Gabriel García Márquez

by Gerald Martin

  Colonel Nicolás R. Márquez (1864–1937), GGM’s maternal grandfather, c. 1914.

  Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes de Márquez (1863–1947), GGM’s maternal grandmother.

  Colonel Nicolás R. Márquez (top left) on a tropical day out, in style, in the 1920s.

  Luisa Santiaga Márquez Iguarán (1905–2002), GGM’s mother, before her marriage.

  Gabriel Eligio García (1901–1984), GGM’s father, and Luisa Santiaga on their wedding day, Santa Marta, 11 June 1926.

  GGM on his first birthday. This is the picture GGM chose for the cover of his 2002 autobiography.

  Part of the Colonel’s old house in Aracataca before any reconstruction work took place.

  Elvira Carrillo (“Aunt Pa”), one of the aunts who looked after GGM and his sister Margot during their childhood in Aracataca.

  (Left to right) Aida GM, Luis Enrique GM, Gabito, cousin Eduardo Márquez Caballero, Margot GM and baby Ligia GM, in Aracataca, 1936. The photograph was taken by the GM children’s father, Gabriel Eligio.

  Gabito at the Colegio San José, Barranquilla, 1941.

  The GM brothers, Luis Enrique and Gabito (right), with cousins and friends, Magangué, c. 1945.

  The Liceo Nacional in Zipaquirá, where GGM studied between 1943 and 1946.

  Argemira García (1887–1950), paternal grandmother of GGM (right), in Sincé with her daughter Ena, who died in 1944 aged twenty-four, allegedly as a result of witchcraft.

  GGM, the budding poet, Zipaquirá, mid-1940s.

  Berenice Martínez, GGM’s girlfriend in Zipaquirá, mid-1940s.

  Mercedes Barcha at school in Medellín in the 1940s.

  Steamship David Arango, on which GGM travelled to Bogotá from the Costa in the 1940s.

  Fidel Castro (left) and other student leaders during the Bogotazo, April 1948.

  Barranquilla, April 1950: farewell party for Ramón Vinyes. Drinkers include Germán Vargas (top, third left), Orlando Rivera (“Figurita”) (top right), “Bob” Prieto (seated first left), GGM and Alfonso Fuenmayor (centre), next to Ramón Vinyes (second from right).

  Barranquilla, 1950: (from left) GGM, Alvaro Cepeda, Alfredo Delgado, Rafael Escalona and Alfonso Fuenmayor in the El Heraldo office.

  GGM, journalist at El Espectador, Bogotá, 1954.

  GGM in the Hôtel de Flandre Paris, 1957.

  Tachia Quintana, Paris.

  GGM and friends (Luis Villar Borda, standing left), Red Square, Moscow, summer 1957.

  The Soviet invasion of Hungary: Russian tanks on a Budapest street in 1956. This was the moment when socialists worldwide concluded that the USSR’s problems were not caused only by Stalin.

  Caracas, 13 May 1958: demonstrators attack U.S. Vice-President Richard Nixon’s limousine. A historic wake-up call for U.S. Latin America policy.

  GGM working for Prensa Latina, Bogotá, 1959.

  Mercedes Barcha in Barranquilla before her marriage to GGM.

  Cuba, December 1958: Che Guevara and comrades relax after battle before marching into Havana.

  GGM and Plinio Mendoza in Prensa Latina, Bogotá, 1959.

  GGM and Mercedes on Séptima, Bogotá, 1960s.

  Havana, January 1961: Cuban militia prepare for the expected U.S. invasion, at the time GGM arrives in New York to work for the revolution.

  Havana, 21 April 1961: U.S.-backed invaders are taken to prison following defeat at Playa Girón (Bay of Pigs), at the time GGM is planning to leave Prensa Latina and travel to Mexico.

  Mexico, 1964: GGM (in glasses, looking distinctly alienated) with Luis Buñuel (front, second left), Luis Alcoriza (front, first left), and (top left to right) Armando Bartra, unknown, unknown (probably Cesare Zavattini), Arturo Ripstein, Alberto Isaac and Claudio Isaac.

  GGM in Aracataca, 1966, with accordionist: this improvised event was the seed of the later vallenato festivals in Valledupar.

  Valledupar, Colombia, 1967: (left to right) Clemente Quintero, Alvaro Cepeda, Roberto Pavajeau, GGM, Hernando Molina and Rafael Escalona.

  Camilo Torres: university friend of GGM, baptized his first son Rodrigo, became Latin America’s best-known revolutionary priest and died in action in 1966.

  Wizard or dunce? GGM in Barcelona, crowned by the famous cabbalistic cover of One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1969.

  Mercedes, Gabo, Gonzalo and Rodrigo, Barcelona, late 1960s.

  A few months later García Márquez was invited by the cultural section of the Mexican Foreign Office to give a lecture and, where he would normally have refused, he in fact agreed, though specifying that he would like to give a literary reading rather than a talk. Always self-critical and concerned with the quality of his work, he had become anxious that he was now lost in a world of his own with Alvaro and María Luisa and that their enthusiasm for his ideas might have hypnotized him:

  I sat down to read on the illuminated stage; the stalls with “my” audience completely in the dark. I started to read, I can’t remember which chapter, but I went on reading and at a given moment there was such silence in the hall and I was in such a state of tension that I panicked. I stopped reading and tried to peer through the darkness and after a few seconds I could see the faces of those in the front row and on the contrary, I could see they had their eyes open wide, like this, and so I was able to go on calmly with the reading. Really people were hanging on my words; not a fly buzzed. When I finished and stepped down from the stage, the first person to embrace me was Mercedes, with an expression on her face—I think it was the first time since I married her that I realized she loved me, because she looked at me with such an expression on her face! … She’d been managing on virtually nothing for a year so that I could write and the day of that reading the expression on her face gave me the certainty that the book was heading in the right direction.12

  Mercedes went on fighting her own campaign to keep the family finances afloat. By early 1966 the money set aside from previous earnings had gone but although her husband’s writer’s block was a thing of the past, the book just got bigger and bigger and seemed set to go on right through the year. Finally García Márquez drove the white Opel to a car pound in Tacubaya and came back with another large sum.13 Now their friends had to drive them around. He even considered letting the telephone go, not only to save the money but to avoid his greatest distraction: talking endlessly to his friends on the phone. When the money for the car ran out Mercedes began to pawn everything: television, fridge, radio, jewellery. Her three last “military positions” were her hairdryer, the liquidizer for the boys’ meals and Gabo’s electric fire. She bought her meat from Don Felipe, the butcher, on ever more elastic credit; she persuaded Luis Coudurier, the landlord, to wait even longer for the rent. And their friends brought regular supplies of every description. They kept the record player, though. García Márquez could not at this stage in his life compose a novel while music was playing; but he could not live without music either and his beloved Bartók, Debussy’s Preludes and the Beatles’ Hard Day’s Night were in the background of most of what he did in those times.

  His worst day in the entire writing was the death of Colonel Aureliano Buendía (chapter 13). Like many writers he experienced the loss of his principal character as a personal bereavement, perhaps even as a homicide. The narration of the death is invested with some of García Márquez’s own most poignant childhood memories and, though the critics have not realized it, the novelist had put more of himself into this apparently unsympathetic character than into any other in his fiction before that time. Aureliano, although the second child, is “the first human being to be born in Macondo”; he is born in March, like García Márquez; born, moreover, with his eyes open, eyes which gaze around that house the moment he emerges from the womb, as little Gabito’s were said to have done. From early childhood he is clairvoyant, just as Gabito is reputed to be in his family. He falls in love with a little girl (and marries her before she reaches puberty); but after her death he is “incapable of love” and acts only out of “sinful pride.” Though ca
pable of great empathy and even kindness as a young man (and though a writer of love poetry—which later embarrasses him), Aureliano is solitary, egocentric and ruthless; nothing can stand in the way of his personal ambition. In Aureliano Buendía, then, García Márquez fuses selected memories of Colonel Márquez (the war, the workshop, the little gold fish) with a self-portrait which amounts to a self-critique; a self-critique which amounts to a perception that he has now achieved his lifelong ambition but that the quest to do so has been calculating, all-consuming and ultimately narcissistic and egotistical. The vocation for writing (for becoming Melquíades), which he would later stress so strongly in Living to Tell the Tale, in fact screens another more elemental and perhaps less palatable instinct, the will to triumph and the desire for fame, glory and riches (Colonel Aureliano Buendía). The Autumn of the Patriarch would take this self-critique to even more surprising lengths.

  At two in the morning, after the deed was done, he went up to the bedroom, where Mercedes was fast asleep, lay down and wept for two hours.14 It requires little biographical insight to suppose that in killing off his central character he was brought to confront not only his own mortality and the end of this novel but also the end of a uniquely euphoric experience—indeed, the end of an entire era of his life and of a person he had been, and the end of a particular inexpressible relationship with the most important person in his life, his grandfather (now lost for ever because literature could not resurrect him). Now, irony of ironies, García Márquez was back, in the midst of his triumphs, to being the man envisaged by his first stories, a man doomed to multiple, successive deaths as he left behind each moment of his life and each object and person that he had loved. Except his wife and children.

  Although he has always given the impression that he stayed in his smoke-filled room until the book was completed, the opportunity of travelling to Colombia at someone else’s expense arose and, after much consideration, he decided to take the opportunity. He had persuaded the Ripsteins to enter Tiempo de morir in the Cartagena Film Festival and travelled by cruise liner from Veracruz to Cartagena, arriving on 1 March 1966 (two weeks after the death in combat of his friend Camilo Torres, now a guerrilla). The film won first prize at the festival, despite García Márquez’s own doubts about the job Ripstein had done. He had much to celebrate on 6 March: the triumph of his movie, the prospects for his novel, and his thirty-ninth birthday back home with the family in Cartagena. He made a brief visit to Bogotá and then flew in to Barranquilla, where Plinio Mendoza was now living. Mendoza received a phone call at work.

  “Gabo, great to hear your voice, where are you?”

  “Sitting in your house, asshole, having a whisky.”15

  He told Mendoza and Alvaro Cepeda about his novel: “It’s nothing like the others, compadres. This time I’ve finally let my hair down. Either I’m going to make my big hit or fall flat on my face.” During the visit he walked round the old haunts in Barranquilla with Alfonso Fuenmayor, reliving old times and reminding himself of places and faces. To complete the whirlwind tour, he returned to Aracataca for the first time in a decade.16 This time he travelled not with his mother but with Alvaro Cepeda, in a jeep driven by Cepeda himself. They were conveniently accompanied on their quest for time past by the Barranquilla correspondent of El Tiempo, who wrote a detailed report: suddenly García Márquez was being converted into a folk hero by the media—prior to his further metamorphosis into a superstar.17

  He had intended to stay several weeks but embarked for Mexico after a few days, arriving towards the end of March. Alfonso Fuenmayor protested at his departure, and García Márquez explained that the night before he left he had suddenly seen the end of his novel so clearly that he could dictate it word for word to a typist. He locked himself away in that room again, and set about assimilating what had just happened to him. The ending that had occurred to him—which speaks perhaps to a sense of how much he had moved on and how much his Colombian friends had not—was one of the greatest conclusions to a novel in all of literature.

  One Hundred Years of Solitude was a book that had a publisher almost from the moment it was started. It had a daily audience of enthusiasts on whom its author could count. And the euphoric writer was hardly in need of encouragement: he was a man possessed. Possessed of creative powers of literature pulsing through him and possessed of the certainty that the work’s success was in the stars, preordained. James Joyce’s Ulysses is the closest example of a mythic book which the cognoscenti knew was coming and which they knew was destined for greatness; but Joyce had no publisher and could never expect to be a best-selling author. Yet so confident was the normally hyper-cautious García Márquez that, far from succumbing to the superstitions that usually restrained him, during his visit to Bogotá in March he had given his old colleagues in El Espectador the first chapter, which they published on 1 May. Carlos Fuentes, by now back in Paris, received the first three chapters in June 1966 and was dazzled.18 He passed them to his friend Julio Cortázar. The reaction was the same. Then Fuentes passed chapter 2 to Emir Rodríguez Monegal to publicize it in the first edition of a new literary magazine, Mundo Nuevo, in Paris in August 1966.

  In an interview with the editor, Fuentes announced that he had just received the first seventy-five pages of García Márquez’s “work in progress” (the reference to Joyce was unmistakable) and considered it without the slightest doubt an absolute masterpiece which immediately consigned all previous Latin American regional classics to a dusty past.

  Then Fuentes sent an article to La Cultura en México (¡Siempre!) announcing to his compatriots also, on 29 June, that One Hundred Years of Solitude was coming and was a great novel (García Márquez probably hadn’t even finished it): “I have just read eighty magisterial pages: the first eighty pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude, the novel Gabriel García Márquez is working on.”19 People could hardly express their astonishment. There were no precedents for what was happening.

  In view of the climate of expectation, it was as well that García Márquez was able to finish the novel. He told Plinio Mendoza: “The book arrived at its natural end in a rush, at eleven in the morning. Mercedes was out and I couldn’t find anyone on the telephone to tell the news. I remember my confusion as if it were yesterday: I didn’t know what to do with myself and tried to make something up to survive until three o’clock in the afternoon!”20 Later that day a blue cat came into the house and the writer thought, “Hmmm, maybe this book is going to sell.” Minutes later the two boys came in with brushes and blue paint all over their hands and clothes.

  His first act was to send a copy off to Germán Vargas in Bogotá, prior to sending the manuscript to Sudamericana. García Márquez asked Vargas if he thought it was all right to have made references to himself and his friends in Barranquilla. First Vargas, then Fuenmayor, replied that they were honoured to be friends of the last of the Buendías. Then Vargas, in that slow way of his, digested the book and wrote an article entitled “A Book That Will Make a Noise,” which he published in April 1967 in Encuentro Liberal, the weekly he himself edited in Bogotá; Vargas’s own essay itself made a noise and was the first Colombian prediction of the novel’s future status.21 Plinio Mendoza also received a copy in Barranquilla and, cancelling work for the day, read it from start to finish. He told his new wife Marvel Moreno, an ex-beauty queen and future novelist, “He’s done it. Gabo’s made the big hit he wanted.” Plinio passed it on to Alvaro Cepeda. Alvaro read it, took the cigar out of his mouth, and shouted, “No shit, Gabo’s pulled off a helluva novel.”22

  The way García Márquez has always told it, his return to the world was almost as dramatic and confusing as that of Rip Van Winkle.23 It was the year of Swinging London. Indira Gandhi was now running the largest democracy on earth and Fidel Castro, in whose company García Márquez would meet that same Indian leader many years later, was busy organizing the first Tricontinental Conference of Asian, African and Latin American States to be held in Havana in August 1967. A right-wing act
or called Ronald Reagan was running for Governor of California. China was in uproar and Mao would proclaim the Cultural Revolution a few days after García Márquez sent the first tranche of his precious package to Buenos Aires. In fact García Márquez himself had to leave the magical world of Macondo in a hurry and begin to make some money. He felt unable to take even a week off to celebrate. He was afraid that it might take him years to pay off the debts he had accumulated. He would say later that he had written 1,300 pages of which he had finally sent 490 to Porrúa; that he had smoked 30,000 cigarettes and owed 120,000 pesos. Understandably, he still felt insecure. Soon after he had finished it he attended a party at his English friend James Papworth’s house. Papworth enquired about the book and García Márquez replied, “I’ve either got a novel or just a kilo of paper, I’m still not sure which.”24 He went straight back to working on film scripts. Then, in his first article for five years, dated July 1966 and still not written for consumption in Mexico, García Márquez wrote a self-referential meditation for El Espectador entitled “Misfortunes of a Writer of Books”: