STREITFELD: You recently had a brush with lung cancer.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: Yes. My prognosis is good. The tumor was benign. Well, it was malign but it had not spread. The doctors give me lots of optimism. I always said that if something like this were to happen, I wanted them to lie to me. So now they give me an impression that everything will be okay and I don’t know if it’s the truth or not. The check-ups remain terrifying. They might find something else. I recently had an appointment scheduled for Wednesday. On Saturday I was anxious. On Sunday, I thought I was going to die.
STREITFELD: What happened on Monday?
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: I moved the appointment up.
STREITFELD: Has the cancer affected your work?
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: I’m in more of a hurry. I used to say, “I can do this in twenty or thirty years.” Now I know there might not be another thirty years. But I try to get over this when I sit down to work. Hurriedness in creative expression is immediately noticed. In any case, using a computer is changing me more than the cancer. The first novel I wrote on a computer was “Love in the Time of Cholera.” I suspect it was the first novel written in Spanish on a computer by anyone.
On a typewriter I used to finish a draft and then give it to the typist, who would make a clean copy. It was a happy thing to see the new draft but the whole process would take a while. Now, with a computer, I just keep rewriting and rewriting. On a computer, a novel is infinitely correctible. It’s so easy. You go on endlessly. But in the end it’s faster. The proof is I used to put out a novel every seven years, now it’s every two years.
STREITFELD: And yet you still have time for journalism.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: Journalism is my true vocation. It keeps my feet on the ground. Otherwise I’m like a balloon, I float off. Journalism keeps me nailed to reality. Curiously, as time goes on, I find the professions of fiction and journalism merging. The essence of literature and of journalism is the credibility they create. People are convinced by details. They say, “That’s it, it’s right”—even if it’s wrong. My new novel, which takes place in Cartagena, is about a legend but it’s filled with reportage. I look for details. Once I’ve found them, everything starts to happen.
STREITFELD: You are famous both for the amount of research you do, and for not letting it show.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: I am still looking for some sources that will tell me what kind of a job someone would have had in the Vatican library, and there are some points of medieval medicine I need to double-check. That’s why I have all these books. When I saw Hemingway’s library in Cuba, I could tell immediately what his profession was. A novelist has to be able to consult everything.
STREITFELD: And reveal nothing.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: And reveal nothing. When you finish the novel, you should destroy all your notes and drafts. Magicians never show how the trick was done. A writer should be the same.
STREITFELD: (Beginning to perspire.) You like it warm in here, eh?
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: I can’t think in the cold. Besides this house, I have an apartment in Bogotá, an apartment in Cartagena, a house in Cuernavaca, a house in Paris and a house in Barcelona. My friends laugh at me because they’re all the same: white. I have the exact same computer everywhere, and the same temperature setting—the temperature of the Caribbean. Tomorrow, if I have to go to Barcelona or Bogotá, I just grab my diskette and put it in my pocket.
STREITFELD: Why white and not, say, blue?
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: When visitors see it’s a white carpet, they immediately start to clean their feet on the mat. If it weren’t white, they wouldn’t bother.
STREITFELD: You were born in 1927—although some sources say 1928.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: In my town, there were no civic birth certificates. I wasn’t baptized until I was three. My father would say I was born in 1927. My mother said, “Let him be born whenever he wants to be born.” Clearly, she’s a practitioner of the new journalism.
STREITFELD: In either case, you’re still a young man—not even seventy.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: It’s curious how one starts to perceive the signs of growing old. I first started to forget names and telephone numbers, then it became more encompassing. I couldn’t remember a word, or a face, or a melody.
STREITFELD: That sounds grim.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: I’ve sort of given up worrying about it. Everyone is at the point of dying in life itself. I want to write a short book, a manual for growing old.
STREITFELD: I’ve heard you get most of your ideas in the shower.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: Yes, it’s true. I work every morning, from about nine to two-thirty in the afternoon. Those were the hours in which my children were at school. But then I had the problem that I was thinking about the story through the afternoon and night. I realized I was thinking about my stories all the time, even when I slept. I’d wake up tired and bored. So now from the moment I close the machine, I don’t think about it at all until the next day.
I’m trying to develop a sports training attitude—I don’t eat too much, only two whiskies at night. The first thing in the morning I read over what I did yesterday so I know what’s ahead. I’m beginning to work out the day. I believe in inspiration—not in the romantic sense, or the Holy Spirit who determines what you write, but in the sense that I and the subject have an intimate communication. And then I get in the shower, and the ideas come.
STREITFELD: It sounds very efficient. How long are you in the shower?
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: Oh, ten minutes. But I would like it to be even more efficient. I want someone to invent a pill in which you take it and you’ve already showered, brushed your teeth. The bureaucracy of everyday things is so tedious.
STREITFELD: Doesn’t the Nobel Prize get you released from many ordinary tasks?
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: The only thing the Nobel Prize is good for is not having to wait in line. They see you in line, they take you right up to the front.
STREITFELD: That’s really the only thing it’s good for?
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: Fame is like flying a jumbo jet, it’s a very delicate business. Also, I can’t complain anymore. The Nobel implies a sort of dignity. You can’t say what you want to say about someone who is bugging you. Mercedes is now the one who runs the bureau of rancor. All wives run the bureau of rancor.
My life changed after One Hundred Years of Solitude was published, when I discovered that a friend sold my letters to a library in the United States. I gave up writing letters so no one else would do that. Fame is a catastrophe in my private life. It’s as if you could even measure solitude by the number of people around you. You’re surrounded by more and more people, you feel smaller and smaller and smaller.
STREITFELD: You have been famous for decades, ever since Solitude became an immediate sensation in 1967. You must be used to it.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: I was famous but no one noticed. After the Nobel it was different. I had a project I wanted to do for a long time: Go to some small town in Colombia, get out of the car and write a report on what that town is about. But I realized something. By the third day, all the correspondents in Colombia would be there watching me do this. I’m the news.
STREITFELD: So you’re turning to the past and writing your memoirs.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: William Faulkner says something unforgettable: that the best place for a writer to live is a bordello. There’s a party every night, the best hours to work—the morning—are always peaceful, and you have a very good relationship with the police. As a young man I was living in a cheap hotel in Barranquilla where prostitutes would take clients. It was the cheapest hotel in the city but I learned things. Once I saw the governor—well, I heard his voice in the hallway.
Faulkner was right. It was a good way to live. Every morning there was a big breakfast. I was very hungry then. This was in 1950. The desk clerk was a very thin man, missing one eye. A room cost about a dollar. I never got the same room two nights in a row. Once I said I didn’t have the money, explaining that I w
as a writer, a novelist, and that meant I didn’t get paid well.
I showed him the manuscript—I was writing my first novel, Leaf Storm—saying, “This is my life, this means more than anything else. I’ll leave it with you, and tomorrow I’ll come back for it.” He said okay, and put it on the shelf. From that day on, whenever I had no money, I would leave the manuscript instead.
STREITFELD: That was when you were first reading Faulkner and Hemingway. You’ve often spoken of your debt to them.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: When novelists read another novelist’s work, they take it apart as if it were a machine. Nothing teaches you how to write a novel except another novel.
STREITFELD: Faulkner gave you something else as well—a sense that all of the Caribbean, whether his Mississippi or your Colombia, was the same wild place.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: I am a man of the coasts, not the interior, where Bogotá is. The officials, the serious people, lived in Bogotá. The coast got the bandits and adventurers. It is a synthesis of many cultures—Spanish, African, Indian. I believe many regions of the world are like this, full of wonder and mystery. Most people just don’t see it. The reality is what is so fantastic. There is nothing magic about it. It’s pure realism. I knew a woman in a small Colombian town who read One Hundred Years of Solitude and said, “I don’t like this book. When you were with us before you saw much better, more interesting things than what is depicted here.”
STREITFELD: In your short story “Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane,” a passenger notices a beautiful woman and asks the ticket clerk if she believes in love at first sight. “Of course,” the clerk responds. “The other kinds are impossible.”
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: Yes, that’s my view. The problem with love is making it last. There’s a Brazilian writer I like to quote: Love is eternal as long as it lasts.
STREITFELD: You came from a very large family—I believe eleven brothers and sisters. That affected you in many ways. And you have two sons.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: Do you know why we didn’t have any more kids? We were afraid we didn’t have the means to educate them. And when we could, Mercedes said she was too old. So I tell all recently married couples to have as many kids as they want. Eventually, you’ll be able to support them.
STREITFELD: You are a great and controversial friend of Castro’s. You’ve described him as a larger than life figure, who reads 50 reports a day, can be interviewed for 17 hours straight and eats 18 scoops of ice cream after lunch. He’s a Rabelasian if not a Marquesian figure.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: When I first knew him, I was at Prensa Latina, nearly forty years ago. I was his friend when no one knew who he was. We both have the conviction that Latin America’s salvation is in its unity, and that the forces that prevent this come from outside Latin America. The destiny of Latin America is intimately tied to the United States. It’s like a transatlantic ocean liner. There’s first class, second class, all kinds of classes, but the day the boat sinks, everyone drowns. The sooner the United States realizes this, the better for everyone concerned.
STREITFELD: How close are you to him?
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: He comes to my house in Havana every time he can. He tells me everything up to the point of state secrets.
STREITFELD: People say you should be the Colombian ambassador to Cuba.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: But if I were ambassador he couldn’t come to my house. Aside from that, I’d be a bad ambassador. If they offer, I’ll say no. I would say, I’ve been a cultural ambassador all my life, that’s enough.
STREITFELD: I heard you bonded with Castro over literature.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: We have this great affinity. We’re part of the literary culture. He’s a great reader. I bring him books—quick, easy books to help him relax. The first book I brought him that he really liked was Dracula.
STREITFELD: Your critics say hanging out with politicians is not going to be good for your writing.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: When I first started to write journalism, everyone said, “Now you’re screwed because it will take up all your time and you won’t be able to write fiction.” And that was when I was just getting started. When I started working in advertising for a while in 1963, they said the same thing. And again when I started making films. And again when I started talking about politics.
STREITFELD: They are particularly critical of your association with Castro, who is not a big champion of human rights. When there is a petition demanding Castro do something, your name is never on it.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: I believe when people sign a petition, they make a great noise. They don’t really care about the cause. They’re just thinking about themselves—what the public is going to think of their petition.
STREITFELD: You have achieved fame and success that no living writer has managed. Why go on writing?
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: I think it’s Rilke who says, “If it’s possible to live without writing, do it.” There’s nothing else in this world I like more than to write. And there’s nothing that can keep me from writing. That’s all I think about. I think I write because I’m afraid of death. If I didn’t write, I would die.
STREITFELD: Since you think about death so much, do you think about your funeral?
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: If I could control it, it would be just my wife, my children. I’d be cremated and that’s it. Unfortunately I know it’ll be like the funeral of Big Mama in the story—nine days of funeral rites, the president and the Supreme Court and the pope in attendance, the national queens of all things that have ever been or ever will be.
Four years later, I saw him again when he came to Washington, D.C., for a very rare U.S. public appearance. He had taken a break from his memoirs to publish News of a Kidnapping, a documentary novel about the drug kingpin Pablo Escobar’s war against Colombia. Based on scrupulous interviews—although not with Escobar, who was killed in December 1993—it took three years to research and write. We went to a popular bookstore cafe, where García Márquez’s books were piled high but no one noticed that their author was right there.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: That piece you wrote about me—it was all about death. Young people always think the old are going to die at any minute. They don’t know that the youth mortality is much higher.
STREITFELD: Something is the matter with your logic but never mind. Colombia seems in the process of self-destructing.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: I never talk about Colombian politics when I’m outside of Colombia.
STREITFELD: Okay. So President Clinton is a big fan of yours. You’re going to meet with him later today. What’s on the agenda?
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: I never talk about American politics when I’m in America.
STREITFELD: Is death the only permissible topic?
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: All I can say is I sent Clinton an early copy of News of a Kidnapping. He got it on the sixteenth of the month. Five or six days later, I got a letter. It was dated the seventeenth. He said he read it all in one sitting, from beginning to end. He also said, ‘Thank you for being the prophet of my presidency.”
STREITFELD: I assume that is because of the comment you made that, if re-elected, Clinton would eventually be ranked as one of the country’s great leaders. Were you just flattering him?
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: I said he’s going to be a great president, and I still think he has the potential.
STREITFELD: In News of a Kidnapping, you write that Escobar “had employees who spent the day engaging in lunatic conversations on his telephones so that the people monitoring his lines would become entangled in mangrove forests of non sequiturs and not be able to distinguish them from real messages … [Sometimes he] traveled in a public minibus that had false plates and markings and drove along established routes but made no stops because it always carried a full complement of passengers, who were his bodyguards. One of Escobar’s diversions, in fact, was to act as driver from time to time.”
This all sounds almost as fantastical as the mad ruler in “Autumn of the Patriarch” selling the sea to the
gringos, who take it away “in numbered pieces to plant it far from the hurricanes in the blood-red dawns of Arizona.” Is it really true?
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: It’s authentic. There’s a journalist, a friend of mine, who was on that bus. Whether I’m working in journalism or literature, I’m always describing the same reality. There are some things about reality I don’t use in my fiction because people wouldn’t believe them. Escobar’s employees were a hidden force that influenced the everyday life of the country that no one ever saw, up to the point that some people even doubted he existed.
STREITFELD: As Colombia collapses, there are again calls for its most famous citizen to take over.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: When a country needs leaders, people look in the newspapers. They think anyone in the news qualifies. A tennis champion should become president, or so they think. Even Pablo Escobar thought he had the right be to be president.
STREITFELD: There are so many rumors about you, sometimes unpleasant. There was a story that Escobar gave you money to write your book.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: That’s a stupid thing to say, because I have more money than he did.
STREITFELD: He was a billionaire.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: Okay, I’m not a rich man. I’m just a poor man with some money.
STREITFELD: You were also reported as saying you would not return to Colombia until President Samper and his corrupt cronies left office.
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