Gabriel García Márquez

by Gerald Martin

  It was around this time that García Márquez gave up smoking. He had been an addict since the age of eighteen and at the time he set them aside he was often smoking eighty cigarettes a day of black tobacco. Only two years before he had said that he would rather die than give up smoking.32 The conversion took place one evening over dinner with his psychiatrist friend Luis Feduchi, who explained how he himself had given up a month before and why. García Márquez would not reveal the full details of this conversation for more than three decades but he stubbed out the cigarette he was smoking over dinner and never smoked another; though he was outraged two weeks later when Luis Feduchi started smoking a pipe.33

  In January 1970 One Hundred Years of Solitude was named Best Foreign Novel of 1969 in France, recipient of a prize first instituted in 1948; but García Márquez flatly refused to attend the ceremony. Months afterwards he would tell an interviewer that “the book doesn’t feel right in French” and hadn’t sold very well despite positive reviews—perhaps because, unfortunately, “the spirit of Descartes has defeated that of Rabelais” in France.34

  Ironically, the situation was totally different with regard to the United States. No novel in recent history had received more unqualified praise than García Márquez now began to receive there. John Leonard, in the New York Times Book Review, declared:

  You emerge from this marvelous novel as if from a dream, the mind on fire. A dark, ageless figure at the hearth, part historian, part haruspex, in a voice by turns angelic and maniacal, first lulls to sleep your grip on a manageable reality, then locks you into legend and myth … With a single bound, Gabriel García Márquez leaps onto the stage with Günter Grass and Vladimir Nabokov, his appetite as enormous as his imagination, his fatalism greater than either. Dazzling.35

  London followed on 16 April. In June The Times, the then establishment pillar and in some respects the most conservative newspaper in the world, which had only recently permitted photographs, dedicated an entire broadsheet page to the first chapter of One Hundred Years of Solitude, accompanied by “psychedelic” illustrations that might have been stolen from the Beatles’ cartoon movie Yellow Submarine. In December the New York Times named One Hundred Years of Solitude one of the twelve books of the year: it was the only fiction title among them. Gregory Rabassa’s inspired English version of One Hundred Years of Solitude was widely considered the best foreign translation of the year.

  As for the other “Boom” writers, Mario Vargas Llosa finally made his long-heralded move to Spain that summer. He had completed his monumental novel Conversation in the Cathedral the previous year and now left his teaching position at the University of London and moved to Barcelona. His friends would call Mario “the cadet,” not only because of the topic—a military academy—of his best-seller The Time of the Hero (1962) but because Mario himself was always neat, tidy, well organized and, in theory at least, aiming to do the right thing. Yet controversy often surrounded him: by now this brilliant but ostensibly conventional young man was married to his first cousin Patricia, having put behind him the scandalous adolescent marriage to his aunt which would later become the subject of his novel Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. Meanwhile, another of his projects, a biographically oriented study of García Márquez’s narrative fiction, was surely one of the most generous and remarkable acts of homage in literature from one great writer to another. It was to be entitled García Márquez: The Story of a Deicide (García Márquez: historia de un deicidio), and it remains arguably, thirty years later, the single best book ever written on García Márquez and still a fundamental reference source today—even if, as many critics have said, it turned the Colombian into a writer with many of the attributes and the obsessions of Mario himself.

  Another writer now in residence was the hypochondriac Chilean José Donoso, whom García Márquez had first met in Carlos Fuentes’s house in 1965. Donoso was the “fifth member of the Boom” (about equivalent to being the “fifth Beatle”), writer of the remarkable The Obscene Bird of Night (1970). Donoso later authored two important chronicles of the era, his Personal History of the “Boom” (1972) and his novel, The Garden Next Door (1981), which casts a satirical—and envious—eye on the relationship between Carmen Balcells (Núria Monclús) and her “favourite” writer, García Márquez (Marcelo Chiriboga).36

  And Plinio Mendoza and his wife Marvel Moreno had decided to move across the Atlantic, first to Paris and then to Mallorca.37 Living in the most stringent austerity, Mendoza would soon become a frequent visitor to Barcelona, thanks to García Márquez’s largesse, but he found things difficult: “I would stay in his house. But in that apartment on Caponata Street, roomy and quiet, that lady with airs and pearl necklaces, Celebrity, was also staying.”38

  It was at this time that García Márquez met Pablo Neruda and his wife Matilde. Neruda was Latin America’s greatest poet, an old-style communist who was also an old-style bon vivant whose approach to life even the sybaritic Alvaro Mutis must have envied and admired. Yet another Latin American writer terrified of flying, Neruda was on his way back by boat from a trip to Europe to be present at the elections which would bring socialist candidate Salvador Allende to power. One of the victorious Allende’s first decisions would be to make Neruda Chile’s ambassador to Paris in 1971. When Neruda’s ship stopped in Barcelona in the summer of 1970, meeting García Márquez was one of his principal objectives.39 Afterwards García Márquez wrote to Mendoza, “It’s a shame you didn’t see Neruda. The bastard caused a hell of an uproar during the lunch, to the point where Matilde had to send him to hell. We pushed him out of a window and brought him here for a siesta and before they went back to the boat we had a fantastic time.”40 This was the occasion on which Neruda, who had still not quite completed his all-important siesta, dedicated a book to Mercedes. García Márquez recalls, “Mercedes said she was going to ask Pablo for his signature. ‘Don’t be such a creep!’ I said and went to hide in the bathroom … He wrote, ‘To Mercedes, in her bed.’ He looked at it and said, ‘This sounds a bit suspicious,’ so he added, ‘To Mercedes and Gabo, in their bed.’ Then he thought, ‘The truth is it’s even worse now.’ So he added, ‘Fraternally, Pablo.’ Then, roaring with laughter, he said, ‘Now it’s worse than ever but there’s nothing to be done about it.’”41

  The next few months saw the high-water mark of the Boom. This brief moment began when Carlos Fuentes’s play The One-Eyed Man Is King was premiered in Avignon in August and he invited all his Boom companions to attend. An expedition was organized from Barcelona. Mario Vargas Llosa and Patricia, who had only just moved to the Catalan capital, José Donoso and Pilar, and Gabo and Mercedes, with their two sons, all took the train from Barcelona to Avignon for the premiere. Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo, another honorary member of the Boom, travelled down from Paris. Avignon was only forty miles from the village of Saignon, Julio Cortázar’s country home in the Vaucluse, and Fuentes chartered a bus to take the group, and many hangers-on, to see Cortázar and Ugné Karvelis on 15 August. For his part Cortázar organized a huge lunch at a local restaurant and then the entire party descended on his house and spent a long afternoon and evening there.

  For many reasons, but above all because this was the first and only time when the entire Boom clan ever got together, the occasion has since taken on a legendary character. Unfortunately, behind the joviality there lurked a couple of problems, one of which had been growing ever since the first Padilla Affair in Cuba in 1968 and had deepened with Castro’s support of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Now both problems were about to reach a crisis point and the already significant latent divisions between the six friends would shortly become unbridgeable. But not quite yet. The first problem was Cuba’s repression of writers and intellectuals; the second, related to it, was Juan Goytisolo’s project for a new magazine, to be located in Paris and to be entitled Libre, “Free,” a name which by now several of the friends gathered together were convinced would itself be considered a provocation in Havana and proof that th
e architects of the Boom were, as the Cubans already suspected, a bunch of “petty-bourgeois” liberals.

  A week after the party Cortázar would write: “It was at once very nice and very strange; something outside of time, unrepeatable of course, and with some deeper meaning that escapes me.”42 It was the last moment when the utopian longings enshrined in the Boom could still be partly sustained as a collective enterprise; and it was ironical that this first great gathering had taken the form of a pilgrimage to Cortázar’s solitary dwelling, he who had always avoided crowds and false bonhomie but who now was not only a member of a mafia welded together by frequent male bonding on a monumental scale but was also gravitating towards the vast collectivist projects of the socialist dream.

  On 4 September Salvador Allende was elected as President of Chile on a minority vote and would be inaugurated on 3 November, promising the Chilean people “socialism within liberty.” But even before he was installed, a CIA-inspired attack fatally wounded General René Schneider, the Commander-in-Chief of the Chilean army, on 22 October. García Márquez had recently met Chilean writer Jorge Edwards, later the biographer of Neruda, whose role in Cuba as Chilean ambassador would have much to do with the ultimate outcome of the Padilla Affair.

  A week before Christmas Cortázar and his wife Ugné drove from Paris to Barcelona, via Saignon. After their arrival all the writers and their wives went off to a Catalan speciality restaurant, La Font des Ocellets (The Bird Bath) in the old quarter. The system there was for the customers to write their orders on a printed form but everyone was so busy talking that after an extended period of time the form was still blank and the waiter complained to the owner. He emerged from the kitchen, scowling, and with heavy Catalan sarcasm uttered the immortal words: “Don’t any of you know how to write?” There was a silence, part embarrassment, part indignation and part amusement. After a moment Mercedes spoke up, “Yes, I know how to write,” and she proceeded to read out the menu and organize the order. Her coolness under fire was legendary. Once an anxious Pilar Serrano rang to tell her that Donoso, an inveterate hypochondriac, was convinced he had leukemia. Mercedes replied, “Don’t worry, Gabito’s just had cancer in his head and now he’s doing fine.”43

  Christmas Eve was spent in the small apartment of the Vargas Llosas so that the Peruvian couple could pack their young children off to bed. Cortázar, who had already been throwing snowballs at all and sundry, now engaged Vargas Llosa in a frenetic competition with the electric racing cars the boys had received for Christmas. Then, after Christmas, Luis Goytisolo and his wife María Antonia organized a party to which both Spaniards and Latin Americans were invited. Donoso, who retained his almost English sense of restraint and decorum, recalled in 1971: “For me, the Boom as an entity came to an end—if it ever was an entity outside one’s imagination and if, in fact, it has ended—in 1970 at the home of Luis Goytisolo in Barcelona with a party presided over by María Antonia who, while weighed down by outrageous, expensive jewelry and in multi-colored knickers and black boots, danced, bringing to mind a Leon Bakst model for Scheherezade or Petrouchka. Wearing his brand-new beard in shades of red, Cortázar danced something very lively with Ugné. In front of the guests who encircled them, the Vargas Llosas danced a Peruvian waltz and, later, the García Márquezes entered the same circle, which awarded them a round of applause, to dance a tropical merengue. Meanwhile, our literary agent, Carmen Balcells, lay back on the plump cushions of a couch, licking her chops and stirring the ingredients of this delicious stew, feeding, with the help of Fernando Tola, Jorge Herralde, and Sergio Pitol, the fantastic, hungry fish that in their lighted aquariums decorated the walls of the room. Carmen Balcells seemed to have in her hands the strings that made us all dance like marionettes, and she studied us: perhaps with admiration, perhaps with hunger, perhaps with a mixture of the two, just as she studied the dancing fish in their aquariums. More than anything else that evening, the founding of the magazine Libre was talked about.”44

  After Cortázar and Ugné returned to Paris through the late-December blizzards the festivities gradually wound down. García Márquez and Mercedes have always liked to organize New Year parties rather than Christmas ones and it was in their house that the small group of remaining Boomers—the Vargas Llosas and the Donosos—welcomed in the year 1971. Little did they know that this was the last time they would be celebrating or indeed fraternally discussing anything together. The Boom was about to implode.

  18

  The Solitary Author Slowly Writes:

  The Autumn of the Patriarch

  and the Wider World

  1971–1975

  BY 1971, after more than three years in Barcelona and with his book still not completed, García Márquez had decided on a break from the stresses of writing and set off for nine months in Latin America. He felt he needed to refamiliarize himself with his world. His own preference was Barranquilla but the previous March he had told Alfonso Fuenmayor that he was not sure the family would let him return there: “The boys are chronically homesick for Mexico and only now have I realized that they lived there long enough for that to be the Macondo they’ll drag around the world for the rest of their lives. The only rotten patriot in this house is me, but I carry less weight all the time.”1 Somehow, though, he had convinced his reluctant family to stay a few months in Barranquilla before revisiting Mexico.

  So in mid-January the García Barcha family arrived in Colombia. García Márquez smiled briefly as he left the plane in Barranquilla and gave a double thumbs-up sign to those waiting to greet him. Photographs show him in full Caribbean dress—Mexican guayabera shirt, leather moccasins and no socks—looking full of cares. With all the inactivity and extra carbohydrates in Barcelona he had filled out; his hair had filled out too and was now in a semi-Afro style characteristic of the era and he sported an equally characteristic Zapata moustache. Mercedes was behind dark glasses apparently pretending to be somewhere else, but the two boys, who hardly knew the country, looked bold and excited.2 The local press and radio were out in force and the taxi drivers shouted from a distance that they would take Gabito to Macondo for just thirty pesos, for old times’ sake. García Márquez, who before leaving Barcelona had announced, at first sight rather ungraciously, that he was going home “for a detox,”3 had by now thought of a more positive way of explaining his visit and coined one of his defining phrases when he said that he had followed his nose back to the Caribbean after the “smell of the guava.”4

  The family travelled down to the home of Alvaro and Tita Cepeda, who by now lived in a magnificent white mansion between the city centre and the Prado area, although—ominously—Cepeda himself was in New York for medical tests. The García Barchas would be staying with Tita until they could find a suitable house or apartment. Journalist Juan Gossaín was allowed in on the first round of beers and listened to the conversation. García Márquez explained, as if in confidence, why he had made this prodigal return. All his life he had wanted to be a world-famous writer and had endured years of misery as a reporter in order to become one. Now that he really was a full-time “professional” author he wished he was a reporter again, a searcher after information, and so his life had come full circle: “I’ve always wanted to be what I no longer am.”5

  Some weeks later a Mexican journalist, Guillermo Ochoa, pursued García Márquez to the beach at Cartagena, where he, Mercedes and the boys were relaxing underneath a coconut palm during a visit to his parents. Ochoa’s first article would concentrate on Luisa Santiaga and helped inaugurate her legend. To celebrate the return of her eldest son she had lovingly fattened a turkey:

  “But I discovered I couldn’t kill it,” she told us. And then, with that stern gentleness that typifies Ursula Iguarán, the character of One Hundred Years of Solitude that she inspired, she added: “I’d become fond of him.” The turkey is still alive and well and Gabito, on his return, had to be content with the seafood soup he has eaten every day since he got back to the city. That’s how Luisa Márquez de
García is. She’s a woman who has never combed her hair at night. “If I did, it would delay the sailors,” she explains. “What is the greatest satisfaction of your life?” we asked her. And she, without hesitation, replied: “Having a daughter who’s a nun.”6

  The house Gabito and Mercedes rented in Barranquilla was almost on the outskirts of the city at that time. For Gonzalo it was a thrilling environment and he retains pleasant memories of the whole experience. Although their parents had fixed up a school in advance, the boys mainly remember an exotic period during which large snakes got into the house and they hunted for iguanas to relieve them of their eggs. But although it was exciting to be back in the tropics and to be enveloped in the lives of two large extended families in Cartagena and Arjona, and a whole network of new friends in Barranquilla, they were also acutely aware that they were Mexico City boys: “The truth is that Rodrigo and I are both urban people; we have almost no experience of the rural world. Whereas our parents are both rural people, and above all tropical people. I can hardly recognize them when I see them in Cartagena or Havana. They are both relatively uptight everywhere else.”7

  In the first week of April García Márquez and Mercedes set off for Caracas alone. He was concerned to recharge his Caribbean batteries to bring his new book alive but it was also in a real sense a symbolic journey, a return to the place they first lived together and then a journey around the Caribbean, as well as the beginning of a pattern in which, increasingly, the boys would be left behind while their parents travelled the world in response to the lures and obligations of García Márquez’s ever-increasing fame.