Gabriel García Márquez

by Gerald Martin

  Fifteen years later García Márquez said to me: “I’ve been looking at Love in the Time of Cholera lately and, truly, I was surprised. My guts are in there, I don’t know how I managed to do it, to write about all that. Actually, I felt proud of it. Anyway, I went through … I’ve been through some very black times in my life.”

  “What, before One Hundred Years of Solitude?”

  “No, in the years after the Nobel. I often thought I was going to die; there was something there, in the background, something black, something under the surface of things.”47

  22

  Against Official History:

  García Márquez’s Bolívar

  (The General in His Labyrinth)

  1986–1989

  JUST AS HE had proved, with the publication of The Autumn of the Patriarch in 1975, that One Hundred Years of Solitude was no fluke and that world literature should expect him to be around for the long haul, so now García Márquez had proved with Love in the Time of Cholera that he was not one of those writers whose career was going to be ended by the pressure of the award of the Nobel Prize. His move towards the theme of love in his writing was paralleled by a new emphasis upon peace, democracy and co-existence in his political activity. It was clear that in Central America and the Caribbean the Reagan government was not prepared to tolerate the triumph of any revolutionary regime; the Cubans, who had inspired or encouraged most of the revolutionary movements, were more cautious than before because they were heavily extended by their commitment to the liberation of southern Africa and could not afford further pressure from the United States in the Caribbean; moreover, developments in the Soviet Union seemed to suggest that it would not be safe to rely on the USSR’s commitment to world revolution for much longer. At the same time Reagan had run into difficulties over his prosecution of the war against the Nicaraguan Revolution and even he might prove susceptible to talk of peace. (In mid-1986 the World Court at The Hague would find that the U.S. administration had broken international law by aiding the Contra rebels in Nicaragua; later in the year the Irangate scandal would break out in the USA itself and shake the entire Reagan government.)

  Even in Colombia there had been a peace process since Betancur came to power in 1982, though by now most observers had despaired of his ability to pursue it successfully and García Márquez himself was speaking with increasing pessimism of the way the country was going. At the end of July 1986 he would warn that Colombia was “on the edge of a holocaust” and that the terrible events at the Palace of Justice late in 1985 had been the inevitable result of the noxious combination of reckless guerrillas, repressive government forces and generalized delinquency and violence.1 Neutral observers might have been more impressed had this statement been made before the last week of Betancur’s period in office, particularly since Amnesty International had been severely criticizing Betancur over human rights abuses by the military; in effect, then, the warning was for the incoming Liberal government of Virgilio Barco and not for García Márquez’s Conservative friend Betancur.

  Thus García Márquez himself now began to adopt a social democratic and merely anti-colonial discourse to go with his message of peace and love to a degree which must have disconcerted old friends and delighted his enemies, who would never be satisfied until both he and Fidel were toppled from their steeds. Among other things Vargas Llosa called him, yet again, a “lackey of Fidel Castro” and a “political opportunist.”2 The latter was a curious epithet to give a man who was causing himself huge amounts of political difficulty by his support for Cuba and who was also, moreover, prepared to spend large sums of money in support of his political commitments, as he had shown with Alternativa in Colombia in the 1970s and as he was about to demonstrate once more, on an even bigger scale, in Cuba.

  In January 1983, at Cayo Piedras, during their first meeting after García Márquez’s Nobel Prize adventure, Gabo and Fidel had begun to dream of a Latin American film school located in Havana; Fidel, who knew a thing or two about propaganda, and was no doubt impressed by García Márquez’s worldwide prestige and influence after the award of the Nobel Prize, had become increasingly—and perhaps belatedly—aware of the ideological impact of culture. Now, as he discussed the cinema with García Márquez, he began to wonder whether the power of movies was not greater even than that of books and to question whether recent Latin American cinema had been as effective as the great films of the 1960s and early 1970s which had been inspired, all over the continent including Cuba itself, by the triumph of his revolution. As they sat together by the Caribbean in earnest discussion, Fidel, inevitably, had his own belligerent way of conceiving the matter: “We’ve really got to make that cinema take off … I, who have spent twenty years of struggle, think those films are like a battery of cannon firing inside and outside. How rich our cinema is in that way! Of course books influence people a lot but to read a book you need ten hours, twelve hours, two days; to see a documentary you only need forty-five minutes.”3 Whether Castro had been influenced by the unexpected impact of a Hollywood actor in the American White House can only be surmised, but he and García Márquez began to talk about the possibility of a Latin American film foundation to be located in Havana as a means of increasing continental production, improving standards, fomenting Latin American unity and, of course, propagating revolutionary values.

  As soon as he had finished Love in the Time of Cholera, García Márquez began to work on the new project. From 1974 to 1979 he had concentrated on political journalism but from around 1980 into the 1990s the obsession with cinema had returned, and the articles he had written between 1980 and 1984 were often intimately connected to the cinema in general and to his own specific projects in particular. His most ambitious venture into film would be, precisely, the Foundation for New Latin American Cinema in Havana, combined with a new International School for Cinema and Television to be situated at San Antonio de los Baños outside the city.4 Here, more than ever, he would put his capitalist money where his revolutionary mouth was. His maxim might have been: where politics is no longer feasible, turn to culture. The film foundation would help to unify the production and study of film in the continent and the school would teach the theory and practice of film-making not only to young Latin Americans but also to students from other parts of the world.

  By 1986 plans for the two new institutions were well advanced and García Márquez was liaising closely with radical film-makers about future developments. But he had begun the year by working not on a movie but on a book about the making of a movie. His friend Miguel Littín, the exiled Chilean film-maker, had made a clandestine return to Chile in May and June 1985 and had escaped undetected with 100,000 feet of film about Pinochet’s Chile.5 García Márquez, who obviously felt that he had been symbolically defeated by Pinochet when he returned to publishing fiction before the dictator’s downfall, saw a possibility of revenge and met Littín in Madrid early in 1986 to explore the options. There he conducted an eighteen-hour interview over the course of a week, then returned to Mexico and condensed a 600-page narrative into 150 pages. He noted: “I preferred to keep Littín’s story in the first person, to preserve its personal—and sometimes confidential—tone, without any dramatic additions or historical pretentiousness on my part. The manner of the final text is, of course, my own, since a writer’s voice is not interchangeable … All the same, I have tried to keep the Chilean idioms of the original and, in all cases, to respect the narrator’s way of thinking, which does not always coincide with mine.” The book, Miguel Littín. Clandestine in Chile, appeared in May 1986.6 Oveja Negra published 250,000 copies and it must have been a particular satisfaction to García Márquez in November when 15,000 of them were burned in the Chilean port of Valparaíso. Silence would have been a much more effective reaction on the part of the Pinochet government, which, although no one knew it, was by then in its final years.

  Despite this brief excursion into political provocation, so committed was García Márquez to his new mission as bring
er of peace that he was prevailed upon to make a speech that summer on 6 August in Ixtapa, Mexico, at the Second Conference of the “Group of Six” countries whose political aim was the prevention of a nuclear holocaust. The “Six” (Argentina, Greece, India, Mexico, Sweden, Tanzania), on the forty-first anniversary of the destruction of Hiroshima, urged the suspension of all nuclear tests.7 The conference was launched with García Márquez’s speech “The Cataclysm of Damocles,” in which he warned that although all the world’s problems could now be solved, money was being spent instead on armaments—and completely irrationally because, as he put it, “only the cockroaches would be left after a nuclear holocaust.”8 It was in a sense a speech about the future of the planet to be read in tandem with his Nobel speech about the destiny of Latin America.

  That autumn, as García Márquez worked on preparations for the new film foundation, Rodrigo enrolled in the American Film Institute in Los Angeles—a striking contrast with his father’s activities in revolutionary Havana. He would be there four years. Meanwhile Gonzalo had moved back to Mexico with his girlfriend Pía Elizondo and worked on a project of his own, the establishment of a high-class publishing house called El Equilibrista (The Tightrope Walker), with Diego García Elío, the son of Jomí García Ascot and María Luisa Elío.9 One of their first projects would be the publication of “The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow” in October in a de luxe edition.

  García Márquez himself was interested in encouraging new independent movies by Latin American directors but other film-makers were more interested in adapting his novels to the cinema. In 1979 a film called María My Dearest (María de mi corazón) had been made by Mexican director Jaime Hermosillo based on a García Márquez script. In the early 1980s Brazilian director Ruy Guerra had filmed Eréndira, the story, almost unmodified from García Márquez’s novella, about the adolescent girl in the Colombian Guajira forced to become a high-intensity prostitute—serving dozens of men per day—in order to compensate her heartless grandmother for accidentally burning down her house. Eventually Eréndira so values her freedom that she forsakes and flees even Ulysses, the young man who loves her and has helped her to kill and escape from the cruel grandmother—an interesting feminist rewriting of European-style fairy stories about Cinderellas, witches and handsome princes. In July 1984 it was announced that Jorge Alí Triana’s remake of Time to Die (Tiempo de morir), produced almost twenty years after Ripstein’s first effort, would be shown on Colombian TV on 7 August. This time it had been made in Colombia, not Mexico, and in colour, not black and white. Once again Nicolás Márquez’s killing of Medardo was silently vindicated and as before the clockwork precision of García Márquez’s sub-Sophoclean plot was compelling, though once again his penchant for sententious epigrams in place of realistic dialogue was an unfortunate distraction. In December 1985 Excelsior had announced that preliminary work was beginning on the filming of Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Francesco Rosi was in Mompox with Alain and Anthony Delon. (Alain would later drop out.)10 Irene Papas, Ornella Muti and Rupert Everett would also star. When Le Monde’s Michel Brandeau wrote about the movie in September 1986, he represented the effort of getting it filmed—in the tourist towns of Cartagena and Mompox—as almost as epic as the storyline itself.11

  On 4 December 1986 the foundation was inaugurated during the 8th Havana Film Festival, with a speech by García Márquez, the President of the foundation, a widely disseminated interview with Fidel—not previously known as a great film-goer—and a few words from Gregory Peck, who was visiting the city. In his speech García Márquez said that between 1952 and 1955 Julio García Espinosa, Fernando Birri, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and himself were all at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. The Italian neo-realism that had inspired them all in those days was “like our cinema has to be, the cinema with least resources but the most human that has ever been made.”12 Best wishes arrived from Ingmar Bergman, Francesco Rosi, Agnès Varda, Peter Brook, and Akira Kurosawa. On 15 December the International School for Cinema and Television (EICTV) was launched in its turn, with García Márquez’s old friend Fernando Birri as its new director. Just over a week later it was reported that the foundation would film seven screenplays written by García Márquez himself, which was perhaps a world record for quick results from insider trading. His closest associates during the next few years would be Alquimia Peña, the Cuban director of the film foundation, and Eliseo Alberto Diego, known to everyone as “Lichi,” the son of one of Cuba’s greatest poets, Eliseo Diego. Lichi would work with the new President not only in his teaching seminars—or “workshops,” as García Márquez insisted they be called—but also in the production and elaboration of a whole raft of film scripts. García Márquez would throw himself body and soul into these enterprises and his energy, enthusiasm and stead-fastness would astonish both his collaborators and the many visitors to the new institutions over the coming years.

  In the middle of all these celebrations shattering news arrived from Colombia to cast a pall over the new enterprise: Guillermo Cano, the Director of El Espectador, was murdered on 17 December as he left his office in Bogotá. The war between the Medellín drug baron Pablo Escobar and the Colombian justice system was now reaching its climactic phase. Escobar was already the seventh richest man on the planet and his “plata o plomo” (bribe or bullet) strategy of attempting to suborn or liquidate everyone in his way had added a second layer of corruption and inefficiency to Colombia’s age-old system of manipulation and violence. His political ambitions had already been frustrated and El Espectador, which had valiantly opposed him, also supported the extradition of suspected drug-traffickers to the United States. Now Cano had paid the price of his courage. The Minister of Justice, the President of the Supreme Court and the head of the national police force had all been assassinated already but the murder of such a respected journalist had an especially devastating effect on national morale. El Espectador journalist María Jimena Duzán told me: “I saw García Márquez again in Cuba in December 1986, around the time of the launching of the film foundation. After a few days he came looking for me; eventually he reached me by phone. ‘They’ve killed Guillermo Cano,’ he said. ‘It’s just happened. That’s why I don’t want to go back to Colombia. They’re killing my friends. No one knows who’s killing who.’ I went to his house, totally distraught. Gabo greeted me by saying that Guillermo Cano was the only friend who had ever really defended him. Castro arrived and I was weeping. Gabo explained what had happened and Fidel talked a lot. Gabo told me again he wouldn’t go back, he was full of bitterness. I said to him, ‘You know, you’ve really got to speak out about things in Colombia,’ but he wouldn’t. I concluded that he’d really freaked out after his episode with Turbay in 1981.”13 García Márquez made no public statement about the murder and sent no message to Cano’s widow, Ana María Busquets.

  Despite the cruel news from Colombia, García Márquez set about his new duties in Havana with gusto. He stayed on in Cuba for several months, working at many tasks at the same time, deciding everything, taking part in everything. News items appeared regularly in papers all over Latin America and Spain about Gabriel García Márquez’s film-related activities and possible adaptations of his books.14 This was more like it! Cinema was not like literature, its creators sentenced to solitude. Cinema was convivial, collective, proactive, youthful; cinema was sexy and cinema was fun. And García Márquez loved every minute of it; he was surrounded by attractive young women and energetic and ambitious but deferential young men, and he was in his element. Though it was costly. He would wryly remark that he had gone on with his expensive hobby despite Mercedes’s disapproval: “When we were poor we spent all our money on the cinema. Now that we have money, I’m still spending it on the cinema. And I’m giving it a huge amount of my time.”15 Some say García Márquez gave the school $500,000 of his own money that year, as well as most of his invaluable time. It was now that he began to charge European or American interviewers $20,000 or $30,000 a session in o
rder to raise money for the film foundation; astonishing numbers of them coughed up.

  He came to specialize in story-telling and script-writing at the new school—he gave a regular course on how to write a story, then how to turn the story into a film script. Visitors and teachers over the next few years would include Francis Ford Coppola, Gillo Pontecorvo, Fernando Solanas and Robert Redford.16 The relationship with Redford was particularly important to García Márquez: he would repay his debt to the handsome American radical by himself travelling to Utah to give a course at Redford’s Sundance film school and festival in August 1989.17 Generally he would say that his policy was to sell his works very dear to non-Latin American producers and very cheaply or for free to Latin Americans. Some books, especially One Hundred Years of Solitude, he would never allow to be adapted, a position which had brought him into conflict with Anthony Quinn a few years before. (It was said that Quinn had offered García Márquez a million dollars for the rights; Quinn said García Márquez had agreed, then reneged on the deal, which the Colombian always denied.)18 Others, such as Love in the Time of Cholera, he would consider selling—but at that time he said he would only give it to a Latin American director. Finally, in 2007 he would at last allow another Hollywood film-maker, in this case the Englishman Mike Newell, to make the film in Cartagena with Javier Bardem as lead.19 At that time gossips would report that Mercedes had finally lost patience with her husband’s relentless philanthropy and wanted to put some money aside for their heirs. It was, after all, “her” book.