One day Mutis climbed the seven flights of stairs, carried two books into the apartment without saying hello, slapped them down on the table, and roared: “Stop fucking about and read that vaina, so you’ll learn how to write!” Whether all García Márquez’s friends really swore all the time during these years we will never know—but in his anecdotes they do. The two slim books were a novel entitled Pedro Páramo, which had been published in 1955, and a collection of stories entitled The Burning Plain (El llano en llamas), published in 1953. The writer was the Mexican Juan Rulfo. García Márquez read Pedro Páramo twice the first day, and The Burning Plain the next day. He claims that he had never been so impressed by anything since he had first read Kafka; that he learned Pedro Páramo, literally, by heart; and that he read nothing else for the rest of the year because everything else seemed so inferior.11
It is interesting to note that García Márquez apparently knew nothing about one of the greatest Latin American novelists of the century. He had reached 1961, thirty-four years of age, knowing really rather little about either the Latin American continent or its literature. By now the extremely new wave in Latin American fiction which would be known as the “Boom” had started—yet at this late date he knew none of the writers who would shortly be his peers, colleagues, friends and rivals, nor indeed many of the works of their essential precursors: the Brazilian Mário de Andrade, the Cuban Alejo Carpentier, the Guatemalan Miguel Angel Asturias, the Mexican Rulfo, or the Peruvian José María Arguedas. He was only really familiar with the Argentinian Borges, in many respects the least “Latin American” of them all, though already one of the most influential. In that sense his time in Europe had not Latin-Americanized him as decisively as it had so many writers of the 1920s: in truth, almost all his friends in Paris had been Colombians. One might say that he saw other Latin Americans as distant cousins rather than as brothers. (A very Colombian perspective: the country, full of talented people, has almost never pulled its cultural weight in the continent.) That decisive process of Latin Americanization was left to Mexico to complete; fortunately for him, there could have been no better teacher. It was Mexico which had initiated most of the processes of Latin America’s twentieth-century “quest for identity” in the 1920s, which had received an extraordinary injection of highly educated Spanish refugees in the 1940s, and was now on the threshold of another great cultural moment.
García Márquez tried new angles. He told Plinio Mendoza that during an early visit to the state of Michoacán he had seen the Indians making straw angels which they dressed in their own local fashion and this had given him the idea for a story that he began now but would only finally complete in 1968, entitled “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings.”12 He said at the time that it was part of “my old project of writing a book of fantastic stories.” This one was quickly discarded for another, entitled “The Sea of Lost Time” (“El mar del tiempo per-dido”), also written during those first desperate months in Mexico. He did not say so but these and other stories seem to have emerged from a nostalgia for the good old days, remembered or imagined, in and around Barranquilla, days that he himself had mainly missed, a world obliquely conveyed by Cepeda’s dream-like movie The Blue Lobster. “The Sea of Lost Time” is an important development, although initially an isolated one. It has caused chaos and confusion among the literary critics because it seems to give many different messages all at once. The story is a continuation, though in a much lower key and with no declamatory interventions by the narrator, of the mode he had initiated in “Big Mama’s Funeral.” It was what in Latin America and eventually elsewhere would be known as “magical realism,” a technique already developed by Asturias, Carpentier and Rulfo, in which the story, or part of the story, is narrated through the world-view of the characters themselves without any indication from the author that this world-view is quaint, folkloric or superstitious. The world is as the characters believe it to be.
Or almost. Because in “The Sea of Lost Time” there is, in fact, a character who knows more than the others. The post-Cuban García Márquez, who had confined himself to national issues in “Big Mama’s Funeral,” now—for the first time—introduces the question of economic imperialism through the character of Mr. Herbert, a “gringo” who comes as a kind of secular evangelist to the small, semi-abandoned town. In the days before he appears the villagers know something transcendent is afoot because there is a smell of roses everywhere in the usually salty and fish-filled air. Then the newcomer arrives and makes an announcement:
“I’m the richest man in the world,” he said. “I’ve got so much money I haven’t got room to keep it any more. And besides, since my heart’s so big that there’s no room for it in my chest, I have decided to travel the world over solving the problems of mankind.”13
Needless to say Mr. Herbert solves no problems; he completes the impoverishment of the town, enriches himself still further, and goes on his way. But before he does so he paints pretty pictures in the minds of the inhabitants—like a Hollywood movie-maker—and leaves them with dissatisfactions they never had before and longings they can hardly even express. Well, a personage with just this name—Mr. Herbert, exactly the same character to all intents and purposes—will later bring the banana company to Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude, and to similar effect. Whereas “Big Mama’s Funeral” had settled García Márquez’s accounts with Colombia and attributed the country’s problems to a bankrupt political system, a reactionary ruling class, and a medieval national Church, “The Sea of Lost Time” at last introduces the great Latin American staple, U.S. imperialism—just as Castro had begun by attacking Batista and the Cuban ruling class and then moved on to confront the United States imperialists who had backed and funded them.
It is perhaps surprising that someone as close to the Communist Party as García Márquez had been for several years now should have waited so long to apply this diagnosis—imperialism—to his country’s ills. It has to be concluded that between the actually existing socialism that he had witnessed in Eastern Europe in 1955 and 1957, and the United States, whose culture had fed so many of his “Giraffes” and whose writers had done so much to make him what he was, the choice for him was not easy—whereas most Latin American writers from the previous generation would not have hesitated simply to launch attacks on the hated gringos. On the other hand, García Márquez had not yet separated himself entirely from the perspectives of communist orthodoxy and therefore did not yet clearly see the USSR itself as an imperialist power with the Stalinist adaptation and deformation of Marxist ideology as its principal weapon. Contrary to the jibes of some of his later detractors, this was not a man who ever rushed to judgement or simplified complex problems (despite the provocative impression he would sometimes enjoy giving in the bourgeois press): he always took his time to think matters through in the most laborious fashion and never took the easy way out where intellectual reflection was concerned. The diaphanous readability of his most characteristic works would always be hard earned.
For the longer term, this short story has another aspect. It is a pointer to the future, away from Macondo-Aracataca and El Pueblo-Sucre, that is, away from Colombia and towards not only Latin America but literary universality. “Big Mama’s Funeral” had finally fused the two small towns and in a sense had ironized both of them, preparing them for liquidation as the writer searched for a way to paint on a larger canvas. One Hundred Years of Solitude would still be set in Macondo but it would be obvious to the informed reader from the first page that this was an allegory of Latin America as a whole: Macondo had made the leap from national to continental symbol.
He still did not yet see clearly that the way to greatness for a Latin American novelist at this time in history was also, fortuitously, through Latin America itself, through a continental vision. He was still a Colombian. Writers in other countries with, ironically, a much less developed political consciousness than his, were nevertheless already making the leap that he was not yet prepared to make:
the Argentinian Julio Cortázar, the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa and, above all, the Mexican Carlos Fuentes, were writers who were becoming conscious of being Latin Americans and were right then composing Joycean, “Ulyssean” books precisely about their own change of consciousness, their own reconquest of the continent, just as that earlier writer from a colonized country, James Joyce himself, had written about his own conquest of Europe forty years before (remember Stephen Dedalus’s ambition to “forge … the uncreated conscience of my race”). Now García Márquez had to redefine his obsessions—his grandfather, his mother, his father, Colombia—and place them within a Latin American perspective. Other Latin American writers—Asturias, Carpentier, Arturo Uslar Pietri—had become Latin Americans in their early twenties; it took García Márquez until he was thirty-eight, and it might never have happened at all without the Boom and, in particular, without the Boom’s great creator and propagandist, the Mexican Carlos Fuentes. Fortunately for García Márquez he would soon be meeting Fuentes, and the meeting would be decisive in his life.
Again what we see is the extraordinary, perhaps unparalleled restraint of a writer who, long before he was famous, always knew how to wait, sometimes in the face of great pressure or great temptation, until a book was right. It merely added to the anguish that this solitary story, “The Sea of Lost Time,” was narrated from the anti-imperialist perspective which Cuba had given him yet he was not in touch with Cuba—on the contrary, it seemed to have spurned him. So in Mexico, blind as he was—without a political soul, as Mao Zedong might have said, now that he’d lost Cuba—he began to wonder, not for the first time, whether he should give up writing literature for good and move, as soon as he could, to writing film scripts. He had a family now and he could not in conscience sacrifice Mercedes, Rodrigo and the unborn child to his still largely unfulfilled literary vocation: if he had failed to make the big breakthrough when he was single, why should they suffer while he tried again and again to succeed? Film work, which he had always longed to do in any case, must have seemed, increasingly, like the most logical aspiration for a man in his situation and it was in that direction that he turned his endeavours. After all, it was still a form of writing.
Mexico was the country with the largest film industry in the Spanish-speaking world.14 But at the beginning nothing materialized in the movies either. Then one evening when he got home after a fruitless search for work—and García Márquez was never very good at asking for anything—Mercedes told him she’d run out of money for food and had not been able to give Rodrigo his usual drink of milk before bedtime. García Márquez sat his two-year-old son down, explained the position and swore to him that this would never happen again. The child “understood,” went to sleep without complaining, and did not wake up in the night. The next morning, sufficiently desperate to ask for another favour, García Márquez called Mutis, who seems to have judged that his friend might finally face up to being a beggar rather than a chooser. He used his own business contacts to arrange a couple of interviews. The first was with Gustavo Alatriste, an entrepreneur who had spent the previous years diversifying miraculously from the manufacture of furniture to several other industries including cinema and journalism.
Alatriste arranged to meet him in the bar of the Hotel Presidente on 26 September 1961, exactly three months after his arrival in Mexico. García Márquez would recall that the sole of one of his shoes was hanging and so he turned up early for the interview and waited for Alatriste to leave before he himself padded away15 Alatriste had produced some of Luis Buñuel’s best films and was married at the time to Silvia Pinal, Mexico’s most glamorous actress and leading lady in three of Buñuel’s movies.16 Obviously García Márquez was hoping that he would get immediate access to the film world through Alatriste. But Alatriste had recently bought several popular publications including The Family (La Familia), a women’s-interest magazine, and Stories for Everyone (Sucesos para Todos), a very Mexican crime and scandal sheet. Editing these magazines was what Alatriste decided to offer the disenchanted supplicant, though he was doubtful even about that. Mutis had made the mistake of showing Alatriste some of García Márquez’s previous journalism as part of his recommendation and Alatriste was doubtful: “This guy’s too good,” he growled. But Mutis assured him that his friend could turn his hand to anything. After some hesitation García Márquez took the job—the two jobs—and went home and asked Rodrigo what he would like most in the world. “A ball.” His father went out and bought the biggest one he could find.
So García Márquez bade farewell for the moment to his dreams about the movies and took on both of Alatriste’s magazines, on the extraordinary condition that his name should not appear anywhere on the staff lists and that he would not have to sign any pieces. He was in charge of The Family and Stories for Everyone—The Home Front and The Street, he must have thought. This was not only a humiliating retreat back into journalism, but the lowest level of journalism possible. He worked in the office down on Avenida Insurgentes Sur without a typewriter, and directed affairs there as if with gloves and tongs. It was almost too much for him to bear. The last time he had been forced to sacrifice his vocation in quite this way was during the crisis after his parents moved from Sucre to Cartagena in 1951; and even then he had found time to go on writing Leaf Storm in the cracks between his commitments. But now there was a wife and child and they had to eat even if he was used to doing without food. He gritted his teeth and prepared to say goodbye not only to the cinema but to literature too.
Another of the house magazines, called S.nob, had successfully lived up to its name by selling almost no copies up to that point but was now able to survive parasitically on the backs of García Márquez’s populist mouthpieces. S.nob was run in those days by two avant-garde writers, Salvador Elizondo and Juan García Ponce, and García Márquez complained bitterly that they were literary aristocrats exploiting his labour—little knowing that one day his still-unborn son would marry Elizondo’s still-unborn daughter.17 From time to time, adding insult to injury, Alatriste would forget to pay his long-suffering employee. Once he fell three months behind and García Márquez had to pursue him everywhere. In the end he pursued him to a Turkish bath and a perspiring Alatriste had to give him the cheque in the midst of the rising steam. When García Márquez got it outside he saw that the writing had run and he had to scurry back in and pursue Alatriste all over again into the changing room.18 He was beginning to resemble Cantinflas, the Mexican comedian.
Within weeks, despite his distaste for the work, he had improved the layout, the style and the mix of both the magazines. In amongst the recipes and knitting patterns of La Familia, which had a huge continental readership, and the blood-curdling stories and gruesome pictures of Sucesos, he infiltrated great novels in condensed form, biographical serials, detective stories, general interest features on other cultures and any other quality padding he could think of. He had done it all before both for Crónica in Barranquilla and for Venezuela Gráfica in Caracas. Much of it was achieved by ransacking other magazines from other countries, using scissors and paste and egged on by a dash of desperation, a large dose of boredom, and a smidgen of cynicism.19 By the early months of 1962 Sucesos had increased its circulation by around a thousand copies each issue and still rising. By April a cooler García Márquez was able to report to Plinio Mendoza that he had “an office with carpets and two secretaries, a home almost, and with a garden, and a boss who is either a rare genius or stark raving mad, I’m still not sure. I’m not yet a magnate but although I’ve moved to within three blocks of the office I’m thinking of buying a Mercedes Benz in July. It would not be surprising if I moved from here to Miami to organize the counter-revolution … We’re expecting Alejandra within ten days and Mercedes is in that interminable period in which women become unbearable not only as wives but also as spectacles. Nevertheless she is preparing her revenge: she’s going to buy loads of dresses and shoes and other things when she goes back down to her normal size.”20
&
nbsp; Guillermo Angulo had suggested in September 1961 that García Márquez should put his unpublished manuscript, In Evil Hour, in for the Esso-sponsored 1961 Colombian Literary Prize, which would be awarded retrospectively in 1962.21 Alvaro Mutis also put pressure on him. It was said that Esso had received 173 submissions and none looked promising; hence the suggestion that García Márquez should send in a last-minute entry. The man himself would recall that he undid the necktie, looked again at his much-travelled typescript, and gave it one last, rigorous revision.22 Unloved by its author, In Evil Hour has never been a favourite with critics either. The plot is somewhat over-fussy; the characters a little undeveloped. Yet it has a lucid, cinematographic quality and a cool hands-off technique that cannot fail to impress themselves on the reader, even if the sombre subject matter is unrelieved by humour or local colour.
The decision was made on Esso’s behalf by the Colombian Academy, and García Márquez’s manuscript was adjudged the winner. He had been asked to provide a title and he set aside “This Shitty Town” and came up with In Evil Hour. It transpired however that the President of the Colombian Academy was a priest, Father Félix Restrepo, who, as guardian both of the Spanish language and of the morals of his flock, had been troubled by the inclusion of words such as “contraceptive” and “masturbation.” Father Restrepo asked the Colombian ambassador in Mexico, Carlos Arango Vélez, to take a letter to García Márquez and to have a discreet and delicate conversation with him in the course of which he should be asked to cut those two offending words. García Márquez decided, Solomon-like (though with the 3,000 dollars prize money already safely in his custody), to allow the ambassador to cut one. He chose “masturbation.”
Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez Page 36