The most important and unforgettable moment of García Márquez’s entire stay in Venezuela occurred at the end of the very first week. On 15 December, only days before he flew from London to Caracas, Pérez Jiménez had been confirmed in power by a popular plebiscite which had been scandalously rigged. On the afternoon of 1 January 1958, after preparing the end-of-year special number and taking part in rowdy New Year celebrations the previous night, García Márquez, Mendoza and Mendoza’s sisters planned to go to the beach, but as everyone gathered their towels and swimsuits García Márquez had one of the premonitions so common in his family and in his fiction, not to mention his own always unpredictable life. He told Plinio, “Shit, I have the feeling something’s about to happen.” He added darkly they should all look out for themselves. A few minutes later they were at the window watching bombers sweeping over the rooftops of the city and listening to the sound of machine-gun fire. Just then Soledad Mendoza, who had been delayed, arrived at the building and shouted the news up from the street: the air base in the city of Maracay had rebelled and was bombing the presidential palace of Miraflores. Everyone rushed up to the roof to watch the spectacle.4
The rebellion was put down but Caracas was thrown into turmoil. Three electric weeks of anxiety, conspiracy and repression followed. From 10 January, after years of terror and intimidation, crowds of demonstrators began to defy the police in protests across the capital city. One afternoon the two Colombians were out of the building when the National Security Police raided the Momento office, arrested all the staff present at the time, and took them to headquarters. The director was away in New York and Mendoza and García Márquez spent all day driving around the crisis-torn city in the white MG until curfew time, thereby avoiding arrest and gathering material. On 22 January the entire Venezuelan press stopped work as the prelude to a general strike called by a “Patriotic Junta” of democratic party leaders organizing from New York. That night tension reached its maximum. The two friends stayed up in the Mendozas’ apartment listening to the radio. At three in the morning they heard the engine of a plane climbing over the roofs of the city, and saw the lights of Pérez Jiménez’s aircraft taking him away into exile to Santo Domingo. The streets filled with joyful people celebrating the news and klaxons were still sounding at dawn.5
Just three days after Pérez Jiménez’s departure, García Márquez and Mendoza were waiting in the ante-room of the city’s Blanco Palace with a crowd of other journalists anxious to see what the military had decided during the night about the status of the newly declared governing junta. Suddenly the door opened and one of the soldiers inside, evidently on the losing side of the argument, backed out of the room with his machine gun at the ready, leaving muddy footprints on the floor as he retreated from the palace and into exile. García Márquez would later say: “It was in that instant, in the instant in which the soldier left the room where they were discussing how the new government would be formed, when I had the first intuition of power, the mystery of power.”6 A few days later he and Mendoza had a long conversation with the major-domo of the presidential palace of Miraflores, a man who had worked for fifty years for all of the presidents of Venezuela since the first days of the archetypal strongman and patriarch, Juan Vicente Gómez, who had run the country from 1908 to 1935, and had a blood-curdling reputation; yet the major-domo talked about him with particular reverence and unmistakable nostalgia. Until that time García Márquez had nurtured the usual democratic knee-jerk attitudes to dictators. But this encounter set him thinking. Why were large sections of the people attracted to these figures? Days later he told Mendoza that he was becoming drawn to the idea of writing a great novel about a dictator, exclaiming, “Haven’t you noticed, there still isn’t one?”7 Gómez would eventually be a central model, perhaps the central model, for The Autumn of the Patriarch.
Soon after these thought-provoking encounters García Márquez would read Thornton Wilder’s novel, The Ides of March, a re-creation of the last days of Julius Caesar. Reminded of his own recent vision of Stalin’s embalmed body in Moscow, he began to collect the details which would eventually make a dictator of his own come to life, fleshing out the obsessions with power and authority, impotence and solitude which had been haunting his imagination since childhood. Mendoza recalls that his tireless friend spent a lot of time in those days reading about Latin America’s seemingly interminable list of tyrants, and would regale him, as they lunched in a local restaurant, with picturesque and preferably hyperbolic details about their lives, gradually developing a profile of boys without fathers, men with an unhealthy dependence on their mothers and an immense lust for taking possession of the earth.8 (Gómez had the reputation of running Venezuela as if it were a large cattle ranch.) The elements of a new novel were fast falling into place, yet once again it would take many exasperating years before the project came to full fruition.
Still, in the present at least, García Márquez was in his element. He responded to the euphoria and the opportunities of the new environment as if he himself were a Venezuelan citizen and began to develop a more explicit rhetoric of human rights, justice and democracy. Many readers have judged his articles for Momento as among the best of his entire career. Where in Europe the first-person perspective had given credibility and immediacy to his reporting, he now progressed to a sense of almost impersonal detachment which only enhanced the clarity and even the underlying passion of his presentation.9
A bare two weeks after the fall of Pérez Jiménez, García Márquez wrote a well-researched political article entitled “The clergy’s participation in the struggle,”10 which explained the role of the Venezuelan Church as a whole and the courage of certain priests in particular, not least the Archbishop of Caracas himself, in contributing to the downfall of the dictator at a time when many democratic politicians had all but given up. He was well aware of the Church’s continuing influence in Latin American politics and referred several times in the article to its “social doctrine.” This was not only pragmatic but prescient because in October of that year John XXIII would become the new Pope at a time when the first portents of what would soon be known as “liberation theology” were in evidence in Latin America. His own friend from university days in Bogotá, Camilo Torres, would become the best-known priest in all the Latin American continent to be involved in guerrilla struggle based on the tenets of the new religious creed.
One day in March he was sitting drinking with Plinio Mendoza, José Font Castro and other friends in Caracas’s Gran Café when he looked at his watch and said, “Fuck it, I’m going to miss my plane.” Plinio asked him where he was going and García Márquez said, “To get married.” Font Castro recalls, “It surprised the lot of us because hardly anyone knew he even had a girlfriend.”11 It was more than twelve years since García Márquez had first asked Mercedes Barcha to marry him and more than sixteen years, according to him, since he had first decided she would be his wife. Now he had just turned thirty-one and she was twenty-five. They hardly knew one another, except through letters. Plinio Mendoza, on the other hand, did know about García Márquez’s affair with Tachia Quintana—who had even asked him by letter if she would be able to find work in Venezuela—and his sister Soledad had met the Spanish actress and struck up a firm friendship with her; indeed, she had asked García Márquez, shortly after his arrival in Caracas, how he could have given up such a woman. Mercedes would be moving into a world, her new husband’s world, about which she herself knew almost nothing—much less, indeed, than most of the people who would surround her. It would be years before she could feel completely confident in her position as the woman in the life of this apparently outgoing but also highly private and even secretive man.
The family in Colombia had not seen Gabito for almost three years and even before that they had hardly seen him more than once or twice since the end of 1951, when he returned to Barranquilla after briefly living with them in Cartagena. In fact things had gone rather badly in Cartagena for the García Márquez f
amily until quite recently and even now they remained difficult. However, the Colonel’s old house in Aracataca had finally been sold on 2 August 1957.12 The income from the rent had fallen to a trickle as the building slowly deteriorated and eventually the García Márquez family decided to sell it for 7,000 pesos to a poor peasant couple who had just won the regional lottery. It was this money that helped to complete a new house which Gabriel Eligio was now building in Pie de la Popa, Cartagena.
Luisa had been zealous about ensuring that Gabito got the best education possible—perhaps she had promised this to her father before he died—but gradually she had become worn down by her life as a mother of eleven and her initial concern for the education of the older girls seems to have been motivated more by a desire to keep them out of the clutches of the “local yokels” in Sucre than to help them towards an independent future. One result was that Aida, who had taught primary classes at a Salesian convent school in Cartagena after graduating from Santa Marta, had rather suddenly decided to become a nun and had left for Medellín a couple of years before Gabito returned in 1958. Gabriel Eligio and Luisa Santiaga had both opposed Aida’s decision at the time—just as they had disapproved of her relationship with Rafael Pérez, the boy who wanted to marry her in Sucre—but on this occasion to no avail. At any rate, the family was soon to pay a heavy price for Gabriel Eligio’s laissez-faire approach to education as Cuqui (Alfredo), now a teenager, began to go astray and fall victim to drugs, a problem which would eventually shorten his life.
Meanwhile Rita, the youngest sister, had become involved in a drama which risked turning into Romeo and Juliet. “The only lover I ever had was my husband, Alfonso Torres. I returned to Cartagena from Sincé in November 1953 and I met him in December at his sister’s, a neighbour of ours. That’s where the tragedy began because no one except Gustavo liked him.”13 She was fourteen when she met Alfonso. The family violently opposed the relationship. It didn’t help that Alfonso, though dashingly handsome, was decidedly dark-skinned. Rita and Alfonso met clandestinely for four years, against all odds; once she became so upset at the situation that she cut off all her hair in protest at the attitude of her parents, who would not even have the young man in the house. They never wanted any of their daughters to marry. (Like Aida, Margot had had her own Rafael in Sucre, Rafael Bueno; by the time she decided to defy her parents he had got another girl pregnant and Margot turned her back on love for ever.) It was now that Rita’s eldest brother Gabito, some of whose stories she had studied at school (she particularly remembers The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor), would come to her rescue.
García Márquez had taken a four-day leave from the magazine and flew to Barranquilla, where he stayed in the old Alhambra Hotel on 72 Street and Carrera 47. He arrived with an empty suitcase. “Clothes are very expensive in Caracas,” he said.14 Mercedes would later insist that he “just turned up” at her house but presumably he had contacted her some time before and this is just part of the long-term comic routine they have always put on when anyone asks them about their courtship and marriage. She told me that she would always vividly remember lying on her bed above the pharmacy and a sister shouting, “Gabito’s arrived.”15 But she still wouldn’t say whether she was excited or just surprised. That night Luis Enrique flew in from Ciénaga and he, Gabito, Fuenmayor and Vargas went on a kind of stag night pilgrimage to “The Cave.”
The couple were married on 21 March 1958 at eleven in the morning in the Perpetuo Socorro church on Avenida 20 de Julio after an engagement of just under three years.16 Almost all the “Cave” gang were in attendance. Alfonso Fuenmayor would recall that Gabito seemed dazed by the solemnity of the moment, thinner than ever in his dark grey suit, with his once-in-a-blue-moon tie carefully knotted. The bride arrived terrifyingly late in a startling full-length electric blue dress and veil. The reception was held in her father’s pharmacy down the road.17
Two days later the newly-weds travelled to Cartagena to visit Mercedes’s new in-laws. It must have been strange for Luisa to see her eldest son turn up married after so long away. Alfonso took the opportunity to arrange a meeting with his girlfriend’s eldest brother in the Miramar ice-cream parlour. The next morning, as Rita was leaving for school, Luisa said to her, “Gabito talked to Alfonso yesterday and today he’s going to talk to your father, so your situation will be decided today.” Rita later heard that her brother had said to his father, “It’s time for you to start selling the merchandise.” Alfonso was at last allowed into the house. Demonstrating his seriousness, he said he was prepared to wait another year until Rita had finished high school; demonstrating his lack of seriousness, Gabriel Eligio said he didn’t approve of long engagements and the couple should marry at once. The deed was done within three months, so Rita never did graduate from school. Instead she would have five children and then work in the local civil service to support her family for twenty-five years; and Alfonso Torres would gradually become the man of the García Márquez family in Cartagena.18
The youngest of the García Márquez children, Yiyo, recalled Gabito’s lightning visit forty years later: “He had just got married and had come to Cartagena with Mercedes for their honeymoon, or to say goodbye. Or both things, I don’t know. But I remember them perfectly: both sitting on the sofa in the lounge, in that big house in Pie de la Popa where I spent my adolescence, talking non-stop, and smoking. They smoked a lot: there in the lounge, in the kitchen, at the table and even in bed, where they each had their own ashtray and three packs of cigarettes. He was thin and so was she. Him, nervous, with his pencil moustache. Her, with her incredible resemblance to Sophia Loren.”19
Too soon for friends and family, the newly-weds flew off to Caracas, via Maracaibo. The little girl who, as a childhood friend later told me, had leaned against a wall in the afternoon sunlight in a patio in Sucre, saying, “Oh, I want to go round the world, live in big cities, move from one hotel to the other,” was on her way. There had been no reason to think such dreams would ever come true in a life like hers. As they sat talking on the plane Gabo told Mercedes some of his own dreams: that he would publish a novel called The House; that he would write another novel about a dictator; and that at the age of forty he would write the masterpiece of his life. She would later reflect: “Gabo was born with his eyes open … He has always got what he wanted. Even our marriage. When I was thirteen he said to his father, ‘I know who I’m going to marry.’ At that time we were just acquaintances.”20 Now she was married to this man she hardly knew.
This was a new García Márquez, transformed by the reality of marriage and new responsibilities, openly planning the future. It was not only that the new husband, naturally, was trying to impress his new bride; he was also initiating a new era, a new project; and even his beloved literature, his very own thing, would have to be part of the new equation. Instead of living just anyhow, literally from hand to mouth, everything would have to be planned and structured—including writing.
In Caracas the entire Mendoza family turned up at the airport, including the now ageing ex-Minister of Defence, Don Plinio Mendoza Neira, who had gradually come to recognize that his political aspirations in Colombia had evaporated with the passage of time. The Conservatives in Colombia had won the historic battle that had just been lost—apparently for good—in Venezuela.
Mercedes was overwhelmed by this noisy, outgoing, perhaps overconfident and even overbearing new family. The middle sister, Soledad, was no doubt comparing her implicitly, and probably negatively, with the cosmopolitan Tachia. Two decades later the youngest sister, Consuelo, would unwittingly reveal, in an article for a posh Bogotá magazine, just why Mercedes felt so uncomfortable. Recalling her arrival all those years before, Consuelo would write: “She is a woman with the classic build of the women of the Coast: slim but wide-boned, dark-skinned, taller rather than shorter, slanting eyes, a full-lipped smile, serious and mocking at one and the same time. When Mercedes Barcha travelled abroad for the first time and arrived in Caracas, she seemed a timi
d, quite ordinary person, with narrow skirts, somewhat larger than was the fashion, and short hair, with a permanent wave that did her no favours.”21 In short: of possibly African origins, unfashionable and undistinguished. Unsurprisingly Mercedes would later tell me that she had spent “too much time” with the Mendozas in Caracas, time which was “not to my taste, far from enjoyable—to be honest, I wanted out of the Mendoza family.” But at the start she had to eat with them almost every day. García Márquez had organized a small apartment in Edificio Roraima, San Bernardino, with almost no furniture or household goods.22 It would be the newly married couple’s story for years. And according to Mario Vargas Llosa, chortling at the idea more than thirty years later as he related the story to me, Plinio Mendoza was never out of the García Barcha household even during the honeymoon period.23 Mendoza’s own memoir The Ice and the Flame implicitly confirms the story. One might imagine that this would ensure discretion but Plinio has told the world about Mercedes’s first disastrous efforts at cooking—Mercedes herself admits she could not even cook an egg and that Gabo had to teach her how to do it24—and the fact that she never said a word after her arrival in Caracas: “Three days after I met Mercedes I told my sisters, ‘Gabo’s married to a mute.’”25
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