Gabriel García Márquez

by Gerald Martin

  Gonzalo, who had his own studio apartment, soon lost interest in the flute, much to his father’s disappointment. Now nineteen, he took up graphic arts in 1981 and met his future wife Pía Elizondo, the daughter of Mexican avant-garde writer Salvador Elizondo, one of the former editors of S.nob. Tachia acted as a kind of aunt to Gonzalo when his parents were out of town. She was still living on the Boulevard de l’Observatoire, opposite the gloomy hospital of their evil hour. When “The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow” appeared in El Espectador on 6 September 1980 the picture on the cover of Magazín Dominical was of a rose dripping spots of blood.

  Only a few weeks after the publication of this encrypted story a rare article about Mercedes appeared, written by Plinio’s sister Consuelo Mendoza de Riaño. It alluded openly to Gabo’s Parisian amour in the 1950s, mentioned that he “may have loved her a lot” and insinuated that Mercedes was naive about this and many other things. Whether or not Mercedes had understood the meaning of the recently published short story, this entirely uncoded follow-up must have been a nasty surprise for her. It ended however with a defiant counter-attack from the interviewee. Consuelo Mendoza recorded: “She is not bothered by the writer’s female admirers. She says: ‘You know, Gabito is an eternal admirer of women, you can see it in his books. He has female friends everywhere whom he loves a great deal. Though most of them are not writers. After all, women writers are sometimes a pain, don’t you think.’”6

  On 19 March 1980, on a visit to Cuba, García Márquez had announced that he had completed—“last week”—a novel that almost no one knew he was even writing, entitled Chronicle of a Death Foretold. It was, he said, “a sort of false novel and a false reportage.” Later he would claim that it was “not that far from the U.S.”s ‘new journalism.’” He repeated a favourite image, that writing stories was like mixing concrete whereas writing a novel was like laying bricks. Then he added a new one: “The novel is like a marriage: you can keep fixing it day after day whereas a story is like a love affair: if it doesn’t work, it can’t be fixed.”7

  Not everyone found the new García Márquez as lovable as he evidently intended. When he tried to explain away the problem of the Cuban asylum seekers who had recently flooded into the Peruvian embassy in Havana, Cuban dissident writer Reinaldo Arenas, as if to show that García Márquez was not fooling him, wrote an article whose title was an untranslatable pun to which we may nonetheless essay an equivalent: “Gabriel García Márquez: Is he an Ass or an Asshole?” Referring specifically to García Márquez’s alleged criticism of the Vietnamese boat people and the Cuban asylum seekers, Arenas declared:

  That a writer like Señor García Márquez, who has lived and written in the West, where his work has had an immense impact and reception which has guaranteed him a lifestyle and intellectual prestige, that such a writer, protected by the freedom and opportunities that such a world affords him, should use them to produce apologies for totalitarian communism, which turns intellectuals into policemen and policemen into criminals, is simply outrageous … It’s time for all intellectuals in the free world (no others exist) to take a position against this kind of unscrupulous propagandist for communism who, taking refuge in the guarantees and facilities which liberty provides, sets out to undermine it.8

  In an interview with Alan Riding of the New York Times in May, García Márquez, who had “visited Havana this month in the midst of Cuba’s refugee problem with the United States,” explained to Riding that he had founded Habeas to “take on special cases requiring contact with both the left and the Establishment, occasionally helping obtain the release of victims of guerrilla kidnappings.”9 This sounded very much like someone who wanted it both ways and the possibilities of being seduced by “the Establishment,” whoever they might be, were obvious. As for his long-awaited book on Cuba, “Every door was opened to me, but now I realize that the book is so critical that it could be used against Cuba, so I refuse to publish it. Though the Cubans want me to go ahead.” Riding noted, “Despite his frequent trips to Havana, he says he could not settle there: ‘I could not live in Cuba because I haven’t been through the process. It would be very difficult to arrive now and adapt myself to the conditions. I’d miss too many things. I couldn’t live with the lack of information. I am a voracious reader of newspapers and magazines from around the world.’ But he also feels unable to live in Colombia. ‘I have no private life there,’ he said. ‘Everything concerns me. I get involved in everything. If the President laughs, I have to give an opinion on his laugh. If he doesn’t laugh, I have to comment on why he didn’t laugh.’ Mr. García Márquez,” Riding noted, “has therefore lived in Mexico City almost continuously since 1961.”

  As usual, the new book, eventually entitled Chronicle of a Death Foretold, was really an old project: a novel based on the horrifying murder of his close friend Cayetano Gentile in Sucre thirty years before. Significantly enough, it was a work inspired by the political violence of the early 1950s, with a theme that would not have been out of place in In Evil Hour, and yet the writer, who had just devoted seven years to politics, would set the novel backwards in time, in a less explosively political period of Colombia’s history; and he would blame its events not so much on capitalism, nor even mainly on a remote but ruthless Conservative government, as he had in In Evil Hour, but upon an apparently much older and deeper social system, heavily influenced by the Catholic Church and obsessed less, in the first instance, with ideological and political differences than with moral and social ones. This was a huge shift in his literary outlook, though one that has barely been noticed by his readers and critics.

  On his wedding day in January 1951, out in the real world, a young man called Miguel Palencia had received a note in the small town of Sucre saying that his new bride Margarita Chica Salas was not a virgin and he had returned her to her family in disgrace. On the 22nd her brothers Víctor Manuel and José Joaquín Chica Salas murdered her ex-boyfriend Cayetano Gentile Chimento in the main square, in front of the whole town, for allegedly having seduced, deflowered and abandoned Margarita.10 The killing was particularly gruesome: Gentile was almost cut to pieces.11 Gentile’s mother was a good friend (and comadre) of Luisa Santiaga Márquez and Cayetano was a good friend of Gabito, his brother Luis Enrique and his eldest sister Margot. Luis Enrique had spent the previous day with Cayetano and Margot had been with him minutes before he was killed; eleven-year-old Jaime had watched him die. Since that very day Gabito had always wanted to write the inside story of this terrible death but because those involved were all people he and his family knew intimately, his mother asked him not to do so while the parents of the principal protagonists were still alive. (The murder was of course the reason why the García Márquez family fled from Sucre in February 1951.) By 1980, when Gabito began to write the novel, those who would have been most affronted had passed away and he was in a position to shuffle the facts of the case and the personalities of the people he knew with the same ruthlessness he had applied to his own character in The Autumn of the Patriarch.12

  García Márquez had conceived the final shape of the new book on his way home from the family’s round-the-world journey in 1979. In the airport at Algiers the sight of an Arab prince carrying a falcon had suddenly opened his eyes to a new way of presenting the conflict between Cayetano Gentile and the Chica brothers. Gentile, of Italian immigrant stock, would become Santiago Nasar, an Arab, and in that way closer to Mercedes Barcha’s family heritage. Margarita Chica, Mercedes’s friend, would become Angela Vicario. Miguel Palencia would become Bayardo San Román. Víctor Manuel and José Joaquín Chica Salas would become the twin brothers Pedro and Pablo Vicario. Most of the book’s other details are the same as in real life; or similar. Some of the relationships are modified, particularly in terms of class, and naturally García Márquez rewrites the whole dramatic affair with the novelist’s magical insight.

  Whereas the modernist Leaf Storm, García Márquez’s most autobiographical novel, omits all direct self-referentialit
y, the postmodern Chronicle of a Death Foretold makes its autobiographical dimension explicit: its narrator is Gabriel García Márquez, who is not named but we know it is he because he has a wife called Mercedes (and seems to expect us to know who she is), a mother called Luisa Santiaga, brothers called Luis Enrique and Jaime, a sister called Margot, another, unnamed, who is a nun, and even, for the first time, a father, who is also unnamed. Here García Márquez toys with his readers and with reality, since these details relating to his family and his own life are largely but not entirely true: for example, Luisa Santiaga, Luis Enrique, Margot and Jaime were indeed in Sucre on the day of the murder but Gabito, Gabriel Eligio, Aida and Mercedes were not; and Aunt Wenefrida had been lying in the cemetery in Aracataca for many years but appears alive at the very end of the book. The family members appear not only with their own names but with their own characters and manner of speaking. The narrator mentions that he proposed to Mercedes when she was just a little girl, as indeed he did, but he also includes the local prostitute, María Alejandrina Cervantes, whom he gives the name of a woman he actually knew in the Sucre area, and he spends much of the novel in bed with her. As for the town, which is unnamed, it has a river just like Sucre’s; and the family house is located along the river bank away from the main square, in a mango grove, just like the García Márquez family’s real house in Sucre—though Sucre never had big steamboats, as the town in the novel does, nor were there ever any cars there; and Cartagena could certainly not be seen in the distance. But in most other respects the town is almost identical to the original.

  The novel is conceived quite consciously as a literary tour de force. The author is now, patently, another man, another writer, a quite different persona. Here indeed he is like a bullfighter who is going to kill his bull in an unforgettable fashion, at once dramatic and aesthetic. The result is as populist, compulsive and irresistible, as, say, Ravel’s Bolero. And equally as self-parodic: which is its saving grace. Because, implicitly mocking the concept of suspense, the writer announces the death of his character in the first line of the first chapter, announces it several times more in the following chapters, and then finally, perhaps uniquely, has the protagonist himself, holding his own intestines like a bunch of roses, declare it on the final page: “They killed me, Miss Wenefrida.” Whereupon the poor wretch collapses, and the novel ends. Thus when García Márquez refers in his title to “a death fore-told” he is referring both to the nature of the story he is telling and the way he himself has chosen to tell it. All of this, with its ironies and ambivalences, is packed into a brief work whose extraordinary complexity is skilfully concealed from its readers, whom the experienced author pilots through with apparently effortless aplomb.

  When Bayardo San Román returns Angela Vicario to her family on the wedding night after discovering she is not a virgin she eventually says that her seducer was Santiago Nasar. After her brothers carry out their murder of Nasar in revenge, they take refuge in the church and tell the priest: “We killed him in full knowledge but we are innocent.” The twins’ lawyer argues that the murder was in legitimate defence of honour. Yet although they are unrepentant it seems they did everything possible to warn Nasar or be stopped by others and they waited for him where they were unlikely to see him and where everyone else could see them. The narrator comments: “There was never a death more announced.” For the rest of the town there is only one true victim, the deceived bridegroom Bayardo San Román, who remains a mystery and says nothing to the narrator twenty-three years later when they meet again. Incredibly, from the moment he rejects Angela, who had been reluctant to marry him, she falls in love and becomes obsessed with him. Finally, when they are both old, he turns up with two thousand unopened letters and the laconic greeting: “Well, here I am.”

  The honour, shame and machismo syndrome is the central social thematic of the novel, as of so many Spanish works from the seventeenth-century “Golden Age” down to Lorca’s twentieth-century dramas. (This choice of theme is in itself an obvious conservative turn by the author.) A possible conclusion from García Márquez: men deserve the violence they do to one another because of what they do to women.

  The story of Colonel Márquez and Medardo must have been in García Márquez’s mind once more throughout the writing of this book. To what extent are we responsible for our actions, in control of our destiny? Irony functions at every level: the ultimate absurdity is that Santiago Nasar may not have done the deed for which he is killed and anyway the brothers do not really want to kill him. It is the combination of fate and human fallibility, and above all the confusion of the two, which brings about the death.

  Chronicle of a Death Foretold is perhaps García Márquez’s most influential title, used in a thousand newspaper headlines and references in magazines. The reason of course is that it implies that whatever is announced can be prevented and that human agency can predetermine the world (though the novel, ironically enough, seems to give the opposite message). On the whole García Márquez’s earlier work tended to imply that more things were subject to human agency than Latin American popular consciousness tended to believe; on the whole the later work tends to question more sceptically what is and is not subject to human agency and tends to show that most things are not. Paradoxically the earlier work appears more pessimistic but is in fact infused with the implicit optimism of a socialist perspective; it is intended to change hearts and minds. The later work is much jauntier but is underpinned by a world-view not too far from despair.

  AT THE END of his extended period of political propaganda and activism between 1973 and 1979, and in preparation for the future that he intuited, he now embraced a role he had hitherto rejected: he became a celebrity. Immediately after the completion of Chronicle of a Death Foretold, anticipating his return to Colombia, he negotiated with his friends in the press in order to embark upon a quite different kind of journalism. His new articles were a return to the kind of thing he had written in the 1940s and 1950s in Cartagena and Barranquilla, closer to literature than to journalism.13 They were, as well as political and cultural commentaries, a kind of serialized memoir, a weekly letter to his friends, a circular to his fans, an ongoing public diary.14 But this was not the diary of a columnist who needed a nom de plume to give himself an identity; this was very much the diary of a Somebody.

  He syndicated the articles most prominently to El Espectador in Bogotá and El País in Spain, as well as other newspapers in Latin America and Europe. The most striking thing about them from the beginning was the extraordinary change of position. Though many of them were on current political themes, gone was the urgent leftist tone. The man writing these articles was a Great Man, like some nineteenth-century novelist who had already received universal acclaim and confirmation. He was still friendly—indeed it was evidently a privilege to have such an important man being so friendly (both things were in the voice)—but it was no longer the unique matiness with which young “Séptimus” had written his “Giraffes” or the comrade-liness of the recent Alternativa journalist. This change of position and tone was one of his most effective publicity wheezes, undertaken with consummate sleight of hand. Manifestly this calm, measured voice, which knew everything but demanded nothing, would not be causing trouble if its owner returned to Bogotá where the articles were being published each Sunday.

  The articles began to appear in September 1980 and would continue virtually without interruption until March 1984, an astonishing total of 173 weekly articles during one of the busiest periods of the writer’s entire life.15 In retrospect, however, perhaps the most astonishing thing of all is that the first four articles were all about the Nobel Prize.16 They revealed between the lines that García Márquez had not only done a great deal of research but was also very familiar with Stockholm and, most striking of all, had met the key academician Artur Lundkvist and been to his home. He had researched the composition of the Nobel Committee, the method of selection and the procedures of the ritual of bestowal. He comments in the firs
t article that the Swedish Academy is like death, it always does the unexpected. Not in his case!

  From the start he gave his readers the impression that they were being allowed into “The Lives of the Rich and Famous,” with their “Champagne Lifestyles and Caviar Dreams.”17 Not only did García Márquez constantly narrate his own current life and lifestyle and the important people he knew but he reminisced about his own past, as if that past were self-evidently of interest to his readers all round the world. It was almost as if twenty-five years had somehow passed between the last Alternativa article in 1979 and the first El Espectador article in September 1980, the kind of thing that might have happened—“The Secret Miracle”—to one of Jorge Luis Borges’s characters. At the same time, in a lofty kind of way, he managed to carry on an unceasing campaign against the Reagan government’s neo-imperialist campaign in Central America and the Caribbean without alienating mainstream liberal international opinion. This was a remarkable achievement and would involve replacing the emphasis on revolutionary friends and contacts such as MAS’s Petkoff and M-19’s costeño guerrilla leader Jaime Bateman with references to respectable democratic politicians such as González, Mitterrand, Carlos Andrés Pérez and Alfonso López Michelsen.