Gabriel García Márquez

by Gerald Martin

  But while he was sailing around the Caribbean on this second honeymoon he was also thinking about a problem that had just recurred in the largest of its islands, a problem which would make this cruise the last relatively uncomplicated moment in his political existence. On 20 March the Cuban government had arrested Heberto Padilla,8 the writer whose poems had caused such a storm of controversy on and off the island in the summer of 1968 and had led to García Márquez’s angry confrontation with Juan Marsé in Barcelona. Now the Cuban poet was accused of subversive activities connected to the CIA. On 5 April, still in prison, Padilla signed a long—and obviously insincere—statement of self-criticism.

  Although so many writers lived in Barcelona, Paris was still in many respects the political capital of Latin America. On 9 April a group of writers based in Europe organized a protest letter addressed to Fidel Castro, first published in Le Monde in Paris, in which they said that although they supported the “principles” of the revolution they could not accept the “Stalinist” persecution of writers and intellectuals. The list of names included, among many others, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Juan Goytisolo and Mario Vargas Llosa (the true instigators of the protest), Julio Cortázar and Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza (organizers, with Goytisolo, of the forthcoming magazine Libre) and … Gabriel García Márquez.9

  In fact García Márquez had not signed the letter: Plinio Mendoza had assumed he would support the protest and had signed for him. García Márquez had his name withdrawn but the damage to his relationship with Cuba was done, followed by lasting difficulties with all the friends who remained signed up: the worst of all outcomes. It was to be, without doubt, the single most important crisis in Latin American literary politics in the twentieth century, one which divided both Latin American and European intellectuals for decades to come. Writers and intellectuals had no choice but to commit and take sides in this cultural equivalent of a civil war. Nothing would ever be the same again, not least the relationship between García Márquez and Vargas Llosa, which would eventually prove to be the noisiest and most violent of all the casualties of this political drama. It was the more ironic because just at that very moment Seix Barral were preparing publication of Vargas Llosa’s García Márquez, the Story of a Deicide, which would appear in December of 1971, as their famous relationship, slowly but surely, began to cool. Vargas Llosa would not allow a second edition of the book for thirty-five years.10

  As Castro’s reactions became increasingly furious and defiant García Márquez, whom friends and family members remember as distraught during this period, nevertheless managed the coolest and most measured public response in a carefully stage-managed “interview” with Barranquilla journalist Julio Roca. He conceded that Padilla’s self-criticism did not seem authentic and acknowledged that this had done damage to the image of the revolution; but he also insisted that he had never signed the first letter, claimed that Fidel Castro had been malevolently misquoted, declared his continuing support for the Cuban regime and, in a characteristic move, stated that if there were Stalinist elements in Cuba Fidel Castro would be the first to say so and to start to root them out, as he had done a decade before in 1961.11

  Subtle though García Márquez’s response was, its attempt to be solomonic and to please all sides failed to satisfy anyone. On 10 June the Colombian press demanded that he “define himself publicly on the Cuban issue” and the next day, still dodging and weaving but less so, he announced: “I am a communist who has not yet found a place to sit.” Most of his friends and colleagues preferred the Chilean route to socialism; García Márquez, even at the beginning, did not. Of his behaviour Juan Goytisolo would later say, with undisguised bitterness, “With his consummate skill in wriggling out of tight corners, Gabo would carefully distance himself from his friends’ critical position while avoiding confrontation with them: the new García Márquez, scintillating strategist of his own enormous talent, victim of fame, devotee of the great and good in this world, and promoter at the planetary level of real or would-be ‘advanced’ causes, was about to be born.”12

  García Márquez went through a very particular agony of anxiety and indecision because, just before the Padilla crisis broke, he had accepted an invitation from Columbia University in New York to be presented with an honorary doctorate at the beginning of June. The timing could hardly have been more disastrous. He knew only too well that Pablo Neruda, a well-known communist, and Carlos Fuentes, a supporter of Cuba from the beginning, had both been excommunicated by the Revolution in 1966 for making visits to New York. And here was he, already seen by many as a rat who had left the apparently sinking ship around the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, accepting an honour from New York’s premier university, an honour which, to Cuban eyes, was obviously an attempt to “recuperate” him (in the language of the era) for U.S. interests.13

  Eventually his official line was that he was accepting the award “on behalf of Colombia,” that everyone in Latin America knew that he was against the regime prevailing in the USA, as indeed was Columbia University itself, and that he had consulted “the taxi drivers of Barranquilla”—champions of common sense, he declared—in order to make up his mind.14 Nevertheless, if his future relationship with the United States—him criticizing but the Americans still welcoming him—was now established, to his evident relief, he was back in the doghouse as far as Cuba was concerned. For the next two years, despite his statement assuring the world that he had not signed the first letter, he again had no contact whatever with the revolutionary island.

  Yet once again García Márquez was about to be lucky. If Cuba was closed to him for the time being, another controversy was about to blow up which would show, again, that on the political barometer García Márquez still had good readings almost everywhere but Cuba and Colombia. Whether coincidentally or not we do not know, a few weeks later a Spanish journalist called Ramón Chao pushed a microphone under the nose of 1967 Nobel Prize winner Miguel Angel Asturias and asked him what he thought of the allegations that the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude had plagiarized a novel by Balzac, The Quest of the Absolute. Asturias paused for a moment and then said he thought there might be something to the accusation. Chao published his scoop in the Madrid weekly Triunfo and Le Monde reprinted it in Paris on 19 June.15

  In October 1967 Asturias had become only the second Latin American, and the first novelist from the continent, to win the Nobel Prize. But he had been heavily criticized in recent years for taking a politically controversial ambassadorship in Paris. He was about to discover that “Gabriel García Márquez,” not “Mguel Angel Asturias,” was now the name of Latin American literature. The truth was that García Márquez had been provoking Asturias for years, despite the older writer’s generous comments on the younger man’s work and achievement. Early in 1968 García Márquez had vowed that with his new book about a Latin American political patriarch, he would “teach” the author of The President, Asturias’s signature work, “how to write a real dictator novel.”16

  It seems possible that García Márquez’s attitude to Asturias was conditioned in part by the fact that Asturias had won the Nobel Prize, the accolade that he, García Márquez, had wanted to be the first Latin American novelist to win, and in part because Asturias was obviously the Latin American precursor not only of magical realism (of which One Hundred Years of Solitude is frequently considered the paradigm) but also, through The President, of the dictator novel (of which The Autumn of the Patriarch was, similarly, intended to be the defining version). Asturias made a large and easy target because of his own vulnerability over the ambassadorship and because he was never the most lucid or coherent of debaters; and by now he was old and sick. Taking him on was like shooting an elephant from a safe distance. In fact, Asturias’s decision in the late 1940s, 1950s and 1960s to act as a kind of literary fellow traveller to world communism, supporting the movement of history in general but without having to tie himself down in detail, was a model for precisely what García Már
quez himself would attempt to do; and, to some extent echoing Asturias’s relations with Guatemala’s Marxist President Jacobo Arbenz, García Márquez would shortly befriend the most charismatic of all Latin American Communist revolutionaries, Fidel Castro.

  García Márquez did not yet know that he had once again been banished from the Cuban political Eldorado and played brilliantly to the leftist gallery. He had not directly caused Asturias’s difficulties but he had helped provoke them and Asturias fell into an ambush—an elephant trap, one might say. The question then arises whether García Márquez had not also been setting a series of psychological traps for Mario Vargas Llosa, his only serious rival among his contemporaries, traps which would cause another even more violent confrontation a few years down the road. And whether the final version of The Autumn of the Patriarch, a self-critical work about a man who cannot tolerate competition from those close to him, whether in public or private life, is not in some measure an expiation for these sins.

  On 9 July the García Barcha family left Soledad Airport in Barranquilla for Mexico. They had spent less than six months back in Colombia. García Márquez arrived in the Mexican capital on 11 July complaining that he had seen no girls during the stopover in Florida because the “Executive Authority” was with him, a joke that Mercedes must have found increasingly tedious down the years. He spent his first day escorted around the city by journalists and photographers from Excelsior, to whom he declared that this was the city he knew best in the world and that he felt as if he had never left. The journalists watched him eating tacos, changing money and cracking jokes (“I’m a very serious guy on the inside but not on the outside”). Young Rodrigo said he would rather be a baseball player or a mechanic than a student. “You can be what you want,” said his indulgent father. Still accompanied by the photographers, he visited Carlos Fuentes and his actress wife Rita Macedo—dressed in black leather hot pants—at their house in San Angel. Fuentes shouted “Plagiarist, plagiarist!” as García Márquez’s car arrived.17 That evening Fuentes held one of his famous parties, attended by a familiar array of Mexico’s progressive intellectuals and artists.

  García Márquez was a different person in Mexico now, the person he would remain for the rest of his life: a favourite foreign son and honorary Mexican. Mexicans would never forget that it was in their capital city, not Paris or London, that One Hundred Years of Solitude had been written. It was one of the ways of papering over the bad memories of the Tlatelolco massacre in 1968 with good publicity and García Márquez lent himself to it. On 21 August he went to see President Luis Echeverría, who had been Minister of the Interior at the time of Tlatelolco, at the presidential residence of Los Pinos, where they talked, so García Márquez claimed, about “writing and liberation.”18 He would never publicly criticize either Echeverría or ex-President Díaz Ordaz for the events of 1968, just as he would never criticize Fidel Castro over any of Cuba’s controversies. Cuba and Mexico were both involved in a complex diplomatic struggle with the United States and, to a lesser extent, with each other. The Mexicans were forced to cooperate with U.S. anti-communist efforts but would insist on retaining a diplomatic corridor to Cuba until the end of the PRI period at the close of the twentieth century. Castro and García Márquez would both be grateful to them for holding out.

  In late September the family flew back to Barcelona from Mexico City via New York, London and Paris. García Márquez now got back to work. It was more than four years since a new book of his had appeared and he was keen to reduce the pressure. During the period since late 1967, although The Autumn of the Patriarch was undoubtedly his major project, he had also settled down to composing his first short stories for several years, and he added to the new ones—which included “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”—the earlier “The Sea of Dead Time” from 1961.19 They would all be published together as Innocent Eréndira and Other Stories in 1972. Innocent Eréndira itself had a long history—in one sense going back to the mythical world of his grandparents in the deserts of the Guajira. The direct source, however, was from a real life story which had already inspired a brief episode in One Hundred Years of Solitude about a young prostitute who is forced to sleep with hundreds of men per day. The finished story had been conceived as a film script before it became a long short story, and had been published in that form by the Mexican magazine ¡Siempre! as early as November 1970.20 Because all the stories had been started before—in some cases long before—García Márquez was able to use them to “warm up his arm” for the return to his unfinished novel.

  The stories of Innocent Eréndira are not at all what one would have expected from a writer who had returned to the Caribbean to re-experience the “smell of guava.” True, they are at first sight more primitive, elemental and magical (sea, sky, desert and the frontier) than the stories of Big Mama, but in a rather painterly and “literary” way, as if the fantastic element of the earliest stories were somehow being applied to a concrete geographical scenario; as if Macondo and the “Pueblo” were real, whereas the Guajira (which García Márquez had never even seen) is a realm of magic and myth (Bogotá and its surrounding highlands being always, by contrast, a bogeyland of shadows and menace). Ironically enough, these stories—on which the critics are divided—are reminiscent of the most cloying tales of García Márquez’s magical realist predecessor, Miguel Angel Asturias, for example in The Mirror of Lida Sal.21

  Now, for the first time, García Márquez set about The Autumn of the Patriarch with the certainty that he would be completing it. There were no more excuses, he had had his sabbatical and there was nowhere to escape to, even in his mind. By now the first number of the Boom-based magazine Libre had appeared in Paris, a year after Cortázar’s party in the south of France, at which it had originally been discussed, and less than six months after the Padilla Affair. It was no doubt being minutely scrutinized in Cuba as García Márquez gave an interview to Plinio Mendoza, the magazine’s editor, for Libre no. 3, in Franco’s Spain.

  In October the traditional left—and Salvador Allende’s beleaguered Popular Unity government in Chile—received a boost when Pablo Neruda, Allende’s ambassador in Paris, was announced as the winner of the Nobel Prize for 1971. Neruda, whom journalists described as looking frail and ill, was asked if he would recommend any other Latin American for the prize and said that his first thought was García Márquez, “author of one of the best novels in the Spanish language.”22 Just before the official announcement of the award was made Neruda called García Márquez and invited him and Mercedes to go to Paris for dinner the next evening. García Márquez naturally said that it was impossible to get there at such short notice given his fear of flying but Neruda used his well-known tactic of sounding as if he was about to cry and the Colombian couple felt obliged to make the trip. By the time they got there the news was out and they dined in Neruda’s house with the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros (who was suspected of having assassinated Trotsky, and certainly had once attempted it), the Chilean painter Roberto Matta, Jorge Edwards, recently expelled from Cuba, the French intellectual Régis Debray, back in Paris after his release from prison in Bolivia and a subsequent period in which he was closely involved with the Allende regime in Chile, and the great photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson—a politically challenging dinner party if ever there was one.

  In December Vargas Llosa’s García Márquez: History of a Deicide was published in Barcelona by Barral. The two writers, whom friends from that era describe as “almost brothers,” had more in common than a first impression might suggest: both had experienced an especially painful version of the childhood “family romance.” Both would always have problems with fathers known belatedly (until he was ten years of age Vargas Llosa thought his father was dead), men who would attack their characters and question their literary vocations. Both had been much indulged, bookish boys brought up in the house of their maternal grandparents for the first, defining years of their lives. Both would leave the comfort and security of their earl
y home for the alienating rigours of a boarding-school regime and an early acquaintance with prostitution and other low-life experiences. Both worked as journalists at a precocious age and then travelled to Paris, eventually even staying in the same hotel, though at different times. Both were great friends of their friends and both, when they met, were fervent supporters of the Cuban Revolution, though the older man, García Márquez, had already been through many difficult moments with the Cuban process—while Vargas Llosa’s worst difficulties lay ahead of him. Despite their closeness at the time, García Márquez would always insist that he had never even read Mario’s book about him, “because if someone showed me all the secret mechanisms of my work, the sources, what it is that makes me write, if someone told me all that, I think it would paralyse me, don’t you see?”23

  Vargas Llosa and García Márquez had first come together on the occasion of the Rómulo Gallegos prize awarded to the young Peruvian in 1967. Now in 1972 García Márquez himself became the second recipient of the prize and his reaction underlined the vast gulf opening up between them in this extraordinary friendship: whereas Vargas Llosa had refused to donate his prize to the causes supported by the Cuban Revolution, García Márquez had decided to give his money to a dissident Venezuelan party, Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement Towards Socialism) or MAS, led by an ex-communist friend of his, Teodoro Petkoff. Like Petkoff, García Márquez had convinced himself that Soviet communism was no longer a genuine revolutionary force, nor was it concerned to address the real needs and interests of Latin America. Carmen Balcells, who travelled to Caracas with García Márquez, told me: “It was an interminable journey, though we were in first class, drinking all the way, and Gabo, who already knew he was going to give all the money to MAS, and to Petkoff, spent the entire time worrying in the most minute detail about what Mario was going to say. It was all he could think about.”24