Gabriel García Márquez

by Gerald Martin

  Truth to tell, hardly anyone had been responding fully to the new era. It was a lot for the world to ask of an old man, though García Márquez was certainly asking it of himself. This was an age of good literature but not an age of great works. In fact, since as long ago as the Second World War, there had been few writers—indeed few artists in any genre—about whom the public and the critics had been able to agree in the way that they had agreed, and still agreed, about most of the great artists of the modernist period between the 1880s and the 1930s. García Márquez was one of the few names, and One Hundred Years of Solitude one of the few titles, on everyone’s list of great writers and great works in the second half of the twentieth century. And he had added Love in the Time of Cholera, which also regularly appeared in charts of the “top fifty” or “top hundred” novels of the twentieth century. Could he add another? Should he even try?

  Certainly he wanted to go on. He had said he had “come out completely empty” after two of his books, One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera.1 Somehow he had always found the determination, and eventually the inspiration, to find new topics and new forms and come up with the next project, a book that first he wanted to write, then needed to write, then absolutely had to write. Now was no different; he was still looking. Indeed, he told his interviewers that he wanted to “go back to fiction.” As usual he had a project. He had three short novels which together, he thought, might make an interesting book, another book about love; love and women. He told El País: “I’m surrounded by women. My friends are mainly women, and Mercedes has had to learn that that’s my way of being, that all my relationships with them are just harmless flirtations. Everyone knows by now what I’m like.”2

  He added that he was beginning to lose his memory, on which his entire life and work had been founded. (This had happened to the autobiographically inspired protagonist of The Autumn of the Patriarch.) Yet ironically the shredder was the machine most used in his house. Lately, though, he had retrieved the drafts of Of Love and Other Demons and given them to Mercedes as a present. He seemed unaware that drafts had lost much of their magic—including financial—in the age of the computer because the computer conceals most genetic traces. Indeed, the evolution from handwriting to typewriting to computer production was one part of the explanation for the fading of the authorial aura in the mind of readers, and perhaps even for a loss of conviction in the mind of authors themselves. García Márquez had resisted this process better than most. And the destruction of most of his preparatory or unfinished works fitted his own strong conviction that it was the job of the artist to produce fully finished works on the classical model, though he would not have wanted to put it that way.

  Retirement was a topic that was in the air and the omens were all bad. It was the autumn of all the patriarchs. Samper was obdurately refusing to resign, even though millions wanted him to do so. Carlos Andrés Pérez had been forcibly retired. Carlos Salinas had managed to see his term of office through but had been obliged to leave the country, threatened with jail or worse. No one had been able to force Fidel Castro into retirement but he would shortly be reaching three score and ten; the revolution itself was growing old and who could possibly replace him? Tellingly, García Márquez, instead of attending the launch of his book in Bogotá, went to visit another reluctant retiree, Felipe González, who, beset by allegations and scandals, had been voted out of office in Spain after thirteen years in the presidential Moncloa Palace in Madrid. García Márquez hastened to the Moncloa as soon as he arrived but the President was not at home and the writer found him alone with his bodyguards in the national park of Monfrague, like one more García Márquez character bereft of his power and glory.3 The last time they had met González had said, as they embraced: “Heavens, man, I think you are the only person in Spain who wants to embrace the President.” Now he declared himself relieved to be out of the job and on his way to retirement. He was about to be replaced by right-wing leader José María Aznar.

  After an extended stay in Spain García Márquez travelled to Cuba to celebrate Fidel Castro’s seventieth birthday with him. It was another autumnal event, not dissimilar to the visit to Felipe González. Fidel was not thinking of retiring but he was in an unusually reflective mood. He, who lived so much in the future and so, in order to get there, had to conquer the present minute by minute, was for once thinking about the past, his own past. He had said he wanted no special celebrations but Gabo had declared that he and Mercedes would travel to Cuba anyway. Prompted by this insistence Fidel, who could not celebrate his birthday officially on the actual day—13 August—due to pressure of work, nevertheless turned up at García Márquez’s house that evening and was given his present, a copy of the new dictionary produced by Colombia’s linguistic institute, the Instituto Caro y Cuervo. Then, two weeks later, Fidel revealed a surprise of his own: he took Gabo and Mercedes, a few close associates, a journalist and a cameraman to Birán, the tiny town where he was born, “a journey into his past, his memories, the place where he had learned to speak, to shoot, to breed fighting cocks, to fish, to box, where he had been educated and formed, where he had not been since 1969 and where, for the first time in his life, he could stand in front of the graves of his parents and offer them some flowers and a posthumous homage which until that moment he had been unable to carry out.” Fidel escorted his guests around the town, went back to the old schoolhouse (he sat in his old desk), remembered his boyhood activities (“I was a cowboy, much more than Reagan because he was just a movie cowboy and I was a real one”), recalled his mother’s and father’s characters and eccentricities, and then, satisfied, declared: “I have not confused dreams with reality. My memories are free of fantasy.”4 García Márquez, who had been writing up his own memories lately—and in particular his return with his mother almost half a century before to the place where he was born—must have been given much food for thought.

  In September, back in Cartagena, García Márquez spent some time at his new house. By now it was an open secret that he did not feel at home there, and not only because he and Mercedes were overlooked by the Hotel Santa Clara: they just didn’t feel comfortable; in fact, they just didn’t like it. An Argentinian journalist, Rodolfo Braceli, who had interviewed Maruja Pachón about her experiences in 1990–91 and about their representation in News of a Kidnapping, used his contact with her to find his way to an irritated but nonetheless forthcoming García Márquez, who was becoming increasingly reflective and philosophical in his interviews these days, like an old soldier out on a limb and at a bit of a loss: interesting and informative, even analytical but no longer focused on the one campaign that excluded all others—the next one—no longer as single-minded as in the past.5 He mentioned again that he was beginning to forget things, especially phone numbers, even though he has always been a “professional of the memory.” His mother now sometimes said to him, “And whose son are you?” Then other days she would get her memory back almost entirely and he would ask her about her recollections of his childhood.6 “And now they come out more because she’s not hiding them, she’s forgotten her prejudices.”

  He told Braceli he had a lot of friends suddenly turning seventy and it had come as a surprise: “I’d never asked them how old they were.” His personal feeling towards death, he said, was: “fury.” He had never seriously thought about his own death until he was sixty. “I remember it exactly: one night I was reading a book and suddenly I thought, hell, it’s going to happen to me, it’s inevitable. I’d never had time to think about it. And suddenly, bang, hell, there’s no escaping it. And I felt a kind of shiver… Sixty years of pure irresponsibility. And I solved it by killing off characters.” Death, he said, was just like the light going off. Or being anaesthetized.

  Clearly he was in a meditative, autobiographical mood—though the tendency had been evident, at least incipiently, since the end of Alternativa and the beginning of his weekly column in El Espectador and El País. Although he had destroyed most of
the written traces of his private life and even of his professional literary activity, he had increasingly been thinking more about two particular aspects of his work. First, the how and the when, the technique and the timing. Clearly he was a master craftsman and increasingly aware that not everyone could tell stories the way that he or Hemingway could tell stories. Hence his script-writing “workshops” in Havana and Mexico City and now his journalism workshops in Madrid and Cartagena. Both were about story-telling: how to break reality down into stories, how to break stories down into their constituent elements, how to narrate them so that each detail leads on naturally to the next, and how to frame them in such a way that the reader or viewer feels unable to stop reading or watching. Second, the what and the why: he was averse, through his sense of “shame and embarrassment,” to emoting and introspection. But for some years now he had been taking more interest in identifying the lived raw materials of his own experience, which had been processed in different ways and for different literary and aesthetic purposes in his works down the years. It was, in part, a way of controlling his own story, of making sure that no one else could shape it without accepting most of his own interpretation. He had been controlling his image for thirty years; now he wanted to control his story.

  In October García Márquez travelled to Pasadena, California, for the 52nd Assembly of the Inter-American Press Association (SIP), where there were two hundred newspaper owners present, together with Central American Nobel Peace Prize winners Rigoberta Menchú and Oscar Arias, as well as Henry Kissinger. Luis Gabriel Cano of El Espectador was elected next president of the organization and it was agreed that the next meeting would be held in Guadalajara. García Márquez, very concerned to front his new journalism foundation, gave a keynote speech declaring that “journalists have become lost in the labyrinth of technology”: teamwork had become undervalued and competition for scoops was damaging serious professional work. There were three key areas that needed attention: “Priority to be given to talent and vocation; that investigative journalism should not be considered a specialist activity because all journalism should be investigative; and ethics should not be an occasional matter but should always accompany the journalist as the buzz accompanies the fly.”7 (This last phrase would become the motto of his journalism foundation, the FNPI. Its key slogan would be: “Not just to be the best but to be known to be the best.” Very GGM.) García Márquez’s speech, like his new foundation, was mainly concerned with what individual journalists should do to improve their professional and ethical standards, whereas in the 1970s he would have been concerned in the first instance with the ownership of the press. But he was moving now in a different world. Probably only he would have even tried to carry off this double life whereby he debated the problems of the bourgeois press in formally democratic countries whilst loyally supporting the one country in the hemisphere, Cuba, where there had never been a free press and never would be while Castro was in power. And García Márquez’s syndicated articles were regularly reproduced in Havana in Granma and Juventud Rebelde. It was all much more difficult in an era in which he could no longer use the excuse of socialist objectives and the need to build a socialist economy. But if he had still been talking about all that, even supposing he had wanted to, he would not have been able to mix with magnates—one of his biggest donors would be Lorenzo Zambrano, a cement monarch from Monterrey—and would not have been able to persuade them to lay out their money.

  Samper had announced before Christmas that he was bringing in a new television law which would set up a commission to decide whether channels were fulfilling their remit to be impartial. Everyone supposed that before long he would be cancelling QAP’s licence to broadcast—QAP was one of Samper’s most ferocious critics—and García Márquez would therefore be at the mercy of power for the first time since 1981. He went out of his way to announce that he would not be celebrating his seventieth birthday in Colombia. On 6 March he, Mercedes, Rodrigo and Gonzalo and their families would spend the day at a secret location away from the country.8 Inevitably his seventieth birthday had been registered in all the Hispanic newspapers. Now One Hundred Years of Solitude’s thirtieth birthday was also registered. Any excuse to get the name García Márquez in the newspapers; because he sold newspapers just as he sold books. Now it turned out that despite his insistence that he did not want “posthumous homages while I’m still alive,” he was intending to emphasize his absence from Colombia even more spectacularly by accepting a multiple anniversary celebration in Washington—of all places—in September, using the fiftieth anniversary of his first published story as the point of reference. Normally such celebrations in Washington would require cooperation, organization and ratification from the honoree’s national embassy. But García Márquez not only had an ongoing relationship with the man in the White House down the road but was also a close friend of the Secretary General of the Organization of American States, an institution in which even the USA, however hegemonic, was only primus inter pares. And it was Gaviria, by now disgusted with what he considered to be the embarrassment of Samper’s government and infuriated at what he considered to be Samper’s frittering of the inheritance that he, Gaviria, had left him, who used his contacts to arrange a series of events in honour of García Márquez which would culminate in a party at his own residence and a dinner at Georgetown University, with García Márquez and Toni Morrison, another Nobel Prize-winning novelist, as twin guests of the university Rector Father Leo Donovan.

  The anniversary tendency had been developing down the years in Western culture as the great millennium approached. 1492, 1776, 1789: in the conditions of postmodernity these dates were becoming the temporal equivalents of theme parks. And in this sphere of things, García Márquez was well on his way to becoming a theme park all of his own, a monument without parallel in the literary world since Cervantes, Shakespeare or Tolstoy. He had become aware of it himself very soon after the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude, a book which had changed the world for all those who read it inside Latin America, as well as for many outside. Little by little he became aware that it was he who was the golden goose; the “frenzy of renown” that surrounded him was so furious, so contagious that in the end, for all his plans and stratagems and manoeuvres, it really didn’t matter what he did: he had entered the spirit of the age and he had also risen above and beyond the spirit of the age, into immortality, eternity. Marketing could work at the margins to increase it or diminish it but his magic was autonomous. He would be hard pressed to prevent the rest of his life from being one permanent celebration of his life, one long happy anniversary. How could he escape from this labyrinth? Did he any longer want to?

  On 11 September he visited Bill Clinton for lunch at the White House. Clinton had already read News of a Kidnapping in manuscript but now García Márquez presented him with his personalized leather-bound copy of the English edition, “so it won’t hurt so much.” (Clinton had sent García Márquez a note when his publisher sent him the manuscript copy of News, “Last night I read your book from start to finish.” One of García Márquez’s publishers wanted to use this priceless puff on the cover when the book was eventually published. García Márquez responded, “Yes, I’m sure he’d agree; but he’d never write me another note.”) The two men discussed the Colombian political situation and, more generally, the problem of drug production in Latin America and drug consumption in the United States.9

  And still Samper would not budge. A few weeks before the jamboree in Washington García Márquez had met up with the rising politician in the Santos family, Juan Manuel, to discuss the still-deteriorating Colombian situation. Santos had declared that he would be putting himself forward as a Liberal candidate for the next presidential elections in 1997. Whether they were conspiring, separately or together, to bring Samper down, only they could know, but they produced a “peace plan”—Santos, under pressure, would eventually say it was García Márquez’s idea (“We have to do something daring, we’ve got to get everyo
ne talking so as to share out the defeat, because we are all of us losing this war”)—which would involve negotiations between all sectors of Colombian society: except the Samper government! Yet Santos denied, when the plan was unveiled in the second week of October, that he was trying to bring the government down. He and García Márquez flew to Spain—García Márquez went straight from Washington to Madrid—to talk to ex-President Felipe González (thereby snubbing the new right-wing President José María Aznar). However, Felipe González effectively killed the initiative by saying that he would only back it if Samper agreed to the negotiations and the United States and other powers gave their support.

  In January 1998 Pope John Paul II, now old and sick, made his long-heralded visit to Castro’s Cuba, the result of arduous and difficult negotiations. (García Márquez had assured me in 1997 that the Pope was “a great man” whose biography I should read.) It was of course Fidel’s way of showing that Cuba, while maintaining its revolutionary principles, was capable of flexibility—he had even allowed Christmas to be reintroduced, on a one-off basis—and might be prepared to negotiate with the powerful of the earth. And who should be sitting at Castro’s side during the events involved in the visit but Gabriel García Márquez. Despite his long and extremely successful record of anti-communist activism, the Pope was also known to be anti-capitalist in many respects and firmly against the decadent aspects of the new consumer societies, which made his visit seem a risk worth taking. Unfortunately for Cuba and Castro, the event, which looked as if it might give Cuba huge amounts of favourable publicity, not least in the United States, was blown off the world’s television screens by the breaking scandal of Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. It was a double disaster: disastrous because the Pope’s visit never did make the global impact it might have done; and disastrous because Clinton, García Márquez’s friend, would be hugely weakened politically by the scandal and the subsequent moves to impeach him. Clinton would have to sit out the rest of his term, almost helpless, in just the way that Samper was doing. The ironies were unmistakable.