instructions to travel to Rome in case the Pope should die of hiccups.8 Secretly, however, Italy had always been his personal number one destination. He had even been given a checklist of objectives by his friends in the cine-club of Bogotá. Above all, though, he was keen to travel to Rome in order to visit the famous film city of Cinecittà, where his great hero the scriptwriter Cesare Zavattini did most of his work. His other secret ambition was to get to Eastern Europe; he wanted to be able to compare the two sides of the Iron Curtain, East and West, two worlds concealed behind the rhetoric of the Big Four. He knew what he thought in theory about capitalism and socialism; now he wanted to see for himself, in practice.

  He reached the Italian capital on 31 July. It too was blazing, like Geneva. A porter led him from the station to a nearby hotel in the Via Nazionale, as he recalled many years later with his usual dose of mythic value added: “It was a very old building reconstructed with diverse materials, and on each floor there was a different hotel. Its windows were so close to the ruins of the Colosseum that you could not only see the thousands of cats dozing in the heat on the terraces but you could smell the intense stench of fermented urine.”9 As for “the eternal city” itself, the Colombian special correspondent sent only two dispatches at this time, one of them on Pope Pius XII’s vacation in Castelgandolfo, where he attended the public audiences. The reports were written with just enough respect to placate his Catholic readers and just enough ironic insinuation to amuse the less reverent customers of a newspaper which was, after all, to the Liberal left of centre. García Márquez hinted almost imperceptibly that the Pope should not be trying to join the world of Hollywood celebrity, into which politicians were now being lured, by passing on agency information about his height and shoe size: this venerable figure was, after all—his readers were invited to reflect—only a man!

  Given his plans to travel to places in Eastern Europe from which it would not be possible to send reports, García Márquez realized that he had to produce something substantial to earn his “vacation” in advance. He wrote nothing about the political situation in Italy, then still making its transition from pre-war fascism to post-war Christian Democracy and from being a predominantly rural society to a predominantly urban one. Instead, his first big story was a series on the so-called “Wilma Montesi scandal,” which he worked on for the whole of August, calling it, somewhat hyperbolically, “the scandal of the century.” Montesi was the twenty-one-year-old daughter of a Roman carpenter; her murder two years before had been covered up for reasons that were still not clear at the time of writing but evidently involved upper-class decadence, police corruption and political manipulation. (It is thought the case helped to inspire Federico Fellini’s breakthrough movie La dolce vita in 1959.) García Márquez visited the quarter and the house where Montesi had lived, the beach forty-two kilometres away where her body had appeared, and a couple of the bars where locals might have some information to give. As for the rest, he used other sources with great efficiency, carried out his own research wherever possible and wrote one of his most effective pieces of reportage.10 In announcing the series El Espectador stated: “For a month now, visiting the places in which the drama took place, Gabriel García Márquez has found out the most minute details of the death of Wilma Montesi and the trial which has followed.”11

  He realized immediately that beyond the matter of the details of the case, the detective mystery as such, there was something about the time, the place and the story that foreshadowed the future: what a cultural critic would later call “the intersections of cinema, paparazzo photography, tabloids, femininity, and politics.”12 His own endeavour would be to discover whether there was any necessary connection, as its Italian exponents themselves believed, between the neo-realist mode in film and the advance of a socialist aesthetic. Long before the influential analyses of French critic André Bazin, García Márquez clearly intuited that the Italian films of the era were a kind of “reconstituted reportage” with a “natural adherence to actuality” which made Italian national cinema a “form of radical humanism.”13 His film reviews in Bogotá had intimated as much. He may also have reflected that, through a correction of the mystification Hollywood had achieved, Italian post-war cinema and journalism were producing a new, more critical approach to celebrity—this knowledge would be an invaluable protection for him when he too became famous—but also, more ominously, that in the second half of the twentieth century even those who were not famous had begun to imagine themselves as though constantly in front of a camera, permanently in danger of being exposed, misrepresented or even betrayed. Few people at that stage of the critical game had reached the conclusion that there was no essential reality or truth to communicate in the first place. This would be left to the theorists of postmodernity, though García Márquez would be there too when they arrived.

  Once the Montesi reports were safely despatched, for publication between 17 and 30 September, he set off for Venice to take part in the sixteenth annual film festival there. Winter had come early to Venice and with it the Eastern Europeans, for the first time since the war. García Márquez spent several days soaking up the atmosphere of a great European film competition and watching movies day and night, with occasional excursions around Venice, where he noted the eccentricities of the Italians and the abyss between the rich and the poor—the Italian poor, who “always lose but they lose in a joyful and different fashion.”14 It was what he already thought about Latin Americans and he would devote much of his career to making Latin Americans more aware of it and more content with what they were. Years later he would add that Italians have “no other aim than to live” because they “discovered a long time ago that there is only one life and that certainty has made them allergic to cruelty.”15

  As in his Geneva reports, he made the best of his situation by sending stories not only on the movies themselves but on more superficial matters such as which stars did and did not turn up; among those who did he expressed disappointment at the fading attractions of Hedy Lamarr, who had once set Venice alight with her nude romp in Ecstasy; scorn for the sexual hypocrisy of Sophia Loren’s supposedly reluctant appearances in a different swimsuit every day on the beach; and scepticism at A
nouk Aimée’s self-presentation as a star who did not behave like a star. Prophetically, although Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Word (Ordet) deservedly won first prize, the director for whom García Márquez expressed the most enthusiasm was a young Italian who was showing Amici per la pelle (1955), Francesco Rosi, “a tousle-haired boy of twenty-nine with a footballer’s face, who stood and acknowledged, also like a footballer, the greatest ovation ever given in the palace of cinema.”16

  Now García Márquez took a train in Trieste and arrived in Venna on 21 September 1955, two months after the departure of the last occupying troops and two months before the Viennese Opera reopened. Pretending that his journey had ended in Vienna and that he had remained there “in October,” he wrote merely three articles on the city which were published on 13, 20 and 27 November.17 It would be four years before he considered it prudent to publish any reports on the rest of his journey.

  Like many other people in those days, García Márquez found it impossible to separate Vienna from Carol Reed’s film The Third Man (whose script had been written by Graham Greene), and he assiduously visited the movie’s already mythical locations. It was in Vienna too that he later claimed to have met “Frau Roberta,” later renamed “Frau Frida,” a fellow Colombian and clairvoyant who earned her living in the Austrian capital by “renting herself out to dream.”18 When the unlikely oracle told him, after an evening on the Danube beneath a full moon, that she had recently dreamed about him, and that he should leave Vienna at once, the superstitious boy from Aracataca took the next train out.19 He did not mention to his readers that the train in question had taken him beyond the Iron Curtain.

  So García Márquez travelled on from Austria to Czechoslovakia and Poland. He had managed to fix himself up with an invitation to the International Film Congress in Warsaw while he was at the Venice Film Festival. However, no reports by García Márquez on those two countries would be published for four years so we cannot be certain either of the exact timing, which he does not remember, or of his initial impressions; by that time those impressions had been updated and merged with the stories of brief returns to the two countries in the summer of 1957 when he travelled to Moscow and Hungary, a cursory account of which he would publish in November 1957. The reports on the first 1957 journey would finally appear in Cromos, Bogotá, in August 1959, by which time he would be working for the Cuban Revolution and was less concerned to hide his tracks. He would never acknowledge the journey he made alone in 1955, however: even when he finally published articles on Czechoslovakia and Poland he inserted them into the subsequent Eastern European trip he had made, in the company of others, in 1957.20

  In view of all these suppressions and manipulations it is difficult either to establish a clear itinerary or to speculate about the development of García Márquez’s political consciousness. What we can certainly infer is that right from the start he saw a paradox: Prague was a majestic, relaxed city, with every appearance of being like any of the Western European capitals, yet the inhabitants seemed to lack all interest in politics; Poland, still pre-Gomulka, was far more underdeveloped, with the scars of the Nazi holocaust still everywhere apparent, yet the Poles were much more politically active, surprisingly enthusiastic readers, and somehow managing to reconcile Communism with Catholicism in a way no other Communist country was even attempting. Four years later García Márquez would reflect that the Poles were the most anti-Russian of all the socialist “democracies.” On the other hand he would also use a number of pejorative adjectives, such as “hysterical,” “complicated” and “difficult,” and would say that the Poles had “an almost feminine over-sensitivity,” which meant it was “difficult to know what they want.”21 He disliked Cracow for what he perceived as its inherent conservatism and regressive Catholicism. However, his description of a visit to Auschwitz, though brief, is stunning. For once the usually flippant commentator confesses to having been on the point of weeping and gives a heart-rendingly sober account of his tour:

  There is a gallery of enormous glass cases full to the roof with human hair. A gallery full of shoes, clothing, handkerchiefs with initials sewn by hand, the suitcases the prisoners carried in to that hallucinatory hotel still bearing the labels from hotels for tourists. There is a case full of children’s shoes with worn metal heels: little white boots to wear to school and the boot extensions of those who before going to die in the concentration camps had taken the trouble to survive infantile paralysis. There is an immense room crammed with prosthetic devices, thousands of pairs of glasses, false teeth, glass eyes, wooden legs, woollen gloves for missing hands, all the gadgets invented by human ingenuity to put humankind to rights. I separated myself from the group moving silently across the gallery. I was gnawing on a suppressed fury because I wanted to cry.22

  In contrast the narration of the absurdities of Communist bureaucracy at border crossings is hilarious.

  At the end of October he was back in Rome, and sent his three articles on Vienna, four more on the Pope and another three on the rivalry between Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida, back to Colombia; interestingly, he remarked that, beyond the question of the battle of their “vital statistics,” Lollobrigida, clearly less talented than Loren, had a far more positive image; he predicted, however, that Loren would eventually triumph when she realized that “Sophia Loren, in the respectable role of Sophia Loren, is unique and invulnerable.”23 He moved into a boarding house in Parioli with a Colombian tenor, Rafael Ribero Silva, who had been in Rome for six years. Like García Márquez, Ribero Silva was from a poor background and was the same age. He was another man who had worked his way up through determination and sacrifices, staying in and practising his singing, as García Márquez noted, when others were out on the town.24

  For several weeks Ribero Silva acted as his informal translator and guide and in the late afternoon the two would borrow a motor scooter and tour the city. Their favourite treat was to watch the prostitutes in Villa Borghese plying their trade as night began to fall. Inspired by this innocent hobby Ribero Silva gave García Márquez one of his sweetest memories of the Italian capital: “After lunch, while Rome slept, we would go on a borrowed Vespa to see the little whores dressed in blue organdy, pink poplin or green linen, and sometimes we would meet one who would invite us to an ice cream. One afternoon I didn’t go. I fell asleep after lunch and was awoken by some very timid taps on the door. I opened it, half asleep, and in the darkness of the pasageway I saw an image out of a delirium. It was a naked girl, very beautiful, freshly bathed and perfumed, with her whole body covered in talc. ‘Buona sera,’ she said in a very soft voice, ‘the tenore sent me.’”25

  García Márquez had made his first tentative contact with Cinecittà, the great studio complex to the south-east of Rome, just after his arrival. It was the largest such dream factory anywhere in the world, and he was interested in studying film-making there at the Centro Sperimentale (Experimental Film Centre). At that time there had been no classes functioning but now he was able to meet active Italians and Latin Americans, like the Argentinian Fernando Birri, an exile who had fled the Peronist regime and who would be an important friend and collaborator in the future, as would other Latin American filmmakers who studied in Rome during that period, such as the Cubans Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Julio García Espinosa. Birri welcomed the young man with the new beret and the over-sized duffel coat, took him back to his apartment at the Piazza di Spagna, and for drinks at the Café di Spagna, and a long and fruitful relationship began.

  García Márquez now enrolled on a course on cinema direction in the Experimental Film Centre. His main interest, not surprisingly, was in script-writing, which is why De Sica’s script man Cesare Zavattini was a particular idol, a man, he would enthuse, who breathed an “unprecedented humanity” into the cinema of his era.26 Looking back on those days, he would comment: “Today you can’t imagine what the emergence of neo-realism at the beginning of the 1950s meant for our generation. It was inventing the cinema anew. We’d been seein
g films from the war or films by Marcel Carné and other French directors which were setting the artistic trend. Then suddenly neo-realism arrived from Italy, with movies made out of reject celluloid with actors it was said had never seen a camera in their lives…Everything seemed to have been done in the street; it was impossible to tell how the scenes were put together, how the rhythm and the tone were maintained. For us it was a miracle.”27 He must have been surprised and disappointed to find that Italian neo-realism was less admired in Italy than elsewhere, in part because it showed aspects of the country that post-war Italy was trying to shrug off. Appropriately enough, he says that it was Miracle in Milan (1952), which he saw again with Fernando Birri in 1955, and on which De Sica, Zavattini and Fellini all worked, which made him feel that cinema could change the world, because both he and Birri felt that reality itself had changed when they emerged from the movie-house. In fact, Cinecittà, which was right then at its zenith, was about to provide the backdrop for the work of Fellini, a film-maker who would depart from the neo-realist aesthetic then dominating the scene and develop towards a sort of “magical realism” not dissimilar to the style for which García Márquez himself would later be admired.28