It was true: García Márquez had met Tachia again. She had been living for some years with Charles Rosoff, a French engineer born in 1914 whose parents had left Russia after the failed 1905 uprising. His father had gone back in 1917 to join the revolution and then left again in 1924, disillusioned after the death of Lenin. Before meeting Rosoff Tachia had some transient relationships but no new love, though Blas de Otero had sought her out again in Paris and attempted to rekindle their tempestuous affair. Ironically it was through Blas, in 1960, that she had met the man she was to marry. But now, in 1968, García Márquez was back in her life. “We all met up at our apartment in Paris; I was very nervous. We all behaved terribly well and talked brightly but it was actually a very tense occasion, very strange, very difficult. But we all managed to act ‘as if nothing had ever happened’ and carried it off.”
García Márquez was still in Paris when the Soviet army invaded Czechoslovakia on 21 August to crush the socialist reform movement or “Prague Spring” led by Alexander Dubcek, the recently elected First Secretary of the Czech Communist Party. Czechoslovakia was a far more serious matter for García Márquez than the events in Paris because it seemed to demonstrate that Soviet communism was incapable of evolution. He told Plinio Mendoza: “My world collapsed but now I think maybe it’s better like this: to demonstrate, without nuances, that we stand between two imperialisms, equally cruel and voracious, is in a certain sense a liberation for one’s conscience … A group of French writers sent Fidel a letter published in L’Observateur, saying his support for the Soviet invasion was ‘the Cuban Revolution’s first serious error.’ They wanted us to sign it but our reply was very clear: it’s our dirty washing and we’ll do it at home. But the truth is I don’t think it will be washed very easily”21
Politically 1968 was proving the most turbulent year in living memory. In January Colombia had re-established diplomatic relations with the USSR for the first time in twenty years and Pope Paul VI had visited the country in August on the first ever papal visit to Latin America. (“Big Mama’s Funeral” had predicted such a visit.) Martin Luther King had been assassinated in Memphis in April and Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles in June; Andy Warhol was shot in New York the same month; the Chicago police had run riot at the Democratic Party convention in August and Richard Nixon would be elected President in November. And of course the French students had rioted in Paris in May largely unaided by the workers; the USSR had carried out its invasion of Czechoslovakia, supported by Cuba; and in early October the Mexican army would kill hundreds of unarmed demonstrators at Tlatelolco, in Mexico City, just before the first Olympic Games ever held in the Third World. All this while García Márquez himself spent most of his time closeted away in Barcelona with his paper “patriarch,” though living under a real dictatorship.22
As for Spain, indeed, García Márquez took so little interest in the nation’s politics that many people in Barcelona thought he was “apolitical.” During his period in the city there would be two major “sit-ins” which crystallized opposition to the Franco regime, participated in by many of his friends, including Vargas Llosa, and virtually every major member of the Divine Left; but not by García Márquez. Thirty years later Beatriz de Moura told me: “In those days Gabo was completely apolitical. Underlined: apolitical. You never heard him talk about politics and it was impossible to know what his opinions were. It was considered de rigueur to be politically committed in those days. And Gabo never was.”23
Novelist Juan Marsé was left with quite a different recollection of the “apolitical” García Márquez. In the late summer of 1968 Marsé was one of the foreign jury members invited to award literary prizes for the Fourth Competition of the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC). When it became clear to the authorities that the poetry prize was going to the allegedly counter-revolutionary poet Heberto Padilla and the theatre prize to the homosexual playwright Antón Arrufat, a crisis broke and the juries were effectively sequestered in Cuba for several weeks. This was the beginning of a conflict about freedom of expression which—three years on—would eventually change Cuba’s international image for ever, especially in Europe and the USA, and cause an irremediable rupture between many writers and what at this time was still seen as a reasonably liberal socialist revolution. The juries finally insisted on their verdicts and the authorities had to content themselves with printing a “health warning” in the two books when they were published. So after his six weeks stranded in Cuba while Fidel Castro waited in vain for the juries to change their mind, Marsé arrived back in Barcelona in late October and narrated his experiences to a group of friends at a party, among them García Márquez. Marsé told me, “The jury gave the prize to Padilla because his book was the best. UNEAC said it wasn’t and of course the message had come down from above. It was true that Padilla turned out to be a provocateur and a really twisted guy, a nutcase. But even if I’d known that I wouldn’t have changed my mind. His was the best book and that was that. Anyway I got back to Barcelona and Carmen held a party for me, so I told my story. I can see Gabo now, with a red kerchief round his neck, pacing up and down while I’m explaining what happened. He was furious with me, really angry. He said that I was an idiot, that I didn’t understand anything about literature and even less about politics. Politics always came first. It didn’t matter if they hanged all us writers. Padilla was a bastard who worked for the CIA and we should never have given the prize to him. It was an extraordinary display. He didn’t actually abuse me but he made it clear that we inhabited totally different intellectual and moral universes. After that we remained friends but I have the feeling that nothing was ever quite the same again, especially for him.”24
The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, August 1968: the last straw for many former supporters of the USSR.
GGM, Barcelona, late 1960s.
GGM and Pablo Neruda in the garden of Neruda’s Normandy home, c. 1972.
Boom couples: (left to right) Mario Vargas Llosa, his wife Patricia, Mercedes, José Donoso, his wife María Pilar Serrano and GGM, Barcelona, early 1970s.
GGM writing The Autumn of the Patriarch, Barcelona, 1970s (taken by his son Rodrigo).
GGM with Carlos Fuentes, Mexico City, 1971.
GGM and Mercedes, 1970s.
Cartagena, 1971: GGM visits his parents Gabriel Eligio and Luisa Santiaga with his son Gonzalo and Mexican journalist Guillermo Ochoa.
Writers of the Boom: (left to right) Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, GGM and José Donoso. Only Julio Cortázar is missing.
Julio Cortázar, Miguel Angel Asturias and GGM, West Germany, 1970.
Paris, 1973: the wedding of Charles Rosoff (left) and Tachia Quintana (right). GGM, the best man, looks on.
Santiago de Chile, 11 September 1973: President Salvador Allende defends the Moneda Palace against rebel forces. Just behind him is Dr. Danilo Bartulín, who, unlike Allende, survived, and became a good friend of GGM’s in Havana.
Santiago de Chile, 11 September 1973: General Pinochet and his henchmen.
Cuban troops in Angola, February 1976.
“Fidel is a king”: Castro, President of Cuba, 1980s.
General Omar Torrijos, President of Panama, 1970s.
GGM interviews Felipe Gonzalez in Bogotá, 1977.
Bogotá, 1977: GGM with Consuelo Araujonoguera (“La Cacica”) and Guillermo Cano, editor of El Espectador. He would be killed by Pablo Escobar’s hitmen in 1986 and she would be murdered, allegedly by FARC guerrillas, in 2001.
GGM with Carmen Balcells and Manuel Zapata Olivella, El Dorado Airport, Bogotá, 1977.
Mexico City, 1981: GGM buried by press attention following his self-exile from Colombia.
Mexico City, October 1982: Alvaro Mutis chauffeurs GGM and Mercedes around to protect them from media attention.
Stockholm, December 1982: (left to right) Jaime Castro, Germán Vargas, GGM, Charles Rosoff (behind), Alfonso Fuenmayor, Plinio Mendoza, Eligio García (behind) and Hernán Vieco.
Stockholm, December 1982. GGM celebrates his prize in a costeño “sombrero vueltiao.”
Stockholm, December 1982: GGM in the chalk circle; King Carl XVI Gustav applauds.
Cartagena, 1993: Luisa Santiaga and her children. (Top row, left to right) Jaime, Alfredo (Cuqui), Ligia, GGM, Gustavo, Hernando (Nanchi), Eligio (Yiyo), Luis Enrique; (bottom row, left to right) Germaine (Emy), Margot, Luisa Santiaga, Rita, Aida.
GGM and Fidel Castro, by the Caribbean, 1983.
Havana, 1988: GGM and Robert Redford.
Bogotá, mid-1980s: GGM and Mercedes with President Betancur and his wife Rosa Helena Alvarez.
Bogotá’s Palacio de Justicia in flames, 6 November 1985 (during Betancur’s presidency), after the army stormed the building to dislodge M-19 guerrillas.
The world changes: celebrations at the fall of the Berlin Wall, November 1989.
Bogotá, 1992: GGM salutes his admirers in the Jorge Eliécer Gaitán Theatre.
GGM, 1999.
GGM and Mercedes, La Santamaría bullring, Bogotá, 1993.
Barcelona, c. 2005: Carmen Balcells (“La Mamá Grande”) in her office, with photo of Gabo triumphant behind.
Havana,2007: Gabo visits his ailing friend Fidel before travelling to Cartagena for his eightieth birthday celebrations.
Cartagena, March 2007: GGM and Bill Clinton.
Cartagena, March 2007: GGM and King Juan Carlos I of Spain.
Cartagena, 26 March 2007: GGM waves to admirers during the celebrations for his eightieth birthday.
What Marsé did not know was that García Márquez, who intuited how serious this problem might eventually become, had supported a direct behind-the-scenes approach to Castro over the Padilla problem. In mid-September he had prolonged another visit to Paris to see Julio Cortázar, with whom he had been corresponding but whom he had never managed to meet. Cortázar had just separated from his first wife, Aurora Bernárdez, and wrote a gloomy letter to Paco Porrúa in Buenos Aires. The only bright spot, he said, was his meeting with García Márquez: “I want you to know that I met Gabriel, who stayed two extra days to meet me; I found both him and Mercedes marvellous; friendship springs up like a fountain when life puts you in touch with people like them.”25 The two men had discussed the Cuban situation—appropriately enough because they were the two who would subsequently support the revolution through thick and thin and, in doing so, distance themselves from most of their contemporaries and certainly from the most famous of them: Vargas Llosa, Donoso, Cabrera Infante, Goytisolo and even Fuentes. García Márquez claims that it was he who suggested a private approach by sending a joint letter to Fidel, though Cortázar seemed to believe it was his initiative. In essence the idea seems to have been to appeal privately to Fidel not to punish Padilla in return—implicitly—for their silence. No reply ever came but Padilla, who had been removed from his work at Casa de las Américas, was reinstated. In 1971 the whole affair would blow up once more; but people such as Vargas Llosa, Juan Goytisolo and Plinio Mendoza had already turned away from Cuba in 1968 and nothing would ever be the same again.
On 8 December García Márquez travelled on an extraordinary expedition to Prague for a week with his new friend Julio Cortázar, Cortázar’s new partner the Lithuanian writer and translator Ugné Karvelis, who worked at the top Parisian publisher Gallimard, and Carlos Fuentes. They were keen to find out what was really happening in the newly occupied Czech capital and wanted to talk to novelist Milan Kundera about the crisis.26 According to Carlos Fuentes, “Kundera asked us to meet him in a sauna by the river bank to tell us what had happened in Prague. Apparently it was one of the few places without ears in the walls … A large hole opened in the ice invited us to ease our discomfort and reactivate our circulation. Milan Kundera pushed us gently towards the irremediable. As purple as certain orchids, the man from Barranquilla, and I, the man from Veracruz, immersed ourselves in that water so alien to our tropical essence.”27
Despite these adventures, the dominant image of García Márquez during this period is that of the solitary hero, tied to his vocation as to a ball and chain yet bereft of inspiration, wandering the dead-end corridors and empty halls of his mansion (forget that he lived in a small apartment) like some Citizen Kane of narrative fiction; or perhaps like Papa Hemingway only with literary bullets that were blanks instead of live ones. He was actually far from house-bound during the writing of The Autumn of the Patriarch as he had been during the writing of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Still, his anguish was undoubtedly real, despite the often ludicrous spectacle of his private torment being splashed repeatedly over the pages of newspapers all across Latin America.
After a while he began to visit Carmen Balcells’s office between five and seven in the evening several days a week, ostensibly to leave the latest section of The Autumn of the Patriarch for safe keeping—Carmen Balcells’s archive started receiving substantial sections of the novel as early as 1 April 1969 and was still receiving them as late as August 1974, with strict instructions “Not to be read”—but also to use her telephone on an unlimited basis for his commercial deals and confidental assignations. This kept business out of the home and perhaps saved Mercedes knowing about things that might have upset her, not least the large amounts of his new wealth that García Márquez would choose to give away over the coming years and, as time went on, the political and other affairs in which he became increasingly involved. In addition Balcells began to act as a kind of sister, a sister he could tell almost anything, a person who would come to love him dearly and who would make any sacrifice on his behalf. “After he had been in Barcelona for a while,” she told me, “he would come in and say, ‘Get ready, I’ve a job for Superman.’ That was me. And that’s who I’ve been ever since for him.”28 (She was later not averse to a joke, though. Years later he asked her during a telephone conversation, “Do you love me, Carmen?” She replied, “I can’t answer that. You are 36.2 per cent of our income.”)
Meanwhile the boys were growing up. García Márquez would later remark that the relationship between parents and children, unchanging for centuries, was radically transformed in the sixties: those parents who adjusted remained young for ever, those who did not were even older than middle-aged people had been before. Rodrigo, today a successful film-maker in Hollywood, told me, “What I most remember is that although we had a very social life it was really just the four of us, always. Just the four of us in the world. We were a wheel with four spokes, never five. So much so that when my brother had a baby a few years ago I was traumatized, I simply couldn’t believe that now there was a fifth spoke. And that’s after me living away from home for many years.”29
He added: “The two of us were breast-fed with a number of essential values. There were things you just had to know. One was the great importance of friendship. There was a huge emphasis on the sheer fascination of other people and their lives. It was my father’s drug. You had to know about their lives and all their business and you had to share in other people’s experiences and share your own with them. At the same time we were brought up to be completely unprejudiced, except in a couple of significant respects. Firstly, Latin American people were the best people in the world. They were not necessarily the cleverest, they might not have built a lot, but they were the very best people in the world, the most human and the most generous. On the other hand, if anything went wrong you always had to know that it was the government’s fault, it was always to blame for everything. And if it wasn’t the government, it was the United States. I’ve since discovered that my father loves the United States and has a lot of admiration for its achievements and a lot of affection for some Americans but when we were growing up the United States was to blame for almost everything bad in the world. Looking back, it was a very humanistic, politically correct upbringing. Although I was christened by Camilo Torres we never had any kind of religious education. Religion was bad, politicians were bad, the police and the army were bad.30
“There were other essential
s too. If there was one word we kept hearing it was ‘seriousness.’ For example, my parents were very strict about manners. You had to hold doors open for ladies and you couldn’t talk with your mouth full. So there was this great belief in seriousness, in manners, in punctuality. And you had to get good grades, you couldn’t possibly not get good grades. But you also had to fool around, you had to know how to fool around and when to fool around; it was almost as if fooling around was part of ‘seriousness.’ And if we went over the top and fooled around too much, then we would be punished. Only two things in the world were really worthy of respect: service—being a doctor or a teacher or something like that—and, above all, creating works of art. But it was always embedded in our brains that fame was of no importance at all, he always said it wasn’t ‘serious.’ You could be immensely famous and still not a great writer; indeed, fame might even be suspicious. For example, he said, his friends Alvaro Mutis and Tito Monterroso were very great writers but no one had ever heard of them. On the other hand, we boys quite liked it when Dad started to be recognized in the street.”31
Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez Page 44