The attacker could also be attacked, however. Cuban exile Norberto Fuentes, who had been a good friend of García Márquez, and whom he had only recently persuaded the authorities to release from the island, had recently written the first of several articles in which he not only showed that he felt no sense of gratitude to García Márquez but violently excoriated him for his role in the Cuban set-up whilst minimizing the extent of his influence and his achievements.49 As usual García Márquez declined to reply. But in April he did something that astonished all who knew him by giving a talk at the Higher Military School in Bogotá. Amidst some uneasy jokes he told them, ominously, that “President Samper holds the future of this country in his hand.” He also said, perhaps not very diplomatically, “We’d all be a lot safer if each one of you carried a book in your rucksack.”50 He spent Easter with the disgraced Carlos Andrés Pérez in Caracas. Did Samper reflect that García Márquez had criticized the Venezuelans for trying to get rid of their President as some Colombians were now trying to get rid of him?
On 2 April, just as excitement was growing about Of Love and Other Demons, whose launch was scheduled for the Bogotá Book Fair in May, a previously unknown group based in Cali, which called itself the Movement for the Dignity of Colombia, kidnapped ex-President Gaviria’s brother Juan Carlos, an architect. It was not the first time Gaviria’s relatives had been targeted. Colombia’s problem, the group announced in a communiqué, was “not legal but moral.” Although evidently a right-wing organization, they quoted García Márquez himself as saying that Colombia was “in the midst of a moral catastrophe” and asked him to take over as President from Samper because, they said, he was one of the few people in Colombia with “clean hands.” They also demanded that César Gaviria should resign as Secretary General of the Organization of American States. Since García Márquez was only a month away from publishing his new book about the problems of contemporary Colombia, since one of the main subjects of that book was Gaviria’s hard line in resisting the pleas from the families of kidnap victims, and since Gaviria himself was one of García Márquez’s main informants, the ironies of the situation were overwhelming. Enrique Santos Calderón said in El Tiempo: “García Márquez has said in an interview with Cambio 16 that he feels he is living through his own reportage. And indeed one shivers to see ex-President Gaviria in the same situation today as the families of the hostages were at that time, or to see the current ‘kidnap tsar,’ Alberto Villamizar, doing the same as he did five years ago when he was trying to free his wife Maruja Pachón.”51
Villamizar and Pachón were the principal protagonists of García Márquez’s next book, News of a Kidnapping. He had not written a work about contemporary Colombia since the time of No One Writes to the Colonel, In Evil Hour and Big Mama’s Funeral in the 1950s. The most political of his historical novels, The General in His Labyrinth, had made him deeply unpopular with the Colombian ruling class at precisely the moment when he was considering returning to Colombia for the long term. He was never likely, ironically, to ingratiate himself with Cartagena upper-class society—an upper-class costeño was never going to respect one of lower-class origins—even though he had devoted three books in a row to their “Heroic City” and even though, and indeed partly because, he now had the biggest, most glamorous and expensive house in town.
No, Bogotá was his target in Colombia, even though he was always uncomfortable there. That was where the power in the country lay. In some respects his next book was written mainly about—possibly even for—the Bogotá-based ruling class. His old leftist supporters would mainly not find it to their taste, but the Bogotá bourgeoisie would find it impossible to reject. Since the death of Luis Carlos Galán, by no means the last but somehow the culmination and symbol of the wave of murders and kidnappings terrorizing the nation, many Colombians had begun at last to convince themselves that their country was indeed hopeless. Galán had repeatedly refused offers from Pablo Escobar to join his campaign and to fund it. García Márquez had not been an associate of Galán’s nor indeed ever an admirer of those, like him, who seemed to feel themselves destined by some spiritual or providential mission. (Only Fidel was entitled to that pretension.) Galán’s replacement César Gaviria also seemed too cool, too serious, too clean-cut, too straight for García Márquez; but both men had needed a powerful friend in 1990 and each had something to offer the other; moreover neither was from Bogotá.
In fact the new book was an astonishing achievement. It would have been a remarkable feat for any writer at any time and all the more so, therefore, for a man who was sixty-nine when he completed it. Critics had been saying for years that García Márquez’s talents were better suited to dramas set in the distant past and that he—like most novelists—was perhaps not equipped to write about contemporary issues. Besides, most observers felt it was almost impossible for anyone to make sense of the chaos that was Colombia in those years and that to create a coherent plot and construct a compelling narrative about it seemed beyond the powers of anyone. Yet when the book appeared even those who disliked its attitudes and point of view agreed that the great story-teller had done it again and produced a top-class page-turner. Indeed, many said that they had not been able to go to bed without finishing the book and some even confessed to the feeling that if they did not complete the novel in one sitting the hostages who were its central characters might not be able to escape from their predicament: such was the power of the narrative. An obvious first question, then, is whether García Márquez sacrificed complexity for clarity in producing his X-ray of the country.
Certainly the author set out to encapsulate Colombia’s labyrinthine complexity within the dramas of seven central characters. The first is the heroine, Maruja Pachón, journalist, director of the film foundation Focine, sister of Gloria Pachón (the widow of Galán and recent ambassador to Unesco). The second, the hero, is Maruja’s husband Alberto Villamizar, brother of the second hostage, Beatriz Villamizar, who is Maruja’s friend as well as her sister-in-law; Alberto does all he can to get his sister (released first) and his wife out of their nightmare predicament. Francisco Santos (generally known as Pachito) is the third major figure, a top journalist with El Tiempo and son of its director Hernando Santos. (Today he is the Vice-President of Colombia.) The fourth is Diana Turbay, a television journalist, daughter of ex-President Julio César Turbay; she is captured with several colleagues who are gradually released one by one; then, tragically, she is killed during the army’s ill-fated operation to rescue her. The fifth is Marina Montoya, sister of a key member of the Barco government, the oldest of the hostages, the first to be taken, and the only one, eventually, to be murdered by the drug-traffickers. The sixth central character is President Gaviria, who perhaps ought to be the hero of the narrative and in some ways, given García Márquez’s close relationship with him, it is surprising that he is not. And the seventh is Pablo Escobar, who hardly appears but is of course the villain of the piece and the evil genius behind the entire drama, a man for whom García Márquez undoubtedly has extremely ambivalent feelings, not excluding admiration. Numerous family members and their servants, numerous minor drug-traffickers and their subordinates, and numerous government ministers and other public servants (including General Miguel Maza Márquez, head of the secret police and a cousin of the author’s), also appear. García Márquez gathers them all together, organizes them and expertly orchestrates the re-telling of the appalling drama.
He states in his prologue that this “autumnal task” was the “most difficult and saddest of my life.” It is surprising, then, that a book about something with no happy ending for either Colombia or many of the protagonists (Marina, Diana, an unnamed and quickly forgotten “mulatto” hostage) should have a contrived happy ending due entirely to its focus on certain protagonists and García Márquez’s own desire to be a “bringer of good news.” It is as if his brilliantly executed work of political journalism had been hijacked—kidnapped?—by another book with all the requirements and preconcept
ions of the Hollywood thriller and with a soap opera ending. We are persuaded to care desperately whether Maruja survives, although her chauffeur is killed on the fourth page of the narrative—despatched as clinically by the narrator as the real driver was by his killers—and never mentioned again (the same goes for Pachito Santos’s chauffeur). From the standpoint of narrative effectiveness, it seems not to matter how many other, inferior people die as long as the stars survive. Indeed, within the conventions of the thriller, the death of some makes a necessary contrast with the much-desired survival of the fittest. This is the cruel, even heartless art of the narrator of this book. He is, surely, a long way from Zavattini; or even the Fellini of La dolce vita.
The basic conception is an alternation between odd-number chapters dealing with the hostages and their kidnappers and even-number chapters dealing with the families and the government. In essence the drama of the story is, first, the ordeal of the hostages and their efforts to survive, negotiating daily life with their guards; second, the efforts of the families to negotiate both with the kidnappers and with the government for the release of the hostages. At a deeper level of course the real struggle is between the “Extraditables” and the government, with the hostages and their families merely the pawns, but García Márquez turns it as far as possible into a “human-interest” story. He concentrates above all on the four key figures out of the ten hostages: Maruja, Marina, Diana and Pachito. Of the four only Maruja and Pachito survive, being released within hours of each other on 20 May 1991 at the end of chapter 11; Marina and Diana die within two days of one another (23 and 25 January 1991), after many months in captivity, in chapter 6.
Conceived as a love story involving a crisis (a damsel in distress), a heroic struggle (a knight) and a successful homecoming, the book really ends at the conclusion of chapter 11, with Maruja’s joyful return to her apartment block, greeted with euphoria by all her friends and neighbours, and then last, and ecstatically, by her husband. García Márquez evidently wanted to show that even in Colombia—perhaps even for Colombia—there could still be a happy ending. Escobar’s surrender and death is a mere postscript to this story, as is the return of Maruja’s ring by the kidnappers which ends the narrative, and the final statement by Maruja herself that “All this has been something that should be written in a book.” But the treatment of Escobar’s death is intriguing. In soap operas and thrillers the demise of the villain, especially a villain of Escobar’s dimensions, is really the climax of the work. But here one senses that Escobar’s death, treated cursorily, disrupts the very conventions it seems tailor-made to bring to a climax.
Like most of García Márquez’s previous works, then, News of a Kidnapping is not about the lower orders (even as long ago as In Evil Hour the sudden appearance of the uprooted poor people in el pueblo came as a shock) but that absence matters more obviously and more crucially here. This is a book almost exclusively about upper middle-class people, including a number of significant right-wingers (the fathers of Diana Turbay and Pachito Santos are people García Márquez had previously opposed and condemned). The columnist Roberto Posada García-Peña (“D’Artagnan”) of El Tiempo, himself the servant of this ruling class, would launch a violent attack on García Márquez for “paying tribute to the Bogotá bourgeoisie.”52
Almost as disconcerting, García Márquez entirely excludes the U.S. dimension from his book. It was the drug-traffickers’ horror of extradition to the USA—Escobar’s “better a grave in Colombia than a cell in the United States”—that determined the conflict which is the motor force of the events narrated in the book, and which of course requires some kind of anti-imperialist critique. But, in a work that even criticizes the guerrillas—despite his Cuban associations—for “all kinds of terrorist acts,”53 the U.S. dimension is not dealt with at all, so that the entire causal-explanatory structure of the novel is distorted and unfocused. This is certainly not a book whose author would be embarrassed when, soon after publication, he presented it to Bill Clinton and it is not surprising that Clinton eventually appreciated its “human” side; there is no other side to this story. Which poses the hardest question of all: is this book actually written for the Bogotá bourgeoisie and Bill Clinton (“Us” and the U.S.) and not for “us” (the readers) at all? Or, to put it another way, is it written for “us” the readers, just as soap operas are written for us, in order to make us content with our station and to make us believe that the rich and famous are “just human beings…” “like us”?
And yet there is always more than one way of looking at a matter. It was of course García Márquez’s first Bogotá-based book. It took stock of contemporary Colombia from the time he decided to “leave” Cuba around 1990 (though he never actually left) and he decided to “return” to Colombia (though he never fully “returned”). More than a taking of stock, however, it was also a taking of power. It was in a sense a display of sheer prowess and an implicit answer to all his Colombian critics. He didn’t live there? Well, had any other contemporary Colombian been able to draw together all the complexities of the country’s recent history and make them coherent and comprehensible, as he had? He was a vain courtier, fawning to power? Well, look what a direct relationship to power could do: here was a “journalist” who, thanks to his prestige, could reach any level of “contacts” and “sources,” and those who couldn’t reach them could never get the “full story” as he could. His writing was becoming hackneyed, self-repeating, self-quoting and self-indulgent? Well, this was what this elderly man—of nearly seventy—could do.
Snide editorials in El Tiempo like those that greeted The General in His Labyrinth would have been rather beside the point in the face of a work and a writer who had so patently taken symbolic possession of the country. So this time they were notable by their absence. García Márquez had not shown it but from the time The General was published he had waited seven years for his revenge, for the level of satisfaction which this book now gave him. There were no girlish interviews to the press expressing his “insecurity” about the new work, as there had been when Of Love and Other Demons was published. “Take that,” said the torero. Surprising as it may seem, Colombia at last belonged to García Márquez, at the age of sixty-nine, in a way it never had before. One Hundred Years of Solitude had made Latin America belong to him, even the world; but not Colombia. One Hundred Years of Solitude was “Macondo,” sure; but everyone in Bogotá and the other great cities of the interior (Medellín, Cali) knew that Macondo was the Costa and they did not include themselves among its referents. Now they themselves were less confident and complacent; and now García Márquez had finally taken in the whole of Colombia, not just the Costa. The backbiting would continue for ever—in the nature of political and social life—but with far less conviction. He was untouchable now. And he would be able to do almost anything he wanted.
The question can still be repeated: in writing News of a Kidnapping for the cachacos in part through cachaco eyes, did he, in effect, give in to them; did he undermine, at his moment of victory (or even because of the nature of that victory), his entire moral and political trajectory? Perhaps he had become conservative in that tired and depressing way that old men become conservative. Or perhaps he finally recognized “political reality” and in particular “political reality after the fall of the Wall.” Or perhaps all he now wanted politically was to see Fidel and the Cuban Revolution symbolically resist the historical labyrinth until the great final labyrinth left them no further options. Or perhaps, still, he was refusing all those encircling realities, all those options and interpretations; perhaps, in the only way he knew how, García Márquez was maintaining his own dream all the way to the end. Perhaps. Certainly this is the question.
Naturally the book went to number one in the best-seller lists as soon as it was published. Although the reviews were overwhelmingly positive there were a few extremely aggressive and even abusive demolitions, especially from the United States, quite different in tone from even the El Tiempo review
s of The General.54 But García Márquez had surveyed his options and he’d made his choice. We can be sure he was satisfied.
24
García Márquez at Seventy
and Beyond: Memoirs and
Melancholy Whores
1996–2005
NOW WHAT WAS he to do? The sixty-nine-year-old writer was still full of energy, still full of plans, still fascinated by politics and committed to “making a difference,” as Americans would say. But was he any longer a writer of fiction? The General in His Labyrinth was a historical novel, brilliantly fictionalized but still a historical novel. News of a Kidnapping, similarly, was a documentary novel, more documentary, indeed, than novel. The General, obviously, was about “then,” about how Colombia had started, two hundred years before; News was about “now,” about what Colombia had become. Both had been written with undeniable verve. But did García Márquez have within him another ambitious work of the creative imagination or was that great world-historical wellspring now effectively dry? The world was his oyster, no doubt about it, but it was no longer the world that had made him. Could he respond to this new world, this post-communist, post-utopian, postmodern universe that now lay before the weary planet on the threshold of the twenty-first century?
Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez Page 67