8
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ ARRIVED back in Bogotá in early January 1954. He came in by plane, despite an already pathological fear of flying that would only deepen over the years. Alvaro Mutis, whose life had long been full of planes, and automobiles and even ships, greeted him at the airport. The new arrival had a suitcase and two hand-carried packages, which he gave to his friend to stow in the boot of the car: the manuscripts of “The House” and Leaf Storm, both still unpublished. Mutis drove him straight to his office in the centre of the city; back into the cold and the rain, back into a world of tensions and alienations which he thought he had left behind for ever when he flew out of the city almost six years before.1
At this time the Esso headquarters in Bogotá was in the same building on Avenida Jiménez de Quesada as the new premises of El Espectador, which had moved from its previous site just a few blocks away. Mutis’s office in public relations was four storeys above that of the editor of the newspaper, Guillermo Cano. Mutis was vague and ambiguous about how they should proceed during the early days of García Márquez’s stay—even the prospect of a job with El Espectador was left in limbo—and García Márquez’s already gloomy and anxious mood began to grow. He was never confident in new situations or with men and women he didn’t know; people were rarely impressed by him on first appearance and he only gained confidence through intimacy and familiarity or by showing what he could do. However, Mutis, in whose personality the entrepreneur and the aesthete seemed to be combined in ways that few had seen or even imagined, was not a man to take no for an answer. He was a master salesman even when he was not sure of the quality of his product; when he had a commodity as valuable as this almost unknown writer he was usually irresistible. And Alvaro Mutis cared deeply about literature and was an unusually generous man.
Physically the two could hardly have been more different—Mutis tall, elegant, vulpine; García Márquez short, skinny, scruffy. García Márquez had been writing novels and stories since he was eighteen; in those days Mutis was exclusively a poet and would only start writing novels in his mid-sixties, after his retirement from a succession of jobs in the employ of U.S.-based international companies. Even now, when both are internationally famous novelists, the two Colombians are separated by the whole history of Latin American literature. And they have always stood at opposite poles of the political spectrum: Mutis, almost theatrically reactionary, a monarchist in a country which has been a republic for almost two hundred years, has always had, in his own words, “a complete lack of interest in all political phenomena later than the fall of Byzantium into the hands of the infidels,” that is, later than 1453;2 while García Márquez’s post-1917 predilections would later become well known—though never a communist, he would be closer to that world-view in its broadest sense than to any other ideology in a long life of practical commitments. Theirs would be a long, close relationship but never a confessional one.
For the first couple of weeks García Márquez sat around not in El Espectador but in Mutis’s office, smoking and shivering, as he always did in Bogotá, talking to Mutis’s recently appointed “assistant”—none other than his old friend Gonzalo Mallarino, who had first introduced them that stormy night in Cartagena—or simply twiddling his thumbs. Sometimes, especially in Latin America and other parts of the so-called “Third World,” where most people are completely powerless, you just have to wait for situations to evolve. (This is why so many of García Márquez’s novels and stories are about waiting and hoping—it is the same verb in Spanish: esperar—for things that may never come and usually don’t.) Then, near the end of January, El Espectador suddenly offered him a staff position and the incredible sum of 900 pesos a month. To earn that in Barranquilla he would have had to write three hundred “Giraffes”—ten a day! It would be the first time he had ever had any spare money and it meant he could help out the family in Cartagena, sending enough for both rent and utilities.
He had been living temporarily in Mutis’s mother’s house out in Usaquén. Now he moved into a “boarding house with no name” near the Parque Nacional, the home of a French woman who had once put up Eva Perón in her dancing days. He had his own suite of rooms, an undreamed-of luxury, though he would spend little time there. Occasionally in the months to come he would find the time and energy to smuggle some transient female into his apartment.3 Mainly, however, he would spend the next year and a half between the newspaper, the boarding house, Mutis’s office and Bogotá’s gothic cinemas carrying out his duties as staff writer, cinema critic and, eventually, star reporter.
Surprisingly, perhaps, newspaper warfare in Bogotá was mainly about competition between the two great Liberal newspapers. El Espectador had been founded in 1887 by the Cano family of Medellín (it moved to Bogotá in 1915), and was thus older than its bitter rival, El Tiempo, founded in 1911 and bought by Eduardo Santos in 1913. The Santos family still owned and ran El Tiempo right up to 2007, when the Spanish publishing house Planeta took a majority stake. The director of El Espectador when García Márquez arrived that January was Guillermo Cano, the myopic, unassuming grandson of the founder; he had only recently taken over this position because, incredibly, he was still in his early twenties. He and García Márquez would be in touch for more than thirty years.
García Márquez already had two solid contacts among the leading writers: Eduardo Zalamea Borda, who had discovered him six years before, and his cousin Gonzalo González, “Gog,” who had begun to work on the paper while a law student in 1946. It was Zalamea Borda who baptized him with the name by which the whole planet would later know him, “Gabo.” A well-known photo from those days shows a new and wholly unfamiliar García Márquez, slim and elegant, with refined features, eyes at once questioning yet already knowing, with the merest whisper of a smile beneath his Latin moustache. Only the hands betray the permanent state of tension in which this man lives.
The news editor at El Espectador was José “Mono” (“Blond” but also “Monkey”) Salgar, a demanding, no-nonsense manager whose slogan was “news, news, news.” García Márquez would say that working for him was “the exploitation of man by monkey.”4He had been employed by the paper since he was little more than a boy and had thus been educated both in the school of journalism and that of life; he was to become an institution in his own right. From the start he was unimpressed by García Márquez’s reputation and deeply suspicious of his unmistakable literariness and incorrigible “lyricism.”5
After a couple of weeks, however, García Márquez showed his worth with two articles on monarchical power and solitude, myth and reality: the first, highly amusing, was “Cleopatra,” a piece which fervently prayed that a new statue reputedly of the Egyptian queen would not modify the romantic image men have had of her for two thousand years; the second, “The Queen Alone,” was about Elizabeth the Queen Mother of England, recently widowed. It may be García Márquez’s single most striking elaboration in that era of certain themes—especially the conjunction of power, fame and solitude—which would reach their culmination twenty years later in The Autumn of the Patriarch:
The Queen Mother, who is now a grandmother, is truly alone for the first time in her life. And as she wanders, accompanied only by her solitude, along the immense corridors of Buckingham Palace, she must remember with nostalgia that happy age in which she never dreamed nor wished to dream of being a queen, and lived with her husband and their two daughters in a house overflowing with intimacy…Little did she know that a mysterious blow of fate would turn her children and the children of her children into kings and queens; and her into a queen alone. A desolate and inconsolable housewife, whose house would fade into the immense labyrinth of Buckingham Palace, its endless corridors and that limitless backyard which extends to the bounds of Africa.6
This article in particular convinced Zalamea Borda, who somewhat bizarrely had a soft spot for the young Queen Elizabeth II, that García Márquez was ready to move on to bigger things.7 Guillermo Cano said that when García Márquez arrived he naturally had to adapt to the newspaper’s cautious and somewhat anonymous house style; but after a while the other writers began to adjust to the newcomer’s brilliant improvisations and then to imitate him.8
García Márquez remembers that he would be sitting at his desk writing a piece for the paper’s “Day by Day” column and José Salgar or Guillermo Cano would tell him, across the noisy room, with just a thumb and forefinger, how much was needed to fill the space. Some of the magic had gone out of his journalism. Worse, Bogotá did not provide him with the vital stimulation he found everywhere on the coast. In late February, already bored to tears, he managed to persuade the management to let him try out as a film critic and publish his review on Saturdays. It must have been a wonderful relief to escape several times a week from the tensions of living under a dictatorship in “the gloomiest city in the world,” and under an irksome and unnecessary apprenticeship in the newspaper office, and to take refuge in the fantasy world of the movies. He was in fact something of a pioneer, because no other journalist had written a regular movie column in any Colombian newspaper before this time; they confined themselves to providing plot summaries and naming the stars.
From the start his view of cinema was literary and humanistic, rather than specifically cinematographic.9 In fact García Márquez’s fast-evolving political ideology at the time must have sharpened his sense that he had a chance to “educate the people” and perhaps relieve them of the false consciousness that made them prefer the prepackaged Hollywood product to the more aesthetically crafted works from France and, especially, those “authentically” conceived and executed works from Italy which he particularly favoured. But in any case the film-goers of 1950s Bogotá were unlikely to appreciate avant-garde evaluations of the movies they went to see and García Márquez was from the beginning obsessed with the idea of viewing reality from the standpoint of “the people” whilst going on, of course, to modify it in progressive directions. Certainly his film reviews took up aesthetically and ideologically questionable “common-sense” positions; but one of the qualities of García Márquez, always, is that his version of “common sense” is invariably “good sense” and is almost never “non-sense.”10
From the very beginning he was hostile to what he perceived to be the shallow commercial and profoundly ideological values of the Hollywood system—he considered Orson Welles and Charlie Chaplin exceptions—and he routinely defended European cinema, whose production and moral values he sought for the development of a national cinema in Colombia. This, with an added Latin American dimension, would become a permanent obsession down the years. He was surprisingly preoccupied with technical questions—script, dialogue, direction, photography, sound, music, cutting, acting—which perhaps gives insight into what he would later call the “carpentry” of his literary works: professional “tricks of the trade” that he has never been fully willing to share, at least not in terms of the novel.11 He insisted that scripts should be economical, consistent and coherent; and that close-ups and long shots should receive the same attention. He was concerned from the beginning with the concept of the well-made story, an obsession which would remain with him for the rest of his career and would explain his continuing reverence for The Thousand and One Nights, Dracula, The Count of Monte Cristo and Treasure Island—all brilliantly narrated works of popular literature. This was what he looked for in the cinema too. Objective reality should predominate but the inner world, even the fantastic world, should not be neglected. He noted that the outstanding feature of Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thieves was its “human authenticity” and its “lifelike method.” These central ideas would dominate his perspective for the next few years, and were not far removed from the central tenets of both bourgeois and socialist realism which found classic fusion in Italian neo-realism. Avant-garde they were not. He showed little awareness of the theories of the nascent French New Wave to be found among Brazilian, Argentine or Cuban cinematographers at this time. Indeed, his selections for best films of the year on 31 December demonstrate unequivocally that for García Márquez in 1954 Italian neo-realism was the way of making movies. Certainly it is ironic to consider that De Sica, his favourite film-maker in this era, and Cesare Zavattini, the incomparable scriptwriter, would never have got involved in filming a script like the plot of Leaf Storm. Which is why, for the moment, García Márquez would not be writing any more novels like Leaf Storm.
The working week was intense. At its end he took part in the journalists’ regular “cultural Fridays,” a euphemism for heavy drinking across the avenue in the Hotel Continental, where the El Espectador and El Tiempo hacks would meet up and exchange drinks and insults; sometimes they drank until dawn.12 He also participated in the Bogotá cine-club organized by another of the many energetic Catalan exiles the young writer would get to know over the years. His name was Luis Vicens; he had himself collaborated with the great critic Georges Sadoul on L’Écran Français and was now making a living in Colombia selling books as well as running the cine-club with two Colombians, the film critic Hernando Salcedo and the painter Enrique Grau. After the cine-club’s sessions he would go on to the inevitable party at the house of Luis Vicens and his Colombian wife Nancy, not far from the newspaper office.13
Nevertheless this new, rather middle-class lifestyle in the world of the bogotanos could hardly replace the sheer fun and exhilaration, not to say interest, of life on the Costa. Early in his stay in Bogotá García Márquez wrote to Alfonso Fuenmayor:
Your noble paternal concerns will be eased if I tell you that my situation here is still quite good, although the question now is to consolidate it. There is an excellent atmosphere in the newspaper and up to now I’ve been allowed the same privileges as the longest-term employees. However the sad part of the song is that I still don’t feel at home in Bogotá, though if things go on as they are I’ll have no option but to get used to it. As I don’t lead an “intellectual” life here I’m lost as to developments in the novel, because “Ulysses” [Zalamea Borda], the only genius I see here, is always buried in great big indigestible novels in English. Recommend me some translations. I received a copy ofSartoris in Spanish but it fell to pieces and I returned it.14
His new-found prosperity did allow him to go back from time to time to Barranquilla, to visit his friends, to keep a watchful eye on Mercedes, to keep in touch with his roots—and of course see the sun; plus the bonus of simply getting out of Bogotá. Certainly the fact that he would appear in the credits for a film which Alvaro Cepeda would shortly direct, a short experimental movie entitled The Blue Lobster, suggests that his visits to the Costa were reasonably frequent.15
By now his old friends had a new hang-out and the Barranquilla Group would become synonymous with a less portentous crowd, “the piss-takers of the Cueva,” as García Márquez would dub them five years later in his story “Big Mama’s Funeral.” Not long after he had left Barranquilla the gang had regrouped and moved the focus of their activities away from the old city centre to the Barrio Boston, not far from where Mercedes Barcha lived. Alfonso Fuenmayor’s cousin Eduardo Vilá Fuenmayor, a reluctant dentist (Mercedes had been one of his patients), started up a bar which was at first called The To and Fro (El Vaivén), the name of the store it had once been, but which the group later baptized “The Cave” (“La Cueva”—like the dockside bar in Cartagena). This place would become immortalized, like some sacred temple, in García Márquez-related mythology, although the man himself would never be able to go there with much regularity. So rowdy was it, with so much heavy drinking and fighting, that Vilá would eventually put up a sign which said, “Here the customer is never right.”
Back in Bogotá, García Márquez was witness to one of the new military regime’s most notorious atrocities on 9 June 1954 as he returned in the late morning along Avenida Jiménez Quesada from a visit to his ex-boss Julio César Villegas, who was serving out his jail sentence in the Model Prison. He heard a sudden burst of machine-gun fire: government troops were firing on a student demonstration and caused heavy casualties, including several dead, before the horrified writer’s eyes. It was the event that ended the uneasy truce between the new government and the Liberal press. García Márquez’s radical political views had been quite unequivocal from the time of his early days in El Universal, only weeks after the Bogotazo; but this third experience of living in or close to Bogotá brought him to commit himself not only to a particular political ideology—socialism—but also, for a few years at least, to a particular way of viewing and interpreting reality and a particular way of expressing and communicating it technically. The result would be his political reportage, and the writing of the novels No One Writes to the Colonel and In Evil Hour and the stories of Big Mama’s Funeral. He had been longing for several years now to be given the opportunity to be a reporter; but El Universal and El Heraldo lived off international cables and, given their resources and, more to the point, the prevailing regime of censorship, hardly went in for serious reporting. Their mission, in many ways, was to publish something, anything, that was not the usual Conservative propaganda. The owners of El Espectador were made of sterner stuff. And they now had at their disposal a young writer who was fascinated by the variety of people in his country, by the things they did and the things that happened to them; a man who loved stories, who whenever possible turned his own life into a story and would now seize the opportunity to turn the lives of others also into narratives which would grip the imagination.
In Colombia in those days the news was generally terrible. It was the height of the Violencia. Massacres of Liberals continued in rural areas, carried out by the oligarchy’s barbaric paramilitary assassins known as chulavitas or pájaros, and Liberal guerrillas were fighting desperate rearguard actions in many parts of the country. Torture, rape and the sadistic desecration of corpses were commonplace. Rojas Pinilla had imposed press censorship on 6 March and hardened it after the killing of the students in Bogotá. Ex-President López Pumarejo proposed a bipartisan agreement for running the country on 25 March, an idea which would bear fruit three years later with the invention of the so-called National Front but was not greeted positively at this time.
All of this was in part the reflection in a peripheral country of the Cold War frenzy of the era. McCarthyism was at its height in the United States; Eisenhower even outlawed the Communist Party in August 1954 and McCarthy was finally censured by the Senate only in December of that year. Meanwhile the Communist bloc was working on the Warsaw Pact, which would be signed in May 1955. In Barranquilla García Márquez had listened more sympathetically to the communist rantings of Jorge Rondón than most of his friends and colleagues. During his last period in Barranquilla, several months after the death of Stalin in Moscow and several weeks after the Rojas Pinilla coup in Colombia, García Márquez had been visited by a man ostensibly selling watches who was in fact a Communist enlisting members for the Party, particularly among journalists, in exchange for his timekeeping wares. Not long after García Márquez arrived in Bogotá, where he was working from the start with politically progressive colleagues, another watch salesman came to visit and before long García Márquez found himself in contact with Gilberto Vieira, Secretary General of the Colombian Communist Party, who was living clandestinely just a few blocks from the city centre.16 It became clear to García Márquez that the Party had been watching him ever since he had worked with Cepeda on El Nacional and considered him promising material; but according to him it was agreed that his best use for the Party was in writing committed journalism which did not appear to compromise him in Party terms. The Party would seemingly continue to take this view of García Márquez’s activities down the years and usually supported his positions if at all possible.
At the end of July Salgar suggested that García Márquez go to Antioquia to find out “what the fuck really happened” in the 12 July landslide. He found himself on a plane to Medellín where the hillside community out at La Media Luna, east of the city, had collapsed two weeks before with heavy loss of life. There were suspicions that the blame could be attributed to government corruption and jerry-building. García Márquez’s brief was to reconstruct the truth on the spot. The intrepid reporter would later confess that he was so nervous about flying that Alvaro Mutis travelled with him to calm his nerves and installed him in the upmarket Hotel Nutibara. When he was left alone there he felt sick with nerves and totally intimidated by the physical challenge and the moral responsibility; he almost resigned from the newspaper on his first day in Medellín. After he had managed to calm himself he discovered that there was no one out by the Media Luna any more and so there was nothing to be added to the reports of journalists who had been there long before him. He hadn’t the faintest idea what to do. A violent rainstorm postponed his agony. He again considered fleeing back to Bogotá; finally sheer desperation, and a chance conversation with a taxi driver, prodded him into action. He began to think, truly think, about the event he was investigating: what might have happened, where he should go, what he should do. Slowly but with accelerating excitement, he discovered the joy of being a reporter-detective, the creativity of discovering—and in a way inventing—the truth, the power of shaping and even changing reality for tens of thousands of people. He realized that the idea of people travelling out to deaths they could not anticipate was his “angle” and he had a taxi driver take him straight out to Las Estancias, the zone from which most people who had died in the catastrophe had travelled. He soon discovered evidence of official negligence, both short term and long term (it seemed the landslide had been incubating for sixty years!), but also revealed an unexpected and more dramatic aspect of the tragedy, one that most readers would have preferred not to know: that many deaths had been due to people from other parts of the city trying to help without official guidance or assistance and thereby triggering a second landslide. He interviewed numbers of survivors and witnesses, and also the authorities, including local politicians, firemen and priests.17
Then he started to write. Very likely it began as something out of Hemingway but by the time he finished it was pure García Márquez, with that inimitable presentation of life as a drama filled with the horrors and ironies of fate, the fate of human beings condemned to live in a world of unknown causes governed by time:
Juan Ignacio Angel, the economics student standing on the ledge ran down below, preceded by a girl of about fourteen and a boy of ten. His companions, Carlos Gabriel Obregón and Fernando Calle, ran in the opposite direction. The first, half buried, died of asphyxia. The second, an asthmatic, stopped, gasping, and said, “I can’t go on.” He was never heard of again. “When I ran down with the girl and the boy,” Juan Ignacio said, “I came to a big hollow. The three of us threw ourselves to the ground.” The boy never got up again. The girl, who Angel was unable to identify among the corpses, got up for a moment but sank down again screaming in desperation when she saw the earth soaring above the hollow. An avalanche of mud crashed over them. Angel tried to run again but his legs were paralysed. The mud rose to his chest in a split second but he managed to free his right arm. He stayed like that until the thunder-like noises ceased and he felt in his legs, at the bottom of that dense and impenetrable sea of mud, the hand of the girl who, at the beginning, held on to him with desperate strength, then clawed at him, and finally, in ever weaker contractions, relaxed her grip on his ankle.18
The sub-headings were almost certainly chosen by García Márquez himself: “The tragedy began sixty years ago”; “Medellín, victim of its own solidarity”; and “Did an old gold mine precipitate the tragedy?”19 He had learned how to convert his own world-view into a set of journalistic “angles.” “Gabo,” the best friend to his friends, had only recently been born; now the great story-teller “Gabriel García Márquez” had finally appeared on the scene. It was noteworthy that although he was pleased to blame the authorities for their part in the disaster, he was also concerned to tell the whole truth, including the involuntary contribution of so many well-meaning rescuers to the tragedy.
The next piece of pioneering reporting was a series on one of Colombia’s forgotten regions, the department of El Chocó, on the Pacific side of the country. On 8 September 1954 the government decided to carve up the Chocó, an undeveloped, forested department, and distribute the pieces between the departments of Antioquia, Caldas and Valle. There were vehement protests and García Márquez was sent down with a cameraman, Guillermo Sánchez, to report on the conflict. The journey was so bad, in an aircraft so old, that he remembers it “raining inside the plane” and says that even the pilots were terrified. The Chocó, a department mainly inhabited by Afro-Colombians, reminded García Márquez at once of Aracataca and its hinterland. For him the proposed dismemberment of the Chocó was symptomatic of Bogotá’s cold and heartless mentality, though other commentators blamed the ambitious Antioquians. When he arrived he discovered that the demonstrations he had gone to report on had petered out—so he got a friend to organize some more! This ensured the success of his mission. After a few days, as the news item began to grow and other reporters flew in to cover it, the government cancelled its plan to restructure the four departments.20
In late October it was announced that García Márquez’s new role model Ernest Hemingway was to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, just as Faulkner had been when he was in his Faulkner phase. García Márquez wrote a note under the “Day by Day” byline repeating comments he had made before about the Nobel Prize phenomenon, and this time downplaying the possible importance of an award which had already gone to so many “undeserving” writers and which, in the case of Hemingway, he speculated, must surely have been one of the less exciting occasions in a life “so full of exciting moments.”21
The year 1955 would see the publication of García Márquez’s most famous newspaper story. It was based on an immensely long interview, in fourteen sessions of four hours each, with a Colombian navy sailor called Luis Alejandro Velasco, the only survivor of eight crewmen who fell overboard from the destroyer Caldas when she rolled out of control in late February—supposedly during a storm—on the way back from refitting in Mobile, Alabama, to her home port of Cartagena. Velasco survived on a raft for ten days without anything to eat and very little to drink. He became a national hero, decorated by the President and fêted by the media, including the new television service. All this up to the moment when García Márquez decided to interview him … The interviews, which were Guillermo Cano’s idea—García Márquez considered the story had gone cold—took place in a small café on Avenida Jiménez.22 Velasco had an astonishing memory and was himself an excellent narrator. But García Márquez had developed a facility for asking revealing questions and then highlighting the essence of the answers or getting to the most human aspects of the story. Velasco began by stressing the heroic point of view: the battle with the waves, the problem of controlling the raft, the fight against the sharks, the struggle with his mind, until García Márquez interrupted: “Don’t you realize that four days have passed and you still haven’t had a pee or a shit!”23 After each interview he would go back to the office in the late afternoon and write up the corresponding chapter until deep in the night. José Salgar would take them from him, sometimes uncorrected, and run them straight over to the printers. Guillermo Cano told García Márquez he would have liked it to run to fifty chapters. After the fourteen-part series had come to an end, El Espectador put out a special supplement on 28 April reprinting the entire story with what it claimed was “the biggest print run any Colombian newspaper has ever published!”
García Márquez, with his rigorous and exhaustive questioning, and his search for new angles, had inadvertently revealed that the boat had not pitched and rolled in a violent storm but had sunk because it was carrying illegal merchandise which was improperly secured; and that regulation safety procedures were grossly inadequate. The story put El Espectador in direct confrontation with the military government and undoubtedly made García Márquez still more of a persona non grata, a troublemaker considered an enemy of the regime. Those who routinely question his courage and commitment should certainly reflect on this period in his life. García Márquez must undoubtedly have been a marked man and, although he has characteristically played down the dangers of the time, it is easy to imagine his feelings whenever he had to walk home late at night through a grim, lugubrious city floating uneasily in the tension of a military dictatorship. It is something of a miracle that he survived unscathed.24
Many years later the story was re-published, after García Márquez became a world-famous writer. It was entitled The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor (Relato de un náufrago, 1970). Astonishingly, it became one of his most successful books, selling 10 million copies in the next twenty-five years. García Márquez never directly challenged the reactionary government in 1954–5 but in report after report he took up a point of view which was implicitly subversive of official stories and thus challenged the ruling system more effectively than any of his more vocal leftist colleagues, guided always by rigorous investigation, reflection and communication of the realities of the country. All in all, it was a sustained and brilliant demonstration of the power of the story-teller’s art and of the power and central importance of the imagination even in the representation of factual material.
Immediately after those implicitly committed and campaigning pieces, Leaf Storm finally appeared in Bogotá at the end of May under a little-known imprint owned by the publisher Lisman Baum and produced by Sipa Editions at five pesos a copy. García Márquez’s friend the painter Cecilia Porras designed the cover, which depicted a little boy sitting on a chair with his legs dangling, waiting for something: the little boy that García Márquez had once been in the dreaming time before his grandfather died and which he had now transposed into his first published novel. The printers claimed to have produced 4,000 copies, few of which were ever sold.25 Its publication made a strange counterpoint to his current status as a hard-hitting, high-profile journalist, for it belonged not only to an era but to a narrative mode that García Márquez had left behind: at once static and time-tormented, fatalistic and mythical.
Still, a book in print at last. Although it had by no means resolved or even assuaged his obsessions, it was a book based directly on his own childhood, something which had suddenly “dropped off” “The House” after he had made his fabulous return to Aracataca with Luisa Santiaga, now five years before. The title had been rapidly improvised in 1951 in order to be able to send the novel off to Buenos Aires; and some time in the months before publication García Márquez composed a sort of prologue or coda dated “1909,” which made more sense of the title and gave the novel a perspective, both historical and mythological at one and the same time, clarifying its social meaning and adding a clearer sense of decadence, loss and nostalgia. All this is conveyed by a narrative voice similar to that of the Colonel’s in the novel, a voice which laments the arrival of the “leaf-trash,” the migrant workers—rather than lamenting the arrival of capitalism and imperialism—and then reluctantly accepts what has happened in the town as part of the “natural” state of affairs, the cycle of ups and downs inherent in life itself. Here we have a man in his mid to late twenties writing with the voice of a seventy-year-old but viewing him with just a trace of irony. The book was dedicated to Germán Vargas, and was well received by Colombian critics, though inevitably many of the reviews were by García Márquez’s close friends and associates.
He was exhausted, tired of Bogotá and drained by the cumulative effort of researching his reports, the responsibility of meeting growing expectations, and the well-grounded fears that the government might take reprisals against him for his evidently antagonistic positions. Thus when the chance came to get away—and to Europe—he seized it with alacrity, despite many subsequent protestations to the contrary. As ever there is uncertainty about the reasons for his journey. Legend has it that he needed to get out of the country to avoid threats from the government; legend also has it that this explanation is itself one of many examples of García Márquez’s alleged instinct for self-dramatization. But the political explanation cannot be simply discounted: he had made several trips down to the Costa simply to lie low after some of his most provocative stories; and several other El Espectador journalists had received threats or been beaten up by unknown assailants. The trip may well have been intended as a brief self-exile in the guise of a journalistic mission. Or as a jaunt to Europe in the guise of a politically motivated self-exile. Or it may have been intended simply as what the newspaper said it was: a brief foreign assignment beginning with the meeting of the “Big Four” powers—the USA, the USSR, the UK and France in Geneva.
He left his apartment in Bogotá and gave away most of his possessions. He had also saved a tidy sum of money in Bogotá and, despite the family’s continuing straitened circumstances in Cartagena, took it with him.26 Clearly he had agreed to go for a few months at least—in some stories he claims he had expected to be away as little as “four days”—but had it at the back of his mind that he might stay even longer.27 On the other hand, even he cannot have imagined he would be away for two and a half years. The least charitable but most likely explanation for the different versions in this case is that he could not bring himself to confess either to his impoverished family or to his future wife that he was wilfully abandoning them for a significant period of time after having already spent eighteen months away in Bogotá. His sense of responsibility was strong but the lure of Europe and the unknown was even stronger.
On his last evening in Bogotá, 13 July, there was a riotous farewell party in Guillermo Cano’s house which made García Márquez miss his early morning plane to Barranquilla, but he got another flight at midday. The family is said to have reluctantly agreed they could do without his subsidies for a time but of course they had no inkling of how long he would actually be away. He must have been utterly overwhelmed and exhausted but there was Mercedes, now twenty-two, to see—but what could he say to her?—and of course another round of festivities, with his local friends and ex-colleagues. Mercedes had been his “intended” for more than a decade in his own mind but now it was to be decided whether she would finally become his “fiancée”—that is to say, whether he would also become her “intended.” It was actually ten years since he had asked her to marry him, back in Sucre. No one has ever asked the question about other loves in her life—she told me categorically there had never been any—or why García Márquez felt able to leave her loyalty—or rather, her fate—to chance. Perhaps he reconciled the implications of his own fear of rejection, and the fact that he had no material security to offer her, with the thought, like Florentino Ariza in Love in the Time of Cholera, that no matter how long it took to get his woman and no matter what she did in the meantime, one day they would be together and she would be his. This entire departure has been told in several different ways and is shrouded in mystery.
His eventual proposal to Mercedes, if such it was, may suggest not only an anguished fear of losing the woman he loved even though he was playing a long—a very long—game but also an unconscious fear of losing Colombia and thus a way of securing his future connection to the country. Mercedes was from his own region and background and guaranteed he would have someone at his side who would understand where he was “coming from” for the rest of his life. In short, she was not only a kind of platonic ideal on the Dantean model—not that he did not find her extremely attractive physically—but also a highly practical strategic choice: the perfect combination. He, though, unlike Dante, would actually marry his unattainable “lady of my mind,” the woman he had chosen when she was nine years old.28 It seems certain, then, that he proposed now precisely because he was intending to be away from her for a long time. Perhaps he felt better able to take the risk of rejection now that he was a celebrated journalist travelling to Europe on a glamorous mission; perhaps she was more inclined to accept for the very same reason. But the truth is that Mercedes hardly features in the memoir and the details of this extraordinary relationship have never been filled in by either of the two parties. Before he left Barranquilla for Bogotá in 1954, they had hardly spoken in any concrete way but he felt they had a sort of understanding.29
In fact, typically—perversely—the woman who will most feature as a romantic interest in the 2002 memoir is not Mercedes, the love of his life, but another woman, Martina Fonseca, his first love, the married woman with whom he had carried on that frenzied affair in Barranquilla when he was a stripling of fifteen—until she put an end to it. He mentions her several times during the Bogotá chapter.30 Did she even exist? Apparently, because one day, towards the end of 1954, he hears her “radiant voice” on the phone and meets her, in the bar of the Hotel Continental, for the first time in twelve years. She is showing the first signs of “an undeserved old age” and asks him if he has missed her. “Only then did I tell her the truth: that I had never forgotten her but her goodbye had been so brutal that it changed my way of being.” She behaved sportingly but he was resentful and somewhat spiteful; she had had twins but assured him they were not his. She said she had wanted to see how he was, so he asked, “And how am I?” She laughed and said, “That you’ll never know.” He ends the episode by stating—teasingly—that he had been longing to see Martina once she’d phoned yet also terrified that he might have spent the rest of his life with her, “the same desolate terror I felt many times after that day whenever the telephone rang.”
This is an intriguing confessional episode and it is interesting to ask how revealing it is meant to be and why. Is it a confession about him and women? And also a justification of some unspoken attitude towards them? It seems odd that Martina should appear again, quite gratuitously, just before García Márquez finally commits himself to Mercedes. Does it confirm, in some coded fashion, in a culture where men could have no sexual relations with the women they intended to marry while having frequent relations with prostitutes and servants, or indeed other men’s wives, that he had decided to separate his feelings between the unofficial Don Juan, open to “crazy loves,” and the official husband in a stable—somehow “arranged”—marriage to a woman who would be a lifelong “virgin” (as far as other men were concerned) and a loyal, reliable wife, the object of “good love”?31 If the anecdote about Martina Fonseca is true—or if it is invented but some other woman had this chastening effect on him at this or some other time—it would explain why he is so frequently concerned in his fiction and his essays to separate love from sex, why he would cling for so many years to the idea of his self-arranged marriage with someone significantly younger than himself, why he doesn’t bother to express any feelings for Mercedes in the memoir (those feelings can and must be taken for granted, for ever), and possibly also why, when I asked her about this time in their lives in front of her good friend Nancy Vicens, Mercedes—who, García Márquez had already informed me, “never tells me she loves me”—assured me with grim meaningfulness (though not a trace of bitterness) that “Gabo is a very unusual person; very unusual.”32 It was clear to me that a request for clarification would be unwise.
Of course much of this is a game played out between two very strong, very ironic and very private people. Despite other versions down the years which speak of agreements being made before his departure,33 García Márquez assures us in his memoir that he did not “see” his sweetheart before he left for Europe—unless it is really true that he saw her in the street through the window of a taxi and did not stop. And so, in the absence of a meeting with Mercedes, there was—inevitably—another violent farewell celebration in “The Cave” to add to the alcoholic overdose he had brought with him from Bogotá. The next day the group members able to get out of bed saw him off at the airport. His well-deserved hangover was the worst possible preparation for what turned out to be a thirty-six-hour journey across the Atlantic Ocean to the Old World. Still, he was more than ready for the experience: he was twenty-eight years of age, a successful journalist and a respected writer who had published his debut novel. It was an appropriate moment for such a journey. The splendours of European civilization awaited him but those who knew him best could be certain that he would view those splendours entirely from his own hard-earned perspective. Needless to say, his memoir makes no mention of either Ulysses or Penelope.