Gabriel García Márquez

by Gerald Martin

  The novel is in eight chapters, and falls, once more, into two halves. The first half, chapters 1 to 4, narrates the journey down that great river that García Márquez himself would travel, over a century later, on his way to school.33 In Bolívar’s case, this last journey took place between 8 and 23 May 1830. The second half, chapters 5 to 8, narrates Bolívar’s last six months of life, 24 May to 17 December 1830, six months spent by the sea on that Costa which would later be the scene of García Márquez’s childhood and much of his youth. One of Spain’s best-loved poems, Jorge Manrique’s Verses on the Death of My Father, composed at the end of the medieval period, is known above all for the line, “Our lives are the rivers that flow down into the sea which is death.” And for one further verse which states that death is the “trap,” the “ambush,” into which we fall. Or, as García Márquez might say, following Bolívar himself, the “labyrinth” into which we fall. Although García Márquez does not mention Manrique, his novel follows exactly the same logic as Manrique’s great poem.

  The subject of the title, “the General,” signifies power but the concept of “the labyrinth” suggests before the work even begins that not even the powerful can control fate and destiny. Of course such impotence may also imply exculpation of, even sympathy for, the powerful, which the infant García Márquez may have felt when Colonel Nicolás Márquez was the only “powerful”—protective, influential, respectable—person he knew. Is his entire oeuvre in some way reflecting upon the impossibility of holding on to that old man, the anguish of having as a “father” someone so old and vulnerable that the most important lesson you learn as a small child is that your only security, your beloved grandfather, must “soon” die? Such a lesson teaches that all power is desirable, essential, yet frail, false, transient, illusory. García Márquez is almost alone in contemporary world literature in his obsession with, indeed his sympathy with, men of power. And although he has always been a socialist this permanent note of aristocratic identification, however much moderated by irony (or even moral condemnation), may explain why his books have an apparently inexplicable power of their own: tragedy, it goes without saying, is greater, wider and deeper when protagonists are aggrandised by power, by isolation, by solitude and, not least, by their influence on the lives of millions of people and history itself.

  By the time he wrote The General in His Labyrinth García Márquez had long been closely acquainted with Fidel Castro, undoubtedly a leading candidate for the number two position—after Bolívar—in the list of Latin America’s great men. Simply in terms of political longevity—almost half a century in power—Fidel Castro’s record is difficult to deny. And Fidel, García Márquez once told me, is “a king.” García Márquez himself, in contrast, has always insisted that he has neither the talent, the vocation nor the desire—still less the ability—to endure such solitude. The solitude of the serious writer is enormous, he has always averred; but the solitude of the political Great Leader is of quite another order. Nevertheless here, in this novel, although Bolívar’s character is, undoubtedly, based factually on that of the Liberator, many of his foibles and vulnerabilities are a combination of Bolívar’s, Castro’s and García Márquez’s own.

  The central subject, then, is power, not tyranny. In other words, García Márquez’s books are sometimes seen from the side of the powerful, sometimes from the side of the powerless, but they are not primarily intended to inspire hatred against tyrants or the “ruling class”—unlike hundreds of protest novels written within the main current of Latin American literary narrative. His constant themes, constantly interwoven, are the irony of history (especially power turning to impotence, life turning to death), fate, destiny, chance, luck, foreboding, presentiment, coincidence, synchronicity, dreams, ideals, ambitions, nostalgias, longings, the body, will and the enigma of the human subject. His titles frequently refer to power (Colonel, Patriarch, General, Big Mama), power which is usually challenged in some way (“no one writes,” “solitude,” “autumn,” “funeral,” “labyrinth,” “death foretold,” “kidnapping”), and to the different forms of representation of reality as related to the different ways of conceiving and organizing time into history or narrative (“no one writes,” “one hundred years,” “time of,” “chronicle of,” “news of,” “memoir of”). His works almost always include the theme of waiting, which is, of course, merely the other side of power, the experience of the impotent. All the way through this novel, for example, Bolívar is announcing his departure, first from Bogotá, then from Colombia, but really of course he is leaving power, while pretending to himself that he is not leaving anything, least of all this life, though nothing can delay that inevitable departure. So waiting is again a huge theme; but delaying (which the powerful—Castro, for example—can do, and love to do) is a bigger theme here (Bolívar delaying his departure from Colombia, from power and glory, delaying accepting reality, death …).

  Some of the impetus for the book must have come from García Márquez’s work on his Nobel Prize speech in which, like others before him, he felt it incumbent upon himself to speak as a representative not of one country but of a whole continent. Much of what he said on that occasion was tacitly “Bolivarian” and many of the ideas turn up again in the novel; indeed, the Nobel speech provides indispensable background to a reading and interpretation of the work. This is all the more ironic since García Márquez, as we have seen, was very slow to come to an awareness of “Latin America,” even during his stay in Europe. Only after visiting both the centre of capitalism and the centre of communism did he come to see that, despite his moral and theoretical attraction to socialism, neither system was the answer for Latin America because in practice both systems functioned primarily in the interests of the countries that advocated them. Latin America had to look after itself; and thus had to unify. Bolívar in the novel has trenchant views about the different European nationalities, favouring the British, of course, given the assistance Great Britain gave at that time to the South American liberation movements; the French come out badly; and the United States, in Bolívar’s own words, is “omnipotent and terrible, and its tale of liberty will end in a plague of miseries for us all.”

  Such are the themes involved in the book and the central problems which structure it. But no matter how much research García Márquez had put into it, no matter how coherent its ideological design and the literary architecture which supported it, the novel would have failed absolutely if the central character had not come alive. And he does. García Márquez takes on the most famous and familiar of all Latin Americans and gives his own version, with breathtaking audacity and astonishing naturalness. Though this is certainly not his greatest work it may well be his greatest achievement because the magnitude of the challenge is there for all to see. Any reader familiar with biographies of Bolívar, on finishing this book, is likely to conclude that García Márquez’s version of the man, achieved in well under three hundred pages and containing the whole of the life within the journey completed in the last six months of it, will henceforth be inseparable from whatever image of Bolívar is carried down to posterity.

  Bolívar is alive, though already mortally ill, from the very first page, where he lies naked—buried, one might say—in his morning bath. His nakedness shocked many readers—as it would shock them to find him vomiting, farting, copulating and cursing, or cheating at cards, or showing a petulant, childish side to his character far removed from the hagiographic vision so common in Latin American speeches and ceremonial. Yet the portrait is also of a man transfused by a touching gallantry: cast down, certainly, by his misfortunes, his rejections and his approaching death, yet never finally defeated even in the darkest and most hopeless of times. Bolívar becomes a García Márquez character in this novel, it cannot be denied; but part of this writer’s greatness is that the “Latin American character” is precisely what he has captured and rendered eternal, long before he turned to Bolívar, and the great Liberator is here revealed as the template for countless
Latin Americans suffering, striving and sometimes succumbing in the arduous kingdom of this world. For all his own vanities and occasional arrogance, García Márquez, subjected to stresses that it is given to few other writers even to imagine, has himself, in turn, reacted to this aesthetic and historical challenge with a grace and a gallantry that few other writers are able to attain. Hence the moving impact the book makes upon most of its readers.

  The novel’s publication was flagged up weeks before it eventually appeared. García Márquez has always boasted that he never attends the launch of any of his books and often suggests that he personally finds it demeaning to have to peddle as a commercial product something which for him is, in its original impulse, an aesthetic creation quite indifferent to whatever exchange value it may eventually have in the capitalist book market. But the truth is that even One Hundred Years of Solitude was publicized long before it appeared. And with each new book the hype increased. All this was why, years later, some people would begin to call him “García Marketing.”

  On 19 February, the first reaction to the novel, read in typescript, was a letter from no less a reader than the ex-President of Colombia, Alfonso López Michelsen, whose response, “I devoured your latest book,” published in El Tiempo, was used to advertise the book before it even came out.34 López declared that García Márquez had shown an astonishing versatility: supposedly a magical realist, he had now written a naturalist work that Zola might have penned had he had the talent. López had been unable to put the book down: he said that although Bolívar’s story was known to everyone in Latin America, the reader was sucked in as if by a detective story. García Márquez’s original new thesis that Bolívar was still hoping to make a political comeback even on his deathbed was credible because “that’s the story with all of us who have gone out of power.” Later it would be revealed that ex-President Betancur had also read the book (he was less fulsome because of course its “liberal” interpretation was less acceptable to him, a Conservative, than to López),35 and the current Liberal President, Virgilio Barco, had stayed up into the night to finish it.36 Even Fidel Castro, that great admirer of Cuba’s own would-be liberator, José Martí, had read the novel and had been heard to declare that it gave a “pagan image” of Bolívar.37 No one was entirely sure what this meant, or whether it was good or bad.

  There were innumerable reviews in newspapers and magazines all over the Spanish-speaking world. This was not only a new novel by the greatest literary name in the language but a portrait of the most important figure in the entire history of Latin America, whose persona and image were dear to millions, not least to the guardians of the Bolivarian flame, whether serious historians, ideologists or demagogues. Most of the reviews were extremely positive but, unusually for García Márquez but not surprisingly, there were also some determined attempts at demolition. A significant minority of critics argued that García Márquez’s overweening sense of his own glory had got in the way of his presentation of Bolívar—a presentation allegedly full of linguistic effects conceived as spectacle, like self-congratulatory fireworks, instead of the appropriate communication of Bolívar’s own possible subjectivity, plus a series of stock phrases and episodic structures whose true function was to draw attention to the García Márquez brand, with the novel as a mausoleum to the writer himself rather than to its protagonist.38

  Predictably, perhaps, the most negative reaction came from García Márquez’s old bête noire, El Tiempo, which, in an editorial no less, found the work anti-Colombian:

  But the book has a political background. During the course of its 284 pages the author cannot conceal his philosophy, especially in the ideological field. He gives vent to an unrepressed hatred for Santander and a cordial antipathy for Bogotá and its classic product the cachacos, whilst pointing out the General’s personal characteristics, attributing to his Caribbean origin the greater part of the impulse that carried him to glory. With great subtlety and skill he emphasizes Bolívar’s dictatorial personality and mulatto blood, as well as his earthy disposition, to create an impalpable comparison with Fidel Castro.39

  This disturbing diatribe shows how offensive García Márquez’s appropriation of Bolívar seemed to the guardians of Colombia’s national identity: he had pressed every single button and the editorialist had evidently lost his cool. García Márquez, no doubt feeling the satisfaction of the warrior who has smoked his enemy out into the open, responded in kind: “I’ve said before that El Tiempo is a demented newspaper protected by a quite unusual impunity… It says whatever it wants against whoever it likes, without measuring the consequences or thinking about the political, social or personal damage it might do. Very few people dare to answer it back for fear of its immense power.” “We need to discover ourselves,” García Márquez concluded, “we don’t want Columbus to remain as our discoverer.” This was inevitably followed by a response from El Tiempo itself entitled “The Nobel’s Tantrum,” on 5 April; it declared that “García Márquez only accepts praise” and called him the “Baron of Macondo.”40

  It was clear that something was happening both to García Márquez himself and to his reputation. His relationships with the great and the good were continuing to grow—political leaders such as Castro, Salinas and Pérez clearly thought they needed him more than he needed them—but the rest of the world was beginning to notice and in some quarters there was less indulgence than before. Moreover García Márquez himself seemed suddenly to be under increased stress—over his relationship with Castro and Cuba, unsubstantiated newspaper insinuations of sexual dalliances, waning middle age, the fear that his popularity was declining and that his political influence might follow—and was more inclined to overreact to attacks or to criticism. He seemed, for the first time, to be ever so slightly losing his touch. Colombian articles would say, and did say, that his fame and influence had definitively gone to his head and he was simply reacting from a loftier height of vanity, narcissism and hypersensitivity.

  But of course things were more complex than this. The truth was that the Cold War game, which García Márquez played better than anyone, was almost over, even if few observers were predicting that the end would come as soon as November 1989. The climate had changed immeasurably and García Márquez’s manoeuvres were less confident and relaxed, and intuited as such by journalists who, even if they could not see the future in a crystal ball as clearly as he could, also responded inevitably to the changing atmosphere.

  García Márquez had written the most talked-about book ever published on Bolívar—the most important politician in the history of Latin America—and had become embroiled himself, as he must have anticipated, in a whole series of political debates in different places and at different levels. His former friend Mario Vargas Llosa, meanwhile, was involved even more directly in matters political. Indeed he was running as a candidate to become the President of Peru on a neoliberal ticket. He and García Márquez had diverged radically about Peruvian affairs in the late 1960s when García Márquez, like most Latin American leftists, conditionally supported the progressive military regime of General Juan Velasco, whereas Vargas Llosa was against him; indeed, dislike for the military was something which characterized Vargas Llosa at all times, whereas García Márquez, always the realist, though personally non-violent, knew that no country, state or regime could survive without an army and thus the military always had to be given some form of respect. At the end of March García Márquez could be found wishing his former friend well, though with reservations: “In Latin America it is inevitable that a person who has a certain public audience ends up in politics. But no one had gone as far as Mario Vargas Llosa. I hope he is not being dragged along by circumstances but believes that he really can resolve the situation in Peru. Even with so many ideological differences, one can only wish, if he gets elected, that the presidency goes well for him, in the interests of Peru.”41 He added that when one is famous, “one should not be naive, so that no one can use you.” In the event, to the disappointment of
most literary spectators, Vargas Llosa was defeated by the almost unknown populist Alberto Fujimori, who went on to become one of Latin America’s most notorious end-of-century rulers.

  In March Spain confirmed what an irate García Márquez had been predicting for months, when it adopted European Community regulations which meant that Latin Americans would no longer be given automatic visas for entry to the Peninsula. In a fit of pique and monomania reminiscent of his Pinochet fiasco, he announced: “I will never go back to Spain.”42 Needless to say, he would have to change his tune, but he was genuinely affronted. Spaniards didn’t have visas when they arrived in Latin America in 1492, he snorted. Why, even Franco had allowed Latin Americans to become Spanish citizens. He told the press he had warned Felipe González that when Spain entered the European Union, “you’ll turn your backs on Latin America.” Now they had.43 The truth was that his relationship with González, though a close one, was continually troubled by two irremediable irritants. González had made the long march from clandestine subversion of the Franco regime to membership not only of the European Community but even of NATO, and so the interests of Spain were no longer “complementary” to those of Latin America, as the Spaniards were claiming, but antagonistic: Spain was now, really for the first time in its modern history, part of “the West,” as González himself would announce quite soon when Spain sent forces to the Gulf War against Iraq in 1991. Secondly, there was nothing González would have liked to do more than satisfy García Márquez’s constant demands for him to ease Cuba back into the international community of nations; but González found Castro’s dictatorial practices unacceptable—as well as inconvenient—in the world in which he now moved and was constantly irritated by what he perceived as Castro’s incorrigible stubbornness and inability to adjust to the way the world was moving. (Castro, needless to say, was increasingly convinced that González was a traitor to international socialism.)