Gabriel García Márquez

by Gerald Martin

  García Márquez decided not to return to Colombia for the first round of the elections in May. But he did send a televised message from his house in Mexico City explaining why he was supporting second-time Conservative candidate Andrés Pastrana and committing himself to “camellar con Andrés” (“slog with Andrés”). García Márquez supporting a Conservative! What would Colonel Márquez have said! The living members of his family viewed his gesture with disapproval and indeed stupefaction. But Pastrana was said to be close to the Miami Cubans and perhaps García Márquez thought that, in this and other ways, he might help with the Cuban situation. In return, García Márquez was supposed to be helping with education, officially Pastrana’s principal policy concern after concern number one, a peace process with the guerrillas.

  García Márquez was savagely though reluctantly criticized by the Liberal press. “D’Artagnan” wrote a coruscating piece in El Tiempo which was evidently intended as an epitaph to the García Márquez who had intervened in Colombian politics up to this moment but was now apparently deceased. How much influence he would really have upon Pastrana’s administration is questionable. Neither he nor Andrés were seen “slogging,” whether together or separately.10 Gaviria, ever the clear-eyed pragmatist, tried to get Cuba voted back into the Organization of American States after a thirty-four-year absence but the resolution was vetoed, predictably enough, by the United States. This stymied Pastrana in advance—he was probably immensely relieved—and meant that García Márquez’s strategy for Andrés’s time in office was dead in the water before he even began, which no doubt explains why he would show such little interest in Colombian affairs over the next four years despite his promises of commitment. Clinton was interested not in improving relations with Cuba but in Pastrana’s “peace process,” with its promise of an end to the drugs trade, and in the autumn the President of the Inter-American Development Bank, a frequent visitor to García Márquez’s house in Mexico City, made a huge loan to Colombia to produce “peace through development.”11 Over the next four years, in the midst of all the local and international dramas, Pastrana would be one of the most honoured and fêted guests in Washington. On 27 October he made the first state visit by a Colombian president in twenty-three years, with García Márquez in attendance, surrounded by an eclectic collection of American “Hispanics” and “Latinos,” mostly musicians and actors.12 Such ceremonial would be Pastrana’s reward for his prior agreement to Clinton’s “Plan Colombia,” an anti-subversion policy reminiscent of Cold War strategies, a topic on which García Márquez made no explicit public statement at this time, though he must have been deeply embarrassed by it.

  Having been deprived of his television slot at the end of 1997,13 García Márquez made an almost immediate decision to purchase Cambio, a magazine originally connected to the Spanish magazine Cambio 16, so influential during the Spanish transition in the 1980s. Cambio (“Change”—which happened to be Andrés Pastrana’s only slogan during his election campaign) was in direct competition with Colombia’s most influential weekly political magazine, Semana; it was something like the competition between Time and Newsweek. García Márquez heard that Patricia Lara, a good friend and colleague of his brother Eligio, was prepared to sell the magazine and he and María Elvira Samper, ex-director of QAP, Mauricio Vargas, Germán Vargas’s son (an ex-member of Gaviria’s government and a known critic of Samper), Roberto Pombo, a journalist on Semana, and others decided to make a bid (one which included Mercedes in her own right). By Christmas the deal was done—the new company was called Abrenuncio S.A. after the sceptical enlightened doctor in Of Love and Other Demons—and by late January García Márquez was beginning to write long headline articles—mainly about big-name personalities like himself (Chávez, Clinton, Wesley Clark, Javier Solana)—in order to boost sales. Larry Rohter of the New York Times talked to him the following year and recorded that “the night in late January 1999 that Cambio held a party to celebrate its rebirth, he stayed at the event until midnight, greeting two thousand invited guests. He then returned to the office, working through the night to write a long article about Venezuela’s new President, Hugo Chávez, which he finished as the sun was rising, just ahead of deadline. ‘It’s been forty years since I’ve done that,’ he said, delight in his voice. ‘It was wonderful.’”14

  The Chávez issue of the magazine was particularly revealing. Colonel Hugo Chávez was the soldier who had tried to overthrow García Márquez’s friend Carlos Andrés Pérez. But he was also the man who, after coming to power in Venezuela, would come to the rescue of Castro’s Cuba in the new millennium by holding Fidel’s head above water through the sale of reliable cheap oil. Moreover he was a “Bolivarian” who argued for the independence and unity of Latin America and he was prepared to put Venezuela’s money where his mouth was. Since García Márquez was also working behind the scenes to help Cuba and unify Latin America, Chávez might have been expected to receive his full, albeit discreet support. But García Márquez was never more than lukewarm about Chávez, perhaps because he was compromised by his prior relationship with Pastrana and Clinton—whereas Chávez’s anti-Americanism was both permanent and virulent. García Márquez had met up with Chávez in Havana in January 1999 and had flown to Venezuela with him on his way back to Mexico. Afterwards he wrote a long article which was syndicated all over the world—making a lot of money for Cambio—and became very influential. It ended:

  Our plane landed in Caracas at about three a.m. I looked out of the window at that unforgettable city, a sea of light. The President took his leave with a Caribbean embrace. As I watched him walk away, surrounded by his guards with all their military decorations, I had the odd feeling that I had travelled and talked with two quite separate men. One was a man to whom obstinate good fortune had given the opportunity to save his country; the other was an illusionist who could well go down in history as yet another despot.15

  In fact García Márquez had been in Cuba with Castro—and the now equally ubiquitous José Saramago, a Nobel Prize winner who had remained a communist and an outspoken revolutionary—celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the Cuban Revolution. Fidel, wearing glasses, read out a speech saying that the world, in the era of multinational capitalism (for the magnates) and consumer capitalism (for their customers) was now “a gigantic casino” and the next forty years would be decisive and could go either way, depending on whether people realized that the only hope for the planet to survive was to end the capitalist system.16 Who knows what García Márquez thought of this, but his eyes looked those of a sick man, distant and distracted. Nevertheless he was putting in a huge effort to try to increase Cambio’s disappointing sales. An article even more widely distributed than the one on Chávez was “Why My Friend Bill Had to Lie,” which dismayed feminists around the world since instead of concentrating on the malign aspects of the Republican conspiracy to impeach Clinton, it cast him as just a typical guy pursuing sexual adventures—as all typical guys evidently did—and trying to conceal them from his wife and everyone else.

  In Havana García Márquez had listened to Fidel calling for an end to capitalism, which was, he had said, entering the final stages of its devastation of the planet. Yet now, back in Europe in the last year of the twentieth century to meet yet another clutch of commitments and interview celebrities for his Cambio pieces, García Márquez became involved in a new organization, a strange mélange of intellectuals and magnates, which would be known as Foro Iberoamérica, whose ostensible purpose was to think about world development problems “outside of the box.” A kind of preliminary meeting was organized by Unesco, the Inter-American Development Bank and the new Spanish government in Madrid. It was in part a continuation of the García Márquez-Saramago show. In his brief contribution García Márquez declared that Latin Americans had lived an inauthentic destiny: “We ended up as a laboratory of failed illusions. Our main virtue is creativity, and yet we have not done much more than live off reheated doctrines and alien wars, heirs of a hapless C
hristopher Columbus who found us by chance when he was looking for the Indies.” He again mentioned Bolívar as a symbol of failure and repeated what he had said in his Nobel speech: “Let us get on quietly with our Middle Ages.” Later he read out one of his new stories, “I’ll See You in August,” a tale about adultery surely quite inappropriate for such a forum.17 Saramago, playing the role García Márquez used to play, proposed that everyone in the world “should become mulattos” and then there would be no need to argue about culture.

  Weeks later García Márquez would find himself back in Bogotá attending the honorary enrolment of Carlos Fuentes and El País’s owner Jesús de Polanco in Colombia’s Caro y Cuervo Institute of Philology. He sat on the platform looking older than he had ever looked before, but said nothing. And then, just as in 1992, he found that the Bogotá altitude had triggered a level of tiredness he had not been aware of in Europe. And he collapsed. He disappeared from the public radar for some weeks, while Mercedes denied rumours of cancer and asked the press to be “patient” for a while. At first it was reported that he had some bizarre malady called “general exhaustion syndrome.” But everyone feared the worst. In the event the diagnosis was lymphoma, or cancer of the immune system.

  Once again he had fallen ill in Bogotá and once again Bogotá had diagnosed his illness. This time however, given the gravity of the diagnosis, he went to Los Angeles, where his son Rodrigo lived, for a second opinion. Lymphoma it was. The family resolved that the treatment should take place in Los Angeles and García Márquez rented, first an apartment, then a bungalow in the hospital grounds. New treatments for lymphoma were constantly emerging and the prospects were quite different from the time when Alvaro Cepeda had to confront a similar challenge in New York. García Márquez and Mercedes called on Cepeda’s daughter Patricia, a translator and interpreter who had already helped them on previous visits to the United States, most notably for the meetings with Bill Clinton. Patricia was married to John O’Leary, a Clinton associate and fellow lawyer who was a former ambassador to Chile. Each month García Márquez, following his treatments and subsequent tests, would, as he later said to me, “go off to see the doctor to find out whether I was going to live or die.” But each month the reports were good and by the autumn he was back in Mexico City and making monthly visits to Los Angeles for check-ups.

  In late November 1999 I flew to Mexico City to visit García Márquez. He was thinner than I had ever seen him and very short of hair. But he was full of vigour. I reflected again that throughout his life he had said that he feared death and yet he had shown himself one of the great fighters when the chips were really down. The meeting was emotionally charged because he knew that I had fallen sick with lymphoma four years before and survived.18 He had done nothing for months, he told me, but now he was looking again at his notes for his memoirs, and he read out to me the narrative of his birth. Mercedes exuded calm and determination but I could see that the effort was straining even her resources. Still, she was made for this situation and was clearly surrounding her husband with normality, including the normality of not making a fuss. Gonzalo and his children visited, and Grandfather behaved just as he always did.

  García Márquez had recently told The New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson that “Plan Colombia,” agreed between Clinton and Pastrana, “could not work” and that the USA seemed to be moving back to an “imperial model.”19 In September he had threatened to sue the news agency EFE for 10 million dollars for reporting that he had “helped to negotiate U.S. military aid to Colombia.”20 Presumably this was his way of signalling his public separation from Pastrana and Clinton and their fateful “Plan.”21 Now he said to me: “As for Colombia, I think I’ve finally got used to it. I think you just have to accept it. Things are getting perceptibly better just at this moment, even the paramilitaries have realized that this can’t go on. But the country will always be the same. There has always been civil war, there have always been guerrillas, and there always will be. It’s a way of life there. Take Sucre. Guerrillas actually live in houses there, yet everyone knows they’re guerrillas. Colombians come and visit me here or in Bogotá and they say, ‘I’m with the FARC, how about a coffee?’ It’s normal.” I took this to mean that he was finally renouncing the effort to change this incorrigible country through direct political activity, not to mention an implicit recognition that to place his own reputation in the hands of political conservatives—in this case Pastrana and the American Republicans who had taken Clinton as their political prisoner—had been a step too far, as most of his family and many of his friends could have told him. Ironically the illness now provided a cover for a discreet withdrawal from these unhappy alliances. Time to turn back to his memoirs, perhaps.

  He wrote occasional articles and kept in contact with Cambio and the Cartagena journalism foundation but mainly he stayed in Mexico City, kept out of the limelight and concentrated on his recovery and his visits to Los Angeles, where he and Mercedes were able to spend more time with Rodrigo and his family. Gabo and Mercedes also developed a close relationship with Cambio journalist and investor Roberto Pombo, who had married into the El Tiempo dynasty and was currently posted in Mexico City. He would be like a third son to Gabo and Mercedes over the coming decade. García Márquez would write increasingly autobiographical articles for the magazine—as well as an interview with Shakira—and would have a “Gabo Replies” section where he would compose an article inspired by readers’ questions. These articles would then be repeatedly advertised in the magazine and offered on a permanent basis to those who browsed the elecronic version on the Internet.

  But of course his main activity would be the memoirs. He had often joked that by the time people got round to writing their memoirs they were usually too old to remember anything; but he had not mentioned that some people died before they even started the job. Completing the memoirs, now known as Living to Tell It (Vivir para contarlo), became his principal objective. Perhaps he remembered Bolívar’s dilemma near the end of The General in His Labyrinth: “He was shaken by the overwhelming revelation that the headlong race between his misfortunes and his dreams was at that moment reaching the finish line. The rest was darkness. ‘Damn it,’ he sighed. ‘How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!’”

  He tried to keep out of politics but occasionally Cambio dragged him back in. It was edging perceptibly to the right in his absence, but so, the young journalists might have retorted, was he. Chávez was going from strength to strength as a populist leader of the Third World but García Márquez told me, “It’s impossible to talk to him.” Evidently Castro did not agree, since he and Chávez met and talked frequently. When I put this to him, García Márquez said, “Fidel’s trying to control his excesses.” Chávez would say in late 2002 that García Márquez had never made any contact with him since their meeting early in 1999 and that he much regretted this. Since Chávez was not so very different from Omar Torrijos of Panama—except that Chávez was much more powerful because he had oil and was democratically elected—it seems likely that beyond personal questions (including his friendships with Carlos Andrés Pérez and Teodoro Petkoff) García Márquez considered him too much of a loose cannon for the new era and for the behind-the-scenes diplomacy that he himself had been engaged in for the last decade.

  One example of this was the news in November 2000 that the Mexican industrialist Lorenzo Zambrano of Monterrey, the king of Mexican cement (CEMEX), was to donate $100,000 for prizes to be awarded to winners of competitions organized by the Foundation for a New Ibero-American Journalism in Cartagena.22 Weeks later it was announced that media giant Televisa was to work with Cambio to produce a Mexican edition directed by Roberto Pombo. This was García Márquez’s world now. The inauguration of Mexico’s new right-wing President Vicente Fox coincided with a meeting of the Foro Iberoamérica, which this time involved not only García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes again, as resident intellectuals, but also Felipe González, ex-President of Spain; Jesús de Polanco, the owner of El País
; international banker Ana Botín; Carlos Slim, the richest man in Mexico and destined to be the richest man in the world, for a while, by mid-2007, another personal friend of García Márquez; and Julio Mario Santo Domingo, the richest man in Colombia, yet another friend of García Márquez, now the owner of El Espectador and another generous donor to the Cartagena foundation. Whether García Márquez, as the president of an independent journalism foundation, should really have been hobnobbing with monopoly capitalists who happened to own great newspapers and television stations as part of their other holdings was not clear and has certainly never been publicly addressed by him. He now normally refused all comment to the press but remarked that he’d had no idea what he or anyone else was doing at the forum until he heard Carlos Fuentes’s excellent speech explaining the importance of an interface between the world of business and the world of ideas! As for Mexico, he hadn’t the faintest notion what was going on. He further entertained journalists by declaring that he was now just “the husband of Mercedes,” which some took as recognition of his new dependence on her and his gratitude for the way she had seen him through his recent and ongoing trials.23 He had recovered most of his hair and fifteen of the twenty kilos he had lost, though observers whispered that he had not recovered his sharp wits and full powers of expression. Perhaps the chemotherapy had accelerated the process of memory loss which he himself had been complaining about for some years.