Gabriel García Márquez

by Gerald Martin

  The Autumn of the Patriarch was published at last, in March 1975, in Barcelona. The Latin American press had been full of rumours that the novel’s publication was imminent right up to the day that it—the most eagerly awaited book in Latin American history—hit the bookshops. It was launched by his Spanish publisher, Plaza y Janés, with a print run of a staggering 500,000 copies in hardback. In June Plaza y Janés would publish his Collected Stories and García Márquez would have settled his accounts, for the time being, with his literary readers. Despite, or perhaps more accurately because of, the high expectations, the reviews were disconcertingly mixed and many of them were downright hostile.22 Some critics liked the book for its extraordinary poetry and ironic rhetoric which both exalt and parody Latin America’s darkest fantasies at one and the same time; others disliked it for a whole battery of reasons ranging from its alleged vulgarities to its incessant hyperboles, from its lack of punctuation to its apparently problematical political stance. These divergences were particularly marked at the time the book was published but the radical disagreement has continued down the years.

  Nevertheless it was The Autumn of the Patriarch that finally con-firmed García Márquez as a professional author, the book that showed he could write another big novel after One Hundred Years of Solitude. Even those who disliked it did not attempt to deny that it had been written, manifestly, by a great writer. Although One Hundred Years of Solitude evidently proclaims a vast and unmistakable continental dimension, it is still a recognizably Colombian book. The Autumn of the Patriarch, on the contrary, is a Latin American book, written with that symbolic readership in mind, with almost no significant Colombian dimension, not least because Colombia never had the sort of patriarch it portrays: formally, it was a “democratic” nation through most of the twentieth century.

  In a sense it is The Autumn of the Patriarch and not One Hundred Years of Solitude which stands as the decisive oeuvre of García Márquez’s career as a writer, because, contrary to first impressions, it encapsulates all his other works. Whether or not it is considered his “best” novel, as García Márquez himself has frequently asserted, it is not difficult to see why he thinks it his most “important” one, especially if we add to its compendiousness two further considerations already mentioned: the insistence that the portrait of the Patriarch is a portrait of himself and the fact that he wrote the book to “prove himself” as an author after the stupefying success of One Hundred Years of Solitude. It might be said, then, that while One Hundred Years of Solitude is undoubtedly the axis of his life (and the most important book as far as the wider world, and perhaps posterity, are concerned), The Autumn of the Patriarch is the pivot of his work: after this, ironically enough, the all-consuming nature of his literary obsession with power would be at an end—at the very moment that power became the central theme of his life. When he had declared that he would not write another novel until Pinochet fell, it was for two very good reasons: firstly, and above all, he was determined to make contact with Latin America’s own living patriarch, Fidel Castro; but secondly, for the time being, he had nothing really important left to write—because, it can now be seen, the first half of his career as a writer did not end with the ecstasy of One Hundred Years of Solitude but with the agony of The Autumn of the Patriarch. As far as literature was concerned, he was not at all sure where to go next. So he concentrated on Castro.

  That spring he was in London again with Lisandro Otero, who recalled: “García Márquez and I were dining with Matta in the House of Brahimi, the Algerian ambassador, when a servant came to the table with an urgent message for Gabo. He went to the phone. It was Carmen Balcells, who had just arrived from Barcelona with the first copies of The Autumn of the Patriarch. As soon as we finished dinner we went to her hotel. She gave Gabo the five copies that had come off the press that very afternoon. He immediately took a pen and dedicated them to Fidel and Raúl Castro, Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, Raúl Roa and me. I felt that with that gesture he was trying to declare his commitment, in the most unequivocal fashion, to the Cuban Revolution.”23

  Assuming his overtures to Castro were successful, his new strategy would require a complex and subtle self-presentation. He would support both socialism and liberal democracy at one and the same time, through his very own but secret “popular front.” At the beginning of June 1975 he flew into Lisbon on Russell Tribunal business—the business of human rights and democracy. But the Portuguese Revolution had broken out in April 1974—a revolution in Europe: perhaps everything was possible!—and it had been carried through in the first instance by soldiers. Its implications for Africa—and Cuba—would be far-reaching, as they would be for García Márquez himself. He met Prime Minister Vasco Gonçalves and the poet José Gomes Ferreira, among others, and would soon publish three major articles in Alternativa on the course of events in Portugal after the revolution.24 His support for the Portuguese Revolution, for the Peruvian military revolution then in full swing, and the heavily militarized Cuban regime, showed a surprising openness to martial involvements. He said in Lisbon that the Peruvians expropriating newspapers was no different from the expropriation of oil, which he also supported; he personally did not believe in bourgeois freedom of the press, which was “in the last analysis, freedom only for the bourgeoisie.”25 This infuriated Mario Vargas Llosa, by then back in Peru.

  García Márquez headed for the Caribbean by way of Mexico City. On his arrival in the Mexican capital he prayed to the Lord that he would never be awarded the Nobel Prize and although, as it later turned out, the Lord was not listening, Excelsior conveniently was and the possibility of García Márquez attaining such future glory was planted in many thousands of minds.26 As for wealth, on 17 June Excelsior reported that between them One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Autumn of the Patriarch had made García Márquez a very rich man.27 Evidently he could afford his self-imposed literary vacation and he could afford to take risks with his popularity in pursuit of his political vocation.

  Back in the Caribbean he went in search of answers to the questions that now obsessed him. Cuba’s government was run by revolutionary guerrillas who had turned themselves, and indeed the whole of the Cuban people, into soldiers. Allende had been overthrown by a reactionary military. Now, in Portugal, Europe’s longest-lived dictatorship had also been overturned by the army. Were revolutionary soldiers—arise General Simón Bolívar!—the answer to Latin America’s problems? He travelled to Central America to find out. There he interviewed a tempestuous, swashbuckling figure second only to Fidel Castro in his attractiveness to García Márquez, General Omar Torrijos, the populist dictator of Panama since 1968, another of those characters who argued that dictatorship for and of but not by the people was sometimes necessary given the neo-colonial condition of contemporary Latin America.28 García Márquez and Torrijos would become bosom buddies, almost blood brothers. (It was Torrijos who, after sitting down and reading The Autumn of the Patriarch, would look up at García Márquez and say, “It’s true, it’s us, that’s what we’re like.”) Torrijos, a quite different personality to Castro (whose “popular” performances were strictly—some would say cynically—choreographed), had begun a historic campaign to recover the Panama Canal for Panama and he explained to García Márquez his negotiations with the USA for a new Canal Treaty and the conditions he would and would not accept. As García Márquez himself pointed out, it was to say the least inconvenient for the USA to have a military rebel appear in the country where the U.S.-run School of the Americas, “in which the soldiers of the continent learn to combat the insurgency of their peoples,” was located. Torrijos told his new friend that he was prepared to go to “the ultimate consequences” to get the canal back and to eradicate colonialism from his country.

  García Márquez was particularly interested in Panama. Not only was it once a part of Colombia, before U.S. imperialism encouraged its secession; it was also the country where his own grandfather, Nicolás Márquez, had travelled as a young man and had pursued on
e of his most important love affairs. Torrijos was a man who could easily have been born in Barranquilla—indeed, in many respects he was reminiscent, even in looks and manner, of García Márquez’s dead friend Alvaro Cepeda. Quite quickly the two men would come to build a friendship based on a deep emotional attraction which evidently turned over time into a kind of love affair. And García Márquez was not alone: even the ice-cool English writer Graham Greene developed a close and affectionate relationship with the Panamanian leader and eventually wrote a surprisingly unguarded book about the process of “getting to know the general.”

  BUT COMPARED TO Fidel Castro, already by then one of the great political personalities of the twentieth century, even Torrijos was a minor figure. It is easy to imagine how fascinating the thought of getting to know Castro must have been for a man as obsessed from an early age with the theme of power as García Márquez. In The Autumn of the Patriarch some parallels are unmistakable. The novel, which appeared three months before García Márquez’s first visit to Cuba in fourteen years, described a dictator obsessed with rural activities, especially cattle breeding, yet who had “smooth maiden hands with the ring of power.” Both details point to Fidel. Some references may be coincidental, others are unmistakable: “he built the largest baseball stadium in the Caribbean and imparted to our team the motto of victory and death.”

  Similarly the Patriarch arbitrarily changes dates and times and even suppresses Sundays, just as Fidel Castro himself would eventually abolish Christmas and then, years later, resurrect it. And just like Fidel, García Márquez’s dictator, during his early years of messianic power, turns up unexpectedly all over the country and personally inspects public works or sets them in motion, and this gives him an enduring popularity so that the people would not blame him for their misfortunes: “every time they learned of a new act of barbarism they would sigh inside, if only the general knew.” Eventually, after the Americans take the sea away—which could be interpreted as the almost fifty-year “blockade,” heroically resisted by the Cuban people—the Patriarch reflects, “I had to bear the weight of this punishment alone … no one knows better … that it’s better to be left without the sea than to allow a landing of marines.” The brutal irony is that the portrait has increasingly fitted Castro more than twenty-five years after the novel was written; he too, with the embargo, had the “sea” taken away from him, and he too presided over a regime which decayed before the eyes of the world while he himself appeared imperturbable. Though only the most fanatical of his enemies have considered him a “monster.”

  In 1975, however, Castro was beginning one of his most successful periods. The regime was coming through the “Stalinist” moment that had included the Padilla Affair and was soon to launch its historic and audacious military campaign in Africa. In 1975 fourteen Latin American countries would restore diplomatic relations with the island regime, including, on 6 March, García Márquez’s forty-eighth birthday, Colombia, which had broken with Cuba under Alberto Lleras in 1961. The decision—taken by López Michelsen—must have seemed an extraordinary augury to García Márquez, who had already made his own secret decision to re-establish relations with the Cuban Revolution, and had arrived in Bogotá only four days before.

  In July the moment finally came and he travelled to Cuba with Rodrigo. Back at last. The revolutionary authorities gave them all the facilities necessary to travel the length and breadth of the island, going where they pleased and talking to whoever they wished. Rodrigo would take over two thousand photographs. García Márquez recalled, “My idea was to write about how the Cubans broke the blockade inside their own homes. Not the work of the Government or the State but how the people themselves solved the problem of cooking, washing and sewing their clothes, in short, all those daily problems.”29 In September he published three memorable dispatches, under the general heading “From One End of Cuba to the Other,” which brilliantly combined large compliments with small criticisms in such a way as to demonstrate to the authorities that here was a big-league revolutionary player with an unprecedentedly safe pair of hands.30

  Over the summer the entire family regrouped in Mexico. García Márquez and Mercedes had found a house down in the south of the city, in Calle Fuego (“Fire Street”), in the Pedregal del Angel zone, just beyond the National University. This modest house is still their main residence more than thirty years later. There were some family bridges to be rebuilt, which is perhaps why García Márquez had taken Rodrigo with him to Cuba, when he must have been a distraction. Of the return to Mexico Rodrigo would tell me, “The fact is that Mexico is the country we’ve always gone back to, not Colombia. It’s as if my parents became Mexicans in that period between 1961 and 1965.”31

  The return to Mexico would allow the boys to confirm and rebuild their long-term identity. Neither of them felt either Colombian or Spanish but their relationship with Mexico had also been severely interrupted. Rodrigo would be determined to establish his own independence and get on without the García Márquez name; eventually he would leave the country. Gonzalo, as the younger son, would be less hypersensitive on this score but he too would try to find his own way without too much reliance on his father’s celebrity, though this would be especially difficult in Mexico. Once again the boys were sent to English schools in order to complete their secondary education.

  In Bogotá, meanwhile, a bomb exploded in the offices of Alternativa in November 1975, attributed to some form of vigilante unit—“at exactly the time,” Enrique Santos Calderón would tell me, “when we were denouncing problems of corruption at the very top of the army”32 Undaunted, though admittedly safe in Mexico, García Márquez released a statement in which he said that the bomb was obviously the work of the Colombian army and must have come from the very top. Clearly, he said, López Michelsen’s refusal to close the magazine had spurred the military into vigilante action. Evidently his recent enthusiasm for soldiers did not extend to the Colombian variety. Even more provocatively, he specifically named the Minister of Defence, General Camacho Leyva, as personally implicated in these repressive policies. The Colombian military would not forget this. Nor would they forget their suspicion that the organizers of Alternativa sympathised with, perhaps even colluded with, the guerrillas of M-19, the middle-class rebels of choice and the group who had symbolically stolen Simón Bolívar’s sword in 1974.

  Still, the wider world was changing fast, apparently for the better. General Franco, whose regime had executed five Basque militants on 27 September, despite worldwide protests (Olof Palme of Sweden said the Spanish government were “bloody murderers”), had a major heart attack on 21 October and Prince Juan Carlos took over as Head of State. On 20 November Franco finally died, to the general delight of left-wingers all around the planet. Juan Carlos was declared King on the 22nd and three days later announced a general amnesty. Spain was about to embark on a transition to democracy which would change it dramatically. On 10 November Angola had become independent of Portugal, amidst violent conflict: the Marxist forces of the governing MPLA, already assisted by Russian advisers, were ranged against the U.S.-backed UNITA of Jonas Savimbi. On 11 November Cuba announced the decision to send thousands of troops to Angola, where they would remain for thirteen years. This would be García Márquez’s chance to show what a great journalist could do for the revolution.

  BUT NOT EVERYONE was impressed by García Márquez’s attention-grabbing behaviour. On 12 February 1976, now a resident of Mexico City, he turned up at the premiere of a film version of Survivors of the Andes. As he arrived, Mario Vargas Llosa, in town for the event—he had written the screenplay—was standing in the foyer. Gabo opened his arms and exclaimed, “Brother!” Without a word Mario, an accomplished amateur boxer, floored him with one mighty blow to the face. With García Márquez semi-conscious on the ground, having struck his head as he fell, Mario then shouted, depending on the source: “That’s for what you said to Patricia.” Or: “That’s for what you did to Patricia.” This was to become the most fa
mous punch in the history of Latin America, still the subject of avid speculation to this day. There were many eyewitnesses and there are many versions not only of what actually happened but why.33

  It is said that the Vargas Llosa marriage went through a difficult moment in the mid-1970s and that García Márquez took it upon him-self to console Mario’s apparently distraught and resentful spouse. Some say that he did this by advising her to initiate divorce proceedings; others that the comfort he offered was more straightforward. Evidently Mario concluded that García Márquez had put his concern for Patricia before their friendship. Only García Márquez and Patricia Llosa know what did or did not happen.34 And only Patricia Llosa knows what she told her husband when they were reunited. In other words, only she knows the entire story.35 As for Mercedes, she would never forgive Vargas Llosa. And she would never forget what she considered a cowardly and dishonourable act, whatever the provocation might have been.