11

Beyond the Iron Curtain: Eastern Europe During the Cold War

1957

IN EARLY MAY 1957 Plinio Mendoza returned to Paris with his sister Soledad to find his friend thinner, wirier and more stoical. “His pullover had holes at the elbows, the soles of his shoes let in water as he walked the streets and the cheekbones in his ferocious Arab’s face protruded starkly.”¹ But he was impressed by his friend’s progress with the French language and how well he knew his way around the city and its problems. On 11 May they were together drinking at the famous café, Les Deux Magots, when they heard that Rojas Pinilla had been overthrown and had gone into exile, just ten days after he had been condemned by the Colombian Catholic Church. A five-man military junta had taken over and neither of the two friends was optimistic about what might follow.

Both García Márquez and Mendoza had leftist affiliations and illusions and were keen to visit Eastern Europe, especially in view of conflicting reports during the previous year which had begun with Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin and ended with the furore over the Soviet invasion of Hungary. They decided to begin with Leipzig, where Luis Villar Borda had been living in exile for a year on a student grant. Mendoza, who had been in work, bought a second-hand Renault 4 for the summer and on 18 June drove the vivacious Soledad and the downbeat García Márquez off along the great German auto-bahns at 65 mph, taking in Heidelberg and Frankfurt.² From Frankfurt they drove in to East Germany. García Márquez’s first article about this other Germany—once again he would have to wait a long time to see it published—declared that the Iron Curtain was actually a red and white roadblock made of wood. The three friends were shocked by conditions at the border and by the scruffy uniforms and general ignorance of the border guards, who, perhaps unsurprisingly, did not find it easy to write down the name of García Márquez’s birthplace. Soledad Mendoza then drove them off by night towards Weimar. At breakfast they stopped at a state restaurant and were again dismayed by what they saw. Mendoza remembers that before they went in García Márquez, stretching and yawning as he got out of the car, said to him, “Listen, Maestro, we’ve got to find out about all this.” “About what?” “About socialism.” García Márquez recalled that venturing into that unattractive eatery was like “crashing headlong into a reality for which I was not prepared.”³ Around a hundred Germans sat there eating breakfasts of ham and eggs fit for kings and queens, though they themselves, defeated and embittered, looked like humiliated beggars. Later that night the three Colombians arrived in Weimar, from where they visited the nearby Buchenwald concentration camp early the next morning. García Márquez, much later, noted that he never did manage to reconcile the reality of the death camps with the character of the Germans, “as hospitable as the Spaniards and as generous as the Soviets.”⁴

The three friends drove on to Leipzig. Leipzig reminded García Márquez of the southern districts of Bogotá, which was not the highest of recommendations. Everything in Leipzig was shabby and depressing and he reflected, “We, in our blue jeans and shirt-sleeves, still covered in dust from the highway, were the only sign of popular democracy.”⁵ At this point he was not clear whether to blame socialism itself or the Russian occupation.

García Márquez would state in the article he wrote about it that he and “Franco” (Plinio Mendoza) had “forgotten” that Leipzig was the site of the Marx-Lenin University, where they were able to meet “South American students” and discuss the situation more concretely⁶ This was in fact the very reason they had chosen the city: it was the home of Villar Borda, whom García Márquez disguised in his report as a Chilean communist called “Sergio,” thirty-two years of age, exiled from his country two years before and studying political economy. Villar Borda was indeed living in exile—from Colombia, of course—having been closely involved with the Communist Youth in Bogotá, and had managed to obtain a grant to study in the East German city.⁷ He had visited García Márquez at Tachia’s room on Rue d’Assas when he had returned to Paris to renew his visa and “actually existing socialism” was one of their principal topics of conversation. “Gabo and I,” Villar Borda told me in 1998, “thought much the same about the communist system and wanted much the same thing: a humanitarian and democratic socialism.” García Márquez would spend a great deal of his life surrounded by fellow travellers, communists and—more often—ex-communists. Among the latter there would be regretful ex-communists, who stayed on the left, and resentful ex-communists, many of whom moved sharply to the right. García Márquez would reluctantly conclude that democratic socialism was preferable, at least in pragmatic terms, to communism.⁸

Villar Borda took the friends out to a state cabaret which had all the appearance of a brothel, with taximeters on the doors of the toilets, much heavy drinking and couples involved in low-level sexual activity. García Márquez wrote: “It wasn’t a brothel. Because prostitution is prohibited and severely punished in the socialist countries. It was a State establishment. But from the social point of view it was something worse than a brothel.”⁹ He and Mendoza decided they should do their chasing of women in the streets. The Latin American students whom they met, even the committed communists, insisted that the system imposed on East Germany was not socialism; Hitler had exterminated all the real communists and the local leaders were bureaucratic lackeys imposing a so-called revolution “brought from the Soviet Union in a trunk” without consulting the people. García Márquez commented: “I believe that at bottom there is an absolute loss of human sensitivity. Concern for the masses makes the individual invisible. And this, which is valid with respect to the Germans, is also valid with respect to the Russian soldiers. In Weimar people objected to the railway station being guarded by a Russian soldier with a machine gun. But no one cared about the poor soldier.” García Márquez and Mendoza asked Villar Borda to put them out of their misery by finding some dialectical explanation for the state of East Germany. Villar Borda, a committed socialist all his life, began a spiel and then paused and said, “It’s a heap of shit.”

All in all, García Márquez’s reaction to East Germany was almost entirely negative. He had mixed emotions during his time in West Berlin, where the Americans were demolishing and rebuilding with even greater enthusiasm than usual in an effort to make the Soviet bloc look bad:

My first contact with that gigantic capitalist operation within the domain of socialism left me with a feeling of emptiness … Out of that rowdy surgical operation something is beginning to emerge which is the exact opposite of Europe. A shining, antiseptic city where things have the unfortunate effect of seeming too new … West Berlin is an enormous capitalist propaganda agency.¹⁰

Ironically, the propaganda worked very effectively on him and on his descriptions of East Berlin, which carry with them a grim disenchantment: “By night, instead of the advertising slogans that flood West Berlin with colour, only the red star shines on the eastern side. The merit of that sombre city is that it does correspond to the economic reality of the country. Except for Stalin Avenue.”¹¹ Stalin Avenue, built on a monumental scale, was unfortunately also built with monumental vulgarity. García Márquez predicted that in “fifty or a hundred years,” when one or other of the regimes had prevailed, Berlin would again be one vast city, “a monstrous commercial fair built out of the free samples offered by both systems.”¹² Given the political tension and the competition between East and West, he concluded that Berlin was a panicky, unpredictable and indecipherable human space where nothing was what it seemed, where everything was manipulated, everyone was involved in daily deceptions and no one had a clear conscience.

After a few days in Berlin the friends went back to Paris, as fast as they could. Soledad Mendoza went on to Spain, and the two men wondered what to do next.¹³ Perhaps their impressions were too hasty; perhaps things were better in other countries. Within a few weeks friends in Leipzig and Berlin scheduled to travel to the 6th World Youth Congress in Moscow suggested that García Márquez and Mendoza should go too. Earlier, in Rome, García Márquez had tried to obtain a visa for Moscow but was refused four times because he had no official sponsorship. But in Paris, by an extraordinary stroke of good fortune, he now connected again with his talisman, Manuel Zapata Olivella. Zapata was accompanying his sister Delia, an expert in and practitioner of Colombian folklore, who was taking a troupe of mainly black Colombians from Palenque and Mapalé to the Moscow Festival.¹⁴ García Márquez was a reasonably convincing singer, guitarist and drummer, and he and Mendoza signed up, then travelled to Berlin to meet the rest of the party. There they would be joined by other Colombians bound for the festival, including Hernán Vieco and Luis Villar Borda.

Until the very last minute García Márquez was unsure whether he would be able to go. He sent a melodramatic letter to Madrid to inform Tachia, with whom he was perhaps surprisingly back in contact, that Soledad Mendoza would be flying there in a few days and announcing that he himself would be leaving either for Moscow “before midnight today” or for London, where he would continue working on his unfinished novel (In Evil Hour) prior to returning to Colombia. He would be meeting Soledad in the Café Mabillon later that day. (The reference to the Mabillon, where they had first talked, was no doubt intended, like most of the apparently insouciant letter, to wound his ex-lover.) As for No One Writes to the Colonel, which was their book: “I’ve lost interest in it, now that the character is up and walking on his own. He can speak now and eats dirt.” In fact he could afford to lose interest in it because the book was finished. He said that he saw Tachia’s youngest sister Paz quite often and made a suggestive remark about his relationship with all three Quintana sisters. Finally, after saying that he was delighted to be leaving “this sad and lonely city,” he lectured her with evident (or feigned) bitterness: “All I hope is that you will realize that life is hard and it always, always, always will be. One day maybe you’ll stop inventing theories about love and realize that when a man seduces you, you have to do something to seduce him in return, instead of demanding every day that he love you more. Marxism has a name for this but I don’t remember it just now.”¹⁵

Berlin to Prague involved a nightmare train journey lasting thirty hours in which García Márquez, Mendoza and the latter’s Colombian friend Pablo Solano had to sleep standing outside a toilet with their heads resting on each other’s shoulders. They then had twenty-four hours in Prague to recover and García Márquez was able to rapidly update his impressions from two years before. The next stretch was easier, to Bratislava, then through Chop, situated where Slovakia, Hungary and the Ukraine all meet; then towards Kiev and on to Moscow.¹⁶ He was staggered at the sheer size of the vast Tolstoyan country: on the second day in the Soviet Union they had still not passed through the Ukraine.¹⁷ All along the route ordinary Ukrainians and Russians threw flowers at the train and offered gifts whenever it stopped. Most had hardly seen foreigners in the previous half century. García Márquez talked to Spaniards, evacuated as children during the civil war, who had tried to return to Spain, given the difficulties in the USSR, but were now on their way back to Moscow. One of them “could not understand how anyone could live under the Franco regime; he did understand, on the other hand, how people could live under Stalin.” García Márquez was disappointed to note, however, that Radio Moscow was the only channel on the train’s wireless system. After almost three days of travel they reached Moscow in the morning, around 10 July, just a week after the fall of Molotov following his defeat by Khrushchev.¹⁸ García Márquez’s first and lasting impression of Moscow was that it was “the largest village in the world” and now 92,000 visitors, almost 50,000 of them foreign, had arrived there for the festival. Many of them were Latin Americans, some already famous like Pablo Neruda, but others younger men who would later have a big impact on their countries, such as Carlos Fonseca, eventual leader of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas, or, indeed, Gabriel García Márquez. The organization of the festival functioned like clockwork and García Márquez wondered, as so many had before and after him, how the Soviet regime could put on such an event or, three months later, send a Sputnik into orbit, yet fail so spectacularly to give its people a reasonable standard of living or produce moderately attractive clothes and other consumer goods.¹⁹

García Márquez, Mendoza and their new companions dropped out of the Youth Festival almost immediately and spent two weeks exploring Moscow and Stalingrad. There is a picture of a group of friends in Red Square in which, as so often, the wafer-thin García Márquez, kneeling in front of the others, stands out from even a dim 1950s black and white photograph as the one brimming with vitality and barely containing a desire to jump up and get on with the action the second he hears the shutter click. He confessed in his article about that time that in two weeks, with no knowledge of Russian, “I couldn’t come to any definitive conclusions.”²⁰ Moscow was all dressed up and on its best behaviour and García Márquez commented, “I didn’t want to know a Soviet Union with its hair done up to receive a visitor. Countries are like women, you need to know them when they’ve just got up.” So he tried provoking his hosts (“Was Stalin a criminal?”), eventually resorting to asking whether there were no dogs in Moscow because they’d all been eaten, and was told that this was a “capitalist press slander.”²¹ The most illuminating conversation was with an old woman who was the only person in Moscow who dared to talk to him about Stalin, even though Stalin had supposedly been discredited by Khrushchev in February 1956. She said that she was not anti-communist in principle but that Stalin’s regime had been monstrous and that he was “the most bloodthirsty, sinister and ambitious figure in the entire history of Russia”—in short, she told García Márquez things in 1957 which would take many years to emerge into the full light of day. He concluded, “There was no reason to think that woman was mad except for the lamentable fact that she seemed it.”²² In other words, he already suspected it was all true but had no evidence and no wish to believe it.

García Márquez made several attempts to see the tombs of Stalin and Lenin and finally gained admittance on the ninth day. He said that the Soviets had banned Kafka as a “pernicious metaphysician” but that he could have been “Stalin’s best biographer.” Most people in the USSR had never laid eyes on their leader. Although not a leaf on any tree had been able to move without his permission, some people doubted his very existence. Thus only Kafka’s books had prepared García Márquez for the almost incredible bureaucracy of the Soviet system, including obtaining permission to visit Stalin’s tomb. When he finally got in he was astonished that there was no smell; he was disappointed by Lenin, “a wax dummy”; and surprised to find Stalin himself “submerged in a sleep without remorse.” Stalin indeed resembled his own propaganda:

He has a human expression, alive, a smirk that doesn’t seem to be a mere muscular contraction but the reflection of an emotion. There is a slight sneer in that expression. Apart from his double chin, it doesn’t correspond to the person. He doesn’t look like a fool. He’s a man of calm intelligence, a good friend, with a definite sense of humour … Nothing impressed me as much as the delicacy of his hands, with their thin transparent nails. They are the hands of a woman.²³

Later Plinio Mendoza would say he believed that in that very moment the first spark of The Autumn of the Patriarch was ignited.²⁴ This subtle presentation of Stalin’s embalmed corpse was, in a sense, an implicit explanation of how Stalin had managed to deceive the world as to his real methods and motives—through the image of “Uncle Joe.”²⁵

Unlike most foreign visitors García Márquez felt that the money wasted on the Moscow metro would have been better spent on improving the lives of the people. He was disappointed to find that free love was now just a doubtful memory in a surprisingly prudish country. He noted with disapproval that the avant-garde film director Eisenstein was almost unknown in his own country, but he approved of the attempt by Hungarian philosopher Gyorgy Lukács to overhaul Marxist aesthetics, the gradual rehabilitation of Dostoyevsky and the tolerance of jazz (though not rock’n’roll).²⁶ He was surprised to note that there was no sign of any hatred whatever of the United States—a sharp contrast with Latin America—and was particularly struck by the fact that the USSR was constantly having to invent things already existing in the West. He tried hard to understand why things were as they were but evidently sympathized with the reaction of a young student who, when upbraided by a visiting French communist, retorted, “You only have one life.” He thought the director of the collective farm he visited was like “a socialized feudal lord.” He stayed on after most of the other delegates to try to understand the extraordinary complexity of the Soviet experience—“a complexity that cannot be reduced to the simplistic formulas of either capitalist or communist propaganda.”²⁷ Because of this extended stay he was alone when he crossed the border and a Soviet interpreter who looked like the actor Charles Laughton said to him: “We thought all the delegates had gone by. But if you like we’ll fetch the children out to throw flowers again, all right?”²⁸

On the whole García Márquez’s view of the Soviet Union was sympathetic and favourable, reminiscent now, all these years later, of the way he would respond to Cuba and its difficulties in the 1970s. But he made no attempt to hide the negatives he had been able to detect. On the return journey he and Plinio Mendoza, still with Pablo Solano, visited Stalingrad (now Volgograd), and sailed down the Volga to the entrance of the great Volga-Don ship canal, where there was a gigantic statue of Stalin presiding complacently over one of the country’s great achievements. García Márquez left Plinio Mendoza in Kiev and travelled on to Hungary. Mendoza, who was later stranded for over a week in Brest-Litovsk because Solano came down with pneumonia, travelled back through Poland. He was utterly disillusioned by everything he had seen—“we lost our innocence,” he would say later—and gradually came to believe that communist regimes were all cursed by the same regressive genetic code (though he would try once more to believe—in Cuba—in 1959); but García Márquez, who had no bourgeois past to mourn, and no bourgeois tastes to cultivate, was still eager for more experience. He had managed to get himself included in a group of eighteen foreign writers and observers, including two reporters—himself and Belgian Maurice Mayer—invited on to Budapest.

This was less than a year after the Soviet invasion of October 1956. János Kádár had replaced Imre Nagy as leader when the Soviet forces quelled the Hungarian uprising in November 1956. At this time, the summer of 1957, Hungary had been closed for ten months and, according to García Márquez, his was the first delegation of foreigners allowed back into the country. The visit was for two weeks and the authorities arranged an itinerary giving no time for free access to the city or the Hungarian people: “they did all they could to stop us forming any concrete impression of the situation.”²⁹ On the fifth day García Márquez escaped his escort after lunch and set out into the city alone. He had been sceptical about Western reports relating to the suppression of the 1956 uprising but the state of the city buildings and the information he was given by Hungarians he met convinced him that the number of Hungarian casualties—estimated at 5,000 dead and 20,000 wounded—might have been even higher than he had read in the Western press. On succeeding evenings he talked to ordinary Hungarians, including several prostitutes, housewives and students, whose alienation and cynicism shocked him. His audacious behaviour and that of his companion Maurice Mayer produced an unexpected outcome: the authorities decided that the foreigners had to be taken more seriously and thus they were introduced to Kádár himself and taken off on one of his speaking tours, to Ujpest, eighty miles from Budapest. The strategy worked—not the last time that García Márquez would be intoxicated by direct access to the powerful. He stated that Kádár was obviously just the kind of ordinary working man who “goes to the zoo on a Sunday to throw peanuts to the elephants”; he was a modest individual who had found himself in power, clearly had no monstrous appetites and had to choose between supporting the nationalist ultra-right or giving his backing to the Soviet occupation of the country in order to save it for the communism he fervently believed in.³⁰

García Márquez was clearly pleased to be given arguments that made him feel better about the depressing picture he had seen in the streets of Hungary. He analysed the contradictions of the communist regime and the way the workers were denied the fruits of their labour in order to build the communist state, and said, tellingly, that looting could have been avoided the previous year: “It was a question of pent-up appetites that a healthy communist party could have channelled in other directions.”³¹ Now, he concluded, Kádár needed to be helped out of the hole he was in but the West was only interested in making things worse. And things were indeed getting worse: the government was being forced to bring in a system of surveillance whose overall effect was “simply monstrous”:

Kádár doesn’t know what to do. From the moment he made his precipitate call for Soviet troops, irremediably committed with a hot potato in his hands, he had to renounce his convictions in order to move forward. But circumstances are pushing him backwards. He got caught up in the campaign against Nagy whom he accused of having sold out to the West because it’s the only way he can justify his own coup d’état. Since he can’t raise the salaries, since there are no consumer goods, since the economy is destroyed, since his collaborators are untried or incompetent, since the people will not forgive him for calling in the Russians, since he can’t perform miracles, but since he can’t let go of the potato either and slip out by a side entrance, he has to put people in prison and maintain against his own principles a regime of terror which is worse than the one before, which he himself had fought.³²

Despite the effort to make excuses for Kádár, García Márquez was deeply shocked and discouraged. In early September, on his return to Paris from Budapest, he phoned Plinio Mendoza just before Mendoza returned to Caracas. Despite his ongoing efforts to write positive reports on his experiences in Hungary, he exclaimed: “Everything we’ve seen up to now is nothing compared to Hungary.”³³ Of course the journey remained, for the time being, a secret. As late as mid-December he would inform his mother back in Cartagena that “a Venezuelan magazine funded a long journey” but he did not say where the journey had taken him.³⁴

García Márquez had returned to Paris from his long journey with no money and nowhere to stay. “After fifty-one hours on the train all I had in my pockets was a telephone token. As I didn’t want to lose it and it was too early, I waited until nine in the morning to call a friend. ‘Wait there,’ he said, and took me to a chambre de bonne he was renting in Neuilly and lent it to me. There I sat down again to write In Evil Hour.”³⁵ First, though, in late September and October 1957, in that maid’s room in Paris, García Márquez wrote up his impressions of the recent journey, seamlessly weaving in the experience of Poland and Czechoslovakia back in 1955. The result was a long series of articles which would eventually appear as “90 Days Behind the Iron Curtain (De viaje por los países socialistas)” in 1959, though he published his experiences of the USSR and Hungary immediately in Momento (Caracas) through Plinio Mendoza.³⁶ They make up a remarkable testimony of a moment in history and a strikingly judicious and prescient critique, by a well-disposed observer, of the weaknesses of the Soviet system.³⁷ He sent them back to his mentor Eduardo Zalamea Borda, “Ulysses,” for publication in El Independiente, where he was now assistant editor. Who knows with what emotions the old leftist editor picked them up and salted them away in his filing cabinet, where García Márquez would find them two years later and finally manage to get them published in the weekly magazine Cromos.³⁸

Meanwhile, Tachia had spent nine months in Spain: “After the affair with Gabriel I spent three years totally disoriented: scarred, embittered, all my relationships had gone wrong, I had no man.” She had gone straight to Madrid in December, before Christmas, and was hired immediately. She worked for the theatre group of Maritza Caballero, a rich Venezuelan, starting, ironically enough, with Antigone, the play so closely connected to García Márquez’s first novel, Leaf Storm: she played Ismene, Antigone’s sister.

Then she went back to Paris: “My boss Maritza Caballero drove me all the way in her Mercedes, which was a glamorous experience.” One day she saw him—“sooner than I wanted to”—in the window of what is now the Café Luxembourg on Boulevard Saint-Michel. She went in, they talked and decided they should “finish things properly.” They went to a cheap hotel nearby and spent the night together. “It was difficult, anguished, but better. That was not long before he left Paris. After that final parting in 1957 Gabriel and I didn’t meet again till 1968.”³⁹

García Márquez’s time in Paris was almost at an end. De Gaulle had returned to power in June, supposedly to save the Fourth Republic from losing Algeria. Instead he had announced the inauguration of the Fifth Republic and would eventually save the French from themselves by giving Algeria away.

In early November, a couple of weeks after the announcement that Albert Camus had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, García Márquez moved to London,⁴⁰ where he intended to hold out as long as possible, as he had in Paris, on the basis of articles hopefully published in El Independiente and the Venezuelan magazine Momento, of which Plinio Mendoza was now the editor. Mendoza would only publish two of these articles, “I Visited Hungary” (“Yo visité Hungría”) and “I Was in Russia” (“Yo estuve en Rusia”), in late November. García Márquez had always wanted to study English and the journey through Eastern Europe had emphasized more starkly its growing importance because no one there spoke Spanish. As it happened he had been showing an interest in British affairs—the monarchy and the politicians (Eden, Bevan, Macmillan)—ever since his arrival in Europe, even if his professed interest was only in Britain’s stereotypical decadence. Although Franco’s Spain was off ideological limits (and perhaps he even feared he might be picked up there, given the close links between Spain and Colombia, and the possibility that he was on the Rojas Pinilla government’s anti-communist blacklist), he had spent the best part of a year with a Spanish woman; and clearly a visit to Europe’s other old colonial country was a logical part of his grand design. Indeed, it is striking how much of Europe East and West he managed to see, given the difficulty of the times and his dire financial straits. But the attempt to live in London on the flimsiest of shoestrings without knowing the language and without the Latin American contacts always available in Paris was certainly a valiant endeavour.

He lasted almost six weeks in a small hotel room in South Kensington, writing not In Evil Hour but yet more stories that had peeled off from it and would later become much loved by readers when they appeared as part of the collection Big Mama’s Funeral and Other Stories. Like his novella about the colonel and his pension, and unlike In Evil Hour, these would be stories not about the cold-hearted authorities who run the small towns in which they take place but about the poor people doing what they can in the face of adversity, as he liked to think that he had done during his dark year in Paris, stories with a human face and positive values. Zavattini-type stories. Despite his best intentions, he gave himself very little opportunity to learn the local language, though on Saturdays and Sundays he would listen to the orators at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park. His article “A Saturday in London,” in which he sums up, almost folklorically, his experiences in the British capital, may be “the best piece of journalism he wrote in Europe.”⁴¹ It was composed while he was still in London and published both by El Nacional of Caracas and by Momento in January 1958. In it he remarks:

When I arrived in London I thought the English talked to themselves in the street. Later I realized they were saying sorry. On Saturdays, when the whole city piles into Piccadilly Circus, it is impossible to move without bumping into someone. Then there is a vast buzzing, a uniform street chorus: “Sorry.” Because of the fog the only thing I knew about the English was the sound of their voices. I would hear them excusing themselves in the midday penumbra, navigating on their instruments like the planes do through the dark cotton wool of the fog. Finally this last Saturday—in the light of the sun—I saw them for the first time. They were all eating as they walked the streets.⁴²

His main complaint, however, he would later tell Mario Vargas Llosa, by then living in London himself, was the absence of black tobacco; he spent much of his money buying imported Gauloises. Yet he would also say that London had held a strange attraction for him: “You are lucky to be in a city which, for mysterious reasons, is the best to write in, apart from being, for my taste, the best in the world. I went there on a tourist basis, and something obliged me to shut myself away in a room where one could literally levitate in the tobacco smoke and in one month I wrote nearly all the stories of Big Mama. I wasted the visit but I gained a book.”⁴³

On 3 December he sent a letter to his mother in Cartagena via Mercedes in Barranquilla. In it he mentioned writing to Aunt Dilia in Bogotá, presumably to send his condolences for the recent death of her husband Juan de Dios, Luisa Santiaga’s only sibling. At that time García Márquez’s plans were still fluid, though he said he thought he would soon be home: “I’ve been in London a fortnight and preparing myself for the return to Colombia. In the next few weeks I’m thinking of making a quick trip back to Paris and then to Barcelona and Madrid—since Spain is the only European country I don’t know—so I calculate I’ll be in Colombia for Christmas or New Year at the latest. I’m still not tired of travelling round the world but Mercedes has been waiting for too long. It’s not fair to make her wait any longer, although—if I’m not mistaken—she may have just a bit of patience left. But it wouldn’t be right, because if there’s one thing I’ve learned in Europe it’s that not all women are as solid and serious as she is.”⁴⁴ He said he had no money and no job, though El Espectador had made promising noises. He asked his mother to get two copies of his birth certificate, commenting, “Believe it or not, I haven’t got married in Europe.”

Less than two weeks later, on 16 December, he received an unexpected telegram from Caracas. Plinio Mendoza’s boss was offering him a plane ticket to the Venezuelan capital to work on Momenta with him and Mendoza. It was an offer too good to refuse, given the obvious lack of options in London, a city where, as he later told me, “it was impossible for a foreigner to live without a minimum of money.”⁴⁵ Still, he phoned Mendoza to say that a madman had called from Caracas complaining about his—the madman’s—misfortunes and offering him a job. Mendoza confirmed that Carlos Ramírez MacGregor was indeed crazy but the job was real. García Márquez flew out of London just before Christmas, not to Colombia, as he had only recently promised, but to Venezuela.

Forty years later, he said to me: “You know, when I lost the job in Europe early in 1956, I let everything go again, just like in Barranquilla. I could easily have picked something up, with some other paper, but I just drifted, for two years. Until of course I stopped and got back to my things. But for most of that time I just attended to my emotions, my inner world, I had experiences and I built a personal world. Most Latin Americans get culture when they’re in Europe but I didn’t do any of that.”⁴⁶