Manifestly The Autumn of the Patriarch is a novel written obsessively, by a solitary writer, about an obsessive, solitary dictator. Yet according to the author the critics, many of whom tended to feel outraged that he had given a moderately sympathetic portrait of this horrific personality, were slow to see what the book was really about. So in Mexico City in December 1975, almost two years after completing it and several months after its publication, a frustrated García Márquez, who declared that his reviewers, without exception, had read the book “superficially,” supplied a totally unexpected explanation of its meaning. It was, he asserted, a kind of autobiography: “It’s almost a personal confession, a totally autobiographical book, almost a book of memoirs. What’s happened, of course, is that they are encoded memoirs; but if instead of seeing a dictator you see a very famous writer who is terribly uncomfortable with his fame, well, with that clue you can read the book and make it work.”42
This is at first sight an astonishing assertion. García Márquez was a man trying to impress his readers with a follow-up to a popular classic, a man under pressure who might have been expected to ingratiate himself with the public; whereas The Autumn of the Patriarch was an ugly portrait of a profoundly ugly persona. This dictator, although in some ways treated indulgently, is one of the most repugnant characters ever created. Was García Márquez merely trying to scandalize the international bourgeoisie with sensational declarations to the press or had he, in truth, written one of the most shockingly self-critical works of world literature, a fictional parallel with Rousseau’s Confessions, for example? Are the author’s relationships with men, women and the world as a whole in some way comparable with those of his hideous yet pathetic creation? And if García Márquez thinks so, is he merely using himself as an example of a world fuller of vile bodies and dangerous liaisons than we have ever dreamed or is this an exclusively personal and thus uniquely devastating self-analysis? Given the cruel aridity of the self-portrait, it seems not impossible that the sojourn in the grotesque sterility of late franquista Spain very quickly turned into a self-imposed penance of self-analysis for the person he had always been as he looked now towards the future. Writing The Autumn of the Patriarch perhaps involved trying to deserve his fame morally as well as trying to show he deserved it literarily (despite the fact, ironically, that many readers saw the manifestly ambitious result as a proof of overweening arrogance and complacency).
The Patriarch’s “first death” might easily be a metaphor for 1967, the year of One Hundred Years of Solitude, when the “real” García Márquez disappeared for ever beneath the weight of celebrity and mythology: he may be describing his gradual farewell to anonymity, normality and privacy, a process through which a crisis of failure in the 1960s turned, with almost comic irony, into a crisis of fame and success in the 1970s. And this may also have represented, in his own consciousness, a farewell to youth (he had just turned forty when One Hundred Years of Solitude was published). Moreover it is not entirely surprising that García Márquez, a man always predisposed to reflections on old age, should bring forward his own mid-life crisis and begin his own “autumn” earlier than anyone else, so that the mid-life crisis in Barcelona was mingled in his case with the crisis of fame that surrounded it. Perhaps after assimilating all these lessons in the writing of this literally nightmarish work, he would put his fame and influence at the service of good causes by becoming, like the Patriarch in his prime, “master of all his power,” only consciously so and with benevolent intent.
Perhaps the result of his sudden celebrity had indeed been another splitting of a personality that García Márquez had desperately been trying to unify ever since he was an adolescent, a struggle whose first traces are clearly visible in the early stories and which, it might be speculated, the writing of One Hundred Years of Solitude had triumphantly completed. But perhaps he had resolved one problem of doubling only to find that now he had to confront another: the divorce between what he would later call his secret and private personas, on the one hand, and his public persona on the other. Perhaps that was why the novel raises the possibility that the corpse the people discover at the start of each chapter may not even be the Patriarch. Now that he too was famous, García Márquez, like the tyrant, was constantly confronted, in the media, by his own representation, “his perfect double, the humiliation of seeing himself in such a state of equality, God damn it, this man is me.” As for the tyrant’s doppelgänger, his official double or public image, Patricio Aragonés, “he had become resigned to live forever a destiny that was not his.” Well, García Márquez felt that he was both men: “the real one” and “the double.” At first the Patriarch had found it difficult to adjust to the new names the people or the media, or, later, state propaganda, chose to call him (like García Márquez’s many brand names: “Gabo,” the “Master of Macondo,” “MelqUíades the Magician,” etc.). But however disconcerted he was by this double or indeed multiple existence, he was never as confused as those around him.
Thus the matter of autobiography (especially his own predicament as a uniquely famous writer) took García Márquez over as he wrote a book that seemed to be about a man who was his polar opposite, and so the Patriarch slowly became him, just as Aureliano Buendía had become him in One Hundred Years of Solitude, only now he was truly plumbing the darkest depths of the human condition, reflected deep in his own soul. The Patriarch, c’est moi: fame, glamour, influence and power, on the one hand; solitude, lust, ambition and cruelty on the other. Needless to say, it is a great autobiographical irony that the writer had in fact set out to write this book about power and celebrity in the late 1950s, many years before he himself actually experienced those phenomena. At all events, by the time he began the final assault on the topic, he too was famous and powerful, he too was solitary, he too was “him,” the “other,” the desired object. The literary monster he had created but was determined to satirize and expose (but whom he had possibly always envied and desired in others) was a figure of the phenomenon he himself had become.
In an interview with Juan Gossaín in 1971 García Márquez had linked the themes of love and power. Insisting that all his characters were in some way autobiographical, he had declared: “You know, old friend, the appetite for power is the result of an incapacity for love.”43 This statement could begin to trace a hidden connection between all of García Márquez’s novels, a thread to help his readers out of the intricate moral and psychological labyrinth created by his oeuvre. Perhaps at first, as his sense of his own potential gradually increased, he began to fantasize that he could have it all: he could gain power and be loved for it. Then came the crisis of fame in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when García Márquez, a man of great self-control, great linguistic potency, and great psychological penetration (with above all a remarkable power of private persuasion, an extraordinary capacity for intimacy, for non-public activity) suddenly found himself at the mercy of other, often less talented beings—critics, journalists, agents, publishers, hangers-on—within the public domain. He, who had enjoyed the power of the reporter, was now himself at the mercy of reporters. He had become an image and a commodity which he could not himself entirely control. No wonder Carmen Balcells became so important to him: she became his “agent” in many more ways than simply arranging his contracts with publishers. She helped him, undoubtedly, to realize the possibility of becoming, as much as any human being can, the “master of all his power.”
So maybe then, like the dictator, he decided to take control of his public self, to become another self (which would only be partially himself, but now he would get to choose his image); instead of protesting about his predicament as he had for the past eight years, he would assume his famous self, use his fame, go past all his rivals, become a man of power and influence based not only on his public success achieved through the solitary act of writing but on his private, behind-the-scenes brilliance and power of seduction.
Because the dictator, however crude he may seem in García Márque
z’s intimate portrayal, was a political genius, for a very simple reason: “he saw the others just as they were while the others were never able to glimpse his hidden thoughts.”44 Although “hermetic to himself,” the Patriarch was “crystal clear in his ability to see the reality and future of others.”45 His patience was immense and he would always win in the end, as when finally—in the case of his unreadable and apparently indispensable adviser Sáenz de la Barra—“he discovered the imperceptible crack he had been seeking for so many years in that obsidian wall of fascination.”46 Is this a picture of García Márquez himself, always wanting to “win”—against all-comers, friends and family, wife and lovers, professional rivals (Asturias, Vargas Llosa), the world? And would Fidel Castro become the only man—his very own Patriarch, his grandfather figure—against whom he could not, would not dare, would not even wish, to win?
The lesson—it might be called a postmodern one—finally learned by the reader of this novel, through his or her reluctant co-existence with the Patriarch, is that life is undoubtedly impossible to understand but there are certain moral “truths,” notwithstanding all our illusions and all our contemporary relativities.47 They relate not only to charity and compassion but to power, responsibility, solidarity, commitment and, finally, love. Perhaps it was the complex inter-relation between these human questions which was the lesson that García Márquez himself learned in becoming famous and which he would not have learned unless he had become famous—which, indeed, for the most part, perhaps only the famous and powerful can learn—even though most powerful figures who experience the process of learning go on, like the Patriarch himself, to become even more despicable as their power and influence increases. It raises the radical possibility that the García Márquez who began to give interviews about politics and morality between, say, 1972 and 1975 was a new García Márquez who had learned what the old, still relatively naive and “innocent” García Márquez was truly like and had resolved to be better and to do better now that fame had shown him the truth.
As for love, when readers these days think about García Márquez and love they are inclined to smile and think of the apparently ingenuous romantic Florentino Ariza from Love in the Time of Cholera and of the wise and knowing face of García Márquez himself reproduced on the covers of millions of novels. Yet his treatment of love and sex, both in The Autumn of the Patriarch and elsewhere, is curiously brutal and disenchanted. The Patriarch’s attitude to women is coarse and unimaginative in the extreme, with two exceptions: the beauty queen Manuela Sánchez, the unattainable woman he idealizes from afar but never gets to know, and at the other extreme the twelve-year-old schoolgirl Lolita figure whom he seduces when he is already senile. Still, the only woman he has ever truly loved appears to be his mother. So is the whole relationship with Luisa Santiaga a key to this novel? And does Manuela Sánchez represent an illusory quest for mere external glamour? And does Leticia Nazareno stand for the destiny of all wives (Mercedes is one of Leticia’s other names)? And is all of it somehow the other, dark side of his suppression of his father, given that in this novel there are not even any grandfathers? Because the Patriarch regards himself as self-generated:
… he considered no one the son of anyone but his mother, and only her. That certainty seemed valid even for him, as he knew that he was a man without a father like the most illustrious despots of history, that the only relative known to him and perhaps the only one he had was his mother of my heart Bendición Alvarado to whom the school texts attributed the miracle of having conceived him without recourse to any male and of having received in a dream the hermetical keys to his messianic destiny, and whom he proclaimed matriarch of the land by decree.48
The truth, it appears, both prosaic and profound, is that men want a wife to be their long-term lover but when they get one they find they wanted a mother all along whilst continuing to want other, idealized lovers. During the Patriarch’s early times with Leticia Nazareno she would sit him down each day to learn to read and write; then they would spend every afternoon naked under her mosquito net, and she would wash him and dress him like a baby. Thus one half of a man is moved to suppress and rape women, considered by definition “younger” and inferior to him, and to wrest them away from other men; the other half wants to be treated like a child or baby by those same women, considered anterior or superior to him—because, once again, equality and democratic interaction are considered unrealistic or even (because unexciting) undesirable. In this book as in others García Márquez hardly ever uses the word “sex,” which causes permanent ambiguity about the meaning of love and the relation between sex and love. Evidently the only certainty that most of us can have about love is that our mother loves us, whatever our faults or crimes. Yet as we know, even this certainty was not given to García Márquez himself in the early years of his life.
By the end of his life the Patriarch can hardly remember anything at all, “conversing with spectres whose voices he couldn’t even decipher,”49 amidst all the signs of advanced old age, still vainly wanting sex, since love is forever denied him, and so his staff bring him women from abroad, but to no avail, because best of all he still likes jumping on working-class women, which always makes him start to sing again (“bright January moon …”).50 Finally, at the very end of the novel, he remembers what his whole life has been dedicated to forgetting, “a remote childhood which for the first time was his own image shivering on the icy barrens and the image of his mother Bendición Alvarado who stole the innards of a ram away from the garbage-heap buzzards for lunch.”51 Childhood, as Memories of My Melancholy Whores will also remind us, does not necessarily excuse but it may explain.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ WOULD CONTINUE to tinker with the novel during the latter part of 1973 and well into 1974.52 But the book was essentially finished and he was able to start planning the future. He had been a solitary writer locked away in solitary conflict with a solitary protagonist, yet simultaneously conducting an interminable conversation with the world about his solitude and about that most collective of matters: politics. It had been a bizarre spectacle for newspaper readers, to say the least, and García Márquez only just managed to carry off the endeavour without making an international fool of himself; but carry it off he did and the experience made him a far tougher literary and political animal, and gave him a thicker skin with which to confront almost any challenge of the many which his talent and his fame would have in store for him.
In the early spring of 1973 he and Mercedes had travelled up from Barcelona to be at Tachia’s wedding in Paris. She and Charles were finally married on 31 March—by then their son Juan was eight—and went to live opposite the hospital where she had miscarried in 1956; later they would move to the Rue du Bac. She would recall, “Gabriel was best man at my wedding and my sister Irene was matron of honour. Gabriel is also the godfather of my son Juan. I’d have liked Blas at the wedding too, it would have been wonderful—but he was so unreliable and unpredictable.”53 There is no reason whatever to think that García Márquez had any regrets about the separation from Tachia, other than the manner of it; but for a man who would be writing insistently about love, she would remain a productive point of reference, a symbol of paths not taken, of relationships outside of marriage, indeed of alternatives to monogamy itself.
Later that year, at the very time he was in the final stages of The Autumn of the Patriarch, García Márquez received another major international honour, the Neustadt Prize, awarded in association with the magazine Books Abroad of the University of Oklahoma. This was a surprising and indeed commendable decision for an American institution to take only six months after the scandal surrounding his donation of the Gallegos Prize to MAS.54 After perfunctorily performing his duty in Oklahoma in return for the ceremonial eagle feather and cheque, García Márquez flew to Los Angeles and San Francisco for a brief family holiday and then on to Mexico City, where the family were to spend the summer. So excited were they all to be back in Mexico together, among their old friends, in
Rodrigo and Gonzalo’s true nation home, that they bought a ramshackle country house on the outskirts of Cuernavaca, that beautiful resort town given notoriety by Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano.55 It was a bargain, with 1,100 square metres of garden, near the house of their old friends Vicente and Albita Rojo, in the direction of Las Quintas, with views of the sierra. This time, unlike his near-purchase of a country house outside Barcelona, García Márquez went ahead with the deal. When he registered the property at the notary public, all the employees from adjoining offices came out to have their copies of One Hundred Years of Solitude signed. García Márquez exulted, “I’m a capitalist, I own a property!” He was forty-eight.
On 9 September he left Mexico, after a stay of more than two months. Mercedes flew to Barcelona, where the boys were returning reluctantly to school. García Márquez was on his way to Colombia on business. But he told the Mexican press that he was so pleased by his reception in Mexico that he would be going on to Barcelona to pack his things and get back to Mexico as quickly as possible.56 He also declared that Latin America was very short of great leaders. The only true leaders in the continent were Castro and Allende, the rest were “mere presidents of the republic.” Two days later, on the first of the doom-laden September the elevenths, one of those two leaders was dead and Latin America would never be the same again.
Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez Page 48