Given the move from power to love in his literary activity, it was logical that love should take pride of place in his movie projects. What the Cubans really thought of this development we shall probably never know but for the next few years the new film foundation would be awash with news of García Márquez’s cinematographic explorations, through a series of different directors, of the theme of love in human relationships. The principal vehicle for this was a series of six films planned as a set to be collectively called Difficult Loves (Amores difíciles), a title previously used by Italo Calvino in a little-known collection of short stories. (When the films appeared on the Public Broadcasting System in the United States they were called Dangerous Loves.) All of them were darker than their publicity might have suggested and all, in one way or another, would explore the relationship between love and death.20
Six years later, in 1996, García Márquez would make a fully Sophoclean film, Oedipus the Mayor (as against Oedipus the King), again with Jorge Alí Triana (and again with a script by García Márquez and an ex-student of the Havana film school, Stella Malagón), about a small-town mayor confronting not only all the atrocities and terrors of late twentieth-century Colombia—drug-traffickers, paramilitaries, guerrillas, the national army—but also the age-old tragedy of Oedipus killing his father and sleeping with his mother, in this case the still tempestuous Spanish actress Angela Molina. Many critics panned the movie mercilessly but it had important virtues and might more fairly and appropriately be considered a heroic failure: it conveyed the complexity and some of the horror of the Colombian predicament and Triana managed to prevent the mythical motifs from undermining the political narrative. He had wanted to film No One Writes to the Colonel as well, and would probably have made a good job of it; in the event, surprisingly, García Márquez gave that project to Arturo Ripstein, with whom he had always had a difficult relationship (it was said that Ripstein had been angered by Triana remaking Time to Die), and in 1999 the novel finally came to the big screen: a film which, despite Ripstein’s huge international reputation, and a cast including international stars Federico Luján, Marisa Paredes and Salma Hayek, must be counted one of the least convincing versions of a work by García Márquez ever filmed.21
This mixed experience confirmed what García Márquez had said so often: that his relationship with the cinema was like some kind of unhappy marriage. He and the cinema couldn’t get along, yet they couldn’t do without one another. Perhaps, more cruelly, one might say that his love was unrequited (a one-way mirror, to quote the title of one of his Mexican television films): he could not live without the cinema but the cinema could in fact get along quite happily without him. Yet the truth is that he has often been blamed for the final versions of his movies when as the writer of the original text he is not ultimately responsible for the finished product. Mel Gussow wrote in the New York Times that García Márquez needed a film-maker of his own stature and that it would probably require a director with Buñuel’s idiosyncratic genius to do him justice.22 (This might explain why Hermosillo, a small chip off the Buñuelian block, was more successful than most.) García Márquez’s son Rodrigo told me that his father is “hopeless” with dialogue, even in his novels; yet the structure of A Time to Die is an undoubted masterpiece and the conception of the movies—dialogue apart—is invariably compelling. What a pity, then, that Fellini never had a go and that Akira Kurosawa, who was extremely excited in these years about the possibility of filming The Autumn of the Patriarch, never managed to get his project off the ground.
Despite all his success and his exciting activities in Cuba, these were exceptionally difficult years for García Márquez. Even he had to recognize that perhaps he had taken on too much and spread his talent and his energy too thin. He found himself assailed by his enemies on the right and involved in numerous polemics and controversies for which he had little appetite at this time, not to mention a number of scandals or near-scandals laced with malicious gossip which were not entirely becoming to a man nearing sixty years of age. In March 1988 he celebrated both his sixtieth birthday and his and Mercedes’s thirtieth wedding anniversary (21 April) in Mexico City and Cuernavaca. Belisario Betancur and thirty other friends from all over the world were in attendance. Much fun was had in the Colombian press as to whether it was García Márquez’s sixtieth or sixty-first birthday—it was his sixty-first, of course—including headlines like “García Márquez sixty again,” and he would not be able to continue with the farce of this deception for much longer—though most writers, truth to tell, including the blurb writers at his publishers, would continue to use a 1928 birth date until the publication of Living to Tell the Tale in 2002, and some even beyond that.
It was this month also that he published his much reprinted, definitive—humorous and affectionate—portrait of Fidel Castro, “Plying the Word,” in which he stressed Castro’s verbal rather than military attributes. He referred to his friend’s “iron discipline” and “terrible power of seduction.” He said it was “impossible to conceive of anyone more addicted to the habit of conversation” and that when Castro was weary of talking “he rests by talking”; he was also a “voracious reader.” He revealed that Fidel was “one of the rare Cubans who neither sings nor dances” and admitted, “I do not think anyone in this world could be a worse loser.” But the Cuban leader was also “a man of austere ways and insatiable illusions, with an old-fashioned formal education, of cautious words and delicate manners … I think he is one of the greatest idealists of our time and this, perhaps, may be his greatest virtue, although it has also been his greatest danger.” Yet when García Márquez asked him once what he would most like to do, the great leader had replied: “Hang around on some street corner.”23
Now came a temporary turn to the theatre. In January 1988 it was announced that the Argentinian actress Graciela Dufau would be starring in an adaptation of a brief work by García Márquez entitled Diatribe of Love Against a Seated Man.24 García Márquez would say that the play was a cantaleta, a repetitive, nagging rant, a word that implies that the nagger—usually a woman, of course—gets no answer from the object of her attentions, nor does she expect one. (Throughout his adult life García Márquez had always said that there was no point arguing with women.) This theme, this form, had obsessed García Márquez for many years and indeed one of his early ideas for The Autumn of the Patriarch was a cantaleta against the dictator by one of the main women in his life.25
The premiere in the Cervantes Theatre in Buenos Aires had to be delayed from 17 to 20 August 1988. In the end García Márquez, too anxious—“as nervous as a debutante,” in his own words—to cope with the stress of confronting a live performance of his work, remained in Havana and sent Mercedes, Carmen Balcells and her twenty-four-year-old photographer son Miguel to face the critics of Buenos Aires, the most demanding and most terrifying in Latin America. The whole of Buenos Aires’s “political and cultural world” was in attendance, including several government ministers. The notable absences were President Alfonsín and the distinguished playwright himself. Sadly, the return to a great theatre in Buenos Aires did not repeat the previous experience of 1967. The play received no more than polite applause and there was no standing ovation. Reviews from the Buenos Aires drama critics were mixed but the majority were negative. A typical reaction came from Osvaldo Quiroga of the heavyweight La Nación: “It is difficult to recognize the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude in this long monologue by a woman tired of being happy without love … It shows his complete ignorance of dramatic language. It cannot be denied that Diatribe is a superficial, repetitive and tedious melodrama.”26
The play, a one-act monologue, is set, like Love in the Time of Cholera, in an unnamed city which is unmistakably Cartagena de Indias. Graciela’s first words, subtly changed since first quoted by García Márquez, are: “Nothing is more like hell on earth than a happy marriage!” Novels have narrative irony built in but a play relies on dramatic irony, which needs a different kind of c
reative intuition, one for which he appears to have little feel. Worse than this, though, worse even than the lack of dramatic action, the play’s most damaging flaw appears to be a deficit of serious reflection and analysis. Like Love in the Time of Cholera in part, Diatribe of Love Against a Seated Man deals with marital conflict (as indeed had No One Writes to the Colonel, over thirty years before);27 and the central proposition—that traditional marriage doesn’t work for most women—is obviously an important one, albeit one that this sixty-year-old author was by now perhaps insufficiently modern to explore in a radical or even meaningful way. Sadly, Diatribe of Love Against a Seated Man is a one-dimensional work which, unlike Love in the Time of Cholera, adds little or nothing to the world canon of great works about love. García Márquez had said not long before that he had never wanted to be a movie director because “I don’t like to lose.”28 The theatre was an even riskier venture. Here for once he had lost. He would never try again.
AFTER THE TRIUMPHANT publication of Love in the Time of Cholera, despite a nagging, anguished sense of fragility which kept appearing in the midst of his apparent immortality, García Márquez had begun to act as if there were no limit to his energies or his ability to work at a high level over a whole range of different activities. Yet there were unmistakable signs of fraying. Clandestine in Chile bore obvious traces of haste; Diatribe of Love Against a Seated Man was an experiment in a medium in which he was out of his depth; and working on six film scripts simultaneously was perhaps too much for any man, added to all of which he had already started his next major book, nothing less than a novel on Latin America’s most important heroic figure of all time, Simón Bolívar.
García Márquez had been intensely committed to the politics and administration of the new film foundation and film school but he had devoted much less time in recent months to international politics and his conspiracies and mediations. Although matters in Central America were grim, Cuba had seemed to be in one of its most comfortable and confident moments. But things were beginning to change there too. García Márquez was about to find that his brief sabbatical from politics and diplomacy would soon be over as dark clouds began to gather over both Cuba and Colombia, clouds which would not lift again for the rest of the century.
In July 1987 he was the guest of honour at the Moscow Film Festival. On the 11th he was received by Mikhail Gorbachev at the Kremlin and urged the radical reformist Soviet leader to travel to Latin America. At this time Gorbachev was the most talked-about politician on the planet. They discussed, so an official communiqué said, “the restructuring being carried out in the USSR, its international implications, the role of intellectuals and the transcendence of humanist values in the world today.”29 Gorbachev said that in reading García Márquez’s books you could see there were no schemes, they were inspired by a love of humanity. García Márquez said that glasnost and perestroika were great words implying vast historical change—maybe! Some people—no doubt he was thinking of Fidel Castro—were sceptical, he said. Was he sceptical himself? That he was in two minds about the outcome was shown by later comments in which he revealed that he had told Gorbachev he was anxious that some politicians—presumably Reagan, Thatcher, Pope John Paul II—might wish to take advantage of his good faith and so there were dangers ahead. He said it was obvious to him that Gorbachev was sincere and declared that for him, García Márquez, the meeting had been the most important event of his recent life.30 For once he may not have been exaggerating.
Towards the end of the following year he finally came into intimate proximity with power in Mexico, the country in which he had lived for more than twenty years in total. In December 1988 Carlos Salinas de Gortari became President and García Márquez moved quickly to secure his relationship with the new leader. They would work closely together on international politics during the coming years. From Mexico he travelled to Caracas to attend Venezuelan Carlos Andrés Pérez’s second inauguration—in fulfilment of a promise he had made at a time when only he, García Márquez, thought that the mercurial populist might ever make a comeback.
He had been working on the Bolívar novel almost since the moment that he completed Love in the Time of Cholera. Though all his novels had been based on an understanding of Latin American and world history, and although he had read widely about dictators and dictatorship in order to write The Autumn of the Patriarch, he had never had to consider the methods of investigating and writing history as such. Now, because his central character was a historical actor, and one of the best-known ones at that, he felt that every event in his novel had to be verified historically and every thought, statement or foible of Bolívar’s in the book had to be appropriately researched and contextualized. This would involve not only personally reading dozens of books about Bolívar and his era and thousands of Bolívar’s letters but also consulting a whole range of authorities, including several of the leading experts on the life and times of the great Liberator.31
In creating his Patriarch in the 1970s, García Márquez had been free to choose whichever facet of whichever dictator he liked at any given moment in order to fashion a creative synthesis which would make sense within his overall design. With Bolívar, although every historian discovers, or invents, a different persona, the basic material was inevitably much more established and intractable, and he soon learned that for the historian each interpretative assertion has to be based on more than one, and in most cases many, pieces of evidence, the result being that what appears in the eventual work is merely the tip of a vast iceberg.32 Somehow he had to process that vast archive of information and yet maintain his own creative faculty so that Bolívar would somehow arise refreshed from the research rather than lie buried under a mountain of desiccated facts.
Of course, although the Liberator had written or dictated ten thousand letters and there were innumerable memoirs written about him both by his own collaborators and others who came across him during his life, there were whole swathes of time when little was known about what he was involved in, and the question of his private life—especially his love life—remained relatively open. Moreover the sequence that most interested García Márquez, for both personal and literary reasons—Bolívar’s last journey down the Magdalena River—had been virtually untouched by either letters or memoirs, leaving the novelist free to invent his own stories within the limits of historical verisimilitude.
The novel would be dedicated to Alvaro Mutis, whose idea it was and who had even written a brief fragment of a first version, “The Last Face,” when he was in prison in Mexico at the end of the 1950s. Eventually García Márquez got him to concede that he was never going to finish the project and seized it for himself. The title, The General in His Labyrinth, was established almost from the beginning of García Márquez’s research on the book.
Simón Bolívar was born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1783, a member of the Creole aristocracy. At that time the whole of the continent of what we now call Latin America remained in the hands of Spain and Portugal, as it had for almost three centuries, while England and France each controlled a few islands in the Caribbean. Slavery existed in every Latin American country, as it did also in the recently independent United States of America. By the time Bolívar died in 1830 almost the whole of Latin America had become independent of external powers and slavery had been officially condemned and in some cases abolished. All of this owed more to Bolívar than to any other single individual.
Bolívar’s father, a landowner, died when he was two and a half; his mother died when he was not yet nine years of age. When he was twelve he rebelled against the uncle who had taken him in and moved to the house of his tutor Simón Rodríguez; after travelling in Europe he married, at the age of nineteen, a young woman who died less than eight months later. At that moment he seems to have decided that it was his destiny to be alone in the world. (He would never marry again, though he would be linked with dozens of women, the best-known of whom was his doughty Ecuadorean mistress, Manuelita Sáenz, herself by now a
not inconsiderable legend, who saved his life on more than one occasion.) On returning to Europe he was present at the coronation of Napoleon in Paris in December 1804; he was inspired by Napoleon’s achievements as liberator of Europe but repelled by his decision to make himself a monarch. On returning to Latin America, having vowed to give his life to the liberation of the colonies held by Spain, he began a military career which eventually saw him achieve supreme prestige throughout the continent and the honourable title of Liberator. All other leaders, even great generals such as San Martín, Sucre, Santander, Urdaneta and Páez, were consigned willy-nilly, one after another, to Bolívar’s shadow.
Beyond the matter of battles won and lost, when one considers the statistics of Bolívar’s marches up and down the continent, across the Andes and along the mighty rivers of that still untamed geography, the facts and figures of his twenty-year campaign are stupefying; yet he was never seriously wounded in battle. His first mission along the Magdalena River in Colombia was at the age of twenty-nine; at the age of thirty he was proclaimed Liberator of Venezuela; at thirty-eight he was elected President of Colombia, which then included present-day Venezuela and Ecuador. During this period he wrote some of the key documents of Latin American identity, most notably his Jamaica Letter of 1815, in which he argued that all Latin American regions had more similarities than differences and that the continent’s mixed-race identity should be accepted and embraced.
Yet once the Spaniards were vanquished local leaders began to assert their local and regional interests and the fragmentation of the now liberated republics began; anarchy, dictatorship and disillusionment appeared like tragic spectres on the horizon; and Bolívar’s overriding dream, the unity of Latin America, began to fade. He became a nuisance, the voice of an impractical idealism; others might never have been able to achieve the almost impossible feats which Bolívar had undertaken but they now considered themselves far more realistic than he in the post-emancipation situation. The prime example was Colombia’s Francisco de Paula Santander, Bolívar’s nemesis and, in García Márquez’s eyes, the paradigmatic cachaco. The novel begins at the moment when Bolívar has realized that there is no future for him in Colombia, despite all his achievements and continuing prestige, and begins the retreat from Bogotá, which is in effect the retreat from his own grandiose vision. At forty-six years of age, ailing and disillusioned, the great Liberator sets off down the Magdalena River on his way towards exile, though García Márquez suggests that Bolívar never finally gave up hope and was still intending to organize another expeditionary campaign of liberation, should that prove possible.
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