10
WHO CAN SAY what Gabriel García Márquez was looking for as he made his way to the French capital in December 1955? Anyone who knew him would have guessed that Italy would always be more congenial to the Colombian costeño—both socially and culturally—than the cooler, more confident, more colonial, more critical—more Cartesian—country to the north. His attitude to Europe in general, from the start, was that it had little to teach him that he had not already learned in books or on newsreels; it was almost as if he had come to see it rot—the smell of boiled cabbage, one might say, rather than the fragrance of the tropical guava that would always be so dear to his heart and his senses. Yet here he was, after all, in Paris.1
From the Alliance Française hostel he moved on to a cheap hotel favoured by Latin American travellers: the Hôtel de Flandre at 16 Rue Cujas, in the Latin Quarter, run by a Monsieur and Madame Lacroix. Directly opposite was the more opulent Grand Hôtel Saint-Michel, another Latin American favourite.2 One of its long-term residents was the influential Afro-Cuban poet and Communist Party member Nicolás Guillén, one of a large number of Latin American writers in exile during that age of dictators—Odría in Peru (1948–56), Somoza in Nicaragua (1936–56), Castillo Armas in Guatemala (1954–7), Trujillo in the Dominican Republic (1930–61), Batista in Cuba (1952–8), Pérez Jiménez in Venezuela (1952–8), and even Rojas Pinilla in Colombia (1953–7). The entire zone is dominated culturally by the nearby Sorbonne, though the ominous bulk of the Panthéon is the most imposing piece of architecture in the vicinity.
Almost immediately García Márquez contacted Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, whom he had known briefly in Bogotá before the April 1948 uprising. Mendoza junior, that serious and rather pretentious young man whose view of the world had been shattered by his father’s political defeat and exile in the months after the assassination of Gaitán, leaned towards radical socialism and was well on his way to becoming a fellow traveller of the international communist movement. He had read about the publication of García Márquez’s Leaf Storm in the Bogotá press and had “assumed from his photograph and the title that he must be a bad novelist.”3 On Christmas Eve 1955 he was in the Bar La Chope Parisienne in the Latin Quarter with two Colombian friends when a duffel-coated García Márquez came in from the wintry afternoon. The newcomer struck Mendoza and his friends as arrogant and self-satisfied during their first conversation about literature, life and journalism, as if the eighteen months he had recently spent in Bogotá had turned him into a typical cachaco. He claimed to be totally unimpressed with Europe. In fact he appeared interested only in himself. He had already published one novel and only became animated when he began to talk about the development of the second one.
As it happened, in Plinio Mendoza García Márquez had just met his future best friend, though by no means the most constant. Because he would come to know García Márquez better than almost anyone else, and was also less constrained than other people by conventional considerations of discretion and taste, he would become, ironically, one of the more reliable witnesses to García Márquez’s life and development. Despite his negative first impression, Mendoza invited the new arrival to a dinner party on Christmas Day, hosted by a Colombian architect from Antioquia, Hernán Vieco, and his blue-eyed American wife at their apartment in Rue Guénégaud, by the Seine. There the assembled Colombian émigrés and exiles ate roast pork and endive salad with large quantities of red Bordeaux and García Márquez picked up a guitar and sang vallenatos composed by his friend Escalona. This improved the first impressions the Colombians had of him but the hostess still complained to Plinio that the new arrival was “a horrible guy” who not only seemed self-important but stubbed out his cigarettes on the sole of his shoe.4 Three days later the two men met again, after the first snowfall of the winter, and García Márquez, child of the tropics, danced along the Boulevard Saint-Michel and over the Place du Luxembourg. Mendoza’s reserve melted like the snowflakes glistening on García Márquez’s duffel coat.
They spent much of January and February 1956 together, before Mendoza returned to Caracas, where most of his family were now living. In those first weeks the two new friends would spend time at Mendoza’s favourite haunts around the Sorbonne, the Café Capoulade on Rue Soufflot, or L’Acropole, a cheap and cheerful Greek restaurant at the bottom of the Rue de l’École de Médecine. If some acquaintances have described García Márquez at this time, perhaps uncharitably, as unprepossessing, Plinio Mendoza was equally or more so. Moreover few Colombians, when they hear his name—he is known all over Colombia as simply “Plinio,” just as García Márquez is known as “Gabo”—react with indifference. Many consider him devious, a supposedly typical product of the highlands of his native Boyacá; but no one denies that he is a brilliant journalist and polemicist. Unpredictable he is, and sentimental; but he is also funny, self-mocking (genuinely self-mocking, quite a rare thing), enthusiastic and generous.
At the end of the first week of January the two friends sat in a café in the Rue des Écoles reading Le Monde, only to discover that Rojas Pinilla had finally brought about the closure of El Espectador through a cynical combination of censorship and direct intimidation. (El Tiempo had already been closed for five months.) Mendoza recalls that García Márquez played down the significance of the event: “‘It’s not serious,’ he said, just like the bullfighters do after they’ve been gored. But it was.”5 The newspaper had already been fined 600,000 pesos earlier in the month; now it closed down entirely. García Márquez’s cheques stopped coming and by the beginning of February he could no longer pay for his room in the Hôtel de Flandre. Madame Lacroix, a charitable soul, allowed him to fall behind with his rent. According to one of García Márquez’s versions she would gradually move him higher and higher in the building until eventually he ended up in an unheated attic on the seventh floor and she pretended to forget about him.6There his friends would find him writing wearing gloves, a ruana and a woolly cap.
García Márquez was already living on a shoestring before they heard the bad news about El Espectador and Mendoza was struck by how few possessions he had brought with him from Colombia. Mendoza introduced him to Nicolás Guillén and another communist activist, the wealthy Venezuelan novelist and journalist Miguel Otero Silva, who, with his father, had founded the influential Caracas newspaper El Nacional in 1943. They met by chance in a bar in the Rue Cujas in the days before Mendoza left for Venezuela, and Otero Silva invited them to eat in the well-known brasserie Au Pied de Cochon by the market of Les Halles. Years later, when they became friends, Otero Silva would not remember the pale and painfully thin young Colombian who listened so earnestly to the communist diagnosis of the situation in France and Latin America while he bolted down a providential free meal.7 Otero Silva and Guillén had just heard about Khrushchev’s stunning denunciation of Stalin and the cult of personality on 25 February near the end of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union; they were deeply troubled by the newly declared policy of co-existence, which they considered defeatist, and speculated anxiously about the future of the international communist movement.8
Guillén would be the protagonist of one of Garcia Márquez’s favourite anecdotes about the Paris period: “It was when Perón ruled Argentina, Odría Peru and Rojas Pinilla in my country, the time of Somoza, Batista, Trujillo, Pérez Jiménez, Stroessner; in fact, Latin America was paved with dictators. Nicolás Guillén used to get up at five in the morning as he read the newspapers over a cup of coffee; then he’d open the window and shout so he could be heard in both hotels, which were full of Latin Americans, just as if he was in a patio in Camagüey. One day he opened his window and said, ‘The man has fallen!,’ and everyone—Argentinians, Paraguayans, Dominicans, Peruvians—thought it was their man. I heard him too and thought, ‘Shit, Rojas Pinilla’s gone!’ Later he told me it was Perón.”9
On 15 February 1956, a new newspaper, El Independiente, had been launched as a direct replacement for El Espectador, six weeks after the closure of its predecessor. It was edited for two months by Liberal ex-President Alberto Lleras Camargo, who was also the former Secretary of the Organization of American States. García Márquez, after a very difficult and anxious few weeks, breathed a sigh of relief; and when Plinio Mendoza left for Caracas at the end of the month he was satisfied that his new friend was back on his feet and secure. García Márquez’s first article in almost three months appeared in the new paper on 18 March. He sent a seventeen-part report—almost a hundred pages when eventually reprinted and included in a book—on the trial of those accused in the recent espionage scandal in which French government secrets were passed to the Communists during the last months of French rule in Vietnam. Thus on 12 March 1956 El Independiente announced on its first page, “Special envoy of The Independent travels to the most sensational trial of the century.” (Little wonder García Márquez would later get a reputation for hyperbole.) Ironically enough, despite the effort invested in the series, the closure of El Independiente on 15 April would mean that García Márquez never got to relate the climax of the trial, which left his readers frustrated at the end of what was not, in any case, the most interesting of his efforts at reporting, nor the best narrated. Once again, however, although he did not know it, García Márquez had found himself connected, at a distance, with someone who would loom large in his later life. The star of the judicial proceedings was the ex-Minister of the Interior and then Minister of Justice, François Mitterrand: “a fair-haired young man, dressed in a light blue suit, who gave the session a faint touch of the movie-house.”10 Mitterrand himself was under suspicion in the case because of his well-known opposition to the colonial war in Vietnam. For now, though, Mitterrand and the rest of the courtroom cast were in the way of García Márquez’s new novel.
He could hear the chime of the Sorbonne’s clock from his attic. As he sat writing Mercedes Barcha, the fiancée he hardly knew, watched him from a picture frame above the bedside table. Plinio Mendoza recalls that when he first went up to his friend’s room, “I moved to the wall to look at his fiancée’s photograph, fixed there; a pretty girl with long straight hair. ‘It’s the sacred crocodile,’ he said.”11 After García Márquez arrived in Europe Mercedes had begun to send him letters at least twice and frequently three times a week. He wrote back equally assiduously12 His letters to her were usually sent via his parents: his brother Jaime, then fifteen, remembers taking them to Mercedes in Barranquilla from time to time.
The new novel was inspired by the small remote river town where he and Mercedes had first met, though there was to be nothing romantic about the book. Eventually it would be entitled In Evil Hour (La mala hora). Though he could not know it, this ill-fated novel would not be published until 1962. It was not a book about the time in which the García Márquez and Barcha Pardo families had lived in that small community together but instead was set a few years later, in a period contemporary with its composition, and would focus on the local repercussions of the Violencia. This was because the Violencia was dominating the thoughts of all Colombians, at home and abroad—he himself was once more an indirect victim of it—and his recent journalism, before leaving Bogotá, had brought his anti-government postures into sharp focus.
The town in García Márquez’s novel is based almost cinemato-graphically on Sucre. Indeed, the topographical details are so exact that the reader could almost draw a map of a place where all attention is focused on the river, the boardwalk, the main square and the houses which surround it. Sucre would be home to several brief, disturbing novels down the years: In Evil Hour, No One Writes to the Colonel and Chronicle of a Death Foretold. All would be direct expressions of its violent destiny.
It would be many years before anyone would even begin to focus on the identity of this small river town; indeed, most readers have continued to try to reconcile it vainly with the quite different descriptions and atmosphere of Macondo-Aracataca. In future years, in interviews, García Márquez himself would never refer to Sucre by name, just as he almost never mentioned his father; the two facts are surely inseparable. On one occasion he would comment, “It is a village in which there is no magic. That’s why my writing about it is always a journalistic sort of literature.”13 Yet the real Sucre, on which, so to speak, he makes his stand for critical realism—against his father and against Colombian Conservatism—and which inspires him to invent long-suffering characters reminiscent of those in De Sica’s Umberto D. or Bicycle Thieves—that real Sucre was not so very different, socially, from Aracataca; indeed, as his brothers and sisters almost unanimously attest, it is in some ways a much more exotic and romantic place. Magic, as always, is in the eye of the beholder. The difference is that when Gabito had lived in Sucre he was not experiencing it as a child between infancy and the age of ten, as he had experienced Aracataca; nor was he living with his beloved grandfather the Colonel, and in any case he never lived there fully because he was sent away to school—and although being sent away to school was a privilege, he had undoubtedly construed it at the time as yet another expulsion from the family. Besides, he had lived in Aracataca in the wake of a thrilling economic boom; the Sucre period saw the start of the Violencia.
When Leaf Storm was published just before he left Bogotá for Europe, García Márquez’s communist friends had commented that although the book was—of course—excellent, there was too much myth and poetry in it for their taste. García Márquez would confess both to Mario Vargas Llosa and to Plinio Mendoza—who at the time agreed with the communist critique—that he had developed a guilt complex because Leaf Storm was a novel that didn’t “condemn or expose anything.”14 In other words, the book did not conform to communist conceptions of a socially committed literature which would denounce capitalist repression and envisage a better socialist future. Indeed, for most communists the novel form itself was a bourgeois vehicle: the cinema was the twentieth century’s only truly popular medium.
Although In Evil Hour is a political work intended as an “exposé,” García Márquez is still a subtle narrator and still uses an oblique approach to political and ideological critique: for example, he doesn’t even specify that the regime carrying out the repressive acts he describes is a Conservative government—though this would of course be obvious to any Colombian reader. And despite the fact that tens of thousands of people were being murdered every year by the police, the army and the paramilitary militias during the period in question, many of them in the most savage and sadistic fashion imaginable, there are only two deaths in this novel: one a civilian “honour crime” which anticipates the central incident in the later Chronicle of a Death Foretold, and the other a more predictably political crime carried out by the government—though at first sight more as a result of incompetence than design. In fact the novel’s intention is to demonstrate, without saying so overtly, that the entire structure of power depicted in the book must inevitably and repeatedly produce such repressive actions: to put it crudely, the Mayor has to kill some of his opponents if he is to survive.
This surprisingly dispassionate understanding of the nature of power takes the novelist far beyond the desire to moralize or engage in facile propaganda; naturally he deplores the Conservative mentality but he never plays to the gallery. In his autobiography García Márquez would state that the figure of the Mayor had been inspired by the policeman husband of his black lover “Nigromanta”; but he had previously given another explanation, recalled by Germán Vargas: “The Mayor in In Evil Hour has a basis in fact. He was from a town near Sucre. García Márquez has said he was a relative of his wife Mercedes. And that he was a real criminal. He wanted to kill Mercedes’s father and so he always carried a gun. Sometimes, to annoy her, García Márquez reminds her that this guy was from her family”15
Despite his best efforts the novel stubbornly refused to take off and he began to lose his grip on it. Sunk in Colombia at its most depressing, indeed flailing about somewhat aimlessly in that disenchanted world he was re-creating, García Márquez was seeing less and less of Paris as winter turned to spring; but occasionally he would go out into the world. France too, in the dog-days of the Fourth Republic, was in a depressed condition. Pierre Mendès-France, the utopian President of the Council of State who had famously tried to get the French to drink milk instead of wine, had recently been forced from power; Edgar Faure had replaced him, but not for much longer. France had been defeated in Vietnam and was struggling in Algeria. Yet, though no one was aware of it at the time, Paris was in one of its most evocative moments, the last before European Community modernity began inexorably to change it in the 1960s from smoky blue to space age silver. García Márquez would mainly eat in cheap student restaurants such as the Capoulade and the Acropole; and whereas most other Latin Americans would feel the need to wander into the Sorbonne or the Louvre for the occasional piece of intellectual elevation, and to view other people like themselves in those gilded Parisian mirrors, he as usual would spend his days in the university of the streets.
Then, out of the blue, or the grey, came a sudden change in his life. On an evening in March he met a young woman by the purest chance when he was out with a Portuguese journalist who was also covering the French spy trial for a Brazilian newspaper. She was a twenty-six-year-old actress from Spain known as Tachia. She was about to give a poetry recital. Almost forty years later, she would recall that Gabriel, as she would always call him, refused to go to the recital: “‘A poetry recital,’ he sneered, ‘what a bore!’ I assumed he hated poetry. He waited in the Café Le Mabillon down on the Boulevard Saint-Germain-des-Prés, near the church, and we joined him there after the recital.16 He was as thin as a finger, he looked just like an Algerian, curly hair and a moustache, and I’ve never liked men with moustaches. I don’t like crude macho men either; and I’d always had the Spanish racial and cultural prejudice that Latin American men were inferior.”17
Tachia had been born María Concepción Quintana in January 1929 in Eibar, Guipúzcoa, in the Spanish Basque country. She was one of three daughters born to a Catholic family who supported the Franco regime after the civil war. Her father, a lover of poetry, had read to her constantly when she was a child, little knowing how this would determine her future. In 1952 she met the already famous Spanish poet Blas de Otero in Bilbao, where she was working as a nanny, one of the few opportunities for women to work independently in Franco’s Spain. Otero, thirteen years her senior, renamed her by loosely reorganizing the name Conchita: “Tachia.” He also seduced her. Soon after that she ran away to Madrid—although in those days you had to be twenty-five to leave home without parental permission—to study theatre and become an actress, and there she began a passionate but ill-starred affair with this man who was a great poet but profoundly unstable and an inveterate womanizer. The name Tachia appears in some of his best-known poems. Otero put her through hell with his manic unpredictability. To get away from him—though it would be many years before she got away from him entirely—she fled from Spain: “I went to Paris late in 1952 as a sort of au pair for six months; the city just dazzled me. Then on 1 August 1953 I went back there for good. I had none of the necessary skills, I attended theatre courses to try and find an entrée.”
Tachia was adventurous, magnetic, curious, open to every experience. She was the kind of woman considered especially attractive in the post-war existentialist period and—though her own great love was the theatre—in the New Wave movies about to be made in late 1950s Paris: a slim, dark left-banker, usually dressed in black, with a close-cropped gamin haircut of the kind Jean Seberg would shortly make famous, and with energy to burn. Sentimentally, though, at just that moment she was at a loose end. As a foreigner her chances of making it in the French theatre had to be considered little more than zéro but she had no intention of returning to Spain. Nor of seeking long-term emotional attachments. She had been through an amour fou in her own country and nothing since had captured her emotions or her imagination in the same way. Now here she was telling her life story to this unprepossessing Colombian.
“I’d say I disliked Gabriel on sight: he seemed despotic, arrogant, yet also timid: a really unattractive combination. I liked the James Mason types—Blas looked quite like him—the British gentleman types, not the pretty boy Latin lover types like Tyrone Power. Also I’d always preferred older men and Gabriel was more or less my own age. He immediately started boasting about his job, he seemed to consider himself a journalist, not a writer. The friend left the bar at ten and we stayed on, talking, and then started to walk around the streets of Paris. Gabriel said terrible things about the French … Though the French got their own back on him later because they proved too rational for his magical realism.”
Tachia discovered that when you started to talk to this sarcastic Colombian, there was another side to him. Something in the voice, the confidential smile, the way he told a story. García Márquez and the forthright young Spanish woman began a relationship that very quickly became intimate. And perhaps archetypal. The most famous Latin American novel early in the following decade would be Argentinian Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch (Rayuela), published in 1963. It would be about a Latin American expatriate wandering about Paris in the 1950s, surrounded by a group of bohemian friends, artists and intellectuals, mainly focused on the Quartier Latin. The feckless protagonist, Oliveira, no longer young, would have no job, nor any interest in finding one; he would be finding himself and finding the world; and his inspiration, his melancholy muse, would be a beautiful young woman, a sort of hippy avant la lettre known as “La Maga,” “the Sorceress.” Cortázar never really lived this romance; but García Márquez did. Walking and talking, one thing led to another: “Gradually I came to like Gabriel, despite my initial reservations, and the relationship developed. We started to go steady after a few weeks, April some time, I suppose. At the beginning Gabriel had enough money to buy a girl a drink or a cup of chocolate or pay for the cinema. Then his newspaper was closed and he was left with nothing.”
Yes. Three weeks after García Márquez met Tachia El Independiente was closed in Bogotá: this time, although he could not know it, for almost a year. It was a disastrous background to a new relationship. Instead of making up his back pay, the management eventually sent him a one-way ticket to Colombia. When the ticket arrived García Márquez gulped, took a deep breath, and cashed it in. Was this a desire to know Europe better; a desire to complete his new novel; or was he in love? He had already been working for three months on In Evil Hour and he intended to go on with it. So for many reasons he was nowhere near ready to leave Paris. In Bogotá he had found little time for his own writing and now he had the bit between his teeth again. It was his own decision. But it would be hard. And then there was Tachia.
I myself first met Tachia Quintana in Paris in March 1993. We walked around the same city streets that she and García Márquez had walked in the mid-1950s. Six months later, in García Márquez’s house in Mexico City, I took a deep breath and asked him, “What about Tachia?” At that time her name was known to only a few people, and the outlines of their story to even fewer; I guess he must have been hoping it would pass me by. He breathed in equally deeply, like someone watching a coffin slowly open, and said, “Well, it happened.” I said, “Can we talk about it?” He said, “No.” It was on that occasion that he would first tell me, with the expression on his face of an undertaker determinedly closing a coffin lid back down, that “everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life and a secret life.” Naturally the public life was there for all to see, I just had to do the work; I would be given occasional access and insight into the private life and was evidently expected to work out the rest; as for the secret life, “No, never.” If it was anywhere, he intimated, it was in his books. I could start with them. “And anyway, don’t worry. I will be whatever you say I am.” On the matter of Tachia Quintana, then, as she was perceived from the standpoint of García Márquez, both in 1956 and after, we will have to examine the books. Tachia herself, though, was happy enough to tell her side of the story.
When I met Gabriel I was just about to move to a tiny room in the Rue d’Assas. I can’t remember where I was before, you’d never believe how many hotels and apartments I lived in in Paris. I even shared a room with Violeta Parra. The new place was near Montparnasse, between Les Invalides and Saint-Germain-des-Prés close to the brasseries of La Coupole, La Closerie des Lilas, Le Dôme and Le Select, and only yards from the Luxembourg Garden and the theatres, cinemas and jazz-bars of Montparnasse. We went to his room in the Hôtel de Flandre sometimes but mainly we slept in the Rue d’Assas. It was a former hôtel particulier which had been converted. I was in the old kitchen, it was minute, like a maid’s room, a chambre de bonne, with a little patio garden right outside. It was just a bed and orange boxes; imagine, twelve people used to sit on that bed. The owner was a strict Catholic but she mainly closed her eyes and basically let us get on with it. The best thing was the little garden out in the open air. How often he used to wait for me, sitting out there! Often with his head in his hands. He drove me crazy but I was very fond of him.
Soon after he met Tachia, the Colombian found that the book he had begun and on which he had made significant though always painful progress was slowly slipping away from him. Many years later he would become one of the most technically assured “professional” writers in the world, a man who always knew exactly what he wanted to write and then invariably accomplished it. But at this time in his life each work seemed to break off into another one; composition was an agonizing experience; and conception never seemed to lead to the expected process of development. So it was now. One of the secondary characters began to grow, to become autonomous and, eventually, to demand his own separate literary environment. In this case it was an old colonel, at once diffident and obdurate, a refugee from Macondo and from the smell of overripe bananas, a man waiting, fifty years after the event, for the pension due him because of his service in the War of a Thousand Days. The original novel, now set aside, was a cool, cruel work requiring nerve and detachment, but its author was finding himself quite unexpectedly in a moment both of passion and great privation, living out his own version of La bohème.
Just as nostalgia brought about by the journey with his mother was the instrument which had given birth to Leaf Storm, a not dissimilar emotion, poignancy (nostalgia about the impossibility of living in the present), was the lever which separated what would become No One Writes to the Colonel (El coronel no tiene quien le escriba: literally, “The Colonel has no one to write to him”) from what would eventually become In Evil Hour, the novel endlessly delayed and postponed. And once again a woman was the inspiration: in a desperate, haunting way the novel about the colonel would be a projection of the drama García Márquez was starting to live out, right there and then, with Tachia. They were involved in a surprising, exciting, passionate, totally unexpected affair; but quite soon they ran short of money. From the very beginning the relationship was conditioned by poverty and then, soon enough, threatened by tragedy. So the first novel, still a work in progress, was tied up, not for the last time, with an old striped necktie, and pushed to the back of the rickety wardrobe in the Hôtel de Flandre; and the intense, obsessive, desperate story of a starving colonel and his hapless, long-suffering wife took hold some time in May or early June of 1956.
García Márquez’s debts at the hotel mounted alarmingly, yet, tellingly perhaps, he held on to the room even though he couldn’t pay for it. Or said he couldn’t. After a few weeks he and Tachia were finding it difficult even to eat. Of course he had been through this before, in Bogotá, in Cartagena, in Barranquilla. It was almost as if he had to go hungry in order to justify clinging to his vocation. His family could not complain that he was not pursuing his law degree, because he was starving; Tachia should not complain that he was not working to support her, because there were no lengths of suffering to which he himself was not prepared to go while he was writing his book. Granted, his French was still rudimentary and jobs were not easy to come by; but the truth is that he was not really looking. When the air fare was gone, he collected empty bottles and old newspapers and received centimes in return at local stores. At times, he says, he “borrowed” a bone from a butcher so that Tachia could use it to make a stew.18 One day he had to beg a fare in the metro—missing the last five centimes again—and was humiliated by the reaction of the Frenchman who gave him the money. He sent messages to his friends in Colombia appealing for financial help, then found himself waiting hopefully for good news, week after week, like his grandfather waiting for his pension all those years before, and like the colonel in his new novel. Perhaps the irony sustained him.
In a way the relationship with Tachia never really had a chance. He had lost his job just three weeks after they met. And a couple of months later another disaster struck: “I realized I was pregnant one evening when we were walking along the Champs Elysées. I was feeling strange and I just knew it. After I got pregnant I was still out looking after children and cleaning floors, vomiting as I did so, and when I got back he’d have done nothing and then I’d have to start cooking. He said I was very bossy, he called me ‘the General.’ Meanwhile he was writing his articles and The Colonel—it was about us of course: our situation, our relationship. I read the novel as it was written, loved it. But we fought all the time for nine months, all the time. It was hard, exhausting, we were destroying one another. Were we just sparring? No, really fighting.”
“But,” remembers Tachia, “he was also very affectionate; he was tenderness itself. We told each other everything. Men are very innocent and so I taught him things, things about women, I gave him a lot of material for his novels. I have the impression that Gabriel had had very few women; certainly at that time he had never lived with one. Although we fought a lot we also had good times. We used to talk about the baby and what he would be like, and come up with names for him. And Gabriel told me endless stories, fascinating ones about his childhood, his family, Barranquilla, Cepeda, and so on. It was wonderful, I loved that. Gabriel also used to sing a lot, especially vallenatos by Escalona—like the ‘House in the Sky’ [‘La casa en el aire’]. He sang cumbias too, like ‘My Pretty Girl’ [‘Mi chiquita linda’]; he had a beautiful voice. And of course, although we fought all day every day we never had any problem understanding one another at night.
“Gabriel would often sing at the endless parties at Hernán Vieco’s place at Rue Guénégaud. Vieco was very seductive, blue eyes, large eyebrows, very attractive. He was the only one with a house, money and a car—the MG sports car he so adored. Gabriel used to sing there and play the guitar; he danced divinely too. We also had French friends who lived in the Rue Chérubini, over the river. It was there we got to know all Brassens’s songs. It was Gabriel who took me to the Communist Party’s Fête de l’Humanité for the first time, him and Luis Villar Borda, I think. In that way I was still a very traditional woman: I just sat there without saying anything while the men talked about politics. I had no political knowledge or ideas at all in those days, though my instincts were progressive. Whereas Gabriel seemed to me an admirably focused and principled person, at least politically. I formed the impression that as far as political morality was concerned, he was a man of integrity, serious, honourable. I thought of him as something hardly any different from a communist. I remember once saying, as if I knew what I was talking about, ‘I suppose there are good and bad communists.’ Gabriel gave me a look and replied, rather severely, ‘No, ma’am, there are communists and non-communists.’
“I must admit that over the pregnancy he was totally fair. It’s one thing that could be said for him. We had an open discussion and he asked me what I wanted. I think he would have been happy enough to have the baby. Il s’assouvit, as they say here: he put up with whatever I wanted. I was the one who didn’t want it. He knew how serious I was about children and so he knew I would expect him to marry me. He was both good about it and weak. He simply let me do whatever I decided. I don’t think he was as horrified as I was. Probably from his Latin American standpoint it wasn’t so unusual or shocking; he may even have been proud, for all I know.
“It was absolutely my decision, not his. Of course by then, despite or perhaps because of my family background, I had broken with God. By the time we’d been through all this I was four and a half months pregnant; and desperate. It was a terrible, terrible time. Then I had the haemorrhage. He was absolutely horrified, he nearly fainted—Gabriel, when he sees blood, well, you know … I spent eight days in the Maternité Port Royal, very close to where I lived. Gabriel was always the first of the fathers to arrive in the hospital at visiting time in the evening.
“After the miscarriage we both knew it was over. I kept threatening to leave. And finally I did, I just left, first to Vieco’s house, to convalesce, and then to Madrid. I was very upset, worn out. I was always on top in the relationship but the pregnancy undermined me. I left Paris from Gare d’Austerlitz in December 1956. Gabriel organized a whole group of friends to take me to the station. I had recovered from the operation but I was very fragile inside. We were late, of course, the luggage had to be thrown on to the train, I had to rush aboard and there wasn’t even time to say goodbye to everyone. I had eight suitcases. Gabriel always says it was sixteen. I was distraught as the train pulled out, weeping into my hands against the window. Then as the train started to move I stared out at Gabriel, and Gabriel with that soulful look on his face, started walking to keep up and then fell away. Really he let me down in 1956. He just couldn’t cope. Of course I could never have married him. I never had the slightest regret about it. He was too unreliable. And I couldn’t bring children into the world with such a father. Because nothing is more important, is it? Yet in a way I was completely wrong because he turned out to be an excellent father.”
Tachia was a woman who was brave, lucky, determined, adventurous, foolish or intelligent enough to lead a completely independent life long before this became a woman’s “right.” Although her story is that of subordinating her needs to García Márquez, it is difficult to imagine it was not her choice. With one important relationship behind her—one in which she had also found herself “sacrificed” to a literary vocation—it is hard to think she would have put up with anything ultimately unacceptable to her. Probably their relationship was a strong attachment that began to sour and to demand too much once she was pregnant—she had either to marry or put an end to it. And this was not her first serious relationship—though it was the first time either of the couple had ever lived with anyone.
García Márquez was probably unhappy about the abortion attempts; children are not considered a problem on the Costa and he was from a family where the women—Tranquilina, his grandmother; Luisa, his own mother—took in numerous children directly related to them; and so he was probably very troubled by the child’s death. It would have been hard on Mercedes if he had had a baby by another woman but Latin Americans are more accustomed to such things and less judgemental than Europeans. As for him returning to marry Mercedes soon after, he may have thought: so what? She was really only a child before. What would anyone have expected of a twenty-eight-year-old Latin American man but that he would have an affair in Paris? His friends would have been disappointed with anything less. If Tachia had had the baby he might still have left her. In Mercedes he seems very deliberately to have chosen a woman from his own milieu, someone who would understand exactly where he was from and what made him tick.
Tachia had left. But he had his novel. That novel, uniquely for García Márquez, is set during the very time he wrote it, the later months of 1956, framed by the Suez crisis in Europe. The details of the plot had been established long before Tachia left for Madrid. It is October: a colonel, whose name the reader will never know, and who used to live in Macondo, is a man of seventy-five rotting away in a small, asphyxiating river town lost in the forests of Colombia. The Colonel has been waiting fifty-six years for his pension from the War of a Thousand Days and has no other means of support. It is fifteen years since he received even a letter from the state pension department but still he goes to the post office every day in hope of information. Thus he spends his life waiting for news that never comes. He and his wife had a son, Agustín, a tailor, who was murdered by the authorities at the beginning of the year for distributing clandestine political propaganda.19 When Agustín, who used to look after the old couple, was killed, he left behind his champion fighting cock, which is worth a significant sum of money. The Colonel endures innumerable humiliations in order not to have to sell the bird, which for him and his son’s friends (named Alfonso, Alvaro and Germán) becomes a symbol of dignity and resistance, as well as a reminder of Agustín himself. The Colonel’s wife, who is more practical, and also ailing and in need of medical treatment, disagrees with him and repeatedly urges him to sell the rooster. At the end of the novel the Colonel is still obdurately resisting.
García Márquez has said that the novel had a multiple inspiration: firstly—given that he always has a visual image as a point of departure for his works—there was the memory of a man he saw in the Barranquilla fish market years before, waiting for a boat “with a kind of silent anxiety.”20 Secondly, more personally, there was the memory of his grandfather waiting for his own Thousand Day War pension although, physically, the model was Rafael Escalona’s father, also a colonel but a slimmer man, as befits the starving protagonist García Márquez imagined for the book.21 Thirdly, obviously, there was the political situation in Colombia during the Violencia. Fourthly, in terms of artistic inspiration, there was De Sica’s Umberto D., scripted by Zavattini, about another man, with another cherished creature (his dog), who lives out a silent via crucis in post-war Rome, amidst the general indifference of his contemporaries. But what García Márquez has never acknowledged is that No One Writes to the Colonel was based—fifthly and most directly of all—on the drama that he and Tachia were living through at the time, with the Suez crisis as a political backdrop both in their lives and in the novel.22
In both cases the woman puts up with what she interprets as the selfishness or weakness of the man she lives with, a man who has convinced himself that he has a historical mission, one which is more important than she is. In each case she babies him (in the novel the old couple have already lost their son; in the real world Tachia would eventually grow tired of babying Gabriel when she lost her own baby…) and she carries out all the indispensable material and maternal functions of the household. She does all the practical work while he keeps labouring away vainly on a hopeless utopian enterprise, horribly constipated, with the fighting cock as the symbol of his courage, independence and eventual triumph. She is convinced everything will turn out badly; he is indomitably optimistic. Nine months have passed between the death of the Colonel’s son and the events of the novel proper; when the wife says to the Colonel, “We are the orphans of our son,” it could be the epitaph to the affair between García Márquez and Tachia. The cock (the novel, the writer’s personal dignity) is a symbol of an individual’s identification with collective values. And guilt, and grief—the miscarriage, the death of the son—can only be assuaged by going on, almost as a memorial. García Márquez’s personal motto might always have been: “the only way out is through.”
No One Writes to the Colonel is one of those prose works which, in spite of its undeniable “realism,” functions like a poem. It is impossible to separate its central themes of waiting and hoping, weather phenomena and bodily functions (not least excreting or, in the unfortunate Colonel’s case, not excreting), politics and poverty, life and death, solitude and solidarity, fate and destiny. Although García Márquez has always said that dialogue is not his forte, the world-weary humour communicated by his characters, modulated in a fractionally different way to distinguish each of them from the others, is one of the defining features of his mature works. That unmistakable humour, as characteristic as that of Cervantes, reaches its definitive expression in this wonderful little novel, just as the Colonel himself, however briefly depicted, becomes one of the unforgettable personages of twentieth-century fiction. The last paragraph, one of the most perfect in all literature, seems to concentrate and then release virtually all of the themes and images marshalled by the work as a whole. The exhausted old man has managed to fall asleep but his exasperated wife, almost beside herself, shakes him violently and wakes him up. She wants to know what they will live on now that he has finally decided not to sell the fighting cock but to prepare it instead for combat:
“What will we eat?”
The Colonel had taken seventy-five years—the seventy-five years of his life, minute by minute—to arrive at that instant. He felt pure, explicit, invincible, at the moment he replied: “Shit.”23
The reader too feels a sense of release; and finds no little aesthetic pleasure in the implicit contrast between the perfectly synthesized ending and a sense of liberation and relief: a raising of consciousness, resistance, rebellion. Dignity, always so important to García Márquez, has been restored.
Years later, No One Writes to the Colonel became a universally acknowledged masterpiece of short fiction, like Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, almost perfect in its self-contained intensity, its carefully punctuated plot and its brilliantly prepared conclusion. The writer himself would say that No One Writes to the Colonel had the “conciseness, terseness and directness I learned from journalism.”24
Yet the end of the novel was not the end of the story. There is always another way of telling a tale. Twenty years later, García Márquez would write a strange and disturbing short narrative, “The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow.” It might be called No One Writes to the Colonel revised and corrected. If the first work would turn out to be his version of the affair at the time, an unmistakable self-justification, the later work is equally clearly a self-criticism and a belated vindication of Tachia. Had he changed his mind or was he trying to mollify his ex-lover many years down the line? In the later story a young Colombian couple travel to Madrid on their honeymoon and then drive to Paris. As they leave the Spanish capital the young woman, Nena Daconte, receives a bunch of red roses and pricks her finger, which then bleeds all the way to Paris. At one point she says, “Imagine, a trail of blood in the snow all the way from Madrid to Paris. Wouldn’t that make a good song.” The author must have remembered, naturally, that after losing so much of her own blood, Tachia had travelled in the opposite direction, all the way from Paris back to Madrid, in the middle of winter. Is all this an exorcism? In the story, when the young couple arrive in Paris, Nena, who knows France well, and is two months pregnant, checks herself into the very hospital—a “huge, gloomy hospital” just off Avenue Denfert-Rochereau—where Tachia’s haemorrhage was treated in 1956, where she too might have died, and where her unborn child did indeed die. Nena’s untutored husband, Billy Sánchez de Avila, who has never left Colombia before this trip to Europe, and who dances in the Parisian snow just as García Márquez himself had done the first time he saw it, proves completely incapable of coping with the crisis, in a cold, hostile Paris, and Nena dies in the hospital without him ever seeing her again.25
Tachia was gone. At Christmas García Márquez was back in the Hôtel de Flandre full time, at the end of what he would later call “that sad autumn of 1956,”26 blamed by most of his friends for Tachia’s problems and her dramatic departure. But he was in the final stages of his novel, he had found a way to justify what had happened, at least to himself (he considered it a point of honour not to talk with other men about his personal relationships) and nothing would stand in his way. The survival of the cock at the end of the novel is also the survival of the novel itself despite a nagging woman; and, in the end, its completion took place just a few weeks after Tachia departed for Madrid. He would date it “January 1957.” No baby was born but the novel was. Tachia said he was “lucky” to finish it under the circumstances of those months. It is difficult to agree that luck had anything to do with it.
Now there was no Tachia to buy food, haggle over prices and cook cheap meals. García Márquez was scraping the barrel just like the old Colonel scrapes his coffee pot on the first page of the novel. He would tell his friend José Font Castro that he once spent a week in his frozen attic hiding from the hotel administrators without eating, and drinking only from the tap in the washbasin. His brother Gustavo recalls, “I remember a confidence Gabito passed to me when we were drinking in Barranquilla: ‘Everyone’s my friend since One Hundred Years of Solitude but no one knows what it cost me to get there. No one knows how I was reduced to eating garbage in Paris,’ he told me. ‘Once I was at a party in the house of some friends who helped me out a bit. After the party the lady of the house asked me to put the garbage out in the street for her. I was so hungry that I salvaged what I could from the garbage and ate it there and then.’”27
In other respects he was at a loose end too. Some friends were alienated by what they took to be his abandonment of Tachia and treated him less benevolently and less generously as a result. He got a job singing in L’Escale, the Latin American nightclub where he had spent evenings with Tachia and where she herself had found occasional work before. Mostly he was not doing vallenatos but Mexican rancheras in duet with the Venezuelan painter and sculptor Jesús Rafael Soto, one of the pioneers of kinetic art. He earned a dollar a night (equivalent to about eight dollars in 2008). He mooched around. He tried to get back to In Evil Hour but it had lost its hold on him after the months he had spent in the company of the old Colonel. The Barranquilla friends at “The Cave” had formed a “Society of Friends to Help Gabito” (“Sociedad de Amigos para Ayudar a Gabito,” or SAAG); together they bought a 100-dollar note, and met in the Rondón Bookshop to work out how best to send it to their friend. Jorge Rondón, using his Communist Party experience, explained how he had learned to send clandestine messages inside postcards. This the friends did and simultaneously sent a letter explaining the trick. Of course, the card arrived before the letter, and the indignant García Márquez, who was hoping for more than best wishes, snorted: “Bastards!” and threw the card in the waste paper bin. That same afternoon the explanatory letter arrived and he was fortunate to be able to retrieve the postcard after rummaging through the hotel’s dustbin.28
Then he had no way of changing the money. The photographer Guillermo Angulo—in Rome at the time, looking for García Márquez!—recalls: “Someone told him about a friend called ‘La Puppa’ who had just got in from Rome after getting paid her salary and should have a lot of money on her. So he went to see her—he was bundled up as usual, since it was wintertime—and ‘La Puppa’ opened the door and a current of warm air from a well-heated room greeted him. ‘La Puppa’ was naked. She was not pretty, but she had a great body and she would take her clothes off without any provocation. So ‘La Puppa’ sat down—according to Gabo, what bothered him most was that she carried on as if she were fully dressed—and crossed her legs and started to talk about Colombia and the Colombians she knew. He started to tell her his problem, and she nodded and went across the room to where she had a little money chest. He realized that what she wanted was to have sex, but what he wanted was to eat. So he went off to eat and pigged out so much that he was sick for a week with indigestion.”29 No doubt this second-hand anecdote has gained a good deal in the telling. It was “La Puppa” who would take a copy of No One Writes to the Colonel back to Rome for Angulo to read. Despite Angulo’s uncharacteristic discretion, it seems that she and García Márquez had a brief fling after Tachia returned to Madrid. Good for the battered ego, no doubt.
The fact remains, though, that García Márquez lived in Paris for eighteen months with only a cashed-in air ticket, sporadic charity from friends and some scant savings of his own to survive on; and no means of getting back to Colombia. By now however he spoke French, knew Paris well and had an assortment of friends and acquaintances, including one or two French people, Latin Americans from several different countries and a number of Arabs. Indeed García Márquez himself was frequently mistaken for an Arab—it was the era not only of Suez but of the Algerian conflict—and more than once he was taken in by the police as part of their regular security sweeps:
One night, as I was leaving a cinema, a police patrol set about me in the street, spat in my face and punched me as they bundled me into an armoured wagon. It was full of silent Algerians, also picked up and beaten and spat on in local cafés. They too, like the police who arrested me, thought I was Algerian. So we spent the night together, crammed like sardines in a cell in the nearest police station, whilst the police, in shirt sleeves, talked about their kids and ate wedges of bread dipped in wine. To piss them off the Algerians and I stayed awake all night singing songs by Brassens against the abuses and stupidity of the forces of law and order.30
He made a new friend inside overnight, Ahmed Tebbal, a doctor who gave him an Algerian viewpoint on the conflict and even involved him in a few subversive activities on behalf of the Algerian cause.31 Economically, however, things just got worse and worse. One grim night he saw a man crossing the Pont Saint-Michel:
I didn’t have a full appreciation of my situation until one night when I found myself by the Luxembourg Garden without having eaten a chestnut all day and without a place to sleep … As I crossed the Saint-Michel bridge I felt I was not alone in the mist, because I could clearly hear the steps of someone approaching in the opposite direction. I saw his outline appear in the mist, on the same sidewalk and moving at the same speed as me, and I clearly saw his tartan jacket with its red and black squares, and in the instant we passed one another halfway across the bridge I saw his untidy hair, his Turk’s moustache, that sad expression that told of daily hungers and sleepless nights, and I saw his eyes were filled with tears. My blood froze because that man looked like me, on my way back.32
Later, talking of those days, he would declare: “I too know what it is to wait for the mail and be hungry and beg: that’s how I finished No One Writes to the Colonel in Paris. He is a bit me, the same.”33
It was around this time that Hernán Vieco, whose financial status was quite different, and who had taken Tachia in after the miscarriage, resolved most of García Márquez’s problems by lending him the 120,000 francs he needed to pay Madame Lacroix at the Hôtel de Flandre. On the way back from a party one night, drunk but by no means incapable, Vieco told García Márquez they needed a heart to heart. He asked him how much his hotel account had now risen to. García Márquez refused to discuss the matter. One of the reasons people often helped him in his youth was because they could always see that no matter how bad his circumstances he never felt especially sorry for himself and he never asked for help. Eventually, after a scene of inebriated theatricality, Vieco flourished a fountain pen, wrote out a cheque on the roof of a parked car and stuffed it in his friend’s coat pocket. It was for the equivalent of 300 dollars, a substantial sum at the time. García Márquez was overwhelmed both with gratitude and with humiliation.34 When he took the money to Madame Lacroix her response was to stammer, red with embarrassment in her turn—this was, after all, Paris, home of bohemianism and of struggling artists—“No, no, monsieur, that’s too much, why don’t you pay me part now and part later.”
He had survived the winter. He was not the father of a baby. He had not been trapped by a European Circe. Mercedes was still waiting for him in Colombia. One bright day early in 1957 he caught sight of his idol Ernest Hemingway walking with his wife Mary Welsh down the Boulevard Saint-Michel in the direction of the Jardin du Luxembourg; he was wearing old jeans, a lumberjack’s shirt and a baseball cap. García Márquez, too timid to approach him, too excited not to do something, called from the other side of the road: “Maestro!” The great writer, whose novel about an old man, the sea and a big fish had partly inspired the younger man’s recently completed novel about an old man, a government pension and a fighting cock, raised his hand and shouted back, “in a slightly puerile voice”: “Adios, amigo!”35