“I don’t think that city surprised us much,” he explains. “It was as if we had already seen it. The reason I went there instead of anywhere else was Ramón Vinyes, that ‘Catalan wise man’ who made an appearance as one of my characters in One Hundred Years of Solitude. In the Barranquilla of my childhood, he’d so vigorously ‘sold’ the Barcelona he’d idealized in his memory, as an exile, that I was sure we had to go there.” When they moved to Spain, Mercedes Barcha and Gabo left behind the cosmopolitan, refined, and progressive Mexico, and the various circles of filmmakers, artists, and literary figures, full of exciting personalities and activities, for a calm Spain that was then in the final stages of Franco’s regime. Barcha fondly remembers “it was all a little snobbish, the Barcelonans were just developing discoteca nightlife while here in Mexico there were already hundreds of them! There they even put on sombreros when they go out!”
“They were trying to outdo Paris,” recalls García Márquez.
“I’ve seen the show Cuéntame† and that’s exactly how it was: Gabo and I had arrived in that world,” comments Mercedes, amused.
“It was as though there was some kind of covert loosening of morals, which centered around a discoteca called Bocaccio. To us it all seemed very old-fashioned,” Gabo agrees.
Barcha points out: “They—the Barcelonans—thought we would be the ones who were out-of-date, since we were from Latin America, but it was completely the opposite. I would walk down the street in my pants or jeans and people would stare at me like I was something very strange. One day I asked Luis Goytisolo’s wife, ‘María Antonia, why are they always staring at me?’ ‘Don’t pay any attention to it,’ she told me, ‘they do the same thing to me.’ ”
The restrictions of Franco’s regime weren’t as stringent in Barcelona as they were in Madrid, the locus of political power, and the Garcías enjoyed the proximity of France. Gabo recalls, “We’d go to France to see the films we discovered in Perpiñán, like Last Tango in Paris. Sometimes we’d go to Paris for three days straight to get caught up on everything. Barcelona was our door into Europe: from there we relocated to London (where we learned English), Milan … We went to concerts, foreign plays … I thoroughly quenched my thirst for culture.”
Gabo and Mercedes experienced the bustling gauche divine,‡ the evenings that never ended and the early mornings at Bocaccio, the blossoming of new literary journals, the political tension preceding Franco’s death … They socialized with other writers who’d been drawn to Barcelona by “Mamá Grande” Balcells, like José Donoso or Mario Vargas Llosa, and they were visited by Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar, Pablo Neruda …
“Now I’m almost ashamed to say it, but those were very good years for us,” Gabo says. “In the Barcelona of the early seventies, people lived really well, though you feel bad admitting it. Only now, when you take a minute to think it over, you realize how sad it all was.”
Paradoxically, the Garcías left before democracy arrived: “We were in Bogotá when Franco died and, when we heard the news, we came back to Mexico. We thought that things were going to get very chaotic in Spain, that there’d be a lot of instability, and we weren’t sure how the new Spanish government would react to The Autumn of the Patriarch, which was about to be published, and which narrated the decline of a dictator. I thought that they wouldn’t believe I’d been inspired by Latin Americans, like Juan Vicente Gómez in Venezuela or ‘Papá Doc’ in Haiti, who ordered that all the black dogs in his country be killed because he believed one of his enemies had been turned into one, or Maximiliano Hernández Martínez in El Salvador, who had all the street lights in the country covered in red paper to combat a measles epidemic. I don’t know how much sense this makes, but in the end Franco was for me too modern and civilized to be the dictator I had in my head and in my soul. You know, the best review of the book I ever had was from Omar Torrijos of Panama, forty-eight hours before his death, when he told me, ‘It’s your best book: we’re all exactly as you say.’ ”
Gabo has a house in Barcelona, and says, “I keep going to that city, more or less every year, though my visit in 2005 caused too much commotion, because I hadn’t gone in five years. When we arrive, it’s always as though we never left. We wake up as if it were the most normal thing in the world, and we go out to eat with people who’ve been our friends forever. We go for walks and we watch ourselves grow older. We walk everywhere. They stop you sometimes, they yell at you from across the street, but with that distance Castilians always maintain, keeping their displays of affection in check. For example, we also went to Madrid a few times, where we have a lot of friends, but we didn’t stay because we’re more of a novelty there, whereas in Barcelona our presence has become quite commonplace. In Madrid, the word spreads to the journalists, the singers, the movie people, it turns into a constant celebration.”
Gabo continues trying to avoid the spotlight. He believes subtlety is always more effective, even in politics. He’s maintained his friendship with Fidel Castro, but has distanced himself “through silence” from his more dogmatic stances, and has been instrumental in influencing the Cuban government to free political prisoners and soften their stances on certain issues. He’s been politically active in many countries, in everything from the liberation of bankers kidnapped in El Salvador to getting dictators to allow family members of dissidents to leave the country. In the course of this, he’s had several experiences worthy of a James Bond movie or one of the novels written by his friend Graham Greene. For example, in 1995, Juan Carlos Gaviria’s kidnappers demanded that he assume the presidency of Colombia.§ (The writer’s response was: “Why would anyone choose to take on the responsibility of being the worst president of the Republic? … Let Gaviria go, take off your masks, and start promoting your ideas for change under the protection of the constitution.”) “I have always been more of a conspirator than a ‘signer,’ ” he points out. “I’ve always achieved many more things by trying to straighten them out from the bottom up than by signing protest manifestos.”
One example of this covert diplomacy is that he now acts as a mediator for peace in Colombia, attempting to bring about some sort of agreement between the members of President Uribe’s government and those leading the guerrilla group of the National Liberation Army (ELN). “Maybe we shouldn’t talk too much about this, since it’s still being worked out. It’s not good to make declarations when you’re in the middle of something. From the moment I was born, I’ve been hearing talk of attempts to create peace in Colombia. Now, after much painstaking negotiation, they’ve finally agreed to have a conversation. I’ve participated in some of the first conversations in La Habana, and they went very well. I’m on good terms with both sides. These affairs, for a writer who’s gotten used to success like me, are always very humbling, because in them so many different issues intersect.
“Violence has existed forever, and it’s an ancient resident of Colombia,” he recalls. “What’s at the root of it all is an economic situation that only increases the gap between the very rich and the very poor. And there’s so much money in the cocaine business, tons of money! The day they stop that drug from being sold, everything will get much better, because that’s what made everything get so much worse. The biggest producers in the world are all there. So much so that now they’re not fighting for political power, like before, but instead for control of the drug. And the United States too is completely wrapped up in the whole thing.”
While posing for some pictures in the garden with his wife, Gabo says to her, laughing, “Now you see why I never give interviews, Mercedes. They start out seeming meek, and then they never leave. Now they’re telling me to kiss you, what next? I bet they’d even ask me to say that I love you.” It’d be a superfluous statement, considering that they met when she was a thirteen-year-old girl and are still there before us, sharing their lives.
Before we leave, García Márquez asks us which Nobel laureates will be appearing in this series of interviews: “Ah, I see that you’ve
only chosen the good ones.” Confidently, every once in a while he grabs hold of his interviewer and it’s impossible to see on his face any of the legendary shyness that, in Barcelona, made him be silent and tremble terribly whenever he had to speak in public. “I think that I must have social anxiety, like the Austrian Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek, because I can maintain a one-on-one conversation, but it terrifies me to address an auditorium of people. My shyness? I have the great advantage now that the people who come here are already intimidated … and that makes it easier for me.”
* Felipe González is a Spanish politician who served as Prime Minister of Spain from 1982 to 1996.
† A popular Spanish TV series about the last years of the Franco regime and the Transition.
‡ The term for an intellectual and artistic movement in Barcelona in the 1960s and ’70s made up of writers, publishers, architects, photographers, and fashion models.
§ Juan Carlos Gaviria was the brother of César Gaviria, who served as president of Colombia from 1990 to 1994, succeeded by Ernesto Sampler. Juan Carlos was kidnapped in 1996 by the rebel group Dignidad por Colombia (Dignity for Colombia), and they did indeed demand that García Márquez take over Colombia’s presidency from Sampler, whose campaign was believed to be financed in large part by drug traffickers.
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ (b. 1927, Aracataca, Colombia; d. 2014, Mexico City, Mexico) was a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. He was one of the most influential and beloved writers of the twentieth century; his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude has been read by millions worldwide, and is the foremost example of “magical realism.” His other books include Love in the Time of Cholera, The Autumn of the Patriarch, No One Writes to the Colonel, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, and a memoir, Living to Tell the Tale. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.
ALONSO ÁNGEL RESTREPO was a journalist for the literary supplement to the newspaper El Colombiano.
ERNESTO GONZÁLEZ BERMEJO was the European correspondent for the magazine Revista Crisis and the author of a number of collections of interviews with major Latin American writers, including Conversaciones con Cortázar (1978) and Conversaciones con Gabriel García Márquez (1982).
PLINIO APULEYO MENDOZA is the author of novels, works of political criticism, and two books about his longtime friendship with García Márquez. He ran the Bogotá office of the news agency Prensa Latina with García Márquez in the sixties, and has been a contributor to El Tiempo and other newspapers.
DAVID STREITFELD writes for The New York Times. He was part of a team that won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting on how the economy is being reshaped by Apple, and he received a 2012 “Best in Business” award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers for a story on a fake review factory. He lives near San Francisco with his family and way too many books.
XAVI AYÉN has covered cultural affairs for La Vanguardia since 1991. He is the co-author, with the photographer Kim Manresa, of the book Rebeldía de Nobel (Nobel Rebellion), a series of interviews with Nobel Prize winners at their homes.
ELLIE ROBINS is a translator from Spanish who has worked in publishing in the UK and the United States.
THEO ELLIN BALLEW is a translator from Spanish and French.
THE LAST INTERVIEW SERIES
* * *
KURT VONNEGUT: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.”
$15.95 / $17.95 CAN
978-1-61219-090-7
ebook: 978-1-61219-091-4
LEARNING TO LIVE FINALLY: THE LAST INTERVIEW JACQUES DERRIDA
“I am at war with myself, it’s true, you couldn’t possibly know to what extent … I say contradictory things that are, we might say, in real tension; they are what construct me, make me live, and will make me die.”
translated by PASCAL-ANNE BRAULT and MICHAEL NAAS
$15.95 / $17.95 CAN
978-1-61219-094-5
ebook: 978-1-61219-032-7
ROBERTO BOLAÑO: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“Posthumous: It sounds like the name of a Roman gladiator, an unconquered gladiator. At least that’s what poor Posthumous would like to believe. It gives him courage.”
translated by SYBIL PEREZ and others
$15.95 / $17.95 CAN
978-1-61219-095-2
ebook: 978-1-61219-033-4
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“I don’t know what you’re thinking or what it’s like inside you and you don’t know what it’s like inside me. In fiction … we can leap over that wall itself in a certain way.”
$15.95 / $15.95 CAN
978-1-61219-206-2
ebook: 978-1-61219-207-9
JORGE LUIS BORGES: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“Believe me: the benefits of blindness have been greatly exaggerated. If I could see, I would never leave the house, I’d stay indoors reading the many books that surround me.”
translated by KIT MAUDE
$15.95 / $15.95 CAN
978-1-61219-204-8
ebook: 978-1-61219-205-5
HANNAH ARENDT: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“There are no dangerous thoughts for the simple reason that thinking itself is such a dangerous enterprise.”
$15.95 / $15.95 CAN
978-1-61219-311-3
ebook: 978-1-61219-312-0
RAY BRADBURY: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“You don’t have to destroy books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
$15.95 / $15.95 CAN
978-1-61219-421-9
ebook: 978-1-61219-422-6
JAMES BALDWIN: THE LAST INTERVIEW
“You don’t realize that you’re intelligent until it gets you into trouble.”
$15.95 / $15.95 CAN
978-1-61219-400-4
ebook: 978-1-61219-401-1
Gabriel Garcia Marquez Page 8