It turned out that at the Film Centre script-writing was just a minor section of the course in film direction. Perhaps predictably, García Márquez was bored almost immediately, with the exception of Dottoressa Rosado’s classes on montage, which, she insisted, was “the grammar of cinema.” The truth is that García Márquez was never much taken with any type of formal education and if it was not actually compulsory he would drift away; now he drifted away from Cinecittà (though in later years he would say that he spent several—even nine—months there). Yet when his friend Guillermo Angulo turned up some time later in search of García Márquez, Dottoressa Rosado remembered the latter, a generally lazy student, as one of her best.29 Many people would be surprised to discover, in later years, that García Márquez had a firm understanding of the technical aspects of moviemaking which, despite his reluctance, he had learned at Cinecittà.
As he would so often remark in the future, García Márquez still liked the cinema but would come to wonder whether the cinema liked him. He never did become disillusioned with Zavattini, however, and had a very personal view of his particular genius: “I am a child of Zavattini, who was a ‘machine for inventing plots.’ They just bubbled out of him. Zavattini made us understand that feelings are more important than intellectual principles.”30 This conviction would enable García Márquez to resist the attacks he would have to face from the literary and cinematographic “socialist realists” in the years to come, not least in Cuba. And this alone had made his brief stay in Italy, and his brief acquaintance with Cinecittà, worthwhile.
When a Latin American in Europe is bored and doesn’t know what to do he gets on a train to Paris. That was not what García Márquez had intended but that is what he did as the last days of 1955 approached. Ironically, in attempting to move to another field, the cinema, he had merely found his way back to literature—not to mention his overriding obsession, Colombia. He was thinking about a novel, a neo-realist one, of course, inspired, cinematographically, in Rome but destined to be written in literary Paris. His train pulled in after midnight one rainy evening not long before Christmas. He took a taxi. His first image was of a prostitute standing on a street corner near the station beneath an orange umbrella.31 The taxi was supposed to take him to the Hotel Excelsior, recommended to him by the poet Jorge Gaitán Durán, but he ended up at an Alliance Française hostel on Boulevard Raspail. He would stay in Paris for almost exactly two years.
10
Hungry in Paris: La Bohème
1956–1957
WHO CAN SAY what Gabriel García Márquez was looking for as he made his way to the French capital in December 1955? Anyone who knew him would have guessed that Italy would always be more congenial to the Colombian costeño—both socially and culturally—than the cooler, more confident, more colonial, more critical—more Cartesian—country to the north. His attitude to Europe in general, from the start, was that it had little to teach him that he had not already learned in books or on newsreels; it was almost as if he had come to see it rot—the smell of boiled cabbage, one might say, rather than the fragrance of the tropical guava that would always be so dear to his heart and his senses. Yet here he was, after all, in Paris.1
From the Alliance Française hostel he moved on to a cheap hotel favoured by Latin American travellers: the Hôtel de Flandre at 16 Rue Cujas, in the Latin Quarter, run by a Monsieur and Madame Lacroix. Directly opposite was the more opulent Grand Hôtel Saint-Michel, another Latin American favourite.2 One of its long-term residents was the influential Afro-Cuban poet and Communist Party member Nicolás Guillén, one of a large number of Latin American writers in exile during that age of dictators—Odría in Peru (1948–56), Somoza in Nicaragua (1936–56), Castillo Armas in Guatemala (1954–7), Trujillo in the Dominican Republic (1930–61), Batista in Cuba (1952–8), Pérez Jiménez in Venezuela (1952–8), and even Rojas Pinilla in Colombia (1953–7). The entire zone is dominated culturally by the nearby Sorbonne, though the ominous bulk of the Panthéon is the most imposing piece of architecture in the vicinity.
Almost immediately García Márquez contacted Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, whom he had known briefly in Bogotá before the April 1948 uprising. Mendoza junior, that serious and rather pretentious young man whose view of the world had been shattered by his father’s political defeat and exile in the months after the assassination of Gaitán, leaned towards radical socialism and was well on his way to becoming a fellow traveller of the international communist movement. He had read about the publication of García Márquez’s Leaf Storm in the Bogotá press and had “assumed from his photograph and the title that he must be a bad novelist.”3 On Christmas Eve 1955 he was in the Bar La Chope Parisienne in the Latin Quarter with two Colombian friends when a duffel-coated García Márquez came in from the wintry afternoon. The newcomer struck Mendoza and his friends as arrogant and self-satisfied during their first conversation about literature, life and journalism, as if the eighteen months he had recently spent in Bogotá had turned him into a typical cachaco. He claimed to be totally unimpressed with Europe. In fact he appeared interested only in himself. He had already published one novel and only became animated when he began to talk about the development of the second one.
As it happened, in Plinio Mendoza García Márquez had just met his future best friend, though by no means the most constant. Because he would come to know García Márquez better than almost anyone else, and was also less constrained than other people by conventional considerations of discretion and taste, he would become, ironically, one of the more reliable witnesses to García Márquez’s life and development. Despite his negative first impression, Mendoza invited the new arrival to a dinner party on Christmas Day, hosted by a Colombian architect from Antioquia, Hernán Vieco, and his blue-eyed American wife at their apartment in Rue Guénégaud, by the Seine. There the assembled Colombian émigrés and exiles ate roast pork and endive salad with large quantities of red Bordeaux and García Márquez picked up a guitar and sang vallenatos composed by his friend Escalona. This improved the first impressions the Colombians had of him but the hostess still complained to Plinio that the new arrival was “a horrible guy” who not only seemed self-important but stubbed out his cigarettes on the sole of his shoe.4 Three days later the two men met again, after the first snowfall of the winter, and García Márquez, child of the tropics, danced along the Boulevard Saint-Michel and over the Place du Luxembourg. Mendoza’s reserve melted like the snowflakes glistening on García Márquez’s duffel coat.
They spent much of January and February 1956 together, before Mendoza returned to Caracas, where most of his family were now living. In those first weeks the two new friends would spend time at Mendoza’s favourite haunts around the Sorbonne, the Café Capoulade on Rue Soufflot, or L’Acropole, a cheap and cheerful Greek restaurant at the bottom of the Rue de l’École de Médecine. If some acquaintances have described García Márquez at this time, perhaps uncharitably, as unprepossessing, Plinio Mendoza was equally or more so. Moreover few Colombians, when they hear his name—he is known all over Colombia as simply “Plinio,” just as García Márquez is known as “Gabo”—react with indifference. Many consider him devious, a supposedly typical product of the highlands of his native Boyacá; but no one denies that he is a brilliant journalist and polemicist. Unpredictable he is, and sentimental; but he is also funny, self-mocking (genuinely self-mocking, quite a rare thing), enthusiastic and generous.
At the end of the first week of January the two friends sat in a café in the Rue des Écoles reading Le Monde, only to discover that Rojas Pinilla had finally brought about the closure of El Espectador through a cynical combination of censorship and direct intimidation. (El Tiempo had already been closed for five months.) Mendoza recalls that García Márquez played down the significance of the event: “‘It’s not serious,’ he said, just like the bullfighters do after they’ve been gored. But it was.”5 The newspaper had already been fined 600,000 pesos earlier in the month; now it closed down entirely. García Már
quez’s cheques stopped coming and by the beginning of February he could no longer pay for his room in the Hôtel de Flandre. Madame Lacroix, a charitable soul, allowed him to fall behind with his rent. According to one of García Márquez’s versions she would gradually move him higher and higher in the building until eventually he ended up in an unheated attic on the seventh floor and she pretended to forget about him.6 There his friends would find him writing wearing gloves, a ruana and a woolly cap.
García Márquez was already living on a shoestring before they heard the bad news about El Espectador and Mendoza was struck by how few possessions he had brought with him from Colombia. Mendoza introduced him to Nicolás Guillén and another communist activist, the wealthy Venezuelan novelist and journalist Miguel Otero Silva, who, with his father, had founded the influential Caracas newspaper El Nacional in 1943. They met by chance in a bar in the Rue Cujas in the days before Mendoza left for Venezuela, and Otero Silva invited them to eat in the well-known brasserie Au Pied de Cochon by the market of Les Halles. Years later, when they became friends, Otero Silva would not remember the pale and painfully thin young Colombian who listened so earnestly to the communist diagnosis of the situation in France and Latin America while he bolted down a providential free meal.7 Otero Silva and Guillén had just heard about Khrushchev’s stunning denunciation of Stalin and the cult of personality on 25 February near the end of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union; they were deeply troubled by the newly declared policy of co-existence, which they considered defeatist, and speculated anxiously about the future of the international communist movement.8
Guillén would be the protagonist of one of Garcia Márquez’s favourite anecdotes about the Paris period: “It was when Perón ruled Argentina, Odría Peru and Rojas Pinilla in my country, the time of Somoza, Batista, Trujillo, Pérez Jiménez, Stroessner; in fact, Latin America was paved with dictators. Nicolás Guillén used to get up at five in the morning as he read the newspapers over a cup of coffee; then he’d open the window and shout so he could be heard in both hotels, which were full of Latin Americans, just as if he was in a patio in Camagüey. One day he opened his window and said, ‘The man has fallen!,’ and everyone—Argentinians, Paraguayans, Dominicans, Peruvians—thought it was their man. I heard him too and thought, ‘Shit, Rojas Pinilla’s gone!’ Later he told me it was Perón.”9
On 15 February 1956, a new newspaper, El Independiente, had been launched as a direct replacement for El Espectador, six weeks after the closure of its predecessor. It was edited for two months by Liberal ex-President Alberto Lleras Camargo, who was also the former Secretary of the Organization of American States. García Márquez, after a very difficult and anxious few weeks, breathed a sigh of relief; and when Plinio Mendoza left for Caracas at the end of the month he was satisfied that his new friend was back on his feet and secure. García Márquez’s first article in almost three months appeared in the new paper on 18 March. He sent a seventeen-part report—almost a hundred pages when eventually reprinted and included in a book—on the trial of those accused in the recent espionage scandal in which French government secrets were passed to the Communists during the last months of French rule in Vietnam. Thus on 12 March 1956 El Independiente announced on its first page, “Special envoy of The Independent travels to the most sensational trial of the century.” (Little wonder García Márquez would later get a reputation for hyperbole.) Ironically enough, despite the effort invested in the series, the closure of El Independiente on 15 April would mean that García Márquez never got to relate the climax of the trial, which left his readers frustrated at the end of what was not, in any case, the most interesting of his efforts at reporting, nor the best narrated. Once again, however, although he did not know it, García Márquez had found himself connected, at a distance, with someone who would loom large in his later life. The star of the judicial proceedings was the ex-Minister of the Interior and then Minister of Justice, François Mitterrand: “a fair-haired young man, dressed in a light blue suit, who gave the session a faint touch of the movie-house.”10 Mitterrand himself was under suspicion in the case because of his well-known opposition to the colonial war in Vietnam. For now, though, Mitterrand and the rest of the courtroom cast were in the way of García Márquez’s new novel.
He could hear the chime of the Sorbonne’s clock from his attic. As he sat writing Mercedes Barcha, the fiancée he hardly knew, watched him from a picture frame above the bedside table. Plinio Mendoza recalls that when he first went up to his friend’s room, “I moved to the wall to look at his fiancée’s photograph, fixed there; a pretty girl with long straight hair. ‘It’s the sacred crocodile,’ he said.”11 After García Márquez arrived in Europe Mercedes had begun to send him letters at least twice and frequently three times a week. He wrote back equally assiduously12 His letters to her were usually sent via his parents: his brother Jaime, then fifteen, remembers taking them to Mercedes in Barranquilla from time to time.
The new novel was inspired by the small remote river town where he and Mercedes had first met, though there was to be nothing romantic about the book. Eventually it would be entitled In Evil Hour (La mala hora). Though he could not know it, this ill-fated novel would not be published until 1962. It was not a book about the time in which the García Márquez and Barcha Pardo families had lived in that small community together but instead was set a few years later, in a period contemporary with its composition, and would focus on the local repercussions of the Violencia. This was because the Violencia was dominating the thoughts of all Colombians, at home and abroad—he himself was once more an indirect victim of it—and his recent journalism, before leaving Bogotá, had brought his anti-government postures into sharp focus.
The town in García Márquez’s novel is based almost cinemato-graphically on Sucre. Indeed, the topographical details are so exact that the reader could almost draw a map of a place where all attention is focused on the river, the boardwalk, the main square and the houses which surround it. Sucre would be home to several brief, disturbing novels down the years: In Evil Hour, No One Writes to the Colonel and Chronicle of a Death Foretold. All would be direct expressions of its violent destiny.
It would be many years before anyone would even begin to focus on the identity of this small river town; indeed, most readers have continued to try to reconcile it vainly with the quite different descriptions and atmosphere of Macondo-Aracataca. In future years, in interviews, García Márquez himself would never refer to Sucre by name, just as he almost never mentioned his father; the two facts are surely inseparable. On one occasion he would comment, “It is a village in which there is no magic. That’s why my writing about it is always a journalistic sort of literature.”13 Yet the real Sucre, on which, so to speak, he makes his stand for critical realism—against his father and against Colombian Conservatism—and which inspires him to invent long-suffering characters reminiscent of those in De Sica’s Umberto D. or Bicycle Thieves—that real Sucre was not so very different, socially, from Aracataca; indeed, as his brothers and sisters almost unanimously attest, it is in some ways a much more exotic and romantic place. Magic, as always, is in the eye of the beholder. The difference is that when Gabito had lived in Sucre he was not experiencing it as a child between infancy and the age of ten, as he had experienced Aracataca; nor was he living with his beloved grandfather the Colonel, and in any case he never lived there fully because he was sent away to school—and although being sent away to school was a privilege, he had undoubtedly construed it at the time as yet another expulsion from the family. Besides, he had lived in Aracataca in the wake of a thrilling economic boom; the Sucre period saw the start of the Violencia.
When Leaf Storm was published just before he left Bogotá for Europe, García Márquez’s communist friends had commented that although the book was—of course—excellent, there was too much myth and poetry in it for their taste. García Márquez would confess both to Mario Vargas Llosa and to Plinio Mendoza—who at the time agreed with
the communist critique—that he had developed a guilt complex because Leaf Storm was a novel that didn’t “condemn or expose anything.”14 In other words, the book did not conform to communist conceptions of a socially committed literature which would denounce capitalist repression and envisage a better socialist future. Indeed, for most communists the novel form itself was a bourgeois vehicle: the cinema was the twentieth century’s only truly popular medium.
Although In Evil Hour is a political work intended as an “exposé,” García Márquez is still a subtle narrator and still uses an oblique approach to political and ideological critique: for example, he doesn’t even specify that the regime carrying out the repressive acts he describes is a Conservative government—though this would of course be obvious to any Colombian reader. And despite the fact that tens of thousands of people were being murdered every year by the police, the army and the paramilitary militias during the period in question, many of them in the most savage and sadistic fashion imaginable, there are only two deaths in this novel: one a civilian “honour crime” which anticipates the central incident in the later Chronicle of a Death Foretold, and the other a more predictably political crime carried out by the government—though at first sight more as a result of incompetence than design. In fact the novel’s intention is to demonstrate, without saying so overtly, that the entire structure of power depicted in the book must inevitably and repeatedly produce such repressive actions: to put it crudely, the Mayor has to kill some of his opponents if he is to survive.
This surprisingly dispassionate understanding of the nature of power takes the novelist far beyond the desire to moralize or engage in facile propaganda; naturally he deplores the Conservative mentality but he never plays to the gallery. In his autobiography García Márquez would state that the figure of the Mayor had been inspired by the policeman husband of his black lover “Nigromanta”; but he had previously given another explanation, recalled by Germán Vargas: “The Mayor in In Evil Hour has a basis in fact. He was from a town near Sucre. García Márquez has said he was a relative of his wife Mercedes. And that he was a real criminal. He wanted to kill Mercedes’s father and so he always carried a gun. Sometimes, to annoy her, García Márquez reminds her that this guy was from her family”15
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