Gabriel García Márquez

by Gerald Martin

  The U.S. press was talking ever more grimly of a “bloodbath” in Havana, with wholesale executions of any and all “Batista supporters” who could be rounded up, whereas the new revolutionary government continued to insist that it was simply trying and executing proven war criminals. García Márquez and Mendoza were persuaded of the justice of the Cuban cause, and convinced of the iniquity of the reactions of the United States’s government and media. An Argentinian journalist, Jorge Ricardo Masetti, interviewed during the events at Sports City, had declared that the U.S. coverage of events in Cuba “demonstrates yet again the need for a Latin American press agency to defend the interests of the Latin American people.”41 This concern to present the news from a Latin American perspective was already an obsession of García Márquez’s. Eventually, the new government invited Masetti himself to set up the kind of press agency he had recommended, in Havana; it was to be called Latin Press (Prensa Latina, or, familiarly, Prela). As soon as the creation of this indispensable revolutionary vehicle was agreed, Masetti would start looking for workers and contributors from every country in the continent, and opening offices in all the major Latin American capitals.

  • • •

  IN APRIL, shortly after Castro had made an eleven-day visit to Washington and New York in which he had been snubbed by the U.S. government, a Mexican called Armando Suárez arrived in Bogotá, the worse for drink, with a suitcase full of banknotes. After talking to Guillermo Angulo, now back in Bogotá, he proposed that Plinio Mendoza and García Márquez should open the new Prensa Latina office planned for the city. Mendoza accepted at once and said that his friend García Márquez, who was still in Venezuela, a brilliant journalist and an ardent supporter of the revolution, was only waiting for the word. “Send for him right now!” was the immediate response.42 The revolution was being made up as it went along. García Márquez would later say, “It was all word of mouth, no cheques and no receipts; that was the Revolution in those days.”43 Days later the Royal Bank of Canada notified Mendoza that 10,000 dollars had arrived in his name. He cabled García Márquez and told him to catch the next plane.

  When push came to shove García Márquez’s desire to work for Cuba overcame his reluctance to return to Bogotá. Venezuela’s political advance, for all its problems and hesitations, had profoundly impressed him. But Cuba was going a step—several steps—further. García Márquez and Mercedes arrived in Bogotá in early May, still not knowing exactly what for, according to Mendoza’s version, and Gabo celebrated the news as Mendoza drove them from the airport: “Cuba! Brilliant!”44 It was his first opportunity in twelve years as a journalist to do exactly the kind of work he wanted, with no censorship and no compromises—or so he thought. The new Prensa Latina office was on 7th Carrera—Séptima: just that must have felt like revolution!—between 17th and 18th streets, opposite the Café Tampa, and in fact quite close to the boarding house in which he had stayed on first arrival in Bogotá fifteen years before, on his way to Zipaquirá.45 Bogotá was no longer just the impregnable stronghold of the cachacos in García Márquez’s eyes: now it was the city where Fidel Castro had learned important revolutionary lessons back in April 1948 and where he and Plinio were going to spread the revolution. He started work at once. There was much to learn and much to improvise. Before long the office on 7th Carrera became a meeting place for the Colombian left. Its staffers, who included Mercedes’s brother Eduardo, were in at the very beginning of the most turbulent, passionate and—ultimately—tragic period in Latin America’s twentieth-century history. At that time progressives around the world were watching events in Cuba with the most intense and often fervent attention; and young Latin Americans began to apply the “lessons of Cuba” to their own countries and to set up guerrilla movements all over the continent. Mendoza and García Márquez themselves would organize frequent pro-Cuban rallies in the streets around the office.

  Despite this activity, Colombia, as so often, was proving the exception to the continental rule. Events there were less promising to the progressive eye than in either Cuba or Venezuela. When Rojas Pinilla had begun to totter in March 1957, after the Colombian Church condemned his regime, there had been a civic movement led by Liberal leader Alberto Lleras Camargo which called for a general strike. The dictator had resigned on 10 May in favour of a five-man junta under General Gabriel París Gordillo which felt constrained to promise a return to democracy. On 20 July, at the beach resort of Sitges on Spain’s eastern Mediterranean coast, Lleras and the exiled Conservative leader Laureano Gómez had planned an arrangement, to be called the “National Front,” by which the Conservative and Liberal parties would alternate as a two-headed governing entity for the foreseeable future in order to prevent both political chaos—code for a swing to the left—and the danger of a return to military rule. The junta had announced a plebiscite in October and the country had approved the plan on 1 December 1957. After a bizarre primary-type poll which decided who were the most popular of the Liberal and Conservative candidates, Lleras stood unopposed in the 1958 elections and soon after García Márquez and Mercedes Barcha returned to Venezuela following their marriage in March, the Liberal leader had been hailed as the next “democratic” President of Colombia as of August 1958.

  García Márquez had summed up Colombia’s recent history in no uncertain terms in an article which was published in Caracas on the day he was married:

  “After eight years, nine months and eleven days without elections, the Colombian people went back to the polls to re-elect a congress which had been dissolved on 9 November 1949, by order of Mariano Ospina Pérez, a Conservative president who had previously been just a discreet millionaire. That act of force initiated, at 3.35 one Saturday, a period of three successive dictatorships which have cost the country 200,000 dead and the worst social and economic imbalance in its history. This implacable armed persecution of the Liberals has disfigured our national electoral reality.”46

  To complete his damning assessment, García Márquez sneered that Lleras Camargo—who he felt was ultimately to blame for allowing the Liberal Party to lose power in 1946—had emerged as the candidate because he was a virtual Conservative who had predictably recruited the Liberal candidates from among the same set of “oligarchs” who had stood for the party twenty years before. A new party, the Liberal Revolutionary Movement (Movimiento Revolucionario Liberal, MRL), founded on 13 February 1959 by Alfonso López Michelsen, would cause a temporary stir in the 1960s but finally made little impact on the struggle between the two political dinosaurs.

  As usual, quite apart from the frustrations of Colombian politics in general, García Márquez was by no means pleased to be back in dreary Bogotá. But he now had a wife to share his reactions and his costeño resistance to the perfidious ways of the bogotanos. Mercedes was several months pregnant, had short hair and often wore trousers, which shocked the Bogotá neighbours, especially in the case of a pregnant woman, as did her husband’s gaudy shirts and weakness for Cuban heels.47 Plinio Mendoza, still a bachelor, turned up at the apartment most days and took Mercedes to the cinema when Gabo was busy. He and his friend had bought identical dark blue raincoats and looked, so their friends teased, “like two boys dressed by the same mother.”48

  In the second half of the year came the publication of the articles García Márquez had written in 1957 about the visit to the Eastern Bloc. They appeared in Cromos, under the general title “90 Days Behind the Iron Curtain,” between 27 July and 28 September 1959. It was perhaps significant that he did not repeat the Hungarian article, presumably because Kádár had executed Nagy after García Márquez had given Kádár such a good press. So he had written a separate article on the subject—though even that piece did not remind his readers of his familiarity with Kádár, and it was noticeable that he blamed Khrushchev rather than the Hungarian: “Even those of us who as a matter of principle believed in the decisive role Khrushchev was playing in the history of socialism must recognize that the Soviet prime minister is beginning to loo
k suspiciously like Stalin.”49 Interestingly, what García Márquez most emphasises is that the execution of Nagy was “an act of political stupidity,” not the last time he would take up such a pragmatic position in the face of authoritarian policies he might have been expected to condemn on principle. It should perhaps not surprise us that the man who wrote it, who at this time clearly believes that there are “right” and “wrong” men for particular situations, and who quite cold-bloodedly puts politics before morality, should eventually support an “irreplaceable” leader like Fidel Castro through thick and thin. Ironically enough, the series on Eastern Europe was more relevant in 1959 than it had been when he wrote it in Paris before his departure for London two years before, because Latin America was moving sharply to the left and debates about communism, socialism, capitalism and democracy would be argued over—and killed for—during the next twenty-five years.

  Mercedes gave birth to their first child, Rodrigo García Barcha, on 24 August. The unfortunate infant was born a cachaco but he had the christening of a child destined for great things. The godfather, predictably enough, was Plinio Mendoza, and the godmother was Susana Linares, the wife of Germán Vargas, who was now living in Bogotá; but the baby was baptized by Father Camilo Torres, the turbulent priest whom García Márquez had known as a fellow law student at the National University back in 1947. Torres had left the university late in 1947 and his unfortunate girlfriend had retired to a convent. He had become a priest in 1955 and then studied sociology at the Catholic University of Louvain, coinciding in Europe with his three old university friends, García Márquez, Plinio Mendoza and Luis Villar Borda. On his return to Colombia he had taught sociology back in the National University where they had all first come together. By the time they met up again in 1959 Father Torres was active among the marginal communities of Bogotá and finding himself increasingly alienated from the traditional Church hierarchy50 García Márquez would no doubt have wanted Torres as the officiating priest at the christening for sentimental reasons—but he was also the only priest that he and Mercedes knew. At first Torres rejected Plinio Mendoza as godfather, not only because he was an unbeliever but for his proven irreverence. As the child was christened, Torres intoned, “Whoever believes that the Holy Spirit is descending over this child should now kneel.” All four members of the congregation remained standing.51

  Whenever the two compadres got in from the office, almost always late at night, after Rodrigo was born, they would try to wake the baby up to play with him; when Mercedes protested, as she always did, García Márquez would say, “All right, all right, but don’t nag our compadre.”52 Camilo Torres remained a frequent visitor to the García Barcha household. Six years later Father Torres, still a blessed innocent, would join the National Liberation Army (Ejército de Liberación Nacional—ELN) guerrillas and would die in his first combat. He remains the most famous revolutionary priest in the history of twentieth-century Latin America.

  1959, the year of the Cuban Revolution, was almost at a close. Long before it ended García Márquez had finished writing what must be counted, without a doubt, the most important short story he ever wrote. Really, the extraordinary creation that is “Big Mama’s Funeral” should never have been placed in the same anthology as the other stories started in London and completed in Venezuela, which were a continuation of his neo-realist works, companions both in style and ideology to No One Writes to the Colonel. Far from being a continuation, or even the culmination of that literary mode and of that ideological era, “Big Mama’s Funeral” was something quite new: it is one of the key texts of García Márquez’s entire literary and political trajectory, the one which unites his two literary modes—“realist” and “magical”—for the very first time, and which paves the way for the whole of the mature work over the next half century, in particular for those two definitive masterpieces, One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Autumn of the Patriarch. Indeed, such is the scale of this story, especially its ending, and such its fusion of different elements within García Márquez’s personal mythology and poetics, that he himself would have to spend years trying to separate its most important strands in order to conceive the endings of those two monumental works waiting for him down the years.

  The fact is that the return to Colombia, politically speaking, had been a violent, if not unexpected, culture shock for García Márquez. No One Writes to the Colonel had been written in Europe where, despite everything, he could still have some sentimental feelings about home and about some of the people there. The other stories of the forthcoming collection were also started in Europe and then completed in his early months in Venezuela; they exude affection for ordinary Colombians similar to his unmistakable affection for the unnamed colonel. “Big Mama’s Funeral,” however, was the product of his return to Colombia itself, not only after more than three years away but also, unmistakably, after Europe, after Venezuela, after Cuba. To read it for the first time is to feel the weight of all those different experiences bearing down one after another on his perception of the country; it is to feel all the writer’s accumulated frustration, and scorn, and anger at a country which endlessly consumed its own children and seemed as though it would never, ever change.

  So the first thing to say about “Big Mama’s Funeral” is that almost nothing happens in it, it is a great song and dance about nothing. Or almost nothing. It tells the story—indeed, a narrator very like Gabriel García Márquez himself tells the story—of the life and death (much more of the death than the life) of an old Colombian matriarch known as “Big Mama” whose funeral is attended by all the politicians and dignitaries of Colombia and even by distinguished visitors from abroad, such as His Holiness the Pope. The story shows but does not say that Big Mama’s entire life has been spent in the middle of absolutely nowhere, that her wealth is based on a shameless relationship of ruthless exploitation with the labouring peasant masses, and that she herself is ugly, vulgar and in every way ludicrous. Yet no one in her unnamed but unmistakable nation seems to notice these obvious facts. In other words, García Márquez is creating an allegory which shows the real moral status of the still feudal semi-“oligarchy” first identified by Gaitán and the hypocrisy of a cachaco-dominated ruling class that pretends that Colombia’s is the best of all possible worlds and that the only ones letting the side down are the poor misbegotten people that these superior beings themselves oppress. What we have, in García Márquez’s view, is a colonial land-tenure system overseen by a nineteenth-century political system. When, oh when, would Colombia’s twentieth century come! Thus his story begins as the representation of a world inside out and upside down:

  This is, for all the world’s unbelievers, the true account of Big Mama, absolute sovereign of the Kingdom of Macondo, who lived for ninety-two years, and died in the odour of sanctity one Tuesday last September, and whose funeral was attended by the Pope.53

  And fifteen pages later it ends:

  Now the Supreme Pontiff could ascend to Heaven in body and soul, his mission on earth fulfilled, and the President of the Republic could sit down and govern according to his good judgement, and the queens of all things that have ever been or ever will be could marry and be happy and conceive and give birth to many sons, and the common people could set up their tents where they damn well pleased in the limitless domains of Big Mama, because the only one who could oppose them and had sufficient power to do so had begun to rot beneath a lead plinth. The only thing left then was for someone to lean a stool against the doorway to tell this story, lesson and example for future generations, so that not one of the world’s disbelievers would be left who did not know the story of Big Mama, because tomorrow, Wednesday, the garbage men will come and will sweep up the garbage from her funeral, for ever and for ever.54

  One thinks of the tone and rhetoric of Karl Marx himself.55 But this narrator’s voice and point of view steer just shy of outright sarcasm and rest content with an almost Swiftian or Voltairian irony so forceful that he is able to state the ve
ry opposite of what he believes to be the case, certain that the reader will stay with him.

  Obviously “Big Mama’s Funeral” is García Márquez’s furious reaction to the national situation and his own sense of let-down on his return, after four long years away from the country. The big difference now is that his voice is that of a writer of authority, a writer whose scorn and contempt has been well earned, based as it is on experience of the wider world.56 The narrator paints a Colombia incapable of change but from a perspective (the USSR? Venezuela? Cuba?) which knows that change is possible, something the narrator of Leaf Storm did not yet know. Such a story could only have been composed in 1959, when García Márquez underwent what Marx would have termed the “dialectical” experience of contrasting the Colombian National Front with the Cuban Revolution—thereby giving his already looming magical realism a savage, satirical, carnivalesque, political edge. This story is, indeed, a unique moment both of distillation and of balance. One of the things it is saying is: “I can no longer write stories like those in this collection. My ‘realist’ phase is over.” But now he too was about to become the victim of a grand historical irony.

  As fate would have it, although he himself had reached the end of his realist, or neo-realist phase, he was now in enthusiastic contact with Cuba; and paradoxically, the Cuban regime, which was opening up the imagination of so many Latin American writers and intellectuals, would nonetheless shortly be arguing for the kind of socialist realist writing that García Márquez had just now become incapable of producing. He would need the reassuring spectacle of other Latin American writers publishing novels based on myth and magic, before he could conceive an entire novel of his own which ignored—indeed, implicitly rejected—the tenets of socialist realism. And there would also be strictly biographical factors at work over the next few years. Another—yet another—change of location, and the need to support a wife and children, would be enormously influential in the coming period: he would be distracted from his vocation in a way he never had been before because he no longer had the sinister luxury of being able to starve while he responded to the call of inspiration whenever and wherever it came to him. Thus, for a long time, “Big Mama” would seem to be merely the end of an era (or even, for a time, the end of his career as a writer); it was only much later that it could be seen as an indispensable and historic point of reference, the beginning of his mature period.