The left performed as badly as ever in the Colombian elections in 1978 and the Liberal candidate Julio César Turbay Ayala was elected President and began his term on 7 August. Alternativa had been aggressive towards Turbay, a right-wing Liberal, from the beginning, with both cartoons and texts emphasizing how fat he was, with his trademark bow tie and nothing behind his glasses.50 Hoping to under-mine his candidacy and provoke the Liberals into finding a more moderate contender, the magazine had constantly questioned his motivation and his electability. García Márquez and Alternativa, both separately and together, would attack his presidency with unusual violence during the next four years, only to find that Turbay, or at least the forces that he represented, were more than capable of hitting back in even more violent and indeed unexpected ways.
Meanwhile, Central America continued its convulsive revolutionary process with Jimmy Carter apparently unable, like Pontius Pilate, to decide whether to referee the contest or join one of the teams. In Nicaragua the Sandinista (FSLN) rebels had been intensifying pressure on the Somoza dictatorship throughout the year. Sandinista leaders quite often met in García Márquez’s house in Mexico City and he sometimes saw Tomás Borge, a co-founder of the Sandinista movement, in Cuba. García Márquez helped to negotiate the agreement to unify the three opposing groups into a common Sandinista Front and would later even claim that it was he who dubbed the young revolutionaries los muchachos (“the kids”).51 On 22 August 1978 a group of Sandinista commandos led by Edén Pastora took the National Palace in Managua, kidnapped twenty-five House representatives, held them for two days and then flew four of them to Panama with sixty political prisoners freed in exchange for releasing the other hostages. Pastora, “Commander Zero,” had conceived this plan eight years before.52 García Márquez called Torrijos immediately and said he would like to publicize this extraordinary revolutionary success. Torrijos offered to keep the guerrillas incommunicado until García Márquez arrived. He set off at once and spent three days in a barracks talking to the exhausted leaders of the spectacular assault—Edén Pastora, Dora María Téllez and Hugo Torres—for a report which he would publish in early September.53 By the end of that month the USA was urging Somoza to resign. García Márquez said later that this report was exactly what he had in mind when he gave up literature for political journalism: “Edén Pastora and Hugo Torres fell asleep worn out by fatigue. I went on working with Dora María, an extraordinary woman, until eight in the morning. Then I went to write up the report in my hotel. When they woke up they corrected it, specifying particularly the right terms for weapons, group structures, etc. That next night I couldn’t sleep, I was so excited, like when I did my first job as a reporter, at the age of twenty.”54 Later in the year García Márquez would tell Alternativa that he had been involved in numerous high-level discussions about the Nicaraguan crisis.
In September, in the midst of his father’s feverish political activism, Rodrigo, disillusioned with cookery school, left for Harvard, where he would major in history. It seems a surprising destination for a member of this revolutionary family and perhaps it was this apparent contradiction which prompted García Márquez to assure El Tiempo in October that “my family is more important to me than my books.”
Once Turbay arrived on the scene in Colombia things began to change for the worse. A month after his inauguration in August he had proved his reactionary credentials by bringing in a security statute which would be roundly criticized by Amnesty International. During these months García Márquez had been involved in organizing, with a number of friends on the left, a human rights movement called “Habeas.” Jimmy Carter’s human rights policy, while undoubtedly sincere, was also an effective means of deflecting attention away from the many organizations which were protesting and contesting the wave of right-wing dictatorships in Latin America—in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Guatemala and Nicaragua. Carter of course argued that the governments of Cuba and Panama were also dictatorships and that the Sandinistas wished to build the same kind of regime. García Márquez fronted the new organization, which was headquartered in the relatively secure environment of Mexico City and inaugurated at a big metropolitan hotel on 20 December 1978.55 (Whether promises were made to the Mexican authorities that Mexico itself would not be fingered is not clear.) At that meeting García Márquez was able to declare that Cuba no longer had political prisoners. He was careful not to claim any credit for this.
Habeas was formed as a human rights institute for Latin America specifically to defend political prisoners, the cause which had first brought Enrique Santos Calderón and García Márquez together in the autumn of 1974.56 García Márquez was instrumental in the constitution of the new organization and undertook to finance it to the tune of $100,000 out of his royalties for the next two years. His friend Danilo Bartulín, formerly Salvador Allende’s personal doctor, who had been with him in his last hours in the Moneda Palace, was to be the executive secretary and there would be representatives in every Latin American country, including Ernesto Cardenal, Nicaragua’s revolutionary priest, and many others of similar stature and similarly progressive credentials. Most of them had a history of anti-Americanism and none of them were likely to want to turn the problems of habeas corpus in the direction of Cuba—and given the horror of what was going on in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay, neither was anyone else. García Márquez sarcastically declared that Alternativa intended to “help President James Carter carry out his human rights policy.” He suggested that the American leader should begin in Puerto Rico, where revolutionary patriots such as Lolita Lebrón had been in prison for twenty-five years for crimes far less serious than those which the Cuban government was currently pardoning.57
In January 1979 García Márquez had an audience with the new Pope, John Paul II, asking him for support for Habeas. He saw the pontiff in the Vatican library for fifteen minutes.58 He did not say so at the time but it was obvious that García Márquez found his brief encounter frustrating: he would later remark that the Pope was incapable of thinking about the rest of the world—even the “disappeared” of Latin America—without relating it to his “obsession” with Eastern Europe. Then on Monday 29 February he had an audience with the King and Queen of Spain, accompanied by Jesús Aguirre, Duke of Alba, the national Director of Music. They met in the Zarzuela Palace and their discussion about human rights in Latin America lasted over an hour. García Márquez was becoming a figure whom not only important leftist figures like Régis Debray and Philip Agee would have to see but also members of the international establishment. Asked how he’d got on with monarchs as compared with the politicians he was used to, García Márquez replied, “Well, the truth is they are very natural people to whom you can talk about anything. As for protocol, the King made things easy for me … They are well informed about Latin America and we had a number of memories of people and landscapes in common. They talked about our continent with real affection throughout.” El País took it as an extremely positive sign that the young constitutional monarch should be talking to such an important international figure, one whose last novel had been a critique of absolutist power.59
On 19 July 1979 the Sandinistas took power in Nicaragua. This news had been anxiously awaited all year, particularly since the USA broke off relations with the Somoza regime on 8 February. Somoza had declared a state of siege on 6 June and had finally faced reality and fled the country on 19 July. This was the first piece of really good news for the Latin American left in a long time, in a year in which things seemed at last to be looking up: Maurice Bishop’s pro-Cuban New Jewel movement had ousted the Prime Minister of Grenada on 13 March and on 27 October the island would become independent from Britain; the Panama Canal Treaty was due to become effective on 1 October; and Central America would continue on the revolutionary road with a military coup, deposing President Carlos Romero of El Salvador on 15 October. Four weeks before the Sandinistas took power García Márquez had carried out a telephone interview from Mexico City to Costa Rica wi
th friend and fellow writer Sergio Ramírez, who had just been proclaimed one of five leaders of the new Provisional Government of Nicaragua in exile.60 The two men had discussed the make-up and functions of the new government, the military situation, Colombia’s policy of not breaking off relations with Somoza and the possible U.S. reaction. When García Márquez asked what a writer was doing mixed up in politics, Ramírez had replied, “Look, during a patriotic war, a war of liberation, against an occupation force like Somoza’s, everyone leaves their jobs, including the poet, and picks up a rifle; I consider myself on the battlefield.”61
García Márquez would always take an interest in the Nicaraguan revolution and would give it considerable support but he never showed the enthusiasm for it that he had shown for Cuba. For one thing he never had the same familiarity with Nicaragua as he had with Castro, nor at that time did he have the intimate relationship with any one member of the leading group which he enjoyed with Fidel. For another thing he always had a certain inevitable scepticism, as he had also shown towards the Chilean experiment: unless a country took the same ruthless military and political measures adopted by the Cubans, there was little chance that the USA would tolerate any kind of left-leaning regime. Moreover his doubts were underlined by Cuba’s own response. The Cubans helped Nicaragua but within a continental perspective on continuing revolution; and they too now had to be far more sensitive to the USA, which had been forced to accept a Soviet veto over invading Cuba itself but would never accept anything remotely like a “second Cuba.”
After a summer in which the family travelled the world, taking in Japan, Vietnam, Hong Kong, India and Moscow, Rodrigo went back to Harvard and Gabo, Mercedes and Gonzalo moved on to Paris, where Gonzalo would begin his musical studies, concentrating on the flute, and his father would spend a month on Unesco business. He had been invited to serve on the MacBride Commission inquiring into the First World’s monopoly of information through the international press agencies. He was interviewed by his friend Ramón Chao and Ignacio Ramonet for an article which, prompted by his work with the commission, was provocatively entitled “The Information War Has Begun.”62 The two journalists said that García Márquez was in Paris “almost on an incognito basis, almost clandestinely.”
García Márquez explained that the commission had been set up by Unesco Director-General Amahdou-Mahtar M’Bow following discussions in 1976. From the start it involved major compromises, since the Russians of course wanted a completely statist press and the Americans a completely private one. The official languages were English, French and Russian and the report would be sent to the General Conference of Unesco in Belgrade in late October 1980.63 García Márquez would later say that he had never been so bored nor, as a “solitary hunter of words,” felt so useless, but equally he had never learned so much—above all, that information flows from the strong to the weak and is a crucial means of domination of the poor by the rich.64 The work of MacBride would be opposed by both the USA and the UK and would eventually lead to both countries withdrawing from Unesco in the mid-1980s.
Curiously enough, it was precisely now—coinciding with the Soviet Union’s disastrous invasion of Afghanistan—that García Márquez began to alter his public pronouncements and his public persona. An early example was his statement at a meeting in Mexico City on 25 January 1980 that Latin America was a helpless victim, a mere bystander in the face of the conflict between the USA and the USSR.65 Perhaps for all his big talk with Chao and Ramonet, García Márquez was not as confident about either the future of the planet in general or of Latin America in particular as he had said—and certainly not that the future of the world would be socialist. Reflecting on Ronald Reagan’s election, he would muse in public that since Reagan was not as tough as he pretended, he would prove his gunslinger reputation in Latin America, “that immense, solitary backyard for which nobody apart from us is prepared to sacrifice their happiness.”66 This proved a very accurate prophecy.
But in any case he was hankering for a return to literature. There were insistent hints now from interviewers that García Márquez was wearying of his reckless promise about Pinochet made almost six years before. Excelsior on 12 November reported that he was writing a series of stories about Latin Americans in Paris and that he would publish them twenty-four hours after the fall of Pinochet. This was something of a disappointment to those who had construed him as saying that he would cease not just publishing but all literary activity as such until the Chilean dictator’s demise. Here he was apparently writing works which, as soon as his “literary strike” was over, would be queuing up for publication like jetliners circling above one of the world’s big cities waiting to land.
He was still not admitting an even larger truth: that he was embarked on a new novel. Earlier in the year he had continued to declare that he had “run out of themes,” that he “didn’t have another novel” in him.67 In fact his next novel, apparently apolitical, would signal a significant shift. Neither his readers nor García Márquez himself would realize that he was in fact looking for love. A vast return to the personal was under way everywhere in the world and García Márquez himself, contrary to first impressions, would be a part of that process.
Alternativa had been a remarkable endeavour but it had encountered increasing financial difficulties, especially once government pressure began to deter advertisers after Turbay came to power. By the end of 1979 these problems had grown critical. The organizers of the magazine continued to subsidize it out of their own resources but when it finally closed, on 27 March 1980, Santos Calderón and Samper sloped back to El Tiempo and those who were not connected to the Bogotá establishment began to look for other means of support; while García Márquez was free to reconsider his political and literary options and plan the next stage of his career.
20
Return to Literature:
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
and the Nobel Prize
1980–1982
NOW COMFORTABLY INSTALLED in the Sofitel Hotel in Paris, García Márquez divided his time between his creative writing in the morning, and the business of Unesco’s controversial MacBride Commission in the afternoon. MacBride’s task, in line with “third-worldist” ideologies of the time, was to consider the possibility of a new “world information order” which would loosen the grip of Western agencies on the content and presentation of international news.1 Much as he approved of it, this collaboration would in fact mark the end of the era of public militancy for García Márquez. There would be no further Russells or MacBrides, no more Alternativa or Militant Journalism (an anthology of his political essays published in Bogotá in the 1970s); even Habeas was an activist endeavour which he would soon relinquish. He had taken the decision to cease his more strident political activism and turn to diplomacy and mediation behind the scenes. And since Pinochet was not apparently likely to be over-thrown any time soon, he had resolved to abjure and go back to creative fiction, which was in any case the best form of public relations he could devise. In September 1981, apparently unabashed, García Márquez would declare that he was “more dangerous as a writer than as a politician.”2
Although he was now one of the most famous authors in the world, he had really only published two novels, One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Autumn of the Patriarch, in the almost twenty years since In Evil Hour appeared. He needed more if he was to be considered one of the great writers of his era. As for politics, although he would never abandon either Latin America or his core political values, he had decided to concentrate on Cuba above all as his principal object of attention, his political heart’s desire, and also of course on Colombia, to the extent that it was possible to imagine positive outcomes for that unhappy country. Cuba, whatever its political and economic short-comings, was at least, for García Márquez, a moral triumph. And Fidel was a Latin American who was not a failure, not defeated, but the bearer of an entire continent’s sense of hope and, above all, dignity. García Márquez decided to stop banging his
head against the adobe wall of Latin American history. He would stick to the positive.
As he distanced himself imperceptibly from direct confrontation of the problems of Latin America, other than Cuba and Colombia, he began to spend time in two places he had previously disliked: Paris and Cartagena. It was during this period that he would buy apartments in both places: on Rue Stanislas in Montparnasse, and in Bocagrande, Cartagena, overlooking the tourist beach and his beloved Caribbean. When in September 1980 he broke his literary strike, the vehicle, “The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow,” would reflect this new existential reality exactly: the story would begin in Cartagena and end in Paris (as well as re-encoding his own Parisian past with Tachia).3 It was typical of his intuition, his timing, or his luck that during this period his two friends François Mitterrand and Jack Lang would be elected to government in France, as President and Culture Minister respectively, and a third, Régis Debray, would become a prominent though controversial government adviser; while Cartagena, thanks to improved air services and a gradual change of cachaco mentality, would become a weekend playground for the wealthy power-brokers of Bogotá.
It turned out to be a moment of exhilarating rejuvenation for a man now in his fifties who could certainly claim that he had given revolutionary activism his best shot. Rodrigo had begun the exodus to Paris with his brief experience of mastering Gallic haute cuisine and García Márquez set about looking for music classes for younger son Gonzalo now that Rodrigo was studying at Harvard. Eligio had also been living in Paris for several years, though he had recently moved to nearby London. At the same time young Colombian journalists such as the ex-Alternativa comrades Enrique Santos Calderón and Antonio Caballero, and El Espectador’s María Jimena Duzán, were in Paris, and Plinio Mendoza was working in the Colombian embassy. García Márquez’s high-level contacts were invaluable to them all.4 Although she spent less time in Paris than Gabo, Mercedes mothered all the young Colombians, acted as their occasional matchmaker and dried their tears when their amours turned sour. García Márquez himself engaged in interminable late-night discussions which showed his friends that his tactics might have changed but not his underlying beliefs.5
Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez Page 52