Gabriel García Márquez

by Gerald Martin

  The Governor of the Department of Magdalena decided to declare 22 October a regional holiday and proposed that Colonel Márquez’s old house in Aracataca should become a national monument. In Bogotá the Communist Party organized street demonstrations pleading with García Márquez to return to the country as a spokesman for the oppressed, to save Colombia. A reporter asked a prostitute in the street if she’d heard the news and she said a client had just told her about it in bed; this was thought to be the best homage García Márquez could receive. In Barranquilla the taxi drivers on the Paseo Bolívar heard the news on their radios and all sounded their horns in unison: after all, Gabito was one of them.

  Newspapers began to call García Márquez “the new Cervantes,” echoing an idea which Pablo Neruda had been one of the first to suggest when he read One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1967.52 This comparison would be made many times down the years from this moment on. Newsweek, which also had García Márquez on the cover, called him “a spellbinding storyteller.”53 Perhaps Salman Rushdie, writing from London, best summed up the opinion that prevailed both then and thereafter. His piece was entitled “Márquez the Magician”: “He is one of the Nobel judges’ most popular choices for years, one of the few true magicians in contemporary literature, an artist with the rare quality of producing work of the highest order that reaches and bewitches a mass audience. Márquez’s masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, is, I believe, one of the two or three most important and most completely achieved works of fiction to be published anywhere since the war.”54

  Meanwhile, just a week after the announcement of the prize, one of his good friends, Felipe González, leader of the Spanish Socialist Party, was elected Prime Minister of his country, yet another cause for celebration and political euphoria. Last year Mitterrand; now González. Was the prize somehow a sign that everything was beginning to change? García Márquez told Gente of Buenos Aires, “I can die happy because now I am immortal.” Perhaps he was joking.

  On 1 December Miguel de la Madrid was inaugurated as the President of Mexico for the next six years. He and García Márquez would never be close but García Márquez attended the ceremony. That same day Felipe González was inaugurated as Prime Minister of the new Spanish government in Madrid. In the first days of December, after visiting Cuba, García Márquez flew on to Madrid to salute González—and be saluted. He let it be known that he had talked to Castro for eleven hours in Havana and that the Reagan government had refused him an unconditional visa to touch down in New York. Meanwhile, in Paris, Mercedes met up with Gonzalo. But not Rodrigo. The only disappointing note for García Márquez was that his elder son, filming in the north of Mexico, was too busy working to travel to Stockholm, the undoubted high point of his distinguished father’s career. The two had met up in Zacatecas the previous month and no one knows what transpired. Neither man has ever been prepared to say more about the matter.

  At seven in the evening on Monday 6 December a government-chartered Avianca jumbo jet took off on a twenty-two-hour journey from Bogotá to Stockholm, carrying the official delegation led by Minister of Education Jaime Arias Ramírez, together with García Márquez’s twelve closest friends chosen by Guillermo Angulo—García Márquez had pleaded with his old friend Angulo to save him from this invidious task—plus their spouses, a large number of people invited by Oveja Negra, and seventy musicians from various ethnic groups organized by the Minister of Culture with the advice and assistance of an anthropologist, Gloria Triana.

  When García Márquez’s guests finally arrived in Stockholm the temperature had just fallen to freezing point. Hundreds of Europe-based Colombians and other Latin Americans were waiting at the airport. As the night wore on the temperature would fall to minus ten degrees but the Swedes told them they were lucky it wasn’t colder and that it hadn’t snowed.55 Groups of friends and family from Spain and Paris had arrived earlier in the afternoon: Carmen Balcells and Magdalena Oliver from Barcelona, together with the Feduchis and journalist Ramón Chao; Mercedes and Gonzalo, Tachia and Charles, and Plinio Mendoza, from Paris, together with Régis Debray and Mitterrand’s wife Danielle, though without Culture Minister Jack Lang, another friend, who had to cancel at the last moment. The Colombian ambassador was also there, plus the Cuban ambassador and the Mexican chargé d’affaires, all waiting in the Arctic cold.56

  Tachia appointed herself official photographer to García Márquez and his friends and she even managed to get herself a press pass. As her old flame advanced from the plane to the waiting room she thrust herself forward and took the first photo of the conquering hero, and then she photographed the wildly enthusiastic Colombians trying to touch García Márquez through the airport’s steel barriers in the Northern darkness. Gabo and Mercedes went on to the Grand Hotel, where an opulent suite of three rooms awaited them and where they would spend the next few nights.57 Exhausted, jet-lagged, over-excited and overwhelmed, García Márquez fell asleep. Then, “I suddenly woke up in bed, and I remembered that they always give the same room in the same hotel to the Nobel winner. And I thought, ‘Rudyard Kipling has slept in this bed, Thomas Mann, Neruda, Asturias, Faulkner.’ It terrified me, and finally I went out to sleep on the sofa.”58

  The next morning García Márquez had breakfast in the hotel with a huge group of friends representing his entire past, including Carmen Balcells and Kataraín. Such a group of people had never been brought together before. Some didn’t even know one another, some probably didn’t like one another. Plinio Mendoza said that García Márquez had behaved at the airport like a visiting bullfighter saluting his fans and that he got dressed every day in his suite, again like a bullfighter, with all his friends around him. On one occasion he took Alfonso Fuenmayor from “the suite of the happy few” into the solitary bedroom and showed him his speech: “Take a look at that, Maestro, and tell me what you think.” Fuenmayor read the piece with admiration and said at last he understood García Márquez’s political position. His friend replied, “What you’ve just read is One Hundred Years of Solitude, no more, no less.”59

  As the hour approached, Mendoza recalls, “In the middle of the lounge I saw Gabo and Mercedes, placid, untroubled, talking, completely oblivious to the coronation ceremony advancing upon them, as if they were still, thirty years ago, in Sucre or Magangué, in the house of Aunt Petra or Aunt Juana some Saturday evening.”60 The literature prize winner’s speech was to be given at 5 p.m. in the theatre of the Swedish Academy of Literature situated in the Stock Exchange, with 200 specially invited guests and a total audience of 400, followed at 6.30 by a dinner in honour of all the prize winners in the house of the Academy Secretary.

  At 5 p.m. García Márquez, wearing his trademark hound’s-tooth jacket, dark trousers, a white shirt and a red polka-dot tie, was introduced by the lanky Lars Gyllensten, Permanent Secretary of the Academy and himself a well-known novelist, who had written the communiqué announcing the award of the prize. Gyllensten, who was speaking in Swedish, could barely be heard because the Colombian radio commentators present at the ceremony sounded as if they were doing a football match and García Márquez had to make a “turn it down” gesture with his fingers before he started his own speech, entitled “The Solitude of Latin America.” It was delivered by its author in an aggressive, defiant, almost incantatory style. Combining a deconstructed magical realism with politics, the speech was an undisguised attack on the inability or unwillingness of Europeans to understand Latin America’s historical problems and their reluctance to give the continent the time to mature and develop that Europe itself had required. It restated his lifelong objection to “Europeans” (including North Americans), whether capitalists or communists, imposing their “schemes” on Latin America’s living realities. García Márquez claimed that the prize had been awarded in part for his political activism and not only his literature. He finished at 5.35 and received an ovation for several minutes.61

  On the evening of Thursday the 9th García Márquez and Mercedes travelled out to the Pr
ime Minister’s residence at Harpsund for a private dinner with Palme and eleven other special guests, including Danielle Mitterrand, Régis Debray, Pierre Schori, Günter Grass, Turkish poet-politician Bülent Ecevit, and Artur Lundkvist. The Swedish Foreign Office said this invitation was a special distinction, rarely given before. García Márquez had been introduced to Palme by François Mitterrand in his Rue de Bièvre home years before. Now, although he was absolutely exhausted, he found himself talking for another two hours about the situation in Central America in a conversation which would be influential in proposing a peace process to be brokered by the six presidents of the isthmus, what would later be known as the Contadora Process.62

  All of this was but a series of hors d’oeuvres to the main course on 10 December, the day of the “Nobel Festival”: in the morning the rehearsal in the Konserthus, in the afternoon the great event, the presentation of the Nobel Prizes by the King of Sweden at four o’clock before an audience of 1,700 people. That day Mercedes, “the wife of the Nobel,” appeared in Colombia on the cover of Carrusel, an El Tiempo supplement. The article inside was by her sister-in-law, Beatriz López de Barcha, entitled “Gabito Waited for Me to Grow Up.”63 One can imagine Mercedes’s sister-in-law having said to her, “OK, you want to wipe out that piece by Consuelo Mendoza last year, why not let me do a really favourable interview, with flattering pictures?” Mercedes: “OK, but just this once.”

  Soon after lunch the man of the hour got dressed. He had been talking about his liquiliqui since the day he heard the news. Sometimes he declared that it was to honour his grandfather the Colonel, sometimes, less modestly, that it was to honour his own most famous creation, Colonel Aureliano Buendía. El Espectador carried a letter the day after the ceremony from Don Aristides Gómez Avilés in Montería, Colombia, who remembered Colonel Márquez well and said he would never have been seen dead in a liquiliqui: he was far too posh for that and would never have been caught out in the street without a jacket on, still less at a Nobel Prize ceremony.64 In these discussions a man who really had worn a liquiliqui in his youth, Gabriel Eligio García, never got a mention.

  Suite 208, Grand Hotel Stockholm, 10 December 1982, 3 p.m. Before travelling from Paris Tachia had bought García Márquez the Damart thermal underwear which appears in a famous photograph of the great writer standing in his intimate apparel, surrounded by his male friends in the dinner jackets which they had all rented for 200 krona apiece. Mercedes handed them yellow roses, one by one, to ward off la pava, as bad luck is called in the Spanish Caribbean, and helped fix them to lapels: “Now then, compadre, let me see….” Then she organized the photographs.65 Then out came the liquiliqui which, Ana María Cano in El Espectador cattily observed three days later, meant that García Márquez arrived at the ceremony looking “as wrinkled as an accordion.”66

  All this was later. Now, dressed defiantly in his liquiliqui—the closest thing when all is said and done to a recognizably Latin American lower-class uniform—with, oh horror, black boots, García Márquez prepared himself for the moment of truth. If the liquiliqui was wrinkled, no doubt those of Nicaragua’s Augusto Sandino and Cuba’s José Martí and other heroes of Latin American resistance had been wrinkled, not to mention that of Aureliano Buendía. He covered himself with an overcoat against the Nordic elements. Plinio Mendoza recalls the moment: “We all crowded tightly together and went down the steps to accompany Gabo for the most memorable moment of his life.”67 Then Mendoza switches to the eternal present: “The streets are covered in snow, photographers everywhere. By Gabo’s side, I see his face tighten for a moment. I can feel, with the antennae of my Pisces ascendant, the sudden tension. The flowers, the flashes, the figures in black, the red carpet: perhaps from the remote deserts where they lie buried his Guajiro ancestors are talking to him. Perhaps they’re telling him that the pomp and ceremony of glory is the same as the pomp and ceremony of death. Something like that is going on because as he pushes on through the magnesium glow and the figures in formal dress I hear him mutter in a low voice in which there is a note of sudden, alarmed, pained astonishment: ‘Shit, this is like turning up at my own funeral!’”68

  Into the grand ballroom of the Konserthus, designed to evoke a Greek temple, they stride. One thousand seven hundred people including three hundred Colombians. A gasp when García Márquez appears in his all-white outfit: he looks as if he is still in his thermal underwear! To the right of the stage, which is covered in yellow flowers, sitting in blue and gold armchairs, are the royal family: King Carl Gustav the Sixteenth, Queen Silvia, the beautiful half-Brazilian who spent her childhood in São Paulo, Princess Lilian and Prince Bertil, who all just arrived as the national anthem was played. Beside them is a podium from which Permanent Secretary Gyllensten will speak. The laureates are all to the left, on red seats: Swedes Sune Bergstrom, Bengt Samuelsson and Briton John Vane for medicine, American Kenneth Wilson for physics, South African Aron Klug for chemistry and American George Stigler for economics. Behind are two further rows of seats in which the academicians, the Swedish cabinet and other notables are seated. García Márquez alone in his liquiliqui surrounded by dress suits, stoles, furs, pearl necklaces. Between him and the King the huge N for Nobel inscribed in the circle—painted or chalked?—that awaits him.

  He was visibly nervous when Professor Gyllensten of the Swedish Academy started to speak. When it came to García Márquez’s moment, last but one, Gyllensten spoke in Swedish, then turned to the Colombian costeño, who stood, with glittering eyes, looking for all the world like the hapless little boy in the Colegio San José de Barranquilla, and switched to French, summarizing what he had said and inviting the Colombian to approach the King to receive the prize. García Márquez, who had chosen Bartok’s Intermezzo as his accompanying piece of music, left his yellow rose on his seat as he moved to receive the award, exposed for a moment to unimaginable misfortune without that totemic flower as he walked across the immense stage with his fists clenched and the trumpets sounding, then stopped inside the painted circle to await the King. Now, as he shook hands with the medal-bedecked monarch he looked like Chaplin’s tramp ingratiating himself with some toff. After receiving the medal and parchment, he bowed stiffly to the King, then to the guests of honour and then the audience, whereupon he received what was generally agreed to have been the longest standing ovation in the history of those august ceremonies: several minutes.69

  The ceremony finished at 5.45 p.m. and as García Márquez filed out with the other winners he raised his hands above his head like a champion boxer, a gesture he would henceforth be making many times in his life to come. Those fortunate enough to be invited had forty-five minutes to get themselves across to the vast blue hall of the Stadhus (Stockholm Town Hall) for the grand Swedish Academy banquet. The menu had been prepared by Johnny Johanssen, Sweden’s top chef, and was a “typically Swedish” affair. Reindeer fillets, trout and sorbet, with banana and almonds. Champagne, sherry and port.70 García Márquez, defiantly, lit a Havana cigar. The highlight of the proceedings—as everyone would agree—was the arrival of the seventy Colombian musicians. García Márquez’s friend Nereo López had been following their adventures and misadventures in Stockholm with his camera.71 He had watched Gloria Triana anxiously chaperoning all the women: “They’re all virgins and I’ve promised their mothers.” On arrival in the Town Hall, which was draped in monarchical tapestries, one of the group from Riosucio had knelt and prayed, thinking he was in a church. López wondered how the Swedes felt when they saw “that heterogeneous group from Macondo coming down the stairs, that amalgam of Indian, Black, Carib and Spanish which makes up the mix of Colombian identity.” Up to then, according to him, the great ice cream known as the Nobel Flambé had been the main attraction at these ceremonies. Now life itself was flooding in. The entire performance, led by Totó la Momposina and Leonor la Negra Grande de Colombia, was a triumph and the applause encouraged them to go on for thirty minutes instead of fifteen.72

  Each laureate read a thr
ee-minute speech followed by a toast. García Márquez went first with a piece entitled “In Praise of Poetry,” which claimed that poetry was “the most definite proof of the existence of man.”73 What no one knew at the time was that he had more than just a little help from his friend Alvaro Mutis, as anyone, reading the speech and then thinking about it, might have deduced. Two of the other laureates asked him to sign copies of One Hundred Years of Solitude. After the toasts everyone filed up to the first floor to the “Great Gold Room” for dancing. This started with a waltz followed by sundry North European dances, then, unexpectedly, “Bésame mucho,” “Perfidia” and other boleros, followed by foxtrots and rumbas.

  Late that evening, after everyone got back to the hotel, there was a phone call from Rodrigo, up in the northern desert of Mexico. The new laureate was with twenty of his friends, still drinking champagne. Everything went quiet and García Márquez, with shining eyes, went over to the phone. Later he would proudly tell journalists that his sons had “the flavour of their mother and their father’s business sense.”74

  By then, thousands of miles away in the small Caribbean town of Aracataca, Colombia, where of course it was still light, an even more vibrant and enthusiastic celebration was under way. There had been a Te Deum in the church where Gabito was baptized at nine in the morning, followed by a pilgrimage to the house where he had been born. A campaign was proposed to make Aracataca a historic tourist town on the model of Proust’s Illiers-Combray Then the Governing Council of the Magdalena Department assembled in the House of Culture, chaired by the energetic Governor Sara Valencia Abdala, her-self an Aracataca native.75 García Márquez’s sister Rita recalled: “The day the prize was presented there was a celebration in Aracataca organized by the Magdalena government. The Governor hired a train to take all the guests; it picked up all the family on the way, cousins, uncles, aunts and nephews, and so we all arrived in Aracataca, where there were more cousins, more uncles and aunts, more family. A lot of people. It was a wonderful day, there were fireworks, a mass, a side of beef roasted in the open air and drinks for the whole town. Our cousin Carlos Martínez Simahan, the Minister of Mines, was there. That day they inaugurated the Telecom building which our brother Jaime had built. Though the best thing of all was when they released the yellow butterflies.”76