Gabriel García Márquez

by Gerald Martin

  He had survived the winter. He was not the father of a baby. He had not been trapped by a European Circe. Mercedes was still waiting for him in Colombia. One bright day early in 1957 he caught sight of his idol Ernest Hemingway walking with his wife Mary Welsh down the Boulevard Saint-Michel in the direction of the Jardin du Luxembourg; he was wearing old jeans, a lumberjack’s shirt and a baseball cap. García Márquez, too timid to approach him, too excited not to do something, called from the other side of the road: “Maestro!” The great writer, whose novel about an old man, the sea and a big fish had partly inspired the younger man’s recently completed novel about an old man, a government pension and a fighting cock, raised his hand and shouted back, “in a slightly puerile voice”: “Adios, amigo!”35

  11

  Beyond the Iron Curtain:

  Eastern Europe During the

  Cold War

  1957

  IN EARLY MAY 1957 Plinio Mendoza returned to Paris with his sister Soledad to find his friend thinner, wirier and more stoical. “His pullover had holes at the elbows, the soles of his shoes let in water as he walked the streets and the cheekbones in his ferocious Arab’s face protruded starkly.”1 But he was impressed by his friend’s progress with the French language and how well he knew his way around the city and its problems. On 11 May they were together drinking at the famous café, Les Deux Magots, when they heard that Rojas Pinilla had been overthrown and had gone into exile, just ten days after he had been condemned by the Colombian Catholic Church. A five-man military junta had taken over and neither of the two friends was optimistic about what might follow.

  Both García Márquez and Mendoza had leftist affiliations and illusions and were keen to visit Eastern Europe, especially in view of conflicting reports during the previous year which had begun with Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin and ended with the furore over the Soviet invasion of Hungary. They decided to begin with Leipzig, where Luis Villar Borda had been living in exile for a year on a student grant. Mendoza, who had been in work, bought a second-hand Renault 4 for the summer and on 18 June drove the vivacious Soledad and the downbeat García Márquez off along the great German auto-bahns at 65 mph, taking in Heidelberg and Frankfurt.2 From Frankfurt they drove in to East Germany. García Márquez’s first article about this other Germany—once again he would have to wait a long time to see it published—declared that the Iron Curtain was actually a red and white roadblock made of wood. The three friends were shocked by conditions at the border and by the scruffy uniforms and general ignorance of the border guards, who, perhaps unsurprisingly, did not find it easy to write down the name of García Márquez’s birthplace. Soledad Mendoza then drove them off by night towards Weimar. At breakfast they stopped at a state restaurant and were again dismayed by what they saw. Mendoza remembers that before they went in García Márquez, stretching and yawning as he got out of the car, said to him, “Listen, Maestro, we’ve got to find out about all this.” “About what?” “About socialism.” García Márquez recalled that venturing into that unattractive eatery was like “crashing headlong into a reality for which I was not prepared.”3 Around a hundred Germans sat there eating breakfasts of ham and eggs fit for kings and queens, though they themselves, defeated and embittered, looked like humiliated beggars. Later that night the three Colombians arrived in Weimar, from where they visited the nearby Buchenwald concentration camp early the next morning. García Márquez, much later, noted that he never did manage to reconcile the reality of the death camps with the character of the Germans, “as hospitable as the Spaniards and as generous as the Soviets.”4

  The three friends drove on to Leipzig. Leipzig reminded García Márquez of the southern districts of Bogotá, which was not the highest of recommendations. Everything in Leipzig was shabby and depressing and he reflected, “We, in our blue jeans and shirt-sleeves, still covered in dust from the highway, were the only sign of popular democracy.”5 At this point he was not clear whether to blame socialism itself or the Russian occupation.

  García Márquez would state in the article he wrote about it that he and “Franco” (Plinio Mendoza) had “forgotten” that Leipzig was the site of the Marx-Lenin University, where they were able to meet “South American students” and discuss the situation more concretely6 This was in fact the very reason they had chosen the city: it was the home of Villar Borda, whom García Márquez disguised in his report as a Chilean communist called “Sergio,” thirty-two years of age, exiled from his country two years before and studying political economy. Villar Borda was indeed living in exile—from Colombia, of course—having been closely involved with the Communist Youth in Bogotá, and had managed to obtain a grant to study in the East German city.7 He had visited García Márquez at Tachia’s room on Rue d’Assas when he had returned to Paris to renew his visa and “actually existing socialism” was one of their principal topics of conversation. “Gabo and I,” Villar Borda told me in 1998, “thought much the same about the communist system and wanted much the same thing: a humanitarian and democratic socialism.” García Márquez would spend a great deal of his life surrounded by fellow travellers, communists and—more often—ex-communists. Among the latter there would be regretful ex-communists, who stayed on the left, and resentful ex-communists, many of whom moved sharply to the right. García Márquez would reluctantly conclude that democratic socialism was preferable, at least in pragmatic terms, to communism.8

  Villar Borda took the friends out to a state cabaret which had all the appearance of a brothel, with taximeters on the doors of the toilets, much heavy drinking and couples involved in low-level sexual activity. García Márquez wrote: “It wasn’t a brothel. Because prostitution is prohibited and severely punished in the socialist countries. It was a State establishment. But from the social point of view it was something worse than a brothel.”9 He and Mendoza decided they should do their chasing of women in the streets. The Latin American students whom they met, even the committed communists, insisted that the system imposed on East Germany was not socialism; Hitler had exterminated all the real communists and the local leaders were bureaucratic lackeys imposing a so-called revolution “brought from the Soviet Union in a trunk” without consulting the people. García Márquez commented: “I believe that at bottom there is an absolute loss of human sensitivity. Concern for the masses makes the individual invisible. And this, which is valid with respect to the Germans, is also valid with respect to the Russian soldiers. In Weimar people objected to the railway station being guarded by a Russian soldier with a machine gun. But no one cared about the poor soldier.” García Márquez and Mendoza asked Villar Borda to put them out of their misery by finding some dialectical explanation for the state of East Germany. Villar Borda, a committed socialist all his life, began a spiel and then paused and said, “It’s a heap of shit.”

  All in all, García Márquez’s reaction to East Germany was almost entirely negative. He had mixed emotions during his time in West Berlin, where the Americans were demolishing and rebuilding with even greater enthusiasm than usual in an effort to make the Soviet bloc look bad:

  My first contact with that gigantic capitalist operation within the domain of socialism left me with a feeling of emptiness … Out of that rowdy surgical operation something is beginning to emerge which is the exact opposite of Europe. A shining, antiseptic city where things have the unfortunate effect of seeming too new … West Berlin is an enormous capitalist propaganda agency.10

  Ironically, the propaganda worked very effectively on him and on his descriptions of East Berlin, which carry with them a grim disenchantment: “By night, instead of the advertising slogans that flood West Berlin with colour, only the red star shines on the eastern side. The merit of that sombre city is that it does correspond to the economic reality of the country. Except for Stalin Avenue.”11 Stalin Avenue, built on a monumental scale, was unfortunately also built with monumental vulgarity. García Márquez predicted that in “fifty or a hundred years,” when one or other of the regimes had
prevailed, Berlin would again be one vast city, “a monstrous commercial fair built out of the free samples offered by both systems.”12 Given the political tension and the competition between East and West, he concluded that Berlin was a panicky, unpredictable and indecipherable human space where nothing was what it seemed, where everything was manipulated, everyone was involved in daily deceptions and no one had a clear conscience.

  After a few days in Berlin the friends went back to Paris, as fast as they could. Soledad Mendoza went on to Spain, and the two men wondered what to do next.13 Perhaps their impressions were too hasty; perhaps things were better in other countries. Within a few weeks friends in Leipzig and Berlin scheduled to travel to the 6th World Youth Congress in Moscow suggested that García Márquez and Mendoza should go too. Earlier, in Rome, García Márquez had tried to obtain a visa for Moscow but was refused four times because he had no official sponsorship. But in Paris, by an extraordinary stroke of good fortune, he now connected again with his talisman, Manuel Zapata Olivella. Zapata was accompanying his sister Delia, an expert in and practitioner of Colombian folklore, who was taking a troupe of mainly black Colombians from Palenque and Mapalé to the Moscow Festival.14 García Márquez was a reasonably convincing singer, guitarist and drummer, and he and Mendoza signed up, then travelled to Berlin to meet the rest of the party. There they would be joined by other Colombians bound for the festival, including Hernán Vieco and Luis Villar Borda.

  Until the very last minute García Márquez was unsure whether he would be able to go. He sent a melodramatic letter to Madrid to inform Tachia, with whom he was perhaps surprisingly back in contact, that Soledad Mendoza would be flying there in a few days and announcing that he himself would be leaving either for Moscow “before midnight today” or for London, where he would continue working on his unfinished novel (In Evil Hour) prior to returning to Colombia. He would be meeting Soledad in the Café Mabillon later that day. (The reference to the Mabillon, where they had first talked, was no doubt intended, like most of the apparently insouciant letter, to wound his ex-lover.) As for No One Writes to the Colonel, which was their book: “I’ve lost interest in it, now that the character is up and walking on his own. He can speak now and eats dirt.” In fact he could afford to lose interest in it because the book was finished. He said that he saw Tachia’s youngest sister Paz quite often and made a suggestive remark about his relationship with all three Quintana sisters. Finally, after saying that he was delighted to be leaving “this sad and lonely city,” he lectured her with evident (or feigned) bitterness: “All I hope is that you will realize that life is hard and it always, always, always will be. One day maybe you’ll stop inventing theories about love and realize that when a man seduces you, you have to do something to seduce him in return, instead of demanding every day that he love you more. Marxism has a name for this but I don’t remember it just now.”15

  Berlin to Prague involved a nightmare train journey lasting thirty hours in which García Márquez, Mendoza and the latter’s Colombian friend Pablo Solano had to sleep standing outside a toilet with their heads resting on each other’s shoulders. They then had twenty-four hours in Prague to recover and García Márquez was able to rapidly update his impressions from two years before. The next stretch was easier, to Bratislava, then through Chop, situated where Slovakia, Hungary and the Ukraine all meet; then towards Kiev and on to Moscow.16 He was staggered at the sheer size of the vast Tolstoyan country: on the second day in the Soviet Union they had still not passed through the Ukraine.17 All along the route ordinary Ukrainians and Russians threw flowers at the train and offered gifts whenever it stopped. Most had hardly seen foreigners in the previous half century. García Márquez talked to Spaniards, evacuated as children during the civil war, who had tried to return to Spain, given the difficulties in the USSR, but were now on their way back to Moscow. One of them “could not understand how anyone could live under the Franco regime; he did understand, on the other hand, how people could live under Stalin.” García Márquez was disappointed to note, however, that Radio Moscow was the only channel on the train’s wireless system. After almost three days of travel they reached Moscow in the morning, around 10 July, just a week after the fall of Molotov following his defeat by Khrushchev.18 García Márquez’s first and lasting impression of Moscow was that it was “the largest village in the world” and now 92,000 visitors, almost 50,000 of them foreign, had arrived there for the festival. Many of them were Latin Americans, some already famous like Pablo Neruda, but others younger men who would later have a big impact on their countries, such as Carlos Fonseca, eventual leader of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, or, indeed, Gabriel García Márquez. The organization of the festival functioned like clockwork and García Márquez wondered, as so many had before and after him, how the Soviet regime could put on such an event or, three months later, send a Sputnik into orbit, yet fail so spectacularly to give its people a reasonable standard of living or produce moderately attractive clothes and other consumer goods.19

  García Márquez, Mendoza and their new companions dropped out of the Youth Festival almost immediately and spent two weeks exploring Moscow and Stalingrad. There is a picture of a group of friends in Red Square in which, as so often, the wafer-thin García Márquez, kneeling in front of the others, stands out from even a dim 1950s black and white photograph as the one brimming with vitality and barely containing a desire to jump up and get on with the action the second he hears the shutter click. He confessed in his article about that time that in two weeks, with no knowledge of Russian, “I couldn’t come to any definitive conclusions.”20 Moscow was all dressed up and on its best behaviour and García Márquez commented, “I didn’t want to know a Soviet Union with its hair done up to receive a visitor. Countries are like women, you need to know them when they’ve just got up.” So he tried provoking his hosts (“Was Stalin a criminal?”), eventually resorting to asking whether there were no dogs in Moscow because they’d all been eaten, and was told that this was a “capitalist press slander.”21 The most illuminating conversation was with an old woman who was the only person in Moscow who dared to talk to him about Stalin, even though Stalin had supposedly been discredited by Khrushchev in February 1956. She said that she was not anti-communist in principle but that Stalin’s regime had been monstrous and that he was “the most bloodthirsty, sinister and ambitious figure in the entire history of Russia”—in short, she told García Márquez things in 1957 which would take many years to emerge into the full light of day. He concluded, “There was no reason to think that woman was mad except for the lamentable fact that she seemed it.”22 In other words, he already suspected it was all true but had no evidence and no wish to believe it.

  García Márquez made several attempts to see the tombs of Stalin and Lenin and finally gained admittance on the ninth day. He said that the Soviets had banned Kafka as a “pernicious metaphysician” but that he could have been “Stalin’s best biographer.” Most people in the USSR had never laid eyes on their leader. Although not a leaf on any tree had been able to move without his permission, some people doubted his very existence. Thus only Kafka’s books had prepared García Márquez for the almost incredible bureaucracy of the Soviet system, including obtaining permission to visit Stalin’s tomb. When he finally got in he was astonished that there was no smell; he was disappointed by Lenin, “a wax dummy”; and surprised to find Stalin himself “submerged in a sleep without remorse.” Stalin indeed resembled his own propaganda:

  He has a human expression, alive, a smirk that doesn’t seem to be a mere muscular contraction but the reflection of an emotion. There is a slight sneer in that expression. Apart from his double chin, it doesn’t correspond to the person. He doesn’t look like a fool. He’s a man of calm intelligence, a good friend, with a definite sense of humour … Nothing impressed me as much as the delicacy of his hands, with their thin transparent nails. They are the hands of a woman.23

  Later Plinio Mendoza would say he believed that in that very mo
ment the first spark of The Autumn of the Patriarch was ignited.24 This subtle presentation of Stalin’s embalmed corpse was, in a sense, an implicit explanation of how Stalin had managed to deceive the world as to his real methods and motives—through the image of “Uncle Joe.”25

  Unlike most foreign visitors García Márquez felt that the money wasted on the Moscow metro would have been better spent on improving the lives of the people. He was disappointed to find that free love was now just a doubtful memory in a surprisingly prudish country. He noted with disapproval that the avant-garde film director Eisenstein was almost unknown in his own country, but he approved of the attempt by Hungarian philosopher Gyorgy Lukács to overhaul Marxist aesthetics, the gradual rehabilitation of Dostoyevsky and the tolerance of jazz (though not rock’n’roll).26 He was surprised to note that there was no sign of any hatred whatever of the United States—a sharp contrast with Latin America—and was particularly struck by the fact that the USSR was constantly having to invent things already existing in the West. He tried hard to understand why things were as they were but evidently sympathized with the reaction of a young student who, when upbraided by a visiting French communist, retorted, “You only have one life.” He thought the director of the collective farm he visited was like “a socialized feudal lord.” He stayed on after most of the other delegates to try to understand the extraordinary complexity of the Soviet experience—“a complexity that cannot be reduced to the simplistic formulas of either capitalist or communist propaganda.”27 Because of this extended stay he was alone when he crossed the border and a Soviet interpreter who looked like the actor Charles Laughton said to him: “We thought all the delegates had gone by. But if you like we’ll fetch the children out to throw flowers again, all right?”28