21
THE NEXT MORNING, the morning after, Gabo and Mercedes flew to Barcelona, accompanied by Carmen Balcells. There they checked into the Princesa Sofía Hotel to sleep it all off until the New Year. They did, however, make another visit to the new Spanish Prime Minister. García Márquez would dutifully record in his weekly column—not interrupted for anyone or anything—that he had visited the Moncloa Palace twice in the last two weeks to chat to the youthful “Felipe,” who had looked “more like a university student” than a president, and to his wife Carmen, accompanied by Mercedes and Gonzalo.1 It was clear that the new Nobel Prize winner was going to be less discreet and more bumptious than ever. In his next article he remarked, “I consider myself, and I take pride in it, the human being most allergic to formality … and I still can’t get used to the idea that my friends become presidents nor have I yet overcome my susceptibility to being impressed by government palaces.” The international jet-setter was convinced that Felipe, who understood Latin America “better than any other non-Latin American,” was going to have “a decisive influence on Latin American-European relations.” Whether Felipe himself saw things the same way we cannot know but clearly García Márquez was hoping to bounce him into supporting his long-term strategy for Cuba, the Caribbean and Latin America, and had no compunction in letting the world know about it.
Nevertheless at their informal exchange with the press, the first thing González mentioned was “the status of Cuba within the region and the need for a security agreement for all,” not necessarily what García Márquez had in mind. García Márquez declared that love would solve all the world’s problems and said he wanted to get back to his latest novel on that very subject: he’d really rather have won the prize next year so that he could have finished the book.2
On 29 December the new laureate left for Havana, having declared that he still wanted to found his own newspaper to enjoy “the old dignity of bearing news,” which perhaps sounded uneasily like the instinct of the go-between, which in Spanish has a less agreeable word, correveidile: “run-see-and-tell-him.” The Madrid-Havana axis would be a crucial concern of García Márquez’s over the coming years, though even he would not be able to reconcile the differences between Castro and González.
Two oft-repeated general truths about the Nobel Prize for Literature are that it is usually given to writers who have completed their creative cycle and no longer have any worthwhile works left inside them; and that, even in the case of younger writers, the prize is a distraction which robs them of time, concentration and ambition. The first was clearly not true of García Márquez: he was one of the youngest of all Nobel Prize winners as well as one of the best-known and most popular. The second was predicted by those who resented his success, or were jealous of it, but the fact is that García Márquez had already experienced celebrity on a scale that even Nobel Prize winners rarely encounter. Not only was he not the kind of man to rest on his laurels but he had already been through this kind of experience in the years after One Hundred Years of Solitude was published: it had been like winning a first Nobel Prize. Alternatively, then, one might expect him to be newly galvanized: to write more, travel more, find new things to do. And so it turned out. He was more than ready for his new status. And yet…
And yet … he had already decided in 1980 on a new way of life appropriate to his new position of authority and respectability. He was already a friend of presidents: to the not very respectable relation with Fidel, the pirate captain, he had added López Portillo of Mexico, Carlos Andrés Pérez of Venezuela, López Michelsen and Betancur of Colombia, Mitterrand of France and lastly González of Spain. He had now increased his own vast celebrity by acquiring a kind of roving presidential status. (Fidel Castro would say, “Yes, of course García Márquez is like a head of state. The only question is, which state?”) He told journalists he was taking a sabbatical, but clearly he was also hoping to use his new influence to mediate more effectively with his new presidential allies. One might say that his openly political period lasted from about 1959 to 1979, and most intensively from 1971 to 1979. Thereafter followed a more “diplomatic” period. The question was whether he would merely be concealing his real politics during this diplomatic period whilst remaining a well-meaning fellow traveller, as in the period 1950–79, or whether he would gradually adjust his political position behind the cover of his mediations, clandestine negotiations and cultural enterprises.
As he flew back across the Atlantic in all his glory, even García Márquez, who planned so very much in his life, whether consciously or unconsciously, must have felt the weight of celebrity and awesome responsibility settling on his shoulders. He had got what he wanted but sometimes, as Marilyn Monroe had famously sung, after you get what you want you don’t want it. For some time now he had been forced to adjust to levels of adulation that, unless one has witnessed them, are almost unimaginable for a serious writer: nothing less than the “frenzy of renown.”3 Now he would have to turn his entire life into a carefully organized spectacle.
People who had known him most of his life would say that he became much more cautious after winning the prize. Some of his friends were grateful that he continued to attend to them at all, others resented a process of perceived neglect. Many people said his vanity increased exponentially, others that it was extraordinary how normal he managed to remain; his cousin Gog said he had always been like a “new-born Nobel Prize winner.”4 Carmen Balcells, who was able to view literary celebrity more coolly than most, said that the extent of his success and fame was “unrepeatable.”5 (“When you have an author like Gabriel García Márquez you can set up a political party, institute a religion or organize a revolution.”) García Márquez himself would later say that he tried everything possible to “stay the same” but that no one viewed him as the same after the journey to Stockholm. Fame, he would say, was “like having the lights on all the time.” People tell you what they think you want to hear; the prize requires dignity, you can no longer just tell people to “fuck off.” You are required always to be amusing and intelligent. If you start talking at a party, even with old friends, everyone else stops speaking and listens to you. Ironically, “as you’re surrounded by more and more people, you feel smaller and smaller and smaller.”6 Before long he would take up tennis because it became completely impossible to exercise by taking walks in the street. In every restaurant waiters would go rushing off to the nearest book-store for copies of his books to be signed. Airports have always been the worst places of all because there he can find no escape. He is always put first on every plane but even then the flight attendants themselves all want books or flight magazines or napkins signed. Yet this is an essentially shy, timid and in many ways anxious man.7 “My main job now is to be me. That’s really tough. You can’t imagine how that weighs you down. But I asked for it.”8 There is every reason to believe that he would find the coming years much more difficult than he affected and yet he would no longer feel able to complain in the way he had done during the writing of The Autumn of the Patriarch.
García Márquez and Mercedes flew in to Havana at five in the morning of 30 December 1982 for an extended stay and were installed in Protocol House number six which, not many years later, would become their Cuban home. Castro had recently been to Brezhnev’s funeral in Moscow, where he and Indira Gandhi had discussed inviting García Márquez to the meeting of Non-Aligned Nations to be held in Delhi in March 1983. (Gandhi had mentioned that she had been reading One Hundred Years of Solitudewhen the Nobel award was announced.) While in Moscow Fidel had bought García Márquez a large supply of his favourite caviar. García Márquez, for his part, was carrying messages from Felipe González and Olof Palme, together with bacalao from the Feduchis and cognac from Carmen Balcells.
Graham Greene passed through Havana that week with his Panamanian friend Chuchú Martínez, one of Torrijos’s closest collaborators, and on 16 January García Márquez wrote about the English novelist in an article entitled “Graham Greene’s Twenty Hours in Havana.” He and Greene had not seen one another since 1977. García Márquez revealed that Greene and Martínez had arrived in the greatest secrecy and that Greene had been given a top politician’s protocol house for the day and loaned a government Mercedes Benz. Greene and Castro had discussed the former’s famous experiment with Russian roulette at the age of nineteen. The column ended: “When we took our leave of one another, I was disturbed by the certainty that that encounter, sooner or later, would be remembered in the memoirs of one of us, and maybe all of us.”9 It was becoming dangerous to talk to García Márquez—you would be in the international press within forty-eight hours—and some were asking whether it was maintaining the dignity of Nobel Prize winners to be interviewing other celebrities and acting the role of newspaperman.
The article on Graham Greene was simply too much for Cuban exile Guillermo Cabrera Infante, who responded with a withering piece entitled “Notable Men in Havana”:
I know that there are South American (and Spanish) readers (and writers) who read the weekly García Márquez column to laugh out loud, and consider his statements with superior disdain as when observing the chattering of a churl or the flourishes of a métèque … Is this the ultimate peak of the ridiculous or merely a corny copy? For readers in the know, García Márquez’s article in El País every week is the sure promise of a frisson nouveau. But not for me. I take the novelist very seriously. This writing is the proof. Although there may be some who counter my opinion by fabricating exclusive excuses: man, it’s hardly worth it, don’t bother, nobody pays any attention. But I do. I believe, with Goldoni, that with the servant one can beat the master.10
The Latin American right, and the Cuban exiles in particular, understandably embittered by the award of the prize, were beginning to panic about García Márquez. Perhaps they had thought that because the Nobel committee knew that he was a “red,” as near a communist as made no difference from their point of view, somehow he would never be given the prize. Or perhaps, now that his prestige had reached the very limits, there was nothing to lose and everything to gain by openly attacking him. Or perhaps they simply couldn’t bear his success, his unconcealed delight and unmistakable popularity. Certainly, as soon as he had given up militant journalism, García Márquez himself had been advertising his personal relationship with Fidel for over a year. And now, if it had not been clear before, it was evident that Fidel needed García Márquez more than García Márquez needed him. At any rate, what is certainly clear is that although the prize gave García Márquez access to even higher strata of political and diplomatic influence in Latin America, it also unleashed an unparalleled level of right-wing hostility which has never ceased in the two decades since (though it has done him surprisingly little damage); whereas in the rest of the world, even in the neo-liberal West, the Nobel certificate of respectability has protected the Colombian writer against all but the most violent—or most determined—of critics.
In case Mexico was feeling left out by his cosying up to Betancur, Mitterrand, González and Castro, he wrote a warm and affectionate piece about the importance of Mexico in his life entitled “Return to Mexico,” which appeared on 23 January.11 His affection did not restrain him from calling it a “luciferine city” only exceeded in ugliness by Bangkok. He now had a nap hand of five influential politicians representing all of the countries which had been most important to him in his life except Venezuela (Colombia, Cuba, France, Spain and Mexico) and which, not entirely coincidentally, were crucial to him if he was to carry out the international political role of which he dreamed. It would be fascinating to see how long he could hold these five cards, whether he could improve his hand and whether he would be able to replace cards successfully used and discarded by other cards of the same suit.
On 30 January, with all those presidential cards in his grasp, García Márquez published an article on Ronald Reagan entitled “Yes, the Wolf Really Is Coming.”12 The article traced his own experience of U.S. imperialism back to the Bay of Pigs. Thinly veiled anti-Americanism was an impulse which would more or less unite his five countries at a moment when the decadence and growing impotence of the Soviet Union was beginning to be taken for granted. It was only unfortunate that at such a favourable time for García Márquez person-ally, the international situation was so unfavourable to his political “interests.” Although the foreign secretaries of what would come to be known as the Contadora countries (Colombia, Mexico, Panama and Venezuela) had recently met, he was convinced that U.S. destabilization efforts would bear fruit during the year. He was right, of course.
Belisario Betancur had announced at the beginning of his presidency that Colombia would seek to join the Organization of Non-Aligned Nations of which, at that time, Fidel Castro was President.13 In early March 1983 the Cuban delegation set off for Delhi. Aboard were Castro, García Márquez, Núñez, Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, Jesús Montané, Maurice Bishop, the leader of the Grenadan New Jewel movement, who would be dead in six months and his island occupied by the United States, and the sinister Désiré Delano Bouterse, Chairman of the Suriname Military Council. Though Castro put a brave face on it, his entire presidency had been vitiated by the fallout from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and he was now relieved to be handing over to someone less closely identified with the USSR. After the official ceremonies, the Cubans all went off to the official venue, the Ashok Hotel, but García Márquez had booked himself a special suite in the Sheraton so that he could welcome all the old friends he was expecting to meet. The next morning Núñez found him in chaos, with his clothes all over the room, trying to find the appropriate outfit for the opening reception. Mercedes usually made these decisions. He said to Núñez: “If all men only knew how good marriage is, we’d run out of women and that would be a disaster.”14 He and Mercedes would be celebrating their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary on 21 March.
Finally, on 11 April García Márquez made the latest of his “returns”—to Colombia, where he had not set foot since the news of the Nobel award almost six months before. There was much speculation in the press about the visit. One thing they did not speak about was the question of García Márquez’s personal security but Betancur insisted that he should have a team of bodyguards in Colombia organized and paid for by the government. A few days after his arrival García Márquez published an article in his column entitled “Return to the Guava.”15 Needless to say, readers in Bogotá would be well aware that “guava” was a code word that signified that he was not so much returning to “Colombia” as to his beloved “Costa.” Although it was difficult to know where García Márquez was located from reading his articles now (they would become much less of a diary and much more a loosely serialized narrative of memoirs and eccentricities), the truth is that he would spend much of this “sabbatical” year in Bogotá, believing no doubt that the prize had finally given him more purchase on the oligarchy and now they would just have to be impressed by him, or at least respectful. Many remained sceptical, however, and some sections of the press began to attack him almost immediately.16
He flew down to the old colonial city of Cartagena at the end of May. Cartagena would soon become his principal destination in Colombia and the setting for most of his future books. Since the installation of the new convention centre down by the harbour in 1982 it was possible for important international meetings to take place in the historic city. Now it was celebrating the 450th anniversary of its foundation and the Cartagena Film Festival was also in full swing. The principal foreign visitor invited to the celebrations was none other than the Andalusian Felipe González, and García Márquez strolled through the carnival crowds with the Spanish leader, wearing his now signature liquiliqui and occasionally dancing with some privileged admirer.17 García Márquez revelled in the “magic” and “chaos” of his family’s home town. Like Betancur, González, who was on his way to talks in the United States, was strongly committed to active encouragement of the Contadora process to bring peace to Central America and while in Cartagena held discussions with the foreign ministers of the four countries guaranteeing the talks.18
In late July García Márquez was in Caracas as part of an official Colombian delegation to celebrate the bicentenary of Bolívar’s birth. He had not been to Venezuela for five years. Here he and Mercedes met up again with now exiled Argentinian writer-journalist Tomás Eloy Martínez, with whom he was hoping to set up the new daily newspaper El Otro. They discussed the project in a truckers’ café by one of the Caracas freeways, where his face, now far too famous, might go unnoticed. Martínez would recall:
We met at about three in the morning. Mercedes, who had eaten that evening flanked by the President of Venezuela and King Juan Carlos of Spain, was wearing a magnificent long dress to which the sleepy truckers paid no attention. A lame waiter brought us some beers. The conversation suddenly turned to the past … but Mercedes took us back to reality. “This place is awful,” she said. “Couldn’t you find anywhere better?” “Blame your husband’s fame,” I said. “In any other bar in Caracas we’d have been constantly interrupted.” “We should’ve gone to Fuck Corner, like in Buenos Aires that first time,” García Márquez said. “Love Lane,” I corrected him. “I’m afraid it’s not there any more.” Mercedes gave a sly wink “Did you imagine then that Gabo would be this famous?” “Of course. I saw the moment when fame came down to him from the sky. It was that night in Buenos Aires, in the theatre. When fame starts like that, you know it will never end.” “You’re wrong,” said García Márquez. “It started long before.” “What, in Paris, when you finished The Colonel? Here, in Caracas, when you saw Pérez Jiménez’s white plane leave and Perón’s black one? Or was it before,” I said sarcastically, “in Rome, when Sophia Loren walked by and smiled at you?” “Long before,” he explained, in all seriousness. Out-side, beyond the mountains, the dawn was coming. “I was already famous when I graduated from the bachillerato in Zipaquirá, or even before, when my grandparents took me from Aracataca to Barranquilla. I was always famous, from the time I was born. It’s just that I was the only one who knew it.”19
In October, persisting in another of his sporadic attempts to spend an extended period in Bogotá, García Márquez was brooding about the Nobel Prize for Literature being awarded to the “boring” Englishman William Golding and the Nobel Peace Prize to Polish freedom fighter Lech Walesa, leader of Solidarity, when some really bad news came in: Maurice Bishop was overthrown and executed in Grenada on 19 October.20 Five days later the United States invaded the island, vindicating all García Márquez’s fears about U.S. policy in the Caribbean. UN condemnation on 28 October had no effect whatever, nor did tough-gal Margaret Thatcher bring herself to protest at the occupation of one of the British Queen’s Commonwealth domains. On 23 October García Márquez’s column included an obituary of the murdered President with reminiscences from the Non-Aligned Conference in New Delhi. In the coming weeks Betancur would mediate between Cuba and the United States over the return of Cuban prisoners taken on the island. He was in constant touch with García Márquez, as the latter would tell the nation in an interview in early November.21
Although he gave it his best shot, he was just not happy in Bogotá. The press speculated each and every week whether García Márquez was finding it difficult to adjust to Colombia; but Colombia was not the problem, the problem was Bogotá. The novelist Laura Restrepo told me about an incident that summer, when García Márquez, who only a few months before had helped Bogotá journalist Felipe López get privileged access to Fidel Castro, now volunteered to give some coaching to the journalists at Semana, which López, the son of Alfonso López Michelsen, directed. They got on to the topic of headlines. At one point, all enthusiastic, García Márquez asked what headline those present would put if, as he left the magazine’s offices, he was shot in the street. “CosteñoKilled,” Felipe López said, quick as a flash and with only the shadow of a smile.22 In Bogotá the Nobel Prize was no protection against homicidal put-downs from the oligarchy and its representatives.
Near the end of the year García Márquez took time off to fulfil a promise and make the last and most definitive of all his returns: to Aracataca. It was sixteen years since his last visit and the journey effectively finished off his “sabbatical.” A week later he wrote a curious account of the day with the title “Return to the Seed,” an unspoken reference to a famous story by Alejo Carpentier.23 He admitted that he had been surprised to receive such a warm welcome (a symptom of guilt?—he was always being criticized for not having “saved” Aracataca from under-development). He said he had remembered absolutely everything, over-whelmed by so many faces from the past, faces like his own face used to be when the circus came. But then he remarked that he himself had never mythologized Aracataca or been nostalgic about it (as everyone else had, he appeared to imply).24 Too much had been made of the Aracataca-Macondo connection; now he’d been back the two places seemed less like each other than ever. “It is difficult to imagine any-where more forgotten, more abandoned, more distant from the paths of God. How can one not feel one’s soul torn by a feeling of rebellion?”
As usual, at the end of this dull sabbatical year, he slipped off to greet the new one in Havana. This time he invited Régis Debray to come and spend time in the Hotel Riviera with him and their old friend Max Marambio, former head of Allende’s personal bodyguard and now an important fixer for Cuba’s trading organizations. Debray found the same old García Márquez, “divided as usual between affection (for the old complicit fellow-Latin) and sarcasm (for the too French Frenchman, arrogant and circumspect), whilst overwhelming me with movies, Veuve Cliquot and songs by Brassens, whose words he knew by heart.”25
NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR would be a better year for García Márquez and another very bad one for Colombia. Once the New Year festivities were over he shrugged off even the continuing diplomatic demands from Cuba and began to make a series of transitions: from his “sabbatical” to his real business, writing fiction; from his weekly column to the major novel he had begun the summer before the Nobel was announced, the “book about love”; and from residence in Bogotá, which was always bad for him, to Cartagena and the Costa.
The return to Aracataca had been predictably paradoxical. On the one hand, it was a return to the place he had transposed into his best-loved fictions under the name of Macondo, the place that had directly inspired his first novel, Leaf Storm, and One Hundred Years of Solitude. Yet the return had simply confirmed his own cancellation of that experience: he had effectively negated his relationship with Aracataca just as he had, in so many ways, negated One Hundred Years of Solitude itself.
Now he was going to rewrite his life—rewrite the rewrite—and fill in some missing gaps. No doubt it felt unseemly for a Nobel Prize winner still to be haunted by childhood traumas and the especially confusing oedipal twist that he had suffered when he was displaced from father to grandfather. Up to now he had simply omitted certain structural facts and papered over the problem while making some psychically satisfying and literarily dramatic adjustments. Now his twice illegitimate father was to be written back in to the story. Gabriel Eligio himself had returned to Aracataca a year before at the time of the Nobel celebrations and, as so often, had made himself the star of the show. (If there was one thing his son had inherited from him, it was his vitality.) But he had also been sincerely ecstatic at the news of Gabito’s success and had basked publicly for the first time in the reflected glory.
The day García Márquez heard he had won the Nobel Prize he had declared to the press that he would like to build his dream house in Cartagena. This was exactly the kind of thing that did not go down well in traditionalist Cartagena—where the point has always been precisely to preserve the houses already there—and many people had very mixed, not to say negative, feelings about his return.26 He himself had decided to shake off the Bogotá blues and refresh his image. Or perhaps he really just felt better back in the Caribbean. Or perhaps it was the effect of dedicating himself full-time to love. At any rate, friends and journalists found a new García Márquez in his now characteristic Caribbean all-white outfit, five kilos lighter, with his hair tidied, his nails manicured, smelling of expensive cologne, sauntering around the streets of old Cartagena, the beach at Bocagrande, the avenues of Manga—all of this when he was not roaring around in his new red Mustang.27
He would get up at 6 a.m. and read the papers, sit preparing himself for writing from nine until about eleven, then slowly take off (like the balloon he would invent both in this book and in the movie Letters from the Park). The great thing, he said, was that he had “got Colombia back.” Mercedes would go to the beach at midday and wait there with friends until he turned up. Then they would lunch on shrimp or lobster and take a siesta. In the late afternoon he would talk to his parents and each evening he would walk the city or talk to friends and then “put it all in the novel the next day”28
Although he was living in a building dubbed “The Typewriter” because of its shape, García Márquez was beginning another revolutionary transition, this time a technical one.29 Perhaps fortunately, he had already written the first sections of what would be Love in the Time of Cholera, his next novel, which gave him a kind of literary bridge across the whole Nobel experience. Now he decided to turn to writing with a computer and asked a typist to transfer the existing manuscript. This made it possible for a man who obsessively threw away every sheet of paper on which there was a typing error to move rather more quickly and may have helped him to pre-empt the kind of writer’s block that has afflicted so many Nobel Prize winners over the years. Critics will argue about a possible change of style brought about by the new technology and whether it was for better or worse.
Yet the biggest shift in García Márquez’s life, his psychic life at least, was in the relationship with his father. For the better part of sixty years they had barely talked. Now the son became reconciled with his father at least enough to drive over the bridge to Manga most afternoons and talk to him and Luisa Santiaga—nearly always separately—about their youth and their courtship. Of course the ostensible motivation was the overriding one of a new book that had to be written but there is every reason to think that García Márquez was finally ready for this transition and that the book allowed him to conceal and protect his pride whilst easing the guilt he no doubt had about this man, his father. Just three years earlier he had written about a character in Chronicle of a Death Foretoldwho comes to a sudden realization about her mother: “In that smile, for the first time since her birth, Angela Vicario saw her as she really was: a poor woman devoted to the cult of her defects.”30 Doubtless when all his own challenges were behind him, García Márquez was able to come to a similarly dispassionate though perhaps less cruel assessment of Gabriel Eligio.
It cannot have been easy. Gabriel Eligio was the man who had taken his mother away from him and then returned, years later, to take him away from his beloved grandfather, the—as Gabito saw it—infinitely superior Colonel. Gabriel Eligio, though by no means an abusive father, always seemed to threaten violence to maintain his often inconsistent and arbitrary authority; he kept his long-suffering wife locked inside the home on a strict, patriarchal basis, yet went away as and when he chose and betrayed her sexually—even scandalously—on numerous occasions; and although, taken overall, his ability to keep a large family fed, clothed and for the most part well educated was an extraordinary achievement, from the standpoint of his eldest son the unpredictability, the crazy schemes, the changes of plan, the silly jokes that everyone had to celebrate, the stubborn political conservatism, the sometimes painful abyss between the man’s actual achievements and his assessment of himself—all of these things, on top of the basic oedipal resentments, were very difficult to bear.
In such relationships almost everything conspires to harden things and worsen them. Perhaps García Márquez’s most quoted and best-loved statement around Latin America was that no matter how successful he became, he would never forget that he was nothing more than one of the sixteen children of the telegraphist of Aracataca. When Gabriel Eligio first heard this he burst into a furious diatribe. He had only been a telegraphist for a brief time, he was now a professional doctor and a poet and a novelist to boot.31 He felt slighted at the fact that everyone knew how much the famous Colonel had influenced his son and how much he had inspired the most unforgettable characters in his books, whereas he, Gabriel Eligio, never got mentioned and seemed to have been deliberately excluded when he was not, as now, insulted.
By late August 1984 García Márquez had written three chapters—over two hundred pages—out of a planned six and the novel was taking shape. He was talking to his parents purportedly to get a general sense of the era and was discussing their own courtship in the middle of these rather vague discussions merely as a sort of case study. Or so he said. He told El País that the book could be summarized in one sentence: “It’s the story of a man and woman who fall desperately in love but can’t get married at the age of twenty because they are too young and can’t get married at the age of eighty, after all the twists and turns of life, because they are too old.” He said it was risky work because it was using all the devices of mass popular culture: all the vulgarities of melodrama, soap opera and bolero. The novel, influenced equally by the French nineteenth-century tradition, began at a funeral and would end on a boat. And would have a happy ending.32 This was presumably why he had decided to set the novel way back in time: perhaps even García Márquez felt he could not carry off a love story with a happy ending set in the late twentieth century and be taken seriously.
Eventually, with the book half completed, he left Cartagena at the end of the summer and left a copy of the manuscript with Margot. The instructions were to keep it until he arrived safely in Mexico and then destroy it. “So I sat down with an empty biscuit tin on my lap and tore it up sheet by sheet, after which I burned the lot.”33 Then, after he made a reluctant business trip to Europe that autumn, came a shock. On 13 December 1984, not long after his eighty-third birthday, Gabriel Eligio García died unexpectedly in the Hospital Bocagrande, Cartagena, after a ten-day illness. Yiyo (Eligio Gabriel), usually thought of as the most nervous member of the family, recalled: “When my father died, everything turned upside down. I arrived the same day and the house was in chaos, no one was capable of taking a decision. I remember it was five in the afternoon and neither Jaime nor Gabito had showed up. I had to take charge of the family and extricate them from the swamp and get things moving. The next day we met to decide how to organize things. It was hell. No one agreed with anyone else.”34
For once Gabito did attend a burial. He managed to arrive on the day of the funeral, after a ten-hour journey involving numerous changes of plane, as the coffin was about to be carried from the Salón Parroquial de Manga after the funeral service. (Gustavo would arrive from Venezuela too late for the service.) Gabito arrived with the Governor of the Department of Bolívar, Arturo Matson Figueroa, and both helped carry the coffin. The Governor wore a black suit and tie; Gabito a hound’s-tooth jacket, an open-necked black shirt and black trousers. Jaime recalls that “the funeral was a disaster. All of us men turned to jelly, we became a bunch of cry-babies totally useless for the practicalities of the moment. Fortunately the women were there to organize everything.”35 (Turning to jelly did not deter the male sib-lings from making a ritual visit to a brothel for old times’ sake—drinks only—and a bit of old-fashioned bonding.)
Suddenly, so soon after renewing his relationship with his father, García Márquez had lost him for ever. He had in fact been getting closer to all his family again for some time but naturally the death of Gabriel Eligio created an entirely new situation. Yiyo recalled, “A few days after my father died, my mother, like a good Guajira, said to Gabito: ‘Now you’re the head of the family’ He span round: ‘And what have I ever done to you, why would you want to put me in such a fix?’ The trouble is that as well as being many, my brothers and sisters are uncontrollable.”36 The world-famous writer was now the head of a very large and very extended family. He had already helped his brothers and sisters in innumerable ways—jobs, medical bills, school fees, mortgages—but now he was financially responsible for his mother as well. It was more than appropriate that this should happen when his own gradual “return” to Colombia was apparently under way and when he was writing a novel based on the events which had led to the creation of the García Márquez nuclear family.
The death of his father and the anguished widowhood of his mother obliged García Márquez to think not only about love and sex but also, once more, and even more, about old age and death. Though he has always said that the writing of Love in the Time of Cholera was a joyful time, things were less easy for him than he affected. He was already finding it hard to adjust to his post-Nobel responsibilities. Experiencing the death of Gabriel Eligio and seeing his mother suffering so much was a traumatic process which of course the novelist assimilated by writing it into his novel, especially the early and late sections. His inveterate habit of destroying his manuscripts and all trace of their evolution has deprived us of what would no doubt have been a fascinating process of life being folded into art as it unfolded in reality. Of course the computer has in any case not only changed the entire process of literary composition but has also made it far more difficult to follow its phases of development.
He had always intended the novel to be a reflection not only on love but also on old age, though love had come to the fore since the Nobel award. In the late summer of 1982 he had published an article on “the youthful old age of Luis Buñuel” which showed not only that he was pondering these matters deeply—including the question of whether it was decent for old people to fall in love and have sex—but also that he had read Simone de Beauvoir’s classic The Coming of Age.37 In February 1985, back in Mexico City, he now told Marlise Simons that his first image of the novel, having read about two old people being murdered by a boatman, was precisely of two old people fleeing in a boat.38 Before, he said, he used to write about old people because his grandparents were the people he best understood; now he was anticipating his own old age. There was a line from Yasunari Kawabata’s The House of the Sleeping Beauties which haunted him: “Old people have death and young people have love, and death comes only once and love many times.”39 It is a line which gives insight into all his late works.
When he met the Colombian journalist María Elvira Samper in Mexico City for another of his updating interviews in the spring of 1985 (Semana claimed it was “exactly two years since he had last talked to the press in a big way”), he told her that he was not himself feeling old, merely detecting signs of age and facing up to reality. He found that inspiration came more often when one was older except now you realized it was not inspiration, it was when you were in the groove and writing, for a time, was “like floating.” These days “I know the last sentence of the book before I sit down to write it. When I sit down I have the book in my head, as if I’d read it, because I’ve been thinking about it for years.” He felt very “rootless” because he now felt exactly the same wherever he was in the world and he was experiencing “orphan-hood and anguish” as a result. Then an extraordinary statement: “All my fantasies have been achieved, one after another. I mean, I’ve known for many years that everything would happen as it has. Naturally I’ve done my bit and I have had to harden myself.” He considered himself “very tough,” though like Che Guevara he believed you had to retain your “tender” side. All men are soft but the “inclemency” of women saves and protects them. He still loved women; they made him feel “safe” and “looked after.” By now, he went on, he found himself bored talking to almost anyone who was not his friend; he could hardly bring himself to listen. “I am the most bad-tempered and violent man I know. That’s why I am also the most controlled.”40
He also talked about love and sex, of course. Though the latter, as noted, is a word that scarcely appears in García Márquez’s novels. He uses the same word, amor, love, for both things and this promiscuous use of it creates a curiously undifferentiated atmosphere which explains much of the peculiar flavour, and possibly the allure, of his writing about this topic.
When the new novel, the last word on love, appeared it was dedicated “To Mercedes, of course.” But when the French translation appeared, it would be dedicated to Tachia …
LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA is set in a Caribbean city immediately recognizable as Cartagena de Indias, between the 1870s and the early 1930s. It is about love and sex, marriage and freedom, youth and old age. It is based on a sexual triangle: the lordly upper-class doctor Juvenal Urbino, the painfully unglamorous shipping clerk Florentino Ariza, and the beautiful parvenue Fermina Daza. Juvenal has elements of Nicolás Márquez about him, though he is based above all on a distinguished local physician, Henrique de la Vega, who was in fact the García Márquez family doctor (who attended to Gabriel Eligio at the time of his death and then died himself less than five months later); Florentino, the main character, has elements of both Gabriel Eligio and Gabito himself, a most curious and fascinating fusion; and Fermina is an astonishing mixture of Mercedes (above all), the ghost of Tachia, and the external details of Luisa Santiaga at the time of her youth and courtship. The book is organized in six parts, with the first and last parts devoted to old age as the structural frame, parts two and three devoted to youth, and parts four and five devoted to middle age. The six-part structure is divided neatly into two halves of three chapters, and this is emblematic of a novel of twos and threes, of a triangle always threatening to collapse into a pair. All in all, the novel implicitly stages the four great reconciliations that García Márquez himself had effected as he approached old age: with France, above all Paris (where both Juvenal and Fermina are especially happy); with Tachia, whom he had loved there in the 1950s; with Cartagena, the reactionary colonial city; and, perhaps above all, with his father, for whom acceptance by Cartagena had always been an aspiration.
The action begins on a Pentecost Sunday in the early 1930s, soon after the Liberal Party has returned to power after almost half a century. Juvenal Urbino, now in his eighties, is killed when he falls from a ladder as he tries to retrieve the family parrot on the very same day that he has buried an old friend and discovered a shocking truth about him. At Urbino’s funeral an old flame of his wife Fermina, Florentino Ariza, tries to rekindle the affair that took place between them when they were still adolescents, over half a century before. The rest of the novel involves a series of carefully embedded flashbacks which tell, first, the story of that original love affair, then Juvenal’s intervention, Fermina’s marriage to Juvenal and journey to Paris with him, and Juvenal’s rise to eminence as Cartagena’s leading authority on health issues, most notably the scourge of cholera. In parallel we follow the illegitimate and partly black Florentino’s less conventional trajectory: he decides that he too must become a respected citizen and gradually rises through the ranks of his uncle’s shipping company; but at the same time, because he has decided to wait for Fermina as long as it takes—until after the death of her husband, if necessary—he embarks upon a long chain of relationships with different women, above all prostitutes and widows, not to mention a fourteen-year-old niece, América Vicuña, who commits suicide when he forsakes her for the newly widowed Fermina near the end of the novel. In contrast Juvenal has only one fling, with a stunning black Jamaican patient, and this almost costs him his marriage.
By the end of chapter 3, the halfway point, the novel has shown how Fermina Daza, a lower-middle-class Colombian, has rejected the true Colombian Florentino Ariza in favour of the upper-class “Frenchified” Juvenal Urbino. So much so that she has, like Juvenal, come to know Europe, whereas Florentino Ariza has never left Cartagena nor has any wish to do so. Juvenal Urbino represents the Cartagena upper class for whom, in a sense, García Márquez was writing as he composed the book. Thus by halfway the novel has shown a decisive defeat by Europe and by modernity of the backward Creole or Mestizo world of illegitimate, lower-class Colombia. Then the second half of the novel reverses all these directions as Florentino improves his position and finally gets the “girl.”
Though Juvenal Urbino is partly Henrique de la Vega, partly the Colonel and partly Gabriel Eligio—a “physician”—he is mainly every-thing about the upper classes that García Márquez envies, admires, resents and despises: the Bogotá and Cartagena ruling elites, much mixed in the last twenty-five years, the Bogotá elite that García Márquez believed rejected him and the Cartagena elite that rejected both him and his father. It is nevertheless notable that this novel is not in any primary sense about conflict or competition between men but about relationships between different men and women.
The epigraph is from a song by the blind vallenato troubadour Leandro Díaz: “The words I am about to express: they now have their own crowned goddess.” This composite reference, which somehow conjures up ancient Greece, the imperial Spanish monarchy and the lower-class Colombia of beauty pageants, brilliantly encapsulates the cultural conflicts at issue in the novel. Its title, at first sight one of his least felicitous, has become much loved and admired: it speaks of both love and of time: love, as so often in García Márquez, as an irresistible sickness or disease; and time, as both mere duration and history but also as the worst disease of all, the one that gnaws away at everything. And yet the novel will stop at a moment where time has been, however temporarily, defeated.
Among the multiple reconciliations effected by this now dazzlingly successful writer approaching late middle age there is also a reconciliation, however parodic and postmodern, with the bourgeois novel itself, and even, however ironically and critically, with the Colombian bourgeois ruling class. This is not exactly Stendhal, Flaubert or Balzac (more Dumas or Larbaud, though of course parodied).41 But this novel “knows” about all of them and all of that and is playing another game entirely. It flirts from its first line with aromas that take us back into the past and remind us, “inevitably,” of unrequited love. Many of the elements are those of cheap romance or even soap opera and Latin American popular music, as the author had intimated; yet these are counterpointed with the conventionalities and taedium vitae involved in bourgeois marriage and the keeping up of appearances. García Márquez was taking huge risks here with his artistic reputation. The novel as a whole becomes a curious mixture of the bland and the banal with the ruthlessly realistic and the profound. It dares to explore the most familiar clichés involved in letters to agony columns and the desperate truisms usually proffered in reply: You never really know any-one. You can’t really judge people. Some people can change their behaviour and, to that extent, their personalities; others can remain the same for ever despite the passage of time. You never ever know what is going to happen in life. You only understand life when it’s too late—and even then you would probably change your view if you lived even longer. It is very difficult to moralize about love and sex. It is very difficult to separate love from sex. It is very difficult to separate love from habit, gratitude or self-interest. You can love more than one person at the same time. There are many kinds of love and you can love people in many different ways. It is impossible to know which is better, single life or marriage, bohemia or convention; similarly, it is impossible to know whether security is better than adventure or vice versa; but everything has to be paid for. On the other hand, there is only one life and no second chance. You are never too old. And yet, and yet: and yet one life is no better than another. All these themes are signalled in the first part and then intermingled and played out in the rest of the novel.
In One Hundred Years of Solitude readers discovered that Melquíades’s room functions as the space of literature itself and that Melquíades has written the story we are reading a century in advance. At the end of Love in the Time of Cholera Florentino Ariza writes Fermina Daza a long letter which is a similar mise en abyme device: it is not ostensibly a love letter but “an extensive meditation on life based on his ideas about, and experience of, relations between men and women,” received by her as “a meditation on life, love, old age, and death.” The scope of this ambition, combined with the work’s remarkable accessibility, means that in some ways this is the sequel to One Hundred Years of Solitude that The Autumn of the Patriarch never quite became.
García Márquez ended his book with the phrase “for ever” and sent it off to Alfonso Fuenmayor in Barranquilla for him and Germán Vargas to read. Carmen Balcells received her copy in London and reportedly spent two days weeping over the manuscript. García Márquez needed to have a business meeting with her and decided to take in New York on the way to Europe. His old friend Guillermo Angulo was at that time Colombian consul in the Big Apple and the photographer Hernán Díaz was also there. García Márquez was not only full of the excitement of having completed the novel, one which was such a new departure for him, but was also going through all the excitement and anguish of computer users in the early days. Did you have back-up, were the diskettes reliable, could you keep them safe, whether from physical damage or from theft? He was very aware that he was one of the world’s first well-known writers—perhaps the first—to complete a major work using a computer. Accompanied by Mercedes and Gonzalo, plus their niece Alexandra Barcha, he flew to New York with the diskettes containing the novel around his neck, for all the world like a Melquíades who had found the philosopher’s stone and could not bear to let it go.42
García Márquez took his younger son into Scribner’s, one of New York’s best-known bookshops, which he had walked past every day in 1961 on his way to work. Hernán Díaz was shocked to discover that Scribner’s apparently had no novels by his illustrious friend but it transpired that they were all in the “classics” section. Much signing and dedication ensued when the staff discovered who the diminutive figure in the hound’s-tooth jacket actually was. Out in the street passers-by approached him as he enjoyed a totemic New York hot dog under the photographer’s gaze. Then, as amazed as if he were discovering ice, he went to a specialist store and printed off the first six copies of his book in a matter of minutes.43
Thus in that autumn of 1985, still wearing the three diskettes around his neck, García Márquez flew to Barcelona to deliver them personally to Carmen Balcells. He stayed at the Princess Sofía Hotel. In the event his room was broken into, just as he had feared, and he was indeed robbed but he told the press he did not think the thieves were after the manuscript of Love in the Time of Cholera.
He was still out of Colombia as one of the defining political moments in its twentieth-century history took place. Tension with M-19 had been growing, and on 3 July it had renounced Betancur’s ceasefire and the country lurched towards disaster. (Many guerrillas suspected that Betancur, far from seeking a lasting peace process, was luring them into a historic trap.) On 9 August García Márquez himself had said the Minister of Defence, Miguel Vega Uribe, should resign over allegations of torture. On 28 August Iván Marino Ospina, the new leader of M-19 after the recent death of García Márquez’s friend Jaime Bateman, had been killed by police. Finally, on 6 November, M-19 guerrillas took over the Palace of Justice, the Supreme Court building in Bogotá, initiating a series of events which would horrify spectators from all over the world as they watched the drama unfold on television. The President’s hapless brother Jaime, recently kidnapped, was on the scene again. The Colombian army went in with tanks and heavy artillery and ended a twenty-seven-hour siege, as the whole world watched in stupefaction. Up to one hundred people were killed including Alfonso Reyes Echandía, the President of the Supreme Court. Judge Humberto Murcia was hit in the leg as he tried to escape, where-upon he threw the—wooden—leg away and escaped from the burning courtyard. The leaders of the guerrilla attack, notably Andrés Almarales, were killed in the battle, among many others. It was strongly rumoured that the army rather than Betancur was in charge of events—the controversy still rages today—and Betancur told me later that he considered it “an act of friendship” that García Márquez remained silent.44 Only a week later another disaster rocked Colombia as the eruption of volcano Nevado del Ruiz buried the town of Armero and killed at least twenty-five thousand people.
The Palace of Justice tragedy was the last straw for García Márquez. He had bought a new apartment and transferred a significant quantity of clothes and other possessions to Bogotá but he did not move in. At the very moment when the event took place he was considering flying back to Bogotá but went to Paris instead. There he thought things over, cancelled his plans for returning to Colombia and went back to Mexico City, where the recent earthquake had left the city physically shattered but morally invigorated. By then, he was already planning his new project—a novel on Bolívar—and had had his first meeting with historian Gustavo Vargas in September 1985.
It was now, on 5 December, after this succession of disasters for Colombia, that Love in the Time of Cholera was launched. It astonished readers and critics around the world because it represented a new García Márquez, a writer who had somehow metamorphosed himself into a sort of nineteenth-century novelist for modern times, a man no longer writing about power but about love and the power of love. It would be his most popular work, his best-loved novel. Published almost twenty years after One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera was only the second of his books to give the critics and general readers almost unalloyed pleasure. Its success encouraged García Márquez to go on writing about human relationships and the private realm, as one of his main preoccupations, and to make this the centre of his renewed activity in the movie business.45 It associated his name not only with love, affection, smiles, flowers, music, food, friends and family, and the like, but also with nostalgia and a look back at the old ways of the past, at the roads and rivers of a bygone era: the fragrance of guava and the aromas of memory. These popular virtues would also allow him to blend in the darker currents he always had in mind under cover of this spell-binding writing.
Even El Tiempo was disarmed: the paper predicted on 1 December, before the book was actually published, that it would “bring love to a choleric country.” A few—very few—critics were quite negative about the work. But overall its reception was triumphant and a characteristic response was an extraordinary eulogy from one of the most sceptical of all great novelists, Thomas Pynchon, when the book appeared in English. Pynchon said that García Márquez had incredible nerve to write about love in these times but he “delivers and triumphantly”:
And—oh boy—does he write well. He writes with impassioned control, out of a maniacal serenity … There is nothing I have read quite like this astonishing final chapter, symphonic, sure in its dynamics and tempo, moving like a riverboat too, its author and pilot, with a lifetime’s experience steering us unerringly among hazards of skepticism and mercy, on this river we all know, without whose navigation there is no love and against whose flow the effort to return is never worth a less honorable name than remembrance—at the very best it results in works that can even return our worn souls to us, among which most certainly belongs Love in the Time of Cholera, this shining and heartbreaking novel.46
Fifteen years later García Márquez said to me: “I’ve been looking at Love in the Time of Cholera lately and, truly, I was surprised. My guts are in there, I don’t know how I managed to do it, to write about all that. Actually, I felt proud of it. Anyway, I went through … I’ve been through some very black times in my life.”
“What, before One Hundred Years of Solitude?”
“No, in the years after the Nobel. I often thought I was going to die; there was something there, in the background, something black, something under the surface of things.”47