Gabriel García Márquez

by Gerald Martin

  This book is a further sign of García Márquez’s engagement with Cartagena. Love in the Time of Cholera may be interpreted as a re-encounter with his father, and with Colombia’s past, as well as an exploration of the conflict between marriage and sexual adventurism; above all, a book about the suburb of Manga, where his parents lived and where he had recently bought his mother an apartment. Of Love and Other Demons is about the old walled city, where García Márquez was having a new “mansion” built as he wrote the book; thus both novels have to do in an oblique way with his properties and his power. This time he was recovering the whole of Colombian history back to the late colonial period. The work has a sort of bleak, heavy authority—like some works by Alvaro Mutis—with few light features. Love in the Time of Cholera was written before the historic disasters of 1989; Of Love and Other Demons, though set in the colonial period, is conceived from the world after 1989 and is a much darker work. For all his optimistic declarations about the future, there is little doubt that in his deeper feelings García Márquez saw a world going backwards for the first time in two hundred years: backwards, in some respects, before the French Revolution and the Enlightenment, backwards before Latin America’s independence from Spain (now being reversed, at least in the economic sense), and backwards from the dreams of the socialist revolution of 1917. He was writing in a world where no revolution seemed conceivable and a Bolivarian conception that political action in Colombia is futile would again begin to dominate his thinking.

  The use of dreams in this work—using elements of García Márquez’s own adolescent experience (his exile from home to a school in icy climes, his trunk, his book without a cover, his terrifying nightmares)—is stunning. The end of the novel, like De Palma out of Hitchcock, makes the blood run cold and reminds the reader that when this writer is fully focused, his powers of evocation are second to none. The last pages give the work a retrospective brilliance which it has perhaps not entirely earned. In particular, perhaps the greatest miracle, as the reader also noticed on the last page of The General in His Labyrinth, is how the writer gives us what we have come to expect—the same themes, albeit arranged in a different design, the same subjects, same structure, same style, same narrative technique—including what, perversely and paradoxically, we want most of all: to be stunned by the manner in which, within the familiar, this writer can nevertheless surprise us yet again in ways we somehow expect yet can never entirely anticipate. Like a journey on a literary roller-coaster, with the biggest churn of the stomach at the very end of the ride.

  The book was generally well received, not least by academics, who were pleased to see García Márquez rather deliberately taking up the academy’s current “postmodern” preoccupations with feminism, sexuality, race, religion, identity and the legacy of the Enlightenment as it related to all these questions. Jean-François Fogel declared in Le Monde that García Márquez remained “one of the few novelists capable of evoking love without irony or embarrassment.”34 A. S. Byatt in the New York Review of Books described the novel as “an almost didactic, yet brilliantly moving, tour de force.”35 Peter Kemp in the London Sunday Times spoke of incredible events narrated in a calm style: “At once nostalgic and satiric, a resplendent fable and a sombre parable, Of Love and Other Demons is a further marvellous manifestation of the enchantment and the disenchantment that his native Colombia always stirs in García Márquez.”36 Despite everything, “Márquez,” as most English-speaking reviewers insisted on calling him, had woven his “magic” yet again.

  AT THE TIME Of Love and Other Demons was published in Colombia, García Márquez made a visit to Spain to resume his practice of being elsewhere when a book of his was launched. He visited Seville again for the spring fair and attended some of the traditional early season bullfights. Rosa Mora of El País caught up with him in April and he told her that he had been working on his memoirs, especially the story of his return to Aracataca with his mother: “I think that everything I am came out of that trip.”37 But the memoirs had come to a halt again and in any case he was resolved that his next book should be some kind of reportage. Not only was he missing journalism, he said, but he had Unesco backing for one of his most cherished projects, a journalism foundation which would challenge the work of modern schools of communication since these, in his perception, “mean to do away with journalism.”

  In recent years more journalists had been killed in Colombia than almost anywhere else in the world. There were also, unfortunately, many more spectacular and usually tragic stories to report in that country than almost anywhere else in the world. Nowhere had a higher murder rate; and almost nowhere else could boast Colombia’s toxic and terrifying mixture of terrorism, drug-trafficking, guerrilla warfare and paramilitary activity, combined with police and military responses that at times were almost as violent as the ills they were seeking to eradicate. César Gaviria was at the end of his hallucinatory four years in government and had striven heroically to prevent the country from sliding into outright anarchy but the next government, due to be elected in May, also had a nightmarish challenge on its hands. And of course García Márquez was working, still secretly, on a book (“some kind of reportage”) which would be based on the period just past. But he was not yet ready to make a full announcement because in this case it was absolutely crucial to conceal and protect his sources.

  In June, back in Latin America, he was present at the 4th Ibero-American Summit of all the leaders of Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula, held in Cartagena. Gaviria had arranged the venue as outgoing President of Colombia. The King of Spain, Felipe González, Carlos Salinas de Gortari and Fidel Castro, as well as Gaviria, were all present at the meeting in what was now effectively García Márquez’s home town. All of them, even the King, were men García Márquez by now considered “friends”; though some Colombians sniped that García Márquez seemed to be a member of the Cuban delegation and indeed he offered himself as bodyguard to Fidel Castro: “I was there because it was rumoured they were going to try to assassinate Fidel. And Cuban security was not going to let Fidel take part in the parade, so I offered to accompany him in the horse-drawn carriage. I told them that here in Colombia, if I went with him, no one would dare to fire. So five of us got in the coach, all squeezed in together and joking about the situation. Just as I was telling Fidel I was sure nothing would happen, the horse reared up.”38 At this summit Carlos Salinas had proposed an “Association of Caribbean States,” to include Cuba. Fidel said that since Cuba was always excluded from everything, “by the will of those who run this world,” he much appreciated the invitation.39 And García Márquez was gratified that he was able to show the Cuban leader some results from all his energetic diplomatic activity.

  Two weeks later the final round of the Colombian elections was held. The two candidates were Liberal Ernesto Samper and Conservative Andrés Pastrana. It was revealing about Colombia that Pastrana, a former mayor of Bogotá, son of a former president, and a well-known television news anchor, had been thought a certain dead man when he was kidnapped by one of the drug cartels in 1988, while Samper, who had just finished a term as Colombian ambassador in Madrid, had barely survived a hail of bullets at the airport of El Dorado in Bogotá the following year. Samper should have been a natural ally of García Márquez. He was on the left of the Liberal Party, he was the brother of his old friend Daniel Samper (a journalist with Alternativa and El Tiempo), and García Márquez had invited him and his number two Horacio Serpa to meet Fidel Castro in Cuba in March 1987. But that meeting had not gone well.40 As a populist Samper was more hostile to Castroism than a more conservative but also pragmatic politician such as Gaviria had proved to be. Samper was also a tough, sceptical, obdurate machine politician, very popular in the provinces despite his Bogotá background, with priorities that were different from those of García Márquez.

  In the event Samper won the election but Pastrana cried foul immediately, having been passed a tape recording by the American secret services which seemed
to suggest that Samper’s campaign manager had received a significant contribution from parties connected directly to the drug-trafficking cartels. This provoked a political and indeed constitutional crisis such as even Colombia had rarely experienced in its history and it would dog Samper’s entire four-year term as President. As a matter of fact it was never certain that he would actually manage to complete his period in office. García Márquez would always deny that he was opposed to the new President at the beginning of his administration but he would never give his unconditional support to Samper and indeed was already building his relationship with younger politicians such as Juan Manuel Santos, another “dauphin” of the El Tiempo dynasty, who had been Minister of Foreign Trade during the Gaviria period and had been designated by the outgoing government to greet the distinguished guests when they arrived at the Ibero-American Summit. García Márquez considered Santos a future president of Colombia and began to cultivate him. Santos would become one of Samper’s most formidable enemies—and from within his own party.

  García Márquez took a team from Paris Match to see his new house being built in Cartagena and told them that he had been “waiting thirty years to build the perfect house in the perfect place.”41 Now at last his dream was coming true. Unfortunately a shadow, literally, had been cast over his plans. The Santa Clara convent, scenario of Of Love and Other Demons, had been converted into the five-star hotel the novel had mentioned fictionally when it was written in 1993, and all the rooms on the western side of the building directly overlooked García Márquez’s new home, still under construction, notably the terrace and the swimming pool.

  On 7 August 1994, the day of Samper’s inauguration, García Márquez and Mercedes sent the new President a message of congratulations and best wishes, which was reprinted in the press, but it did not take a very suspicious mind to see that this was not an especially warm greeting and that it implicitly anticipated difficult times for the new government. Indeed, as the newspaper headlines revealed, it was a kind of warning: “Mr. President, take good care of your senses.”42 Events were taking on, undoubtedly, a Shakespearean turn. Things had been going so well for García Márquez recently, and they had started so badly for Samper almost from the day of his inauguration, that it is possible that the normally circumspect García Márquez began to overreach himself from the very beginning of Samper’s term.

  However in September, at last, he finally gained access to the very centre of power on the planet when he and Carlos Fuentes were invited by Fuentes’s friend William Styron to meet Bill and Hillary Clinton at Styron’s house at Martha’s Vineyard. The owners of the Washington Post and New York Times were also present. García Márquez was hoping to talk about Cuba—only the week before he had persuaded Fidel to allow dissident writer Norberto Fuentes to leave the country—but unfortunately for him U.S.-Cuban relations were then going through one of their worst phases and it is said that Clinton refused to discuss Cuban affairs.43 They did discuss the Colombian crisis, however, and García Márquez made some defence of Samper and urged Clinton not to punish Colombia for Samper’s possible misdemeanours. Something the American President and the three writers were able to agree on, in a highly cordial meeting, was their shared enthusiasm for the work of William Faulkner. Fuentes and García Márquez were astonished to hear Clinton recite whole passages from The Sound and the Fury entirely from memory. As for Cuba, Clinton would find himself unable to resist the pressure from the Miami Cubans and a virulently anti-communist Republican Senate and would be forced to allow ever-harsher sanctions against the island state. There is little evidence that García Márquez’s future relationship with the most powerful man on the planet brought positive results either for Cuba or for Colombia, though there is no doubt that in terms of his own glamour and prestige it was certainly good for García Márquez.

  The following month César Gaviria became Secretary General of the Organization of American States. Ironically enough Gaviria, a right-of-centre neo-liberal, found it difficult to pursue his own inclination of liberalizing hemispheric relationships with Cuba in the face of opposition from a Democrat President in the USA but he persisted in the endeavour. So now García Márquez had important relationships with the Secretary General of the Organization of American States, the Director General of Unesco, and the leaders of the United States, Mexico, Cuba, France and Spain. Only Colombia was missing. Meanwhile, on the occasion of Gaviria’s inauguration as Secretary General, Carlos Fuentes, always politically acute, said that Bill Clinton should “lose Florida but gain the world” and that Fidel Castro should “lose Marx but save the Revolution.”44 Neither man had any intention of heeding his advice.

  On 20 September Alfonso Fuenmayor, the last essential representative—and the very heart—of the Barranquilla Group, died in Barranquilla. (Germán Vargas had died in 1991 and Alejandro Obregón the following year.) From the time his old colleague and mentor fell sick García Márquez had kept away, saying that he was “too much of a chicken” to confront his friend in such a crisis.45 Perhaps his own illness had made him superstitious about coming too close to death. Fuenmayor’s son Rodrigo and Group members Quique Scopell and Juancho Jinete attended the wake alone, with two bottles of whisky standing between the three of them. This left as García Márquez’s most prominent old friend Alvaro Mutis, who was still going strong.

  In February García Márquez’s son Rodrigo married Adriana Sheinbaum in a quiet ceremony at the Hall of Record in East Los Angeles. The couple’s first child, Isabel, would be born on 1 January 1996 and the second, Inés, in 1998. The previous July García Márquez had assured Paris Match, “I have excellent relations with both my sons. They are what they wanted to be, and what I wanted them to be.”46 Rodrigo’s career as a film-maker in Hollywood would go from strength to strength.

  On 5 March García Márquez carried out his first-ever interview for television, with Jack Lang, in Cartagena. He chose Sergio Cabrera, director of the highly praised movie The Snail’s Strategy, as his cameraman. Lang was in his last days as a minister. François Mitterrand, now a very sick man, had survived to the end of his two seven-year terms; he would die on 8 January 1996. The French Socialist Party was about to be voted out of office and would never be elected again during the rest of Jack Lang’s political career. García Márquez’s contact with politicians in France began to wane.

  Now he formally launched his Foundation for a New Ibero-American Journalism, whose regular “workshops” would be held both in Barranquilla and Cartagena, though Cartagena would gradually assume precedence and become the operational centre. He loved the word “foundation,” like the word “workshop,” because, no doubt, they reminded him of his grandfather the Colonel, the man he always claimed had “founded” the town of Aracataca. This new foundation was García Márquez’s present to his adoptive Colombian city and the strongest symbol of his renewed commitment to the country and its well-being. (However, the foundation’s youthful director, Jaime Abello, was from Barranquilla, not Cartagena; the choice was certainly not accidental.) It would provide brief courses for young journalists from all over Latin America, with the incentive of García Márquez himself leading a significant number of them and other world-famous journalists such as Poland’s Ryszard Kapuściński and the USA’s Jon Lee Anderson also taking part.

  By the time Of Love and Other Demons was published García Márquez had lost patience completely with the new Colombian President. In an interview with Mexican journalist Susana Cato in Mexico he barely concealed his frustration and contempt for Samper. She asked, “What are Colombians thinking of doing so as not to arrive at the twenty-first century in the same situation they are in today?” García Márquez replied:

  How do you suppose we can think about the twenty-first century when we’re still trying to reach the twentieth? Just think that I’ve spent three years trying to make sure there is not a single false piece of information in a book about a country where we no longer know what is true and what is false. What future can there
be for fiction if a presidential candidate does not realize that his sacred advisors are receiving millions of dollars of dirty money for his campaign? Where his accusers are not taken seriously because in the midst of the many truths they told, they also told a lot of lies. Where the President in turn sets himself up as the accuser of his accusers with the argument that they really did receive dirty money but didn’t use it in their campaign because they stole it… In a country like that, goddammit, we novelists have no option but to look for another job.47

  It was a return to old arguments from a man protesting that he just wanted to record everyday naturalistic reality but that Colombia’s horrors went beyond ordinary notions of reportage. Macondo lived on.

  Things went from bad to worse. García Márquez became concerned that his bodyguards, supplied by successive governments ever since the Betancur regime, were now poorly and inconsistently managed. They were changed so often that in the end more than sixty men had an intimate acquaintance with his lifestyle and personal details. This, in Colombia, was a highly dangerous situation in which to find oneself and made him wonder how safe he was in the country. He and Samper had continued to talk, with tension constantly increasing between them—some said García Márquez was even drinking more whisky—until they met, for the last time, over Easter 1996, in the apartment of the ex-Mayor of Cartagena, Jorge Enrique Rizo. García Márquez told Samper, who was about to be judged by Congress, that the constitutional reforms he was considering might be thought to be an advance payment to the congressmen for absolving him. Stung, Samper replied, “It must be those Gaviria supporters filling your head with stories.” García Márquez then retorted, “Kindly pay me some respect. Why when I give an opinion that coincides with what you want to hear is it me that is thinking but when it doesn’t it’s the opposition brainwashing me?” Samper tried to smoothe it over but García Márquez was heard to mutter, “There’s no more to be done here.” From that moment he began to withdraw from active participation in the nation’s affairs and he and Samper would not meet again for many years.48