Gabriel García Márquez

by Gerald Martin

  Journalists pursued García Márquez everywhere in Colombia. As usual. He was already working on another historical drama about erotic passion to be entitled Of Love and Other Demons and now marked his return by announcing that he would be adapting Jorge Isaacs’s María (1867), Colombia’s best-known and most-loved novel before One Hundred Years of Solitude, for Colombian television, to be shown in October. He said it was a great challenge and a great responsibility but one he was looking forward to immensely. He was hoping to make the housewives of Latin America weep even more with the television version than their great-great-grandmothers—and his—had wept with the original novel in their laps back in the 1870s. “Love,” he declared—for María is indeed the best-known love story in the history of Latin America—“is the most important subject in the history of humanity. Some say it is death. I don’t think so because everything is connected to love.”7 He could not more succinctly have conveyed his own evolution in terms of a thematic centre of gravity.

  Despite the announcement that he was “back”—viewed with inevitable scepticism by Colombians who had heard it many times before—García Márquez and Mercedes were soon on their way to Chile and Brazil, before returning temporarily to safe haven in Mexico. The visit to Chile was for the inauguration on 11 March of Patricio Aylwin, the first democratic President in Chile since 1973. Now García Márquez was finally able to get some satisfaction from seeing the back of Pinochet, who had also, like the Sandinistas, been voted out of office (though not out of Chile’s political life). García Márquez had encountered him in Washington in 1977 when the Panama Canal treaty was signed during García Márquez’s literary strike (due precisely to Pinochet being in power); now they were together again at a ceremony where the Chilean General must have felt much the less comfortable of the two. (The London Financial Times, appropriately, remarked that Pinochet was now “adrift in his labyrinth.”)8 García Márquez’s most notable experience was taking part in the symbolic gesture of reopening Pablo Neruda’s house at Isla Negra, a place of pilgrimage closed down by the dictatorship for seventeen years. He was accompanied by José Donoso, Jorge Edwards, the poet Nicanor Parra and Enrique Correa, General Secretary of the new government.

  In August Gaviria, elected in May, came to power in Colombia at the age of forty-three. Almost his first policy initiative was to propose a National Constituent Assembly to reform the country’s system of government—the current constitution dated back to the country’s only costeño president, Rafael Núñez, in 1886—and this of course was exactly what García Márquez, who had always said that the old constitution was merely “theoretical,” would have wished Gaviria to do. (On 4 September El País asked rhetorically if García Márquez was a “Gavirista.”9 Not yet, was the answer. But he soon would be.) A new constitution would redefine the country and might lead to an entirely different future. García Márquez was proposed on 27 August as a candidate for the Constituent Assembly, tasked with drawing up the new document; the press would discuss his possible participation endlessly for the next few months, taking great pleasure in exposing the contradictions of a man who was a “friend of dictators” and who had never voted in his entire life.

  Despite his constructive beginning, Gaviria was given no honeymoon by the drug-traffickers, and politics as usual continued in the very month of his inauguration. On 30 August Diana Turbay, journalist daughter of ex-President Julio César Turbay, and five other journalists were abducted by gangsters working for Pablo Escobar. On 31 August bandits attempted to abduct radio journalist Yamid Amat. These events and other similar cases would form the basis for García Márquez’s documentary novel News of a Kidnapping four years later, though at this moment the pattern of events was not clear even to him. On 3 September he found the second phrase of his new slogan. The first was already familiar: “The times are changing and we have to adjust.” The second was new: “Only Fidel can change Cuba. But the United States always needs a bogeyman.”10 This was brilliantly ingenious but whether Fidel had been consulted about the need to change Cuba was in doubt. He was certainly not saying so publicly himself; but he would soon have to acknowledge Cuba’s economic orphanhood without the Soviet Union and with the U.S. embargo still in place and the so-called “Special Period” of unparalleled austerity would shortly be proclaimed.

  In 1991 García Márquez improved his Colombian operation and confirmed his long-term intention to divide his life between Mexico and Colombia by installing his cousin Margarita Márquez, daughter of his late uncle Juan de Dios, as his local secretary in the spacious Bogotá apartment he and Mercedes had bought for their hitherto mythical return. But the month of García Márquez’s latest visit was another brutal one. Marina Montoya, a grandmother, was taken away from the other hostages captured by Escobar and murdered. The army attempted to rescue Diana Turbay on 25 January but she was killed as she attempted to flee her kidnappers. This provoked García Márquez—usually reluctant to make declarations in support of Colombian governments—to speak out. In a Radio Caracol interview on 26 January he said that the “Extraditables”—those liable to be arrested and sent to the United States for trial—should “respect the lives of journalists.”11 Hostage Beatriz Villamizar was released on 6 February, but Maruja Pachón and Pachito Santos, a member of the El Tiempo dynasty (and a future vice-president of the country), remained in captivity. To add to the chaos, there was also intense guerrilla activity around Bogotá itself. Meanwhile President Gaviria issued a statement in the United States declaring that on balance he still favoured extradition for drug-traffickers, a decision which ensured that the current levels of violence would continue or even increase. It seemed to be a war to the death between the drug cartels and civil society.

  In July García Márquez returned briefly to Mexico to attend to his affairs and commitments there. Before he left, however, President Gaviria, who had perhaps been listening to García Márquez, had negotiated a sensational but profoundly controversial deal with Pablo Escobar through which the master criminal gave himself up in return for a reduced sentence and comfortable prison conditions—not in the United States, as the drug-traffickers all feared, but near his home city of Medellín. García Márquez described this agreement, which was certain to be condemned both by the Colombian right and by the USA, as a “triumph of intelligence.” He pointed out that the USA itself had a long history of negotiating with gangsters when there were reasons of state for doing so.12 It would be difficult to support all the agonizing twists and turns government policy would be obliged to take over the coming three years but García Márquez would do his best to be helpful.

  And Gaviria would be helpful to him. When García Márquez got back to Colombia, he had important business to attend to which would demonstrate to all the doubters—of whom there were many—that he was committed not only to returning to the country on a long-term basis but also to participating in political life. He had decided to buy into the bid for a nightly television news bulletin, to be called QAP (taxi-driver slang for “ready, at your service, over to you”). The idea was Enrique Santos Calderón’s; other journalists involved were María Elvira Samper and María Isabel Rueda, and Julio Andrés Camacho, owner of the magazine Cromos, was a significant shareholder; as was García Márquez (though he would later claim that he was just “the holy spirit” of the enterprise). Not surprisingly, the Gaviria government gave the QAP a licence to begin broadcasting on 1 January 1992.

  Meanwhile García Márquez and Mercedes were showing their commitment to the great return in the most tangible way of all. Following the purchase of the apartment in Bogotá they selected a location for a new house in Cartagena, a plot right on the seafront by the old city walls and next to the derelict Santa Clara convent, one of the city’s most beautiful colonial buildings. Colombia’s leading architect, Rogelio Salmona, who had helped García Márquez out in Paris in 1957, would lead the project. It seemed that Cuba was no longer García Márquez’s first priority. Or at least he was going to make it seem as if Cuba
were no longer his first priority.

  In August 1991, as part of his ongoing process of adaptation to the triumph of the liberal capitalist world, he at last entered the United States on a normal visa, for the first time since 1961. The new laws on communism and immigration had finally caused the name Gabriel García Márquez to be removed from the prohibition list. He had been waiting thirty years for a regular visa and now he entered the country to open the New York Film Festival held between 16 and 30 August. The prohibition had irritated García Márquez even more than he had been prepared to admit. For one thing, like most people on the Costa, not least the other members of the Barranquilla Group, he had never felt the visceral hatred for the USA and the lordly contempt for its culture which was so common among Latin American intellectuals and which they shared, of course, with many Europeans, most notably the French. (Ironically enough, Fidel Castro was also unprejudiced against the U.S. people and their culture; his lifelong love of baseball is just one example.)

  In fact García Márquez’s objections to the USA had been overwhelmingly political in nature. He had been quick to notice that his American readers were significantly more enthusiastic than his European ones and much less troubled, surprisingly enough, by his extra-literary positions. His translations into English had always sold well and been well received by critics, and both his main translators, Gregory Rabassa and Edith Grossman, were Americans. In recent years he had been eager to build whatever links he could with progressive American film-makers, notably Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Red-ford and Woody Allen.13 And he had begun to appreciate New York much more now that he was visiting as a high-profile tourist and not under constant siege from Cuban anti-revolutionaries. So it was a great relief to have got his situation regularized. While he was in New York the attempted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev took place in Moscow; this would lead to the Soviet leader’s fall in December and the eventual disintegration of the USSR. García Márquez watched events on the television in his New York hotel room and discussed these and other world developments with none other than his former bête noire—only Pinochet had been a more hated figure—the ex-U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.14 Cuba was high on the agenda.

  In the late autumn, having made his peace with the United States, Latin America’s most recent oppressor, García Márquez returned to its original colonizer, Spain. The year 1992 was fast approaching and with it the celebration of the 500th anniversary of the so-called “discovery of the New World.” The Spaniards, not always fully aware of how patronizing they can seem to Latin Americans, were dismayed when Latin Americans fell over one another to declare that they had not needed “discovering,” thank you very much—they, or their Indian forefathers and mothers, had discovered themselves many centuries before—and that it was by no means obvious to them that the arrival of the Spaniards in what they had mistakenly named the “Indies” in 1492 was a cause for celebration. The Spaniards hastily rebranded the forthcoming event the quincentenary of the “Encounter of Two Worlds” and engaged in some crisis diplomacy to get everyone back on board (so to speak). García Márquez had been one of the high-profile doubters. Yet secretly he must have been delighted at the prospect. His friend François Mitterrand had been in power for the celebration of the bicentenary of the French Revolution; now his Spanish friend Felipe González was in power for the organizing of the celebration of the half millennium since Europe’s arrival in the New World.

  Always closely attuned to history, García Márquez had been working on an appropriate literary project for the occasion. Ever since the 1960s, and in a sense since he had actually lived in Europe in the mid-1950s, he had been toying with stories which communicated the reverse experience to the one being commemorated by the Spanish, namely that of Latin Americans arriving in Europe and confronting what for them was, despite everything, an alien culture. In a sense it was what he had recently been talking about with regard to Hispanic immigration into the United States, a kind of symbolic reverse colonization—some might even say a return of the repressed. He had outlined literally dozens of plots over the years and now he had decided to select the most promising ones, those which survived his final cull, to produce a collection that could appear in 1992. Some of them had emerged as late as the period 1980–84 when, just as he had written chronicles that would eventually turn into film scripts for the Difficult Loves series, so he had also produced stories that could be slipped into this new literary collection. García Márquez was never in a hurry to publish but he rarely missed an opportunity either; many of his projects remained ongoing for decades but found their way into artistic form—and into book form—in the end, and often at the ideal moment. Thus he delayed the completion and publication of his new novel Of Love and Other Demons and attended to his Europe-based tales.

  He travelled to Barcelona, where he now had a sumptuous apartment on the Passeig de Graça or Paseo de Gracia, one of the city’s classiest addresses, in a block that had been refurbished by the prestigious architect Alfons Milà. After this he travelled round Europe, as if to stake his claim on the once-imperialist territory, part of which was busy recalling its adventures in his own region of the world, visiting Switzerland and Sweden among other countries. The main reason was that he had decided to call his new story collection Cuentos peregrinos. In Spanish the primary meaning of the word peregrino is the noun “pilgrim” but there is a second, adjectival meaning: “strange,” “surprising” or “alien”—hence the title of the English translation, Strange Pilgrims. He too was an alien pilgrim, less at home politically in the world than ever yet more determined than ever to put his best foot forward and think—or at least talk—positively. By now his projected short fiction collection was down to about fifteen stories but his visit to Europe, intended as a mere last-minute refresher course, more sentimental journey than practical update, put him in something of a panic. The Europe he remembered was not the Europe of today and neither of those Europes seemed to have been encapsulated in his book. He took hasty notes and then dedicated the next few months to an intense revision of the new book which, he had promised his agent and his publisher, would be ready in time to appear at the Seville Exposition the following July.

  Unhappily, Cuba began the quincentenary year with another execution, that of an invading rebel Eduardo Díaz Betancourt. García Márquez himself made a public appeal for clemency, as did the leaders of even the countries most sympathetic to Cuba, but to no avail.15 The Cuban authorities judged that in Cuba’s circumstances deterring counter-revolution and terrorism was a matter of life and death. Mexico’s leading intellectual, the poet Octavio Paz, and the Latin American right had a field day and García Márquez had to scramble yet again to justify his relationship with the Cuban leader by explaining his record of getting prisoners pardoned and released. His own popularity was undiminished, however, at least with the Latin American people. When, in February, he made a brief appearance at a conference at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, just a few blocks from his house, the entire audience stood up as soon as he entered the auditorium and gave him a two-minute standing ovation.16 He was not even one of the participants. It happened everywhere he went. Latin America has not, historically, been a continent of winners but García Márquez was an undefeated and undisputed world champion.

  Yet suddenly the champ was laid low by an unexpected enemy. He had been feeling tired for some time and had suddenly found it difficult to breathe when he got back into the thin air of Bogotá. He decided on a check-up. Doctors found a tumour a centimetre across in his left lung, due almost certainly to all the black tobacco he had smoked for all those years in front of all those typewriters. The doctors proposed an operation. He told the newsmen that both Fidel Castro and Carlos Salinas had called him before the surgery to wish him well. Castro offered him a private plane to Cuba with his personal doctor and Salinas lamented that he was not returning to Mexico for the treatment. García Márquez promised that Mexico would be his first stop after he recovered.
He could have chosen to go to Cuba, Mexico or the United States but decided to have the surgery in Colombia. No metastasis was detected and the operation was deemed a complete success; he would have no breathing difficulties. His prospects were excellent and he was said to be in the best of spirits.

  García Márquez had feared death all his life and had therefore also feared illness. Ever since he had become famous he had listened closely to doctors and had taken most of their advice about healthy living. Now, despite all his precautions, he had fallen ill. And almost nothing was more frightening than lung cancer. Yet he surprised himself and those who knew him. He took the challenge in hand, insisted on knowing all the facts about the illness and its likely prognosis, and was able to boast: “I mastered my life.”17 He was supposed to take six weeks of complete rest but on 10 June it was announced that he would be at the Seville Exposition in July, as scheduled, to launch not only the Colombian Pavilion but his own new book. By now it was known that there would be twelve “pilgrim stories,” and that the book was ready.

  There was indeed almost a García Márquez takeover of the Seville Exposition. He became lord of the Colombian exhibition hall after his arrival in the Andalusian city, despite having declared in Madrid that there would not be a “Macondo Pavilion” in Seville.18 (“Macondo” was a word he had not used for many years and its use now was a sign of things to come.) Just as he had in Madrid, he advertised his new book, Strange Pilgrims, of which 500,000 copies had been printed, at every opportunity. And the public clamoured for his autograph wherever he went. The Colombian politician and future presidential candidate Horacio Serpa, waiting to enter the Colombian Pavilion, heard two Spaniards commenting on the picture of García Márquez presiding over the banner advertising the twenty-fifth anniversary of One Hundred Years of Solitude: “And who is that guy?” “Oh, he’s the dictator of Colombia, he’s been in power twenty-five years now.”19 In fact it was the first time García Márquez had ever been present at the launch of one of his own books—it was after all 1992, and on Colombia’s national day!—and the crowds had to be controlled by the police. García Márquez even acted as President for a day because Pablo Escobar had escaped from prison and Gaviria had cancelled his journey to Spain. The Nobel Prize winner found himself opening a Colombian bottling plant in Madrid.