Gabriel García Márquez

by Gerald Martin

  On 19 July El País carried a photo of the old man in Mexico City with the caption: “García Márquez does not allow himself to be seen. It is increasingly rare to see García Márquez at any public event.”31 On the occasions when he did appear, he refused all comment to the press. Evidently what El País really meant to say was: “Is there something wrong with García Márquez? Why is he hiding himself away? Is he ill? Why won’t he speak? Is he losing his memory? Is he finished?”

  Meanwhile the memoir was published in English and French. Same cover. Same family photographs in the surrounding publicity. Not quite the success of the Spanish-speaking world but a very good reception in the English-speaking world, though much less so in France. To coincide with its publication, the New York PEN Club organized a special homage to García Márquez on 5 November 2003. Given PEN’s traditions of protecting free speech and the human rights of authors, this was a surprising decision in view of the onslaught, not least from Americans, against García Márquez over his Cuba links earlier in the year. One of the main organizers was Rose Styron, who was not only a friend of ex-President Clinton—who made a video presentation—but had also been at the fabled “Camelot” dinner for artists and intellectuals put on by President Kennedy and Jackie in the early 1960s.32 Many of New York’s top glitterati, literati and illuminati were present and must have been extremely disappointed by García Márquez’s failure to turn up even at this event. He was not entirely well, that was true; but he was also extremely disillusioned by developments in U.S. society and by U.S. policy both in Colombia and in the Middle East during George W. Bush’s presidency. He sent a party-pooping message to the act of homage which was not only undiplomatic—and ungrateful—but also one of the most pessimistic declarations ever made by this relentlessly upbeat personality. It was not a time, he said, for celebrations. Despite this, in January 2004 One Hundred Years of Solitude became an “Oprah Book” recommended by Oprah Winfrey’s mass-viewing television talk show in the United States. It leaped from number 3,116 in the sales list to number one.33

  García Márquez felt unable to ignore big long-term commitments he had accepted in Mexico and attended most of them but still without any press declarations. He would just turn up like some benign old white-haired wizard and sit on the designated platform or hand over the appropriate prize. He still took part in such Cambio meetings as were held in Mexico, and Roberto Pombo looked after him there just as Carmen Balcells looked after him in Spain and Patricia Cepeda in the United States.

  He had been hoping to be more energetic and adventurous. He and Mercedes had recently changed apartments in Paris. They had given up the small place in Rue Stanislas and bought a bigger one on the Rue du Bac, one of Paris’s most sought-after streets—right under Tachia’s. So now he owned the apartment beneath her in a curious kind of fidelity to an ill-starred love which had become a difficult and uncomfortable kind of friendship. He would have very few opportunities to visit the new apartment but his son Gonzalo and family set up there for a while when they moved from Mexico to Paris in 2003. (Gonzalo wanted to take up painting again.)

  He had set aside the memoirs but he had been planning a novel entitled Memoria de mis putas tristes (“Memoir of My Sad Whores,” though eventually translated into English as Memories of My Melancholy Whores) for many years, at least a quarter of a century. When I saw him in Havana in 1997 it was the book he was currently thinking about and when we talked a year later it was clear that the book was well advanced. It is most likely that a first version was completed long before he published Living to Tell the Tale and that few significant changes were made between autumn 2002 and autumn 2004 when it finally appeared. Conceived originally as a long short story, it is hardly more than a novella but was publicized and sold as a novel.

  In October, as the new work was being anticipated all around Latin America, he returned to Colombia and press photos showed him walking the streets of Cartagena, looking lost and confused, with Mercedes, his brother Jaime, now working for the journalism foundation, Jaime’s wife Margarita, and Jaime Abello, the long-term director of the foundation. Many people had predicted García Márquez would never return to Colombia again. They were confounded. And yet the old magician did not look entirely himself.

  When the new novel finally appeared most of its readers were totally disconcerted. Simply told, it is the story of a man about to celebrate his ninetieth birthday who decides to have a night of passionate sex with an adolescent virgin and pays the madam of a brothel he used to frequent to arrange it for him. Although he does not take the girl’s virginity he becomes obsessed with her, gradually falls in love with her, and decides to leave her all his property. The man presents himself as utterly mediocre, a bachelor newspaperman who has never done anything of interest in his entire life until, at the age of ninety, he finds love for the first time. Strikingly, it is García Márquez’s only novel set in Barranquilla, though the city is not named.

  It seems likely that instead of an image, the usual inspiration for García Márquez’s novels, this one began with its striking title, which stuck in García Márquez’s consciousness and waited down the years for the chance to become a novel. Yet the title is a problem. First, obviously, it is shocking (and presumably meant to be). “Puta,” “whore,” though more literary than “prostituta,” “prostitute,” is also less neutral and more derogatory. Some television and radio stations in Colombia refused to allow the word puta to be uttered by their presenters. Secondly, the title bears no precise relation to the content of the book: the novel itself insists that what we have here is a “love story” and the only “whore” with whom the narrator has any sexual relation is the fourteen-year-old girl with whom he becomes obsessed and who appears never to have had a previous sexual relationship of any kind, paid or unpaid. Nor, as far as can be divined, is she “melancholy.” (Nor, come to that, is she ever awake.) The title is best understood as a line written embodying the distinctive poetic conceit, known as hyperbaton (the separation for effect of words that normally go together), of the influential Spanish Golden Age bard Luis de Góngora (1561–1627). If the line were by him the informed reader would deconstruct it as “My Sad Memories of Whores.” Or even: “I, Sad, Remember Whores.” Not that this resolves the problem of the plural: the only two whores in the main body of the novel are Delgadina, the girl, as mentioned, and Rosa Cabarcas, the madam (unless, and this would be profoundly significant, as we shall see, the title also includes a brief reference in the narrative to an ex-prostitute called Clotilde Armenta and, more specifically, the two-line reference to another madam, Castorina, at the very end of the book). A García Márquez on top of his form would have resolved the reader’s perplexities: here he (the intended reader is probably a he) is left with the impression that he has been conned by a title that suggested an altogether racier book. Though many readers may reflect that this one is quite racy enough.

  García Márquez always acknowledged that the book was inspired by Yasunari Kawabata’s The House of the Sleeping Beauties, about an establishment where old men go to lie alongside drugged prostitutes whom they are not allowed to touch.34 (The epigraph itself is from that novel.) Yet the effect of this acknowledgement may be to conceal the fact that sexual relations between mature men and inexperienced adolescents are a recurrent motif in García Márquez’s work.

  There are two social phenomena here which usually coincide but are analytically separate. The first is the attraction men feel for the woman as “girl,” the adolescent barely old enough or even (in the case of Remedios in One Hundred Years of Solitude, for example) not old enough to have sexual relations. (On the whole the more conventional Don Juan character would prefer to seduce older females, not least those who, married or betrothed, belong to other men.) The second is the obsession with virginity. In Chronicle of a Death Foretold virginity, or the honour and shame syndrome associated with it, is the central focus of the drama; but the female protagonist, Angela Vicario, is not an adolescent. In Love in the Time
of Cholera, however, Florentino Ariza, a man by then in his seventies, who manages to retain the affection of most readers, has a sexual relationship with his fourteen-year-old niece and ward, América Vicuña (the same initials as Angela Vicario), though—to be fair to him—he also has sexual relations with every other kind of woman imaginable.

  The best-known exposition of this topic in all of literature is Nabokov’s Lolita, a controversial work if ever there was one. But why is the theme so prevalent in Latin American literature? (Not that an obsession with schoolgirls is confined to Latin American men.) It is often used in Latin American fiction as a symbol of the discovery and conquest of the continent itself, as a taking possession of the unknown and unexplored, as a desire for newness, for all that has not yet been exploited and developed. But this can hardly explain the apparent strength of the impulse in Latin American men themselves, beyond any literary fancy. One possibility is that although young women have always been seduced, violated or bought by older, wealthier and more powerful men in all cultures, adolescent boys in Latin America have typically had their first sexual experience with an older woman, usually a servant or a prostitute, and that many of them go on yearning for the first experience with an innocent and untutored adolescent that they never had when they themselves were still innocent and untutored adolescents. Romeo and Juliet has not traditionally been a theme common in Latin American literature or indeed in Latin American society itself.35

  García Márquez decided to marry his own wife when she was nine (or eleven, or thirteen, the age varies). Clearly he gets some ironic or even perverse pleasure out of the mere assertion that she was only nine (as does Mercedes herself). But perhaps the real instinct was neither ironic nor perverse; perhaps he wished to reserve her in advance, to keep her, pure and unsullied, all for himself and for always. (Dante, of course, was happy to leave Beatrice unsullied even by himself.)

  When García Márquez first discussed this novel with me he was seventy. But María Jimena Duzán—a friend of García Márquez’s who became a journalist as a teenager—remembers him telling her about the project in Paris when he was fifty.36 By the time the book was published he was nearly eighty. And his protagonist was ninety. Almost uniquely in modern literature, this extraordinary novelist had been writing about old people since he was a very young man. And the older he has got the more he has written about the attractions of very young women. Perhaps it is not surprising that a boy for whom his grandparents were so very important should have become obsessed with contrasts of youth and age (the very stuff of fairy stories). There is a remarkable contrast between the cover of Living to Tell the Tale, with the photograph of one-year-old García Márquez in sepia used in all editions across the world, and the Spanish-language edition of Memories of My Melancholy Whores, which has a photograph of an old man dressed all in white shuffling away, possibly off-stage, perhaps into the great beyond: as if turning his back on life for the last time (though the novel itself defies such an interpretation). It is impossible not to think of the many retired colonels who appear down the years in García Márquez’s fiction; but the picture also looks eerily like that same García Márquez, his body slimmed, his hair thinned, his powers waning, who had sat revising that novel before it was delivered to the press. Whether anyone had consciously planned this contrast we do not know.

  Because the novel is written in the first person it has an interesting impenetrability quite foreign to most of García Márquez’s novels. Here no irony—the distance between the narrator and the character—impels us towards a critique or even a reliable interpretation of the protagonist. When the narrator—let us call him by his nickname, Mustio Collado, since we never learn his real name—writes on the first page that for his ninetieth birthday he decided to give himself a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin, we seem to get no clue as to how to react. When he talks of his morality and the purity of his principles we do not know whether to judge him from where we are today or whether to begin to accept that in his society (1950s Barranquilla) there would have been no necessary contradiction for a middle-class journalist like him to speak in this way.

  Collado has never in his life had sex without paying for it. He dislikes complications and commitments. The girl procured for him is just fourteen, seventy-six years younger than he is. She is working class, her father is dead, her mother an invalid; evidently she has no older brothers; she is very dark skinned, has a pronounced lower-class accent, and works in a clothing factory. Collado wishes to think of her as a fantasy lover, a living but unconscious doll. He calls her Delgadina—somewhat grotesquely, since the Spanish ballad of that name is about a perverse and ruthless king who wishes to violate his own helpless daughter; but Collado doesn’t see the irony. One morning the girl leaves him a message on the mirror of their hotel room: “For the ugly papa.” 37 He doesn’t wish to know her real name (still less her real self).

  Eventually, after a series of melodramas triggered only by the old man’s needs and fantasies, he decides that he truly loves the girl and makes all his possessions over to her in his will. He does not die on his ninety-first birthday, as he has come to fear, and the next morning goes out into the street feeling radiant and confident that he will live to be a hundred. (Naturally the reader reflects that the best thing for the girl would be for him to die at once.) “It was, at last, real life, with my heart safe and condemned to die of happy love (not crazy love) in the joyful agony of any day after my hundredth birthday.” It is the young who die for love in García Márquez’s books: love keeps the old alive.

  In fact there are two other possible readings not yet mentioned by critics. First, that the once invulnerable, exploitative and inhuman old man is now susceptible because of “love” and is taken for a ride, with or without the girl’s knowledge, by the “malign” madam, Cabarcas, who has turned the impoverished Delgadina into a whore; and that she is still deceiving him between the end of the action of the novel (now most likely with the girl’s knowledge) and its writing. The novel never addresses the fact that absolutely everything the protagonist knows about Delgadina (other than the fruits of his pornographic fumblings and paedophiliac fantasizings) comes through the mediation of the brothel-keeper, who may have made up the girl and her love for her customer like any writer of romans roses or Hollywood movies, giving her audience—Collado—exactly what he desires. And of course Collado rejects all real details about the girl; he simply and quite explicitly doesn’t want to know. If this secondary plot is intended to be the primary—or corrective—plot, then the novel acquires a dimension of self-critique that is really very interesting. The least that can be said is that it converts the silly old fool into an object of contempt (though not pity), certainly for the reader and possibly for both the reader and the writer.

  The other reading (not necessarily excluded by the first) is that Collado is a damaged personality. At the age of eleven he is introduced involuntarily to sex by an older woman who is also a prostitute, in the very building—in the book—where Collado’s father worked (which happens to be the building—in reality—where García Márquez cohabited with prostitutes when he worked for El Heraldo: the “Skyscraper”). The experience first traumatizes the boy and then turns him into a sexual addict. Since it was, apparently, Gabriel Eligio who organized a similar and a similarly traumatic experience for Gabito at a similar age, and since García Márquez has chosen to situate this—explanatory, exculpatory?—episode close to the very end of the book, it is possible that it is meant to provide an explanation for the old man’s inability to love or develop close relationships, for his obsession with prostitutes, and for his paedophiliac desire for that young virgin with whom, perhaps, he would like to have had his own first sexual experience if time could somehow be conjured anew and he could go back to his adolescence. If this were the case, it would inevitably induce the reader to ask himself whether the same analysis is to be applied retrospectively to the similar fantasies in all this author’s earlier novels; in which c
ase this one, narrated by a protagonist now “free at last of a servitude that had kept me enslaved since the age of thirteen,”38 would be as ruthlessly self-exposing and self-critical as The Autumn of the Patriarch, written thirty years before. It would also suggest that the García Márquez who consciously forgave his father in the writing of Living to Tell the Tale continued, perhaps unconsciously (perhaps not), to blame him for childhood traumas whose effects were prolonged into adulthood. In short, just as in the memoir, written at the age of seventy-five, he had returned to the idea that Luisa Santiaga, who had abandoned him, feared he might not know her, so in Memories, written at the age of seventy-seven, he returns to the idea that the father who took his mother away when he was a baby subsequently perverted his sexual being when he was just beginning adolescence.

  Memories is possibly García Márquez’s least-accomplished novel. But, as in all of them, even through the relative flatness and banality of the narrative here, a radiance of the imagination, and occasionally of the poetic faculty, shines through as it were from behind the silver screen. By this writer’s standards the book is weak, sometimes even embarrassing—in short, unfinished. But nevertheless, given the profundity of his underlying vision of the world, it has—because of its potential, which allows each reader to complete the story in the way that he or she desires—as many levels of ambiguity, ambivalence and complexity as any of his others—more than Of Love and Other Demons, for example; more also than Chronicle of a Death Foretold—because this book has both an unashamed and unattenuated flirtation with fantasy and a conventional moral dimension that most of the others quite deliberately lack. It is a fairy tale, albeit a disconcertingly lurid one.