He flew down to the old colonial city of Cartagena at the end of May. Cartagena would soon become his principal destination in Colombia and the setting for most of his future books. Since the installation of the new convention centre down by the harbour in 1982 it was possible for important international meetings to take place in the historic city. Now it was celebrating the 450th anniversary of its foundation and the Cartagena Film Festival was also in full swing. The principal foreign visitor invited to the celebrations was none other than the Andalusian Felipe González, and García Márquez strolled through the carnival crowds with the Spanish leader, wearing his now signature liquiliqui and occasionally dancing with some privileged admirer.17 García Márquez revelled in the “magic” and “chaos” of his family’s home town. Like Betancur, González, who was on his way to talks in the United States, was strongly committed to active encouragement of the Contadora process to bring peace to Central America and while in Cartagena held discussions with the foreign ministers of the four countries guaranteeing the talks.18
In late July García Márquez was in Caracas as part of an official Colombian delegation to celebrate the bicentenary of Bolívar’s birth. He had not been to Venezuela for five years. Here he and Mercedes met up again with now exiled Argentinian writer-journalist Tomás Eloy Martínez, with whom he was hoping to set up the new daily newspaper El Otro. They discussed the project in a truckers’ café by one of the Caracas freeways, where his face, now far too famous, might go unnoticed. Martínez would recall:
We met at about three in the morning. Mercedes, who had eaten that evening flanked by the President of Venezuela and King Juan Carlos of Spain, was wearing a magnificent long dress to which the sleepy truckers paid no attention. A lame waiter brought us some beers. The conversation suddenly turned to the past … but Mercedes took us back to reality. “This place is awful,” she said. “Couldn’t you find anywhere better?” “Blame your husband’s fame,” I said. “In any other bar in Caracas we’d have been constantly interrupted.” “We should’ve gone to Fuck Corner, like in Buenos Aires that first time,” García Márquez said. “Love Lane,” I corrected him. “I’m afraid it’s not there any more.” Mercedes gave a sly wink “Did you imagine then that Gabo would be this famous?” “Of course. I saw the moment when fame came down to him from the sky. It was that night in Buenos Aires, in the theatre. When fame starts like that, you know it will never end.” “You’re wrong,” said García Márquez. “It started long before.” “What, in Paris, when you finished The Colonel? Here, in Caracas, when you saw Pérez Jiménez’s white plane leave and Perón’s black one? Or was it before,” I said sarcastically, “in Rome, when Sophia Loren walked by and smiled at you?” “Long before,” he explained, in all seriousness. Out-side, beyond the mountains, the dawn was coming. “I was already famous when I graduated from the bachillerato in Zipaquirá, or even before, when my grandparents took me from Aracataca to Barranquilla. I was always famous, from the time I was born. It’s just that I was the only one who knew it.”19
In October, persisting in another of his sporadic attempts to spend an extended period in Bogotá, García Márquez was brooding about the Nobel Prize for Literature being awarded to the “boring” Englishman William Golding and the Nobel Peace Prize to Polish freedom fighter Lech Walesa, leader of Solidarity, when some really bad news came in: Maurice Bishop was overthrown and executed in Grenada on 19 October.20 Five days later the United States invaded the island, vindicating all García Márquez’s fears about U.S. policy in the Caribbean. UN condemnation on 28 October had no effect whatever, nor did tough-gal Margaret Thatcher bring herself to protest at the occupation of one of the British Queen’s Commonwealth domains. On 23 October García Márquez’s column included an obituary of the murdered President with reminiscences from the Non-Aligned Conference in New Delhi. In the coming weeks Betancur would mediate between Cuba and the United States over the return of Cuban prisoners taken on the island. He was in constant touch with García Márquez, as the latter would tell the nation in an interview in early November.21
Although he gave it his best shot, he was just not happy in Bogotá. The press speculated each and every week whether García Márquez was finding it difficult to adjust to Colombia; but Colombia was not the problem, the problem was Bogotá. The novelist Laura Restrepo told me about an incident that summer, when García Márquez, who only a few months before had helped Bogotá journalist Felipe López get privileged access to Fidel Castro, now volunteered to give some coaching to the journalists at Semana, which López, the son of Alfonso López Michelsen, directed. They got on to the topic of headlines. At one point, all enthusiastic, García Márquez asked what headline those present would put if, as he left the magazine’s offices, he was shot in the street. “Costeño Killed,” Felipe López said, quick as a flash and with only the shadow of a smile.22 In Bogotá the Nobel Prize was no protection against homicidal put-downs from the oligarchy and its representatives.
Near the end of the year García Márquez took time off to fulfil a promise and make the last and most definitive of all his returns: to Aracataca. It was sixteen years since his last visit and the journey effectively finished off his “sabbatical.” A week later he wrote a curious account of the day with the title “Return to the Seed,” an unspoken reference to a famous story by Alejo Carpentier.23 He admitted that he had been surprised to receive such a warm welcome (a symptom of guilt?—he was always being criticized for not having “saved” Aracataca from under-development). He said he had remembered absolutely everything, over-whelmed by so many faces from the past, faces like his own face used to be when the circus came. But then he remarked that he himself had never mythologized Aracataca or been nostalgic about it (as everyone else had, he appeared to imply).24 Too much had been made of the Aracataca-Macondo connection; now he’d been back the two places seemed less like each other than ever. “It is difficult to imagine any-where more forgotten, more abandoned, more distant from the paths of God. How can one not feel one’s soul torn by a feeling of rebellion?”
As usual, at the end of this dull sabbatical year, he slipped off to greet the new one in Havana. This time he invited Régis Debray to come and spend time in the Hotel Riviera with him and their old friend Max Marambio, former head of Allende’s personal bodyguard and now an important fixer for Cuba’s trading organizations. Debray found the same old García Márquez, “divided as usual between affection (for the old complicit fellow-Latin) and sarcasm (for the too French Frenchman, arrogant and circumspect), whilst overwhelming me with movies, Veuve Cliquot and songs by Brassens, whose words he knew by heart.”25
NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR would be a better year for García Márquez and another very bad one for Colombia. Once the New Year festivities were over he shrugged off even the continuing diplomatic demands from Cuba and began to make a series of transitions: from his “sabbatical” to his real business, writing fiction; from his weekly column to the major novel he had begun the summer before the Nobel was announced, the “book about love”; and from residence in Bogotá, which was always bad for him, to Cartagena and the Costa.
The return to Aracataca had been predictably paradoxical. On the one hand, it was a return to the place he had transposed into his best-loved fictions under the name of Macondo, the place that had directly inspired his first novel, Leaf Storm, and One Hundred Years of Solitude. Yet the return had simply confirmed his own cancellation of that experience: he had effectively negated his relationship with Aracataca just as he had, in so many ways, negated One Hundred Years of Solitude itself.
Now he was going to rewrite his life—rewrite the rewrite—and fill in some missing gaps. No doubt it felt unseemly for a Nobel Prize winner still to be haunted by childhood traumas and the especially confusing oedipal twist that he had suffered when he was displaced from father to grandfather. Up to now he had simply omitted certain structural facts and papered over the problem while making some psychically satisfying and literarily dramatic adjustments. Now h
is twice illegitimate father was to be written back in to the story. Gabriel Eligio himself had returned to Aracataca a year before at the time of the Nobel celebrations and, as so often, had made himself the star of the show. (If there was one thing his son had inherited from him, it was his vitality.) But he had also been sincerely ecstatic at the news of Gabito’s success and had basked publicly for the first time in the reflected glory.
The day García Márquez heard he had won the Nobel Prize he had declared to the press that he would like to build his dream house in Cartagena. This was exactly the kind of thing that did not go down well in traditionalist Cartagena—where the point has always been precisely to preserve the houses already there—and many people had very mixed, not to say negative, feelings about his return.26 He himself had decided to shake off the Bogotá blues and refresh his image. Or perhaps he really just felt better back in the Caribbean. Or perhaps it was the effect of dedicating himself full-time to love. At any rate, friends and journalists found a new García Márquez in his now characteristic Caribbean all-white outfit, five kilos lighter, with his hair tidied, his nails manicured, smelling of expensive cologne, sauntering around the streets of old Cartagena, the beach at Bocagrande, the avenues of Manga—all of this when he was not roaring around in his new red Mustang.27
He would get up at 6 a.m. and read the papers, sit preparing himself for writing from nine until about eleven, then slowly take off (like the balloon he would invent both in this book and in the movie Letters from the Park). The great thing, he said, was that he had “got Colombia back.” Mercedes would go to the beach at midday and wait there with friends until he turned up. Then they would lunch on shrimp or lobster and take a siesta. In the late afternoon he would talk to his parents and each evening he would walk the city or talk to friends and then “put it all in the novel the next day”28
Although he was living in a building dubbed “The Typewriter” because of its shape, García Márquez was beginning another revolutionary transition, this time a technical one.29 Perhaps fortunately, he had already written the first sections of what would be Love in the Time of Cholera, his next novel, which gave him a kind of literary bridge across the whole Nobel experience. Now he decided to turn to writing with a computer and asked a typist to transfer the existing manuscript. This made it possible for a man who obsessively threw away every sheet of paper on which there was a typing error to move rather more quickly and may have helped him to pre-empt the kind of writer’s block that has afflicted so many Nobel Prize winners over the years. Critics will argue about a possible change of style brought about by the new technology and whether it was for better or worse.
Yet the biggest shift in García Márquez’s life, his psychic life at least, was in the relationship with his father. For the better part of sixty years they had barely talked. Now the son became reconciled with his father at least enough to drive over the bridge to Manga most afternoons and talk to him and Luisa Santiaga—nearly always separately—about their youth and their courtship. Of course the ostensible motivation was the overriding one of a new book that had to be written but there is every reason to think that García Márquez was finally ready for this transition and that the book allowed him to conceal and protect his pride whilst easing the guilt he no doubt had about this man, his father. Just three years earlier he had written about a character in Chronicle of a Death Foretold who comes to a sudden realization about her mother: “In that smile, for the first time since her birth, Angela Vicario saw her as she really was: a poor woman devoted to the cult of her defects.”30 Doubtless when all his own challenges were behind him, García Márquez was able to come to a similarly dispassionate though perhaps less cruel assessment of Gabriel Eligio.
It cannot have been easy. Gabriel Eligio was the man who had taken his mother away from him and then returned, years later, to take him away from his beloved grandfather, the—as Gabito saw it—infinitely superior Colonel. Gabriel Eligio, though by no means an abusive father, always seemed to threaten violence to maintain his often inconsistent and arbitrary authority; he kept his long-suffering wife locked inside the home on a strict, patriarchal basis, yet went away as and when he chose and betrayed her sexually—even scandalously—on numerous occasions; and although, taken overall, his ability to keep a large family fed, clothed and for the most part well educated was an extraordinary achievement, from the standpoint of his eldest son the unpredictability, the crazy schemes, the changes of plan, the silly jokes that everyone had to celebrate, the stubborn political conservatism, the sometimes painful abyss between the man’s actual achievements and his assessment of himself—all of these things, on top of the basic oedipal resentments, were very difficult to bear.
In such relationships almost everything conspires to harden things and worsen them. Perhaps García Márquez’s most quoted and best-loved statement around Latin America was that no matter how successful he became, he would never forget that he was nothing more than one of the sixteen children of the telegraphist of Aracataca. When Gabriel Eligio first heard this he burst into a furious diatribe. He had only been a telegraphist for a brief time, he was now a professional doctor and a poet and a novelist to boot.31 He felt slighted at the fact that everyone knew how much the famous Colonel had influenced his son and how much he had inspired the most unforgettable characters in his books, whereas he, Gabriel Eligio, never got mentioned and seemed to have been deliberately excluded when he was not, as now, insulted.
By late August 1984 García Márquez had written three chapters—over two hundred pages—out of a planned six and the novel was taking shape. He was talking to his parents purportedly to get a general sense of the era and was discussing their own courtship in the middle of these rather vague discussions merely as a sort of case study. Or so he said. He told El País that the book could be summarized in one sentence: “It’s the story of a man and woman who fall desperately in love but can’t get married at the age of twenty because they are too young and can’t get married at the age of eighty, after all the twists and turns of life, because they are too old.” He said it was risky work because it was using all the devices of mass popular culture: all the vulgarities of melodrama, soap opera and bolero. The novel, influenced equally by the French nineteenth-century tradition, began at a funeral and would end on a boat. And would have a happy ending.32 This was presumably why he had decided to set the novel way back in time: perhaps even García Márquez felt he could not carry off a love story with a happy ending set in the late twentieth century and be taken seriously.
Eventually, with the book half completed, he left Cartagena at the end of the summer and left a copy of the manuscript with Margot. The instructions were to keep it until he arrived safely in Mexico and then destroy it. “So I sat down with an empty biscuit tin on my lap and tore it up sheet by sheet, after which I burned the lot.”33 Then, after he made a reluctant business trip to Europe that autumn, came a shock. On 13 December 1984, not long after his eighty-third birthday, Gabriel Eligio García died unexpectedly in the Hospital Bocagrande, Cartagena, after a ten-day illness. Yiyo (Eligio Gabriel), usually thought of as the most nervous member of the family, recalled: “When my father died, everything turned upside down. I arrived the same day and the house was in chaos, no one was capable of taking a decision. I remember it was five in the afternoon and neither Jaime nor Gabito had showed up. I had to take charge of the family and extricate them from the swamp and get things moving. The next day we met to decide how to organize things. It was hell. No one agreed with anyone else.”34
For once Gabito did attend a burial. He managed to arrive on the day of the funeral, after a ten-hour journey involving numerous changes of plane, as the coffin was about to be carried from the Salón Parroquial de Manga after the funeral service. (Gustavo would arrive from Venezuela too late for the service.) Gabito arrived with the Governor of the Department of Bolívar, Arturo Matson Figueroa, and both helped carry the coffin. The Governor wore a black suit and tie; Gabito a hound’s-tooth
jacket, an open-necked black shirt and black trousers. Jaime recalls that “the funeral was a disaster. All of us men turned to jelly, we became a bunch of cry-babies totally useless for the practicalities of the moment. Fortunately the women were there to organize everything.”35 (Turning to jelly did not deter the male sib-lings from making a ritual visit to a brothel for old times’ sake—drinks only—and a bit of old-fashioned bonding.)
Suddenly, so soon after renewing his relationship with his father, García Márquez had lost him for ever. He had in fact been getting closer to all his family again for some time but naturally the death of Gabriel Eligio created an entirely new situation. Yiyo recalled, “A few days after my father died, my mother, like a good Guajira, said to Gabito: ‘Now you’re the head of the family’ He span round: ‘And what have I ever done to you, why would you want to put me in such a fix?’ The trouble is that as well as being many, my brothers and sisters are uncontrollable.”36 The world-famous writer was now the head of a very large and very extended family. He had already helped his brothers and sisters in innumerable ways—jobs, medical bills, school fees, mortgages—but now he was financially responsible for his mother as well. It was more than appropriate that this should happen when his own gradual “return” to Colombia was apparently under way and when he was writing a novel based on the events which had led to the creation of the García Márquez nuclear family.
The death of his father and the anguished widowhood of his mother obliged García Márquez to think not only about love and sex but also, once more, and even more, about old age and death. Though he has always said that the writing of Love in the Time of Cholera was a joyful time, things were less easy for him than he affected. He was already finding it hard to adjust to his post-Nobel responsibilities. Experiencing the death of Gabriel Eligio and seeing his mother suffering so much was a traumatic process which of course the novelist assimilated by writing it into his novel, especially the early and late sections. His inveterate habit of destroying his manuscripts and all trace of their evolution has deprived us of what would no doubt have been a fascinating process of life being folded into art as it unfolded in reality. Of course the computer has in any case not only changed the entire process of literary composition but has also made it far more difficult to follow its phases of development.
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