As fate would have it, the jury’s favourable decision was made on the day that the second García Barcha child, Gonzalo, was born, 16 April 1962. García Márquez would later tell Plinio Mendoza that the baby was delivered “in six minutes” and “our only worry was that he might be born in the car on the way to the clinic.” After winning the prize he was temporarily, relatively, rich. He used part of the money to pay for Mercedes’s stay in the clinic.23 But since he felt the money was “stolen”—he would later say, perhaps hypocritically, that entering the novel for the prize was the worst decision he had ever taken in his life—he then decided, superstitiously, not to spend it on routine housekeeping and instead purchased a car, a white Opel 62 saloon with red upholstery, to transport his family about the vast metropolis. He told Plinio Mendoza: “It’s the most extraordinary toy I’ve had in all my life. I get up in the middle of the night to see if it’s still there.”24
But none of this was enough. He had won a literary prize but he was no longer a writer. He went on fretting. He found himself still yearning for work in the cinema. Despite his high hopes, and his strategy of seducing Alatriste through his devotion to duty, nothing came.25 Indeed, the more money he made for Alatriste by overhauling and improving the two downmarket magazines, the less Alatriste was likely to allow him to move.
He was no longer sure whether he would be able to write even under the right conditions. Since he had been married he had only written a few short stories and even the despised In Evil Hour seemed a long book to him. The truth is that his mind was filled with nonsense at work, family matters at home, and movie talk with his friends. It is ironic to think that he had embarked, without conviction, on the next book after One Hundred Years of Solitude—Eréndira and Other Stories—but could not get to the novel he had been waiting to write, in one sense, for the whole of his life. So after a few months he went back to it; in other words, back to “The House,” in his spare time. But “The House” was inhabited only by ghosts and again he got nowhere. So back he went to another idea that he felt deep down was a winner, a novel entitled The Autumn of the Patriarch.26 One Hundred Years of Solitude did not even exist as a title, but this other, once aborted novel even had its eventual name. By the time the stories of Big Mama’s Funeral were published in April 1962, the month he won the prize for In Evil Hour, and soon after he received the first copies of No One Writes to the Colonel, he had put together three hundred pages of The Autumn of the Patriarch and he still felt that he was on the wrong track. In the end he abandoned it again; later he would say that only the names of the characters survived.27 Perhaps that dictator novel—partly about himself, in the present—could never have been written before the problem of “The House”—about his family, in the past—was dealt with. Desperate, discouraged, distraught, he put the manuscript away again and, for the first time, contemplated a future without literature.
But that was intolerable. He became more and more frustrated with his work on the two mediocre magazines and now complained to his compadre Plinio Mendoza: “For the time being I’m swallowing tranquilizers spread on my bread like butter and I still can’t sleep more than four hours. I think my only hope is to get myself completely rewired … As you can imagine, I’m not writing anything. It’s two months since I opened the typewriter. I don’t know where to start, I’m troubled by the idea that in the end I won’t write anything and I won’t get rich either. Nothing more to say, compadre, I’m fucked, victim of a good situation.”28
Politically, the question of his own relationship with Cuba was grating on him. As far as he was concerned, the matter was still pending; as far as the Cubans were concerned, it was closed. Despite the problems he had experienced in New York, García Márquez still felt that his difficulties were with the sectarians, not the Cuban regime itself. Perhaps he felt deep down that he should have hung on longer. His admiration for Castro can only have been growing as he watched the young Cuban leader and the steely Guevara defying the power of the United States and the serried ranks of bourgeois liberal Latin American countries. In April 1962, as Castro confronted both the entire capitalist world and the dogmatists in the Cuban Communist Party, García Márquez, who would always love to boast of having inside information, wrote to Plinio Mendoza: “I know the whole story about Fidel’s ‘purge’ of Aníbal Escalante and I was sure that Masetti would be quickly rehabilitated. Fidel said such tough things to the comrades—‘Don’t think you won this Revolution in a raffle’—that for a while I was afraid the crisis would be a grave one. It’s incredible how Cuba is racing through phases that take ten or twenty years in other countries. I have the impression the comrades bowed their heads to Fidel but I do not rule out the possibility—and I know exactly what I’m saying—that they might kill him any day now. For the moment, though, I’m delighted for Masetti and all of us and, of course, for our beautiful little Cuba which is proving to be an incredible education for everyone.”29
The letter is illuminating: here is García Márquez, two years after his separation from Prensa Latina and his disillusionment with sectarian attempts to take control of it, continuing to invest his political faith and dreams for the future in Cuba and his confidence in its leader, for whom his admiration is unlimited. Here we see how two different approaches to Castro coincide: first, a way of talking that suggests that, like so many socialists at the time, García Márquez feels he knows “Fidel” personally, almost as a friend or elder brother, in the way that we know someone well but still from the outside; second, more unusually, the novelist’s sense that he has an inside vision of the Cuban leader, as if Castro is a character in one of his books, acting and talking more or less in fulfilment of García Márquez’s wishes. For now, though, Cuba was closed to him; so were the movies; and so, it seemed, was the one thing under his own control: his literature. He was beginning to lose hope.
NINETEEN SIXTY-TWO DRAGGED ON. The Cuban missile crisis came and went and the world, shaken and stirred, survived it. But still there was no light at the end of García Márquez’s endless tunnel. Then: Hallelujah! In April 1963 he finally escaped from The Family and Stories for Everyone and became, as he wrote jubilantly to Plinio Mendoza, a “professional writer.”30 He meant script-writer but it was a telling paraphrase. After discussing his predicament with Mercedes, he had taken a chance on a desperate piece of private enterprise by writing a screenplay, on his own initiative, in five days, over the Easter holiday. The script was for a film to be called El Charro (The Cowboy), and García Márquez had the great Mexican actor Pedro Armendáriz in mind to play the protagonist. When Alatriste heard about the project he wanted to take it over with the idea of that most Mexican of film-makers, Emilio “The Indian” Fernández, directing the film. When he discovered that García Márquez had already promised the script to the young director José Luis González de León in exchange for complete control of the screenplay and when he became convinced that García Márquez would not break his word with the other director, Alatriste suddenly changed his previous tune and told García Márquez that he would pay him the same salary as he had paid him for editing the magazines to stay at home for a year and write two more film scripts of his choice.31 García Márquez was delighted that his gamble had paid off.
Unfortunately the unpredictable Alatriste ran out of money over the summer and asked García Márquez to release him from their deal whilst promising to continue to provide him with visa cover. Having succeeded once in provoking competition among film producers, García Márquez contacted another of Alvaro Mutis’s friends: Manuel Barbachano, the producer, who was only too happy to take him on as long as it was on a freelance basis. One of Barbachano’s obsessions was the work of Juan Rulfo and he planned to carry the story “The Golden Cock” (“El gallo de oro”) to the screen. It is the tale of a poor man who saves a dying fighting cock and discovers he has found a champion; he aspires both to great wealth and to the local belle, the mistress of a rich man, and eventually all concerned lose everything they have fought f
or. In several respects it was the world of No One Writes to the Colonel and Mutis had recommended his excited friend as the very man for the job. No better opportunity could have come García Márquez’s way. The director, Roberto Gavaldón, was one of the best-known, and politically best-placed of the country’s film-makers—while the director of photography, Gabriel Figueroa, was probably the most brilliant cameraman in all of Latin America. García Márquez would finally meet the tortured alcoholic author of the story, Juan Rulfo, at a wedding in late November 1963—on the day Lee Harvey Oswald died shortly after being accused of assassinating President John F. Kennedy—and they became as friendly as Rulfo’s condition and García Márquez’s state of anxiety and depression would allow.
Barbachano was not offering García Márquez the same security as Alatriste and the bills still had to be paid, so García Márquez called the Walter Thompson advertising agency in September and was taken on immediately. Though far from what he was ideally looking for, advertising suited his temperament better and left him with far more freedom than the treadmill of running magazines. At least in this new situation he was in a better position to do what he had always done: attend to his day job efficiently and responsibly while still retaining the energy and somehow finding the time to work on what really interested him.32 He was destined to spend late 1963, all of 1964 and much of 1965 working simultaneously in freelance movie work and in advertising agencies—first Walter Thompson, and then Stanton, Pritchard and Wood, which was part of another global giant, McCann Erickson. Walter Thompson and McCann Erickson were among the top three advertising agencies in the world and so for a time García Márquez found himself working for the standard-bearers of U.S. monopoly capitalism, Madison Avenue branch, not something he has ever been keen to highlight. Mutis had preceded him in this as in other things, having worked at Stanton early in his stay in Mexico, from the moment it was established.
Much later, the experience gained during this somewhat bizarre interlude prepared García Márquez, ironically enough, to negotiate his own future celebrity—to understand fame, to think about self-presentation, to produce a personal brand-image and then to manage it. Still more ironic, this early training in advertising and public relations would allow him to live out his political contradictions in public without hostile U.S. commentators ever seriously laying a finger on him in the decades to come. He had the knack, and whenever García Márquez was inspired his manager, a reformed alcoholic, would raise his right hand and punch the air like a prize fighter. He also had help at home: Mercedes was always coming up with memorable phrases about products—“You can’t live without a Kleenex” was one of them—and he turned several of her off-the-cuff remarks into profitable slogans.33
García Márquez now became fully installed in the Mexican cultural milieu at one of its most influential and effervescent moments; the Zona Rosa, Mexico’s answer to Swinging London’s Carnaby Street and King’s Road, would really get going in 1964. Era, the recently funded left-wing publishing house, had just brought out the second edition of No One Writes to the Colonel in September 1963, to García Márquez’s delight—though still with a print run of only 1,000 copies. He began to live quite a social whirl among the black leather jackets and dark glasses of the city’s fashionable writers, painters, movie actors, singers and journalists. The couple were now prosperous and well dressed. Rodrigo and Gonzalo would go to private English schools, first the Colegio Williams kindergarten, then the Queen Elizabeth School in San Angel.34 The family owned a car and started looking around for a house with more space.
Within a few months of starting as a freelance movie writer García Márquez had produced the script for Rulfo’s “The Golden Cock.”35 Barbachano considered it excellent, with just one reservation—he said it was written in Colombian, not Mexican. It was at this moment that García Márquez’s luck improved still more, indeed decisively. Carlos Fuentes, the country’s leading young writer, eighteen months García Márquez’s junior, returned to Mexico late in 1963 after a longish stay in Europe.36 He and the Colombian had a plethora of friends in common. Whoever introduced them, it helped when they first met that Fuentes knew who García Márquez was and already admired his work. As the Mexican would recall, “I’d first heard about Gabriel through Alvaro Mutis, who in the late 1950s gave me a copy of Leaf Storm. ‘This is the best thing that’s come out,’ he said, wisely failing to specify either time or place.”37 As a result of this recommendation Fuentes had published “Big Mama’s Funeral” and the “Monologue of Isabel Watching It Rain in Macondo” in the Revista Mexicana de Literatura. He had even written an enthusiastic review of No One Writes to the Colonel in La Cultura en México (¡Siempre!) in January 1963.
Still, Fuentes was enough to worsen anyone’s inferiority complex. He had enjoyed a privileged upbringing, which he had made the most of. He spoke both English and French superbly, in the virile but modulated tones of the classic Mexican tenor. He was handsome, dashing and dynamic, glamorous in every way. In 1957 he had married the leading actress Rita Macedo; later he would have a dramatic affair with the ill-fated Hollywood star Jean Seberg when she was filming Macho Callahan up in Durango. And in 1958 he had published what can fairly be considered the work which announced the imminent Boom of the Latin American novel, Where the Air Is Clear (La región más transparente). Like García Márquez, Fuentes had travelled to Cuba immediately after the revolution but was always politically independent: he would eventually manage the unlikely feat of being banned from communist Cuba, fascist Spain and the liberal United States. In 1962 he had published two more outstanding books, the gothic novella Aura and The Death of Artemio Cruz (La muerte de Artemio Cruz), one of the great Mexican novels of the century and perhaps the greatest of all novels about the Mexican Revolution—a work which he completed in Havana, where he had viewed his own country’s fading revolutionary process from the perspective of Cuba’s new one. At thirty-five, then, Carlos Fuentes was without question the leading young writer in Mexico and a rising international star.
With so many shared interests and a vocation in common, the two men soon developed a close and mutually profitable relationship. Of course García Márquez had infinitely more to gain. Fuentes was not only several years ahead of him in terms of career development, he was a Mexican in his own country and he had developed over the previous decade a quite extraordinary network of contacts with many of the leading intellectuals in the world—the worlds—in which García Márquez aspired to move. Fuentes could take him to places that almost no other writer in Latin America could reach; and his intellectual generosity was unrivalled. Above all, Fuentes’s Latin American consciousness was much more developed than that of García Márquez and he was able to tutor and groom the still raw and uncertain Colombian for a role in a vast Latin American literary drama that Fuentes, more than any other man alive, could foresee and for which, more than any other man alive, he would be personally responsible.
García Márquez and Fuentes began to work together on the script of “The Golden Cock” with Roberto Gavaldón. García Márquez would later claim that he and Fuentes spent five long months arguing with the director about the script and got nowhere. The movie was eventually filmed between 17 June and 24 July 1964 at the famous Churubusco studios and on location in Querétaro, with star actors Ignacio López Tarso and Lucha Villa as the leads. When the ninety-minute production eventually opened on 18 December 1964 it would be a commercial and critical flop. Rulfo’s writing is ritualistic and implicitly mythic but it is always spare and suggestive, never overt, and nothing could have been more difficult to adapt to the big screen.
Although both men would persist with the genre, particularly García Márquez—he said it was “a safety valve to liberate my ghosts”—neither of them would ever be entirely at home in film work.38 It is not difficult to see why they persisted, however: there was no money to be made in literature in those days, or so it seemed, and the movies were a way to appeal directly to the consciousness of the great L
atin American public. Moreover, in the 1960s, in a relatively repressive society like Mexico’s, the cinema, with its new approach to sexuality and nudity, and its use of beautiful actresses and young, outgoing, avant-garde directors, gave rare and privileged access both to glamour and to the cultural future. Unfortunately the 1960s also encouraged much effervescent but vacuous nonsense, not least in Mexico. To be up to date, fashionable and “where it was at,” or better, to be “in,” became essential in those days and even García Márquez and Fuentes found themselves seduced by the cultural market and its public relations machine.
In July he confessed to Plinio Mendoza that his admiration for Alejo Carpentier’s recent novel Explosion in a Cathedral was beginning to make him think—following Fuentes, no doubt—about the relation between the tropics and the literary baroque. He drew Plinio’s attention to the success in Europe the year before of translations of Explosion in a Cathedral, Fuentes’s The Death of Artemio Cruz, Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, and Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Time of the Hero, a list which included the first three novels of what was not yet known as the “Boom.”39 Little did he dream that the fourth and most famous novel of all would be written by him.
Gabo and Mercedes were now offered the opportunity of moving straight into a new house that was ideal for their purposes.40 It was, he told Plinio, “a great house, with a garden, a study, a guest room, telephone and all the comforts of bourgeois life, in a very quiet and traditional sector full of illustrious oligarchs.” This was something of an exaggeration: it was true that the house was close to such a sector but they were separated from it by a major roadway. Still, agreeable, quiet and comfortable it undoubtedly was. And he, at long last, had his own study, a “cave full of papers.” The house was sparsely furnished but roomier than anywhere the family had lived before, and although largely empty of possessions it would always be full of music, especially Bartók and the Beatles.41
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