Gabriel García Márquez

by Gerald Martin

  He had always intended the novel to be a reflection not only on love but also on old age, though love had come to the fore since the Nobel award. In the late summer of 1982 he had published an article on “the youthful old age of Luis Buñuel” which showed not only that he was pondering these matters deeply—including the question of whether it was decent for old people to fall in love and have sex—but also that he had read Simone de Beauvoir’s classic The Coming of Age.37 In February 1985, back in Mexico City, he now told Marlise Simons that his first image of the novel, having read about two old people being murdered by a boatman, was precisely of two old people fleeing in a boat.38 Before, he said, he used to write about old people because his grandparents were the people he best understood; now he was anticipating his own old age. There was a line from Yasunari Kawabata’s The House of the Sleeping Beauties which haunted him: “Old people have death and young people have love, and death comes only once and love many times.”39 It is a line which gives insight into all his late works.

  When he met the Colombian journalist María Elvira Samper in Mexico City for another of his updating interviews in the spring of 1985 (Semana claimed it was “exactly two years since he had last talked to the press in a big way”), he told her that he was not himself feeling old, merely detecting signs of age and facing up to reality. He found that inspiration came more often when one was older except now you realized it was not inspiration, it was when you were in the groove and writing, for a time, was “like floating.” These days “I know the last sentence of the book before I sit down to write it. When I sit down I have the book in my head, as if I’d read it, because I’ve been thinking about it for years.” He felt very “rootless” because he now felt exactly the same wherever he was in the world and he was experiencing “orphan-hood and anguish” as a result. Then an extraordinary statement: “All my fantasies have been achieved, one after another. I mean, I’ve known for many years that everything would happen as it has. Naturally I’ve done my bit and I have had to harden myself.” He considered himself “very tough,” though like Che Guevara he believed you had to retain your “tender” side. All men are soft but the “inclemency” of women saves and protects them. He still loved women; they made him feel “safe” and “looked after.” By now, he went on, he found himself bored talking to almost anyone who was not his friend; he could hardly bring himself to listen. “I am the most bad-tempered and violent man I know. That’s why I am also the most controlled.”40

  He also talked about love and sex, of course. Though the latter, as noted, is a word that scarcely appears in García Márquez’s novels. He uses the same word, amor, love, for both things and this promiscuous use of it creates a curiously undifferentiated atmosphere which explains much of the peculiar flavour, and possibly the allure, of his writing about this topic.

  When the new novel, the last word on love, appeared it was dedicated “To Mercedes, of course.” But when the French translation appeared, it would be dedicated to Tachia …

  LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA is set in a Caribbean city immediately recognizable as Cartagena de Indias, between the 1870s and the early 1930s. It is about love and sex, marriage and freedom, youth and old age. It is based on a sexual triangle: the lordly upper-class doctor Juvenal Urbino, the painfully unglamorous shipping clerk Florentino Ariza, and the beautiful parvenue Fermina Daza. Juvenal has elements of Nicolás Márquez about him, though he is based above all on a distinguished local physician, Henrique de la Vega, who was in fact the García Márquez family doctor (who attended to Gabriel Eligio at the time of his death and then died himself less than five months later); Florentino, the main character, has elements of both Gabriel Eligio and Gabito himself, a most curious and fascinating fusion; and Fermina is an astonishing mixture of Mercedes (above all), the ghost of Tachia, and the external details of Luisa Santiaga at the time of her youth and courtship. The book is organized in six parts, with the first and last parts devoted to old age as the structural frame, parts two and three devoted to youth, and parts four and five devoted to middle age. The six-part structure is divided neatly into two halves of three chapters, and this is emblematic of a novel of twos and threes, of a triangle always threatening to collapse into a pair. All in all, the novel implicitly stages the four great reconciliations that García Márquez himself had effected as he approached old age: with France, above all Paris (where both Juvenal and Fermina are especially happy); with Tachia, whom he had loved there in the 1950s; with Cartagena, the reactionary colonial city; and, perhaps above all, with his father, for whom acceptance by Cartagena had always been an aspiration.

  The action begins on a Pentecost Sunday in the early 1930s, soon after the Liberal Party has returned to power after almost half a century. Juvenal Urbino, now in his eighties, is killed when he falls from a ladder as he tries to retrieve the family parrot on the very same day that he has buried an old friend and discovered a shocking truth about him. At Urbino’s funeral an old flame of his wife Fermina, Florentino Ariza, tries to rekindle the affair that took place between them when they were still adolescents, over half a century before. The rest of the novel involves a series of carefully embedded flashbacks which tell, first, the story of that original love affair, then Juvenal’s intervention, Fermina’s marriage to Juvenal and journey to Paris with him, and Juvenal’s rise to eminence as Cartagena’s leading authority on health issues, most notably the scourge of cholera. In parallel we follow the illegitimate and partly black Florentino’s less conventional trajectory: he decides that he too must become a respected citizen and gradually rises through the ranks of his uncle’s shipping company; but at the same time, because he has decided to wait for Fermina as long as it takes—until after the death of her husband, if necessary—he embarks upon a long chain of relationships with different women, above all prostitutes and widows, not to mention a fourteen-year-old niece, América Vicuña, who commits suicide when he forsakes her for the newly widowed Fermina near the end of the novel. In contrast Juvenal has only one fling, with a stunning black Jamaican patient, and this almost costs him his marriage.

  By the end of chapter 3, the halfway point, the novel has shown how Fermina Daza, a lower-middle-class Colombian, has rejected the true Colombian Florentino Ariza in favour of the upper-class “Frenchified” Juvenal Urbino. So much so that she has, like Juvenal, come to know Europe, whereas Florentino Ariza has never left Cartagena nor has any wish to do so. Juvenal Urbino represents the Cartagena upper class for whom, in a sense, García Márquez was writing as he composed the book. Thus by halfway the novel has shown a decisive defeat by Europe and by modernity of the backward Creole or Mestizo world of illegitimate, lower-class Colombia. Then the second half of the novel reverses all these directions as Florentino improves his position and finally gets the “girl.”

  Though Juvenal Urbino is partly Henrique de la Vega, partly the Colonel and partly Gabriel Eligio—a “physician”—he is mainly every-thing about the upper classes that García Márquez envies, admires, resents and despises: the Bogotá and Cartagena ruling elites, much mixed in the last twenty-five years, the Bogotá elite that García Márquez believed rejected him and the Cartagena elite that rejected both him and his father. It is nevertheless notable that this novel is not in any primary sense about conflict or competition between men but about relationships between different men and women.

  The epigraph is from a song by the blind vallenato troubadour Leandro Díaz: “The words I am about to express: they now have their own crowned goddess.” This composite reference, which somehow conjures up ancient Greece, the imperial Spanish monarchy and the lower-class Colombia of beauty pageants, brilliantly encapsulates the cultural conflicts at issue in the novel. Its title, at first sight one of his least felicitous, has become much loved and admired: it speaks of both love and of time: love, as so often in García Márquez, as an irresistible sickness or disease; and time, as both mere duration and history but also as the worst disease of all, the one that gnaws away at everything.
And yet the novel will stop at a moment where time has been, however temporarily, defeated.

  Among the multiple reconciliations effected by this now dazzlingly successful writer approaching late middle age there is also a reconciliation, however parodic and postmodern, with the bourgeois novel itself, and even, however ironically and critically, with the Colombian bourgeois ruling class. This is not exactly Stendhal, Flaubert or Balzac (more Dumas or Larbaud, though of course parodied).41 But this novel “knows” about all of them and all of that and is playing another game entirely. It flirts from its first line with aromas that take us back into the past and remind us, “inevitably,” of unrequited love. Many of the elements are those of cheap romance or even soap opera and Latin American popular music, as the author had intimated; yet these are counterpointed with the conventionalities and taedium vitae involved in bourgeois marriage and the keeping up of appearances. García Márquez was taking huge risks here with his artistic reputation. The novel as a whole becomes a curious mixture of the bland and the banal with the ruthlessly realistic and the profound. It dares to explore the most familiar clichés involved in letters to agony columns and the desperate truisms usually proffered in reply: You never really know any-one. You can’t really judge people. Some people can change their behaviour and, to that extent, their personalities; others can remain the same for ever despite the passage of time. You never ever know what is going to happen in life. You only understand life when it’s too late—and even then you would probably change your view if you lived even longer. It is very difficult to moralize about love and sex. It is very difficult to separate love from sex. It is very difficult to separate love from habit, gratitude or self-interest. You can love more than one person at the same time. There are many kinds of love and you can love people in many different ways. It is impossible to know which is better, single life or marriage, bohemia or convention; similarly, it is impossible to know whether security is better than adventure or vice versa; but everything has to be paid for. On the other hand, there is only one life and no second chance. You are never too old. And yet, and yet: and yet one life is no better than another. All these themes are signalled in the first part and then intermingled and played out in the rest of the novel.

  In One Hundred Years of Solitude readers discovered that Melquíades’s room functions as the space of literature itself and that Melquíades has written the story we are reading a century in advance. At the end of Love in the Time of Cholera Florentino Ariza writes Fermina Daza a long letter which is a similar mise en abyme device: it is not ostensibly a love letter but “an extensive meditation on life based on his ideas about, and experience of, relations between men and women,” received by her as “a meditation on life, love, old age, and death.” The scope of this ambition, combined with the work’s remarkable accessibility, means that in some ways this is the sequel to One Hundred Years of Solitude that The Autumn of the Patriarch never quite became.

  García Márquez ended his book with the phrase “for ever” and sent it off to Alfonso Fuenmayor in Barranquilla for him and Germán Vargas to read. Carmen Balcells received her copy in London and reportedly spent two days weeping over the manuscript. García Márquez needed to have a business meeting with her and decided to take in New York on the way to Europe. His old friend Guillermo Angulo was at that time Colombian consul in the Big Apple and the photographer Hernán Díaz was also there. García Márquez was not only full of the excitement of having completed the novel, one which was such a new departure for him, but was also going through all the excitement and anguish of computer users in the early days. Did you have back-up, were the diskettes reliable, could you keep them safe, whether from physical damage or from theft? He was very aware that he was one of the world’s first well-known writers—perhaps the first—to complete a major work using a computer. Accompanied by Mercedes and Gonzalo, plus their niece Alexandra Barcha, he flew to New York with the diskettes containing the novel around his neck, for all the world like a Melquíades who had found the philosopher’s stone and could not bear to let it go.42

  García Márquez took his younger son into Scribner’s, one of New York’s best-known bookshops, which he had walked past every day in 1961 on his way to work. Hernán Díaz was shocked to discover that Scribner’s apparently had no novels by his illustrious friend but it transpired that they were all in the “classics” section. Much signing and dedication ensued when the staff discovered who the diminutive figure in the hound’s-tooth jacket actually was. Out in the street passers-by approached him as he enjoyed a totemic New York hot dog under the photographer’s gaze. Then, as amazed as if he were discovering ice, he went to a specialist store and printed off the first six copies of his book in a matter of minutes.43

  Thus in that autumn of 1985, still wearing the three diskettes around his neck, García Márquez flew to Barcelona to deliver them personally to Carmen Balcells. He stayed at the Princess Sofía Hotel. In the event his room was broken into, just as he had feared, and he was indeed robbed but he told the press he did not think the thieves were after the manuscript of Love in the Time of Cholera.

  He was still out of Colombia as one of the defining political moments in its twentieth-century history took place. Tension with M-19 had been growing, and on 3 July it had renounced Betancur’s ceasefire and the country lurched towards disaster. (Many guerrillas suspected that Betancur, far from seeking a lasting peace process, was luring them into a historic trap.) On 9 August García Márquez himself had said the Minister of Defence, Miguel Vega Uribe, should resign over allegations of torture. On 28 August Iván Marino Ospina, the new leader of M-19 after the recent death of García Márquez’s friend Jaime Bateman, had been killed by police. Finally, on 6 November, M-19 guerrillas took over the Palace of Justice, the Supreme Court building in Bogotá, initiating a series of events which would horrify spectators from all over the world as they watched the drama unfold on television. The President’s hapless brother Jaime, recently kidnapped, was on the scene again. The Colombian army went in with tanks and heavy artillery and ended a twenty-seven-hour siege, as the whole world watched in stupefaction. Up to one hundred people were killed including Alfonso Reyes Echandía, the President of the Supreme Court. Judge Humberto Murcia was hit in the leg as he tried to escape, where-upon he threw the—wooden—leg away and escaped from the burning courtyard. The leaders of the guerrilla attack, notably Andrés Almarales, were killed in the battle, among many others. It was strongly rumoured that the army rather than Betancur was in charge of events—the controversy still rages today—and Betancur told me later that he considered it “an act of friendship” that García Márquez remained silent.44 Only a week later another disaster rocked Colombia as the eruption of volcano Nevado del Ruiz buried the town of Armero and killed at least twenty-five thousand people.

  The Palace of Justice tragedy was the last straw for García Márquez. He had bought a new apartment and transferred a significant quantity of clothes and other possessions to Bogotá but he did not move in. At the very moment when the event took place he was considering flying back to Bogotá but went to Paris instead. There he thought things over, cancelled his plans for returning to Colombia and went back to Mexico City, where the recent earthquake had left the city physically shattered but morally invigorated. By then, he was already planning his new project—a novel on Bolívar—and had had his first meeting with historian Gustavo Vargas in September 1985.

  It was now, on 5 December, after this succession of disasters for Colombia, that Love in the Time of Cholera was launched. It astonished readers and critics around the world because it represented a new García Márquez, a writer who had somehow metamorphosed himself into a sort of nineteenth-century novelist for modern times, a man no longer writing about power but about love and the power of love. It would be his most popular work, his best-loved novel. Published almost twenty years after One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera was only the second of his books to give the critics and general
readers almost unalloyed pleasure. Its success encouraged García Márquez to go on writing about human relationships and the private realm, as one of his main preoccupations, and to make this the centre of his renewed activity in the movie business.45 It associated his name not only with love, affection, smiles, flowers, music, food, friends and family, and the like, but also with nostalgia and a look back at the old ways of the past, at the roads and rivers of a bygone era: the fragrance of guava and the aromas of memory. These popular virtues would also allow him to blend in the darker currents he always had in mind under cover of this spell-binding writing.

  Even El Tiempo was disarmed: the paper predicted on 1 December, before the book was actually published, that it would “bring love to a choleric country.” A few—very few—critics were quite negative about the work. But overall its reception was triumphant and a characteristic response was an extraordinary eulogy from one of the most sceptical of all great novelists, Thomas Pynchon, when the book appeared in English. Pynchon said that García Márquez had incredible nerve to write about love in these times but he “delivers and triumphantly”:

  And—oh boy—does he write well. He writes with impassioned control, out of a maniacal serenity … There is nothing I have read quite like this astonishing final chapter, symphonic, sure in its dynamics and tempo, moving like a riverboat too, its author and pilot, with a lifetime’s experience steering us unerringly among hazards of skepticism and mercy, on this river we all know, without whose navigation there is no love and against whose flow the effort to return is never worth a less honorable name than remembrance—at the very best it results in works that can even return our worn souls to us, among which most certainly belongs Love in the Time of Cholera, this shining and heartbreaking novel.46