One might say that in one way the ending takes García Márquez to the end of his literary and philosophical journey through life. When he realized, in his sixties, that he was going to die, he decided that he had to do everything fast, “without missing a strike.” When he contracted lymphoma in his seventies the compulsion became even stronger but he had to prioritize: thus because writing his memoir Living to Tell the Tale was, not altogether ironically, his most urgent objective, he forsook all other activities for a time and completed that book. By then it had become obvious that his memory was fading frighteningly fast and so he went into reverse, deciding that after managing to complete the autobiography he had to take things as they came. The narrator of Memories of My Melancholy Whores is in no hurry whatever at the end—we hurry on only to death—but is determined to live as long as possible and to take each day as it comes. Though he too has lived to tell his tale. The poignant, or paradoxical, side of this is that García Márquez only came to this patient wisdom—if wisdom it is—when physical reality no longer gave him any other choice.
John Updike, reviewing the book in The New Yorker in 2005, retrieved its possible motivations with his usual ingenuity and eloquence:
The instinct to memorialize one’s loves is not peculiar to nonagenarian rakes; in the slow ruin of life, such memory reverses the current for a moment and silences the voice that murmurs in our narrator’s ear, “No matter what you do, this year or in the next hundred, you will be dead forever.” The septuagenarian Gabriel García Márquez, while he is still alive, has composed, with his usual sensual gravity and Olympian humor, a love letter to the dying light.39
It turned out that García Márquez had two big reasons for returning to Cartagena at the time the novel appeared. There was to be another meeting of the Foro Iberoamérica. (His contributions to Cartagena’s conference and tourist income were by now considerable.) And before that the King and Queen of Spain were due in town. They arrived on 18 November and during their visit the old rascal engaged in social pleasantries with their Hispanic majesties and a possibly embarrassed President Uribe. If they asked him about the book he no doubt explained that it was inspired by the story of a Spanish princess sexually abused by her father the king. Of course he would have just been playing the fool. (Pictures of him sticking his tongue out at the proffered camera lens now regularly appeared in the newspapers.)
It seemed there were no more books to write. His new life—the end of his life, his retirement—could begin. In April 2005, after all the fears, and for the first time since he fell sick, he crossed the Atlantic, returned to Spain and France, and visited his apartments in Europe one more time. Again, the occasion of his journey was a meeting of the Foro Iberoamérica in Barcelona, a commitment that now seemed to outweigh all others. The press had been celebrating in advance that García Márquez was returning to Spain—this year was the 400th anniversary of the publication of Don Quixote—and particularly to Barcelona, where it was the Year of the Book. But when he arrived they reported that he seemed hesitant and even—it was implied—disorientated.
We had been out of contact for three years. I hesitated, then finally flew to Mexico City to talk to him in October. Mercedes had influenza so he came to visit me twice at my hotel. He looked quite different. He no longer had the appearance of the typical cancer survivor: he had still been shockingly slim and his hair was still short and thin when he completed Living to Tell the Tale in 2002. Now he looked as he always had; he was merely an older version of the man I had known between 1990 and 1999. But he was more forgetful. With suitable prompts he could remember most things from the distant past—though not always the titles of his novels—and engage in a reasonably normal, even humorous conversation. But his short-term memory was fragile and he was manifestly anguished about that and about the phase he seemed to be embarked upon. After we’d talked about his work and his plans for a while, he stated that he was not sure he would be doing any more writing. Then he said, almost plaintively: “I’ve written enough, haven’t I? People can’t be disappointed, they can’t expect any more of me, can they?”
We were sitting in huge blue armchairs in a secluded hotel lounge which looked out on Mexico City’s southern ring road. Outside was the twenty-first century, flying away. Eight lanes of traffic that never stopped.
He looked at me and said, “You know, sometimes I get depressed.”
“What, you, Gabo, after all you’ve achieved? Surely not. Why?”
He gestured towards the world beyond the window (the great urban thoroughfare, the silent intensity of all those ordinary people going about their everyday business in a world no longer his), then he looked back at me and murmured, “Realizing that all this is coming to an end.” 40
EPILOGUE
Immortality—The New Cervantes
2006–2007
BUT LIFE HAD NOT yet finished with Gabriel García Márquez. Though a few weeks after our last meeting in México City one might have thought so. In January 2006 he gave a surprise interview to Barcelona’s La Vanguardia newspaper—a surprise at least to those who were by then accustomed to the fact that he no longer talked to the press. But this was no spur-of-the-moment matter. It seemed possible that there had been a family meeting which had decided, given the circumstances, on a formal “last statement” followed by withdrawal. Then silence.
Mercedes was present at the interview at the family home in México City—at the previous one, three years before, it had been Mónica, his secretary—and it was Mercedes who put an end to the conversation, as the reporters seemed to indicate in their piece. García Márquez himself said little—the report was more a narrative than a dialogue—and when he was asked a question about his past life he said, “You will have to ask my official biographer, Gerald Martin, about that sort of thing, only I think he’s waiting for something to happen to me before he finishes.”1 It was true that I was taking a long time. But such “ardent patience,” to quote the title of Antonio Skármeta’s novel about Pablo Neruda’s postman, had now been rewarded by the discovery, after fifteen years, that I was the great man’s “official” biographer and not just a “tolerated” one, as I was given to explaining. If only I’d known!
It seemed to be a matter of working out how much longer he could appear in the public eye and under what conditions. He could not be relied upon to give clear or accurate answers to direct and unexpected questions and he was capable of forgetting what he had said five minutes before. I was no expert on the different forms and progressions of memory loss but my impression was that the condition was moving rather steadily. It was hard to see a man who had made memory the central focus of his entire existence beset by such a misfortune. “A professional rememberer,” he had always called himself. Yet by the time his mother died she had been unaware of who she was and who her children were. His half-brother Abelardo had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease for three decades. Their younger brother Nanchi was apparently developing it. Eligio had died of a brain tumour. Gustavo had returned from Venezuela with signs of memory loss. And now there was Gabito’s condition. “Problems with the noddle,” Jaime said to me. “It seems to be the family thing.”2
García Márquez was now almost seventy-nine. (Ever since the spectacular celebrations for his seventieth birthday he had given up pretending that he had been born in 1928. One might say he had started to act his age.) Notwithstanding his uncertain condition, which no one in his inner circle was inclined to reveal and about which the media maintained a surprisingly discreet silence, the question of his eightieth birthday had to be confronted. As part of Spain’s long-term programme of cultural diffusion the Spanish Royal Academy had begun, after 1992, to organize triennial congresses to celebrate the Spanish language and its literatures around the Hispanic world. At the first, much delayed congress, in Zacatecas, México, in April 1997, García Márquez had famously suggested that traditional Spanish grammar and spelling should be “retired.”3 Although this had caused controversy, even affront,
the academy, so authoritarian in the past, was by then far too diplomatic and strategic an institution to allow a writer of García Márquez’s stature to become a renegade and he was invited to visit the academy itself and meet its officers during a visit to Madrid in November of that year. Still, in 2001 he declared that he would not be going to the second congress in Zaragoza, Spain, as a protest against Spain’s policy of requiring visas from Latin Americans for the first time in its history. He said that Spain seemed to be declaring itself a European country first and a Hispanic one second. Controversy continued in 2004, when he was not invited to the third congress in Rosario, Argentina (a country he had always superstitiously avoided revisiting in any case). José Saramago, the Portuguese Nobel Prize winner, then declared that if García Márquez were not invited he would not go either, whereupon the academy declared that there had been an administrative oversight and of course the Colombian Nobel Prize winner was invited. García Márquez still did not attend. But the 2007 congress was scheduled for Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, the city where García Márquez now had his principal home in Colombia and which he had exalted in two memorable novels.
Moreover, in 2004 the academy had launched a mass-market edition of Cervantes’s Don Quixote to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the publication of that most important book in the history of Spain and its various literatures. What an idea it would be if for 2007, in Cartagena, the academy could follow this up with a similar edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude, to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of its first publication and García Márquez’s own eightieth birthday. First a Spanish genius, then a Latin American one. After all, many critics compared the Colombian novel to its illustrious predecessor and argued that it already held and would for the foreseeable future continue to hold the same significance for Latin Americans as Cervantes’s work held, first for Spaniards, then for Spanish Americans as well. Of course some would disagree. But one critic who had not always been a devotee of García Márquez would shortly declare, using a very twenty-first-century analogy, that One Hundred Years of Solitude had tapped into the “DNA” of Latin American culture and had been inseparable from it since its first publication in 1967.4 Like Cervantes, García Márquez had explored the dreams and delusions of his characters which, at a certain time in history, had been those of Spain during its great imperial period and had then, in a different form, become those of Latin America after independence. Moreover, like Cervantes, he had created a mood, a humour, indeed a sense of humour, which was somehow instantly recognizable and, once it came into existence, seemed to have always been there and was an integral part of the world to which it referred.
In April 1948 García Márquez had fled from Bogotá and travelled to Cartagena for the first time in his life. In that beautiful but decadent and run-down colonial city he had met newspaper editor Clemente Manuel Zabala and had been invited to become a journalist on a recently founded daily named, perhaps appropriately, El Universal. On 20 May 1948 the new recruit had been saluted in the pages of his new literary home. On 21 May, 358 years to the day after a certain Miguel de Cervantes wrote to the King of Spain asking for employment abroad, “possibly in Cartagena,” the new recruit’s first column had appeared.5 Cervantes never made it to Cartagena, nor indeed to any part of the Indies: he never saw the New World, though he would help to create an even vaster new world—Western modernity—in his books and those books would travel to the new continent despite the Spanish prohibition against the reading and writing of novels in the recently discovered dominions. In April 2007, to coincide with the Royal Academy congress in Cartagena and the arrival of the King and Queen of Spain, a new statue of Cervantes was installed on the harbour-front in the old colonial port.
For most of his life Cervantes had been unappreciated and frustrated. Whereas García Márquez, as his eightieth birthday approached, was one of the best-known writers on the planet and a celebrity who could hardly have achieved more fame and recognition in his own continent had he been a footballer or a pop star. The Hispanic international establishment was planning to give him in life the kind of recognition that Cervantes only acquired, gradually and over centuries, after his death. When García Márquez won the Nobel Prize in 1982 there had been seven weeks of celebratory media coverage in Latin America from the moment the news was announced in October until the moment the King of Sweden presented him with the award in December. When he reached seventy in 1997 there had been a week of festivities in March, accompanied by extensive news items in the press, and then another week in September when the fiftieth anniversary of his first short story was celebrated in Washington, with a party organized by the Secretary General of the Organization of American States and a visit to the White House to see his friend Bill Clinton. Now he was about to celebrate reaching his eightieth birthday, the sixtieth anniversary of his public debut as a writer, the fortieth anniversary of the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the award of the Nobel Prize. And so his friends and admirers began to plan a period of eight weeks in March and April 2007 to match those seven unforgettable weeks in 1982.
Many steps had already been taken to turn García Márquez into a living monument. The Barranquilla Group’s old haunt “The Cave” had been ingeniously relaunched as part museum and part bar-restaurant by a local journalist, Heriberto Fiorillo. There had been a move to rename Aracataca as Aracataca-Macondo on the model of Proust’s Illiers-Combray; unfortunately, although most residents appeared to be in favour, not enough of them had turned out for the referendum and the proposal fell. Now the local and national authorities agreed to convert Colonel Márquez’s old house in Aracataca, where little Gabriel had been born, into a major tourist attraction—it was already a somewhat ramshackle though evocative museum—and it was resolved that the remains of the old house should be demolished and a carefully researched reconstruction carried out.
So March 2007 arrived. The annual Cartagena Film Festival was dedicated to García Márquez. And, appropriately enough, Cuba was the “highlighted country.” (In April García Márquez would be the featured writer at the Bogotá Book Fair at the moment when Colombia began its year’s reign as the “World’s Capital of the Book.” Circles within circles, everything coinciding, as in a dream.) Almost all the films based on García Márquez’s books were shown and many of the directors who had made them were in attendance, including Fernando Birri, Miguel Littín, Jaime Hermosillo, Jorge Alí Triana and Lisandro Duque. But although the festival ran through his birthday García Márquez himself did not turn up. When he was asked why, he retorted, “Nobody invited me.” It was not one of his most successful jokes; but how could he not be forgiven? On 6 March a birthday party accompanied by vallenato music was held in a top Cartagena hotel—appropriately enough, a hotel named “Passion”—without the principal guest, who celebrated more quietly with his family elsewhere. After this, tension began to mount. Many of the posters announcing the Royal Academy event—known in Spanish as the “Congreso de la Lengua” (Congress of the Language or—it is the same word—the Tongue) featured a photograph of García Márquez, the advertised guest of honour, sticking his tongue out at the viewer. This acknowledgement of the famous writer’s well-known sense of humour was no doubt intended to signal that the academy itself had a sense of humour but even if that were true it was doubtful that it would extend to the possibility of the celebrity guest failing to turn up at the party they had so carefully prepared for him.
In the middle of the month yet another great event, the annual meeting of the Inter-American Press Association, was held in Cartagena. There were two guests of honour: Bill Gates, the computer magnate, who was the richest man in the world (though within a few months García Márquez’s billionaire friend Carlos Slim of México would overtake Gates), and Gabriel García Márquez himself, who, although not willing to speak, had promised to turn up. He did so only on the last day but his appearance, as usual, caused a sensation and, as usual, immediately put all other
participants in the shade. It was a big moment for Jaime Abello, the Director of García Márquez’s journalism foundation, and García Márquez’s brother, another Jaime, by now the Assistant Director. It was also a big moment for the Spanish Royal Academy, which, along with all of Colombia, was able to breathe a discreet sigh of relief.
Witnesses reported that Gabo looked very well. Although somewhat hesitant, he was in good humour and seemed on good form. Contrary to my assessment a year before, he seemed to have stabilized his condition and had evidently resolved, while no longer giving interviews, to confront both the malady and his public with the optimism and gallantry that had characterized him in easier times. Friends and admirers were flying in to Cartagena from all over the world, as well as the hundreds of linguists and other academics attending the Royal Academy congress. There were huge concerts with international pop stars, smaller vallenato performances, a profusion of literary events and many other fringe activities. The weather was glorious. Just as, three years before, the academy had produced a new mass-market version of Don Quixote to accompany the previous congress, so now it launched its new critical edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude. It was no surprise that it included essays by two of his best literary friends, Alvaro Mutis and Carlos Fuentes; what got everyone talking was that there was also a long piece by—of all people—Mario Vargas Llosa. Had there been a reconciliation? Certainly for the essay to be included both men would have had to agree. Though what Mercedes Barcha felt about the decision was not known.
Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez Page 72