Gabriel García Márquez

by Gerald Martin

  Once again, most of the internal tension in the New York office, as García Márquez saw it, was between old-style hard-line Cuban communists and the new breed of Latin American leftists recruited by Masetti. “And in the New York office I was seen as Masetti’s man.”16 Things rapidly became intolerable and García Márquez began to consider his position. Eventually he decided that he wanted out. One evening at midnight, alone in the office, he received a direct threat from a Caribbean voice which declared, “Get ready, arsehole, your time is up. We’re coming for you now.” García Márquez left a message on the teleprinter saying, “If I don’t turn this off before I leave, it’s because I’ve been killed.” A message from Havana replied, “OK, compañero, we’ll send flowers.” Then, in his panic, when he left the building at one o’clock he forgot to turn the machine off.17 He stole home to the hotel in terror, past the vast grey mass of St. Patrick’s Cathedral beneath the falling rain, afraid of his own footsteps, and slept in the clothes he was wearing.

  Before long the impulsive Masetti had been trapped into resigning by increasing pressure from the communists. On 7 April García Márquez sent a letter to Plinio Mendoza informing him of Masetti’s resignation and saying that he had decided to follow suit: he had given in his notice for the end of April and told Mendoza he was thinking of going to Mexico. But after the Bay of Pigs invasion on 17 April, one day after Castro’s declaration that the revolution, as many had suspected, was now a socialist one, Castro himself asked Masetti to continue in his post and to take part in the live television interviews of the counter-revolutionary prisoners. Masetti agreed and García Márquez too decided to hold on until the post-invasion crisis was over.18 In fact he has since claimed that what he really wanted to do in those days was return from New York to Cuba.

  On the day after the great Cuban victory at the Bay of Pigs, in which Castro had personally directed the defence of the island and the arrest of the invaders, Plinio Mendoza had found that, mysteriously, and for the first time, the telecom office in Bogotá refused to carry his dispatches and immediately suspected that the USA had pressured the Colombian authorities into cutting off the service to Cuba. He phoned García Márquez in New York and García Márquez said, “Hold on, there’s a public telex out in Fifth Avenue, right by the office.” Thus the two friends proudly outwitted the CIA on the day of the legendary defeat of the counter-revolutionary invaders, claimed by the Cubans as the “first victory against imperialism on Latin American territory.” But soon afterwards García Márquez went home to his hotel and wrote Masetti a letter by hand—something he almost never did (he even dated the letter)—outlining his grievances, his opposition to Moscow-style sectarianism and his fears for the future of the revolution if the orthodox communist line prevailed. He left the letter in the hotel room awaiting what he knew was the inevitable moment of his resignation. It was as well that he stayed on until the battle of the Bay of Pigs, for had he got out just before it he would surely have been branded for ever as the rat who left the sinking ship.19 Little did he know that Masetti too would soon be leaving Prensa Latina for good and that he would later return to Argentina and die in a hopeless revolutionary campaign in 1964.

  It was almost the end of García Márquez’s time in New York. Plinio Mendoza flew to Havana to discuss the situation with Masetti and was lunching with him and his wife Conchita Dumois when the news came that “they,” the mamertos, the hard-liners, had finally taken over the Prensa Latina office under a new director, the Spaniard Fernando Revueltas. When Mendoza arrived in New York again on a Pan-American flight in late May, on his way home from Havana, he was met, after a CIA interrogation, by Mercedes and Rodrigo. Mercedes smiled, in that imperturbable way of hers, and said, “So the mamertos have taken over Prela, compadre?” “Yes, comadre, they have.” When he told her that he had handed in his resignation to the new head of Prensa Latina, with a copy to President Dorticós, she told him that Gabo’s own letter was already written and merely awaiting his arrival.20

  García Márquez has never said much about these problems since the 1960s—even in his subsequent conversations with Antonio Núñez Jiménez, himself an orthodox communist, he merely said, without entering into details, that he felt the communist hard-liners were “anti-revolutionaries”21—despite the fact that the events of 1961 would cast a shadow over more than ten long years of his life. The reason, evidently, is that he has continued to view the Cuban Revolution as an endless struggle between the “schematic” mamertos, supposedly represented in those days by Castro’s brother Raúl, and the more intuitive revolutionary romantics supposedly represented by Fidel himself. Twenty-five years later Mendoza would say that his own experiences in Cuba, following on from the journey to Eastern Europe in 1957, were decisive in distancing him from socialism by convincing him that all socialist regimes eventually became bureaucratic and tyrannical, and that this was inevitable. And he would insist that in the early 1960s García Márquez was as alienated by all that happened as he, Mendoza, was and that in those days they saw things in exactly the same way22

  Mendoza stayed on in New York for a few days awaiting the news about his friend’s back pay and tickets. He and Mercedes strolled around Central Park by day with Rodrigo, as García Márquez wound up his affairs at the office. Then García Márquez and Mendoza wandered together around Fifth Avenue, Times Square and Greenwich Village, discussing what had happened, the future of Cuba and their own uncertain plans. Stranded between two different ideologies, and two different worlds, a hard time was about to begin for both of them. García Márquez wrote to Alvaro Cepeda on 23 May:

  Now, after a bloody awful crisis that went on a month and only finally came to a head this week, the decent young men of Prensa Latina have fucked off, with very high-flown resignation letters. Despite all the shit we could see looming ahead I never thought that events would become so overwhelming and I thought I would still have a few more months in New York. However, my last hope of staying here evaporated for good this evening and I’m going to Mexico on 1 June, by road, with the aim of crossing the deep disordered South. I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do but I’m trying to salvage some dollars from Colombia which I hope will allow me to live for a time in Mexico while I look for work. Who knows what the fuck as, because as for journalism I’ve thrown in the towel. Maybe as an intellectual.23

  Just after Mendoza left New York Masetti called García Márquez and said that the situation was improving again. He had talked to President Dorticós and had been told that he was still in Fidel Castro’s good books after all. He asked García Márquez to delay his journey to Mexico but by this time the Colombian had made his plans and was only waiting for his pay-off, which the Prensa Latina authorities were in no hurry to concede. He was trying to persuade them to give him some kind of severance pay plus tickets to Mexico for him and the family. So he reluctantly refused Masetti’s entreaties. As he explained in a letter to Mendoza:

  I know Masetti: this personal help he asks for at the start will turn, whatever we try to do, into some huge and complex undertaking which I’ll be caught up in until the comrades see the guava is ripe and decide to eat it, just as they did with Prensa Latina. Moreover: if Masetti were still entrapped and in danger, as you told me he was, I’d have done anything to overturn my plans and help him. But I have the impression that the President has found a way of making things OK for him and he is no longer in such urgent need of help.24

  Later he said, “I have become a stranger in an office I’m supposed to be managing down to the most minute details. Fortunately all this will be over in 48 hours.”25 He feared that Prensa Latina would not pay the family’s return passages and said he only had 200 dollars to his name.

  In effect, the García Márquez family had no way of flying back to Colombia and so they were heading for Mexico by road. In Mexico they would try to enlist help to return home (though Mendoza himself believes that an extended stay in Mexico had long been one of García Márquez’s keenest aspirations; it
may be that many of the misunderstandings about his movements and motivation down the years have come from the fact that he was always reluctant to admit that he did not wish to return to Colombia and the extended family). Not surprisingly the New York management said he had resigned, not been sacked—clearly he was considered a deserter, if not actually a gusano—and that they were not authorized to give him tickets to Mexico. Later the communists would tell friends who asked about him in Havana, “García Márquez went over to the counter-revolution.”26 In mid-June, resigned to getting nothing out of Prensa Latina and the revolution, the García Barcha family took a Greyhound bus for New Orleans, where Mendoza would be sending a further 150 dollars from Bogotá.

  The fourteen-day journey, with an eighteen-month-old child, was arduous, to say the least, involving frequent stops and, as the couple would later report, endless “cardboard hamburgers,” “sawdust hot dogs” and plastic buckets of Coca-Cola. In the end they began to eat Rodrigo’s processed baby food, especially the stewed fruit. They saw Maryland, Virginia, the two Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi. For García Márquez himself it had the advantage of taking him through Faulkner country, a long-standing dream. Like all foreign visitors in those days, the young couple were shocked by the stark examples of racial discrimination throughout the American South, particularly in Georgia and Alabama, before the civil rights reforms later in the decade. In Montgomery they missed a night’s sleep because no one would rent “dirty Mexicans” a room. By the time they reached New Orleans they were desperate for “proper food” and used some of Mendoza’s 150 dollars, sent to the Colombian consulate, for a square meal in Le Vieux Carré, a high-class French-style restaurant. They were disappointed, however, to see a large peach atop each steak as their dinners arrived at the table.27 In 1983 García Márquez would remember their great adventure:

  At the end of that heroic journey we had confronted once more the relation between truth and fiction: the immaculate parthenons amidst the cotton fields, the farmers taking their siesta beneath the eaves of the roadside inns, the black people’s huts surviving in wretchedness, the white heirs to Uncle Gavin Stevens walking to Sunday prayers with their languid women dressed in muslin; the terrible world of Yoknapatawpha County had passed in front of our eyes from the window of a bus, and it was as true and as human as in the novels of the old master.28

  He would tell Mendoza in his first letter after the trip, “We arrived safe and sound after a very interesting journey which proved on the one hand that Faulkner and the rest have told the truth about their environment and on the other that Rodrigo is a perfectly portable young man who can adapt to any emergency.”29

  Finally, after two long and unforgettable weeks they reached the border at Laredo. There, on the world’s most contrast-filled frontier, they found a dirty, sordid town where, nevertheless, they felt that life was suddenly real again. The first cheap restaurant provided a delicious meal. Mercedes decided that in a country like Mexico where, she had discovered, they knew the secret of cooking rice as well as many other things, she might be able to live. They took a train and arrived in Mexico City in late June 1961. There they would find a vast but still manageable city where the boulevards were lined with flowers and where—in those days—the immensely distant sky was usually a transparent, glorious blue and you could still see the volcanoes.

  14

  Escape to Mexico

  1961–1964

  ON MONDAY 26 JUNE 1961 the train bringing the García Barcha family to Mexico City pulled slowly into Buenavista Station. “We arrived one mauve-coloured evening, with our last twenty dollars and nothing in our future,” García Márquez would recall.1 There on the platform to meet them was Alvaro Mutis, welcoming them to Mexico with that wide, wolfish smile just as he had welcomed Gabo to Bogotá in 1954. Mutis took the exhausted family to the Hotel Apartamentos Bonampak on Calle Mérida. It was just outside the newly fashionable “Pink Zone” and only a few blocks from the very heart of the city at the place where its two great throbbing arteries, the Paseo de la Reforma and Avenida Insurgentes, were bisected beneath the gaze of the Aztec warrior Cuauhtémoc. Mercedes was already suffering from the stomach complaint that, whether the rice is cooked well or not, greets most first-time travellers to the Mexican capital, where early days are often difficult for this and many other reasons. García Márquez would recall that they had only four friends in the city at that moment: Mutis himself, the Colombian sculptor Rodrigo Arenas Betancourt, the Mexican writer Juan García Ponce, whom he had met in New York, and the Catalan film-maker and bookseller Luis Vicens, who had been keeping his mail for him.2

  In Mexico’s one-party system—ruled by the ambiguously named Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI)—the government’s rhetoric was far more radical than its political practices. The PRI had emerged in the years following the 1910–17 Mexican Revolution, the world’s first social revolution of the twentieth century and a continuing example to Latin American progressives until Castro’s triumphant entry into Havana in 1959; but forty years of power had slowed revolutionary progress to a virtual standstill. García Márquez had to learn very fast about this complex new country, where, more than anywhere else in Latin America, things are never quite what they seem.

  A week later—though García Márquez has always said it was the day after he arrived—he was woken up first thing in the morning by García Ponce. “Listen to this,” bellowed the Mexican, who had once made an uproarious visit to Barranquilla and had quickly learned how to speak like a costeño, “that bastard Hemingway has blown his head off with a shotgun.”3 So the first thing García Márquez wrote, shortly after his arrival in Mexico, was a long article in homage to the late American writer. This essay, “A Man Has Died a Natural Death,” was published on 9 July by the influential intellectual Fernando Benítez in México en la Cultura, the literary supplement of one of Mexico’s leading newspapers, Novedades. García Márquez, clearly moved by the death of the man he had seen on that Paris boulevard years before, predicted that “time will show that Hemingway, as a minor writer, will eat up many a great writer through his knowledge of men’s motives and the secrets of his trade…”4

  He also said that this death seemed to mark “a new era.”5 Little did he know that it would be his own leanest era so far in terms of literary creation, with the end of one mode of writing not leading quickly or automatically to the beginning of another. How could he or anyone else have thought, moreover, that, with one exception, this first article would also be the last serious and significant piece that he, a born journalist, would write for thirteen years?

  Alvaro Mutis had arrived in Mexico in its last years as “the most transparent region”; now its crystalline sky was just beginning to be smeared with the grey streaks of late-twentieth-century pollution. Really Mexico was not Mutis’s kind of country at all. But his ability to charm his way into high society had proved essential to his own extraordinary rehabilitation after his release from Lecumberri Prison and was now invaluable in easing the García Barchas into a society as resistant and as difficult to penetrate as a prickly pear. With Mutis’s help, the newly arrived couple found an apartment on Renán Street near the city centre; not for the first time they slept on a mattress on the floor. They had a table and two chairs: the table served both for eating and working. So it had been in Caracas, at the start; then in Bogotá; in New York Mercedes had had to live in one room in a hotel, with a small child; now they were without money again and back to basics. García Márquez wrote to Plinio Mendoza, “Here we are, for the third time in our three years of marriage, installed in an empty apartment. In accordance with our traditions, lots of light, lots of glass, lots of plans but almost nowhere to sit.”6

  For the first two months very little went right. Despite the efforts of Mutis and Vicens, García Márquez could not find work and he and Mercedes spent endless hours queuing at the Ministry of the Interior in Bucareli Street to regularize their residence papers. García Márquez was not entirely sur
e what work he wanted—the film industry seems to have been his preferred destination. He started to become anxious and depressed. Prensa Latina appeared determined not to give him the back pay they owed him. He went on waiting; he joked in a letter to Plinio Mendoza that if things continued as they were the logical thing would be to write No One Writes to the Colonel—except that it was already written.7 Mendoza received the news that Mercedes was now expecting “Alejandra”—García Márquez insisted that it was a girl and had already decided on the name—the following April.8 However, the child would not in fact be “the daughter I dreamed of having all my life and never had,”9 because it would be a boy and it would also be the last.

  Mutis saw that his friend’s nerves were starting to jangle and took him on a jaunt down to the Caribbean in late August, to the seaport of Veracruz on the Gulf of Mexico. Until then García Márquez hadn’t really absorbed the fact that Mexico, a desert country and a high plains country, was also, in effect, a Caribbean country. The pretext was the planned publication by the University of Veracruz at Xalapa of Big Mama’s Funeral and Other Stories. It was the advance of 1,000 pesos for this book that had allowed García Márquez to put down the month’s deposit on the apartment and start to buy “the third fridge of our marriage” on instalments.10 He had no money, no job and a wife and child to support; politically he had lost touch with the first development in Latin American politics that had ever inspired him whilst hundreds of others climbed on the revolutionary bandwagon. Literarily, he had also lost his way: the story “Big Mama’s Funeral” was written from a post-Cuban perspective but he had parted company with its inspiration, Cuba, however reluctantly, and now he was coming to terms with a new, very different and immensely complex and powerful cultural world which might take years to assimilate. In Mexico one had to learn to fit in.