The Venezuelans were shocked to see a man with an Afro hairstyle, an open-necked Hawaiian-style tropical shirt, grey trousers, white shoes and no socks saunter on to the rostrum in Caracas’s Teatro París to receive the prize. Recalling that Vargas Llosa had refused to donate the prize to the armed struggle in Latin America, people all over the continent were wondering what García Márquez would do with his cash. When asked this question immediately after the ceremony he declared that he was tired of being poor and would be buying “another yacht” from a contact in Caracas, or from Carlos Barral back in Barcelona. This became one of his most famous boutades.25 Mercedes had not flown in with him—she would arrive later with the Feduchis—but also witnessing the performance were his son, twelve-year-old Rodrigo, and his two near namesakes, his father Gabriel Eligio and his youngest brother Eligio Gabriel, who had recently married a girl from the Colombian Llanos, Myriam Garzón. Gabito had invited them to Caracas for their honeymoon, to coincide with his acceptance of the Gallegos prize. Gabriel Eligio had invited himself along and the trio visited the places where Gabito and Mercedes had spent their own honeymoon fourteen years earlier and stayed in the same hotel together. Myriam remembers: “Eligio’s father was put in a separate wing of the hotel and protested bitterly to the management: ‘How can you do this to me, he’s my son.’ Next morning he called us at 6 a.m.: ‘What time are we going down to breakfast?’”26
Gabriel Eligio was predictably unimpressed by his son’s comportment on this vast and prestigious stage. Little did he know what was to follow. The next morning Gabo took his cheque for $22,750, his son Rodrigo, his brother Eligio, who had arranged with El Tiempo to write a series of reports on the award of Latin America’s most important literary prize to his elder brother, one or two other privileged journalists, a photographer and a large bag to a Caracas bank where he changed the cheque into cash. Then he took the bag, the money and his escort to the headquarters of the Movement Towards Socialism and handed the money over to the party’s leader Teodoro Petkoff, his “friend for many years.”27 MAS, he explained, was a new, youthful movement of the kind Latin America needed, with no remaining ties to the communist movement and no fixed schemes or dogmas.
A storm of criticism blew in from everywhere, near and far, not excluding García Márquez’s own family. MAS was only a tiny organization but the fallout was enormous. Most of the left considered him a “deviationist” and the right branded him a “subversive.” Even though it eventually transpired that the money was specifically intended for MAS’s political magazine and not for guerrilla warfare, by late August even Moscow would be calling him a “reactionary” and his own father could be found informing the press in Caracas that his eldest son was “very sly—he was the same as a child, always making up stories.”28 García Márquez must have been more troubled when he got back to Europe by the criticism of Pablo Neruda, whose views—despite the Chilean’s long-time membership of the Communist Party—were similar in many ways to those of García Márquez himself. The next time they met Neruda told him that he could understand his action but any benefit done to the interests of MAS was far outweighed by the divisions this kind of gesture caused within the international socialist movement.29 It was probably then that García Márquez began his policy—already applied to Cuba—of never openly criticizing socialist groups, not excluding Moscow-line communist parties, because of the comfort it gave to their enemies.30
After he had sorted out his own affairs he flew to New York in the middle of August to visit his old friend Alvaro Cepeda, who was being treated for cancer in the Memorial Hospital. García Márquez was already terrified of hospitals and of death and the experience only confirmed his sense of the great city’s staggering inhumanity. When he got back to Barcelona a week later he sent Cepeda’s wife a letter:
Tita,
I couldn’t phone you. Besides, I had nothing to say: the maestro was so keen to reassure me that he made me believe that he had never been ill and instead devoted himself to looking after me. I found him very pale and almost worn out but I soon realized that it was because of the radiation because after a week of rest, in which we did nothing other than talk and eat, he had recovered quite a lot. I was alarmed that he had almost completely lost his voice but he convinced me that that too was down to the radiation. Indeed, with a decongestant jelly, whose prescription I read, he started to get his voice back within a few days. It wasn’t possible for me to talk to the doctor. However I talked to other doctors, friends of mine, and they agreed that certain kinds of lymphoma have been curable for six years now! …
Big hug, Gabo
Yet again he felt frustrated at interrupting The Autumn of the Patriarch and yet again he felt reluctant to get back to it. Soon afterwards, Plinio Mendoza was with him in Barcelona when Alejandro Obregón called to tell him that all hope had gone and Cepeda was dying. After a day of anguish García Márquez bought a plane ticket. Mendoza recalls, “But he didn’t go. He couldn’t. His guts or his knees refused to take him: at the door to his house, with a suitcase in his hand, and the taxi approaching down the street, he had something like vertigo and instead of heading for the airport he shut himself in his room, pulled the curtains and lay down. Mercedes told me about it in the kitchen, by a washing machine that was moaning and sighing as if it were human. ‘Gabito’s been crying.’ I was surprised. Gabo crying? Gabo shut in his room? I have never seen a tear on his Arab face—and as they say in my homeland, only God knows what he’s been through in his time.”31
On 12 October 1972, Columbus Day, Alvaro Cepeda died in New York. Wayward as he was in almost every respect, Cepeda was the only member of the Barranquilla Group who never went away from Barranquilla for long, despite his yearnings for the USA. (Alfonso, Germán and Alvaro had all appeared in No One Writes to the Colonel and they all reappeared in One Hundred Years of Solitude, which had predicted that Alvaro would pass on first, followed by Germán, then Alfonso.) The body was flown back to Colombia two days later and Obregón and Julio Mario Santo Domingo held a vigil over the coffin until the morning of the 15th when a huge crowd of mourners escorted the hearse to Barranquilla’s Garden of Rest.32 A few weeks later García Márquez sent Alfonso Fuenmayor a letter reflecting on Cepeda’s death: “Well, Maestro, this is a fucking awful thing to have to say: I’m turned to shit, in a wretched state of dismay and demoralization and for the first time in my life I can’t find a way out. I say this to you because I think it will help me to say it to you and because perhaps my saying it will help you too. Gabito.”33
The following year, when Neruda died, García Márquez would tell journalists in Bogotá: “The death of my great friend Alvaro Cepeda last year hit me so hard that I realized I can’t cope with the disappearance of my friends. ‘Hell,’ I thought, ‘if I don’t face up to this business it’s me that’ll die one of these days the next time I get this kind of news.’”34 It was true that given his growing celebrity García Márquez had put in quite an effort to see his stricken friend and certainly his grief was real. But it was also true that he had been moving away from Cepeda and all the Barranquilla Group and the 1971 visit to the city had only emphasized this. More than most men García Márquez, who felt nostalgia with great intensity, had also learned early in his life how to fight it. Now the death of Cepeda drew a definitive line under the Barranquilla experience.
It was a gloomy autumn following his friend’s demise. On 7 November came the ominous news that Richard Nixon had been re-elected President of the United States. In that same month ex-President Juan Perón made his at first euphoric but ultimately disastrous return to Buenos Aires after seventeen years away and Salvador Allende had to refashion his Popular Unity government to put an end to a wave of strikes in Chile, while Pablo Neruda’s cancer forced him to resign his ambassadorship to Paris. García Márquez was there to see the old Communist poet set off on his last return to South America. They would never meet again.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ WENT on with The Autumn of the Patriarch in a st
ate of depression but also with a curiously renewed vigour. Alvaro Cepeda’s death had made him more aware than ever that life was short and perhaps he realized that he did not want to be in Europe while events in Latin America were passing him by. In Spain everything was paralysed while the country waited for General Franco to expire. The regime was clearly on its last legs—on 8 June Franco appointed Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco President, after ruling alone for thirty-four years—but its end was a long time coming, almost as long as the passing of García Márquez’s own “Patriarch” in the novel he had nearly completed. In May 1973 he began to tell newspapermen that The Autumn of the Patriarch was finished. However, he was going to let it sit for a year or more, “to see whether I still like it.”35 Behind the blasé appearance—apparently this writer didn’t really care whether his books were published or not and certainly did not respond to pressure either from publishers or readers—there was evidently still the same insecurity about the novel, which he had been working on intensively since his return from Barranquilla and Mexico late in 1971.
It is typical of García Márquez’s prescience that his first book after One Hundred Years of Solitude should be a novel which not only confronted the pitfalls of fame and power before they had even fully engulfed him but also anticipated and in that sense cauterized middle and old age long before he had reached them. However, it is impossible to talk of The Autumn of the Patriarch in simplistic terms. No other work by García Márquez even begins to approach its complexity—best illustrated perhaps by the contrast between the seductive beauty of the book’s poetic imagery and the ugliness of its subject matter.36 There is, indeed, a curious historical paradox relating to the conception of this work. The novels which had created the sense of a Latin American Boom in the 1960s—The Time of the Hero, The Death of Artemio Cruz and Hopscotch—were mainly updated versions of the great European and American modernist novels of the 1920s and 1930s—works such as Ulysses, In Search of Lost Time, Manhattan Transfer, Mrs. Dalloway or Absalom, Absalom! Yet the book which crystallized and consecrated that Latin American Boom, One Hundred Years of Solitude, seemed infinitely less labyrinthine and modernist than the others. At a time when the term “postmodernist” had not yet been invented, critics like Emir Rodríguez Monegal talked of the curious “anachronism” of García Márquez’s novel—because it was apparently transparent, easy to read, and accessible even to people who only had a modest literary education.37 For his follow-up, however, García Márquez felt challenged to write something more like a typical Boom novel: this is why the Joycean and Woolfian features of The Autumn of the Patriarch are immediately obvious to the experienced readers for whom the book was evidently intended. This was at the very moment when most other writers, stung by García Márquez’s success, were turning away from the characteristic Boom mode and writing much more transparent “postmodern” works of the kind One Hundred Years of Solitude was supposed to represent.
The new novel went through many versions. It is the story of an uneducated Latin American soldier from an unnamed, composite nation who seizes power despite having little political experience and contrives to rule as dictator of his tropical country for two centuries. Among the tyrants García Márquez drew on for his horrifying portrait were the Venezuelans Juan Vicente Gómez (in power 1908–35) and Marcos Pérez Jiménez (1952–8), Porfirio Díaz of Mexico (1884–1911), Manuel Estrada Cabrera of Guatemala (1898–1920), the Somozas of Nicaragua (Anastasio, Luis and Anastasio Jr., 1936–79) and Rafael Trujillo (1930–61) of the Dominican Republic. Spain and Franco, García Márquez still insisted, had, if anything, got in his way. He still, to this day, knew very little about Franco, because such a cold and ascetic European figure was of little use or interest to him.
Known to the reader only as “the Patriarch,” the book’s monstrous protagonist is as solitary as he is powerful and as sentimental as he is barbaric. Though apparently insensitive almost to the point of stupidity, he has an extraordinary instinct for power and an intuitive insight into other men’s motives—though women, not excluding his beloved mother, remain a mystery to him. García Márquez had realized, he told interviewers, that this dictator was what Colonel Aureliano Buendía would have turned into if he had won his war—in other words, if Colombian history had been different and the Liberals rather than the Conservatives had triumphed over the course of the nineteenth century.38 For his protagonist to maintain his mythical force he had decided that he should have no name: just “the Patriarch” (known also to his staff as “the General”). Rather shockingly, García Márquez explained that he had written a relatively sympathetic portrait because “all dictators, from Creon onwards, are victims.” The unfortunate truth, he insisted, was that Latin American history was not as people would wish: most dictators were from the popular classes and were never overthrown by the people they oppressed. It was not that myth had triumphed over history but rather that history itself always becomes mythologized. It was an essential purpose of literature, he declared, to show this process. But he was not prepared to give any further enlightenment: “The political aspect of the book is a good deal more complex than it seems and I’m not prepared to explain it.”39
What is unmistakable is that this new novel altered and deepened García Márquez’s approach to the twin problematics of power and love—his two central themes—with their associated motifs of memory, nostalgia, solitude and death. Power and love, the love of power, the power of love, are central aspects of human experience, with a particularly strong momentum in Latin American history, society and literature.
The book is set in a fictitious Caribbean nation, which seems to have Colombia—or, more particularly, Bogotá—as its neighbour, so that we can think of it as either something like Venezuela or as the Colombian Costa itself. In that sense this nameless state is similar to the fictitious countries invented by Joseph Conrad in Nostromo (1904) or by Spain’s Ramón María del Valle-Inclán in Tirano Banderas (1926). The portrait of its crude and violent Latin American dictator is focused in particular on his “autumn,” that is, the later years of his regime.
The book unfolds in an impossible historical time which stretches over some two hundred years, probably from the late eighteenth century until the 1960s.40 Most of it is narrated through flashbacks and follows the general contours of Latin American history until the sea is expropriated by the gringos at the “twilight” of the Patriarch’s autumn, followed by his death and the consequent end of his regime (winter and dissolution). The protagonist lives in a world where the military, the Church and the gringos are incessantly jockeying for power. “The people” themselves are virtually passive; there is no dialectical progress in the novel because there is no history, no real passage of time, no true social or political participation or interaction. Yet the relationship between the dictator and the people is perhaps the central focus of the novel. One might say that García Márquez’s intended gesture is that the novel should be handed over from the patriarch to the people in its closing lines, whose euphoria—clearly a memory of the fall of Pérez Jiménez in Venezuela in 1958—seems to be intended literally, not ironically.
In more individual terms, the Patriarch’s closest relationship on earth is to his mother, Bendición Alvarado. His wife is the ex-nun Leticia Nazareno, whom he kidnaps and possibly murders; the lover he pursues but never wins is the beauty queen Manuela Sánchez, and his only successful erotic relationship is, bizarrely, with a twelve-year-old schoolgirl when he is already senile. On the male side he has a double, or public face, Patricio Aragonés; just one good friend, Rodrigo de Aguilar; and later an evil genius, the glamorous Security Minister José Ignacio Sáenz de la Barra, similar to the advisers of the military juntas in Chile and Argentina in the 1970s, at the time the novel was being completed. This structure of relationships conforms to the classic pattern of Western myth.41
But this is wisdom after the event. The reader’s overwhelming experience is one of uncertainty and confusion. The whole point of view, structu
re and even chronology of the novel are determined by the uncertainty of a succession of narrators who are never sure of anything. One might say that the endless dilemma as to whether the dictator does or does not control “all of his power,” which is perhaps the most reiterated and the most confusing aspect of the novel—magnified enormously by the fact that it is considered above all from his point of view (at once stupid and unreflective, hypocritical and self-serving)—is governed by a three-way oscillation between the classical enlightenment view of human consciousness as that of a rational unified subject; a more Marxist perception of class domination and imperialism (these two perceptions, combined, would be a modernist view); and the Foucauldian view that power is everywhere, epistemic, always to be resisted but impossible to defeat and beyond even the most “powerful” subject’s ability to control (this of course would be a postmodernist view and is in fact dominant in the novel). In this work’s absolutely ruthless cynicism about human beings, power and effect we find ourselves forced to consider that power is there to be used and that “someone has to do this,” because García Márquez’s view of history is very close to that bleak vision which Machiavelli first theorized and Shakespeare repeatedly exemplified. He would go straight off after completing the book to seek a relationship with Fidel Castro, a socialist liberator who was, as it turned out, the Latin American politician with the potential to become the most durable and the most loved of all the continent’s authoritarian figures.
The novel’s sentences are immensely long: there are only twenty-nine in chapter 1, twenty-three in chapter 2, eighteen in chapter 3, sixteen in chapter 4, thirteen in chapter 5 and just one in chapter 6, making a total, apparently, of one hundred. The early chapters begin with three or four paragraphs on the first page, like an orchestra tuning up, and then they grow longer and longer. There are constant switches of narrative person from first (“I,” “we”) to second (“General sir,” “Mother of mine,” etc.) to third (“he,” “they”), although the latter is nearly always inside another voice. García Márquez himself as third-person narrator is almost absolutely absent, yet no novel is more dominated by his characteristic literary voice. Each chapter begins with his usual obsession, the matter of burial, though the reader cannot be sure whether the body found is that of the tyrant—or indeed, if it is, whether he is really dead. Thus the “we”—we the people who found the corpse—are conjuring up a world in retrospect through a few short sentences on the first page of each chapter with variable details about the discovery of the body, after which the narrative plunges into the labyrinth or whirlpool of flashbacks into the life of “him,” “the General,” which dissolves gradually into an autobiographical “I,” the Man of Power. The labyrinth, as in all modernist works, is both topic (life) and technique (the way through it).
Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez Page 47