Yet in the midst of all the social whirl, behind the fake bonhomie and despite his new-found security and respectability, García Márquez was increasingly unhappy. Pictures of him from this period are painful to look at: he exudes tension and stress. Some said they saw him close to fist fights at parties. He was writing nothing that he cared about, except, on and off, The Autumn of the Patriarch, which he felt was going nowhere. He was a petty-bourgeois script-writer and ad man. Successful authors such as Julio Cortázar and Mario Vargas Llosa, who had no revolutionary antecedents, were being courted by the Cuban Revolution while he was out in the cold. When the influential Uruguayan literary critic Emir Rodríguez Monegal, who would play a fundamental role in publicizing not only Fuentes and García Márquez but all the other writers of the rapidly swelling Boom, had visited Mexico in January 1964 to teach at the Colegio de México, he had found García Márquez in a disturbing mental condition: “a tortured soul, an inhabitant of the most exquisite hell: that of literary sterility. To try to speak to him about his earlier work, to praise (for example) No One Writes to the Colonel, was like torturing him with one of the most subtle machines of the Inquisition.”42
He soldiered on. In late 1964 he rewrote his first original screenplay, El charro, originally to have been filmed by José Luis González de León. Now it was directed by the twenty-two-year-old Arturo Ripstein and retitled Tiempo de morir (Time to Die).43 Its origin, like so many of García Márquez’s works, lay in one image, a memory, a lived incident in the past. He had once gone back to an apartment of his in Colombia to find the doorman, an ex-hit-man, knitting a sweater.44 In the screenplay a man who has spent eighteen years in prison for a murder he was provoked into committing returns to his home village, despite the fact that the sons of the dead man have sworn to kill him. He too knits sweaters. The younger son has a change of heart but the other repeatedly provokes the older man—history repeating itself—until finally, ironically, the protagonist shoots the older son and the younger son then shoots the protagonist dead without resistance on the other’s part. Obviously this was a rewrite of his grandfather’s experience in Barrancas, when he too was provoked by a younger man—though of course Nicolás Márquez eventually shot his adversary and spent only one year in jail, not eighteen.
The movie was eventually filmed at Churubusco and in Pátzcuaro between 7 June and 10 July 1965, only weeks after García Márquez had completed the script. It would star Jorge Martínez de Hoyos, Marga López and Enrique Rocha; the dialogue would be adapted by Carlos Fuentes, the camera work was by the great Alex Phillips, and the titles were produced by García Márquez’s friend Vicente Rojo. It was ninety minutes long and premiered on 11 August 1966 at the Cine Variedades in Mexico City. Yet again a movie involving García Márquez was generally considered a failure, though the young director’s raw cinematographic talent was evident to all. García Márquez and Ripstein would each blame the other. García Márquez’s contribution was typical of his cinematographic virtues and vices: the plot was almost worthy of Sophocles in its perfection; the dialogue was far too sententious for a movie. García Márquez had seen with disillusioning clarity that for him at least writing movie scripts was less satisfying than writing literary stories, even if almost no one reads them: first of all, writing for films was completely different from writing for a reading public; second, you inevitably lost your independence, your political and moral integrity, and even your identity; because finally, producers and directors inevitably saw you as merely a means to an end, a commodity.45
Nevertheless what was, in many respects, García Márquez’s most historic moment in the movies had come almost at the start of this ultimately disillusioning new era, when many of Mexico’s best-known celebrities, mostly friends of his, took part in the filming of his story “There Are No Thieves in This Town” in late October 1964. It was the tale of a layabout in a small town who decides to make some money by selling the ivory billiard balls in the local pool hall, only to bring disaster upon himself, his long-suffering wife and their recently born child.46 Filming took place in Mexico City and in Cuautla. García Márquez himself, who would also work on the montage, played the ticket collector outside the village cinema and, always self-conscious in such situations, gave a particularly uneasy performance. Luis Buñuel played the priest, Juan Rulfo, Abel Quezada and Carlos Monsiváis were dominoes players, Luis Vicens was the owner of the pool hall, José Luis Cuevas and Emilio García Riera were billiards players, María Luisa Mendoza was a cabaret singer, and the painter Leonora Carrington played a churchgoer dressed in mourning. The leads were Julián Pastor, Rocío Sagaón and Graciela Enríquez. Decidedly one of the better films of the era, There Are No Thieves in This Town was ninety minutes long and premiered on 9 September 1965.
Despite these and other developments, the movies had started to lose their charm for García Márquez at just the moment that he found himself fully installed in the industry and finally earning good money. Was that the point? He could see that he could go on working in the Mexican cinema with tolerable success for as far into the future as he wanted. Yet he was also becoming aware that this was not where his talent lay, that the satisfactions of script-writing were limited, and in any case the script-writer was never in full control of his own destiny. He was beginning to feel trapped again. Besides, the world of Latin American literature was changing rapidly and becoming, ironically, much more glamorous than the movies. And just around then, as the movies palled, he began to perceive that the movies were part of the trouble he had had with literature. It was not so much that he was writing literary scripts for a quite different medium, though undoubtedly he was; the real problem was that the movies had taken over his conception of the novel, years before, and he needed to go back to his own literary roots. Looking back several years later, he reflected: “I always thought that the cinema, through its tremendous visual power, was the perfect means of expression. All my books before One Hundred Years of Solitude are hampered by that uncertainty. There is an immoderate desire for the visualization of character and scene, a millimetric account of the time of dialogue and action and an obsession with indicating point of view and frame. While actually working in cinema, however, I came to realize not only what could be done but also what couldn’t be done; I saw that the predominance of the image over other narrative elements was certainly an advantage but also a limitation and this was for me a startling discovery because only then did I become aware of the fact that the possibilities of the novel itself are unlimited.”47
In 1965 a grand symposium of intellectuals was held at the site of the Mayan archaeological ruins of Chichén Itzá. Carlos Fuentes, José Luis Cuevas and William Styron were among the participants in what was a real jamboree with its much-advertised intellectual dimension somewhat sidelined by high jinks of every kind. Of course no one at that time would have thought of inviting García Márquez, still unknown internationally nor would García Márquez have thought of exposing himself to such an occasion. However, when the participants set off for their various destinations via Mexico City Fuentes organized a huge and now legendary party at his house, at which García Márquez was a guest and met the Chilean novelist José Donoso, who admired No One Writes to the Colonel and would remember García Márquez as “a gloomy, melancholy person tormented by his writer’s block, a blockage as legendary as those of Ernesto Sábato and the eternal block of Juan Rulfo…and William Styron.”48
Following the party came two visits which were to prove decisive in García Márquez’s return to literature and the revolutionizing of his life. While Ripstein was shooting Tiempo de morir in Pátzcuaro, Michoacán, in June, García Márquez was visited by Luis Harss, a young Chilean-American who had met him briefly in the United Nations building in New York in 1961 and who was now preparing a book of critical interviews of leading Latin American novelists of the last two generations in response to the sensational phenomenon that would later be called the Boom.49 He had originally planned nine interviews. Most of the oth
er writers included were fairly obvious, though still shrewdly chosen: Miguel Angel Asturias, Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier, João Guimarães Rosa, Juan Carlos Onetti and Juan Rulfo, from the previous generation; and Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes from the writers of the Boom. García Márquez, however, was the brilliant exception. The recommendation, inevitably, came from Fuentes.50
The visit by Harss and his inclusion in this top ten list must have been an exhilarating shot in the arm for García Márquez. The interview remains today one of the most extraordinary insights into a man who, at that time, in his first serious major interview, had not yet developed the brash celebrity persona of later years, though he did begin by calling Colombian literature “a casualty list.” It was the first time García Márquez had been subjected to public interrogation and its effect on his own self-scrutiny and self-analysis is likely to have been dramatic. Harss described him thus:
He is stocky, but light on his feet, with a bristling mustache, a cauliflower nose, and many fillings in his teeth. He wears an open sports shirt, faded blue jeans, and a bulky jacket flung over his shoulders … A strenuous life that might have wrecked another man has provided García Márquez with the rich hoard of personal experiences that form the hard core of his work. For years he has been living in Mexico. He would go home if he could—he says he would drop everything if he were needed there—but at the moment he and Colombia have nothing to offer each other. For one thing, his politics are unwelcome there, and he has strong feelings on the subject. Meantime—if life abroad can be an ordeal, it also has its compensations—he is like a jeweler polishing his gems. With a handful of books behind him, each born of the labor of love, like a pearl in an oyster, he has begun to make a solid reputation for himself.51
Later in the interview, however, García Márquez would try to undermine Harss’s view of him as constant and tenacious: “I have firm political ideas. But my literary ideas change according to my digestion.” And Harss noted that he also seemed somehow to carry drama with him:
Angel Gabriel, tightening his belt, comes out of a dark bend in the corridor with lights in his eyes. He lets himself into the room stealthily, a bit on edge, wondering what is going to happen to him, but at the same time, it seems, rubbing his hands with anticipation … He has a way of startling himself with his own thoughts. Now—the night is fragrant and full of surprises—he lies back on a bed, like a psychoanalytic patient, stubbing out cigarettes. He talks fast, snatching thoughts as they cross his mind, winding and unwinding them like paper streamers, following them in one end and out the other, only to lose them before he can pin them down. A casual tone with a deep undertow suggests he is making a strategy of negligence. He has a way of eavesdropping on himself, as if he were trying to overhear bits of a conversation in the next room. What matters is what is left unsaid.52
Was García Márquez already like this or was he becoming this as he spoke, urged on by the drama in which he felt he was taking part? Who knows. Harss would entitle his interview “Gabriel García Márquez, or the Lost Chord.”
Just a few weeks later, following this first public camera flash, came a crucial business visit. Since 1962 the Barcelona literary agent Carmen Balcells had been acting for García Márquez in a largely hypothetical sense as the negotiator of his translations; whereas he, up to now, had been having a hard time getting the novels published even in their original language. Balcells arrived in Mexico on Monday 5 July after a visit to New York, where she had negotiated a contract with Roger Klein of Harper and Row to publish García Márquez’s four extant works in English translation for 1,000 dollars.53 She was an ambitious international literary agent and he was a promising young writer aching for success. She introduced herself to her new author, explained the contract and waited for his reaction: “The contract is a piece of shit,” was his reply. The ebullient Balcells, rotund of face and body, and her husband Luis Palomares, had already been disconcerted by the Colombian’s curious but characteristic mixture of diffidence, indifference and arrogance, and must have been astounded that a writer almost no one had heard of could have such a high opinion of his own worth. This was not a good start: “I found him most unlikeable, petulant. But he was right about the contract.”54 Fortunately García Márquez and Mercedes soon rallied and put on three days of guided tours and parties, culminating on 7 July 1965 in the signing of a second, spoof contract in which, like a colonel in one of his stories, and in the presence of Luis Vicens, he authorized Balcells to represent him in all languages and on all sides of the Atlantic for 150 years. Now his own short story was weaving its magic: he had found his own Big Mama in real life, and for the long term. She at once negotiated with Era for new editions of No One Writes to the Colonel and In Evil Hour, and would soon negotiate Italian translations with Feltrinelli. She probably thought he should be grateful for his luck. Little did she know how lucky she was going to be.
After these unexpected visits from afar and their accompanying good news, García Márquez decided to take the family for a brief vacation in Acapulco the following weekend, having been away filming in Pátzcuaro for so long. The road down to Acapulco is one of the most tortuous and testing in a country of terrifying twists and turns, and García Márquez, who has always enjoyed driving, was delighting in the piloting of his little white Opel through the ever-changing panorama of the Mexican road. He has often said that driving is a skill at once so automatic and yet so demanding of concentration that it allows him to displace the surplus concentration to a consideration of his novels.55 He had not been driving long that day when, “from nowhere,” the first sentence of a novel floated down into his brain. Behind it, invisible but palpable, was the entire novel, there as if dictated—downloaded—from above. It was as powerful, as irresistible as a magic spell. The secret formula of the sentence was in the point of view and, above all, in the tone: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad …” García Márquez, as if in a trance, pulled over at the roadside, turned the Opel around, and drove back in the direction of Mexico City. And then …
It seems a pity to intervene in the story at this point but the biographer feels constrained to point out that there have been many versions of this story (as of so many others) and that the one just related cannot be true—or at least, cannot be as miraculous as most of its narrators have suggested. The different versions vary as to whether it was the first line that García Márquez heard or whether it was just the image of a grandfather taking a boy to discover ice (or, indeed, to discover something else).56 Whatever the truth, something mysterious, not to say magical, had certainly happened.
The classic version, just interrupted, has García Márquez turning the car round the very moment he hears the line in his head and peremptorily cancelling the family vacation, driving back to Mexico City and beginning the novel as soon as he gets home. Other versions have him repeating the line to himself and reflecting on its implications as he drives, then making extensive notes when he gets to Acapulco, then starting the novel proper as soon as he gets back to the capital city.57 This is certainly the most convincing of the different alternatives; but in all the versions the vacation is truncated and the boys and the long-suffering Mercedes, little knowing how long-suffering she would now be called upon to be, had to swallow their disappointment and wait for another holiday—an occasion which would be a long time coming.
15
Melquíades the Magician:
One Hundred Years of Solitude
1965–1966
YEARS LATER GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ would say that after he got home he sat down at his typewriter the next day, just as he did every day except “this time I did not get up for another eighteen months.”1 In fact the writing would take not much longer than a year, July 1965 to July or August 1966, including several interruptions, yet he would always say it was eighteen months; perhaps because it had really taken him eighteen years. He told Plinio Mendoza that his biggest problem had been: “Getting started, I remember quite
distinctly the day that with enormous difficulty I finished the first sentence and I asked myself, terrified, what the hell came next. In fact, until the galleon was discovered in the middle of the jungle I didn’t really think the book would get anywhere. But from that point on the whole thing became a kind of frenzy, and very enjoyable as well.”2
In other words, only when he got about ten pages in and wrote the episode in which the first José Arcadio Buendía comes aross a Spanish galleon in the tropical forest did he realize that the magic was not going to end this time and that he really could begin to relax. This was evidently in the very first week, while he still had vacation time away from the office. All the burdens of the previous five years began to fall away. He expected to write eight hundred typed pages which he would eventually reduce to about four hundred; not a bad guess, as it turned out. In those four hundred pages he would tell the story of four generations of the Buendía family, the first of whom arrives at a place called Macondo some time in the nineteenth century and begins to experience a hundred years of Colombian history with a mixture of perplexity, obduracy, obsessiveness and black humour. The family moves from a posture of childlike innocence through all the stages of man and woman to eventual decadence and the last of them is swept away by a “biblical hurricane” on the last page of the novel. Critics have speculated endlessly on the meaning of this conclusion ever since the book first appeared. The six central characters, who begin the novel and dominate its first half, are José Arcadio Buendía, the excitable founder of the village of Macondo; his wife Ursula, the backbone of not only her family but also the entire novel; their sons José Arcadio and Aureliano—the latter, Colonel Aureliano Buendía, generally considered the principal character of the book; their daughter Amaranta, tormented as a child and embittered as a woman; and the gypsy Melquíades, who brings news of the outside world from time to time and eventually stays on in Macondo. The history of Colombia is dramatized through two principal events: the War of a Thousand Days, and the massacre of the banana workers in Ciénaga in 1928. These were of course the two main historical references which had been the context of García Márquez’s own childhood.
Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez Page 38