Gabriel García Márquez

by Gerald Martin

  Strange Pilgrims brought together a collection of the first works by García Márquez set outside Latin America, and they all have a somewhat autobiographical air about them. The author states in his prologue that all except two of them (“The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow” and “Miss Forbes’s Summer of Happiness”) were completed in April 1992, though all were begun between 1976 and January 1982, in other words during the period when García Márquez was working for Alternativa and had resolved not to publish anything “literary” until Pinochet fell from power in Chile. It is, in retrospect, astonishing that he was working on these whimsical and in some cases rather slight creations at a time when he was interacting closely with Fidel and Raúl Castro and writing politically committed diatribes against the United States and the Colombian ruling class.

  The stories are organized in no discernible order, whether chronological or thematic. The first, “Bon Voyage, Mr. President,” narrated in the third person, is many readers’ favourite, and is set in the 1950s in Geneva, the first place García Márquez went to in 1955, directly after landing in Paris. The protagonist, ex-President of the Caribbean republic Puerto Santo, has come from exile in Martinique to have medical tests in Switzerland. Like another story, “Maria dos Prazeres,” and his last novel, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, it tells the story of someone who discovers that death can always be postponed and is best forgotten about—a story, then, that probably became more relevant to the author in the final stages of preparing the collection. Here a charming but deeply cynical member of the ruling class wins over two well-meaning proletarians, justifying his own manipulations by saying, “They’re lies and they’re not lies. When it has to do with a president, the worst ignominies may be both true and false at the same time.”

  García Márquez had decided to spend this quincentennial summer in Europe following his enforced stay in Bogotá. Strange pilgrimage. An invasion in reverse. Everyone who met him said he looked wonderful. “The doctors took out the only unhealthy things inside me,” he declared.20 Then he returned to Mexico. On 6 November Mercedes turned sixty and it was reported that she had received a huge floral tribute from President Salinas on her birthday.21 She had a whole phalanx of admirers among men of power and influence, many of whom even envied García Márquez a companion who showed—but never showed off—such an array of qualities, such good judgement, such permanent support. She was a consummate diplomat. This was not long after her husband was asked what he expected in the twenty-first century and he said that he thought women should take over the world to save humanity.22

  Then, continuing this diplomatic revisionism, he took his first-ever political step against those totemic representatives of the Colombian left, the country’s guerrillas. He signed a letter sent to El Tiempo on 22 November by a long list of Colombian intellectuals, including the painter Fernando Botero. The letter was effectively in support of Gaviria’s recent decision to wage all-out war on the guerrillas, who had shown no interest in his peace overtures.23 The result, undoubtedly, would be to leave the guerrillas feeling isolated, especially by “petit-bourgeois intellectuals,” and to cause them to take an even harder line, which continues to this day. For García Márquez it was a huge decision but undoubtedly one consonant with the other decisions he had taken as a result of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Probably, as much as anything, he was hoping to have a quieter time following his illness. He did not want to be constantly urged to support the almost insupportable. He would never again have quite the influence with the Colombian left that he had enjoyed until that moment; but then the Colombian left would not have the influence it had before. Inevitably rumours spread still more widely that he would soon be moving away from Castro too; after all Fidel was the originator and the symbol of most of the guerrilla movements which had swept Latin America ever since the early 1960s. García Márquez laughed the rumours off. He would never abandon Fidel.24

  He had dissociated himself from the guerrillas at precisely the moment that a new president was about to enter the White House in Washington. It was reported that Bill Clinton, the first Democrat President for twelve years, was “an enthusiastic reader of García Márquez.” Perhaps things were looking up at last: it had been widely reported that the Bush family had no books in their house and much preferred watching television.

  García Márquez stayed on in Cartagena and on 11 January could be seen in a photo in El Espectador at the bullring talking with Augusto López Valencia, the President of Julio Mario Santo Domingo’s multinational company, Bavaria.25 The newspaper had no comment or explanation of their encounter. In previous eras García Márquez would have either ensured that such meetings were unknown to the world or would have provided some explanation, including serendipity. Not any longer. He too was now in the bourgeois world and was ready to commit himself to the market economy. As a socialist he had always been opposed on principle to charity (though, privately, he had always been generous to dependent individuals with his own money, whilst never drawing attention to the fact); but in the absence of any other form of income for causes in which he believed, he turned to a phenomenon that was returning to the Western world on a scale not seen since the last great triumph of monopoly capitalism at the time of the American “Gilded Age” in the late nineteenth century: public philanthropy. (Bill Clinton himself would eventually write a book on “Giving.”)26 He had a Cuban film foundation to run. And he was beginning to think of another major and similarly costly project, an institute of journalism. The overt socialist war, both armed and intellectual, was over, the class struggle was in abeyance, and he had become convinced that the cultural and political war of positions—acting as progressively as possible in the circumstances—was all that he could aspire to. Thus he began to cultivate the rich, famous and powerful more assiduously than before.

  As part of his diplomatic self-redefinition, he had allowed his name to go forward to a Unesco “Forum of Reflection,” or forum of twenty-one “Wise Men,” as the Colombian press dubbed it, to discuss the planet’s growing problems within the so-called “new world order” at a time when Unesco had been under heavy criticism by the USA and the UK for just this kind of thing—costly international “junkets,” mere “talking shops” instead of concrete action. Of course talk had been thought dangerous in the powerhouses of the liberal West, for the first time in decades, since the advent of Thatcher and Reagan. Talk caused trouble and was mainly indulged in by leftists; and after all, what was the point of idle speculation when, as Thatcher herself had famously declared, there was “no such thing as society.” García Márquez was nominated by Luis Carlos Galán’s widow, Gloria Pachón, who was Colombian ambassador to Unesco in Paris, and of course by her boss, Gaviria. García Márquez said he was doing it as much for the sake of his country as for the world.27 Other members included Vaclav Havel, Umberto Eco, Michel Serres and Edward Said. The first meeting was held in Paris on 27 January 1993 and put García Márquez in touch with the first-ever Hispanic director of Unesco, the Spaniard Federico Mayor, who soon became a firm friend. As if to emphasise his enhanced dignity and respectability, and perhaps to impress the folks back home in the “Athens of South America,” he followed up his visit to Paris, home of the Academy mentality, with a broadside against the Spanish Royal Academy, author, he alleged, of “a geocentric dictionary.”28 Once again, in the past he would not have deigned to refer to academies. But this would turn out to be yet another extremely smart move in the longer term and would, again, put him in close touch with people—academicians, philologists, right-wing poets—on whom he would never previously have “wasted” his time. Before long he would be building links with the University of Guadalajara in Mexico, where he had recently developed a close relationship with its Rector, Raúl Padilla López, and he and Carlos Fuentes gave their support for Guadalajara’s Chair in honour of Julio Cortázar. Fuentes and García Márquez were already talking about ways of approaching the new U.S. President, Bill Clinton, presumed to be much more moderate—as wel
l as more cultured—than his recent Republican predecessors.

  In June, ignoring all his own complaints about distractions from writing, he was in Barcelona electioneering with Felipe González, creating a sensation in front of forty thousand PSOE supporters at one of González’s late rallies at Montjuïc. He would perhaps have done better to travel to Venezuela where another friend, Carlos Andrés Pérez, was entering a political crisis from which he would never recover. On 20 May Pérez was relieved of his functions as President of Venezuela, accused of stealing 17 million dollars of the nation’s money when he came to power in 1989. García Márquez sent a public message of support stressing Pérez’s courage in resisting several coup attempts against him—one by a soldier called Hugo Chávez, currently serving out a jail sentence—and his “magnificent sense of friendship” (what did that have to do with anything, many readers asked), though not exalting his great sense of integrity. Unfortunately García Márquez went still further and had the effrontery to criticize the institutions and representatives of the country and to imply that the accusations were a put-up job; he barely stopped short of criticizing the Venezuelan people.29 He would never be quite so popular in Venezuela again. His personal relationships with the powerful were beginning to cost him dear.

  In October García Márquez met Gloria Pachón’s sister Maruja, by then Minister of Education in Colombia, and her husband Alberto Villamizar. The couple proposed that he should write a book about their experiences in 1990–91, when Maruja was kidnapped. He was still absorbed in the preparation of Of Love and Other Demons and asked for a year to think about it but to their astonishment he came back to them after just a few weeks and accepted. He was a man of sixty-six embarking on another demanding and exhausting project. The book would be called News of a Kidnapping. As it happened, by the time he had made his mind up two of the principal protagonists of the drama were dead: Father Rafael García Herreros, who had persuaded Pablo Escobar to give himself up, had died on 24 November 1992, and Escobar himself was gunned down by Colombian police in Medellín on 2 December 1993, only weeks after García Márquez’s first conversation with his former victims, Maruja and Alberto.

  But just before Escobar was finally tracked down by the police came the pay-off for all García Márquez’s efforts with Gaviria. It was announced that Colombia was restoring its diplomatic links with Cuba. Castro, on his way back from attending the inauguration of a new president in Bolivia, had recently made a “private visit” to Cartagena—at last García Márquez had had the pleasure of greeting his friend on Colombian soil—and now, just a few weeks later, full relations were restored. Fidel in, Escobar out: this was a wonderful month both for Gaviria and for García Márquez.

  At the end of the year the whole García Márquez family got together in Cartagena for the first time in many years. A historic photograph was taken of Luisa Santiaga and all her children. There would never be another such meeting.

  García Márquez continued to keep busy; far too busy, surely. Almost no one knew it but, as usual, he was already at work on his next book before the last one was even published. But he needed to keep it secret for the time being. In March he travelled to Itagüí near Medellín in north-western Colombia with a number of American reporters, including James Brooke of the New York Times. Their objective was to visit the Ochoa brothers, the leading drug-traffickers after Escobar. Brooke recalled:

  Presidents come and go but the owlish writer, universally known by his nickname, Gabo, endures… A day spent with Mr. García Márquez quickly sketched the dimensions of the man. At the airport in Cartagena, where he lives, travelers recognized the author in his black-rimmed glasses and repeated his nickname in awe. At a prison in Itagüí, outside Medellín, three convicted cocaine traffickers known as the Ochoa brothers tripped over themselves vying for the honor of serving him lunch. At a barracks in Neiva, uniformed helicopter pilots from Colombia’s anti-drug police ignored the national police commander and jostled for position in souvenir photos with the writer.30

  This was the only journey García Márquez would make while researching News of a Kidnapping. Two years later he revealed that he had given Brooke and other journalists the slip and talked to Jorge Luis Ochoa by himself. He didn’t want his sources to be “burned” nor Ochoa to give a false version of their meeting.

  Suddenly, just as García Márquez was looking forward to the publication of Of Love and Other Demons, Mexico, his refuge, his place of stability, began to implode, and Carlos Salinas, his great friend, began to move into difficulties that would eventually be greater even than those recently suffered by the hapless Carlos Andrés Pérez in Venezuela. First, down in Chiapas, in the Mexican south, a new indigenist movement, the Zapatistas, inspired by a mysterious and charismatic guerrilla leader known as “Comandante Marcos,” began to catch world headlines and Salinas seemed to be caught off guard and to have little idea what to do. But then, even more dramatically, the governing PRI’s official candidate for the upcoming elections, Luis Donaldo Colosio, a good friend of García Márquez’s, was assassinated in the north of the country, the first politician of his stature to die in this way since the bloody revolutionary period in the 1920s. Salinas himself was suspected by many observers of having planned the murder of his own successor, placing García Márquez in a situation not entirely different from the one he had faced four years earlier in Havana when his friend Tony la Guardia was executed by his friend Fidel Castro. He had got very close to Colosio and had high hopes that the somewhat unorthodox candidate might take the country in a more progressive direction. For the first time García Márquez broke his personal rule—and Mexico’s laws—by issuing a statement on the event and calling for calm in this country he loved.31 Colombia, Cuba, Venezuela, now even Mexico, all his citadels were falling: it was back to Macondo with a vengeance.

  And García Márquez himself was wondering whether he had started on a decline of his own. He was interviewed in March and April by David Streitfeld of the Washington Post as the last preparations were made for the publication of Of Love and Other Demons. Streitfeld noted that García Márquez’s books were obsessed with death and so was their author, who felt that if he stopped writing he might die: “In more ways than the cancer, his body is beginning to betray him. ‘It’s curious,’ he says, ‘how one starts to perceive the signs of growing old. I first started to forget names and telephone numbers, then it became more encompassing. I couldn’t remember a word, a face, or a melody.’”32 No doubt this helped to explain why writing his memoirs had recently come to seem a much more pressing task than before.

  On 22 April, in the midst of so much political chaos, Of Love and Other Demons was published. Its launch coincided with the Bogotá Book Fair, where his old friend Gonzalo Mallarino made an impassioned speech exalting his friend’s new novel. García Márquez had reached the summit of his powers, he declared.33 He had dedicated the novel to Carmen Balcells, “bathed in tears.” Once again it was set in Cartagena: late in 1949 a young journalist, working for a newspaper whose editor is Clemente Manuel Zabala, is sent to investigate a story. The old convent of Santa Clara is to be converted into a de luxe hotel and some of the oldest tombs have been opened for relocation. (García Márquez was making his peace with Cartagena past by mentioning—acknowledging—Zabala; and he was imagining his way in to Cartagena present because his new house was to be built right across the street from the old convent.) In one of the tombs there has appeared a skull with a torrent of bright red hair that has continued growing for almost two centuries and is now more than twenty-two metres long. The young journalist decides to investigate the case. The result is this novel.

  The novel imagines that one December, late in the colonial period, a rabid dog bites several people in the market at Cartagena, including a girl with long red hair called Sierva María, who is just about to celebrate her twelfth birthday. Although her father the Marquis of Casal-duero is one of the wealthiest men in the city, he is also a weakling and has allowed Sierva María,
unloved by her mother, to be brought up in the slave yard. Despite the fact that rabies does not develop, the Catholic Church believes that she is possessed by the devil—she has merely taken on African beliefs—and urges the Marquis to have her exorcised. She is taken to the convent of Santa Clara for supervision and the Bishop brings in one of the up-and-coming experts on possession and exorcism, Cayetano Delaura, a theologian and librarian destined, it is said, for the Vatican. The girl will never see the streets of Cartagena again.

  Delaura, who has no experience or understanding of women, has a dream about the girl even before he meets her. She is in a room—which in his dream is the room he had as a student in Salamanca—looking out on a snow-covered landscape and she is eating grapes from her lap that never run out; if they did she would die. The girl he meets the next morning, tied hand and foot because of her rages, is exactly as he dreamed her. His first reaction is to tell the Abbess that the treatment she is suffering would turn anyone into a devil. His second reaction is to become obsessed with the child and to begin to explore the forbidden books in the library that only he is permitted to see. He finds a secret entrance to the convent, and begins to visit Sierva María every night, reciting poetry. Finally he declares his true feelings, embraces her, and they sleep together without quite completing the sexual act. But in April, nearly five months after she was bitten by the rabid dog, the process of exorcism begins. Her hair is cut off and burned. The Bishop officiates in front of all the authorities and nuns but collapses; Sierva María naturally acts like one possessed. Delaura’s misdeeds are discovered and he is condemned by the Inquisition as a heretic—which of course he is: indeed, he is guilty and Sierva María is innocent—and he is condemned to spend many years in a lepers’ hospital. Sierva María waits for him in vain and after three days she refuses to eat. She never understands why Delaura did not come back, but on 29 May she in her turn dreams about the field of snow but now she eats the grapes two at a time in her fever to get to the last one. Before the sixth exorcism she is dead but her shorn head is bursting with hair again.