20
NOW COMFORTABLY INSTALLED in the Sofitel Hotel in Paris, García Márquez divided his time between his creative writing in the morning, and the business of Unesco’s controversial MacBride Commission in the afternoon. MacBride’s task, in line with “third-worldist” ideologies of the time, was to consider the possibility of a new “world information order” which would loosen the grip of Western agencies on the content and presentation of international news.1 Much as he approved of it, this collaboration would in fact mark the end of the era of public militancy for García Márquez. There would be no further Russells or MacBrides, no more Alternativa or Militant Journalism (an anthology of his political essays published in Bogotá in the 1970s); even Habeas was an activist endeavour which he would soon relinquish. He had taken the decision to cease his more strident political activism and turn to diplomacy and mediation behind the scenes. And since Pinochet was not apparently likely to be over-thrown any time soon, he had resolved to abjure and go back to creative fiction, which was in any case the best form of public relations he could devise. In September 1981, apparently unabashed, García Márquez would declare that he was “more dangerous as a writer than as a politician.”2
Although he was now one of the most famous authors in the world, he had really only published two novels, One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Autumn of the Patriarch, in the almost twenty years since In Evil Hour appeared. He needed more if he was to be considered one of the great writers of his era. As for politics, although he would never abandon either Latin America or his core political values, he had decided to concentrate on Cuba above all as his principal object of attention, his political heart’s desire, and also of course on Colombia, to the extent that it was possible to imagine positive outcomes for that unhappy country. Cuba, whatever its political and economic short-comings, was at least, for García Márquez, a moral triumph. And Fidel was a Latin American who was not a failure, not defeated, but the bearer of an entire continent’s sense of hope and, above all, dignity. García Márquez decided to stop banging his head against the adobe wall of Latin American history. He would stick to the positive.
As he distanced himself imperceptibly from direct confrontation of the problems of Latin America, other than Cuba and Colombia, he began to spend time in two places he had previously disliked: Paris and Cartagena. It was during this period that he would buy apartments in both places: on Rue Stanislas in Montparnasse, and in Bocagrande, Cartagena, overlooking the tourist beach and his beloved Caribbean. When in September 1980 he broke his literary strike, the vehicle, “The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow,” would reflect this new existential reality exactly: the story would begin in Cartagena and end in Paris (as well as re-encoding his own Parisian past with Tachia).3 It was typical of his intuition, his timing, or his luck that during this period his two friends François Mitterrand and Jack Lang would be elected to government in France, as President and Culture Minister respectively, and a third, Régis Debray, would become a prominent though controversial government adviser; while Cartagena, thanks to improved air services and a gradual change of cachaco mentality, would become a weekend playground for the wealthy power-brokers of Bogotá.
It turned out to be a moment of exhilarating rejuvenation for a man now in his fifties who could certainly claim that he had given revolutionary activism his best shot. Rodrigo had begun the exodus to Paris with his brief experience of mastering Gallic haute cuisine and García Márquez set about looking for music classes for younger son Gonzalo now that Rodrigo was studying at Harvard. Eligio had also been living in Paris for several years, though he had recently moved to nearby London. At the same time young Colombian journalists such as the ex-Alternativa comrades Enrique Santos Calderón and Antonio Caballero, and El Espectador’s María Jimena Duzán, were in Paris, and Plinio Mendoza was working in the Colombian embassy. García Márquez’s high-level contacts were invaluable to them all.4 Although she spent less time in Paris than Gabo, Mercedes mothered all the young Colombians, acted as their occasional matchmaker and dried their tears when their amours turned sour. García Márquez himself engaged in interminable late-night discussions which showed his friends that his tactics might have changed but not his underlying beliefs.5
Gonzalo, who had his own studio apartment, soon lost interest in the flute, much to his father’s disappointment. Now nineteen, he took up graphic arts in 1981 and met his future wife Pía Elizondo, the daughter of Mexican avant-garde writer Salvador Elizondo, one of the former editors of S.nob. Tachia acted as a kind of aunt to Gonzalo when his parents were out of town. She was still living on the Boulevard de l’Observatoire, opposite the gloomy hospital of their evil hour. When “The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow” appeared in El Espectador on 6 September 1980 the picture on the cover of Magazín Dominical was of a rose dripping spots of blood.
Only a few weeks after the publication of this encrypted story a rare article about Mercedes appeared, written by Plinio’s sister Consuelo Mendoza de Riaño. It alluded openly to Gabo’s Parisian amour in the 1950s, mentioned that he “may have loved her a lot” and insinuated that Mercedes was naive about this and many other things. Whether or not Mercedes had understood the meaning of the recently published short story, this entirely uncoded follow-up must have been a nasty surprise for her. It ended however with a defiant counter-attack from the interviewee. Consuelo Mendoza recorded: “She is not bothered by the writer’s female admirers. She says: ‘You know, Gabito is an eternal admirer of women, you can see it in his books. He has female friends everywhere whom he loves a great deal. Though most of them are not writers. After all, women writers are sometimes a pain, don’t you think.’”6
On 19 March 1980, on a visit to Cuba, García Márquez had announced that he had completed—“last week”—a novel that almost no one knew he was even writing, entitled Chronicle of a Death Foretold. It was, he said, “a sort of false novel and a false reportage.” Later he would claim that it was “not that far from the U.S.”s ‘new journalism.’” He repeated a favourite image, that writing stories was like mixing concrete whereas writing a novel was like laying bricks. Then he added a new one: “The novel is like a marriage: you can keep fixing it day after day whereas a story is like a love affair: if it doesn’t work, it can’t be fixed.”7
Not everyone found the new García Márquez as lovable as he evidently intended. When he tried to explain away the problem of the Cuban asylum seekers who had recently flooded into the Peruvian embassy in Havana, Cuban dissident writer Reinaldo Arenas, as if to show that García Márquez was not fooling him, wrote an article whose title was an untranslatable pun to which we may nonetheless essay an equivalent: “Gabriel García Márquez: Is he an Ass or an Asshole?” Referring specifically to García Márquez’s alleged criticism of the Vietnamese boat people and the Cuban asylum seekers, Arenas declared:
That a writer like Señor García Márquez, who has lived and written in the West, where his work has had an immense impact and reception which has guaranteed him a lifestyle and intellectual prestige, that such a writer, protected by the freedom and opportunities that such a world affords him, should use them to produce apologies for totalitarian communism, which turns intellectuals into policemen and policemen into criminals, is simply outrageous … It’s time for all intellectuals in the free world (no others exist) to take a position against this kind of unscrupulous propagandist for communism who, taking refuge in the guarantees and facilities which liberty provides, sets out to undermine it.8
In an interview with Alan Riding of the New York Times in May, García Márquez, who had “visited Havana this month in the midst of Cuba’s refugee problem with the United States,” explained to Riding that he had founded Habeas to “take on special cases requiring contact with both the left and the Establishment, occasionally helping obtain the release of victims of guerrilla kidnappings.”9 This sounded very much like someone who wanted it both ways and the possibilities of being seduced by “the Establishment,” whoever they might be, were obvious. As for his long-awaited book on Cuba, “Every door was opened to me, but now I realize that the book is so critical that it could be used against Cuba, so I refuse to publish it. Though the Cubans want me to go ahead.” Riding noted, “Despite his frequent trips to Havana, he says he could not settle there: ‘I could not live in Cuba because I haven’t been through the process. It would be very difficult to arrive now and adapt myself to the conditions. I’d miss too many things. I couldn’t live with the lack of information. I am a voracious reader of newspapers and magazines from around the world.’ But he also feels unable to live in Colombia. ‘I have no private life there,’ he said. ‘Everything concerns me. I get involved in everything. If the President laughs, I have to give an opinion on his laugh. If he doesn’t laugh, I have to comment on why he didn’t laugh.’ Mr. García Márquez,” Riding noted, “has therefore lived in Mexico City almost continuously since 1961.”
As usual, the new book, eventually entitled Chronicle of a Death Foretold, was really an old project: a novel based on the horrifying murder of his close friend Cayetano Gentile in Sucre thirty years before. Significantly enough, it was a work inspired by the political violence of the early 1950s, with a theme that would not have been out of place in In Evil Hour, and yet the writer, who had just devoted seven years to politics, would set the novel backwards in time, in a less explosively political period of Colombia’s history; and he would blame its events not so much on capitalism, nor even mainly on a remote but ruthless Conservative government, as he had in In Evil Hour, but upon an apparently much older and deeper social system, heavily influenced by the Catholic Church and obsessed less, in the first instance, with ideological and political differences than with moral and social ones. This was a huge shift in his literary outlook, though one that has barely been noticed by his readers and critics.
On his wedding day in January 1951, out in the real world, a young man called Miguel Palencia had received a note in the small town of Sucre saying that his new bride Margarita Chica Salas was not a virgin and he had returned her to her family in disgrace. On the 22nd her brothers Víctor Manuel and José Joaquín Chica Salas murdered her ex-boyfriend Cayetano Gentile Chimento in the main square, in front of the whole town, for allegedly having seduced, deflowered and abandoned Margarita.10 The killing was particularly gruesome: Gentile was almost cut to pieces.11 Gentile’s mother was a good friend (and comadre) of Luisa Santiaga Márquez and Cayetano was a good friend of Gabito, his brother Luis Enrique and his eldest sister Margot. Luis Enrique had spent the previous day with Cayetano and Margot had been with him minutes before he was killed; eleven-year-old Jaime had watched him die. Since that very day Gabito had always wanted to write the inside story of this terrible death but because those involved were all people he and his family knew intimately, his mother asked him not to do so while the parents of the principal protagonists were still alive. (The murder was of course the reason why the García Márquez family fled from Sucre in February 1951.) By 1980, when Gabito began to write the novel, those who would have been most affronted had passed away and he was in a position to shuffle the facts of the case and the personalities of the people he knew with the same ruthlessness he had applied to his own character in The Autumn of the Patriarch.12
García Márquez had conceived the final shape of the new book on his way home from the family’s round-the-world journey in 1979. In the airport at Algiers the sight of an Arab prince carrying a falcon had suddenly opened his eyes to a new way of presenting the conflict between Cayetano Gentile and the Chica brothers. Gentile, of Italian immigrant stock, would become Santiago Nasar, an Arab, and in that way closer to Mercedes Barcha’s family heritage. Margarita Chica, Mercedes’s friend, would become Angela Vicario. Miguel Palencia would become Bayardo San Román. Víctor Manuel and José Joaquín Chica Salas would become the twin brothers Pedro and Pablo Vicario. Most of the book’s other details are the same as in real life; or similar. Some of the relationships are modified, particularly in terms of class, and naturally García Márquez rewrites the whole dramatic affair with the novelist’s magical insight.
Whereas the modernist Leaf Storm, García Márquez’s most autobiographical novel, omits all direct self-referentiality, the postmodern Chronicle of a Death Foretold makes its autobiographical dimension explicit: its narrator is Gabriel García Márquez, who is not named but we know it is he because he has a wife called Mercedes (and seems to expect us to know who she is), a mother called Luisa Santiaga, brothers called Luis Enrique and Jaime, a sister called Margot, another, unnamed, who is a nun, and even, for the first time, a father, who is also unnamed. Here García Márquez toys with his readers and with reality, since these details relating to his family and his own life are largely but not entirely true: for example, Luisa Santiaga, Luis Enrique, Margot and Jaime were indeed in Sucre on the day of the murder but Gabito, Gabriel Eligio, Aida and Mercedes were not; and Aunt Wenefrida had been lying in the cemetery in Aracataca for many years but appears alive at the very end of the book. The family members appear not only with their own names but with their own characters and manner of speaking. The narrator mentions that he proposed to Mercedes when she was just a little girl, as indeed he did, but he also includes the local prostitute, María Alejandrina Cervantes, whom he gives the name of a woman he actually knew in the Sucre area, and he spends much of the novel in bed with her. As for the town, which is unnamed, it has a river just like Sucre’s; and the family house is located along the river bank away from the main square, in a mango grove, just like the García Márquez family’s real house in Sucre—though Sucre never had big steamboats, as the town in the novel does, nor were there ever any cars there; and Cartagena could certainly not be seen in the distance. But in most other respects the town is almost identical to the original.
The novel is conceived quite consciously as a literary tour de force. The author is now, patently, another man, another writer, a quite different persona. Here indeed he is like a bullfighter who is going to kill his bull in an unforgettable fashion, at once dramatic and aesthetic. The result is as populist, compulsive and irresistible, as, say, Ravel’s Bolero. And equally as self-parodic: which is its saving grace. Because, implicitly mocking the concept of suspense, the writer announces the death of his character in the first line of the first chapter, announces it several times more in the following chapters, and then finally, perhaps uniquely, has the protagonist himself, holding his own intestines like a bunch of roses, declare it on the final page: “They killed me, Miss Wenefrida.” Whereupon the poor wretch collapses, and the novel ends. Thus when García Márquez refers in his title to “a death fore-told” he is referring both to the nature of the story he is telling and the way he himself has chosen to tell it. All of this, with its ironies and ambivalences, is packed into a brief work whose extraordinary complexity is skilfully concealed from its readers, whom the experienced author pilots through with apparently effortless aplomb.
When Bayardo San Román returns Angela Vicario to her family on the wedding night after discovering she is not a virgin she eventually says that her seducer was Santiago Nasar. After her brothers carry out their murder of Nasar in revenge, they take refuge in the church and tell the priest: “We killed him in full knowledge but we are innocent.” The twins’ lawyer argues that the murder was in legitimate defence of honour. Yet although they are unrepentant it seems they did everything possible to warn Nasar or be stopped by others and they waited for him where they were unlikely to see him and where everyone else could see them. The narrator comments: “There was never a death more announced.” For the rest of the town there is only one true victim, the deceived bridegroom Bayardo San Román, who remains a mystery and says nothing to the narrator twenty-three years later when they meet again. Incredibly, from the moment he rejects Angela, who had been reluctant to marry him, she falls in love and becomes obsessed with him. Finally, when they are both old, he turns up with two thousand unopened letters and the laconic greeting: “Well, here I am.”
The honour, shame and machismo syndrome is the central social thematic of the novel, as of so many Spanish works from the seventeenth-century “Golden Age” down to Lorca’s twentieth-century dramas. (This choice of theme is in itself an obvious conservative turn by the author.) A possible conclusion from García Márquez: men deserve the violence they do to one another because of what they do to women.
The story of Colonel Márquez and Medardo must have been in García Márquez’s mind once more throughout the writing of this book. To what extent are we responsible for our actions, in control of our destiny? Irony functions at every level: the ultimate absurdity is that Santiago Nasar may not have done the deed for which he is killed and anyway the brothers do not really want to kill him. It is the combination of fate and human fallibility, and above all the confusion of the two, which brings about the death.
Chronicle of a Death Foretold is perhaps García Márquez’s most influential title, used in a thousand newspaper headlines and references in magazines. The reason of course is that it implies that whatever is announced can be prevented and that human agency can predetermine the world (though the novel, ironically enough, seems to give the opposite message). On the whole García Márquez’s earlier work tended to imply that more things were subject to human agency than Latin American popular consciousness tended to believe; on the whole the later work tends to question more sceptically what is and is not subject to human agency and tends to show that most things are not. Paradoxically the earlier work appears more pessimistic but is in fact infused with the implicit optimism of a socialist perspective; it is intended to change hearts and minds. The later work is much jauntier but is underpinned by a world-view not too far from despair.
AT THE END of his extended period of political propaganda and activism between 1973 and 1979, and in preparation for the future that he intuited, he now embraced a role he had hitherto rejected: he became a celebrity. Immediately after the completion ofChronicle of a Death Foretold, anticipating his return to Colombia, he negotiated with his friends in the press in order to embark upon a quite different kind of journalism. His new articles were a return to the kind of thing he had written in the 1940s and 1950s in Cartagena and Barranquilla, closer to literature than to journalism.13 They were, as well as political and cultural commentaries, a kind of serialized memoir, a weekly letter to his friends, a circular to his fans, an ongoing public diary.14 But this was not the diary of a columnist who needed a nom de plume to give himself an identity; this was very much the diary of a Somebody.
He syndicated the articles most prominently to El Espectador in Bogotá and El País in Spain, as well as other newspapers in Latin America and Europe. The most striking thing about them from the beginning was the extraordinary change of position. Though many of them were on current political themes, gone was the urgent leftist tone. The man writing these articles was a Great Man, like some nineteenth-century novelist who had already received universal acclaim and confirmation. He was still friendly—indeed it was evidently a privilege to have such an important man being so friendly (both things were in the voice)—but it was no longer the unique matiness with which young “Séptimus” had written his “Giraffes” or the comrade-liness of the recent Alternativajournalist. This change of position and tone was one of his most effective publicity wheezes, undertaken with consummate sleight of hand. Manifestly this calm, measured voice, which knew everything but demanded nothing, would not be causing trouble if its owner returned to Bogotá where the articles were being published each Sunday.
The articles began to appear in September 1980 and would continue virtually without interruption until March 1984, an astonishing total of 173 weekly articles during one of the busiest periods of the writer’s entire life.15 In retrospect, however, perhaps the most astonishing thing of all is that the first four articles were all about the Nobel Prize.16 They revealed between the lines that García Márquez had not only done a great deal of research but was also very familiar with Stockholm and, most striking of all, had met the key academician Artur Lundkvist and been to his home. He had researched the composition of the Nobel Committee, the method of selection and the procedures of the ritual of bestowal. He comments in the first article that the Swedish Academy is like death, it always does the unexpected. Not in his case!
From the start he gave his readers the impression that they were being allowed into “The Lives of the Rich and Famous,” with their “Champagne Lifestyles and Caviar Dreams.”17 Not only did García Márquez constantly narrate his own current life and lifestyle and the important people he knew but he reminisced about his own past, as if that past were self-evidently of interest to his readers all round the world. It was almost as if twenty-five years had somehow passed between the last Alternativa article in 1979 and the first El Espectador article in September 1980, the kind of thing that might have happened—“The Secret Miracle”—to one of Jorge Luis Borges’s characters. At the same time, in a lofty kind of way, he managed to carry on an unceasing campaign against the Reagan government’s neo-imperialist campaign in Central America and the Caribbean without alienating mainstream liberal international opinion. This was a remarkable achievement and would involve replacing the emphasis on revolutionary friends and contacts such as MAS’s Petkoff and M-19’s costeño guerrilla leader Jaime Bateman with references to respectable democratic politicians such as González, Mitterrand, Carlos Andrés Pérez and Alfonso López Michelsen.
His readers discovered that, like many of them, this great man was terrified of flying, and he was able to confide that other great men such as Buñuel, Picasso and even the much-travelled Carlos Fuentes were similarly afflicted. Yet despite his terror, he seemed to be travelling constantly and he described each of his glamorous journeys for his avid fans: where he went, who he went to see, what they were like, their foibles (because, it was clear, we all have our little foibles). He was also superstitious and, he appeared to assume, much the more lovable for that. He even had doubts and insecurities: in December 1980 he reflected in Paris on the murder of John Lennon and the nostalgia associated for several generations with the music of the Beatles, lamenting: “This afternoon, thinking about all that as I gaze through a gloomy window at the falling snow, with more than fifty years upon my shoulders and still not knowing very well who I am, nor what the hell I’m doing here, I have the impression that the world was the same from the moment of my birth until the moment the Beatles started to play”18 He stressed that Lennon had above all been associated with love. He himself—his readers might perhaps have reflected—had been more closely identified with power, solitude and the absence of love; but that was about to change.
The article on John Lennon was a coded message. Paris, Europe, was not the answer. He needed, as he broadcast in a whole series of interviews at this time, to return to Colombia, where his latest novel, once again, had been set. He had been promising to return for years. But the country had already begun to lurch back into chaos by the time Alternativa closed in early 1980: a new surge in violence, a new wave of drug-trafficking and a new kind of guerrilla group wedded to spectacular operations.
It was against this background that García Márquez and Mercedes returned to Turbay’s repressive and reactionary Colombia in February 1981. Gabito organized a grand family reunion in Cartagena where the star turn was Aunt Elvira, “Aunt Pa,” whose prodigious memory astonished all those present.19 After this he began to work in the apartment he had recently bought for his favourite sister Margot in Bocagrande. Colombian poet-critic Juan Gustavo Cobo Borda visited him there not long after García Márquez’s arrival and was allowed to take away the manuscript of Chronicle, which he read in two hours on the nineteenth floor of a nearby hotel.20 Cobo Borda reported that the writer was working each day at Margot’s, then would walk down the four flights of stairs to the ground floor, drive to visit his mother in Manga and listen to “the unintelligible jokes of his father.”
On 20 March, in Bogotá, García Márquez attended a Légion d’Honneur gala organized by the French embassy and then saw Cobo Borda again for what they agreed to call “the meeting between the slimy cachaco and the vulgar costeño.” Cobo Borda said he had never seen his interviewee looking so happy in Colombia. This contentment was short-lived: the two men spoke on the day the President would announce the breaking off of relations with Cuba. And there was more: García Márquez had begun to receive information that the government was trying to link him to the M-19 guerrilla movement, which in turn was being linked to Cuba, and there were even rumours that he might be assassinated. He later told Mexican reporters that he had heard four different versions of a story that the Colombian military was planning to kill him.21 On 25 March, surrounded by friends who had gathered to protect him, he asked for asylum in the Mexican embassy and slept there overnight.22 At ten past seven the next evening he flew north under the protection of the Mexican ambassador to Colombia, María Antonia Sánchez-Gavito, to be greeted by another large group of friends and an even larger number of journalists at the Mexico City airport. The Mexican government immediately gave him a personal bodyguard.
During the flight he had had a long conversation with the Colombian journalist Margarita Vidal, who later wrote an in-depth account of the drama.23 As they flew over the Caribbean García Márquez assured her that neither Castro nor Torrijos was supplying arms to the Colombian guerrillas: Castro had reached an agreement with López Michelsen not to assist them militarily and he had kept to it. He, García Márquez, would return to Colombia when, as he expected, López Michelsen became President again. He said he was totally opposed to terrorism: revolution was the only long-term solution, whatever the cost in blood, but he didn’t see how it could be achieved. Colombia had always been a country with a low consciousness, ripe for populism but not for revolution. Colombians no longer had any belief in anything, politics had never got them anywhere, and now the attitude was each for himself, threatening complete social dissolution: “A country with-out an organized left, with a left incapable of convincing anyone, that spends its life dividing itself into pieces, can’t do anything.”
All of this was an extraordinary backdrop for the publication of a novel entitled Chronicle of a Death Foretold. One imagines Colombian officers sitting in their barracks a few days earlier and having a hearty chuckle about the unpleasant and ironic surprise they had in store for the conceited costeño lefty. In the event the bird had flown and the celebration of his homecoming gift to Colombia—his new novel—would take place in Bogotá without him.
Readers discovered that Chronicle of a Death Foretold narrated a story that could hardly have been more dramatic. Yet it was also one of those novels that have their own dramatic story after they are published. First, the sales were astronomical when the book was released—simultaneously—in Spain (Bruguera), Colombia (Oveja Negra), Argentina (Sudamericana) and Mexico (Diana). On 23 January 1981 Excelsior had reported that more than a million copies were being produced for the Hispanic world—250,000 paperbacks in each of the four countries and 50,000 hardbacks in Spain. Oveja Negra was reported as having completed this work in April, the longest single printing of any Latin American novel in history. On 26 April Excelsior said 140,000 dollars was being spent on advertising in Mexico alone and the book was being translated into thirty-one languages. It was being sold by newspaper sellers and chewing-gum vendors on streets all over Latin America.
Oveja Negra boss José Vicente Kataraín was interviewed soon after publication.24 It turned out that there were not one but two million copies of the book: a million printed in Colombia and another million in Spain and Argentina—though Kataraín would always be unreliable about numbers, as befitted the name of his company, “Black Sheep.” And whereas the previous biggest number of copies of a Colombian first edition had been 10,000, García Márquez’s new book was printing more than for any other first edition of any literary work ever published in the world. Two million copies had meant buying 200 tons of paper, ten tons of cardboard and 1,600 kilos of ink. Forty-five Boeing 727s had been needed to transport the copies out of Colombia alone. As if to help all this along, García Márquez declared on 29 April that Chronicle of a Death Foretold was “my best work.” On 12 May however some Colombian critics claimed that the book was “a swindle,” little more than a long short story which added nothing to the writer’s earlier achievements.25 But Chronicle went straight to the top of the sales lists in Spain, where the book was compared, inevitably, to Lope de Vega’s Fuenteovejuna, and remained there until 4 November. It was the best-selling book in Spain in 1981. And Gabo the great novelist was back with a bang.
On 7 May a Bogotá lawyer, Enrique Alvarez, sued García Márquez for half a million dollars for slandering the brothers portrayed in the novel since they had both been found “innocent” of the crime, whereas the book showed them as murderers. Thinking of the unfortunate and possibly even innocent Cayetano Gentile who had indeed been murdered—if not according to law—by the brothers thirty years before, this would seem to have been adding insult to injury with a vengeance.26 Some of the other “central characters” of the book, people who were portrayed in it or thought they were, plus other family members, gathered in Colombia—some having flown from distant parts of the world—to discuss their grievances. They would all be disappointed: they would never get a cut of García Márquez’s astronomical profits because the courts in Colombia, where most of the professional classes have always had a solid literary education, would make subtle literary distinctions between historical truth and narrative fiction, and authorial freedom would be resoundingly upheld.
Chronicle of a Death Foretold has been one of García Márquez’s most successful novels with the reading public and even with the critics—once read, never forgotten. Yet it is perhaps the most pessimistic of all his works. Clearly this shift must bear some relation to the frustrations of his political activity between 1974 and 1980, and to the condition of Colombia at the end of that period.
On 21 May García Márquez was in Paris for François Mitterrand’s inauguration, together with Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar and Salvador Allende’s widow Hortensia. It was the first of many presidential inaugurations staged by personal friends of his in the coming years, though none would be more imposing, more theatrical or indeed poetic than the extraordinary spectacle put on by this most self-aware—and historically aware—of politicians. How far García Márquez had come since the days when he was not far above the Parisian clochards!27 The next month would find him in Havana, staying in a suite in the Hotel Riviera which the authorities kept permanently reserved for him. His relationship with Fidel had settled into a pattern. They began to have an annual vacation together at Castro’s residence at Cayo Largo where, sometimes alone, sometimes with other guests, they would sail on his fast launch or his cruiser Acuaramas. Mercedes particularly enjoyed these occasions because Fidel had a special way with women, always attentive and with an old-style gallantry that was both pleasurable and flattering.
By now Gabo and Fidel were sufficiently relaxed together for the Colombian to play the role of reluctant younger brother, the non-athletic and sulky one who was constantly complaining about chores and hunger and others among life’s unfortunate imperatives, a pantomime which always made Castro laugh. Of course the weaknesses of his fellow men did not always amuse the Comandante but in the case of García Márquez there were reasons to make an exception. He not only acted the younger brother and was generally deferential but he knew when to joke and play court jester and how far to go. Fidel was not necessarily a respecter of writers in general—nor of their freedoms—but he always acknowledged when someone was the best at what they did.
Someone who respected García Márquez even more than Castro and treated him as an older, wiser but equally irreverent brother was Panama’s General Torrijos. Felipe González later told me that his enduring memory of Torrijos and García Márquez was the two of them drinking a bottle of whisky together in one of Torrijos’s houses. After much carousing and “piss-taking,” a tropical downpour began. The two men ran down from the balcony where they were drinking and rolled on the lawn below in the pouring rain, kicking their legs in the air and roaring with laughter like two small boys who just loved being together.28 García Márquez visited Torrijos in late July with Venezuela’s Carlos Andrés Pérez and Alfonso López Michelsen, who García Márquez was hoping would win the next year’s elections; they spent the weekend on the beautiful island of Contadora. García Márquez stayed on with his military friend for a few days and then went back to Mexico, at a moment when the entire planet, even Latin America, was gawping at the televised wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer in London. However on 31 July came one of the worst blows García Márquez had ever suffered personally, and the worst politically since the death of Salvador Allende in 1973, when it was reported that Torrijos had been killed in an air accident in the mountains of Panama. García Márquez had decided only at the last moment not to accompany him on the flight.
There was much speculation in the press as to whether Torrijos had been murdered and also, in the next four days, as to whether García Márquez would attend the funeral, and much surprise and disappointment when he did not. His explanation immediately entered the canon of classic García Márquez justifications: “I do not bury my friends.”29 It was an extraordinary statement to come from the author of Leaf Storm and No One Writes to the Colonel, both of which involved burials and were based on the assumption that ensuring the dignified disposal of a corpse was a key moral duty—perhaps the minimum requirement of our always uncertain humanity—as in Antigone.
García Márquez did not bury his friends but he continued to praise them: his obituary article, “Torrijos,” appeared in El Espectador on 9 August while he was at the Galician Fair in Coruña.30 Some thought his behaviour callous and ambivalent. Yet Torrijos’s death had hit him hard. Mercedes would later remark, “He and Torrijos were great friends, he really loved him. He was very upset at his death: so much so, that he fell ill from the effect of it. He misses him so much he hasn’t been back to Panama.”31 Later he himself would reflect, “I think Torrijos travelled too much by plane, sometimes without a real reason: he travelled compulsively. He gave fate as many opportunities as he gave his enemies. But there is a high-level rumour that one of his aides left a walkie-talkie on a table shortly before leaving on the official flight. They say that when the escort went back to pick up the machine they’d changed it for another with explosives.” Being García Márquez, he added: “If it’s not a true story it’s attractive in a literary way”32
It was election year in Colombia and López Michelsen, backed by García Márquez, was the Liberal opponent of Belisario Betancur, the Conservative candidate. García Márquez warned on 12 March that López Michelsen was the best hope for democracy in the country.33 Two days later in his column he revealed that he himself was on the hit-list of MAS, a right-wing death squad (not to be confused with Petkoff’s political party in Venezuela). Also on the list was María Jimena Duzán, who had travelled to interview M-19 guerrillas two weeks before. García Márquez accused the military and the government of collusion with MAS and said that he had always hoped to die “at the hands of a jealous husband” and certainly not through the actions of “the clumsiest government in the history of Colombia.”34
Despite his support for López Michelsen, a majority of the 55 per cent of the electorate that voted did not agree and Conservative Belisario Betancur won with 48.8 per cent of the vote to López’s 41.0 per cent, with the dissident Liberal Luis Carlos Galán effectively winning the election for the Conservatives by taking 10.9 per cent. Outgoing President Turbay lifted the state of siege which had been in effect on and off for thirty-four years in the land of Macondo. Betancur’s own son Diego campaigned against his father on behalf of a Maoist workers’ revolutionary party. On his accession Betancur immediately declared an amnesty for the guerrilla movements and began the first serious peace negotiations with them in modern times.
García Márquez’s first intervention in democratic politics had not gone well and there now followed another Latin American calamity to disappoint him. At the start of that month the Argentinian army occupied the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic and the British sent a task force to recover them. The phenomenon of a fascist military junta, but nevertheless a Latin American regime, confronting a European nation would test García Márquez’s new-found democratic rhetoric to the limits over the coming twelve months, when, like Fidel Castro, he would find himself preferring Latin American dictators to European colonialists. His first comment, an article entitled “With the Malvinas or Without Them,” appeared on 11 April.35 Over the coming weeks, as it became clear that the Argentinian forces were heading for humiliation, the mood of dismay in the continent would increase.
Indeed, all the political news in Latin America since the Sandinista victory in 1979 seemed to be going from bad to even worse. Then there were the problems of the Communist regime in Poland, where the trade union movement led by Solidarity was questioning the government’s legitimacy. Everything everywhere seemed to be heading in the wrong direction, from García Márquez’s perspective. Meanwhile García Márquez was flying backwards and forwards across the Atlantic—and telling his readers about it—including a trip by Concorde “among the impassive businessmen and the radiant high-class whores”;36 he had also flown to “Bangkok the horrendous” after hiring a Rolls-Royce in Hong Kong (“none of my friends has one”), convincing himself once again that, “as always,” even in the world capital of sex tourism, “American hotels are the best places to make love, with their pure air and clean sheets.”37 But he seemed to have run out of literary topics. Now that socialism was on the wane, now that the solitude and power he had always written about appeared to be destined to prevail across the entire planet, he felt the need to find another subject, some-thing to feed his own optimism and inspire others to follow suit. What could it be? Of course: love! Gabo would become the Charlie Chaplin of the literary world: he would make them smile and he would make them fall in love.
The first public sign of this move was an article entitled “Peggy, give me a kiss,” inspired by a message scrawled on a wall in the Mexico street where he lived.38 García Márquez said that he was touched by this naive appeal in a world where the news was always bad, especially the news from Colombia. But he suspected that love was making a welcome comeback. (Just four months earlier he had confided to his readers that he “never dares to write” unless there is a yellow rose on his desk—placed there, of course, by his loving spouse.)39 Not that he was against sex—he informed the entire world right there and then that he had lost his virginity at the precocious age of thirteen—but “sex is better with all the rest, which is complete love.” Novels about love were once more the ones selling best, he declared, and even the old Latin American boleros were back in fashion.
Perhaps it was not entirely coincidental, then, that, after many refusals, he had consented to a long-awaited interview with Playboy magazine in—naturally—Paris, the world capital of love. The magazine had sent Claudia Dreifus, who would later become one of the world’s most successful interviewers, and this would be one of the best-researched and most comprehensive conversations with the writer.40 He explained his political positions for Playboy’s American readers, insisting that he and Fidel “talked more about culture than politics”: theirs was really just a friendship! Then he moved on to matters of love and sex. He said that none of us ever knows another person completely and he and Mercedes were no exception; he still had no idea how old she was. He explained that most of his relationships with prostitutes when he was a young man were simply a matter of finding company and escaping solitude.
I have fond memories of prostitutes and I write about them for sentimental reasons … Brothels cost money, and so they are places for older men. Sexual initiation actually starts with servants at home. And with cousins. And with aunts. But the prostitutes were friends to me when I was a young man … With prostitutes—including some I did not go to bed with—I always had some good friendships. I could sleep with them because it was horrible to sleep alone. Or I could not. I have always said, as a joke, that I married not to eat lunch alone. Of course, Mercedes says that I’m a son of a bitch.
He said that he envied his sons living in an age of equality between men and women: Chronicle showed how things were when he was a young man. He finally described himself as a man who desperately needed love: “I am the shyest man in the world. I am also the kindest. On this I accept no argument or debate … My greatest weakness? Umm. It’s my heart. In the emotional-sentimental sense. If I were a woman, I would always say yes. I need to be loved a great deal. My great problem is to be loved more, and that is why I write.” Playboy: “You make it sound like being a nymphomaniac.” García Márquez: “Well, yes—but a nymphomaniac of the heart … If I had not become a writer, I’d want to have been a piano player in a bar. That way, I could have made a contribution to making lovers feel even more loving toward each other. If I can achieve that much as a writer—to have people love one another more because of my books—I think that’s the meaning I’ve wanted for my life.” Of course now he would try to do that for people through his love stories and for countries through his mediations.
Just before this celebrity interview—which would not appear in print for almost a year—one of the best-known books about García Márquez had been published, one which would go on selling large numbers of copies down the years. The Fragrance of Guavawas a favour to Plinio Mendoza, who had again fallen on hard times. It was an apparently frank but carefully calculated conversation—expertly staged—which surveyed the whole of García Márquez’s life and work and gave his opinions on everything from, again, politics to women.41 It is difficult not to imagine that the sometimes startling insinuations about sexual flirtations and possible extramarital affairs were not in some way the opening up of a new market for a writer for whom the literary expression of love seemed always previously to have been associated with violence and tragedy.
So García Márquez confirmed his decision to go back to writing and now would never forsake it again, as long as he was capable of practising it. Until quite recently it had been a vocation, a compulsion, an ambition, sometimes a torment. Now he started to truly enjoy it. Years before, during his literary “strike,” he had told an interviewer somewhat wistfully that he was coming to realize that he was never as happy as when he was writing.42 Now at last he had an idea for a new book: a book about love and reconciliation. As spring arrived in Europe he began to make notes.
That summer he and Mercedes travelled around the Old Continent with Colombian friends Alvaro Castaño, who owned Bogotá’s leading classical music radio station, HJCK, and his wife Gloria Valencia, Colombia’s best-known television presenter. They took in Paris, Amsterdam, Greece and Rome. Then Gabo and Mercedes returned to Mexico. By now he had fixed on the specifics of the new novel; it would be created around, of all things, the love affair between his parents, about which he had so long been in denial.
In late August García Márquez and Mercedes vacationed once more with Fidel Castro on the Cuban coastland. Rodrigo had just graduated from Harvard and accompanied them on the visit. He was now considering a career in the cinema. Their great friends the Feduchis and Carmen Balcells also spent time with them and the Comandante. Fidel not only honoured them with a cruise on his yacht Acuaramas but also gave them a dinner invitation to his apartment on 11th Street, where few foreigners had eaten since the death of Celia Sánchez. Castro is an enthusiastic chef and cooking is one of his favourite topics of conversation, especially at that time as he was engaged in a campaign to produce a Cuban Camembert and a Cuban Roquefort. The next night everyone ate at Antonio Núñez Jiménez’s house and on this occasion conversation turned from cooking to money43 Castro was considering making a visit to Colombia and said that “Gabriel,” as he has always insisted on calling him, should accompany him, “unless you’re afraid of being accused of being a Cuban agent.”
“It’s a bit late for that,” replied García Márquez.
“When I hear people saying Castro pays García Márquez,” said Mercedes, “I say it’s about time we saw some of the money.”
“That would be bad, if you sent me the bill,” said Castro. “But I have an unbeatable argument. ‘Señores, we can’t pay García Márquez because he is too expensive.’ Not long ago, so as not to come out with the boast that we can’t be bought, I said to some Yankees: ‘It’s not that we won’t sell ourselves, you understand, the fact is that the USA hasn’t got enough money to buy us.’ More modest, right? And it’s the same with García Márquez. We can’t make him our agent. You know why? We haven’t got enough money to buy him, he’s too expensive.”
Rodrigo, silent until then, said: “When I arrived at a North American university, they asked me how my father reconciled his political ideas with his money and his lifestyle. I answered as best I could but there’s no satisfactory answer to the question.”
“Look, you just say to them, ‘That’s a problem for my mother, not my father,’” said Castro. “You should say, ‘Look, my father hasn’t got a sou, my mother’s the one who spends the money’”
“And she only gives me money for gasoline,” said García Márquez without a shadow of a smile.
Castro replied, “I’m working out a policy here for when they talk to you about your bank accounts. You must tell them that the socialist formula is from each according to his ability and to each according to his work and as Gabriel is a socialist—he’s not yet a communist—he gives according to his ability and he receives according to his work. Besides, the communist formula isn’t applied anywhere.”
Rodrigo warmed to the topic: “Once, out of nowhere, a boy turned to me and said, ‘Your father’s a communist.’ I asked him, ‘What does that mean, that he has a party card, he lives in a communist country?’”
Castro replied, “You should tell him, ‘My father is a communist only when he travels to Cuba and they pay him nothing; he gives according to his ability, they’ve printed about a million of his books, and he receives according to his needs.’”
“They pay me nothing. They never pay me a centavo in royalties here,” said Gabo.
During this visit García Márquez and Castro also talked about the implications of Betancur’s election in Colombia, which, at first sight, was a considerable setback for both García Márquez and the Cuban Revolution. Betancur had been inaugurated on 7 August. Although a Conservative and an ex-editor of the reactionary newspaper El Siglo, his reputation had always been that of a “civilized” politician who was not sectarian and he was an amateur poet who counted many other poets among his personal friends. García Márquez had begun flirting with the new regime in press interviews soon after the election, in addition to repeating how “homesick” he was feeling.
Despite refusing to attend Betancur’s inauguration García Márquez spoke well of the new President to Castro, declaring that he was “a good friend of mine.” He was the son of a muleteer; they had known one another since 1954 when “Gabo” was at El Espectador and “Belisario” at El Colombiano. They had always been in contact since then. García Márquez explained to Castro, “In Colombia you are either Conservative or Liberal from birth, it doesn’t matter what you think.” Betancur, he said, was not a true ideological Conservative, and his government was full of independent people. “He’s a great rhetorical speaker, he gets through to people, really gets through to them. And,” and here came the payoff, “he asks my advice all the time.”44
THE NOBEL SEASON was approaching once more and, as in previous years, García Márquez’s name was being mentioned again, only this time even more insistently. All the more surprising, then, that he chose, less than a month before the award was announced, to launch a withering attack on Israeli leader Menachem Begin—and, by direct implication, the Nobel Foundation which had awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1978. In early June Begin had ordered the invasion of neighbouring Lebanon and his military commander General Ariel Sharon had neglected to protect Palestinian refugees from attack, thereby enabling the massacres in the Sabra and Chatila camps in Beirut on 18 September. García Márquez suggested that Sharon and Begin should be awarded a Nobel Death Prize.45
But there is every sign he had been working on his own candidacy, too. When his friend Alfonso Fuenmayor asked him later in the year whether he had been to Stockholm before, he replied with a grin: “Yes, I was here three years ago when I came to fix myself up with the Nobel Prize.”46 Naturally this could just be one of his boutades but the truth is that he had made several visits to Stockholm in the 1970s and had gone out of his way to make contact with Artur Lundkvist, the left-wing Swedish academician and distinguished writer who had already had a strong influence on the prize going to Latin Americans Miguel Angel Asturias and Pablo Neruda. And García Márquez had vacationed in Cuba with the Swedish ambassador in the summer of 1981.
If he was looking for omens he couldn’t have had a better one than the return to power of Olof Palme’s Social Democrats in the Swedish elections of 19 September 1982. Palme had been a friend of García Márquez for years and had always emphasized his personal debt to Lundkvist’s literary works for opening his eyes to the wider world. Meanwhile brother Eligio, the family’s literary expert, was always absolutely certain that Gabito was going to win the prize in 1982 and was sure that Gabito himself thought so too. Alvaro Mutis had said his friend’s behaviour was “suspicious” at the time. And on Saturday 16 October, when Eligio talked to him by phone and mentioned the prize, Gabito, roaring with laughter, said he was sure that if someone was going to win it, the Swedish ambassador would have talked to that person a month beforehand …47
On Wednesday 20 October the Mexican newspapers were announcing that García Márquez’s new novel was to be about love. As he and Mercedes sat down for lunch in the early afternoon, a friend called from Stockholm to say that all indications suggested that the prize really was in the bag but that he must keep it to himself or the academicians might change their minds. After he hung up Gabo and Mercedes looked at one another in stupefaction, unable to say a word. Finally she said, “My God, what are we in for now!” They got straight up from the table and fled to Alvaro Mutis’s house for comfort, only returning to their own home in the early hours to wait for confirmation of this accolade which he at least had wanted but which was also a life sentence for them both.
Neither of them slept. At 5.59 the next morning, Mexico City time, Pierre Shori, Vice Foreign Minister of Sweden, called the house in Mexico City and confirmed the news. García Márquez put down the telephone, turned to Mercedes and said: “I’m fucked.”48They had no time to discuss it or to prepare themselves for the inevitable onslaught before the phone began to ring. The first caller, just two minutes later, was President Betancur, from Bogotá. Betancur had heard the news from François Mitterrand who had heard it from Olof Palme, but the official version said Betancur had heard it from an RCN journalist at 7.03 a.m. Bogotá time.49 García Márquez and Mercedes got dressed as they fielded the first calls and picked at the improvised breakfast brought up by their maid Nati when she heard them moving about upstairs.
With the exception of the writing of One Hundred Years of Solitude, nothing in the great García Márquez mythology has been discussed as much as the announcement of the Nobel Prize, the ensuing pandemonium, and García Márquez’s journey to Stockholm to receive it. If an American or an English man or woman wins the honour, it barely makes the news. (What do writers matter; and who do the Swedes think they are, anyway…) But this was not only an award to a man from Colombia, a country quite unused to international congratulations; it was—it transpired—an award to a man admired and adored throughout a vast, isolated continent, a man who millions in that continent considered their own representative and, indeed, their champion. Congratulations rained down on the house in Mexico City from around the world by telephone and telegram: Betancur, first, but also Mitterrand, Cortázar, Borges, Gregory Rabassa, Juan Carlos Onetti, the Colombian Senate. Castro could not get through so sent a telegram the next day: “Justice has been done at last. Jubilation here since yesterday. Impossible to get through by phone. I congratulate both you and Mercedes with all my heart.” Graham Greene also sent a telegram, “Warmest congratulations. Pity we couldn’t celebrate it with Omar.” Norman Mailer too: “Couldn’t have gone to a better man.” Above all, though, it was an opportunity for Latin America to say at last what it felt about García Márquez—Colombia, Cuba and Mexico all claimed him as their own—and a vast amount of eulogistic copy was logged with newspapers there and all over the world. It was as if One Hundred Years of Solitude had just been published and a billion people had read it simultaneously, five seconds after its appearance, in some strange and magical time, and wanted to celebrate together.
Within minutes the house in Mexico City was under siege from the media, and the police set up roadblocks at either end of Calle Fuego. The first journalists invited him out into the street for a glass of champagne—with photos, of course—and the neighbours came out to applaud. When Alejandro Obregón turned up that morning to stay with his old friend and saw the chaos he thought to himself, “Shit! Gabo’s died!” (Obregón was in Mexico to restore a painting he had given García Márquez, a self-portrait one of whose eyes had been shot out by the painter himself in a drunken fit.)50 Dozens of journalists thronged through the García Márquez house, fetishistically describing every last detail outside and in—they particularly noticed the yellow roses and guavas on every table—and each clamouring for an “exclusive” interview with the man of the moment.
García Márquez had not spoken to his mother for three weeks because her phone was down and an enterprising Bogotá journalist used the wonders of technology to link them up for a public conversation. So Luisa Santiaga told the whole of Colombia that she thought the best thing about the news was that “Maybe now I’ll get my phone fixed.” Which she very soon did. She also said that she’d always hoped Gabito would never win the prize because she was sure he would die soon afterwards. Her son, well used to these eccentricities, said that he would be taking yellow roses to Stockholm in order to protect himself.
García Márquez eventually organized an improvised press conference for the more than a hundred journalists by then swarming over his house. He announced that he would not wear evening dress at the ceremony in Stockholm but a guayabera shirt or even aliquiliqui—the white linen tunic and trousers worn by Latin American peasants in Hollywood movies—in honour of his grandfather. This topic became an obsession in cachaco Colombia, right up to the moment of the ceremony emblematic of the fear that García Márquez would cause some international scandal or behave with unbearable vulgarity and let the country down. He also announced that he would use the prize money to found a newspaper to be called El Otro (The Other), in Bogotá: in his opinion half of the prize had been awarded in recognition of his journalism. He would also build his dream house in Cartagena.
At one in the afternoon, García Márquez and Mercedes left the journalists to it and fled the Calle Fuego, took a room in the Hotel Chapultepec Presidente and began to ring their closest friends. They spent the afternoon in seclusion with just eight people while their house was still in uproar. Alvaro Mutis was designated as the García Barcha family chauffeur for the duration of the media furore.
Washington, meanwhile, confirmed on that same day that despite his new status García Márquez would still not be given a visa to visit the United States, from which he had been banned ever since working for Cuba in 1961. (On 7 November he would write in his column in El Espectador that he would rather “the door be closed than half open”—which was quite untrue because he was still profoundly irked by the prohibition—so on 1 December he would make another of his rash threats, vowing to ban the publication of his books in the United States since, if they were still refusing him a visa, why should they allow his books to enter?)51 This happened also to be the day the dissident poet Armando Valladares was released from prison in Cuba, largely thanks to García Márquez’s mediation between Castro and Mitterrand. Valla dares, supposedly paralysed, according to his supporters, was accompanied by Mitterrand’s adviser Régis Debray and astonished everyone by rising from his wheelchair and walking on arrival at the airport in Paris.
All around the world García Márquez’s friends celebrated. Plinio Mendoza wept in Paris. He was not the only one. By contrast the publisher José Vicente Kataraín, already on his way to Mexico, learned the news in the airport on arrival and began to dance; the girl at the news stand asked if he’d won the lottery. Indeed he had. Down in Cartagena, as the family celebrated, Gabriel Eligio said, to anyone who would listen, “I always knew it.” No one reminded him of the prediction that Gabito would “eat paper.” Luisa Santiaga said her father the Colonel must be celebrating somewhere; he had always predicted great things for Gabito. Most of the reports would present the family as eccentric inhabitants of their own little Macondo: Luisa Santiaga was Ursula and Gabriel Eligio was José Arcadio, though as usual he wondered aloud whether he might not be Melquíades. But little by little, despite his pride and undoubted euphoria, Gabriel Eligio began to misbehave: Gabito had got the prize through Mitterrand’s influence, he said (“those things count, you know”); Gabito was just one of the many writers in his family; he couldn’t think why this one got quite so much attention.
The Governor of the Department of Magdalena decided to declare 22 October a regional holiday and proposed that Colonel Márquez’s old house in Aracataca should become a national monument. In Bogotá the Communist Party organized street demonstrations pleading with García Márquez to return to the country as a spokesman for the oppressed, to save Colombia. A reporter asked a prostitute in the street if she’d heard the news and she said a client had just told her about it in bed; this was thought to be the best homage García Márquez could receive. In Barranquilla the taxi drivers on the Paseo Bolívar heard the news on their radios and all sounded their horns in unison: after all, Gabito was one of them.
Newspapers began to call García Márquez “the new Cervantes,” echoing an idea which Pablo Neruda had been one of the first to suggest when he read One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1967.52 This comparison would be made many times down the years from this moment on. Newsweek, which also had García Márquez on the cover, called him “a spellbinding storyteller.”53 Perhaps Salman Rushdie, writing from London, best summed up the opinion that prevailed both then and thereafter. His piece was entitled “Márquez the Magician”: “He is one of the Nobel judges’ most popular choices for years, one of the few true magicians in contemporary literature, an artist with the rare quality of producing work of the highest order that reaches and bewitches a mass audience. Márquez’s masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, is, I believe, one of the two or three most important and most completely achieved works of fiction to be published anywhere since the war.”54
Meanwhile, just a week after the announcement of the prize, one of his good friends, Felipe González, leader of the Spanish Socialist Party, was elected Prime Minister of his country, yet another cause for celebration and political euphoria. Last year Mitterrand; now González. Was the prize somehow a sign that everything was beginning to change? García Márquez told Gente of Buenos Aires, “I can die happy because now I am immortal.” Perhaps he was joking.
On 1 December Miguel de la Madrid was inaugurated as the President of Mexico for the next six years. He and García Márquez would never be close but García Márquez attended the ceremony. That same day Felipe González was inaugurated as Prime Minister of the new Spanish government in Madrid. In the first days of December, after visiting Cuba, García Márquez flew on to Madrid to salute González—and be saluted. He let it be known that he had talked to Castro for eleven hours in Havana and that the Reagan government had refused him an unconditional visa to touch down in New York. Meanwhile, in Paris, Mercedes met up with Gonzalo. But not Rodrigo. The only disappointing note for García Márquez was that his elder son, filming in the north of Mexico, was too busy working to travel to Stockholm, the undoubted high point of his distinguished father’s career. The two had met up in Zacatecas the previous month and no one knows what transpired. Neither man has ever been prepared to say more about the matter.
At seven in the evening on Monday 6 December a government-chartered Avianca jumbo jet took off on a twenty-two-hour journey from Bogotá to Stockholm, carrying the official delegation led by Minister of Education Jaime Arias Ramírez, together with García Márquez’s twelve closest friends chosen by Guillermo Angulo—García Márquez had pleaded with his old friend Angulo to save him from this invidious task—plus their spouses, a large number of people invited by Oveja Negra, and seventy musicians from various ethnic groups organized by the Minister of Culture with the advice and assistance of an anthropologist, Gloria Triana.
When García Márquez’s guests finally arrived in Stockholm the temperature had just fallen to freezing point. Hundreds of Europe-based Colombians and other Latin Americans were waiting at the airport. As the night wore on the temperature would fall to minus ten degrees but the Swedes told them they were lucky it wasn’t colder and that it hadn’t snowed.55 Groups of friends and family from Spain and Paris had arrived earlier in the afternoon: Carmen Balcells and Magdalena Oliver from Barcelona, together with the Feduchis and journalist Ramón Chao; Mercedes and Gonzalo, Tachia and Charles, and Plinio Mendoza, from Paris, together with Régis Debray and Mitterrand’s wife Danielle, though without Culture Minister Jack Lang, another friend, who had to cancel at the last moment. The Colombian ambassador was also there, plus the Cuban ambassador and the Mexican chargé d’affaires, all waiting in the Arctic cold.56
Tachia appointed herself official photographer to García Márquez and his friends and she even managed to get herself a press pass. As her old flame advanced from the plane to the waiting room she thrust herself forward and took the first photo of the conquering hero, and then she photographed the wildly enthusiastic Colombians trying to touch García Márquez through the airport’s steel barriers in the Northern darkness. Gabo and Mercedes went on to the Grand Hotel, where an opulent suite of three rooms awaited them and where they would spend the next few nights.57 Exhausted, jet-lagged, over-excited and overwhelmed, García Márquez fell asleep. Then, “I suddenly woke up in bed, and I remembered that they always give the same room in the same hotel to the Nobel winner. And I thought, ‘Rudyard Kipling has slept in this bed, Thomas Mann, Neruda, Asturias, Faulkner.’ It terrified me, and finally I went out to sleep on the sofa.”58
The next morning García Márquez had breakfast in the hotel with a huge group of friends representing his entire past, including Carmen Balcells and Kataraín. Such a group of people had never been brought together before. Some didn’t even know one another, some probably didn’t like one another. Plinio Mendoza said that García Márquez had behaved at the airport like a visiting bullfighter saluting his fans and that he got dressed every day in his suite, again like a bullfighter, with all his friends around him. On one occasion he took Alfonso Fuenmayor from “the suite of the happy few” into the solitary bedroom and showed him his speech: “Take a look at that, Maestro, and tell me what you think.” Fuenmayor read the piece with admiration and said at last he understood García Márquez’s political position. His friend replied, “What you’ve just read is One Hundred Years of Solitude, no more, no less.”59
As the hour approached, Mendoza recalls, “In the middle of the lounge I saw Gabo and Mercedes, placid, untroubled, talking, completely oblivious to the coronation ceremony advancing upon them, as if they were still, thirty years ago, in Sucre or Magangué, in the house of Aunt Petra or Aunt Juana some Saturday evening.”60 The literature prize winner’s speech was to be given at 5 p.m. in the theatre of the Swedish Academy of Literature situated in the Stock Exchange, with 200 specially invited guests and a total audience of 400, followed at 6.30 by a dinner in honour of all the prize winners in the house of the Academy Secretary.
At 5 p.m. García Márquez, wearing his trademark hound’s-tooth jacket, dark trousers, a white shirt and a red polka-dot tie, was introduced by the lanky Lars Gyllensten, Permanent Secretary of the Academy and himself a well-known novelist, who had written the communiqué announcing the award of the prize. Gyllensten, who was speaking in Swedish, could barely be heard because the Colombian radio commentators present at the ceremony sounded as if they were doing a football match and García Márquez had to make a “turn it down” gesture with his fingers before he started his own speech, entitled “The Solitude of Latin America.” It was delivered by its author in an aggressive, defiant, almost incantatory style. Combining a deconstructed magical realism with politics, the speech was an undisguised attack on the inability or unwillingness of Europeans to understand Latin America’s historical problems and their reluctance to give the continent the time to mature and develop that Europe itself had required. It restated his lifelong objection to “Europeans” (including North Americans), whether capitalists or communists, imposing their “schemes” on Latin America’s living realities. García Márquez claimed that the prize had been awarded in part for his political activism and not only his literature. He finished at 5.35 and received an ovation for several minutes.61
On the evening of Thursday the 9th García Márquez and Mercedes travelled out to the Prime Minister’s residence at Harpsund for a private dinner with Palme and eleven other special guests, including Danielle Mitterrand, Régis Debray, Pierre Schori, Günter Grass, Turkish poet-politician Bülent Ecevit, and Artur Lundkvist. The Swedish Foreign Office said this invitation was a special distinction, rarely given before. García Márquez had been introduced to Palme by François Mitterrand in his Rue de Bièvre home years before. Now, although he was absolutely exhausted, he found himself talking for another two hours about the situation in Central America in a conversation which would be influential in proposing a peace process to be brokered by the six presidents of the isthmus, what would later be known as the Contadora Process.62
All of this was but a series of hors d’oeuvres to the main course on 10 December, the day of the “Nobel Festival”: in the morning the rehearsal in the Konserthus, in the afternoon the great event, the presentation of the Nobel Prizes by the King of Sweden at four o’clock before an audience of 1,700 people. That day Mercedes, “the wife of the Nobel,” appeared in Colombia on the cover of Carrusel, an El Tiempo supplement. The article inside was by her sister-in-law, Beatriz López de Barcha, entitled “Gabito Waited for Me to Grow Up.”63 One can imagine Mercedes’s sister-in-law having said to her, “OK, you want to wipe out that piece by Consuelo Mendoza last year, why not let me do a really favourable interview, with flattering pictures?” Mercedes: “OK, but just this once.”
Soon after lunch the man of the hour got dressed. He had been talking about his liquiliqui since the day he heard the news. Sometimes he declared that it was to honour his grandfather the Colonel, sometimes, less modestly, that it was to honour his own most famous creation, Colonel Aureliano Buendía. El Espectador carried a letter the day after the ceremony from Don Aristides Gómez Avilés in Montería, Colombia, who remembered Colonel Márquez well and said he would never have been seen dead in aliquiliqui: he was far too posh for that and would never have been caught out in the street without a jacket on, still less at a Nobel Prize ceremony.64 In these discussions a man who really had worn a liquiliqui in his youth, Gabriel Eligio García, never got a mention.
Suite 208, Grand Hotel Stockholm, 10 December 1982, 3 p.m. Before travelling from Paris Tachia had bought García Márquez the Damart thermal underwear which appears in a famous photograph of the great writer standing in his intimate apparel, surrounded by his male friends in the dinner jackets which they had all rented for 200 krona apiece. Mercedes handed them yellow roses, one by one, to ward off la pava, as bad luck is called in the Spanish Caribbean, and helped fix them to lapels: “Now then, compadre, let me see….” Then she organized the photographs.65 Then out came the liquiliqui which, Ana María Cano in El Espectador cattily observed three days later, meant that García Márquez arrived at the ceremony looking “as wrinkled as an accordion.”66
All this was later. Now, dressed defiantly in his liquiliqui—the closest thing when all is said and done to a recognizably Latin American lower-class uniform—with, oh horror, black boots, García Márquez prepared himself for the moment of truth. If theliquiliquiwas wrinkled, no doubt those of Nicaragua’s Augusto Sandino and Cuba’s José Martí and other heroes of Latin American resistance had been wrinkled, not to mention that of Aureliano Buendía. He covered himself with an overcoat against the Nordic elements. Plinio Mendoza recalls the moment: “We all crowded tightly together and went down the steps to accompany Gabo for the most memorable moment of his life.”67 Then Mendoza switches to the eternal present: “The streets are covered in snow, photographers everywhere. By Gabo’s side, I see his face tighten for a moment. I can feel, with the antennae of my Pisces ascendant, the sudden tension. The flowers, the flashes, the figures in black, the red carpet: perhaps from the remote deserts where they lie buried his Guajiro ancestors are talking to him. Perhaps they’re telling him that the pomp and ceremony of glory is the same as the pomp and ceremony of death. Something like that is going on because as he pushes on through the magnesium glow and the figures in formal dress I hear him mutter in a low voice in which there is a note of sudden, alarmed, pained astonishment: ‘Shit, this is like turning up at my own funeral!’”68
Into the grand ballroom of the Konserthus, designed to evoke a Greek temple, they stride. One thousand seven hundred people including three hundred Colombians. A gasp when García Márquez appears in his all-white outfit: he looks as if he is still in his thermal underwear! To the right of the stage, which is covered in yellow flowers, sitting in blue and gold armchairs, are the royal family: King Carl Gustav the Sixteenth, Queen Silvia, the beautiful half-Brazilian who spent her childhood in São Paulo, Princess Lilian and Prince Bertil, who all just arrived as the national anthem was played. Beside them is a podium from which Permanent Secretary Gyllensten will speak. The laureates are all to the left, on red seats: Swedes Sune Bergstrom, Bengt Samuelsson and Briton John Vane for medicine, American Kenneth Wilson for physics, South African Aron Klug for chemistry and American George Stigler for economics. Behind are two further rows of seats in which the academicians, the Swedish cabinet and other notables are seated. García Márquez alone in his liquiliqui surrounded by dress suits, stoles, furs, pearl necklaces. Between him and the King the huge N for Nobel inscribed in the circle—painted or chalked?—that awaits him.
He was visibly nervous when Professor Gyllensten of the Swedish Academy started to speak. When it came to García Márquez’s moment, last but one, Gyllensten spoke in Swedish, then turned to the Colombian costeño, who stood, with glittering eyes, looking for all the world like the hapless little boy in the Colegio San José de Barranquilla, and switched to French, summarizing what he had said and inviting the Colombian to approach the King to receive the prize. García Márquez, who had chosen Bartok’sIntermezzoas his accompanying piece of music, left his yellow rose on his seat as he moved to receive the award, exposed for a moment to unimaginable misfortune without that totemic flower as he walked across the immense stage with his fists clenched and the trumpets sounding, then stopped inside the painted circle to await the King. Now, as he shook hands with the medal-bedecked monarch he looked like Chaplin’s tramp ingratiating himself with some toff. After receiving the medal and parchment, he bowed stiffly to the King, then to the guests of honour and then the audience, whereupon he received what was generally agreed to have been the longest standing ovation in the history of those august ceremonies: several minutes.69
The ceremony finished at 5.45 p.m. and as García Márquez filed out with the other winners he raised his hands above his head like a champion boxer, a gesture he would henceforth be making many times in his life to come. Those fortunate enough to be invited had forty-five minutes to get themselves across to the vast blue hall of the Stadhus (Stockholm Town Hall) for the grand Swedish Academy banquet. The menu had been prepared by Johnny Johanssen, Sweden’s top chef, and was a “typically Swedish” affair. Reindeer fillets, trout and sorbet, with banana and almonds. Champagne, sherry and port.70 García Márquez, defiantly, lit a Havana cigar. The highlight of the proceedings—as everyone would agree—was the arrival of the seventy Colombian musicians. García Márquez’s friend Nereo López had been following their adventures and misadventures in Stockholm with his camera.71 He had watched Gloria Triana anxiously chaperoning all the women: “They’re all virgins and I’ve promised their mothers.” On arrival in the Town Hall, which was draped in monarchical tapestries, one of the group from Riosucio had knelt and prayed, thinking he was in a church. López wondered how the Swedes felt when they saw “that heterogeneous group from Macondo coming down the stairs, that amalgam of Indian, Black, Carib and Spanish which makes up the mix of Colombian identity.” Up to then, according to him, the great ice cream known as the Nobel Flambé had been the main attraction at these ceremonies. Now life itself was flooding in. The entire performance, led by Totó la Momposina and Leonor la Negra Grande de Colombia, was a triumph and the applause encouraged them to go on for thirty minutes instead of fifteen.72
Each laureate read a three-minute speech followed by a toast. García Márquez went first with a piece entitled “In Praise of Poetry,” which claimed that poetry was “the most definite proof of the existence of man.”73 What no one knew at the time was that he had more than just a little help from his friend Alvaro Mutis, as anyone, reading the speech and then thinking about it, might have deduced. Two of the other laureates asked him to sign copies of One Hundred Years of Solitude. After the toasts everyone filed up to the first floor to the “Great Gold Room” for dancing. This started with a waltz followed by sundry North European dances, then, unexpectedly, “Bésame mucho,” “Perfidia” and other boleros, followed by foxtrots and rumbas.
Late that evening, after everyone got back to the hotel, there was a phone call from Rodrigo, up in the northern desert of Mexico. The new laureate was with twenty of his friends, still drinking champagne. Everything went quiet and García Márquez, with shining eyes, went over to the phone. Later he would proudly tell journalists that his sons had “the flavour of their mother and their father’s business sense.”74
By then, thousands of miles away in the small Caribbean town of Aracataca, Colombia, where of course it was still light, an even more vibrant and enthusiastic celebration was under way. There had been a Te Deum in the church where Gabito was baptized at nine in the morning, followed by a pilgrimage to the house where he had been born. A campaign was proposed to make Aracataca a historic tourist town on the model of Proust’s Illiers-Combray Then the Governing Council of the Magdalena Department assembled in the House of Culture, chaired by the energetic Governor Sara Valencia Abdala, her-self an Aracataca native.75 García Márquez’s sister Rita recalled: “The day the prize was presented there was a celebration in Aracataca organized by the Magdalena government. The Governor hired a train to take all the guests; it picked up all the family on the way, cousins, uncles, aunts and nephews, and so we all arrived in Aracataca, where there were more cousins, more uncles and aunts, more family. A lot of people. It was a wonderful day, there were fireworks, a mass, a side of beef roasted in the open air and drinks for the whole town. Our cousin Carlos Martínez Simahan, the Minister of Mines, was there. That day they inaugurated the Telecom building which our brother Jaime had built. Though the best thing of all was when they released the yellow butterflies.”76
Back in Stockholm the man of the hour was beginning to relax. He had felt responsible for communicating a positive image of Latin America to the world, knowing that in Colombia, above all, his enemies could hardly wait for him to make a mistake because their view of what might be a “good image” of the country was entirely different from what he was trying to do. He would later say: “No one ever suspected how unhappy I was during those three days, attending to the minutest detail so that everything would turn out well. I could not afford any mistakes because the smallest error, however insignificant, would have been catastrophic in those circumstances.”77 (Later, when they were both back in Mexico City, the new laureate would say to Alvaro Mutis: “Tell me about that Stockholm business, I can’t remember a thing. I just see the photographers’ flashes and see myself enduring the journalists’ questions, always the same questions. Tell me what you remember.”)78
Yet so stunningly successful was he that even El Tiempo, with which his relationship would never be easy, gave him an almost unqualified thumbs up in an editorial. It congratulated García Márquez, acknowledging that his life had been hard and he had earned every last ounce of his glory. It ended: “After the euphoria involved in the Nobel ceremony, the country must return to reality, face up to its problems and go back to its routine. But there is something that will not be the same as before: the conviction that our potentialities are still an unexplored richness and that we have barely begun to emerge on the world stage. And there to prove it is García Márquez, so that we will never forget this invaluable lesson.”79