12
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ FLEW in to Venezuela’s Maiquetía Airport on 23 December 1957, a week after receiving the telegram from Caracas. He was full of excitement and anticipation. He had travelled via Lisbon, where it was snowing, then flew far away from Europe and landed in Paramaribo, Surinam, where it was asphyxiatingly hot and reeking of guavas, the smell of his childhood.1 He was wearing blue jeans and a brown nylon shirt he had bought in a sale on Boulevard Saint-Michel, which he washed every night, and he was carrying the rest of his possessions in a single cardboard suitcase mainly filled by the manuscripts of No One Writes to the Colonel, the new stories he had started in London, and the still unnamed In Evil Hour. Mendoza remembers picking his friend up at about five in the afternoon, with his sister Soledad for company, giving him a brief tour of central Caracas and then taking him to the smart suburb of San Bernardino and lodging him in a pensión whose owners were Italian immigrants.
It was his first visit to a Latin American country other than Colombia. Caracas was a conurbation of perhaps a million and a half people. On the ride into town in Mendoza’s white open-topped MG sports car, García Márquez asked him and Soledad where the city was. Caracas was by then a sprawling, disorganized, motor-dominated urban ribbon, shining white against the green foothills and mauve summit of Mount Avila. It was like a North American city in the tropics. Venezuela, not for the first time, was in the grip of a ruthless military dictatorship. Indeed, the native land of the great Liberator Simón Bolívar had almost no tradition or experience of parliamentary democracy. The portly General Marcos Pérez Jiménez had been absolute ruler for six long years but he had presided over an industrial boom based on the petroleum industry which had unleashed a frenzy of building and highway construction such as no other Latin American country had yet experienced.2
The owner of Momento, Carlos Ramírez MacGregor, dubbed “the madman” (“el loco”) by his employees, was thin, bald and, so Mendoza said, given to fits of hysteria; he wore crumpled white tropical suits and spent most of his life behind the dark glasses which were then at the height of their popularity in a Latin America dominated by military dictatorships. He did not even return García Márquez’s greeting the first morning. Perhaps, like Guillermo Cano before him at El Espectador, he could not reconcile the garish, skeletal figure before him with the picture Mendoza had painted of an outstanding writer and journalist who had enhanced his already substantial reputation during two and a half years in Europe.
García Márquez was undaunted. He would later describe his time in Caracas as a period when he was “happy and undocumented” (the eventual title of the anthology of the articles he wrote there), though he did not feel immediately at home. After Europe’s grey restraint he found Venezuelans somewhat overbearing. But for all the excesses in terms of decibels and glad-handing, the atmosphere in Caracas was reminiscent of the life of tropical gaiety and informality that he had loved in Barranquilla, with one extraordinary advantage: Caracas was actually the capital city of this unfamiliar Caribbean country.
García Márquez and Mendoza, excited to be together again, celebrated both Christmas and New Year in the house of another of Plinio’s sisters, Elvira. Gabo, who had spent much of the last year quite alone, and his brief time in London completely isolated, was delighted to have an audience—if occasionally a reluctant one—for his endless ideas for stories, a stream which had increased dramatically ever since he encountered Cinecittà and the movie scripts of Zavattini. Mendoza had not previously lived in close proximity to a García Márquez with a fixed abode and a steady job and was soon astonished to discover that a friend who worked with such intensity in the newspaper office nevertheless managed to sustain another, completely separate life: “Everywhere I witnessed his secret work as a novelist, the way he always contrived to get on with his books. And I even shared in that strange schizophrenia of the novelist who manages, day by day, to live with his characters, as if they were creatures with a life of their own. Before writing each chapter, he would narrate it to me.”3
The most important and unforgettable moment of García Márquez’s entire stay in Venezuela occurred at the end of the very first week. On 15 December, only days before he flew from London to Caracas, Pérez Jiménez had been confirmed in power by a popular plebiscite which had been scandalously rigged. On the afternoon of 1 January 1958, after preparing the end-of-year special number and taking part in rowdy New Year celebrations the previous night, García Márquez, Mendoza and Mendoza’s sisters planned to go to the beach, but as everyone gathered their towels and swimsuits García Márquez had one of the premonitions so common in his family and in his fiction, not to mention his own always unpredictable life. He told Plinio, “Shit, I have the feeling something’s about to happen.” He added darkly they should all look out for themselves. A few minutes later they were at the window watching bombers sweeping over the rooftops of the city and listening to the sound of machine-gun fire. Just then Soledad Mendoza, who had been delayed, arrived at the building and shouted the news up from the street: the air base in the city of Maracay had rebelled and was bombing the presidential palace of Miraflores. Everyone rushed up to the roof to watch the spectacle.4
The rebellion was put down but Caracas was thrown into turmoil. Three electric weeks of anxiety, conspiracy and repression followed. From 10 January, after years of terror and intimidation, crowds of demonstrators began to defy the police in protests across the capital city. One afternoon the two Colombians were out of the building when the National Security Police raided the Momento office, arrested all the staff present at the time, and took them to headquarters. The director was away in New York and Mendoza and García Márquez spent all day driving around the crisis-torn city in the white MG until curfew time, thereby avoiding arrest and gathering material. On 22 January the entire Venezuelan press stopped work as the prelude to a general strike called by a “Patriotic Junta” of democratic party leaders organizing from New York. That night tension reached its maximum. The two friends stayed up in the Mendozas’ apartment listening to the radio. At three in the morning they heard the engine of a plane climbing over the roofs of the city, and saw the lights of Pérez Jiménez’s aircraft taking him away into exile to Santo Domingo. The streets filled with joyful people celebrating the news and klaxons were still sounding at dawn.5
Just three days after Pérez Jiménez’s departure, García Márquez and Mendoza were waiting in the ante-room of the city’s Blanco Palace with a crowd of other journalists anxious to see what the military had decided during the night about the status of the newly declared governing junta. Suddenly the door opened and one of the soldiers inside, evidently on the losing side of the argument, backed out of the room with his machine gun at the ready, leaving muddy footprints on the floor as he retreated from the palace and into exile. García Márquez would later say: “It was in that instant, in the instant in which the soldier left the room where they were discussing how the new government would be formed, when I had the first intuition of power, the mystery of power.”6 A few days later he and Mendoza had a long conversation with the major-domo of the presidential palace of Miraflores, a man who had worked for fifty years for all of the presidents of Venezuela since the first days of the archetypal strongman and patriarch, Juan Vicente Gómez, who had run the country from 1908 to 1935, and had a blood-curdling reputation; yet the major-domo talked about him with particular reverence and unmistakable nostalgia. Until that time García Márquez had nurtured the usual democratic knee-jerk attitudes to dictators. But this encounter set him thinking. Why were large sections of the people attracted to these figures? Days later he told Mendoza that he was becoming drawn to the idea of writing a great novel about a dictator, exclaiming, “Haven’t you noticed, there still isn’t one?”7 Gómez would eventually be a central model, perhaps the central model, for The Autumn of the Patriarch.
Soon after these thought-provoking encounters García Márquez would read Thornton Wilder’s novel, The Ides of March, a re-creation of the last days of Julius Caesar. Reminded of his own recent vision of Stalin’s embalmed body in Moscow, he began to collect the details which would eventually make a dictator of his own come to life, fleshing out the obsessions with power and authority, impotence and solitude which had been haunting his imagination since childhood. Mendoza recalls that his tireless friend spent a lot of time in those days reading about Latin America’s seemingly interminable list of tyrants, and would regale him, as they lunched in a local restaurant, with picturesque and preferably hyperbolic details about their lives, gradually developing a profile of boys without fathers, men with an unhealthy dependence on their mothers and an immense lust for taking possession of the earth.8 (Gómez had the reputation of running Venezuela as if it were a large cattle ranch.) The elements of a new novel were fast falling into place, yet once again it would take many exasperating years before the project came to full fruition.
Still, in the present at least, García Márquez was in his element. He responded to the euphoria and the opportunities of the new environment as if he himself were a Venezuelan citizen and began to develop a more explicit rhetoric of human rights, justice and democracy. Many readers have judged his articles for Momento as among the best of his entire career. Where in Europe the first-person perspective had given credibility and immediacy to his reporting, he now progressed to a sense of almost impersonal detachment which only enhanced the clarity and even the underlying passion of his presentation.9
A bare two weeks after the fall of Pérez Jiménez, García Márquez wrote a well-researched political article entitled “The clergy’s participation in the struggle,”10 which explained the role of the Venezuelan Church as a whole and the courage of certain priests in particular, not least the Archbishop of Caracas himself, in contributing to the downfall of the dictator at a time when many democratic politicians had all but given up. He was well aware of the Church’s continuing influence in Latin American politics and referred several times in the article to its “social doctrine.” This was not only pragmatic but prescient because in October of that year John XXIII would become the new Pope at a time when the first portents of what would soon be known as “liberation theology” were in evidence in Latin America. His own friend from university days in Bogotá, Camilo Torres, would become the best-known priest in all the Latin American continent to be involved in guerrilla struggle based on the tenets of the new religious creed.
One day in March he was sitting drinking with Plinio Mendoza, José Font Castro and other friends in Caracas’s Gran Café when he looked at his watch and said, “Fuck it, I’m going to miss my plane.” Plinio asked him where he was going and García Márquez said, “To get married.” Font Castro recalls, “It surprised the lot of us because hardly anyone knew he even had a girlfriend.”11 It was more than twelve years since García Márquez had first asked Mercedes Barcha to marry him and more than sixteen years, according to him, since he had first decided she would be his wife. Now he had just turned thirty-one and she was twenty-five. They hardly knew one another, except through letters. Plinio Mendoza, on the other hand, did know about García Márquez’s affair with Tachia Quintana—who had even asked him by letter if she would be able to find work in Venezuela—and his sister Soledad had met the Spanish actress and struck up a firm friendship with her; indeed, she had asked García Márquez, shortly after his arrival in Caracas, how he could have given up such a woman. Mercedes would be moving into a world, her new husband’s world, about which she herself knew almost nothing—much less, indeed, than most of the people who would surround her. It would be years before she could feel completely confident in her position as the woman in the life of this apparently outgoing but also highly private and even secretive man.
The family in Colombia had not seen Gabito for almost three years and even before that they had hardly seen him more than once or twice since the end of 1951, when he returned to Barranquilla after briefly living with them in Cartagena. In fact things had gone rather badly in Cartagena for the García Márquez family until quite recently and even now they remained difficult. However, the Colonel’s old house in Aracataca had finally been sold on 2 August 1957.12 The income from the rent had fallen to a trickle as the building slowly deteriorated and eventually the García Márquez family decided to sell it for 7,000 pesos to a poor peasant couple who had just won the regional lottery. It was this money that helped to complete a new house which Gabriel Eligio was now building in Pie de la Popa, Cartagena.
Luisa had been zealous about ensuring that Gabito got the best education possible—perhaps she had promised this to her father before he died—but gradually she had become worn down by her life as a mother of eleven and her initial concern for the education of the older girls seems to have been motivated more by a desire to keep them out of the clutches of the “local yokels” in Sucre than to help them towards an independent future. One result was that Aida, who had taught primary classes at a Salesian convent school in Cartagena after graduating from Santa Marta, had rather suddenly decided to become a nun and had left for Medellín a couple of years before Gabito returned in 1958. Gabriel Eligio and Luisa Santiaga had both opposed Aida’s decision at the time—just as they had disapproved of her relationship with Rafael Pérez, the boy who wanted to marry her in Sucre—but on this occasion to no avail. At any rate, the family was soon to pay a heavy price for Gabriel Eligio’s laissez-faire approach to education as Cuqui (Alfredo), now a teenager, began to go astray and fall victim to drugs, a problem which would eventually shorten his life.
Meanwhile Rita, the youngest sister, had become involved in a drama which risked turning into Romeo and Juliet. “The only lover I ever had was my husband, Alfonso Torres. I returned to Cartagena from Sincé in November 1953 and I met him in December at his sister’s, a neighbour of ours. That’s where the tragedy began because no one except Gustavo liked him.”13 She was fourteen when she met Alfonso. The family violently opposed the relationship. It didn’t help that Alfonso, though dashingly handsome, was decidedly dark-skinned. Rita and Alfonso met clandestinely for four years, against all odds; once she became so upset at the situation that she cut off all her hair in protest at the attitude of her parents, who would not even have the young man in the house. They never wanted any of their daughters to marry. (Like Aida, Margot had had her own Rafael in Sucre, Rafael Bueno; by the time she decided to defy her parents he had got another girl pregnant and Margot turned her back on love for ever.) It was now that Rita’s eldest brother Gabito, some of whose stories she had studied at school (she particularly remembers The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor), would come to her rescue.
García Márquez had taken a four-day leave from the magazine and flew to Barranquilla, where he stayed in the old Alhambra Hotel on 72 Street and Carrera 47. He arrived with an empty suitcase. “Clothes are very expensive in Caracas,” he said.14 Mercedes would later insist that he “just turned up” at her house but presumably he had contacted her some time before and this is just part of the long-term comic routine they have always put on when anyone asks them about their courtship and marriage. She told me that she would always vividly remember lying on her bed above the pharmacy and a sister shouting, “Gabito’s arrived.”15 But she still wouldn’t say whether she was excited or just surprised. That night Luis Enrique flew in from Ciénaga and he, Gabito, Fuenmayor and Vargas went on a kind of stag night pilgrimage to “The Cave.”
The couple were married on 21 March 1958 at eleven in the morning in the Perpetuo Socorro church on Avenida 20 de Julio after an engagement of just under three years.16 Almost all the “Cave” gang were in attendance. Alfonso Fuenmayor would recall that Gabito seemed dazed by the solemnity of the moment, thinner than ever in his dark grey suit, with his once-in-a-blue-moon tie carefully knotted. The bride arrived terrifyingly late in a startling full-length electric blue dress and veil. The reception was held in her father’s pharmacy down the road.17
Two days later the newly-weds travelled to Cartagena to visit Mercedes’s new in-laws. It must have been strange for Luisa to see her eldest son turn up married after so long away. Alfonso took the opportunity to arrange a meeting with his girlfriend’s eldest brother in the Miramar ice-cream parlour. The next morning, as Rita was leaving for school, Luisa said to her, “Gabito talked to Alfonso yesterday and today he’s going to talk to your father, so your situation will be decided today.” Rita later heard that her brother had said to his father, “It’s time for you to start selling the merchandise.” Alfonso was at last allowed into the house. Demonstrating his seriousness, he said he was prepared to wait another year until Rita had finished high school; demonstrating his lack of seriousness, Gabriel Eligio said he didn’t approve of long engagements and the couple should marry at once. The deed was done within three months, so Rita never did graduate from school. Instead she would have five children and then work in the local civil service to support her family for twenty-five years; and Alfonso Torres would gradually become the man of the García Márquez family in Cartagena.18
The youngest of the García Márquez children, Yiyo, recalled Gabito’s lightning visit forty years later: “He had just got married and had come to Cartagena with Mercedes for their honeymoon, or to say goodbye. Or both things, I don’t know. But I remember them perfectly: both sitting on the sofa in the lounge, in that big house in Pie de la Popa where I spent my adolescence, talking non-stop, and smoking. They smoked a lot: there in the lounge, in the kitchen, at the table and even in bed, where they each had their own ashtray and three packs of cigarettes. He was thin and so was she. Him, nervous, with his pencil moustache. Her, with her incredible resemblance to Sophia Loren.”19
Too soon for friends and family, the newly-weds flew off to Caracas, via Maracaibo. The little girl who, as a childhood friend later told me, had leaned against a wall in the afternoon sunlight in a patio in Sucre, saying, “Oh, I want to go round the world, live in big cities, move from one hotel to the other,” was on her way. There had been no reason to think such dreams would ever come true in a life like hers. As they sat talking on the plane Gabo told Mercedes some of his own dreams: that he would publish a novel calledThe House; that he would write another novel about a dictator; and that at the age of forty he would write the masterpiece of his life. She would later reflect: “Gabo was born with his eyes open … He has always got what he wanted. Even our marriage. When I was thirteen he said to his father, ‘I know who I’m going to marry.’ At that time we were just acquaintances.”20 Now she was married to this man she hardly knew.
This was a new García Márquez, transformed by the reality of marriage and new responsibilities, openly planning the future. It was not only that the new husband, naturally, was trying to impress his new bride; he was also initiating a new era, a new project; and even his beloved literature, his very own thing, would have to be part of the new equation. Instead of living just anyhow, literally from hand to mouth, everything would have to be planned and structured—including writing.
In Caracas the entire Mendoza family turned up at the airport, including the now ageing ex-Minister of Defence, Don Plinio Mendoza Neira, who had gradually come to recognize that his political aspirations in Colombia had evaporated with the passage of time. The Conservatives in Colombia had won the historic battle that had just been lost—apparently for good—in Venezuela.
Mercedes was overwhelmed by this noisy, outgoing, perhaps overconfident and even overbearing new family. The middle sister, Soledad, was no doubt comparing her implicitly, and probably negatively, with the cosmopolitan Tachia. Two decades later the youngest sister, Consuelo, would unwittingly reveal, in an article for a posh Bogotá magazine, just why Mercedes felt so uncomfortable. Recalling her arrival all those years before, Consuelo would write: “She is a woman with the classic build of the women of the Coast: slim but wide-boned, dark-skinned, taller rather than shorter, slanting eyes, a full-lipped smile, serious and mocking at one and the same time. When Mercedes Barcha travelled abroad for the first time and arrived in Caracas, she seemed a timid, quite ordinary person, with narrow skirts, somewhat larger than was the fashion, and short hair, with a permanent wave that did her no favours.”21 In short: of possibly African origins, unfashionable and undistinguished. Unsurprisingly Mercedes would later tell me that she had spent “too much time” with the Mendozas in Caracas, time which was “not to my taste, far from enjoyable—to be honest, I wanted out of the Mendoza family.” But at the start she had to eat with them almost every day. García Márquez had organized a small apartment in Edificio Roraima, San Bernardino, with almost no furniture or household goods.22 It would be the newly married couple’s story for years. And according to Mario Vargas Llosa, chortling at the idea more than thirty years later as he related the story to me, Plinio Mendoza was never out of the García Barcha household even during the honeymoon period.23 Mendoza’s own memoir The Ice and the Flame implicitly confirms the story. One might imagine that this would ensure discretion but Plinio has told the world about Mercedes’s first disastrous efforts at cooking—Mercedes herself admits she could not even cook an egg and that Gabo had to teach her how to do it24—and the fact that she never said a word after her arrival in Caracas: “Three days after I met Mercedes I told my sisters, ‘Gabo’s married to a mute.’”25
Mercedes says she had no problem communicating with her husband, however. When I asked her in 1991 what she thought had clinched their relationship, she said: “It’s a question of the effect of skin on skin, don’t you think? Without that, there’s nothing.”26But that was just the start; soon she would get right under his skin but in a way quite different from all those years of frustration before he really knew her; she would become indispensable to a man who thought of himself as absolutely self-reliant, a man who had not been able to count on anyone since his grandfather died when he was ten years old. She would bring coolness and method to his life. Gradually, as her confidence grew—or, rather, as she found a way to give her inner confidence outward expression—she began to impose her now legendary sense of order on García Márquez’s much-cultivated chaos. She sorted out his articles and press clippings; his documents, stories, the typescripts of “The House” and No One Writes to the Colonel.
In fact before the wedding García Márquez had been working feverishly on his literary activities despite the intense period of political and journalistic activity since his arrival in Caracas. He wrote “Tuesday Siesta,” his fourth Macondo story, almost at one sitting, after Mendoza suggested that his friend enter a short story competition organized by the newspaper EI Nacional and funded by Miguel Otero Silva. García Márquez’s story, written, according to Plinio, during Easter week 1958 (if his friend was telling him the truth; again, there may already have been a first version which Plinio had not seen), was based on an event he had remembered since he was a child, when he heard the shout, “Here comes the mother of that thief,” and saw a poor woman go by the Colonel’s house in Aracataca.27 The short story narrates the experience of just such a woman and her daughter arriving in Macondo by train and obliged to walk through the streets under the hostile gaze of the townsfolk in order to visit the cemetery where her son is buried, having been shot dead while attempting a robbery. Although one of the few stories set in Aracataca-Macondo, its style operates strictly within the neo-realist aesthetic characteristic of this period of García Márquez’s life. He has often said that he considers it his best story and also, intriguingly, “the most intimate”—presumably because the memory from his childhood became fused, magically, with that of his own return, with his mother, walking through the midday heat of Aracataca in 1950.28 For all its merits, it was not awarded the prize.
In terms of inspiration, of course, this and the other Macondo-Aracataca stories draw on the author’s memories, many of them nostalgic, from his “prodigious” childhood, whereas the stories set in “the town” (Sucre) exorcise the memories of his painful adolescence. But whether set in Macondo or in “the town,” these stories focus not on the cold-hearted authorities who run the two communities—though the priests of Macondo are never as cold-hearted as the priest we find in “the town,” and the same goes for the other authorities (Macondo doesn’t even seem to have a mayor)—but on the ordinary people, in close-up, and in warm colour, trying with great difficulty to live their lives with as much courage, decency, dignity and honour as their always adverse circumstances will allow. If this sounds sentimental and unlikely to be “realistic,” well, it is the genius of this writer that he manages to convince the most sceptical readers of his view of the matter.
As fate would have it, García Márquez would be able to spend the second half of May and all of June on his stories. Because once again, as in 1948 and 1956, an unwelcome ill wind would bring good luck as far as literature was concerned. United States Republican Vice-President Richard Nixon arrived in Venezuela on a catastrophic goodwill visit on 13 May, less than four months after the fall of Pérez Jiménez, whom his boss President Eisenhower had recently decorated as a friend of the United States. Nixon’s car was besieged on the way from the airport, stoned, and spat on, and he could easily have lost his life. The event received worldwide coverage and was taken as a historic sign of how low relations between the United States and Latin America had sunk. Heart-searching about this humiliating rebuff would have a lot to do with the founding of the Alliance for Progress three years later. Like other newspaper owners Ramírez MacGregor decided to write an exceptional editorial lamenting Nixon’s reception and effectively apologizing for the incident. Mendoza found himself involved in a bitter argument about the incident, shrieked at the proprietor “Eat shit!,” resigned on the spot and walked out. On the way down the stairs he met García Márquez, arriving late at the office. He explained what had happened and García Márquez turned around and went back down the stairs with him. They were out of a job.29
The two unemployed journalists went back to San Bernardino, picked up Mercedes, and went for a drink and a meal, half postmortem, half celebration, in El Rincón de Baviera, a local restaurant. Mercedes, who would prove to have both a phlegmatic disposition and a black sense of humour, roared with laughter as they told her how and why they had been sacked. The spare time allowed García Márquez both to extend his honeymoon and to go on with his short stories. So the newly-weds were able to spend more time together.30
She had brought her huge collection of letters from Gabo to Caracas with her. There were 650 sheets. After a few weeks he asked her to destroy them because, according to her recollection, “someone might get hold of them.” His own version was that whenever they had a disagreement about something she would say, “You can’t say that because in your letter from Paris you said you’d never do such a thing.” When she proved reluctant—given their characters, this must have been a cagey and difficult discussion—he offered to buy them from her and they eventually settled on the symbolic sum of 100 bolívares, after which she destroyed them all.31 The incident is interesting—if it is true (and even if it is not, come to that). First and foremost, it suggests that he was implicitly guaranteeing to remain married to her for the rest of her life; there would never be a “Gabito” period for her to look back on because there would never be a distance between them which might make sense of a nostalgic moment looking through old correspondence. Secondly, perhaps, the letters were for him, secretly, a memorial to a time when he had indeed forsaken her, during the affair with Tachia and the fling with “La Puppa”; no doubt his conscience demanded that the evidence be destroyed (possibly because he was not ruling out making contact again with Tachia, whom he had met two years to the day before he married Mercedes). Finally, however unlikely it may seem at first sight, it could also suggest that the young man who had boasted on the plane of his future exploits really was expecting to be famous and had the instinct from the start that he should destroy all his lifetime’s evidence in advance and construct his own image for future students, critics and biographers, ready-made. Whatever the truth, the gesture fits in any case with a profound instinct in García Márquez not to hold on to the past, nor to collect souvenirs or mementoes—even of his novels.
Plinio Mendoza got himself rehired by Elite, the top news magazine in the country. There García Márquez would meet one of his most important Venezuelan contacts for the future, Simón Alberto Consalvi, who would later be Foreign Minister of the republic. Mendoza managed to find García Márquez himself another job in the same organization through Miguel Angel Capriles, owner of the Capriles group, one of Latin America’s most powerful newspaper corporations. Thus on 27 June García Márquez became editor in chief of the most frivolous of the Capriles magazines, Venezuela Gráfica, popularly known as “Venezuela Pornográfica” because of the large number of scantily dressed “vedettes” for which it was renowned.32 He had just written an important article on the execution of Hungarian ex-President Nagy for Elite (28 June 1958) but he wrote little for his new magazine.
The good news from Colombia was the unexpected publication of No One Writes to the Colonel in Bogotá in the June edition of Mito, a literary review which had previously published a García Márquez story called “Monologue of Isabel Watching It Rain in Macondo” just after he left for Europe in 1955. He had given Germán Vargas a copy of the novel and Vargas had passed it on, “without my knowledge,” so García Márquez would say, to the editor Gaitán Durán.33 The publication of No One Writes to the Colonelin a literary magazine meant that once again a novel of his had appeared almost clandestinely and would be read by no more than a few hundred people. Better than nothing, he must have thought in those days when best-sellerdom was quite outside his expectations.
Once again, however, another sort of politics was about to intervene to make a radical change in his destiny. Ever since Nicolás Guillén had told him in Paris in early 1956 that a young lawyer called Castro, the leader of the 26 July movement, was the only hope for Cuba, García Márquez had been following the man’s exploits, including his preparations in Mexico, the epic though almost disastrous voyage to Cuba in the motor cruiser Granma and the guerrilla war in Cuba’s Sierra Maestra. Castro had quickly become the object of another of García Márquez’s intuitions. Venezuela was feeling its way anxiously towards a new democratic order through a process which García Márquez would never forget but Venezuela was not his country and things had become less absorbing for him as time went on; in any case his ability to participate through his writing—reporting, editorials—had again been taken away from him. But Cuba, since Castro’s political struggle had unmistakable continental implications, not to say ambitions, might indeed become García Márquez’s country.
He had interviewed Castro’s sister Emma in Caracas in “My Brother Fidel” (“Mi hermano Fidel”), a report published in Momento on 18 April 1958, and he had followed events in Cuba with mounting excitement throughout the year. Although Castro had not yet declared his movement a socialist one, García Márquez had found himself able, for the very first time in his now long career as a journalist, to demonstrate an unrestrained enthusiasm for a politician and an evident optimism about his revolutionary crusade. He mentioned that Castro’s favourite food, which he cooked expertly himself, was spaghetti, and then noted: “In the Sierra Maestra Fidel is still doing spaghetti. ‘He’s a good man, a simple man,’ says his sister. ‘He’s a good conversationalist but, above all, a good listener.’ She says he can listen for hours, with the same interest, to any kind of conversation. That concern for the problems of his fellow men, added to an unbreakable will, seems to be the essence of his personality.”34 Forty-five years later García Márquez would be saying almost exactly the same thing—not to mention eating spaghetti cooked by Castro in Castro’s own kitchen—and little wonder: Fidel Castro was one of the few things in which he was ever able to believe. And the discovery, now, that Castro had been involved in the Bogotazo gave an extra twist of biographical coincidence to García Márquez’s interest in the young Cuban’s epic adventure. Indeed, after his favourable interview with Emma Castro, members of Castro’s 26 July movement in Caracas would begin to feed García Márquez information which he in turn would feed into the magazines he worked for.
On New Year’s Eve 1958, García Márquez and Mercedes had been at a New Year party hosted by one of the Capriles family. When they got back to their building at three in the morning the elevator was out of service. Because they had both had a lot to drink they sat down to rest on each landing as they climbed the stairs to the sixth floor. When they finally opened the door to their apartment they heard pandemonium breaking out across the city, people cheering, car horns sounding, church bells ringing and factory sirens wailing. Another revolution in Venezuela? They had no radio in the apartment and had to run back down the six flights of stairs to find out what was going on. The concierge, a Portuguese woman, told them that it was not Venezuela: Batista had fallen in Cuba!35Later that day, 1 January 1959, Fidel Castro led his guerrilla army into Havana and opened a new era in Latin American history. And for the very first time since the discovery, the whole planet would be touched directly by political events in Latin America. Perhaps the continent’s time of solitude and failure was at an end, García Márquez may have speculated. Later that day he and Plinio Mendoza would celebrate the news together over a large number of cold beers on the balcony of the Mendoza family apartment in Bello Monte, as cars drove around the Caracas freeway system with their klaxons blaring and Cuban flags waving out of the windows. Over the next two weeks the two friends would follow every last detail through press cables in their respective offices.
On 18 January 1959 García Márquez was tidying his desk in the Venezuela Gráfica office prior to leaving for home when a Cuban revolutionary arrived and said a plane was waiting at Maiquetía Airport to take interested journalists to the island to observe the public trial of Batista criminals, called “Operation Truth” (“Operación Verdad”). Was he interested? The decision had to be made on the spot because the plane was leaving later that evening and there was no time even to go home. Mercedes in any case had returned to Barranquilla for a brief vacation with her family. García Márquez called Plinio Mendoza—“Put two shirts in a suitcase and get down to the airport: Fidel’s invited us to Cuba!”—and the two of them set off that same night, García Márquez in the clothes he stood in and without a passport, in a twin-engined plane captured from Batista’s army which gave off “an unbearable smell of rancid urine.”36 As they climbed aboard, with press and television cameras recording the entire event, García Márquez was horrified to see that the man at the controls was a well-known radio presenter, a Cuban exile whom no one knew as a pilot. Then he heard him complaining to the airline company that the plane was overloaded, with people and luggage piled high in the aisle. García Márquez asked the pilot in a quavering voice if he thought they could make it and the pilot told him to put his trust in the Virgin. The plane took off in a tropical storm and had to make an emergency stopover in Camagüey in the middle of the night.
They arrived in Havana on the morning of the 19th, three days after Fidel Castro became premier, and were plunged at once into the excitement, confusion and drama of the new revolution. Everywhere there were red flags, bearded guerrillas with rifles on their shoulders mingling with dreamy-eyed peasants wearing straw hats, and an unforgettable euphoria. One of the first things the two friends noticed was pilots from Batista’s air force who were letting their beards grow to show that they were now revolutionaries. In no time at all García Márquez found himself in the national palace, where, he recalls, there was absolute chaos—revolutionaries, counter-revolutionaries and foreign journalists all intermingled. Mendoza would remember that as they filed in to the press room he saw Camilo Cienfuegos and Che Guevara talking and he clearly heard Cienfuegos saying, “We ought to shoot all those sons of bitches.”37 Minutes later García Márquez was interviewing the legendary Spanish General Alberto Bayo when he heard the sound of a helicopter overhead as Castro flew in to explain “Operation Truth” to a crowd of a million people gathered along the Avenida de las Misiones in front of the building.38 García Márquez interrupted his interview as Castro entered the vast room and was only three people away from him when the new leader prepared to speak. As he started, García Márquez felt a pistol in his back; the presidential guard had mistaken him for an infiltrator. Fortunately he was able to explain himself.
The next day the two Colombians went to Sports City (Ciudad Deportiva) to witness the trial of the Batista supporters accused of war crimes, and they stayed there all day and all night. The purpose of “Operation Truth” was to show the world that the revolution was trying and executing only war criminals, not all “Batista supporters,” as sections of the press in the United States were already alleging. García Márquez and Mendoza attended the trial of Colonel Jesús Sosa Blanco, one of the most notorious members of Batista’s armed forces, charged with murdering unarmed peasants. There was a kind of boxing ring in the stadium, illuminated by floodlights, in which the accused stood in handcuffs. The two Colombians found themselves in the front row, as the crowd, eating improvised meals and drinking beer, bayed for blood and Sosa Blanco, with a mixture of contempt, cynicism and terror, tried to defend himself. When Sosa was finally found guilty, Plinio Mendoza found himself handing the microphone to the condemned man so he could respond to the verdict; but Sosa refused all comment. García Márquez later said that this event changed his idea of The Autumn of the Patriarch, which he now conceived as the trial of a recently overthrown dictator, to be narrated through monologues around a corpse. Both he and Mendoza declined to accompany other journalists to see the condemned man in his cell that evening. The next morning the wife and twelve-year-old twin daughters of Sosa Blanco went to the hotel to plead with the foreign journalists to sign a petition asking for clemency, which all of them did. The mother had given the daughters drugs the previous evening to keep them awake, “so they’ll remember this night for the rest of their lives.”39 García Márquez seems to have signed more out of sympathy for the family and lifelong opposition to the death penalty than out of a concern for the justice of the proceedings. The trial had indeed been a “circus,” as Sosa Blanco protested, but hardly a Roman one. His guilt was not in doubt, and many years later both García Márquez and Mendoza would say that they believed, despite the irregularities, that the sentence was a just one.40
Three days later the two friends flew back to Caracas. Plinio Mendoza, already exasperated by what he saw as growing xenophobia in Venezuela, decided to return to Bogotá. He left at the end of February and began to work freelance for magazines such asCromos and La Calle while he waited for news from Cuba. The utopian euphoria had convinced Mendoza, always more impressionable and impulsive than his older friend, that he should work in some way for the new revolution which both men saw as a phenomenon of continental dimensions and importance. García Márquez himself had already made it plain to contacts in Cuba that he too might be prepared to work for the new regime. If they could find him something useful to do.
The U.S. press was talking ever more grimly of a “bloodbath” in Havana, with wholesale executions of any and all “Batista supporters” who could be rounded up, whereas the new revolutionary government continued to insist that it was simply trying and executing proven war criminals. García Márquez and Mendoza were persuaded of the justice of the Cuban cause, and convinced of the iniquity of the reactions of the United States’s government and media. An Argentinian journalist, Jorge Ricardo Masetti, interviewed during the events at Sports City, had declared that the U.S. coverage of events in Cuba “demonstrates yet again the need for a Latin American press agency to defend the interests of the Latin American people.”41 This concern to present the news from a Latin American perspective was already an obsession of García Márquez’s. Eventually, the new government invited Masetti himself to set up the kind of press agency he had recommended, in Havana; it was to be called Latin Press (Prensa Latina, or, familiarly, Prela). As soon as the creation of this indispensable revolutionary vehicle was agreed, Masetti would start looking for workers and contributors from every country in the continent, and opening offices in all the major Latin American capitals.
• • •
IN APRIL, shortly after Castro had made an eleven-day visit to Washington and New York in which he had been snubbed by the U.S. government, a Mexican called Armando Suárez arrived in Bogotá, the worse for drink, with a suitcase full of banknotes. After talking to Guillermo Angulo, now back in Bogotá, he proposed that Plinio Mendoza and García Márquez should open the new Prensa Latina office planned for the city. Mendoza accepted at once and said that his friend García Márquez, who was still in Venezuela, a brilliant journalist and an ardent supporter of the revolution, was only waiting for the word. “Send for him right now!” was the immediate response.42 The revolution was being made up as it went along. García Márquez would later say, “It was all word of mouth, no cheques and no receipts; that was the Revolution in those days.”43 Days later the Royal Bank of Canada notified Mendoza that 10,000 dollars had arrived in his name. He cabled García Márquez and told him to catch the next plane.
When push came to shove García Márquez’s desire to work for Cuba overcame his reluctance to return to Bogotá. Venezuela’s political advance, for all its problems and hesitations, had profoundly impressed him. But Cuba was going a step—several steps—further. García Márquez and Mercedes arrived in Bogotá in early May, still not knowing exactly what for, according to Mendoza’s version, and Gabo celebrated the news as Mendoza drove them from the airport: “Cuba! Brilliant!”44 It was his first opportunity in twelve years as a journalist to do exactly the kind of work he wanted, with no censorship and no compromises—or so he thought. The new Prensa Latina office was on 7th Carrera—Séptima: just that must have felt like revolution!—between 17th and 18th streets, opposite the Café Tampa, and in fact quite close to the boarding house in which he had stayed on first arrival in Bogotá fifteen years before, on his way to Zipaquirá.45 Bogotá was no longer just the impregnable stronghold of the cachacos in García Márquez’s eyes: now it was the city where Fidel Castro had learned important revolutionary lessons back in April 1948 and where he and Plinio were going to spread the revolution. He started work at once. There was much to learn and much to improvise. Before long the office on 7th Carrera became a meeting place for the Colombian left. Its staffers, who included Mercedes’s brother Eduardo, were in at the very beginning of the most turbulent, passionate and—ultimately—tragic period in Latin America’s twentieth-century history. At that time progressives around the world were watching events in Cuba with the most intense and often fervent attention; and young Latin Americans began to apply the “lessons of Cuba” to their own countries and to set up guerrilla movements all over the continent. Mendoza and García Márquez themselves would organize frequent pro-Cuban rallies in the streets around the office.
Despite this activity, Colombia, as so often, was proving the exception to the continental rule. Events there were less promising to the progressive eye than in either Cuba or Venezuela. When Rojas Pinilla had begun to totter in March 1957, after the Colombian Church condemned his regime, there had been a civic movement led by Liberal leader Alberto Lleras Camargo which called for a general strike. The dictator had resigned on 10 May in favour of a five-man junta under General Gabriel París Gordillo which felt constrained to promise a return to democracy. On 20 July, at the beach resort of Sitges on Spain’s eastern Mediterranean coast, Lleras and the exiled Conservative leader Laureano Gómez had planned an arrangement, to be called the “National Front,” by which the Conservative and Liberal parties would alternate as a two-headed governing entity for the foreseeable future in order to prevent both political chaos—code for a swing to the left—and the danger of a return to military rule. The junta had announced a plebiscite in October and the country had approved the plan on 1 December 1957. After a bizarre primary-type poll which decided who were the most popular of the Liberal and Conservative candidates, Lleras stood unopposed in the 1958 elections and soon after García Márquez and Mercedes Barcha returned to Venezuela following their marriage in March, the Liberal leader had been hailed as the next “democratic” President of Colombia as of August 1958.
García Márquez had summed up Colombia’s recent history in no uncertain terms in an article which was published in Caracas on the day he was married:
“After eight years, nine months and eleven days without elections, the Colombian people went back to the polls to re-elect a congress which had been dissolved on 9 November 1949, by order of Mariano Ospina Pérez, a Conservative president who had previously been just a discreet millionaire. That act of force initiated, at 3.35 one Saturday, a period of three successive dictatorships which have cost the country 200,000 dead and the worst social and economic imbalance in its history. This implacable armed persecution of the Liberals has disfigured our national electoral reality.”46
To complete his damning assessment, García Márquez sneered that Lleras Camargo—who he felt was ultimately to blame for allowing the Liberal Party to lose power in 1946—had emerged as the candidate because he was a virtual Conservative who had predictably recruited the Liberal candidates from among the same set of “oligarchs” who had stood for the party twenty years before. A new party, the Liberal Revolutionary Movement (Movimiento Revolucionario Liberal, MRL), founded on 13 February 1959 by Alfonso López Michelsen, would cause a temporary stir in the 1960s but finally made little impact on the struggle between the two political dinosaurs.
As usual, quite apart from the frustrations of Colombian politics in general, García Márquez was by no means pleased to be back in dreary Bogotá. But he now had a wife to share his reactions and his costeño resistance to the perfidious ways of the bogotanos. Mercedes was several months pregnant, had short hair and often wore trousers, which shocked the Bogotá neighbours, especially in the case of a pregnant woman, as did her husband’s gaudy shirts and weakness for Cuban heels.47 Plinio Mendoza, still a bachelor, turned up at the apartment most days and took Mercedes to the cinema when Gabo was busy. He and his friend had bought identical dark blue raincoats and looked, so their friends teased, “like two boys dressed by the same mother.”48
In the second half of the year came the publication of the articles García Márquez had written in 1957 about the visit to the Eastern Bloc. They appeared in Cromos, under the general title “90 Days Behind the Iron Curtain,” between 27 July and 28 September 1959. It was perhaps significant that he did not repeat the Hungarian article, presumably because Kádár had executed Nagy after García Márquez had given Kádár such a good press. So he had written a separate article on the subject—though even that piece did not remind his readers of his familiarity with Kádár, and it was noticeable that he blamed Khrushchev rather than the Hungarian: “Even those of us who as a matter of principle believed in the decisive role Khrushchev was playing in the history of socialism must recognize that the Soviet prime minister is beginning to look suspiciously like Stalin.”49 Interestingly, what García Márquez most emphasises is that the execution of Nagy was “an act of political stupidity,” not the last time he would take up such a pragmatic position in the face of authoritarian policies he might have been expected to condemn on principle. It should perhaps not surprise us that the man who wrote it, who at this time clearly believes that there are “right” and “wrong” men for particular situations, and who quite cold-bloodedly puts politics before morality, should eventually support an “irreplaceable” leader like Fidel Castro through thick and thin. Ironically enough, the series on Eastern Europe was more relevant in 1959 than it had been when he wrote it in Paris before his departure for London two years before, because Latin America was moving sharply to the left and debates about communism, socialism, capitalism and democracy would be argued over—and killed for—during the next twenty-five years.
Mercedes gave birth to their first child, Rodrigo García Barcha, on 24 August. The unfortunate infant was born a cachaco but he had the christening of a child destined for great things. The godfather, predictably enough, was Plinio Mendoza, and the godmother was Susana Linares, the wife of Germán Vargas, who was now living in Bogotá; but the baby was baptized by Father Camilo Torres, the turbulent priest whom García Márquez had known as a fellow law student at the National University back in 1947. Torres had left the university late in 1947 and his unfortunate girlfriend had retired to a convent. He had become a priest in 1955 and then studied sociology at the Catholic University of Louvain, coinciding in Europe with his three old university friends, García Márquez, Plinio Mendoza and Luis Villar Borda. On his return to Colombia he had taught sociology back in the National University where they had all first come together. By the time they met up again in 1959 Father Torres was active among the marginal communities of Bogotá and finding himself increasingly alienated from the traditional Church hierarchy50 García Márquez would no doubt have wanted Torres as the officiating priest at the christening for sentimental reasons—but he was also the only priest that he and Mercedes knew. At first Torres rejected Plinio Mendoza as godfather, not only because he was an unbeliever but for his proven irreverence. As the child was christened, Torres intoned, “Whoever believes that the Holy Spirit is descending over this child should now kneel.” All four members of the congregation remained standing.51
Whenever the two compadres got in from the office, almost always late at night, after Rodrigo was born, they would try to wake the baby up to play with him; when Mercedes protested, as she always did, García Márquez would say, “All right, all right, but don’t nag our compadre.”52 Camilo Torres remained a frequent visitor to the García Barcha household. Six years later Father Torres, still a blessed innocent, would join the National Liberation Army (Ejército de Liberación Nacional—ELN) guerrillas and would die in his first combat. He remains the most famous revolutionary priest in the history of twentieth-century Latin America.
1959, the year of the Cuban Revolution, was almost at a close. Long before it ended García Márquez had finished writing what must be counted, without a doubt, the most important short story he ever wrote. Really, the extraordinary creation that is “Big Mama’s Funeral” should never have been placed in the same anthology as the other stories started in London and completed in Venezuela, which were a continuation of his neo-realist works, companions both in style and ideology to No One Writes to the Colonel. Far from being a continuation, or even the culmination of that literary mode and of that ideological era, “Big Mama’s Funeral” was something quite new: it is one of the key texts of García Márquez’s entire literary and political trajectory, the one which unites his two literary modes—“realist” and “magical”—for the very first time, and which paves the way for the whole of the mature work over the next half century, in particular for those two definitive masterpieces, One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Autumn of the Patriarch.Indeed, such is the scale of this story, especially its ending, and such its fusion of different elements within García Márquez’s personal mythology and poetics, that he himself would have to spend years trying to separate its most important strands in order to conceive the endings of those two monumental works waiting for him down the years.
The fact is that the return to Colombia, politically speaking, had been a violent, if not unexpected, culture shock for García Márquez. No One Writes to the Colonel had been written in Europe where, despite everything, he could still have some sentimental feelings about home and about some of the people there. The other stories of the forthcoming collection were also started in Europe and then completed in his early months in Venezuela; they exude affection for ordinary Colombians similar to his unmistakable affection for the unnamed colonel. “Big Mama’s Funeral,” however, was the product of his return to Colombia itself, not only after more than three years away but also, unmistakably, after Europe, after Venezuela, after Cuba. To read it for the first time is to feel the weight of all those different experiences bearing down one after another on his perception of the country; it is to feel all the writer’s accumulated frustration, and scorn, and anger at a country which endlessly consumed its own children and seemed as though it would never, ever change.
So the first thing to say about “Big Mama’s Funeral” is that almost nothing happens in it, it is a great song and dance about nothing. Or almost nothing. It tells the story—indeed, a narrator very like Gabriel García Márquez himself tells the story—of the life and death (much more of the death than the life) of an old Colombian matriarch known as “Big Mama” whose funeral is attended by all the politicians and dignitaries of Colombia and even by distinguished visitors from abroad, such as His Holiness the Pope. The story shows but does not say that Big Mama’s entire life has been spent in the middle of absolutely nowhere, that her wealth is based on a shameless relationship of ruthless exploitation with the labouring peasant masses, and that she herself is ugly, vulgar and in every way ludicrous. Yet no one in her unnamed but unmistakable nation seems to notice these obvious facts. In other words, García Márquez is creating an allegory which shows the real moral status of the still feudal semi-“oligarchy” first identified by Gaitán and the hypocrisy of a cachaco-dominated ruling class that pretends that Colombia’s is the best of all possible worlds and that the only ones letting the side down are the poor misbegotten people that these superior beings themselves oppress. What we have, in García Márquez’s view, is a colonial land-tenure system overseen by a nineteenth-century political system. When, oh when, would Colombia’s twentieth century come! Thus his story begins as the representation of a world inside out and upside down:
This is, for all the world’s unbelievers, the true account of Big Mama, absolute sovereign of the Kingdom of Macondo, who lived for ninety-two years, and died in the odour of sanctity one Tuesday last September, and whose funeral was attended by the Pope.53
And fifteen pages later it ends:
Now the Supreme Pontiff could ascend to Heaven in body and soul, his mission on earth fulfilled, and the President of the Republic could sit down and govern according to his good judgement, and the queens of all things that have ever been or ever will be could marry and be happy and conceive and give birth to many sons, and the common people could set up their tents where they damn well pleased in the limitless domains of Big Mama, because the only one who could oppose them and had sufficient power to do so had begun to rot beneath a lead plinth. The only thing left then was for someone to lean a stool against the doorway to tell this story, lesson and example for future generations, so that not one of the world’s disbelievers would be left who did not know the story of Big Mama, because tomorrow, Wednesday, the garbage men will come and will sweep up the garbage from her funeral, for ever and for ever.54
One thinks of the tone and rhetoric of Karl Marx himself.55 But this narrator’s voice and point of view steer just shy of outright sarcasm and rest content with an almost Swiftian or Voltairian irony so forceful that he is able to state the very opposite of what he believes to be the case, certain that the reader will stay with him.
Obviously “Big Mama’s Funeral” is García Márquez’s furious reaction to the national situation and his own sense of let-down on his return, after four long years away from the country. The big difference now is that his voice is that of a writer of authority, a writer whose scorn and contempt has been well earned, based as it is on experience of the wider world.56 The narrator paints a Colombia incapable of change but from a perspective (the USSR? Venezuela? Cuba?) which knows that change is possible, something the narrator of Leaf Storm did not yet know. Such a story could only have been composed in 1959, when García Márquez underwent what Marx would have termed the “dialectical” experience of contrasting the Colombian National Front with the Cuban Revolution—thereby giving his already looming magical realism a savage, satirical, carnivalesque, political edge. This story is, indeed, a unique moment both of distillation and of balance. One of the things it is saying is: “I can no longer write stories like those in this collection. My ‘realist’ phase is over.” But now he too was about to become the victim of a grand historical irony.
As fate would have it, although he himself had reached the end of his realist, or neo-realist phase, he was now in enthusiastic contact with Cuba; and paradoxically, the Cuban regime, which was opening up the imagination of so many Latin American writers and intellectuals, would nonetheless shortly be arguing for the kind of socialist realist writing that García Márquez had just now become incapable of producing. He would need the reassuring spectacle of other Latin American writers publishing novels based on myth and magic, before he could conceive an entire novel of his own which ignored—indeed, implicitly rejected—the tenets of socialist realism. And there would also be strictly biographical factors at work over the next few years. Another—yet another—change of location, and the need to support a wife and children, would be enormously influential in the coming period: he would be distracted from his vocation in a way he never had been before because he no longer had the sinister luxury of being able to starve while he responded to the call of inspiration whenever and wherever it came to him. Thus, for a long time, “Big Mama” would seem to be merely the end of an era (or even, for a time, the end of his career as a writer); it was only much later that it could be seen as an indispensable and historic point of reference, the beginning of his mature period.
In fact, then, in terms of literature, by the middle of 1960 García Márquez was at a loose end. He was even thinking of going back to Barranquilla to work on cinema with Alvaro Cepeda, if the job with the Cuban Revolution did not work out.57 On one of his visits to Barranquilla the Medellín cinema delegate Alberto Aguirre and García Márquez sat waiting in the Hotel del Prado for Cepeda, who was supposed to be coming with a proposal for a national cinematographic organization but failed to arrive. Over lunch García Márquez mentioned in passing that Mercedes had phoned from Bogotá to tell him they needed to pay 600 pesos to prevent their services from being disconnected. Aguirre was a lawyer and editor, who had admired No One Writes to the Colonel when it was published by Mito two years before. At the end of the meal he offered to re-publish the novel. García Márquez said: “You’re mad, you know my books don’t sell in Colombia. Remember what happened with the first edition of Leaf Storm.” Aguirre set out to persuade him, however, and offered him 800 pesos, 200 in advance. García Márquez thought about the electricity bill and agreed on the spot. In a letter a year later, he would complain that he was “the only person who makes verbal contracts when he’s hung over, sprawling in a bamboo rocking chair, in the afternoon heat of the tropics.”58 What he said to Aguirre was right, though. When the book came out in 1961 only 800 of the first 2,000 copies would be sold. If he had waited for success in Colombia he might have waited for ever.