Gabriel García Márquez

by Gerald Martin

  Mercedes says she had no problem communicating with her husband, however. When I asked her in 1991 what she thought had clinched their relationship, she said: “It’s a question of the effect of skin on skin, don’t you think? Without that, there’s nothing.”26 But that was just the start; soon she would get right under his skin but in a way quite different from all those years of frustration before he really knew her; she would become indispensable to a man who thought of himself as absolutely self-reliant, a man who had not been able to count on anyone since his grandfather died when he was ten years old. She would bring coolness and method to his life. Gradually, as her confidence grew—or, rather, as she found a way to give her inner confidence outward expression—she began to impose her now legendary sense of order on García Márquez’s much-cultivated chaos. She sorted out his articles and press clippings; his documents, stories, the typescripts of “The House” and No One Writes to the Colonel.

  In fact before the wedding García Márquez had been working feverishly on his literary activities despite the intense period of political and journalistic activity since his arrival in Caracas. He wrote “Tuesday Siesta,” his fourth Macondo story, almost at one sitting, after Mendoza suggested that his friend enter a short story competition organized by the newspaper EI Nacional and funded by Miguel Otero Silva. García Márquez’s story, written, according to Plinio, during Easter week 1958 (if his friend was telling him the truth; again, there may already have been a first version which Plinio had not seen), was based on an event he had remembered since he was a child, when he heard the shout, “Here comes the mother of that thief,” and saw a poor woman go by the Colonel’s house in Aracataca.27 The short story narrates the experience of just such a woman and her daughter arriving in Macondo by train and obliged to walk through the streets under the hostile gaze of the townsfolk in order to visit the cemetery where her son is buried, having been shot dead while attempting a robbery. Although one of the few stories set in Aracataca-Macondo, its style operates strictly within the neo-realist aesthetic characteristic of this period of García Márquez’s life. He has often said that he considers it his best story and also, intriguingly, “the most intimate”—presumably because the memory from his childhood became fused, magically, with that of his own return, with his mother, walking through the midday heat of Aracataca in 1950.28 For all its merits, it was not awarded the prize.

  In terms of inspiration, of course, this and the other Macondo-Aracataca stories draw on the author’s memories, many of them nostalgic, from his “prodigious” childhood, whereas the stories set in “the town” (Sucre) exorcise the memories of his painful adolescence. But whether set in Macondo or in “the town,” these stories focus not on the cold-hearted authorities who run the two communities—though the priests of Macondo are never as cold-hearted as the priest we find in “the town,” and the same goes for the other authorities (Macondo doesn’t even seem to have a mayor)—but on the ordinary people, in close-up, and in warm colour, trying with great difficulty to live their lives with as much courage, decency, dignity and honour as their always adverse circumstances will allow. If this sounds sentimental and unlikely to be “realistic,” well, it is the genius of this writer that he manages to convince the most sceptical readers of his view of the matter.

  As fate would have it, García Márquez would be able to spend the second half of May and all of June on his stories. Because once again, as in 1948 and 1956, an unwelcome ill wind would bring good luck as far as literature was concerned. United States Republican Vice-President Richard Nixon arrived in Venezuela on a catastrophic goodwill visit on 13 May, less than four months after the fall of Pérez Jiménez, whom his boss President Eisenhower had recently decorated as a friend of the United States. Nixon’s car was besieged on the way from the airport, stoned, and spat on, and he could easily have lost his life. The event received worldwide coverage and was taken as a historic sign of how low relations between the United States and Latin America had sunk. Heart-searching about this humiliating rebuff would have a lot to do with the founding of the Alliance for Progress three years later. Like other newspaper owners Ramírez MacGregor decided to write an exceptional editorial lamenting Nixon’s reception and effectively apologizing for the incident. Mendoza found himself involved in a bitter argument about the incident, shrieked at the proprietor “Eat shit!,” resigned on the spot and walked out. On the way down the stairs he met García Márquez, arriving late at the office. He explained what had happened and García Márquez turned around and went back down the stairs with him. They were out of a job.29

  The two unemployed journalists went back to San Bernardino, picked up Mercedes, and went for a drink and a meal, half postmortem, half celebration, in El Rincón de Baviera, a local restaurant. Mercedes, who would prove to have both a phlegmatic disposition and a black sense of humour, roared with laughter as they told her how and why they had been sacked. The spare time allowed García Márquez both to extend his honeymoon and to go on with his short stories. So the newly-weds were able to spend more time together.30

  She had brought her huge collection of letters from Gabo to Caracas with her. There were 650 sheets. After a few weeks he asked her to destroy them because, according to her recollection, “someone might get hold of them.” His own version was that whenever they had a disagreement about something she would say, “You can’t say that because in your letter from Paris you said you’d never do such a thing.” When she proved reluctant—given their characters, this must have been a cagey and difficult discussion—he offered to buy them from her and they eventually settled on the symbolic sum of 100 bolívares, after which she destroyed them all.31 The incident is interesting—if it is true (and even if it is not, come to that). First and foremost, it suggests that he was implicitly guaranteeing to remain married to her for the rest of her life; there would never be a “Gabito” period for her to look back on because there would never be a distance between them which might make sense of a nostalgic moment looking through old correspondence. Secondly, perhaps, the letters were for him, secretly, a memorial to a time when he had indeed forsaken her, during the affair with Tachia and the fling with “La Puppa”; no doubt his conscience demanded that the evidence be destroyed (possibly because he was not ruling out making contact again with Tachia, whom he had met two years to the day before he married Mercedes). Finally, however unlikely it may seem at first sight, it could also suggest that the young man who had boasted on the plane of his future exploits really was expecting to be famous and had the instinct from the start that he should destroy all his lifetime’s evidence in advance and construct his own image for future students, critics and biographers, ready-made. Whatever the truth, the gesture fits in any case with a profound instinct in García Márquez not to hold on to the past, nor to collect souvenirs or mementoes—even of his novels.

  Plinio Mendoza got himself rehired by Elite, the top news magazine in the country. There García Márquez would meet one of his most important Venezuelan contacts for the future, Simón Alberto Consalvi, who would later be Foreign Minister of the republic. Mendoza managed to find García Márquez himself another job in the same organization through Miguel Angel Capriles, owner of the Capriles group, one of Latin America’s most powerful newspaper corporations. Thus on 27 June García Márquez became editor in chief of the most frivolous of the Capriles magazines, Venezuela Gráfica, popularly known as “Venezuela Pornográfica” because of the large number of scantily dressed “vedettes” for which it was renowned.32 He had just written an important article on the execution of Hungarian ex-President Nagy for Elite (28 June 1958) but he wrote little for his new magazine.

  The good news from Colombia was the unexpected publication of No One Writes to the Colonel in Bogotá in the June edition of Mito, a literary review which had previously published a García Márquez story called “Monologue of Isabel Watching It Rain in Macondo” just after he left for Europe in 1955. He had given Germán Vargas a copy of the novel and Vargas had
passed it on, “without my knowledge,” so García Márquez would say, to the editor Gaitán Durán.33 The publication of No One Writes to the Colonel in a literary magazine meant that once again a novel of his had appeared almost clandestinely and would be read by no more than a few hundred people. Better than nothing, he must have thought in those days when best-sellerdom was quite outside his expectations.

  Once again, however, another sort of politics was about to intervene to make a radical change in his destiny. Ever since Nicolás Guillén had told him in Paris in early 1956 that a young lawyer called Castro, the leader of the 26 July movement, was the only hope for Cuba, García Márquez had been following the man’s exploits, including his preparations in Mexico, the epic though almost disastrous voyage to Cuba in the motor cruiser Granma and the guerrilla war in Cuba’s Sierra Maestra. Castro had quickly become the object of another of García Márquez’s intuitions. Venezuela was feeling its way anxiously towards a new democratic order through a process which García Márquez would never forget but Venezuela was not his country and things had become less absorbing for him as time went on; in any case his ability to participate through his writing—reporting, editorials—had again been taken away from him. But Cuba, since Castro’s political struggle had unmistakable continental implications, not to say ambitions, might indeed become García Márquez’s country.

  He had interviewed Castro’s sister Emma in Caracas in “My Brother Fidel” (“Mi hermano Fidel”), a report published in Momento on 18 April 1958, and he had followed events in Cuba with mounting excitement throughout the year. Although Castro had not yet declared his movement a socialist one, García Márquez had found himself able, for the very first time in his now long career as a journalist, to demonstrate an unrestrained enthusiasm for a politician and an evident optimism about his revolutionary crusade. He mentioned that Castro’s favourite food, which he cooked expertly himself, was spaghetti, and then noted: “In the Sierra Maestra Fidel is still doing spaghetti. ‘He’s a good man, a simple man,’ says his sister. ‘He’s a good conversationalist but, above all, a good listener.’ She says he can listen for hours, with the same interest, to any kind of conversation. That concern for the problems of his fellow men, added to an unbreakable will, seems to be the essence of his personality.”34 Forty-five years later García Márquez would be saying almost exactly the same thing—not to mention eating spaghetti cooked by Castro in Castro’s own kitchen—and little wonder: Fidel Castro was one of the few things in which he was ever able to believe. And the discovery, now, that Castro had been involved in the Bogotazo gave an extra twist of biographical coincidence to García Márquez’s interest in the young Cuban’s epic adventure. Indeed, after his favourable interview with Emma Castro, members of Castro’s 26 July movement in Caracas would begin to feed García Márquez information which he in turn would feed into the magazines he worked for.

  On New Year’s Eve 1958, García Márquez and Mercedes had been at a New Year party hosted by one of the Capriles family. When they got back to their building at three in the morning the elevator was out of service. Because they had both had a lot to drink they sat down to rest on each landing as they climbed the stairs to the sixth floor. When they finally opened the door to their apartment they heard pandemonium breaking out across the city, people cheering, car horns sounding, church bells ringing and factory sirens wailing. Another revolution in Venezuela? They had no radio in the apartment and had to run back down the six flights of stairs to find out what was going on. The concierge, a Portuguese woman, told them that it was not Venezuela: Batista had fallen in Cuba!35 Later that day, 1 January 1959, Fidel Castro led his guerrilla army into Havana and opened a new era in Latin American history. And for the very first time since the discovery, the whole planet would be touched directly by political events in Latin America. Perhaps the continent’s time of solitude and failure was at an end, García Márquez may have speculated. Later that day he and Plinio Mendoza would celebrate the news together over a large number of cold beers on the balcony of the Mendoza family apartment in Bello Monte, as cars drove around the Caracas freeway system with their klaxons blaring and Cuban flags waving out of the windows. Over the next two weeks the two friends would follow every last detail through press cables in their respective offices.

  On 18 January 1959 García Márquez was tidying his desk in the Venezuela Gráfica office prior to leaving for home when a Cuban revolutionary arrived and said a plane was waiting at Maiquetía Airport to take interested journalists to the island to observe the public trial of Batista criminals, called “Operation Truth” (“Operación Verdad”). Was he interested? The decision had to be made on the spot because the plane was leaving later that evening and there was no time even to go home. Mercedes in any case had returned to Barranquilla for a brief vacation with her family. García Márquez called Plinio Mendoza—“Put two shirts in a suitcase and get down to the airport: Fidel’s invited us to Cuba!”—and the two of them set off that same night, García Márquez in the clothes he stood in and without a passport, in a twin-engined plane captured from Batista’s army which gave off “an unbearable smell of rancid urine.”36 As they climbed aboard, with press and television cameras recording the entire event, García Márquez was horrified to see that the man at the controls was a well-known radio presenter, a Cuban exile whom no one knew as a pilot. Then he heard him complaining to the airline company that the plane was overloaded, with people and luggage piled high in the aisle. García Márquez asked the pilot in a quavering voice if he thought they could make it and the pilot told him to put his trust in the Virgin. The plane took off in a tropical storm and had to make an emergency stopover in Camagüey in the middle of the night.

  They arrived in Havana on the morning of the 19th, three days after Fidel Castro became premier, and were plunged at once into the excitement, confusion and drama of the new revolution. Everywhere there were red flags, bearded guerrillas with rifles on their shoulders mingling with dreamy-eyed peasants wearing straw hats, and an unforgettable euphoria. One of the first things the two friends noticed was pilots from Batista’s air force who were letting their beards grow to show that they were now revolutionaries. In no time at all García Márquez found himself in the national palace, where, he recalls, there was absolute chaos—revolutionaries, counter-revolutionaries and foreign journalists all intermingled. Mendoza would remember that as they filed in to the press room he saw Camilo Cienfuegos and Che Guevara talking and he clearly heard Cienfuegos saying, “We ought to shoot all those sons of bitches.”37 Minutes later García Márquez was interviewing the legendary Spanish General Alberto Bayo when he heard the sound of a helicopter overhead as Castro flew in to explain “Operation Truth” to a crowd of a million people gathered along the Avenida de las Misiones in front of the building.38 García Márquez interrupted his interview as Castro entered the vast room and was only three people away from him when the new leader prepared to speak. As he started, García Márquez felt a pistol in his back; the presidential guard had mistaken him for an infiltrator. Fortunately he was able to explain himself.

  The next day the two Colombians went to Sports City (Ciudad Deportiva) to witness the trial of the Batista supporters accused of war crimes, and they stayed there all day and all night. The purpose of “Operation Truth” was to show the world that the revolution was trying and executing only war criminals, not all “Batista supporters,” as sections of the press in the United States were already alleging. García Márquez and Mendoza attended the trial of Colonel Jesús Sosa Blanco, one of the most notorious members of Batista’s armed forces, charged with murdering unarmed peasants. There was a kind of boxing ring in the stadium, illuminated by floodlights, in which the accused stood in handcuffs. The two Colombians found themselves in the front row, as the crowd, eating improvised meals and drinking beer, bayed for blood and Sosa Blanco, with a mixture of contempt, cynicism and terror, tried to defend himself. When Sosa was finally found guilty, Plinio Mendoza found himself handing the
microphone to the condemned man so he could respond to the verdict; but Sosa refused all comment. García Márquez later said that this event changed his idea of The Autumn of the Patriarch, which he now conceived as the trial of a recently overthrown dictator, to be narrated through monologues around a corpse. Both he and Mendoza declined to accompany other journalists to see the condemned man in his cell that evening. The next morning the wife and twelve-year-old twin daughters of Sosa Blanco went to the hotel to plead with the foreign journalists to sign a petition asking for clemency, which all of them did. The mother had given the daughters drugs the previous evening to keep them awake, “so they’ll remember this night for the rest of their lives.”39 García Márquez seems to have signed more out of sympathy for the family and lifelong opposition to the death penalty than out of a concern for the justice of the proceedings. The trial had indeed been a “circus,” as Sosa Blanco protested, but hardly a Roman one. His guilt was not in doubt, and many years later both García Márquez and Mendoza would say that they believed, despite the irregularities, that the sentence was a just one.40

  Three days later the two friends flew back to Caracas. Plinio Mendoza, already exasperated by what he saw as growing xenophobia in Venezuela, decided to return to Bogotá. He left at the end of February and began to work freelance for magazines such as Cromos and La Calle while he waited for news from Cuba. The utopian euphoria had convinced Mendoza, always more impressionable and impulsive than his older friend, that he should work in some way for the new revolution which both men saw as a phenomenon of continental dimensions and importance. García Márquez himself had already made it plain to contacts in Cuba that he too might be prepared to work for the new regime. If they could find him something useful to do.