In early June García Márquez was interviewed in Mexico by Visión, the Latin American equivalent of Time, and the only magazine sold all over the continent (though published, significantly enough, from Washington). García Márquez told his interviewers that he was planning to take his family for two years to “a beach resort near Barcelona.”9 He repeated the now familiar story that he had started One Hundred Years of Solitude when he was “seventeen” but that the “package” was too big for him to manage. But he also said something surprising: “When I finish writing a book it no longer interests me. As Hemingway said: ‘Every finished book is like a dead lion.’ The problem then is how to hunt an elephant.” García Márquez tired of One Hundred Years of Solitude: could he be serious! The statement was published in other magazines and newspapers all over Latin America and was typical of a new journalistic phenomenon: the boutade à la García Márquez.10 It was a multiple contradiction in terms: consciously nonchalant, and irritating to his critics for that and other reasons; as knowingly hypocritical as a wink of the eye, with a kind of my-way arrogance passing for modesty; all wrapped up in a popular witticism allowing its author to escape from aggression with the effortless elegance of a Chaplinesque pirouette—and yet, underneath, and paradoxically, it would always contain some undeniable kernel of truth.
García Márquez and Mercedes set off for Argentina on 19 June to begin to meet their destiny. He had confessed to Plinio Mendoza that he was “as frightened as a cockroach” and looking for “a bed big enough for me to hide under.”11 They flew first to Colombia and left their two sons with their maternal grandmother on the way. The boys, both effectively Mexicans, would not return to their home country for many years. On the plane to Buenos Aires their parents discussed their options for the future and Mercedes must have reflected on the promises Gabo had made about his future objectives when they took their first flight together almost ten years before. He had indeed now written “the novel of his life” at the age of forty. On 20 June they landed at Ezeiza Airport in Buenos Aires at three in the morning, three weeks after the publication of the novel. Despite their clandestine arrival, Paco Porrúa recalls that the whole city seemed to be in party mode, having “succumbed immediately to the novel’s seductive charm.”12 He and Martínez were there to greet the unsuspecting couple, whose life had changed more even than they knew. Far from exhausted by the journey, García Márquez asked to see the pampas and to eat an Argentine grilled steak.13 As a compromise they took him to a restaurant on Montevideo Street. As they tried to accustom themselves to this man from the tropics, with his psychedelic lumberjack’s overcoat, his tight Italian trousers, his Cuban boots, his black-capped teeth and his curious mixture of sententiousness and nonchalance, they persuaded themselves that this indeed was what the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude had to look like. As for his wife, she was a wonderful apparition who looked like an Amerindian version of Queen Nefertiti.14
García Márquez was dazzled by Buenos Aires—his first experience, he would say, of a Latin American metropolis that didn’t look “unfinished.” One morning he saw a woman with a copy of the novel stuffed in her shopping bag, between the tomatoes and lettuces, as he breakfasted in a café on a street corner. His book, already “popular” in both senses of the word, was being received “not like a novel but like life.”15 That same night he and Mercedes went to an event in the theatre of the Instituto Di Tella, the motor for Argentinian cultural life in that era. Tomás Eloy Martínez has recorded the moment when García Márquez became, for ever, a character in a story he had written in advance, like his character Melquíades, without knowing it: “Mercedes and Gabo moved towards the stage, disconcerted by so many early furs and shimmering feathers. The auditorium was in shadow but for some reason a spotlight followed them. They were about to sit down when someone shouted ‘Bravo!’ and broke into applause. A woman echoed the shout. ‘For your novel!’ she said. The entire theatre stood up. At that precise moment I saw fame come down from the sky, wrapped in a dazzling flapping of sheets, like Remedios the Beautiful, and bathe García Márquez in one of those winds of light that are immune to the ravages of time.”16
Martínez says that García Márquez wove his magic all over Buenos Aires. He was just about to leave a party one evening by the banks of the Río de la Plata when he noticed “a young woman who was almost levitating with happiness. García Márquez said, ‘That young woman is really sad but doesn’t know how to realize it. Wait a moment, I’m going to help her to cry.’ He whispered a few secret words in the young woman’s ear. Huge uncontrollable tears sprang from her eyes. ‘How could you tell she was sad?’ I asked him later. ‘What did you say to make her cry?’ ‘I told her not to feel so alone.’ ‘She felt alone?’ ‘Of course. Have you ever known a woman who didn’t feel alone?’” Martínez continues, “I met him again, furtively, the night before his departure. They had told him that in a glade in the Palermo woods, couples would hide in dark fiery caves where they could kiss one another freely. ‘It’s a place they call El Tiradero, Fuck Corner,’ he ventured. ‘Villa Cariño, Love’s Abode,’ I translated. ‘Mercedes and I are desperate,’ he said. ‘Every time we try to kiss one another someone interrupts.’”17
García Márquez could not possibly know just how famous he was going to be but he must have had some inkling. Back in Mexico City, he and Mercedes began to make plans and wind up their affairs. They were resolved to exercise their new-found freedom. Faced by the sudden, totally new perspective of celebrity and possibly even financial security, García Márquez had decided that he would leave Mexico and move to Spain. And he was in a hurry.
The novel was published in Mexico City, on 2 July, six years after the family had arrived in the country.18 María Luisa Elío, to whom it had been dedicated, recalls: “We went crazy. He brought me a copy, then we went from bookstore to bookstore buying books for my friends and making him write dedications. Gabo told me, ‘You’re heading for financial ruin.’ I was buying all the copies I could afford. We went to Gabo’s house and drank toasts with Mercedes. The following day, well, we didn’t have any money back then, neither do we have any nowadays, but we manage … You probably remember there’s a passage in One Hundred Years of Solitude … where it rained yellow daisies. Well, that day I bought a large basket, the largest I could find, and I filled it with yellow daisies. I had on a gold bracelet, so I took it off and put it in the basket, then looked for a little gold fish and a bottle of whisky. I put it all in the basket and we went to their house.”19 This tendency to turn the world of reality into the magical world of One Hundred Years of Solitude would gather pace like a snowball and would before too long make the author himself utterly weary of the constructions placed on his extraordinary novel. He would eventually himself wish to move on from the sixties but he would find himself endlessly dragged back there.
On 1 August he left for Caracas to attend the 13th International Congress of Ibero-American Literature organized by the University of Pittsburgh, which was to coincide with the presentation of the newly created Rómulo Gallegos prize to Mario Vargas Llosa for his 1966 novel The Green House. Their planes from London and Mexico landed almost simultaneously at Maiquetía and they met, symbolically enough, in the airport: both men would be taking many flights in the years to come.20 There had already been correspondence. Now they became room-mates. It was to be a profound but ultimately turbulent literary friendship. García Márquez felt overwhelmed. He had not written a script for this eventuality. He was a late arrival at the banquet of the Boom—although nine years younger, Mario Vargas Llosa, who had lived in Europe since 1959, already knew most of the other writers both in Paris and Barcelona; he was handsome, debonair, critically sophisticated (he had been working towards a PhD), yet he knew how to wow the literary masses. In the face of this unmistakable star quality García Márquez, the new sensation, suddenly felt nervy, intimidated, defensive. At one party he had his Venezuelan friends put up a sign saying “Forbidden to speak of One Hundred Years
of Solitude.” Nevertheless he also acted up for the press: he told them, straight-faced, that Mercedes wrote his books but made him sign them because they were so bad. And, asked whether the local sacred cow, ex-President Rómulo Gallegos, was a great novelist, he replied: “In his novel Canaima there’s a description of a chicken that’s really quite good.”21 Now García Márquez would begin to meet everybody who was anybody; now that there was a García Márquez, there could really be a Boom; now, there could be anything. This man was magic. His book was magic—his name was magic: “Gabo” was a Warhol-era dream and not just for fifteen minutes.
Emir Rodríguez Monegal told García Márquez that two days before flying to Caracas he had been in the Coupole in Paris with Fuentes and Pablo Neruda; Fuentes was giving Neruda a rave review of One Hundred Years of Solitude, predicting that it would be as important for Latin America as Cervantes’s Don Quixote had been for Spain.22
The Gabo-Mario show moved on to Bogotá on 12 August. One Hundred Years of Solitude had still not begun to circulate there and there had been little feedback from Buenos Aires. Neither El Espectador nor El Tiempo published anything about the novel in the early weeks. It was almost as if Colombians were deliberately withholding their interest; as if they were waiting until it was impossible to ignore this astonishing phenomenon in their midst. The truth is that he would never be as much appreciated in his home country as in other parts of Latin America.23 Plinio Mendoza had travelled up to Bogotá with Cepeda: “I remember that just before One Hundred Years of Solitude was published in Colombia García Márquez came to Bogotá with Mario Vargas Llosa. Mario had just won the Rómulo Gallegos prize in Caracas with The Green House. As happens with all the personalities who turn up there, ‘le tout Bogotá’ rushed out to celebrate him. There were all those people fluttering, bubbling around him, always attending to the etiquette of success, still unaware of the bomb García Márquez had made, still valuing the home writer in quite modest terms; and leaving him discreetly in the background.”24
Vargas Llosa left for Lima on 15 August but the show went on again when García Márquez joined him there for a week of literary events at the start of September. The friendship was symbolically cemented when García Márquez acted as godfather to Mario and Patricia Vargas Llosa’s second son, named Gonzalo Gabriel.
He was back in Cartagena by the end of September and took the opportunity to visit Valledupar with Alvaro Cepeda and Rafael Escalona. A young woman called Consuelo Araujonoguera had organised a small vallenato festival similar to the improvised event García Márquez and Cepeda had arranged in Aracataca the previous year; the event would acquire permanent status the following year. After it was over García Márquez began to finalize arrangements for the departure. It was good to see the Colombian families before leaving but despite all the water that had flowed under their respective bridges, the relationship between García Márquez and his father seemed beyond repair. Eligio would recall, “In October 1967 Gabito was in Cartagena with Mercedes and the two boys. I can still feel how embarrassed I was to see Gabito sitting there on a bed, totally intimidated by my father, who was lying in the hammock. It was as if my father inspired some indescribable fear, almost a terror, which was a false impression (the family profession!); later, talking it over with Jaime and Gabito, we came to the conclusion that Gabito just didn’t know how to behave in front of him.”25 No truer word was ever said. But the reason was no longer fear, one can be sure. One can also be sure that the father was still not giving the son due credit for his achievements, even though it now looked as if, far from eating paper, Gabito could perhaps start eating banknotes; and one can be equally sure that the son, that “peripatetic spermatozoa,” would not have welcomed the belated credit anyway. He still saw Gabriel Eligio as his stepfather.
No doubt politics remained among the difficulties between them. In September Governor Ronald Reagan of California had urged the escalation of the American war in Vietnam and divisions were growing all across the Western world. Presumably García Márquez and his father discussed the death of Che Guevara, whom Gabito had briefly met in Havana, which was announced to the world by the Bolivian High Command on 10 October. This painful news was perhaps compounded shortly afterwards by the announcement that another father figure always rejected by García Márquez, Guatemalan writer Miguel Angel Asturias, had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first Latin American novelist ever to be so honoured. (A poet, the Chilean Gabriela Mistral, had won in 1945.) This was obviously interpreted all over the world as a symbolic acknowledgement of the ongoing Boom of the Latin American novel. Asturias and García Márquez, the two greatest “magical realists” who seemed to have so much in common, would soon come to cordially detest one another. Asturias, belatedly crowned, would fear the young pretender, and García Márquez, newly acclaimed, would seem bent on parricide.26
There is undoubtedly a sense that he fled to Europe to give himself freedom from day-to-day pressure and room to manoeuvre and regroup. Journalists were asking him his opinion about everything under the sun, but above all about politics. It would be a mistake, however, to think that his intention was to escape from political commitment altogether. He was lucid enough to realize that he could only be influential if he was writing successful novels; thus the first thing was to ensure himself the time and space to write the next one—not least because the next one, like One Hundred Years of Solitude, had already been a long time coming. Of course García Márquez was now able to act more overtly and to take symbolic stands that would have interested nobody just a few short months before. In November, just before his departure, and in the face of pressure from students to make some public commitment to social and political change, he told El Espectador that producers of culture were “persecuted” in Colombia by its reactionary ruling class.27 Another interview that appeared after his departure was with Alfonso Monsalve for Enfoque Nacional, which included the statement “The revolutionary duty of a writer is to write well.”28 It would be reprinted in El Tiempo in mid-January. It came several years after Fidel Castro’s first (and last) words on the topic, which were somewhat different. Castro’s famous speech, “Words to the Intellectuals,” had declared that literary form should be free but literary content rather less so: “Inside the Revolution, everything; outside the Revolution, nothing.” Castro had also declared that the most revolutionary writer would be one who renounced his writing for the revolution.
García Márquez, troubled by his relations with the press (and through them, with his new reading public), would find himself working harder than even he had expected in these early years to give himself that room to manoeuvre politically and aesthetically that he was seeking; if he was to find himself in some difficult moral and ideological corners, he was determined that they would be of his own making or, at the least, that he would manage them on his own terms. He told Monsalve that serious “professional” writers put their vocation before all things and should never accept any kind of “subsidy” or “grant.” He said he felt a profound responsibility towards his readers and that The Autumn of the Patriarch had been almost ready for publication when One Hundred Years of Solitude was published but now he felt he would have to completely rewrite it—not in order for it to be like the great best-seller but precisely to be different from it. Here already he introduces a disconcerting idea: that the success of One Hundred Years of Solitude is in part due to certain “technical devices” (he will later call them “tricks”) which he could use as trademarks but he would rather move on and write something completely different. “I do not wish to parody myself.” Monsalve presents his compatriot as someone who at first looks and sounds more like a Mexican than a Colombian until he relaxes, “finds the thread of his ideas” and becomes once again “the typical Colombian costeño, talkative, candid, straightforward in his concepts and putting into each of his expressions a wit syncretized in his dual Black and Spanish ancestry beneath the stupefying sun of the tropics.” Clearly this man, presented here with
an evidently sympathetic intention, was still perceived very much as an alien in the capital of his own country, as he had been, once upon a time, in his own family.
So it would always be. García Márquez could hardly wait to leave.
PART III
Man of the World:
Celebrity and Politics
1967–2005
17
Barcelona and the
Latin American Boom:
Between Literature and Politics
1967–1970
THE GARCÍA BARCHA FAMILY arrived in Spain on 4 November 1967.1 After almost a week in Madrid they travelled to Barcelona. They intended a quite brief stay but, as in Mexico, they would remain almost six years.2 Once again it would be impossible for García Márquez to work as a journalist because the press was ruthlessly censored and he was a figure of international renown. But this would turn out to be a blessing: the separation from journalism and politics in Mexico City had coincided with one big book, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and in Barcelona it would coincide with an almost equally large one, The Autumn of the Patriarch.
To many the journey to Barcelona seemed a curious venture for a left-leaning Latin American, and García Márquez had always claimed to have avoided visiting Spain out of hatred for the Franco dictatorship.3 Mexico was the most hostile of all Hispanic countries to the Spanish regime and it was certainly an irony that García Márquez would travel from there to live in a country from which so many of his Catalan friends in both Mexico and Colombia were exiled. But although he would usually deny it, the spectacle of the old Spanish dictator near the end of his life and power was inevitably a stimulus to the writing of the book he had long since planned on an even more geriatric Latin American tyrant, a literary one whose power would seem eternal to his helpless and long-suffering subjects.
Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez Page 42