Gabriel García Márquez

by Gerald Martin

  He was well out of Colombia. His old friend Guillermo Angulo had been kidnapped by the FARC on the way to his country house outside Bogotá. Angulo, a man in his seventies, would be released months later; he told me he was sure García Márquez had something to do with his release, which was an exceptional event: most FARC hostages remained in captivity for years, like presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt.24 By the end of 2000 it was widely agreed that Andrés Pastrana was perhaps the weakest Colombian President of the post-1948 era. When an open letter was sent to Pastrana and George W Bush in February 2001 by luminaries such as Eric Hobsbawm, Ernesto Sábato and Enrique Santos Calderón, requesting that any joint Colombian-U.S. activity in Colombia should involve the United Nations and the European Community, the name of García Márquez was attached.25 Once again he was signalling his opposition to “Plan Colombia”: this meant burning his boats not only with Pastrana but also with Gaviria, who supported it.

  In March Comandante Marcos led his unarmed Zapatista guerrillas into Mexico City as he had long been promising. García Márquez, with the help of Roberto Pombo, briefly escaped from retirement to carry out an interview for Cambio. The Zapatistas, who had attracted left-wing sympathy and support from all over the world, including many political pilgrimages by well-known intellectual and artistic figures down to Chiapas, were not the kind of organization García Márquez any longer spent time supporting. Indeed his silence about the sufferings of ordinary people, not least the displaced peasants of Colombia, caught in a nightmare world between the guerrillas, the paramilitaries, the landowners, the police and the army, is something that cannot fail to disconcert anyone observing his activities over the course of the years after 1980. But this was not a man who had ever made crowd-pleasing political statements for the sake of his own conscience: he had always been a deeply political and practical person who did what he thought was necessary and not—contrary to the assertions of his critics—what he thought would make him popular.

  While García Márquez had been fighting his cancer his youngest brother Eligio had been fighting his own battles. Like Gabito he was struggling to finish a book, Tras las claves de Melquíades: historia de “Cien años de soledad” (Following Melquíades’s Clues: The Story of “One Hundred Years of Solitude”), while suffering from a terminal brain tumour. He was unable to finish the book as he would have wanted but he and his family and friends decided that it should appear before he died. By the time it was published in May Eligio was in a wheelchair and scarcely able to speak. He was the last of the Buendías and would die shortly after deciphering the family’s ancestral document, as had been uncannily predicted in One Hundred Years of Solitude. (Cuqui had been the first of the brothers and sisters to die, in October 1998.) Gabito did not find the strength to travel to Eligio’s funeral at the end of June.

  On 11 September the twin towers of the World Trade Center of New York were brought down by civil airplanes piloted by A1 Qaeda jihadists and world politics changed dramatically, accelerating on the path to war that George W Bush had already seemed determined upon, though this was not quite the script that Bush had envisaged. García Márquez had recently been to Cuba to see Fidel Castro, who was rumoured to be in declining health. Two weeks after the horrors in New York, and three weeks after the release of Guillermo Angulo, on 24 September 2001, Consuelo Araujonoguera, Colombian ex-Minister of Culture and wife of the Procurator General of the Republic, was kidnapped by FARC guerrillas near Valledupar; almost a week later, on 30 September, she was found dead, apparently caught in crossfire. Known to the whole of the country as “La Cacica” (“the chief”), she was the principal promoter of Valledupar and its vallenato festival, a friend of García Márquez, Alvaro Cepeda, Rafael Escalona (she was also his biographer), Daniel Samper (until they fell out over a television biography he wrote), and Alfonso López Michelsen. Bill Clinton had met her and would write about her in his memoirs. She was one of the last people anyone would have imagined being killed by those who claimed to be the defenders of the Colombian people and their culture.

  By January 2002 it was clear that García Márquez was going to make it. He was gradually returning to public life. Those who met him noticed that he was more hesitant, sometimes confused, lacking in memory, but looking well. For a man of his age—he would soon be seventy-five—and continuing commitments—he was still contributing to both Cambio and his journalism foundation—it was a remarkable recovery which testified again to his extraordinary vitality. That said, the delay in bringing out the memoirs suggested that he was not working as effectively as in the past. He had sent a first version to Mutis at the end of July 2001 but something had delayed his progress and he eventually called on his son Gonzalo and Colombian writer William Ospina to check facts and help fill the gaps in his failing memory. He was putting the finishing touches to the book when his mother, Luisa Santiaga Márquez Iguarán, died in Cartagena at the age of ninety-six. Her husband and two of her sons had died before her. Once again Gabito failed to make the funeral.26

  On 7 August Alvaro Uribe Vélez, a renegade Liberal, was inaugurated as President of Colombia on an anti-guerrilla ticket. FARC guerrillas—the FARC were alleged to have killed his father—fired rockets at him during his inauguration. Once again Horacio Serpa, the Liberal candidate and loyal servant of Ernesto Samper, had lost out. The country was glad to see the back of Pastrana but in Uribe it seemed to be taking a big risk. He was a landowner from Antioquia with rumoured links to paramilitary forces. Nevertheless he would govern with extraordinary, almost frenetic energy and with a style at once populist and authoritarian which would keep his ratings almost eerily high. His election left Colombia, in the era of Chávez, Lula of Brazil, Morales of Bolivia, Lagos and Bachelet of Chile, and the Kirchners of Argentina, as the country with the only significant right-wing government in South America—though Colombians were well used to being out of step. Uribe would be a close ally and supporter of George W. Bush.

  The time approached at last for the publication of the memoirs, which covered the period from García Márquez’s birth to 1955. At the last moment “Vivir para contarlo” (living to tell “it,” masculine, living to tell the act of living itself) changed to “Vivir para contarla” (living to tell “it,” feminine, living to tell “la vida,” life, the contemplation of life). The English translation, as usual, added an extra, romanticized dimension: “Living to Tell the Tale,” that is, surviving great adventures and then relating them—but not planning to do so in advance and not doing so as a way of life.27 Of course the English version had another point: these memoirs had been delayed by a drama, the drama of García Márquez’s fight against death, against cancer, and his heroic victory. Everyone, above all his readers, was aware of this.

  He had been talking about his memoirs ever since the publication of his great novel about Macondo. That should have given his readers the clue to his deepest motivation as a writer. Going back was all he ever wanted, writing about himself was all he ever wanted; Narcissus wanted to return to his own original face but even his face, lost in time, lost in all the times, was constantly changing, never the same, so even if he had found that original—eternal, oracular—face he would have seen it differently each time it appeared to him. But it was what he wanted. In 1967 people hearing him talk about his memoirs must have thought: this man hasn’t lived enough. But Narcissus has always lived long enough to want to see if his face is still the same. Yet if he never had his own mother tell him his face was beautiful, then he was doomed always to look for her, find her, go back with her. And so the book would start with Luisa Santiaga’s search for her lost son in Barranquilla in 1950, bringing poignant memories of another journey she had made some sixteen years before:

  My mother asked me to go with her to sell the house. She had come that morning from the distant town where the family lived, and she had no idea how to find me … She arrived at twelve sharp. With her light step she made her way among the tables of books on display, stopped in front of me, looking
into my eyes with the mischievous smile of her better days, and before I could react she said:

  “I’m your mother.”

  Thus at the age of seventy-five, Gabriel García Márquez begins the story of his life with a scene in which, once again, his mother is afraid that he will not know who she is and has to introduce herself to him. That re-encounter, he would claim—it is the central theme of the memoirs—took place on “the day I was really born, the day I became a writer.”28 It was the day he had got his mother back. And they had gone back home together. Back to the beginning.

  On the matter of his memoirs he had started to say a surprising thing to journalists as early as 1981: “García Márquez [has been] talking about his memoirs, which he hopes to write soon and which will really be ‘False Memoirs’ because they won’t tell what his life actually was, nor what it might have been, but what he himself thinks his life was.”29 Twenty-one years later he would be saying exactly the same thing. What on earth did it mean? Well, now he had an epigraph to clarify it: “Life is not what one lived but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.”

  Living to Tell the Tale turned out to be his longest book. Like all his others it falls neatly—less neatly than usual—into two halves but the structural proof that the exercise had caused him serious problems is that each of the two halves ends with the least interesting—to him and also, unfortunately, to us—section related to the land of the cachacos: firstly the Zipaquirá section, 1943–6, and secondly Bogotá and El Espectador, 1954–5.

  Though much of the writing is extraordinary it must be admitted that it is writing as wish-fulfilment: it conceals all the hurt (which is extraordinary given the way it begins). There are occasional digs at his father simply because of the character that he “is,” and not because Gabito himself feels any hostility or has any oedipal feelings or a world-view still shaped by the Márquez Iguarán side of the family. In general the book continues the sense of reconciliation—of making peace—initiated by Love in the Time of Cholera. Its author has been careful to send small—usually one-paragraph, sometimes one-line—compliments to all his friends and their wives or widows. There are no real intimacies or confessions. The book contains his public life and his “false,” invented life, but it does not contain much of his “private” life and very little indeed of his “secret” life.

  The central theme is the narrator becoming a writer through both a growing and irresistible vocation and an unusual and privileged experience of life. (And not, for example, the narrator becoming a writer who at the same time is developing a sophisticated and serious political consciousness which will inform and shape what he actually writes.) The irony, of which he seems unaware (by the time he finishes this book he has lost some of the acute awareness he used to have), is that the book—and his life—are formed by and dominated by the period before he became aware of the vocation and indeed, strictly speaking, by the period before he himself could even read and write. García Márquez is perhaps uncomfortable with the autobiographical genre itself. As a writer he is an extrovert, both declarative and a fabulist. But when relating his own life he has more of a psychic need to conceal than to exhibit. Moreover in a memoir it can be disastrous to claim to know what you don’t know—from which much of the humour of One Hundred Years of Solitude itself, for example, derives—or to assert facts which are contradictory. Similarly the trademarks of the García Márquez style—hyperbole, antithesis, sententiousness, displacement—are far more problematical in an autobiographical work. When all is said and done, we are left with the irony of a García Márquez who exposed himself utterly in the barely penetrable The Autumn of the Patriarch and now conceals himself absolutely in the apparently transparent Living to Tell the Tale!

  Of course it is obvious, on even the briefest of considerations, that García Márquez became obsessed by his memoirs not so much because of his alleged vanity but because it was the best way of combating his fame and his anguish by getting out his own story, his own version of his life and character. Despite the promise of the early pages, this was not a confessional work.

  On 8 October 2002 Vivir para contarla was published in Mexico City, with extraordinary fanfare and truly staggering advance sales. The magician was back again. Back, indeed, this time, from the dead.

  GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ WAS a great survivor by any definition. He had not only withstood the cancer treatments physically and mentally, he had completed the first volume of his memoirs—he really had lived to tell the tale—and had left an image of himself with which he personally was content and which, he knew, would also survive. The baby on the cover holding the biscuit was now a man of seventy-five and what a life he had led. It had taken him all those years to journey through the labyrinth we all of us have to travel, made up in part of the world and in part of our perception of it. García Márquez, looking back, had decided that he was born to invent stories and that he had lived more than anything else to tell the tale of existence as he himself had experienced it. The anxious child he had chosen to leave on that cover eternally looking for his mother had waited all those years to tell the world the story of how in reality he had found her again, got her back for ever, and how thereafter, born again as a writer, he had set out on the road that would make him a visionary who would enchant the world. It was tragically appropriate that it was at the very moment he started the final push to finish the work that she herself had lost her memory, and that at the moment he was putting the final touches to a book which was so much hers as well as his she should have passed on from the life he was there recording.

  That first part of the memoirs, in which—as a matter of fact—his mother found him (not the other way round) and told him who she was and took him back to the house where he was born, the house she had left while he was growing from baby to boy, is, truly, an anthology piece, a great work of autobiographical creation by any measure, a story told by a great classical writer of modern literature. Really, it was that story above all that he had wanted to tell; all the others faded when held against the vivid colours of that journey and the passions that inspired its telling. The rest of the book was a pleasure to read, García Márquez talking directly, at last, about his remarkable life and times, but nothing in its nearly six hundred pages would equal the radiant triumph of the first fifty. Of course of all his books it was the one most certain to disappoint the expectations of its readers. But once they had adjusted to the realization that autobiographies—even the autobiographies of literary wizards—are rarely as magical as novels, most of them found it satisfying and agreeable and a book they would read again, even if the experience of reading it was like the experience of a warm, comforting bath which eased away all the hard knocks and bruises of life while growing colder, all too soon.

  Within three weeks the book had sold an astonishing 1 million copies in Latin America alone. None of his books had ever sold faster. On 4 November García Márquez took a copy to President Fox in the palace of Los Pinos in Mexico City. Chávez of Venezuela had got hold of one and sent congratulations, waving it at the cameras during his weekly television broadcast and urging all Venezuelans to read it. On the 18th the King and Queen of Spain would land in Mexico City on an official visit; naturally they would make time for García Márquez. Presumably he gave them a copy.

  In December he travelled once more to the Havana Film Festival and saw Fidel and Birri and his other friends. When he got back from the festival in January he gave what would prove to be his last personal one-to-one interview, not a sit-down affair but a kind of ramshackle amble through his Mexico City home and out across the garden and into the study with an American photographer, Caleb Bach. His secretary Mónica Alonso Garay was close at hand. She said her boss had a prodigious memory but it was notable that she frequently jumped in to answer questions on his behalf. He talked to Bach about the photograph of himself as a baby he had chosen for the cover of Living to Tell the Tale. He was pleased with the result. He said he had a twenty-seven-
year-old parrot called Carlitos. And he revealed—having forgotten that he swore he would never do so—what his psychiatrist friend (Luis Feduchi) had told him in Barcelona in the 1970s that had made him give up smoking the same day he heard it: it would cause memory loss in later life …30

  In March 2003 the United States and Great Britain invaded Saddam Hussein’s Iraq without United Nations approval on the pretext that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (as the invaders themselves did, of course, though it turned out that Iraq did not) and that it was harbouring Al Qaeda militants (which it was not; but after the invasion it would). Some said that 9/11 had changed the world for ever; others said that the U.S. response to 9/11, of which the Iraq invasion was merely the most far-reaching act, had changed the world much more, only not in the way that the invaders intended but in the way that the perpetrators of 9/11 had intended. Shock and awe for the Iraqis; stupefaction and disbelief for the rest of the world, not least García Márquez. The BBC Latin American website carried an article on the challenges of covering the war entitled “Living Not to Tell the Tale.” The United States opened a new prison camp at Cuba’s Guantánamo Bay, a zone it had occupied, like the Panama Canal, since the start of the twentieth century; there hundreds of alleged Al Qaeda militants arrested in Afghanistan and Pakistan were imprisoned for years and possibly tortured without any form of trial, on that island where, the United States had always insisted, Castro’s government had jails where his opponents were imprisoned for years and possibly tortured without any form of trial. There were no human rights on the island of Cuba, they said. Newspeak. It transpired that the Bush government now had an official invasion plan for Cuba. Just as soon as they had dealt with North Korea, Iraq and Iran, the “Axis of Evil…”