16

Fame at Last

1966–1967

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ HIMSELF was less anxious about the book’s eventual success than whether the two packages would even arrive in Buenos Aires. Alvaro Mutis had been working as the Latin American representative of 20th Century Fox for a year and was shortly off to Argentina; García Márquez asked him to take another copy to Paco Porrúa in the Sudamericana office in Buenos Aires. Mutis phoned Porrúa on arrival and said he had the manuscript. Porrúa said: “Forget it. I’ve already read it, and it’s absolutely brilliant.”¹ If Porrúa thought the book was “absolutely brilliant,” it was likely to be a sensation.

Back in Mexico City García Márquez had all his daily notes and his family trees written in forty school notebooks. He and Mercedes claim to have torn them up and burned them as soon as they heard the manuscript had arrived safely in Argentina. They were mainly about structural and procedural questions, he has said. His friends, much more aware of academic and historical considerations, were appalled and said he should not have destroyed them but rather saved them for posterity (or even, as things turned out, to make a handy profit out of them).² But García Márquez has always defended himself by explaining his sense of embarrassment (“pudor”), which means that he would no more want people to sift over his literary scraps than his household scraps or bits of gossip about his family intimacies. “It’s like being caught in your underwear.”³ Of course there is also something about the artist—or the magician—wanting to protect the tricks of the trade. Unfortunately for biographers he has the same attitude to revealing the most innocent details about his own life. He has always wanted to control the version of his life that would be told—or tell several versions so that no one version can ever be told—as if to cover over for ever the feelings of loss, betrayal, abandonment and inferiority that came to him from his childhood.

He was already being talked about as the fourth member of that small band of brothers who were leading the Latin American narrative vanguard to international attention through the so-called literary Boom. These four writers—Cortázar, Fuentes, Vargas Llosa and, from this moment, García Márquez—would receive unparalleled publicity in the years to come but at that particular time the movement had not entirely gelled and no one writer had emerged as what might be called the brand leader of this extraordinary range of new products. But his peers already knew; metaphorically, they had already bowed their heads: Gabriel García Márquez was it. Nothing would ever be the same again in Latin America after the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude. The first people to realize this were the Argentinians.

Argentina, in terms of high culture, was the leading nation in Latin America. Buenos Aires, its glamorous cosmopolitan capital, where García Márquez’s novel was soon to be published, was something like a fusion of Paris and London in the New World. Literary culture there was intense and sometimes pretentious but the quality of debate was always high and its influence on the rest of Latin America undeniable, particularly after the Spanish Civil War when the mother country ceased to have significant intellectual or literary impact on the great continent to the south. When García Márquez read Kafka in Bogotá in 1947, and so many other writers in Barranquilla between 1950 and 1953, it was invariably in Argentinian editions that he did so. Losada had turned down his first novel fifteen years before; now his early dream was about to come true and that early wrong was about to be righted: he was about to be published in Buenos Aires.

Down in the Argentinian capital the publishers at Sudamericana were making no secret of the fact that they thought they had a Latin American prodigy—and possibly a critical sensation—on their hands. As it happened, the name García Márquez had already received a modest amount of publicity in Buenos Aires over the preceding months. Around the middle of 1966 the Jorge Alvarez Editorial published The Ten Commandments (Los diez mandamientos), an anthology of Latin American short stories which included “There Are No Thieves in This Town.” This book, which was an early attempt to cash in on the growing Boom, was a best-seller throughout the second half of 1966.⁴ The publishers had invited each writer to give a literary self-portrait. García Márquez’s was emblematic of his new approach to self-advertising once he became convinced that he was about to become a literary success:

My name, Señor, is Gabriel García Márquez. I’m sorry: I don’t like the name either because it is a string of commonplaces I’ve never been able to connect to myself. I was born in Aracataca, Colombia, forty years ago and I’m still not sorry. My sign is Pisces and my wife Mercedes. Those are the two most important things that have happened in my life because thanks to them, at least until now, I’ve been able to survive by writing.

I am a writer through timidity. My true vocation is that of magician, but I get so flustered trying to do tricks that I’ve had to take refuge in the solitude of literature. Both activities, in any case, lead to the only thing that has interested me since I was a child: that my friends should love me more.

In my case, being a writer is an exceptional achievement because I am very bad at writing. I have had to subject myself to an atrocious discipline in order to finish half a page after eight hours of work; I fight physically with every word and it is almost always the word that wins, but I am so stubborn that I have managed to publish four books in twenty years. The fifth, which I am writing now, is going slower than the others, because between my debtors and my headaches I have very little free time.

I never talk about literature because I don’t know what it is and besides I’m convinced the world would be just the same without it. On the other hand, I’m convinced it would be completely different without the police. I therefore think I’d have been much more useful to humanity if instead of being a writer I’d been a terrorist.⁵

Here, patently, was a writer expecting to be famous. Once more he had mainly said the opposite of the truth in a way calculated to make himself not only more visible but also more lovable. The image is of the ordinary guy with—implicitly, sheepishly—the extraordinary gift. The contrast between the surface timidity and self-deprecation and the underlying confidence and desire for attention is notable, and would irritate future adversaries beyond measure. Readers of the statement would also have divined that this ordinary guy was politically progressive too, though with a great sense of humour about politics and everything else. He was a man of his age, a man of the moment. Who, reading this, would not look out for his books?

Argentina’s most influential weekly magazine at the time was Primera Plana. Its editor was Porrúa’s friend the writer Tomás Eloy Martínez, who would later become a good friend of García Márquez himself. Primera Plana was a major opinion former and sold 60,000 copies a week. Its proprietors were always looking for the next big cultural sensation and in December 1966, primed by Paco Porrúa, they decided to send Ernesto Schóo, their star reporter and a member of the editorial board, to interview García Márquez in Mexico. Given the cost of air fares in those days this was quite an investment for any magazine but Primera Plana trusted Porrúa and knew what they were about. The Argentinian journalist effectively lived with the García Barcha family in Mexico for an entire week. When the magazine eventually published his piece six months later it put García Márquez on the cover, not in his own unglamorous street but in the picturesque cobbled lanes of old San Angel. The photos were taken by Schóo himself and showed García Márquez clowning about in typical sixties style wearing his familiar black and red checked jacket. This was not the way Argentinian writers dressed, it was more Jack Kerouac; soon it would just be García Márquez; then “Gabo.” So instead of the gloomy writer described by Luis Harss in that influential book published only a few weeks before Schóo’s interview, Schóo’s pictures would show a happy, indeed euphoric, novelist essentially at home in the world.⁶

In April Mario Vargas Llosa, who had recently published his scintillating second novel The Green House, rode one of his own hobby horses into battle by announcing that García Márquez’s forthcoming book was, not Latin America’s “Bible,” as Carlos Fuentes had asserted, but Latin America’s great “novel of chivalry.” Vargas Llosa must have been stunned by the sudden appearance of this unexpected rival from Colombia but, like Fuentes, he opted, appropriately enough, for the chivalrous approach. His groundbreaking article, “Amadís in America,” appeared in Primera Plana in April and declared that One Hundred Years of Solitude was at one and the same time a family saga and an adventure story: “A sharply focused prose, an infallible technical wizardry and a diabolical imagination are the weapons which have made this narrative deed possible, the secret of this exceptional book.”⁷

The Argentinians decided to give García Márquez the full treatment. He was invited to visit Buenos Aires in June, both to publicize the novel and as the member of a jury of the Primera Plana/Sudamericana fiction prize. In the interim both Sudamericana andPrimera Plana redoubled their efforts to publicize the novel. One Hundred Years of Solitude was finally printed on 30 May 1967. It was 352 pages long and cost 650 pesos, about U.S.$2. The initial idea had been to produce the standard print run of 3,000 copies, high by Latin American standards but fairly normal in Argentina. But the overwhelming enthusiasm of Fuentes, Vargas Llosa and Cortázar, plus Porrúa’s own intuition, made them take a chance. So they moved to 5,000; but demand from booksellers for pre-publication copies put it up to 8,000 two weeks before printing. They expected these to sell in six months if things went well. After a week the book had sold 1,800 copies and was third in the list of best-sellers, an unheard-of achievement for a Latin American novel by a virtually unknown writer. By the end of the second week it had tripled that number in Buenos Aires alone and was out in first place, with the initial print run of 8,000 now looking totally inadequate.

Ironically enough, Primera Plana itself, after all the staff’s efforts, was a little slow out of the blocks. The intention had been to publish Schóo’s six-month-old report with García Márquez’s picture on the front page of the edition for the week 13 to 19 June but the Six Day War in the Middle East broke out on the 5th at 3.10 a.m. Buenos Aires time and García Márquez’s moment was postponed until the 29th. Inside the magazine a note introducing the issue said that this was not just an extraordinary event but that it (the book but also, implicitly, this issue of Primera Plana) was the baptismal font from which the new Latin American novel would emerge. Schóo’s essay was entitled “The Journeys of Sinbad,” implicitly comparing García Márquez’s work from the outset with theOne Thousand and One Nights which had indeed been so important in the fashioning of his imagination. Magic was in the air. Between the book being printed and going on sale the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper, also destined for mythical status, appeared in record shops all over the world.

García Márquez had tried to placate his friend Vicente Rojo, sore at the Colombian not selling the book to his friends at Era in Mexico, by inviting him to design the cover. Rojo worked hard to communicate the chaotic, multiple, popular flavour of the novel. He put the E of SOLEDAD backwards, leading in due course to the most recondite and esoteric theories of literary critics and to a letter from a bookseller in Guayaquil protesting the receipt of defective copies which he had had to correct by hand so as not to annoy his customers.⁸ Rojo’s cover would eventually appear on more than a million copies of the book, and become a Latin American cultural icon; but it did not appear in the first printing because it failed to arrive in time. So for the first edition a house designer, Iris Pagano, drew up a blueish galleon floating in a blueish jungle against a grey background, with three orange flowers blooming beneath the ship. This is the cover which collectors would later seek for their transactions, not the much more sophisticated cover designed by one of Mexico’s leading artists. The second, third and fourth editions in June, September and December each carried Rojo’s design and were produced in print runs of 20,000 copies, a phenomenon without precedent in the history of Latin American publishing.

In early June García Márquez was interviewed in Mexico by Visión, the Latin American equivalent of Time, and the only magazine sold all over the continent (though published, significantly enough, from Washington). García Márquez told his interviewers that he was planning to take his family for two years to “a beach resort near Barcelona.”⁹ He repeated the now familiar story that he had started One Hundred Years of Solitude when he was “seventeen” but that the “package” was too big for him to manage. But he also said something surprising: “When I finish writing a book it no longer interests me. As Hemingway said: ‘Every finished book is like a dead lion.’ The problem then is how to hunt an elephant.” García Márquez tired of One Hundred Years of Solitude: could he be serious! The statement was published in other magazines and newspapers all over Latin America and was typical of a new journalistic phenomenon: the boutade à la García Márquez.¹⁰ It was a multiple contradiction in terms: consciously nonchalant, and irritating to his critics for that and other reasons; as knowingly hypocritical as a wink of the eye, with a kind of my-way arrogance passing for modesty; all wrapped up in a popular witticism allowing its author to escape from aggression with the effortless elegance of a Chaplinesque pirouette—and yet, underneath, and paradoxically, it would always contain some undeniable kernel of truth.

García Márquez and Mercedes set off for Argentina on 19 June to begin to meet their destiny. He had confessed to Plinio Mendoza that he was “as frightened as a cockroach” and looking for “a bed big enough for me to hide under.”¹¹ They flew first to Colombia and left their two sons with their maternal grandmother on the way. The boys, both effectively Mexicans, would not return to their home country for many years. On the plane to Buenos Aires their parents discussed their options for the future and Mercedes must have reflected on the promises Gabo had made about his future objectives when they took their first flight together almost ten years before. He had indeed now written “the novel of his life” at the age of forty. On 20 June they landed at Ezeiza Airport in Buenos Aires at three in the morning, three weeks after the publication of the novel. Despite their clandestine arrival, Paco Porrúa recalls that the whole city seemed to be in party mode, having “succumbed immediately to the novel’s seductive charm.”¹² He and Martínez were there to greet the unsuspecting couple, whose life had changed more even than they knew. Far from exhausted by the journey, García Márquez asked to see the pampas and to eat an Argentine grilled steak.¹³ As a compromise they took him to a restaurant on Montevideo Street. As they tried to accustom themselves to this man from the tropics, with his psychedelic lumberjack’s overcoat, his tight Italian trousers, his Cuban boots, his black-capped teeth and his curious mixture of sententiousness and nonchalance, they persuaded themselves that this indeed was what the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude had to look like. As for his wife, she was a wonderful apparition who looked like an Amerindian version of Queen Nefertiti.¹⁴

García Márquez was dazzled by Buenos Aires—his first experience, he would say, of a Latin American metropolis that didn’t look “unfinished.” One morning he saw a woman with a copy of the novel stuffed in her shopping bag, between the tomatoes and lettuces, as he breakfasted in a café on a street corner. His book, already “popular” in both senses of the word, was being received “not like a novel but like life.”¹⁵ That same night he and Mercedes went to an event in the theatre of the Instituto Di Tella, the motor for Argentinian cultural life in that era. Tomás Eloy Martínez has recorded the moment when García Márquez became, for ever, a character in a story he had written in advance, like his character Melquíades, without knowing it: “Mercedes and Gabo moved towards the stage, disconcerted by so many early furs and shimmering feathers. The auditorium was in shadow but for some reason a spotlight followed them. They were about to sit down when someone shouted ‘Bravo!’ and broke into applause. A woman echoed the shout. ‘For your novel!’ she said. The entire theatre stood up. At that precise moment I saw fame come down from the sky, wrapped in a dazzling flapping of sheets, like Remedios the Beautiful, and bathe García Márquez in one of those winds of light that are immune to the ravages of time.”¹⁶

Martínez says that García Márquez wove his magic all over Buenos Aires. He was just about to leave a party one evening by the banks of the Río de la Plata when he noticed “a young woman who was almost levitating with happiness. García Márquez said, ‘That young woman is really sad but doesn’t know how to realize it. Wait a moment, I’m going to help her to cry.’ He whispered a few secret words in the young woman’s ear. Huge uncontrollable tears sprang from her eyes. ‘How could you tell she was sad?’ I asked him later. ‘What did you say to make her cry?’ ‘I told her not to feel so alone.’ ‘She felt alone?’ ‘Of course. Have you ever known a woman who didn’t feel alone?’” Martínez continues, “I met him again, furtively, the night before his departure. They had told him that in a glade in the Palermo woods, couples would hide in dark fiery caves where they could kiss one another freely. ‘It’s a place they call El Tiradero, Fuck Corner,’ he ventured. ‘Villa Cariño, Love’s Abode,’ I translated. ‘Mercedes and I are desperate,’ he said. ‘Every time we try to kiss one another someone interrupts.’”¹⁷

García Márquez could not possibly know just how famous he was going to be but he must have had some inkling. Back in Mexico City, he and Mercedes began to make plans and wind up their affairs. They were resolved to exercise their new-found freedom. Faced by the sudden, totally new perspective of celebrity and possibly even financial security, García Márquez had decided that he would leave Mexico and move to Spain. And he was in a hurry.

The novel was published in Mexico City, on 2 July, six years after the family had arrived in the country.¹⁸ María Luisa Elío, to whom it had been dedicated, recalls: “We went crazy. He brought me a copy, then we went from bookstore to bookstore buying books for my friends and making him write dedications. Gabo told me, ‘You’re heading for financial ruin.’ I was buying all the copies I could afford. We went to Gabo’s house and drank toasts with Mercedes. The following day, well, we didn’t have any money back then, neither do we have any nowadays, but we manage … You probably remember there’s a passage in One Hundred Years of Solitude … where it rained yellow daisies. Well, that day I bought a large basket, the largest I could find, and I filled it with yellow daisies. I had on a gold bracelet, so I took it off and put it in the basket, then looked for a little gold fish and a bottle of whisky. I put it all in the basket and we went to their house.”¹⁹ This tendency to turn the world of reality into the magical world of One Hundred Years of Solitude would gather pace like a snowball and would before too long make the author himself utterly weary of the constructions placed on his extraordinary novel. He would eventually himself wish to move on from the sixties but he would find himself endlessly dragged back there.

On 1 August he left for Caracas to attend the 13th International Congress of Ibero-American Literature organized by the University of Pittsburgh, which was to coincide with the presentation of the newly created Rómulo Gallegos prize to Mario Vargas Llosa for his 1966 novel The Green House. Their planes from London and Mexico landed almost simultaneously at Maiquetía and they met, symbolically enough, in the airport: both men would be taking many flights in the years to come.²⁰ There had already been correspondence. Now they became room-mates. It was to be a profound but ultimately turbulent literary friendship. García Márquez felt overwhelmed. He had not written a script for this eventuality. He was a late arrival at the banquet of the Boom—although nine years younger, Mario Vargas Llosa, who had lived in Europe since 1959, already knew most of the other writers both in Paris and Barcelona; he was handsome, debonair, critically sophisticated (he had been working towards a PhD), yet he knew how to wow the literary masses. In the face of this unmistakable star quality García Márquez, the new sensation, suddenly felt nervy, intimidated, defensive. At one party he had his Venezuelan friends put up a sign saying “Forbidden to speak of One Hundred Years of Solitude.” Nevertheless he also acted up for the press: he told them, straight-faced, that Mercedes wrote his books but made him sign them because they were so bad. And, asked whether the local sacred cow, ex-President Rómulo Gallegos, was a great novelist, he replied: “In his novel Canaima there’s a description of a chicken that’s really quite good.”²¹ Now García Márquez would begin to meet everybody who was anybody; now that there was a García Márquez, there could really be a Boom; now, there could be anything. This man was magic. His book was magic—his name was magic: “Gabo” was a Warhol-era dream and not just for fifteen minutes.

Emir Rodríguez Monegal told García Márquez that two days before flying to Caracas he had been in the Coupole in Paris with Fuentes and Pablo Neruda; Fuentes was giving Neruda a rave review of One Hundred Years of Solitude, predicting that it would be as important for Latin America as Cervantes’s Don Quixote had been for Spain.²²

The Gabo-Mario show moved on to Bogotá on 12 August. One Hundred Years of Solitude had still not begun to circulate there and there had been little feedback from Buenos Aires. Neither El Espectador nor El Tiempo published anything about the novel in the early weeks. It was almost as if Colombians were deliberately withholding their interest; as if they were waiting until it was impossible to ignore this astonishing phenomenon in their midst. The truth is that he would never be as much appreciated in his home country as in other parts of Latin America.²³ Plinio Mendoza had travelled up to Bogotá with Cepeda: “I remember that just before One Hundred Years of Solitude was published in Colombia García Márquez came to Bogotá with Mario Vargas Llosa. Mario had just won the Rómulo Gallegos prize in Caracas with The Green House. As happens with all the personalities who turn up there, ‘le tout Bogotá’ rushed out to celebrate him. There were all those people fluttering, bubbling around him, always attending to the etiquette of success, still unaware of the bomb García Márquez had made, still valuing the home writer in quite modest terms; and leaving him discreetly in the background.”²⁴

Vargas Llosa left for Lima on 15 August but the show went on again when García Márquez joined him there for a week of literary events at the start of September. The friendship was symbolically cemented when García Márquez acted as godfather to Mario and Patricia Vargas Llosa’s second son, named Gonzalo Gabriel.

He was back in Cartagena by the end of September and took the opportunity to visit Valledupar with Alvaro Cepeda and Rafael Escalona. A young woman called Consuelo Araujonoguera had organised a small vallenato festival similar to the improvised event García Márquez and Cepeda had arranged in Aracataca the previous year; the event would acquire permanent status the following year. After it was over García Márquez began to finalize arrangements for the departure. It was good to see the Colombian families before leaving but despite all the water that had flowed under their respective bridges, the relationship between García Márquez and his father seemed beyond repair. Eligio would recall, “In October 1967 Gabito was in Cartagena with Mercedes and the two boys. I can still feel how embarrassed I was to see Gabito sitting there on a bed, totally intimidated by my father, who was lying in the hammock. It was as if my father inspired some indescribable fear, almost a terror, which was a false impression (the family profession!); later, talking it over with Jaime and Gabito, we came to the conclusion that Gabito just didn’t know how to behave in front of him.”²⁵ No truer word was ever said. But the reason was no longer fear, one can be sure. One can also be sure that the father was still not giving the son due credit for his achievements, even though it now looked as if, far from eating paper, Gabito could perhaps start eating banknotes; and one can be equally sure that the son, that “peripatetic spermatozoa,” would not have welcomed the belated credit anyway. He still saw Gabriel Eligio as his stepfather.

No doubt politics remained among the difficulties between them. In September Governor Ronald Reagan of California had urged the escalation of the American war in Vietnam and divisions were growing all across the Western world. Presumably García Márquez and his father discussed the death of Che Guevara, whom Gabito had briefly met in Havana, which was announced to the world by the Bolivian High Command on 10 October. This painful news was perhaps compounded shortly afterwards by the announcement that another father figure always rejected by García Márquez, Guatemalan writer Miguel Angel Asturias, had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first Latin American novelist ever to be so honoured. (A poet, the Chilean Gabriela Mistral, had won in 1945.) This was obviously interpreted all over the world as a symbolic acknowledgement of the ongoing Boom of the Latin American novel. Asturias and García Márquez, the two greatest “magical realists” who seemed to have so much in common, would soon come to cordially detest one another. Asturias, belatedly crowned, would fear the young pretender, and García Márquez, newly acclaimed, would seem bent on parricide.²⁶

There is undoubtedly a sense that he fled to Europe to give himself freedom from day-to-day pressure and room to manoeuvre and regroup. Journalists were asking him his opinion about everything under the sun, but above all about politics. It would be a mistake, however, to think that his intention was to escape from political commitment altogether. He was lucid enough to realize that he could only be influential if he was writing successful novels; thus the first thing was to ensure himself the time and space to write the next one—not least because the next one, like One Hundred Years of Solitude, had already been a long time coming. Of course García Márquez was now able to act more overtly and to take symbolic stands that would have interested nobody just a few short months before. In November, just before his departure, and in the face of pressure from students to make some public commitment to social and political change, he told El Espectador that producers of culture were “persecuted” in Colombia by its reactionary ruling class.²⁷Another interview that appeared after his departure was with Alfonso Monsalve for Enfoque Nacional, which included the statement “The revolutionary duty of a writer is to write well.”²⁸ It would be reprinted in El Tiempo in mid-January. It came several years after Fidel Castro’s first (and last) words on the topic, which were somewhat different. Castro’s famous speech, “Words to the Intellectuals,” had declared that literary form should be free but literary content rather less so: “Inside the Revolution, everything; outside the Revolution, nothing.” Castro had also declared that the most revolutionary writer would be one who renounced his writing for the revolution.

García Márquez, troubled by his relations with the press (and through them, with his new reading public), would find himself working harder than even he had expected in these early years to give himself that room to manoeuvre politically and aesthetically that he was seeking; if he was to find himself in some difficult moral and ideological corners, he was determined that they would be of his own making or, at the least, that he would manage them on his own terms. He told Monsalve that serious “professional” writers put their vocation before all things and should never accept any kind of “subsidy” or “grant.” He said he felt a profound responsibility towards his readers and that The Autumn of the Patriarch had been almost ready for publication when One Hundred Years of Solitudewas published but now he felt he would have to completely rewrite it—not in order for it to be like the great best-seller but precisely to be different from it. Here already he introduces a disconcerting idea: that the success of One Hundred Years of Solitude is in part due to certain “technical devices” (he will later call them “tricks”) which he could use as trademarks but he would rather move on and write something completely different. “I do not wish to parody myself.” Monsalve presents his compatriot as someone who at first looks and sounds more like a Mexican than a Colombian until he relaxes, “finds the thread of his ideas” and becomes once again “the typical Colombian costeño, talkative, candid, straightforward in his concepts and putting into each of his expressions a wit syncretized in his dual Black and Spanish ancestry beneath the stupefying sun of the tropics.” Clearly this man, presented here with an evidently sympathetic intention, was still perceived very much as an alien in the capital of his own country, as he had been, once upon a time, in his own family.

So it would always be. García Márquez could hardly wait to leave.