18
BY 1971, after more than three years in Barcelona and with his book still not completed, García Márquez had decided on a break from the stresses of writing and set off for nine months in Latin America. He felt he needed to refamiliarize himself with his world. His own preference was Barranquilla but the previous March he had told Alfonso Fuenmayor that he was not sure the family would let him return there: “The boys are chronically homesick for Mexico and only now have I realized that they lived there long enough for that to be the Macondo they’ll drag around the world for the rest of their lives. The only rotten patriot in this house is me, but I carry less weight all the time.”1 Somehow, though, he had convinced his reluctant family to stay a few months in Barranquilla before revisiting Mexico.
So in mid-January the García Barcha family arrived in Colombia. García Márquez smiled briefly as he left the plane in Barranquilla and gave a double thumbs-up sign to those waiting to greet him. Photographs show him in full Caribbean dress—Mexican guayabera shirt, leather moccasins and no socks—looking full of cares. With all the inactivity and extra carbohydrates in Barcelona he had filled out; his hair had filled out too and was now in a semi-Afro style characteristic of the era and he sported an equally characteristic Zapata moustache. Mercedes was behind dark glasses apparently pretending to be somewhere else, but the two boys, who hardly knew the country, looked bold and excited.2 The local press and radio were out in force and the taxi drivers shouted from a distance that they would take Gabito to Macondo for just thirty pesos, for old times’ sake. García Márquez, who before leaving Barcelona had announced, at first sight rather ungraciously, that he was going home “for a detox,”3 had by now thought of a more positive way of explaining his visit and coined one of his defining phrases when he said that he had followed his nose back to the Caribbean after the “smell of the guava.”4
The family travelled down to the home of Alvaro and Tita Cepeda, who by now lived in a magnificent white mansion between the city centre and the Prado area, although—ominously—Cepeda himself was in New York for medical tests. The García Barchas would be staying with Tita until they could find a suitable house or apartment. Journalist Juan Gossaín was allowed in on the first round of beers and listened to the conversation. García Márquez explained, as if in confidence, why he had made this prodigal return. All his life he had wanted to be a world-famous writer and had endured years of misery as a reporter in order to become one. Now that he really was a full-time “professional” author he wished he was a reporter again, a searcher after information, and so his life had come full circle: “I’ve always wanted to be what I no longer am.”5
Some weeks later a Mexican journalist, Guillermo Ochoa, pursued García Márquez to the beach at Cartagena, where he, Mercedes and the boys were relaxing underneath a coconut palm during a visit to his parents. Ochoa’s first article would concentrate on Luisa Santiaga and helped inaugurate her legend. To celebrate the return of her eldest son she had lovingly fattened a turkey:
“But I discovered I couldn’t kill it,” she told us. And then, with that stern gentleness that typifies Ursula Iguarán, the character of One Hundred Years of Solitude that she inspired, she added: “I’d become fond of him.” The turkey is still alive and well and Gabito, on his return, had to be content with the seafood soup he has eaten every day since he got back to the city. That’s how Luisa Márquez de García is. She’s a woman who has never combed her hair at night. “If I did, it would delay the sailors,” she explains. “What is the greatest satisfaction of your life?” we asked her. And she, without hesitation, replied: “Having a daughter who’s a nun.”6
The house Gabito and Mercedes rented in Barranquilla was almost on the outskirts of the city at that time. For Gonzalo it was a thrilling environment and he retains pleasant memories of the whole experience. Although their parents had fixed up a school in advance, the boys mainly remember an exotic period during which large snakes got into the house and they hunted for iguanas to relieve them of their eggs. But although it was exciting to be back in the tropics and to be enveloped in the lives of two large extended families in Cartagena and Arjona, and a whole network of new friends in Barranquilla, they were also acutely aware that they were Mexico City boys: “The truth is that Rodrigo and I are both urban people; we have almost no experience of the rural world. Whereas our parents are both rural people, and above all tropical people. I can hardly recognize them when I see them in Cartagena or Havana. They are both relatively uptight everywhere else.”7
In the first week of April García Márquez and Mercedes set off for Caracas alone. He was concerned to recharge his Caribbean batteries to bring his new book alive but it was also in a real sense a symbolic journey, a return to the place they first lived together and then a journey around the Caribbean, as well as the beginning of a pattern in which, increasingly, the boys would be left behind while their parents travelled the world in response to the lures and obligations of García Márquez’s ever-increasing fame.
But while he was sailing around the Caribbean on this second honeymoon he was also thinking about a problem that had just recurred in the largest of its islands, a problem which would make this cruise the last relatively uncomplicated moment in his political existence. On 20 March the Cuban government had arrested Heberto Padilla,8 the writer whose poems had caused such a storm of controversy on and off the island in the summer of 1968 and had led to García Márquez’s angry confrontation with Juan Marsé in Barcelona. Now the Cuban poet was accused of subversive activities connected to the CIA. On 5 April, still in prison, Padilla signed a long—and obviously insincere—statement of self-criticism.
Although so many writers lived in Barcelona, Paris was still in many respects the political capital of Latin America. On 9 April a group of writers based in Europe organized a protest letter addressed to Fidel Castro, first published in Le Monde in Paris, in which they said that although they supported the “principles” of the revolution they could not accept the “Stalinist” persecution of writers and intellectuals. The list of names included, among many others, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Juan Goytisolo and Mario Vargas Llosa (the true instigators of the protest), Julio Cortázar and Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza (organizers, with Goytisolo, of the forthcoming magazine Libre) and … Gabriel García Márquez.9
In fact García Márquez had not signed the letter: Plinio Mendoza had assumed he would support the protest and had signed for him. García Márquez had his name withdrawn but the damage to his relationship with Cuba was done, followed by lasting difficulties with all the friends who remained signed up: the worst of all outcomes. It was to be, without doubt, the single most important crisis in Latin American literary politics in the twentieth century, one which divided both Latin American and European intellectuals for decades to come. Writers and intellectuals had no choice but to commit and take sides in this cultural equivalent of a civil war. Nothing would ever be the same again, not least the relationship between García Márquez and Vargas Llosa, which would eventually prove to be the noisiest and most violent of all the casualties of this political drama. It was the more ironic because just at that very moment Seix Barral were preparing publication of Vargas Llosa’s García Márquez, the Story of a Deicide, which would appear in December of 1971, as their famous relationship, slowly but surely, began to cool. Vargas Llosa would not allow a second edition of the book for thirty-five years.10
As Castro’s reactions became increasingly furious and defiant García Márquez, whom friends and family members remember as distraught during this period, nevertheless managed the coolest and most measured public response in a carefully stage-managed “interview” with Barranquilla journalist Julio Roca. He conceded that Padilla’s self-criticism did not seem authentic and acknowledged that this had done damage to the image of the revolution; but he also insisted that he had never signed the first letter, claimed that Fidel Castro had been malevolently misquoted, declared his continuing support for the Cuban regime and, in a characteristic move, stated that if there were Stalinist elements in Cuba Fidel Castro would be the first to say so and to start to root them out, as he had done a decade before in 1961.11
Subtle though García Márquez’s response was, its attempt to be solomonic and to please all sides failed to satisfy anyone. On 10 June the Colombian press demanded that he “define himself publicly on the Cuban issue” and the next day, still dodging and weaving but less so, he announced: “I am a communist who has not yet found a place to sit.” Most of his friends and colleagues preferred the Chilean route to socialism; García Márquez, even at the beginning, did not. Of his behaviour Juan Goytisolo would later say, with undisguised bitterness, “With his consummate skill in wriggling out of tight corners, Gabo would carefully distance himself from his friends’ critical position while avoiding confrontation with them: the new García Márquez, scintillating strategist of his own enormous talent, victim of fame, devotee of the great and good in this world, and promoter at the planetary level of real or would-be ‘advanced’ causes, was about to be born.”12
García Márquez went through a very particular agony of anxiety and indecision because, just before the Padilla crisis broke, he had accepted an invitation from Columbia University in New York to be presented with an honorary doctorate at the beginning of June. The timing could hardly have been more disastrous. He knew only too well that Pablo Neruda, a well-known communist, and Carlos Fuentes, a supporter of Cuba from the beginning, had both been excommunicated by the Revolution in 1966 for making visits to New York. And here was he, already seen by many as a rat who had left the apparently sinking ship around the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, accepting an honour from New York’s premier university, an honour which, to Cuban eyes, was obviously an attempt to “recuperate” him (in the language of the era) for U.S. interests.13
Eventually his official line was that he was accepting the award “on behalf of Colombia,” that everyone in Latin America knew that he was against the regime prevailing in the USA, as indeed was Columbia University itself, and that he had consulted “the taxi drivers of Barranquilla”—champions of common sense, he declared—in order to make up his mind.14 Nevertheless, if his future relationship with the United States—him criticizing but the Americans still welcoming him—was now established, to his evident relief, he was back in the doghouse as far as Cuba was concerned. For the next two years, despite his statement assuring the world that he had not signed the first letter, he again had no contact whatever with the revolutionary island.
Yet once again García Márquez was about to be lucky. If Cuba was closed to him for the time being, another controversy was about to blow up which would show, again, that on the political barometer García Márquez still had good readings almost everywhere but Cuba and Colombia. Whether coincidentally or not we do not know, a few weeks later a Spanish journalist called Ramón Chao pushed a microphone under the nose of 1967 Nobel Prize winner Miguel Angel Asturias and asked him what he thought of the allegations that the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude had plagiarized a novel by Balzac, The Quest of the Absolute. Asturias paused for a moment and then said he thought there might be something to the accusation. Chao published his scoop in the Madrid weekly Triunfo and Le Monde reprinted it in Paris on 19 June.15
In October 1967 Asturias had become only the second Latin American, and the first novelist from the continent, to win the Nobel Prize. But he had been heavily criticized in recent years for taking a politically controversial ambassadorship in Paris. He was about to discover that “Gabriel García Márquez,” not “Mguel Angel Asturias,” was now the name of Latin American literature. The truth was that García Márquez had been provoking Asturias for years, despite the older writer’s generous comments on the younger man’s work and achievement. Early in 1968 García Márquez had vowed that with his new book about a Latin American political patriarch, he would “teach” the author of The President, Asturias’s signature work, “how to write a real dictator novel.”16
It seems possible that García Márquez’s attitude to Asturias was conditioned in part by the fact that Asturias had won the Nobel Prize, the accolade that he, García Márquez, had wanted to be the first Latin American novelist to win, and in part because Asturias was obviously the Latin American precursor not only of magical realism (of which One Hundred Years of Solitude is frequently considered the paradigm) but also, through The President, of the dictator novel (of which The Autumn of the Patriarch was, similarly, intended to be the defining version). Asturias made a large and easy target because of his own vulnerability over the ambassadorship and because he was never the most lucid or coherent of debaters; and by now he was old and sick. Taking him on was like shooting an elephant from a safe distance. In fact, Asturias’s decision in the late 1940s, 1950s and 1960s to act as a kind of literary fellow traveller to world communism, supporting the movement of history in general but without having to tie himself down in detail, was a model for precisely what García Márquez himself would attempt to do; and, to some extent echoing Asturias’s relations with Guatemala’s Marxist President Jacobo Arbenz, García Márquez would shortly befriend the most charismatic of all Latin American Communist revolutionaries, Fidel Castro.
García Márquez did not yet know that he had once again been banished from the Cuban political Eldorado and played brilliantly to the leftist gallery. He had not directly caused Asturias’s difficulties but he had helped provoke them and Asturias fell into an ambush—an elephant trap, one might say. The question then arises whether García Márquez had not also been setting a series of psychological traps for Mario Vargas Llosa, his only serious rival among his contemporaries, traps which would cause another even more violent confrontation a few years down the road. And whether the final version of The Autumn of the Patriarch, a self-critical work about a man who cannot tolerate competition from those close to him, whether in public or private life, is not in some measure an expiation for these sins.
On 9 July the García Barcha family left Soledad Airport in Barranquilla for Mexico. They had spent less than six months back in Colombia. García Márquez arrived in the Mexican capital on 11 July complaining that he had seen no girls during the stopover in Florida because the “Executive Authority” was with him, a joke that Mercedes must have found increasingly tedious down the years. He spent his first day escorted around the city by journalists and photographers from Excelsior, to whom he declared that this was the city he knew best in the world and that he felt as if he had never left. The journalists watched him eating tacos, changing money and cracking jokes (“I’m a very serious guy on the inside but not on the outside”). Young Rodrigo said he would rather be a baseball player or a mechanic than a student. “You can be what you want,” said his indulgent father. Still accompanied by the photographers, he visited Carlos Fuentes and his actress wife Rita Macedo—dressed in black leather hot pants—at their house in San Angel. Fuentes shouted “Plagiarist, plagiarist!” as García Márquez’s car arrived.17 That evening Fuentes held one of his famous parties, attended by a familiar array of Mexico’s progressive intellectuals and artists.
García Márquez was a different person in Mexico now, the person he would remain for the rest of his life: a favourite foreign son and honorary Mexican. Mexicans would never forget that it was in their capital city, not Paris or London, that One Hundred Years of Solitude had been written. It was one of the ways of papering over the bad memories of the Tlatelolco massacre in 1968 with good publicity and García Márquez lent himself to it. On 21 August he went to see President Luis Echeverría, who had been Minister of the Interior at the time of Tlatelolco, at the presidential residence of Los Pinos, where they talked, so García Márquez claimed, about “writing and liberation.”18 He would never publicly criticize either Echeverría or ex-President Díaz Ordaz for the events of 1968, just as he would never criticize Fidel Castro over any of Cuba’s controversies. Cuba and Mexico were both involved in a complex diplomatic struggle with the United States and, to a lesser extent, with each other. The Mexicans were forced to cooperate with U.S. anti-communist efforts but would insist on retaining a diplomatic corridor to Cuba until the end of the PRI period at the close of the twentieth century. Castro and García Márquez would both be grateful to them for holding out.
In late September the family flew back to Barcelona from Mexico City via New York, London and Paris. García Márquez now got back to work. It was more than four years since a new book of his had appeared and he was keen to reduce the pressure. During the period since late 1967, although The Autumn of the Patriarch was undoubtedly his major project, he had also settled down to composing his first short stories for several years, and he added to the new ones—which included “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”—the earlier “The Sea of Dead Time” from 1961.19 They would all be published together as Innocent Eréndira and Other Stories in 1972. Innocent Eréndira itself had a long history—in one sense going back to the mythical world of his grandparents in the deserts of the Guajira. The direct source, however, was from a real life story which had already inspired a brief episode in One Hundred Years of Solitude about a young prostitute who is forced to sleep with hundreds of men per day. The finished story had been conceived as a film script before it became a long short story, and had been published in that form by the Mexican magazine ¡Siempre! as early as November 1970.20 Because all the stories had been started before—in some cases long before—García Márquez was able to use them to “warm up his arm” for the return to his unfinished novel.
The stories of Innocent Eréndira are not at all what one would have expected from a writer who had returned to the Caribbean to re-experience the “smell of guava.” True, they are at first sight more primitive, elemental and magical (sea, sky, desert and the frontier) than the stories of Big Mama, but in a rather painterly and “literary” way, as if the fantastic element of the earliest stories were somehow being applied to a concrete geographical scenario; as if Macondo and the “Pueblo” were real, whereas the Guajira (which García Márquez had never even seen) is a realm of magic and myth (Bogotá and its surrounding highlands being always, by contrast, a bogeyland of shadows and menace). Ironically enough, these stories—on which the critics are divided—are reminiscent of the most cloying tales of García Márquez’s magical realist predecessor, Miguel Angel Asturias, for example in The Mirror of Lida Sal.21
Now, for the first time, García Márquez set about The Autumn of the Patriarch with the certainty that he would be completing it. There were no more excuses, he had had his sabbatical and there was nowhere to escape to, even in his mind. By now the first number of the Boom-based magazine Libre had appeared in Paris, a year after Cortázar’s party in the south of France, at which it had originally been discussed, and less than six months after the Padilla Affair. It was no doubt being minutely scrutinized in Cuba as García Márquez gave an interview to Plinio Mendoza, the magazine’s editor, for Libre no. 3, in Franco’s Spain.
In October the traditional left—and Salvador Allende’s beleaguered Popular Unity government in Chile—received a boost when Pablo Neruda, Allende’s ambassador in Paris, was announced as the winner of the Nobel Prize for 1971. Neruda, whom journalists described as looking frail and ill, was asked if he would recommend any other Latin American for the prize and said that his first thought was García Márquez, “author of one of the best novels in the Spanish language.”22 Just before the official announcement of the award was made Neruda called García Márquez and invited him and Mercedes to go to Paris for dinner the next evening. García Márquez naturally said that it was impossible to get there at such short notice given his fear of flying but Neruda used his well-known tactic of sounding as if he was about to cry and the Colombian couple felt obliged to make the trip. By the time they got there the news was out and they dined in Neruda’s house with the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros (who was suspected of having assassinated Trotsky, and certainly had once attempted it), the Chilean painter Roberto Matta, Jorge Edwards, recently expelled from Cuba, the French intellectual Régis Debray, back in Paris after his release from prison in Bolivia and a subsequent period in which he was closely involved with the Allende regime in Chile, and the great photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson—a politically challenging dinner party if ever there was one.
In December Vargas Llosa’s García Márquez: History of a Deicide was published in Barcelona by Barral. The two writers, whom friends from that era describe as “almost brothers,” had more in common than a first impression might suggest: both had experienced an especially painful version of the childhood “family romance.” Both would always have problems with fathers known belatedly (until he was ten years of age Vargas Llosa thought his father was dead), men who would attack their characters and question their literary vocations. Both had been much indulged, bookish boys brought up in the house of their maternal grandparents for the first, defining years of their lives. Both would leave the comfort and security of their early home for the alienating rigours of a boarding-school regime and an early acquaintance with prostitution and other low-life experiences. Both worked as journalists at a precocious age and then travelled to Paris, eventually even staying in the same hotel, though at different times. Both were great friends of their friends and both, when they met, were fervent supporters of the Cuban Revolution, though the older man, García Márquez, had already been through many difficult moments with the Cuban process—while Vargas Llosa’s worst difficulties lay ahead of him. Despite their closeness at the time, García Márquez would always insist that he had never even read Mario’s book about him, “because if someone showed me all the secret mechanisms of my work, the sources, what it is that makes me write, if someone told me all that, I think it would paralyse me, don’t you see?”23
Vargas Llosa and García Márquez had first come together on the occasion of the Rómulo Gallegos prize awarded to the young Peruvian in 1967. Now in 1972 García Márquez himself became the second recipient of the prize and his reaction underlined the vast gulf opening up between them in this extraordinary friendship: whereas Vargas Llosa had refused to donate his prize to the causes supported by the Cuban Revolution, García Márquez had decided to give his money to a dissident Venezuelan party, Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement Towards Socialism) or MAS, led by an ex-communist friend of his, Teodoro Petkoff. Like Petkoff, García Márquez had convinced himself that Soviet communism was no longer a genuine revolutionary force, nor was it concerned to address the real needs and interests of Latin America. Carmen Balcells, who travelled to Caracas with García Márquez, told me: “It was an interminable journey, though we were in first class, drinking all the way, and Gabo, who already knew he was going to give all the money to MAS, and to Petkoff, spent the entire time worrying in the most minute detail about what Mario was going to say. It was all he could think about.”24
The Venezuelans were shocked to see a man with an Afro hairstyle, an open-necked Hawaiian-style tropical shirt, grey trousers, white shoes and no socks saunter on to the rostrum in Caracas’s Teatro París to receive the prize. Recalling that Vargas Llosa had refused to donate the prize to the armed struggle in Latin America, people all over the continent were wondering what García Márquez would do with his cash. When asked this question immediately after the ceremony he declared that he was tired of being poor and would be buying “another yacht” from a contact in Caracas, or from Carlos Barral back in Barcelona. This became one of his most famous boutades.25 Mercedes had not flown in with him—she would arrive later with the Feduchis—but also witnessing the performance were his son, twelve-year-old Rodrigo, and his two near namesakes, his father Gabriel Eligio and his youngest brother Eligio Gabriel, who had recently married a girl from the Colombian Llanos, Myriam Garzón. Gabito had invited them to Caracas for their honeymoon, to coincide with his acceptance of the Gallegos prize. Gabriel Eligio had invited himself along and the trio visited the places where Gabito and Mercedes had spent their own honeymoon fourteen years earlier and stayed in the same hotel together. Myriam remembers: “Eligio’s father was put in a separate wing of the hotel and protested bitterly to the management: ‘How can you do this to me, he’s my son.’ Next morning he called us at 6 a.m.: ‘What time are we going down to breakfast?’”26
Gabriel Eligio was predictably unimpressed by his son’s comportment on this vast and prestigious stage. Little did he know what was to follow. The next morning Gabo took his cheque for $22,750, his son Rodrigo, his brother Eligio, who had arranged with El Tiempo to write a series of reports on the award of Latin America’s most important literary prize to his elder brother, one or two other privileged journalists, a photographer and a large bag to a Caracas bank where he changed the cheque into cash. Then he took the bag, the money and his escort to the headquarters of the Movement Towards Socialism and handed the money over to the party’s leader Teodoro Petkoff, his “friend for many years.”27 MAS, he explained, was a new, youthful movement of the kind Latin America needed, with no remaining ties to the communist movement and no fixed schemes or dogmas.
A storm of criticism blew in from everywhere, near and far, not excluding García Márquez’s own family. MAS was only a tiny organization but the fallout was enormous. Most of the left considered him a “deviationist” and the right branded him a “subversive.” Even though it eventually transpired that the money was specifically intended for MAS’s political magazine and not for guerrilla warfare, by late August even Moscow would be calling him a “reactionary” and his own father could be found informing the press in Caracas that his eldest son was “very sly—he was the same as a child, always making up stories.”28 García Márquez must have been more troubled when he got back to Europe by the criticism of Pablo Neruda, whose views—despite the Chilean’s long-time membership of the Communist Party—were similar in many ways to those of García Márquez himself. The next time they met Neruda told him that he could understand his action but any benefit done to the interests of MAS was far outweighed by the divisions this kind of gesture caused within the international socialist movement.29 It was probably then that García Márquez began his policy—already applied to Cuba—of never openly criticizing socialist groups, not excluding Moscow-line communist parties, because of the comfort it gave to their enemies.30
After he had sorted out his own affairs he flew to New York in the middle of August to visit his old friend Alvaro Cepeda, who was being treated for cancer in the Memorial Hospital. García Márquez was already terrified of hospitals and of death and the experience only confirmed his sense of the great city’s staggering inhumanity. When he got back to Barcelona a week later he sent Cepeda’s wife a letter:
Tita,
I couldn’t phone you. Besides, I had nothing to say: the maestro was so keen to reassure me that he made me believe that he had never been ill and instead devoted himself to looking after me. I found him very pale and almost worn out but I soon realized that it was because of the radiation because after a week of rest, in which we did nothing other than talk and eat, he had recovered quite a lot. I was alarmed that he had almost completely lost his voice but he convinced me that that too was down to the radiation. Indeed, with a decongestant jelly, whose prescription I read, he started to get his voice back within a few days. It wasn’t possible for me to talk to the doctor. However I talked to other doctors, friends of mine, and they agreed that certain kinds of lymphoma have been curable for six years now! …
Big hug, Gabo
Yet again he felt frustrated at interrupting The Autumn of the Patriarch and yet again he felt reluctant to get back to it. Soon afterwards, Plinio Mendoza was with him in Barcelona when Alejandro Obregón called to tell him that all hope had gone and Cepeda was dying. After a day of anguish García Márquez bought a plane ticket. Mendoza recalls, “But he didn’t go. He couldn’t. His guts or his knees refused to take him: at the door to his house, with a suitcase in his hand, and the taxi approaching down the street, he had something like vertigo and instead of heading for the airport he shut himself in his room, pulled the curtains and lay down. Mercedes told me about it in the kitchen, by a washing machine that was moaning and sighing as if it were human. ‘Gabito’s been crying.’ I was surprised. Gabo crying? Gabo shut in his room? I have never seen a tear on his Arab face—and as they say in my homeland, only God knows what he’s been through in his time.”31
On 12 October 1972, Columbus Day, Alvaro Cepeda died in New York. Wayward as he was in almost every respect, Cepeda was the only member of the Barranquilla Group who never went away from Barranquilla for long, despite his yearnings for the USA. (Alfonso, Germán and Alvaro had all appeared in No One Writes to the Colonel and they all reappeared in One Hundred Years of Solitude, which had predicted that Alvaro would pass on first, followed by Germán, then Alfonso.) The body was flown back to Colombia two days later and Obregón and Julio Mario Santo Domingo held a vigil over the coffin until the morning of the 15th when a huge crowd of mourners escorted the hearse to Barranquilla’s Garden of Rest.32 A few weeks later García Márquez sent Alfonso Fuenmayor a letter reflecting on Cepeda’s death: “Well, Maestro, this is a fucking awful thing to have to say: I’m turned to shit, in a wretched state of dismay and demoralization and for the first time in my life I can’t find a way out. I say this to you because I think it will help me to say it to you and because perhaps my saying it will help you too. Gabito.”33
The following year, when Neruda died, García Márquez would tell journalists in Bogotá: “The death of my great friend Alvaro Cepeda last year hit me so hard that I realized I can’t cope with the disappearance of my friends. ‘Hell,’ I thought, ‘if I don’t face up to this business it’s me that’ll die one of these days the next time I get this kind of news.’”34 It was true that given his growing celebrity García Márquez had put in quite an effort to see his stricken friend and certainly his grief was real. But it was also true that he had been moving away from Cepeda and all the Barranquilla Group and the 1971 visit to the city had only emphasized this. More than most men García Márquez, who felt nostalgia with great intensity, had also learned early in his life how to fight it. Now the death of Cepeda drew a definitive line under the Barranquilla experience.
It was a gloomy autumn following his friend’s demise. On 7 November came the ominous news that Richard Nixon had been re-elected President of the United States. In that same month ex-President Juan Perón made his at first euphoric but ultimately disastrous return to Buenos Aires after seventeen years away and Salvador Allende had to refashion his Popular Unity government to put an end to a wave of strikes in Chile, while Pablo Neruda’s cancer forced him to resign his ambassadorship to Paris. García Márquez was there to see the old Communist poet set off on his last return to South America. They would never meet again.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ WENT on with The Autumn of the Patriarch in a state of depression but also with a curiously renewed vigour. Alvaro Cepeda’s death had made him more aware than ever that life was short and perhaps he realized that he did not want to be in Europe while events in Latin America were passing him by. In Spain everything was paralysed while the country waited for General Franco to expire. The regime was clearly on its last legs—on 8 June Franco appointed Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco President, after ruling alone for thirty-four years—but its end was a long time coming, almost as long as the passing of García Márquez’s own “Patriarch” in the novel he had nearly completed. In May 1973 he began to tell newspapermen that The Autumn of the Patriarchwas finished. However, he was going to let it sit for a year or more, “to see whether I still like it.”35 Behind the blasé appearance—apparently this writer didn’t really care whether his books were published or not and certainly did not respond to pressure either from publishers or readers—there was evidently still the same insecurity about the novel, which he had been working on intensively since his return from Barranquilla and Mexico late in 1971.
It is typical of García Márquez’s prescience that his first book after One Hundred Years of Solitude should be a novel which not only confronted the pitfalls of fame and power before they had even fully engulfed him but also anticipated and in that sense cauterized middle and old age long before he had reached them. However, it is impossible to talk of The Autumn of the Patriarch in simplistic terms. No other work by García Márquez even begins to approach its complexity—best illustrated perhaps by the contrast between the seductive beauty of the book’s poetic imagery and the ugliness of its subject matter.36 There is, indeed, a curious historical paradox relating to the conception of this work. The novels which had created the sense of a Latin American Boom in the 1960s—The Time of the Hero, The Death of Artemio Cruz and Hopscotch—were mainly updated versions of the great European and American modernist novels of the 1920s and 1930s—works such as Ulysses, In Search of Lost Time, Manhattan Transfer, Mrs. Dalloway or Absalom, Absalom! Yet the book which crystallized and consecrated that Latin American Boom, One Hundred Years of Solitude, seemed infinitely less labyrinthine and modernist than the others. At a time when the term “postmodernist” had not yet been invented, critics like Emir Rodríguez Monegal talked of the curious “anachronism” of García Márquez’s novel—because it was apparently transparent, easy to read, and accessible even to people who only had a modest literary education.37 For his follow-up, however, García Márquez felt challenged to write something more like a typical Boom novel: this is why the Joycean and Woolfian features of The Autumn of the Patriarch are immediately obvious to the experienced readers for whom the book was evidently intended. This was at the very moment when most other writers, stung by García Márquez’s success, were turning away from the characteristic Boom mode and writing much more transparent “postmodern” works of the kind One Hundred Years of Solitude was supposed to represent.
The new novel went through many versions. It is the story of an uneducated Latin American soldier from an unnamed, composite nation who seizes power despite having little political experience and contrives to rule as dictator of his tropical country for two centuries. Among the tyrants García Márquez drew on for his horrifying portrait were the Venezuelans Juan Vicente Gómez (in power 1908–35) and Marcos Pérez Jiménez (1952–8), Porfirio Díaz of Mexico (1884–1911), Manuel Estrada Cabrera of Guatemala (1898–1920), the Somozas of Nicaragua (Anastasio, Luis and Anastasio Jr., 1936–79) and Rafael Trujillo (1930–61) of the Dominican Republic. Spain and Franco, García Márquez still insisted, had, if anything, got in his way. He still, to this day, knew very little about Franco, because such a cold and ascetic European figure was of little use or interest to him.
Known to the reader only as “the Patriarch,” the book’s monstrous protagonist is as solitary as he is powerful and as sentimental as he is barbaric. Though apparently insensitive almost to the point of stupidity, he has an extraordinary instinct for power and an intuitive insight into other men’s motives—though women, not excluding his beloved mother, remain a mystery to him. García Márquez had realized, he told interviewers, that this dictator was what Colonel Aureliano Buendía would have turned into if he had won his war—in other words, if Colombian history had been different and the Liberals rather than the Conservatives had triumphed over the course of the nineteenth century.38 For his protagonist to maintain his mythical force he had decided that he should have no name: just “the Patriarch” (known also to his staff as “the General”). Rather shockingly, García Márquez explained that he had written a relatively sympathetic portrait because “all dictators, from Creon onwards, are victims.” The unfortunate truth, he insisted, was that Latin American history was not as people would wish: most dictators were from the popular classes and were never overthrown by the people they oppressed. It was not that myth had triumphed over history but rather that history itself always becomes mythologized. It was an essential purpose of literature, he declared, to show this process. But he was not prepared to give any further enlightenment: “The political aspect of the book is a good deal more complex than it seems and I’m not prepared to explain it.”39
What is unmistakable is that this new novel altered and deepened García Márquez’s approach to the twin problematics of power and love—his two central themes—with their associated motifs of memory, nostalgia, solitude and death. Power and love, the love of power, the power of love, are central aspects of human experience, with a particularly strong momentum in Latin American history, society and literature.
The book is set in a fictitious Caribbean nation, which seems to have Colombia—or, more particularly, Bogotá—as its neighbour, so that we can think of it as either something like Venezuela or as the Colombian Costa itself. In that sense this nameless state is similar to the fictitious countries invented by Joseph Conrad in Nostromo (1904) or by Spain’s Ramón María del Valle-Inclán in Tirano Banderas (1926). The portrait of its crude and violent Latin American dictator is focused in particular on his “autumn,” that is, the later years of his regime.
The book unfolds in an impossible historical time which stretches over some two hundred years, probably from the late eighteenth century until the 1960s.40 Most of it is narrated through flashbacks and follows the general contours of Latin American history until the sea is expropriated by the gringos at the “twilight” of the Patriarch’s autumn, followed by his death and the consequent end of his regime (winter and dissolution). The protagonist lives in a world where the military, the Church and the gringos are incessantly jockeying for power. “The people” themselves are virtually passive; there is no dialectical progress in the novel because there is no history, no real passage of time, no true social or political participation or interaction. Yet the relationship between the dictator and the people is perhaps the central focus of the novel. One might say that García Márquez’s intended gesture is that the novel should be handed over from the patriarch to the people in its closing lines, whose euphoria—clearly a memory of the fall of Pérez Jiménez in Venezuela in 1958—seems to be intended literally, not ironically.
In more individual terms, the Patriarch’s closest relationship on earth is to his mother, Bendición Alvarado. His wife is the ex-nun Leticia Nazareno, whom he kidnaps and possibly murders; the lover he pursues but never wins is the beauty queen Manuela Sánchez, and his only successful erotic relationship is, bizarrely, with a twelve-year-old schoolgirl when he is already senile. On the male side he has a double, or public face, Patricio Aragonés; just one good friend, Rodrigo de Aguilar; and later an evil genius, the glamorous Security Minister José Ignacio Sáenz de la Barra, similar to the advisers of the military juntas in Chile and Argentina in the 1970s, at the time the novel was being completed. This structure of relationships conforms to the classic pattern of Western myth.41
But this is wisdom after the event. The reader’s overwhelming experience is one of uncertainty and confusion. The whole point of view, structure and even chronology of the novel are determined by the uncertainty of a succession of narrators who are never sure of anything. One might say that the endless dilemma as to whether the dictator does or does not control “all of his power,” which is perhaps the most reiterated and the most confusing aspect of the novel—magnified enormously by the fact that it is considered above all from his point of view (at once stupid and unreflective, hypocritical and self-serving)—is governed by a three-way oscillation between the classical enlightenment view of human consciousness as that of a rational unified subject; a more Marxist perception of class domination and imperialism (these two perceptions, combined, would be a modernist view); and the Foucauldian view that power is everywhere, epistemic, always to be resisted but impossible to defeat and beyond even the most “powerful” subject’s ability to control (this of course would be a postmodernist view and is in fact dominant in the novel). In this work’s absolutely ruthless cynicism about human beings, power and effect we find ourselves forced to consider that power is there to be used and that “someone has to do this,” because García Márquez’s view of history is very close to that bleak vision which Machiavelli first theorized and Shakespeare repeatedly exemplified. He would go straight off after completing the book to seek a relationship with Fidel Castro, a socialist liberator who was, as it turned out, the Latin American politician with the potential to become the most durable and the most loved of all the continent’s authoritarian figures.
The novel’s sentences are immensely long: there are only twenty-nine in chapter 1, twenty-three in chapter 2, eighteen in chapter 3, sixteen in chapter 4, thirteen in chapter 5 and just one in chapter 6, making a total, apparently, of one hundred. The early chapters begin with three or four paragraphs on the first page, like an orchestra tuning up, and then they grow longer and longer. There are constant switches of narrative person from first (“I,” “we”) to second (“General sir,” “Mother of mine,” etc.) to third (“he,” “they”), although the latter is nearly always inside another voice. García Márquez himself as third-person narrator is almost absolutely absent, yet no novel is more dominated by his characteristic literary voice. Each chapter begins with his usual obsession, the matter of burial, though the reader cannot be sure whether the body found is that of the tyrant—or indeed, if it is, whether he is really dead. Thus the “we”—we the people who found the corpse—are conjuring up a world in retrospect through a few short sentences on the first page of each chapter with variable details about the discovery of the body, after which the narrative plunges into the labyrinth or whirlpool of flashbacks into the life of “him,” “the General,” which dissolves gradually into an autobiographical “I,” the Man of Power. The labyrinth, as in all modernist works, is both topic (life) and technique (the way through it).
Manifestly The Autumn of the Patriarch is a novel written obsessively, by a solitary writer, about an obsessive, solitary dictator. Yet according to the author the critics, many of whom tended to feel outraged that he had given a moderately sympathetic portrait of this horrific personality, were slow to see what the book was really about. So in Mexico City in December 1975, almost two years after completing it and several months after its publication, a frustrated García Márquez, who declared that his reviewers, without exception, had read the book “superficially,” supplied a totally unexpected explanation of its meaning. It was, he asserted, a kind of autobiography: “It’s almost a personal confession, a totally autobiographical book, almost a book of memoirs. What’s happened, of course, is that they are encoded memoirs; but if instead of seeing a dictator you see a very famous writer who is terribly uncomfortable with his fame, well, with that clue you can read the book and make it work.”42
This is at first sight an astonishing assertion. García Márquez was a man trying to impress his readers with a follow-up to a popular classic, a man under pressure who might have been expected to ingratiate himself with the public; whereas The Autumn of the Patriarch was an ugly portrait of a profoundly ugly persona. This dictator, although in some ways treated indulgently, is one of the most repugnant characters ever created. Was García Márquez merely trying to scandalize the international bourgeoisie with sensational declarations to the press or had he, in truth, written one of the most shockingly self-critical works of world literature, a fictional parallel with Rousseau’s Confessions, for example? Are the author’s relationships with men, women and the world as a whole in some way comparable with those of his hideous yet pathetic creation? And if García Márquez thinks so, is he merely using himself as an example of a world fuller of vile bodies and dangerous liaisons than we have ever dreamed or is this an exclusively personal and thus uniquely devastating self-analysis? Given the cruel aridity of the self-portrait, it seems not impossible that the sojourn in the grotesque sterility of late franquista Spain very quickly turned into a self-imposed penance of self-analysis for the person he had always been as he looked now towards the future. Writing The Autumn of the Patriarch perhaps involved trying to deserve his fame morally as well as trying to show he deserved it literarily (despite the fact, ironically, that many readers saw the manifestly ambitious result as a proof of overweening arrogance and complacency).
The Patriarch’s “first death” might easily be a metaphor for 1967, the year of One Hundred Years of Solitude, when the “real” García Márquez disappeared for ever beneath the weight of celebrity and mythology: he may be describing his gradual farewell to anonymity, normality and privacy, a process through which a crisis of failure in the 1960s turned, with almost comic irony, into a crisis of fame and success in the 1970s. And this may also have represented, in his own consciousness, a farewell to youth (he had just turned forty when One Hundred Years of Solitude was published). Moreover it is not entirely surprising that García Márquez, a man always predisposed to reflections on old age, should bring forward his own mid-life crisis and begin his own “autumn” earlier than anyone else, so that the mid-life crisis in Barcelona was mingled in his case with the crisis of fame that surrounded it. Perhaps after assimilating all these lessons in the writing of this literally nightmarish work, he would put his fame and influence at the service of good causes by becoming, like the Patriarch in his prime, “master of all his power,” only consciously so and with benevolent intent.
Perhaps the result of his sudden celebrity had indeed been another splitting of a personality that García Márquez had desperately been trying to unify ever since he was an adolescent, a struggle whose first traces are clearly visible in the early stories and which, it might be speculated, the writing of One Hundred Years of Solitude had triumphantly completed. But perhaps he had resolved one problem of doubling only to find that now he had to confront another: the divorce between what he would later call his secret and private personas, on the one hand, and his public persona on the other. Perhaps that was why the novel raises the possibility that the corpse the people discover at the start of each chapter may not even be the Patriarch. Now that he too was famous, García Márquez, like the tyrant, was constantly confronted, in the media, by his own representation, “his perfect double, the humiliation of seeing himself in such a state of equality, God damn it, this man is me.” As for the tyrant’s doppelgänger, his official double or public image, Patricio Aragonés, “he had become resigned to live forever a destiny that was not his.” Well, García Márquez felt that he was both men: “the real one” and “the double.” At first the Patriarch had found it difficult to adjust to the new names the people or the media, or, later, state propaganda, chose to call him (like García Márquez’s many brand names: “Gabo,” the “Master of Macondo,” “MelqUíades the Magician,” etc.). But however disconcerted he was by this double or indeed multiple existence, he was never as confused as those around him.
Thus the matter of autobiography (especially his own predicament as a uniquely famous writer) took García Márquez over as he wrote a book that seemed to be about a man who was his polar opposite, and so the Patriarch slowly became him, just as Aureliano Buendía had become him in One Hundred Years of Solitude, only now he was truly plumbing the darkest depths of the human condition, reflected deep in his own soul. The Patriarch, c’est moi: fame, glamour, influence and power, on the one hand; solitude, lust, ambition and cruelty on the other. Needless to say, it is a great autobiographical irony that the writer had in fact set out to write this book about power and celebrity in the late 1950s, many years before he himself actually experienced those phenomena. At all events, by the time he began the final assault on the topic, he too was famous and powerful, he too was solitary, he too was “him,” the “other,” the desired object. The literary monster he had created but was determined to satirize and expose (but whom he had possibly always envied and desired in others) was a figure of the phenomenon he himself had become.
In an interview with Juan Gossaín in 1971 García Márquez had linked the themes of love and power. Insisting that all his characters were in some way autobiographical, he had declared: “You know, old friend, the appetite for power is the result of an incapacity for love.”43 This statement could begin to trace a hidden connection between all of García Márquez’s novels, a thread to help his readers out of the intricate moral and psychological labyrinth created by his oeuvre. Perhaps at first, as his sense of his own potential gradually increased, he began to fantasize that he could have it all: he could gain power and be loved for it. Then came the crisis of fame in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when García Márquez, a man of great self-control, great linguistic potency, and great psychological penetration (with above all a remarkable power of private persuasion, an extraordinary capacity for intimacy, for non-public activity) suddenly found himself at the mercy of other, often less talented beings—critics, journalists, agents, publishers, hangers-on—within the public domain. He, who had enjoyed the power of the reporter, was now himself at the mercy of reporters. He had become an image and a commodity which he could not himself entirely control. No wonder Carmen Balcells became so important to him: she became his “agent” in many more ways than simply arranging his contracts with publishers. She helped him, undoubtedly, to realize the possibility of becoming, as much as any human being can, the “master of all his power.”
So maybe then, like the dictator, he decided to take control of his public self, to become another self (which would only be partially himself, but now he would get to choose his image); instead of protesting about his predicament as he had for the past eight years, he would assume his famous self, use his fame, go past all his rivals, become a man of power and influence based not only on his public success achieved through the solitary act of writing but on his private, behind-the-scenes brilliance and power of seduction.
Because the dictator, however crude he may seem in García Márquez’s intimate portrayal, was a political genius, for a very simple reason: “he saw the others just as they were while the others were never able to glimpse his hidden thoughts.”44 Although “hermetic to himself,” the Patriarch was “crystal clear in his ability to see the reality and future of others.”45 His patience was immense and he would always win in the end, as when finally—in the case of his unreadable and apparently indispensable adviser Sáenz de la Barra—“he discovered the imperceptible crack he had been seeking for so many years in that obsidian wall of fascination.”46 Is this a picture of García Márquez himself, always wanting to “win”—against all-comers, friends and family, wife and lovers, professional rivals (Asturias, Vargas Llosa), the world? And would Fidel Castro become the only man—his very own Patriarch, his grandfather figure—against whom he could not, would not dare, would not even wish, to win?
The lesson—it might be called a postmodern one—finally learned by the reader of this novel, through his or her reluctant co-existence with the Patriarch, is that life is undoubtedly impossible to understand but there are certain moral “truths,” notwithstanding all our illusions and all our contemporary relativities.47 They relate not only to charity and compassion but to power, responsibility, solidarity, commitment and, finally, love. Perhaps it was the complex inter-relation between these human questions which was the lesson that García Márquez himself learned in becoming famous and which he would not have learned unless he had become famous—which, indeed, for the most part, perhaps only the famous and powerful can learn—even though most powerful figures who experience the process of learning go on, like the Patriarch himself, to become even more despicable as their power and influence increases. It raises the radical possibility that the García Márquez who began to give interviews about politics and morality between, say, 1972 and 1975 was a new García Márquez who had learned what the old, still relatively naive and “innocent” García Márquez was truly like and had resolved to be better and to do better now that fame had shown him the truth.
As for love, when readers these days think about García Márquez and love they are inclined to smile and think of the apparently ingenuous romantic Florentino Ariza from Love in the Time of Cholera and of the wise and knowing face of García Márquez himself reproduced on the covers of millions of novels. Yet his treatment of love and sex, both in The Autumn of the Patriarch and elsewhere, is curiously brutal and disenchanted. The Patriarch’s attitude to women is coarse and unimaginative in the extreme, with two exceptions: the beauty queen Manuela Sánchez, the unattainable woman he idealizes from afar but never gets to know, and at the other extreme the twelve-year-old schoolgirl Lolita figure whom he seduces when he is already senile. Still, the only woman he has ever truly loved appears to be his mother. So is the whole relationship with Luisa Santiaga a key to this novel? And does Manuela Sánchez represent an illusory quest for mere external glamour? And does Leticia Nazareno stand for the destiny of all wives (Mercedes is one of Leticia’s other names)? And is all of it somehow the other, dark side of his suppression of his father, given that in this novel there are not even any grandfathers? Because the Patriarch regards himself as self-generated:
… he considered no one the son of anyone but his mother, and only her. That certainty seemed valid even for him, as he knew that he was a man without a father like the most illustrious despots of history, that the only relative known to him and perhaps the only one he had was his mother of my heart Bendición Alvarado to whom the school texts attributed the miracle of having conceived him without recourse to any male and of having received in a dream the hermetical keys to his messianic destiny, and whom he proclaimed matriarch of the land by decree.48
The truth, it appears, both prosaic and profound, is that men want a wife to be their long-term lover but when they get one they find they wanted a mother all along whilst continuing to want other, idealized lovers. During the Patriarch’s early times with Leticia Nazareno she would sit him down each day to learn to read and write; then they would spend every afternoon naked under her mosquito net, and she would wash him and dress him like a baby. Thus one half of a man is moved to suppress and rape women, considered by definition “younger” and inferior to him, and to wrest them away from other men; the other half wants to be treated like a child or baby by those same women, considered anterior or superior to him—because, once again, equality and democratic interaction are considered unrealistic or even (because unexciting) undesirable. In this book as in others García Márquez hardly ever uses the word “sex,” which causes permanent ambiguity about the meaning of love and the relation between sex and love. Evidently the only certainty that most of us can have about love is that our mother loves us, whatever our faults or crimes. Yet as we know, even this certainty was not given to García Márquez himself in the early years of his life.
By the end of his life the Patriarch can hardly remember anything at all, “conversing with spectres whose voices he couldn’t even decipher,”49 amidst all the signs of advanced old age, still vainly wanting sex, since love is forever denied him, and so his staff bring him women from abroad, but to no avail, because best of all he still likes jumping on working-class women, which always makes him start to sing again (“bright January moon …”).50 Finally, at the very end of the novel, he remembers what his whole life has been dedicated to forgetting, “a remote childhood which for the first time was his own image shivering on the icy barrens and the image of his mother Bendición Alvarado who stole the innards of a ram away from the garbage-heap buzzards for lunch.”51Childhood, asMemories of My Melancholy Whores will also remind us, does not necessarily excuse but it may explain.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ WOULD CONTINUE to tinker with the novel during the latter part of 1973 and well into 1974.52 But the book was essentially finished and he was able to start planning the future. He had been a solitary writer locked away in solitary conflict with a solitary protagonist, yet simultaneously conducting an interminable conversation with the world about his solitude and about that most collective of matters: politics. It had been a bizarre spectacle for newspaper readers, to say the least, and García Márquez only just managed to carry off the endeavour without making an international fool of himself; but carry it off he did and the experience made him a far tougher literary and political animal, and gave him a thicker skin with which to confront almost any challenge of the many which his talent and his fame would have in store for him.
In the early spring of 1973 he and Mercedes had travelled up from Barcelona to be at Tachia’s wedding in Paris. She and Charles were finally married on 31 March—by then their son Juan was eight—and went to live opposite the hospital where she had miscarried in 1956; later they would move to the Rue du Bac. She would recall, “Gabriel was best man at my wedding and my sister Irene was matron of honour. Gabriel is also the godfather of my son Juan. I’d have liked Blas at the wedding too, it would have been wonderful—but he was so unreliable and unpredictable.”53 There is no reason whatever to think that García Márquez had any regrets about the separation from Tachia, other than the manner of it; but for a man who would be writing insistently about love, she would remain a productive point of reference, a symbol of paths not taken, of relationships outside of marriage, indeed of alternatives to monogamy itself.
Later that year, at the very time he was in the final stages of The Autumn of the Patriarch, García Márquez received another major international honour, the Neustadt Prize, awarded in association with the magazine Books Abroad of the University of Oklahoma. This was a surprising and indeed commendable decision for an American institution to take only six months after the scandal surrounding his donation of the Gallegos Prize to MAS.54 After perfunctorily performing his duty in Oklahoma in return for the ceremonial eagle feather and cheque, García Márquez flew to Los Angeles and San Francisco for a brief family holiday and then on to Mexico City, where the family were to spend the summer. So excited were they all to be back in Mexico together, among their old friends, in Rodrigo and Gonzalo’s true nation home, that they bought a ramshackle country house on the outskirts of Cuernavaca, that beautiful resort town given notoriety by Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano.55 It was a bargain, with 1,100 square metres of garden, near the house of their old friends Vicente and Albita Rojo, in the direction of Las Quintas, with views of the sierra. This time, unlike his near-purchase of a country house outside Barcelona, García Márquez went ahead with the deal. When he registered the property at the notary public, all the employees from adjoining offices came out to have their copies of One Hundred Years of Solitude signed. García Márquez exulted, “I’m a capitalist, I own a property!” He was forty-eight.
On 9 September he left Mexico, after a stay of more than two months. Mercedes flew to Barcelona, where the boys were returning reluctantly to school. García Márquez was on his way to Colombia on business. But he told the Mexican press that he was so pleased by his reception in Mexico that he would be going on to Barcelona to pack his things and get back to Mexico as quickly as possible.56 He also declared that Latin America was very short of great leaders. The only true leaders in the continent were Castro and Allende, the rest were “mere presidents of the republic.” Two days later, on the first of the doom-laden September the elevenths, one of those two leaders was dead and Latin America would never be the same again.