Gabriel García Márquez

by Gerald Martin

  Back in Stockholm the man of the hour was beginning to relax. He had felt responsible for communicating a positive image of Latin America to the world, knowing that in Colombia, above all, his enemies could hardly wait for him to make a mistake because their view of what might be a “good image” of the country was entirely different from what he was trying to do. He would later say: “No one ever suspected how unhappy I was during those three days, attending to the minutest detail so that everything would turn out well. I could not afford any mistakes because the smallest error, however insignificant, would have been catastrophic in those circumstances.”77 (Later, when they were both back in Mexico City, the new laureate would say to Alvaro Mutis: “Tell me about that Stockholm business, I can’t remember a thing. I just see the photographers’ flashes and see myself enduring the journalists’ questions, always the same questions. Tell me what you remember.”)78

  Yet so stunningly successful was he that even El Tiempo, with which his relationship would never be easy, gave him an almost unqualified thumbs up in an editorial. It congratulated García Márquez, acknowledging that his life had been hard and he had earned every last ounce of his glory. It ended: “After the euphoria involved in the Nobel ceremony, the country must return to reality, face up to its problems and go back to its routine. But there is something that will not be the same as before: the conviction that our potentialities are still an unexplored richness and that we have barely begun to emerge on the world stage. And there to prove it is García Márquez, so that we will never forget this invaluable lesson.”79

  21

  The Frenzy of Renown

  and the Fragrance of Guava:

  Love in the Time of Cholera

  1982–1985

  THE NEXT MORNING, the morning after, Gabo and Mercedes flew to Barcelona, accompanied by Carmen Balcells. There they checked into the Princesa Sofía Hotel to sleep it all off until the New Year. They did, however, make another visit to the new Spanish Prime Minister. García Márquez would dutifully record in his weekly column—not interrupted for anyone or anything—that he had visited the Moncloa Palace twice in the last two weeks to chat to the youthful “Felipe,” who had looked “more like a university student” than a president, and to his wife Carmen, accompanied by Mercedes and Gonzalo.1 It was clear that the new Nobel Prize winner was going to be less discreet and more bumptious than ever. In his next article he remarked, “I consider myself, and I take pride in it, the human being most allergic to formality … and I still can’t get used to the idea that my friends become presidents nor have I yet overcome my susceptibility to being impressed by government palaces.” The international jet-setter was convinced that Felipe, who understood Latin America “better than any other non-Latin American,” was going to have “a decisive influence on Latin American-European relations.” Whether Felipe himself saw things the same way we cannot know but clearly García Márquez was hoping to bounce him into supporting his long-term strategy for Cuba, the Caribbean and Latin America, and had no compunction in letting the world know about it.

  Nevertheless at their informal exchange with the press, the first thing González mentioned was “the status of Cuba within the region and the need for a security agreement for all,” not necessarily what García Márquez had in mind. García Márquez declared that love would solve all the world’s problems and said he wanted to get back to his latest novel on that very subject: he’d really rather have won the prize next year so that he could have finished the book.2

  On 29 December the new laureate left for Havana, having declared that he still wanted to found his own newspaper to enjoy “the old dignity of bearing news,” which perhaps sounded uneasily like the instinct of the go-between, which in Spanish has a less agreeable word, correveidile: “run-see-and-tell-him.” The Madrid-Havana axis would be a crucial concern of García Márquez’s over the coming years, though even he would not be able to reconcile the differences between Castro and González.

  Two oft-repeated general truths about the Nobel Prize for Literature are that it is usually given to writers who have completed their creative cycle and no longer have any worthwhile works left inside them; and that, even in the case of younger writers, the prize is a distraction which robs them of time, concentration and ambition. The first was clearly not true of García Márquez: he was one of the youngest of all Nobel Prize winners as well as one of the best-known and most popular. The second was predicted by those who resented his success, or were jealous of it, but the fact is that García Márquez had already experienced celebrity on a scale that even Nobel Prize winners rarely encounter. Not only was he not the kind of man to rest on his laurels but he had already been through this kind of experience in the years after One Hundred Years of Solitude was published: it had been like winning a first Nobel Prize. Alternatively, then, one might expect him to be newly galvanized: to write more, travel more, find new things to do. And so it turned out. He was more than ready for his new status. And yet…

  And yet … he had already decided in 1980 on a new way of life appropriate to his new position of authority and respectability. He was already a friend of presidents: to the not very respectable relation with Fidel, the pirate captain, he had added López Portillo of Mexico, Carlos Andrés Pérez of Venezuela, López Michelsen and Betancur of Colombia, Mitterrand of France and lastly González of Spain. He had now increased his own vast celebrity by acquiring a kind of roving presidential status. (Fidel Castro would say, “Yes, of course García Márquez is like a head of state. The only question is, which state?”) He told journalists he was taking a sabbatical, but clearly he was also hoping to use his new influence to mediate more effectively with his new presidential allies. One might say that his openly political period lasted from about 1959 to 1979, and most intensively from 1971 to 1979. Thereafter followed a more “diplomatic” period. The question was whether he would merely be concealing his real politics during this diplomatic period whilst remaining a well-meaning fellow traveller, as in the period 1950–79, or whether he would gradually adjust his political position behind the cover of his mediations, clandestine negotiations and cultural enterprises.

  As he flew back across the Atlantic in all his glory, even García Márquez, who planned so very much in his life, whether consciously or unconsciously, must have felt the weight of celebrity and awesome responsibility settling on his shoulders. He had got what he wanted but sometimes, as Marilyn Monroe had famously sung, after you get what you want you don’t want it. For some time now he had been forced to adjust to levels of adulation that, unless one has witnessed them, are almost unimaginable for a serious writer: nothing less than the “frenzy of renown.”3 Now he would have to turn his entire life into a carefully organized spectacle.

  People who had known him most of his life would say that he became much more cautious after winning the prize. Some of his friends were grateful that he continued to attend to them at all, others resented a process of perceived neglect. Many people said his vanity increased exponentially, others that it was extraordinary how normal he managed to remain; his cousin Gog said he had always been like a “new-born Nobel Prize winner.”4 Carmen Balcells, who was able to view literary celebrity more coolly than most, said that the extent of his success and fame was “unrepeatable.”5 (“When you have an author like Gabriel García Márquez you can set up a political party, institute a religion or organize a revolution.”) García Márquez himself would later say that he tried everything possible to “stay the same” but that no one viewed him as the same after the journey to Stockholm. Fame, he would say, was “like having the lights on all the time.” People tell you what they think you want to hear; the prize requires dignity, you can no longer just tell people to “fuck off.” You are required always to be amusing and intelligent. If you start talking at a party, even with old friends, everyone else stops speaking and listens to you. Ironically, “as you’re surrounded by more and more people, you feel smaller and smaller and smaller.”6 Before long he would t
ake up tennis because it became completely impossible to exercise by taking walks in the street. In every restaurant waiters would go rushing off to the nearest book-store for copies of his books to be signed. Airports have always been the worst places of all because there he can find no escape. He is always put first on every plane but even then the flight attendants themselves all want books or flight magazines or napkins signed. Yet this is an essentially shy, timid and in many ways anxious man.7 “My main job now is to be me. That’s really tough. You can’t imagine how that weighs you down. But I asked for it.”8 There is every reason to believe that he would find the coming years much more difficult than he affected and yet he would no longer feel able to complain in the way he had done during the writing of The Autumn of the Patriarch.

  García Márquez and Mercedes flew in to Havana at five in the morning of 30 December 1982 for an extended stay and were installed in Protocol House number six which, not many years later, would become their Cuban home. Castro had recently been to Brezhnev’s funeral in Moscow, where he and Indira Gandhi had discussed inviting García Márquez to the meeting of Non-Aligned Nations to be held in Delhi in March 1983. (Gandhi had mentioned that she had been reading One Hundred Years of Solitude when the Nobel award was announced.) While in Moscow Fidel had bought García Márquez a large supply of his favourite caviar. García Márquez, for his part, was carrying messages from Felipe González and Olof Palme, together with bacalao from the Feduchis and cognac from Carmen Balcells.

  Graham Greene passed through Havana that week with his Panamanian friend Chuchú Martínez, one of Torrijos’s closest collaborators, and on 16 January García Márquez wrote about the English novelist in an article entitled “Graham Greene’s Twenty Hours in Havana.” He and Greene had not seen one another since 1977. García Márquez revealed that Greene and Martínez had arrived in the greatest secrecy and that Greene had been given a top politician’s protocol house for the day and loaned a government Mercedes Benz. Greene and Castro had discussed the former’s famous experiment with Russian roulette at the age of nineteen. The column ended: “When we took our leave of one another, I was disturbed by the certainty that that encounter, sooner or later, would be remembered in the memoirs of one of us, and maybe all of us.”9 It was becoming dangerous to talk to García Márquez—you would be in the international press within forty-eight hours—and some were asking whether it was maintaining the dignity of Nobel Prize winners to be interviewing other celebrities and acting the role of newspaperman.

  The article on Graham Greene was simply too much for Cuban exile Guillermo Cabrera Infante, who responded with a withering piece entitled “Notable Men in Havana”:

  I know that there are South American (and Spanish) readers (and writers) who read the weekly García Márquez column to laugh out loud, and consider his statements with superior disdain as when observing the chattering of a churl or the flourishes of a métèque … Is this the ultimate peak of the ridiculous or merely a corny copy? For readers in the know, García Márquez’s article in El País every week is the sure promise of a frisson nouveau. But not for me. I take the novelist very seriously. This writing is the proof. Although there may be some who counter my opinion by fabricating exclusive excuses: man, it’s hardly worth it, don’t bother, nobody pays any attention. But I do. I believe, with Goldoni, that with the servant one can beat the master.10

  The Latin American right, and the Cuban exiles in particular, understandably embittered by the award of the prize, were beginning to panic about García Márquez. Perhaps they had thought that because the Nobel committee knew that he was a “red,” as near a communist as made no difference from their point of view, somehow he would never be given the prize. Or perhaps, now that his prestige had reached the very limits, there was nothing to lose and everything to gain by openly attacking him. Or perhaps they simply couldn’t bear his success, his unconcealed delight and unmistakable popularity. Certainly, as soon as he had given up militant journalism, García Márquez himself had been advertising his personal relationship with Fidel for over a year. And now, if it had not been clear before, it was evident that Fidel needed García Márquez more than García Márquez needed him. At any rate, what is certainly clear is that although the prize gave García Márquez access to even higher strata of political and diplomatic influence in Latin America, it also unleashed an unparalleled level of right-wing hostility which has never ceased in the two decades since (though it has done him surprisingly little damage); whereas in the rest of the world, even in the neo-liberal West, the Nobel certificate of respectability has protected the Colombian writer against all but the most violent—or most determined—of critics.

  In case Mexico was feeling left out by his cosying up to Betancur, Mitterrand, González and Castro, he wrote a warm and affectionate piece about the importance of Mexico in his life entitled “Return to Mexico,” which appeared on 23 January.11 His affection did not restrain him from calling it a “luciferine city” only exceeded in ugliness by Bangkok. He now had a nap hand of five influential politicians representing all of the countries which had been most important to him in his life except Venezuela (Colombia, Cuba, France, Spain and Mexico) and which, not entirely coincidentally, were crucial to him if he was to carry out the international political role of which he dreamed. It would be fascinating to see how long he could hold these five cards, whether he could improve his hand and whether he would be able to replace cards successfully used and discarded by other cards of the same suit.

  On 30 January, with all those presidential cards in his grasp, García Márquez published an article on Ronald Reagan entitled “Yes, the Wolf Really Is Coming.”12 The article traced his own experience of U.S. imperialism back to the Bay of Pigs. Thinly veiled anti-Americanism was an impulse which would more or less unite his five countries at a moment when the decadence and growing impotence of the Soviet Union was beginning to be taken for granted. It was only unfortunate that at such a favourable time for García Márquez person-ally, the international situation was so unfavourable to his political “interests.” Although the foreign secretaries of what would come to be known as the Contadora countries (Colombia, Mexico, Panama and Venezuela) had recently met, he was convinced that U.S. destabilization efforts would bear fruit during the year. He was right, of course.

  Belisario Betancur had announced at the beginning of his presidency that Colombia would seek to join the Organization of Non-Aligned Nations of which, at that time, Fidel Castro was President.13 In early March 1983 the Cuban delegation set off for Delhi. Aboard were Castro, García Márquez, Núñez, Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, Jesús Montané, Maurice Bishop, the leader of the Grenadan New Jewel movement, who would be dead in six months and his island occupied by the United States, and the sinister Désiré Delano Bouterse, Chairman of the Suriname Military Council. Though Castro put a brave face on it, his entire presidency had been vitiated by the fallout from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and he was now relieved to be handing over to someone less closely identified with the USSR. After the official ceremonies, the Cubans all went off to the official venue, the Ashok Hotel, but García Márquez had booked himself a special suite in the Sheraton so that he could welcome all the old friends he was expecting to meet. The next morning Núñez found him in chaos, with his clothes all over the room, trying to find the appropriate outfit for the opening reception. Mercedes usually made these decisions. He said to Núñez: “If all men only knew how good marriage is, we’d run out of women and that would be a disaster.”14 He and Mercedes would be celebrating their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary on 21 March.

  Finally, on 11 April García Márquez made the latest of his “returns”—to Colombia, where he had not set foot since the news of the Nobel award almost six months before. There was much speculation in the press about the visit. One thing they did not speak about was the question of García Márquez’s personal security but Betancur insisted that he should have a team of bodyguards in Colombia organized and paid for by the governme
nt. A few days after his arrival García Márquez published an article in his column entitled “Return to the Guava.”15 Needless to say, readers in Bogotá would be well aware that “guava” was a code word that signified that he was not so much returning to “Colombia” as to his beloved “Costa.” Although it was difficult to know where García Márquez was located from reading his articles now (they would become much less of a diary and much more a loosely serialized narrative of memoirs and eccentricities), the truth is that he would spend much of this “sabbatical” year in Bogotá, believing no doubt that the prize had finally given him more purchase on the oligarchy and now they would just have to be impressed by him, or at least respectful. Many remained sceptical, however, and some sections of the press began to attack him almost immediately.16