Gabriel García Márquez

by Gerald Martin

  His readers discovered that, like many of them, this great man was terrified of flying, and he was able to confide that other great men such as Buñuel, Picasso and even the much-travelled Carlos Fuentes were similarly afflicted. Yet despite his terror, he seemed to be travelling constantly and he described each of his glamorous journeys for his avid fans: where he went, who he went to see, what they were like, their foibles (because, it was clear, we all have our little foibles). He was also superstitious and, he appeared to assume, much the more lovable for that. He even had doubts and insecurities: in December 1980 he reflected in Paris on the murder of John Lennon and the nostalgia associated for several generations with the music of the Beatles, lamenting: “This afternoon, thinking about all that as I gaze through a gloomy window at the falling snow, with more than fifty years upon my shoulders and still not knowing very well who I am, nor what the hell I’m doing here, I have the impression that the world was the same from the moment of my birth until the moment the Beatles started to play”18 He stressed that Lennon had above all been associated with love. He himself—his readers might perhaps have reflected—had been more closely identified with power, solitude and the absence of love; but that was about to change.

  The article on John Lennon was a coded message. Paris, Europe, was not the answer. He needed, as he broadcast in a whole series of interviews at this time, to return to Colombia, where his latest novel, once again, had been set. He had been promising to return for years. But the country had already begun to lurch back into chaos by the time Alternativa closed in early 1980: a new surge in violence, a new wave of drug-trafficking and a new kind of guerrilla group wedded to spectacular operations.

  It was against this background that García Márquez and Mercedes returned to Turbay’s repressive and reactionary Colombia in February 1981. Gabito organized a grand family reunion in Cartagena where the star turn was Aunt Elvira, “Aunt Pa,” whose prodigious memory astonished all those present.19 After this he began to work in the apartment he had recently bought for his favourite sister Margot in Bocagrande. Colombian poet-critic Juan Gustavo Cobo Borda visited him there not long after García Márquez’s arrival and was allowed to take away the manuscript of Chronicle, which he read in two hours on the nineteenth floor of a nearby hotel.20 Cobo Borda reported that the writer was working each day at Margot’s, then would walk down the four flights of stairs to the ground floor, drive to visit his mother in Manga and listen to “the unintelligible jokes of his father.”

  On 20 March, in Bogotá, García Márquez attended a Légion d’Honneur gala organized by the French embassy and then saw Cobo Borda again for what they agreed to call “the meeting between the slimy cachaco and the vulgar costeño.” Cobo Borda said he had never seen his interviewee looking so happy in Colombia. This contentment was short-lived: the two men spoke on the day the President would announce the breaking off of relations with Cuba. And there was more: García Márquez had begun to receive information that the government was trying to link him to the M-19 guerrilla movement, which in turn was being linked to Cuba, and there were even rumours that he might be assassinated. He later told Mexican reporters that he had heard four different versions of a story that the Colombian military was planning to kill him.21 On 25 March, surrounded by friends who had gathered to protect him, he asked for asylum in the Mexican embassy and slept there overnight.22 At ten past seven the next evening he flew north under the protection of the Mexican ambassador to Colombia, María Antonia Sánchez-Gavito, to be greeted by another large group of friends and an even larger number of journalists at the Mexico City airport. The Mexican government immediately gave him a personal bodyguard.

  During the flight he had had a long conversation with the Colombian journalist Margarita Vidal, who later wrote an in-depth account of the drama.23 As they flew over the Caribbean García Márquez assured her that neither Castro nor Torrijos was supplying arms to the Colombian guerrillas: Castro had reached an agreement with López Michelsen not to assist them militarily and he had kept to it. He, García Márquez, would return to Colombia when, as he expected, López Michelsen became President again. He said he was totally opposed to terrorism: revolution was the only long-term solution, whatever the cost in blood, but he didn’t see how it could be achieved. Colombia had always been a country with a low consciousness, ripe for populism but not for revolution. Colombians no longer had any belief in anything, politics had never got them anywhere, and now the attitude was each for himself, threatening complete social dissolution: “A country with-out an organized left, with a left incapable of convincing anyone, that spends its life dividing itself into pieces, can’t do anything.”

  All of this was an extraordinary backdrop for the publication of a novel entitled Chronicle of a Death Foretold. One imagines Colombian officers sitting in their barracks a few days earlier and having a hearty chuckle about the unpleasant and ironic surprise they had in store for the conceited costeño lefty. In the event the bird had flown and the celebration of his homecoming gift to Colombia—his new novel—would take place in Bogotá without him.

  Readers discovered that Chronicle of a Death Foretold narrated a story that could hardly have been more dramatic. Yet it was also one of those novels that have their own dramatic story after they are published. First, the sales were astronomical when the book was released—simultaneously—in Spain (Bruguera), Colombia (Oveja Negra), Argentina (Sudamericana) and Mexico (Diana). On 23 January 1981 Excelsior had reported that more than a million copies were being produced for the Hispanic world—250,000 paperbacks in each of the four countries and 50,000 hardbacks in Spain. Oveja Negra was reported as having completed this work in April, the longest single printing of any Latin American novel in history. On 26 April Excelsior said 140,000 dollars was being spent on advertising in Mexico alone and the book was being translated into thirty-one languages. It was being sold by newspaper sellers and chewing-gum vendors on streets all over Latin America.

  Oveja Negra boss José Vicente Kataraín was interviewed soon after publication.24 It turned out that there were not one but two million copies of the book: a million printed in Colombia and another million in Spain and Argentina—though Kataraín would always be unreliable about numbers, as befitted the name of his company, “Black Sheep.” And whereas the previous biggest number of copies of a Colombian first edition had been 10,000, García Márquez’s new book was printing more than for any other first edition of any literary work ever published in the world. Two million copies had meant buying 200 tons of paper, ten tons of cardboard and 1,600 kilos of ink. Forty-five Boeing 727s had been needed to transport the copies out of Colombia alone. As if to help all this along, García Márquez declared on 29 April that Chronicle of a Death Foretold was “my best work.” On 12 May however some Colombian critics claimed that the book was “a swindle,” little more than a long short story which added nothing to the writer’s earlier achievements.25 But Chronicle went straight to the top of the sales lists in Spain, where the book was compared, inevitably, to Lope de Vega’s Fuenteovejuna, and remained there until 4 November. It was the best-selling book in Spain in 1981. And Gabo the great novelist was back with a bang.

  On 7 May a Bogotá lawyer, Enrique Alvarez, sued García Márquez for half a million dollars for slandering the brothers portrayed in the novel since they had both been found “innocent” of the crime, whereas the book showed them as murderers. Thinking of the unfortunate and possibly even innocent Cayetano Gentile who had indeed been murdered—if not according to law—by the brothers thirty years before, this would seem to have been adding insult to injury with a vengeance.26 Some of the other “central characters” of the book, people who were portrayed in it or thought they were, plus other family members, gathered in Colombia—some having flown from distant parts of the world—to discuss their grievances. They would all be disappointed: they would never get a cut of García Márquez’s astronomical profits because the courts in Colombia, where most of the professional classes have alway
s had a solid literary education, would make subtle literary distinctions between historical truth and narrative fiction, and authorial freedom would be resoundingly upheld.

  Chronicle of a Death Foretold has been one of García Márquez’s most successful novels with the reading public and even with the critics—once read, never forgotten. Yet it is perhaps the most pessimistic of all his works. Clearly this shift must bear some relation to the frustrations of his political activity between 1974 and 1980, and to the condition of Colombia at the end of that period.

  On 21 May García Márquez was in Paris for François Mitterrand’s inauguration, together with Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar and Salvador Allende’s widow Hortensia. It was the first of many presidential inaugurations staged by personal friends of his in the coming years, though none would be more imposing, more theatrical or indeed poetic than the extraordinary spectacle put on by this most self-aware—and historically aware—of politicians. How far García Márquez had come since the days when he was not far above the Parisian clochards!27 The next month would find him in Havana, staying in a suite in the Hotel Riviera which the authorities kept permanently reserved for him. His relationship with Fidel had settled into a pattern. They began to have an annual vacation together at Castro’s residence at Cayo Largo where, sometimes alone, sometimes with other guests, they would sail on his fast launch or his cruiser Acuaramas. Mercedes particularly enjoyed these occasions because Fidel had a special way with women, always attentive and with an old-style gallantry that was both pleasurable and flattering.

  By now Gabo and Fidel were sufficiently relaxed together for the Colombian to play the role of reluctant younger brother, the non-athletic and sulky one who was constantly complaining about chores and hunger and others among life’s unfortunate imperatives, a pantomime which always made Castro laugh. Of course the weaknesses of his fellow men did not always amuse the Comandante but in the case of García Márquez there were reasons to make an exception. He not only acted the younger brother and was generally deferential but he knew when to joke and play court jester and how far to go. Fidel was not necessarily a respecter of writers in general—nor of their freedoms—but he always acknowledged when someone was the best at what they did.

  Someone who respected García Márquez even more than Castro and treated him as an older, wiser but equally irreverent brother was Panama’s General Torrijos. Felipe González later told me that his enduring memory of Torrijos and García Márquez was the two of them drinking a bottle of whisky together in one of Torrijos’s houses. After much carousing and “piss-taking,” a tropical downpour began. The two men ran down from the balcony where they were drinking and rolled on the lawn below in the pouring rain, kicking their legs in the air and roaring with laughter like two small boys who just loved being together.28 García Márquez visited Torrijos in late July with Venezuela’s Carlos Andrés Pérez and Alfonso López Michelsen, who García Márquez was hoping would win the next year’s elections; they spent the weekend on the beautiful island of Contadora. García Márquez stayed on with his military friend for a few days and then went back to Mexico, at a moment when the entire planet, even Latin America, was gawping at the televised wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer in London. However on 31 July came one of the worst blows García Márquez had ever suffered personally, and the worst politically since the death of Salvador Allende in 1973, when it was reported that Torrijos had been killed in an air accident in the mountains of Panama. García Márquez had decided only at the last moment not to accompany him on the flight.

  There was much speculation in the press as to whether Torrijos had been murdered and also, in the next four days, as to whether García Márquez would attend the funeral, and much surprise and disappointment when he did not. His explanation immediately entered the canon of classic García Márquez justifications: “I do not bury my friends.”29 It was an extraordinary statement to come from the author of Leaf Storm and No One Writes to the Colonel, both of which involved burials and were based on the assumption that ensuring the dignified disposal of a corpse was a key moral duty—perhaps the minimum requirement of our always uncertain humanity—as in Antigone.

  García Márquez did not bury his friends but he continued to praise them: his obituary article, “Torrijos,” appeared in El Espectador on 9 August while he was at the Galician Fair in Coruña.30 Some thought his behaviour callous and ambivalent. Yet Torrijos’s death had hit him hard. Mercedes would later remark, “He and Torrijos were great friends, he really loved him. He was very upset at his death: so much so, that he fell ill from the effect of it. He misses him so much he hasn’t been back to Panama.”31 Later he himself would reflect, “I think Torrijos travelled too much by plane, sometimes without a real reason: he travelled compulsively. He gave fate as many opportunities as he gave his enemies. But there is a high-level rumour that one of his aides left a walkie-talkie on a table shortly before leaving on the official flight. They say that when the escort went back to pick up the machine they’d changed it for another with explosives.” Being García Márquez, he added: “If it’s not a true story it’s attractive in a literary way”32

  It was election year in Colombia and López Michelsen, backed by García Márquez, was the Liberal opponent of Belisario Betancur, the Conservative candidate. García Márquez warned on 12 March that López Michelsen was the best hope for democracy in the country.33 Two days later in his column he revealed that he himself was on the hit-list of MAS, a right-wing death squad (not to be confused with Petkoff’s political party in Venezuela). Also on the list was María Jimena Duzán, who had travelled to interview M-19 guerrillas two weeks before. García Márquez accused the military and the government of collusion with MAS and said that he had always hoped to die “at the hands of a jealous husband” and certainly not through the actions of “the clumsiest government in the history of Colombia.”34

  Despite his support for López Michelsen, a majority of the 55 per cent of the electorate that voted did not agree and Conservative Belisario Betancur won with 48.8 per cent of the vote to López’s 41.0 per cent, with the dissident Liberal Luis Carlos Galán effectively winning the election for the Conservatives by taking 10.9 per cent. Outgoing President Turbay lifted the state of siege which had been in effect on and off for thirty-four years in the land of Macondo. Betancur’s own son Diego campaigned against his father on behalf of a Maoist workers’ revolutionary party. On his accession Betancur immediately declared an amnesty for the guerrilla movements and began the first serious peace negotiations with them in modern times.

  García Márquez’s first intervention in democratic politics had not gone well and there now followed another Latin American calamity to disappoint him. At the start of that month the Argentinian army occupied the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic and the British sent a task force to recover them. The phenomenon of a fascist military junta, but nevertheless a Latin American regime, confronting a European nation would test García Márquez’s new-found democratic rhetoric to the limits over the coming twelve months, when, like Fidel Castro, he would find himself preferring Latin American dictators to European colonialists. His first comment, an article entitled “With the Malvinas or Without Them,” appeared on 11 April.35 Over the coming weeks, as it became clear that the Argentinian forces were heading for humiliation, the mood of dismay in the continent would increase.

  Indeed, all the political news in Latin America since the Sandinista victory in 1979 seemed to be going from bad to even worse. Then there were the problems of the Communist regime in Poland, where the trade union movement led by Solidarity was questioning the government’s legitimacy. Everything everywhere seemed to be heading in the wrong direction, from García Márquez’s perspective. Meanwhile García Márquez was flying backwards and forwards across the Atlantic—and telling his readers about it—including a trip by Concorde “among the impassive businessmen and the radiant high-class whores”;36 he had also flown to “Bangkok the horrendous” after hirin
g a Rolls-Royce in Hong Kong (“none of my friends has one”), convincing himself once again that, “as always,” even in the world capital of sex tourism, “American hotels are the best places to make love, with their pure air and clean sheets.”37 But he seemed to have run out of literary topics. Now that socialism was on the wane, now that the solitude and power he had always written about appeared to be destined to prevail across the entire planet, he felt the need to find another subject, some-thing to feed his own optimism and inspire others to follow suit. What could it be? Of course: love! Gabo would become the Charlie Chaplin of the literary world: he would make them smile and he would make them fall in love.

  The first public sign of this move was an article entitled “Peggy, give me a kiss,” inspired by a message scrawled on a wall in the Mexico street where he lived.38 García Márquez said that he was touched by this naive appeal in a world where the news was always bad, especially the news from Colombia. But he suspected that love was making a welcome comeback. (Just four months earlier he had confided to his readers that he “never dares to write” unless there is a yellow rose on his desk—placed there, of course, by his loving spouse.)39 Not that he was against sex—he informed the entire world right there and then that he had lost his virginity at the precocious age of thirteen—but “sex is better with all the rest, which is complete love.” Novels about love were once more the ones selling best, he declared, and even the old Latin American boleros were back in fashion.

  Perhaps it was not entirely coincidental, then, that, after many refusals, he had consented to a long-awaited interview with Playboy magazine in—naturally—Paris, the world capital of love. The magazine had sent Claudia Dreifus, who would later become one of the world’s most successful interviewers, and this would be one of the best-researched and most comprehensive conversations with the writer.40 He explained his political positions for Playboy’s American readers, insisting that he and Fidel “talked more about culture than politics”: theirs was really just a friendship! Then he moved on to matters of love and sex. He said that none of us ever knows another person completely and he and Mercedes were no exception; he still had no idea how old she was. He explained that most of his relationships with prostitutes when he was a young man were simply a matter of finding company and escaping solitude.