Gabriel García Márquez

by Gerald Martin

  In fact there was much else to be said for the decision. His literary agent, Carmen Balcells, was in Barcelona and was already on her way to becoming one of the most influential agents not only in Spain but in the whole of Europe. With the Seix Barral publishing house and many others already in existence or springing up, Barcelona was, despite Franco, at the very centre of the 1960s publishing boom in Latin American fiction. Behind it was a renascent if necessarily muted Catalan nationalism and an economic upturn which, despite everything, the policies of the Franco dictatorship had recently begun to foment. The raw material fuelling the publishing boom was of course the creative “Boom” of the Latin American novel itself of which García Márquez was already the brightest star.

  He arrived in Barcelona at the very moment the Boom’s importance was becoming clear. The unparalleled albeit temporary openness of horizons which characterized the 1960s created an aesthetic moment of extraordinary fertility. This openness, this choice between alternatives, is clearly visible in both the subject matter and the structures of the canonical Latin American texts of the era. All are about the historical formation of Latin America, the contribution of both history and myth to contemporary Latin American identity, and, implicitly, about its possible futures, both good and bad.

  Looking back, the intense historical moment that was the Boom ran from 1963, when Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch (Rayuela) appeared, to 1967, when García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude—the Boom novel par excellence—was published. Everyone agreed that Hopscotch was something like “Latin America’s Ulysses”—appropriately enough, because the Boom is best understood as the crystallization and culmination of Latin America’s twentieth-century modernist movement. But One Hundred Years of Solitude changed the entire perspective, making it clear at once that something much more far-reaching had occurred for which a quite different time-frame was required—because, as almost everyone again agreed, One Hundred Years of Solitude was “Latin America’s Don Quixote.”

  García Márquez became the focus of attention, almost the icon of the burgeoning literary movement; it would begin to seem as if he alone attracted as much media coverage as all the other writers put together. No one said it in so many words but clearly here was some kind of Exotic Phenomenon, some Noble Savage, some Caliban of Letters metamorphosed magically into a new image of the writer for this contradictory era of pop culture and post-colonial revolution. The Spanish press, culturally and politically underdeveloped after thirty years of Francoism, was completely unprepared for the novelties and complexities of the Latin American new wave and García Márquez was subjected to dozens of thoughtless and embarrassing interviews. Few journalists were interested in the fact that this man from nowhere, who seemed to have appeared, like his book, out of thin air, through some form of spontaneous Third World combustion, was actually a deadly serious, inconceivably industrious, ferociously determined writer who had worked unceasingly for two decades to get where he was and would be prepared to work equally tenaciously to stay there—whatever he might say, in throwaway remarks, to gullible journalists. This was a writer who would use his literary celebrity to become a great public figure and on a scale unimagined by any of his predecessors except perhaps Hugo, Dickens, Twain or Hemingway.

  Yet he would be consistently underestimated. Over nearly four decades, his critics would fail to see what was there before their very eyes: that he was cleverer than they were, that he was manipulating them at will, that the public loved him more than they loved the critics and would forgive him almost anything, not only because they loved his books but because they felt that he was one of them. Just as they had loved the Beatles in part because instead of being managed by the media (like Elvis or Marilyn) they knew how to play the journalists at their own game: taking them deadly seriously by appearing not to take them seriously at all. He was, it seemed, an ordinary guy—not pretentious, pompous or pedantic. He was just a man like his readers but one who made genuine literature accessible and easy.

  His arrival in Barcelona started a trend. Before long José Donoso and Mario Vargas Llosa would also arrive. García Márquez was soon acquainted with such leading Spanish writers and intellectuals as the critic José María Castellet, Juan and Luis Goytisolo and Juan Marsé.4 At this time underground opposition to the Franco dictatorship was growing all across Spain, led and mainly organized by the Communist Party through figures such as Santiago Carrillo, Jorge Semprún and Fernando Claudín, but paralleled by the Socialist Party (PSOE) and young clandestine militants such as Felipe González.5 Historically Catalonia has been not only the home of the bourgeois businessmen who famously stoked the engine that pulled Spain’s otherwise empty carriages in the nineteenth century but also a land of anarchists and socialists, painters and architects, the stage of Gaudí, Albéniz, Granados, Buñuel, Dalí, Miró and, by adoption, Picasso. Second only to Paris as a cultural laboratory or greenhouse for “Latin” culture, Barcelona had been an avant-garde city between the great Renascenza of the 1880s and 1890s and the fall of the Spanish Republic in 1939. Now, in the 1960s, with its language officially suppressed, Spain’s most industrious and productive province was beginning to assert itself once more; however, in the 1960s politics had to masquerade as culture and Catalan bourgeois nationalism, denied normal expression, took on a radical left-wing persona through a heterogeneous group of mainly middle-class writers and architects, film-makers and professors, painters and media celebrities, philosophers and models known as the gauche divine (divine left).

  One of García Márquez’s first contacts was Rosa Regás, today one of Spain’s leading women writers and cultural impresarios but in those days a tall, beautiful young woman who looked like the Vanessa Redgrave of Antonioni’s Blow-Up and was one of the “muses” of the divine left. Her brother Oriol, who was big in public relations (like so many of the people García Márquez knew in his Mexican and Spanish years), was also the owner of Bocaccio, the “in” bar up on Calle Muntaner where the beautiful and dangerous young people of the avant-garde used to meet. The mini-skirted Rosa was a married woman in her mid-thirties with children, but she led a life of sixties freedom that scandalized the traditionalist majority and was a standard-bearer for every new cultural fashion. At this time she was organizing public relations in Carlos Barral’s office, though by the end of the decade she would be running her own imprint, La Gaia Ciencia. She had read One Hundred Years of Solitude and was “blown away”: “I was madly in love with that book; indeed, I still travel with it now as I do with Proust and I always find something new in it. It’s like Don Quixote; I have no doubt it will last. But in those days it seemed to speak to me directly, it was my world. We all loved it; it was like a children’s craze, we all passed it around.”6

  Rosa Regás immediately invited Gabo and Mercedes to a party in their honour at her house, where she introduced them to some of the influential members of Barcelona’s avant-garde society. It was there they met a couple, Luis and Leticia Feduchi, who were to be their closest Spanish friends over the next thirty years. Part of the attraction was that the Feduchis were not from Catalonia. As in Mexico, the García Barchas would interact above all with the émigré crowd. Luis Feduchi was a psychiatrist born in Madrid and Leticia was from Málaga and had recently studied literature at the University of Barcelona.7 He and Leticia gave “the Gabos,” as they were beginning to be called, a lift home after the party, stopped the car, talked for a long time, and arranged to meet again. Their three daughters, the “infantas,” as García Márquez would call them, were much the same age as Rodrigo and Gonzalo, and the five children too would also become lifelong friends, like favourite cousins.8

  A young Brazilian woman, Beatriz de Moura, was another early acquaintance, another “muse” of the divine left and another person who, like Rosa Regás, would be running her own publishing house, Tusquets (her then husband’s family name), in 1969, at the age of thirty. If this was salon society, the new hostesses were astonishingly young. Beatriz had arrived in
Spain because, as the daughter of a diplomat, she had broken with her conservative family over politics and made her way through her talent and, no doubt, her youthful glamour. (If Rosa was like the Vanessa Redgrave of Antonioni’s Blow-Up, Beatriz resembled the Jeanne Moreau of Truffaut’s Jules et Jim.)

  However, García Márquez, it turned out, was in Barcelona to work, and he and Mercedes soon began to limit their socializing. They moved from one apartment to another, all in the pleasant but unfashionable Gracia and Sarriá areas north of the Diagonal, before finally renting a quite small apartment in a new block on Calle Caponata, still in Sarriá. Guests were struck by the sobriety of its decor—essentially the Mexican conception of white walls with furniture of colours that varied from room to room—which would characterize all their residences from this time forward. Here they would stay, in a pleasant area surprisingly reminiscent of the unpretentious and sensible, almost suburban zone where they had lived in Mexico, until the end of their stay in the Catalan capital.

  They decided to send Rodrigo and Gonzalo to the local British School, the Colegio Kensington. The headmaster, Mr. Paul Giles, was a Yorkshireman who had studied law at Cambridge and had something in common with the García Barchas: before opening his school in Barcelona, he had lived in Mexico. As for his pupils’ famous parent, García Márquez had a tendency to the sarcastic which Giles, quintessentially English, did not appreciate: “I didn’t pay him much attention, he wasn’t that well known in those days. He was pleasant enough but also rather aggressive. I assumed he had a chip on his shoulder against the English. But why be disagreeable about other people’s cultures? I mean, why pour beer in someone else’s Beaujolais? … Do you think García Márquez is as good as they say? What, as good as Cervantes? Good Lord, who says that? Him, I should think.”9

  The two biggest editorial contacts available in Barcelona were the formidable Carmen Balcells and Carlos Barral, one of the founders of the Seix Barral publishing house. García Márquez’s relationship with Barral was already doomed: although Barral did more to promote the Boom than any other single individual, he was also the man, so it was said, who back in 1966 had “missed,” or “lost” (it is the same word in Spanish) One Hundred Years of Solitude, which, if true, would be the single biggest misjudgement in the history of Spanish publishing. By contrast Balcells is, without a doubt, García Márquez’s most important contact in Barcelona and the most important woman in his life after Luisa Santiaga and Mercedes. She had started out negotiating contracts for Barral at the beginning of the 1960s and then struck out on her own. “When I started out I knew nothing. There was snobbery everywhere, and beautiful girls; I felt like a peasant woman by comparison. Of course, in the end I made it; my first customers were Mario Vargas Llosa and Luis Goytisolo; but it was Gabo who really pulled my chestnuts out of the fire.”10

  With Mercedes to run the home (he told interviewers, “she gives me pocket money for sweets, like she does with the boys”)11 and Carmen to run his business and other affairs, which she did first with alacrity and then with devotion, García Márquez was in a position to administer his fame and write his next book. He would not be long in realizing that the world was now at his feet. His telephone vice would now reach unimagined heights: he could be in daily contact with whoever he wanted in any of his strategic places—Colombia, Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela, Spain and France—or indeed anywhere else in the world, at a moment’s notice. In terms of business, however, he would need to chase no possibilities, launch no initiatives, seek no advantages: from now on the world would be coming to him, through Carmen. This would take some adjusting to but he would get there.

  Part of the process of adjustment lay in explaining—not least to himself—the relation between the already mythical One Hundred Years of Solitude, the “dead lion,” and his current project, The Autumn of the Patriarch. He would have been immortal thanks to One Hundred Years of Solitude even had he written no other book but he was not interested in talking about it: he wanted to concentrate on the new one. So he began to tell journalists that he was bored with One Hundred Years of Solitude—as much as anything he was bored by their stupid questions—and even, horror of horrors, that the book was “superficial” and that its success was largely due to a series of writer’s “tricks.”12 In short, he seemed to be saying, he was not really a magician, just a talented conjuror.

  In one way of course he was obviously right: One Hundred Years of Solitude is indeed full of “tricks”; not only the sleight of hand readers love so much in the Thousand and One Nights (which foreshadowed Melquíades and his associated themes and strategies) but the modernist techniques, arduously acquired, which had allowed the author to distance himself from the preoccupations of “The House” and hence to dissolve all his lifelong obsessions—both biographical and literary—into thin air.13 But behind this, no doubt, there is some further dimension of disappointment and even resentment. Now it was as if the book had robbed him of that house and that past. He could never go back again. He had not necessarily wanted to know that.14

  Another reason for him to react against One Hundred Years of Solitude was the question of celebrity with all its attendant pressures, responsibilities and expectations.15 He was ambivalent about this, even hypocritical at times, but there can be no doubt that, from the start, he—a large part of him—sincerely deplored and lamented it. Like so many others before him, he had wanted the glory but he was reluctant to pay the price. Thus the novel had released him from a tormented past but condemned him to a complicated future. So among other things the story of the rest of his life would be that of a man who had deserved the fame he now enjoyed and then had to learn how to live with it, to meet both the expectations and the responsibilities, and to triumph again (this time over fame and success themselves) and keep on triumphing with each new book.16

  Viewed in this way, One Hundred Years of Solitude is evidently the axis of García Márquez’s life: the end of Macondo (his previously unassimilated world) and the beginning of “Macondo” (its successful representation, now achieved and behind him); the end of his obscurity and virtual anonymity, the beginning of his “power” (as The Autumn of the Patriarch would put it); the end of his modernist period and the beginning of his postmodernist period. Even more grandiosely, the novel is also the axis of Latin America’s twentieth-century literature, the continent’s only undisputable world-historical and world-canonical novel. And more grandiose still, but nonetheless true, it is part of a worldwide phenomenon which marks the ending of all “modernity” with the post-colonial arrival of the Third World and its literatures on the global stage (hence the parallel importance of Cuba and Castro): the end of the period, we could say, that began with Rabelais (saying farewell to the Middle Ages by satirizing its world-view) and was confirmed by Cervantes; and whose end was announced by Ulysses and, it may be asserted, confirmed by One Hundred Years of Solitude.17 No one would have found it easy to adjust to the idea—even the possibility-of that degree of historical significance.

  IN APRIL AND May 1968 the family made their first foray outside Spain, taking in Paris and Italy, where Giangiacomo Feltrinelli was publishing the first translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude into a foreign language. Feltrinelli’s book launches were usually “happenings,” media spectacles which exalted the celebrity status of literary figures. But although Feltrinelli presented him as “the new Quixote,” García Márquez was true to his word and refused to have anything to do with the launch of the book or with its publicity. He felt strongly that publishers exploited writers and that they should at least handle their own end of the business: “Editors don’t help me write my books so why should I help them sell them.”18

  This European tour was completed while the almost revolutionary events of May 1968 took place in Paris. García Márquez has barely ever mentioned this huge historic phenomenon, whereas Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa hastened to Paris to take part and Fuentes wrote a well-known eyewitness report and analysis of the failed insurrec
tion, Paris: The May Revolution.19 Of course, although he was undoubtedly disappointed by the outcome, García Márquez had little faith in the ability of the French bourgeoisie, even its student youth, to transform a country and a culture about which he had fundamental reservations; and in any case he still had his eyes firmly fixed on Latin America. Nevertheless he decided to return to Paris over the summer, at the end of which he communicated his feelings to Plinio Mendoza:

  Paris came out of me as if it were a splinter I had stuck in my foot… The last threads that linked me to the French just broke. That precision, that fabulous ability to split a hair in four, is something that has simply aged and the French don’t realize it… We arrived there when the paving stones were still broken after the battles in May and those battles were already petrified in the minds of the French: the taxi drivers, the baker, the grocer, made wearisome analyses of the events, drowned us in a bucket of rationalizations, and left us with the impression that all that had happened was a collision of words. It was infuriating …

  My fate is that of a bullfighter and I don’t know how to cope with it. In order to go over the translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude I had to take refuge in Tachia’s apartment; she is now a well-set up lady, with a marvellous husband who speaks seven languages without an accent, and on first meeting she established a very good friendship with Mercedes based principally on complicity against me.20