22
JUST AS HE had proved, with the publication of The Autumn of the Patriarch in 1975, that One Hundred Years of Solitude was no fluke and that world literature should expect him to be around for the long haul, so now García Márquez had proved with Love in the Time of Cholera that he was not one of those writers whose career was going to be ended by the pressure of the award of the Nobel Prize. His move towards the theme of love in his writing was paralleled by a new emphasis upon peace, democracy and co-existence in his political activity. It was clear that in Central America and the Caribbean the Reagan government was not prepared to tolerate the triumph of any revolutionary regime; the Cubans, who had inspired or encouraged most of the revolutionary movements, were more cautious than before because they were heavily extended by their commitment to the liberation of southern Africa and could not afford further pressure from the United States in the Caribbean; moreover, developments in the Soviet Union seemed to suggest that it would not be safe to rely on the USSR’s commitment to world revolution for much longer. At the same time Reagan had run into difficulties over his prosecution of the war against the Nicaraguan Revolution and even he might prove susceptible to talk of peace. (In mid-1986 the World Court at The Hague would find that the U.S. administration had broken international law by aiding the Contra rebels in Nicaragua; later in the year the Irangate scandal would break out in the USA itself and shake the entire Reagan government.)
Even in Colombia there had been a peace process since Betancur came to power in 1982, though by now most observers had despaired of his ability to pursue it successfully and García Márquez himself was speaking with increasing pessimism of the way the country was going. At the end of July 1986 he would warn that Colombia was “on the edge of a holocaust” and that the terrible events at the Palace of Justice late in 1985 had been the inevitable result of the noxious combination of reckless guerrillas, repressive government forces and generalized delinquency and violence.1 Neutral observers might have been more impressed had this statement been made before the last week of Betancur’s period in office, particularly since Amnesty International had been severely criticizing Betancur over human rights abuses by the military; in effect, then, the warning was for the incoming Liberal government of Virgilio Barco and not for García Márquez’s Conservative friend Betancur.
Thus García Márquez himself now began to adopt a social democratic and merely anti-colonial discourse to go with his message of peace and love to a degree which must have disconcerted old friends and delighted his enemies, who would never be satisfied until both he and Fidel were toppled from their steeds. Among other things Vargas Llosa called him, yet again, a “lackey of Fidel Castro” and a “political opportunist.”2 The latter was a curious epithet to give a man who was causing himself huge amounts of political difficulty by his support for Cuba and who was also, moreover, prepared to spend large sums of money in support of his political commitments, as he had shown with Alternativa in Colombia in the 1970s and as he was about to demonstrate once more, on an even bigger scale, in Cuba.
In January 1983, at Cayo Piedras, during their first meeting after García Márquez’s Nobel Prize adventure, Gabo and Fidel had begun to dream of a Latin American film school located in Havana; Fidel, who knew a thing or two about propaganda, and was no doubt impressed by García Márquez’s worldwide prestige and influence after the award of the Nobel Prize, had become increasingly—and perhaps belatedly—aware of the ideological impact of culture. Now, as he discussed the cinema with García Márquez, he began to wonder whether the power of movies was not greater even than that of books and to question whether recent Latin American cinema had been as effective as the great films of the 1960s and early 1970s which had been inspired, all over the continent including Cuba itself, by the triumph of his revolution. As they sat together by the Caribbean in earnest discussion, Fidel, inevitably, had his own belligerent way of conceiving the matter: “We’ve really got to make that cinema take off … I, who have spent twenty years of struggle, think those films are like a battery of cannon firing inside and outside. How rich our cinema is in that way! Of course books influence people a lot but to read a book you need ten hours, twelve hours, two days; to see a documentary you only need forty-five minutes.”3 Whether Castro had been influenced by the unexpected impact of a Hollywood actor in the American White House can only be surmised, but he and García Márquez began to talk about the possibility of a Latin American film foundation to be located in Havana as a means of increasing continental production, improving standards, fomenting Latin American unity and, of course, propagating revolutionary values.
As soon as he had finished Love in the Time of Cholera, García Márquez began to work on the new project. From 1974 to 1979 he had concentrated on political journalism but from around 1980 into the 1990s the obsession with cinema had returned, and the articles he had written between 1980 and 1984 were often intimately connected to the cinema in general and to his own specific projects in particular. His most ambitious venture into film would be, precisely, the Foundation for New Latin American Cinema in Havana, combined with a new International School for Cinema and Television to be situated at San Antonio de los Baños outside the city.4 Here, more than ever, he would put his capitalist money where his revolutionary mouth was. His maxim might have been: where politics is no longer feasible, turn to culture. The film foundation would help to unify the production and study of film in the continent and the school would teach the theory and practice of film-making not only to young Latin Americans but also to students from other parts of the world.
By 1986 plans for the two new institutions were well advanced and García Márquez was liaising closely with radical film-makers about future developments. But he had begun the year by working not on a movie but on a book about the making of a movie. His friend Miguel Littín, the exiled Chilean film-maker, had made a clandestine return to Chile in May and June 1985 and had escaped undetected with 100,000 feet of film about Pinochet’s Chile.5 García Márquez, who obviously felt that he had been symbolically defeated by Pinochet when he returned to publishing fiction before the dictator’s downfall, saw a possibility of revenge and met Littín in Madrid early in 1986 to explore the options. There he conducted an eighteen-hour interview over the course of a week, then returned to Mexico and condensed a 600-page narrative into 150 pages. He noted: “I preferred to keep Littín’s story in the first person, to preserve its personal—and sometimes confidential—tone, without any dramatic additions or historical pretentiousness on my part. The manner of the final text is, of course, my own, since a writer’s voice is not interchangeable … All the same, I have tried to keep the Chilean idioms of the original and, in all cases, to respect the narrator’s way of thinking, which does not always coincide with mine.” The book, Miguel Littín. Clandestine in Chile, appeared in May 1986.6 Oveja Negra published 250,000 copies and it must have been a particular satisfaction to García Márquez in November when 15,000 of them were burned in the Chilean port of Valparaíso. Silence would have been a much more effective reaction on the part of the Pinochet government, which, although no one knew it, was by then in its final years.
Despite this brief excursion into political provocation, so committed was García Márquez to his new mission as bringer of peace that he was prevailed upon to make a speech that summer on 6 August in Ixtapa, Mexico, at the Second Conference of the “Group of Six” countries whose political aim was the prevention of a nuclear holocaust. The “Six” (Argentina, Greece, India, Mexico, Sweden, Tanzania), on the forty-first anniversary of the destruction of Hiroshima, urged the suspension of all nuclear tests.7 The conference was launched with García Márquez’s speech “The Cataclysm of Damocles,” in which he warned that although all the world’s problems could now be solved, money was being spent instead on armaments—and completely irrationally because, as he put it, “only the cockroaches would be left after a nuclear holocaust.”8 It was in a sense a speech about the future of the planet to be read in tandem with his Nobel speech about the destiny of Latin America.
That autumn, as García Márquez worked on preparations for the new film foundation, Rodrigo enrolled in the American Film Institute in Los Angeles—a striking contrast with his father’s activities in revolutionary Havana. He would be there four years. Meanwhile Gonzalo had moved back to Mexico with his girlfriend Pía Elizondo and worked on a project of his own, the establishment of a high-class publishing house called El Equilibrista (The Tightrope Walker), with Diego García Elío, the son of Jomí García Ascot and María Luisa Elío.9 One of their first projects would be the publication of “The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow” in October in a de luxe edition.
García Márquez himself was interested in encouraging new independent movies by Latin American directors but other film-makers were more interested in adapting his novels to the cinema. In 1979 a film called María My Dearest (María de mi corazón) had been made by Mexican director Jaime Hermosillo based on a García Márquez script. In the early 1980s Brazilian director Ruy Guerra had filmed Eréndira, the story, almost unmodified from García Márquez’s novella, about the adolescent girl in the Colombian Guajira forced to become a high-intensity prostitute—serving dozens of men per day—in order to compensate her heartless grandmother for accidentally burning down her house. Eventually Eréndira so values her freedom that she forsakes and flees even Ulysses, the young man who loves her and has helped her to kill and escape from the cruel grandmother—an interesting feminist rewriting of European-style fairy stories about Cinderellas, witches and handsome princes. In July 1984 it was announced that Jorge Alí Triana’s remake of Time to Die (Tiempo de morir), produced almost twenty years after Ripstein’s first effort, would be shown on Colombian TV on 7 August. This time it had been made in Colombia, not Mexico, and in colour, not black and white. Once again Nicolás Márquez’s killing of Medardo was silently vindicated and as before the clockwork precision of García Márquez’s sub-Sophoclean plot was compelling, though once again his penchant for sententious epigrams in place of realistic dialogue was an unfortunate distraction. In December 1985 Excelsior had announced that preliminary work was beginning on the filming of Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Francesco Rosi was in Mompox with Alain and Anthony Delon. (Alain would later drop out.)10 Irene Papas, Ornella Muti and Rupert Everett would also star. When Le Monde’s Michel Brandeau wrote about the movie in September 1986, he represented the effort of getting it filmed—in the tourist towns of Cartagena and Mompox—as almost as epic as the storyline itself.11
On 4 December 1986 the foundation was inaugurated during the 8th Havana Film Festival, with a speech by García Márquez, the President of the foundation, a widely disseminated interview with Fidel—not previously known as a great film-goer—and a few words from Gregory Peck, who was visiting the city. In his speech García Márquez said that between 1952 and 1955 Julio García Espinosa, Fernando Birri, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and himself were all at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. The Italian neo-realism that had inspired them all in those days was “like our cinema has to be, the cinema with least resources but the most human that has ever been made.”12 Best wishes arrived from Ingmar Bergman, Francesco Rosi, Agnès Varda, Peter Brook, and Akira Kurosawa. On 15 December the International School for Cinema and Television (EICTV) was launched in its turn, with García Márquez’s old friend Fernando Birri as its new director. Just over a week later it was reported that the foundation would film seven screenplays written by García Márquez himself, which was perhaps a world record for quick results from insider trading. His closest associates during the next few years would be Alquimia Peña, the Cuban director of the film foundation, and Eliseo Alberto Diego, known to everyone as “Lichi,” the son of one of Cuba’s greatest poets, Eliseo Diego. Lichi would work with the new President not only in his teaching seminars—or “workshops,” as García Márquez insisted they be called—but also in the production and elaboration of a whole raft of film scripts. García Márquez would throw himself body and soul into these enterprises and his energy, enthusiasm and stead-fastness would astonish both his collaborators and the many visitors to the new institutions over the coming years.
In the middle of all these celebrations shattering news arrived from Colombia to cast a pall over the new enterprise: Guillermo Cano, the Director of El Espectador, was murdered on 17 December as he left his office in Bogotá. The war between the Medellín drug baron Pablo Escobar and the Colombian justice system was now reaching its climactic phase. Escobar was already the seventh richest man on the planet and his “plata o plomo” (bribe or bullet) strategy of attempting to suborn or liquidate everyone in his way had added a second layer of corruption and inefficiency to Colombia’s age-old system of manipulation and violence. His political ambitions had already been frustrated and El Espectador, which had valiantly opposed him, also supported the extradition of suspected drug-traffickers to the United States. Now Cano had paid the price of his courage. The Minister of Justice, the President of the Supreme Court and the head of the national police force had all been assassinated already but the murder of such a respected journalist had an especially devastating effect on national morale. El Espectador journalist María Jimena Duzán told me: “I saw García Márquez again in Cuba in December 1986, around the time of the launching of the film foundation. After a few days he came looking for me; eventually he reached me by phone. ‘They’ve killed Guillermo Cano,’ he said. ‘It’s just happened. That’s why I don’t want to go back to Colombia. They’re killing my friends. No one knows who’s killing who.’ I went to his house, totally distraught. Gabo greeted me by saying that Guillermo Cano was the only friend who had ever really defended him. Castro arrived and I was weeping. Gabo explained what had happened and Fidel talked a lot. Gabo told me again he wouldn’t go back, he was full of bitterness. I said to him, ‘You know, you’ve really got to speak out about things in Colombia,’ but he wouldn’t. I concluded that he’d really freaked out after his episode with Turbay in 1981.”13 García Márquez made no public statement about the murder and sent no message to Cano’s widow, Ana María Busquets.
Despite the cruel news from Colombia, García Márquez set about his new duties in Havana with gusto. He stayed on in Cuba for several months, working at many tasks at the same time, deciding everything, taking part in everything. News items appeared regularly in papers all over Latin America and Spain about Gabriel García Márquez’s film-related activities and possible adaptations of his books.14 This was more like it! Cinema was not like literature, its creators sentenced to solitude. Cinema was convivial, collective, proactive, youthful; cinema was sexy and cinema was fun. And García Márquez loved every minute of it; he was surrounded by attractive young women and energetic and ambitious but deferential young men, and he was in his element. Though it was costly. He would wryly remark that he had gone on with his expensive hobby despite Mercedes’s disapproval: “When we were poor we spent all our money on the cinema. Now that we have money, I’m still spending it on the cinema. And I’m giving it a huge amount of my time.”15 Some say García Márquez gave the school $500,000 of his own money that year, as well as most of his invaluable time. It was now that he began to charge European or American interviewers $20,000 or $30,000 a session in order to raise money for the film foundation; astonishing numbers of them coughed up.
He came to specialize in story-telling and script-writing at the new school—he gave a regular course on how to write a story, then how to turn the story into a film script. Visitors and teachers over the next few years would include Francis Ford Coppola, Gillo Pontecorvo, Fernando Solanas and Robert Redford.16 The relationship with Redford was particularly important to García Márquez: he would repay his debt to the handsome American radical by himself travelling to Utah to give a course at Redford’s Sundance film school and festival in August 1989.17 Generally he would say that his policy was to sell his works very dear to non-Latin American producers and very cheaply or for free to Latin Americans. Some books, especially One Hundred Years of Solitude, he would never allow to be adapted, a position which had brought him into conflict with Anthony Quinn a few years before. (It was said that Quinn had offered García Márquez a million dollars for the rights; Quinn said García Márquez had agreed, then reneged on the deal, which the Colombian always denied.)18 Others, such as Love in the Time of Cholera, he would consider selling—but at that time he said he would only give it to a Latin American director. Finally, in 2007 he would at last allow another Hollywood film-maker, in this case the Englishman Mike Newell, to make the film in Cartagena with Javier Bardem as lead.19 At that time gossips would report that Mercedes had finally lost patience with her husband’s relentless philanthropy and wanted to put some money aside for their heirs. It was, after all, “her” book.
Given the move from power to love in his literary activity, it was logical that love should take pride of place in his movie projects. What the Cubans really thought of this development we shall probably never know but for the next few years the new film foundation would be awash with news of García Márquez’s cinematographic explorations, through a series of different directors, of the theme of love in human relationships. The principal vehicle for this was a series of six films planned as a set to be collectively called Difficult Loves (Amores difíciles), a title previously used by Italo Calvino in a little-known collection of short stories. (When the films appeared on the Public Broadcasting System in the United States they were called Dangerous Loves.) All of them were darker than their publicity might have suggested and all, in one way or another, would explore the relationship between love and death.20
Six years later, in 1996, García Márquez would make a fully Sophoclean film, Oedipus the Mayor (as against Oedipus the King), again with Jorge Alí Triana (and again with a script by García Márquez and an ex-student of the Havana film school, Stella Malagón), about a small-town mayor confronting not only all the atrocities and terrors of late twentieth-century Colombia—drug-traffickers, paramilitaries, guerrillas, the national army—but also the age-old tragedy of Oedipus killing his father and sleeping with his mother, in this case the still tempestuous Spanish actress Angela Molina. Many critics panned the movie mercilessly but it had important virtues and might more fairly and appropriately be considered a heroic failure: it conveyed the complexity and some of the horror of the Colombian predicament and Triana managed to prevent the mythical motifs from undermining the political narrative. He had wanted to film No One Writes to the Colonel as well, and would probably have made a good job of it; in the event, surprisingly, García Márquez gave that project to Arturo Ripstein, with whom he had always had a difficult relationship (it was said that Ripstein had been angered by Triana remaking Time to Die), and in 1999 the novel finally came to the big screen: a film which, despite Ripstein’s huge international reputation, and a cast including international stars Federico Luján, Marisa Paredes and Salma Hayek, must be counted one of the least convincing versions of a work by García Márquez ever filmed.21
This mixed experience confirmed what García Márquez had said so often: that his relationship with the cinema was like some kind of unhappy marriage. He and the cinema couldn’t get along, yet they couldn’t do without one another. Perhaps, more cruelly, one might say that his love was unrequited (a one-way mirror, to quote the title of one of his Mexican television films): he could not live without the cinema but the cinema could in fact get along quite happily without him. Yet the truth is that he has often been blamed for the final versions of his movies when as the writer of the original text he is not ultimately responsible for the finished product. Mel Gussow wrote in the New York Times that García Márquez needed a film-maker of his own stature and that it would probably require a director with Buñuel’s idiosyncratic genius to do him justice.22 (This might explain why Hermosillo, a small chip off the Buñuelian block, was more successful than most.) García Márquez’s son Rodrigo told me that his father is “hopeless” with dialogue, even in his novels; yet the structure of A Time to Die is an undoubted masterpiece and the conception of the movies—dialogue apart—is invariably compelling. What a pity, then, that Fellini never had a go and that Akira Kurosawa, who was extremely excited in these years about the possibility of filming The Autumn of the Patriarch, never managed to get his project off the ground.
Despite all his success and his exciting activities in Cuba, these were exceptionally difficult years for García Márquez. Even he had to recognize that perhaps he had taken on too much and spread his talent and his energy too thin. He found himself assailed by his enemies on the right and involved in numerous polemics and controversies for which he had little appetite at this time, not to mention a number of scandals or near-scandals laced with malicious gossip which were not entirely becoming to a man nearing sixty years of age. In March 1988 he celebrated both his sixtieth birthday and his and Mercedes’s thirtieth wedding anniversary (21 April) in Mexico City and Cuernavaca. Belisario Betancur and thirty other friends from all over the world were in attendance. Much fun was had in the Colombian press as to whether it was García Márquez’s sixtieth or sixty-first birthday—it was his sixty-first, of course—including headlines like “García Márquez sixty again,” and he would not be able to continue with the farce of this deception for much longer—though most writers, truth to tell, including the blurb writers at his publishers, would continue to use a 1928 birth date until the publication of Living to Tell the Tale in 2002, and some even beyond that.
It was this month also that he published his much reprinted, definitive—humorous and affectionate—portrait of Fidel Castro, “Plying the Word,” in which he stressed Castro’s verbal rather than military attributes. He referred to his friend’s “iron discipline” and “terrible power of seduction.” He said it was “impossible to conceive of anyone more addicted to the habit of conversation” and that when Castro was weary of talking “he rests by talking”; he was also a “voracious reader.” He revealed that Fidel was “one of the rare Cubans who neither sings nor dances” and admitted, “I do not think anyone in this world could be a worse loser.” But the Cuban leader was also “a man of austere ways and insatiable illusions, with an old-fashioned formal education, of cautious words and delicate manners … I think he is one of the greatest idealists of our time and this, perhaps, may be his greatest virtue, although it has also been his greatest danger.” Yet when García Márquez asked him once what he would most like to do, the great leader had replied: “Hang around on some street corner.”23
Now came a temporary turn to the theatre. In January 1988 it was announced that the Argentinian actress Graciela Dufau would be starring in an adaptation of a brief work by García Márquez entitled Diatribe of Love Against a Seated Man.24 García Márquez would say that the play was a cantaleta, a repetitive, nagging rant, a word that implies that the nagger—usually a woman, of course—gets no answer from the object of her attentions, nor does she expect one. (Throughout his adult life García Márquez had always said that there was no point arguing with women.) This theme, this form, had obsessed García Márquez for many years and indeed one of his early ideas for The Autumn of the Patriarch was a cantaleta against the dictator by one of the main women in his life.25
The premiere in the Cervantes Theatre in Buenos Aires had to be delayed from 17 to 20 August 1988. In the end García Márquez, too anxious—“as nervous as a debutante,” in his own words—to cope with the stress of confronting a live performance of his work, remained in Havana and sent Mercedes, Carmen Balcells and her twenty-four-year-old photographer son Miguel to face the critics of Buenos Aires, the most demanding and most terrifying in Latin America. The whole of Buenos Aires’s “political and cultural world” was in attendance, including several government ministers. The notable absences were President Alfonsín and the distinguished playwright himself. Sadly, the return to a great theatre in Buenos Aires did not repeat the previous experience of 1967. The play received no more than polite applause and there was no standing ovation. Reviews from the Buenos Aires drama critics were mixed but the majority were negative. A typical reaction came from Osvaldo Quiroga of the heavyweight La Nación: “It is difficult to recognize the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude in this long monologue by a woman tired of being happy without love … It shows his complete ignorance of dramatic language. It cannot be denied that Diatribe is a superficial, repetitive and tedious melodrama.”26
The play, a one-act monologue, is set, like Love in the Time of Cholera, in an unnamed city which is unmistakably Cartagena de Indias. Graciela’s first words, subtly changed since first quoted by García Márquez, are: “Nothing is more like hell on earth than a happy marriage!” Novels have narrative irony built in but a play relies on dramatic irony, which needs a different kind of creative intuition, one for which he appears to have little feel. Worse than this, though, worse even than the lack of dramatic action, the play’s most damaging flaw appears to be a deficit of serious reflection and analysis. Like Love in the Time of Cholera in part, Diatribe of Love Against a Seated Man deals with marital conflict (as indeed had No One Writes to the Colonel, over thirty years before);27 and the central proposition—that traditional marriage doesn’t work for most women—is obviously an important one, albeit one that this sixty-year-old author was by now perhaps insufficiently modern to explore in a radical or even meaningful way. Sadly, Diatribe of Love Against a Seated Man is a one-dimensional work which, unlike Love in the Time of Cholera, adds little or nothing to the world canon of great works about love. García Márquez had said not long before that he had never wanted to be a movie director because “I don’t like to lose.”28 The theatre was an even riskier venture. Here for once he had lost. He would never try again.
AFTER THE TRIUMPHANT publication of Love in the Time of Cholera, despite a nagging, anguished sense of fragility which kept appearing in the midst of his apparent immortality, García Márquez had begun to act as if there were no limit to his energies or his ability to work at a high level over a whole range of different activities. Yet there were unmistakable signs of fraying. Clandestine in Chile bore obvious traces of haste; Diatribe of Love Against a Seated Man was an experiment in a medium in which he was out of his depth; and working on six film scripts simultaneously was perhaps too much for any man, added to all of which he had already started his next major book, nothing less than a novel on Latin America’s most important heroic figure of all time, Simón Bolívar.
García Márquez had been intensely committed to the politics and administration of the new film foundation and film school but he had devoted much less time in recent months to international politics and his conspiracies and mediations. Although matters in Central America were grim, Cuba had seemed to be in one of its most comfortable and confident moments. But things were beginning to change there too. García Márquez was about to find that his brief sabbatical from politics and diplomacy would soon be over as dark clouds began to gather over both Cuba and Colombia, clouds which would not lift again for the rest of the century.
In July 1987 he was the guest of honour at the Moscow Film Festival. On the 11th he was received by Mikhail Gorbachev at the Kremlin and urged the radical reformist Soviet leader to travel to Latin America. At this time Gorbachev was the most talked-about politician on the planet. They discussed, so an official communiqué said, “the restructuring being carried out in the USSR, its international implications, the role of intellectuals and the transcendence of humanist values in the world today.”29 Gorbachev said that in reading García Márquez’s books you could see there were no schemes, they were inspired by a love of humanity. García Márquez said that glasnost and perestroika were great words implying vast historical change—maybe! Some people—no doubt he was thinking of Fidel Castro—were sceptical, he said. Was he sceptical himself? That he was in two minds about the outcome was shown by later comments in which he revealed that he had told Gorbachev he was anxious that some politicians—presumably Reagan, Thatcher, Pope John Paul II—might wish to take advantage of his good faith and so there were dangers ahead. He said it was obvious to him that Gorbachev was sincere and declared that for him, García Márquez, the meeting had been the most important event of his recent life.30 For once he may not have been exaggerating.
Towards the end of the following year he finally came into intimate proximity with power in Mexico, the country in which he had lived for more than twenty years in total. In December 1988 Carlos Salinas de Gortari became President and García Márquez moved quickly to secure his relationship with the new leader. They would work closely together on international politics during the coming years. From Mexico he travelled to Caracas to attend Venezuelan Carlos Andrés Pérez’s second inauguration—in fulfilment of a promise he had made at a time when only he, García Márquez, thought that the mercurial populist might ever make a comeback.
He had been working on the Bolívar novel almost since the moment that he completed Love in the Time of Cholera. Though all his novels had been based on an understanding of Latin American and world history, and although he had read widely about dictators and dictatorship in order to write The Autumn of the Patriarch, he had never had to consider the methods of investigating and writing history as such. Now, because his central character was a historical actor, and one of the best-known ones at that, he felt that every event in his novel had to be verified historically and every thought, statement or foible of Bolívar’s in the book had to be appropriately researched and contextualized. This would involve not only personally reading dozens of books about Bolívar and his era and thousands of Bolívar’s letters but also consulting a whole range of authorities, including several of the leading experts on the life and times of the great Liberator.31
In creating his Patriarch in the 1970s, García Márquez had been free to choose whichever facet of whichever dictator he liked at any given moment in order to fashion a creative synthesis which would make sense within his overall design. With Bolívar, although every historian discovers, or invents, a different persona, the basic material was inevitably much more established and intractable, and he soon learned that for the historian each interpretative assertion has to be based on more than one, and in most cases many, pieces of evidence, the result being that what appears in the eventual work is merely the tip of a vast iceberg.32 Somehow he had to process that vast archive of information and yet maintain his own creative faculty so that Bolívar would somehow arise refreshed from the research rather than lie buried under a mountain of desiccated facts.
Of course, although the Liberator had written or dictated ten thousand letters and there were innumerable memoirs written about him both by his own collaborators and others who came across him during his life, there were whole swathes of time when little was known about what he was involved in, and the question of his private life—especially his love life—remained relatively open. Moreover the sequence that most interested García Márquez, for both personal and literary reasons—Bolívar’s last journey down the Magdalena River—had been virtually untouched by either letters or memoirs, leaving the novelist free to invent his own stories within the limits of historical verisimilitude.
The novel would be dedicated to Alvaro Mutis, whose idea it was and who had even written a brief fragment of a first version, “The Last Face,” when he was in prison in Mexico at the end of the 1950s. Eventually García Márquez got him to concede that he was never going to finish the project and seized it for himself. The title, The General in His Labyrinth, was established almost from the beginning of García Márquez’s research on the book.
Simón Bolívar was born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1783, a member of the Creole aristocracy. At that time the whole of the continent of what we now call Latin America remained in the hands of Spain and Portugal, as it had for almost three centuries, while England and France each controlled a few islands in the Caribbean. Slavery existed in every Latin American country, as it did also in the recently independent United States of America. By the time Bolívar died in 1830 almost the whole of Latin America had become independent of external powers and slavery had been officially condemned and in some cases abolished. All of this owed more to Bolívar than to any other single individual.
Bolívar’s father, a landowner, died when he was two and a half; his mother died when he was not yet nine years of age. When he was twelve he rebelled against the uncle who had taken him in and moved to the house of his tutor Simón Rodríguez; after travelling in Europe he married, at the age of nineteen, a young woman who died less than eight months later. At that moment he seems to have decided that it was his destiny to be alone in the world. (He would never marry again, though he would be linked with dozens of women, the best-known of whom was his doughty Ecuadorean mistress, Manuelita Sáenz, herself by now a not inconsiderable legend, who saved his life on more than one occasion.) On returning to Europe he was present at the coronation of Napoleon in Paris in December 1804; he was inspired by Napoleon’s achievements as liberator of Europe but repelled by his decision to make himself a monarch. On returning to Latin America, having vowed to give his life to the liberation of the colonies held by Spain, he began a military career which eventually saw him achieve supreme prestige throughout the continent and the honourable title of Liberator. All other leaders, even great generals such as San Martín, Sucre, Santander, Urdaneta and Páez, were consigned willy-nilly, one after another, to Bolívar’s shadow.
Beyond the matter of battles won and lost, when one considers the statistics of Bolívar’s marches up and down the continent, across the Andes and along the mighty rivers of that still untamed geography, the facts and figures of his twenty-year campaign are stupefying; yet he was never seriously wounded in battle. His first mission along the Magdalena River in Colombia was at the age of twenty-nine; at the age of thirty he was proclaimed Liberator of Venezuela; at thirty-eight he was elected President of Colombia, which then included present-day Venezuela and Ecuador. During this period he wrote some of the key documents of Latin American identity, most notably his Jamaica Letter of 1815, in which he argued that all Latin American regions had more similarities than differences and that the continent’s mixed-race identity should be accepted and embraced.
Yet once the Spaniards were vanquished local leaders began to assert their local and regional interests and the fragmentation of the now liberated republics began; anarchy, dictatorship and disillusionment appeared like tragic spectres on the horizon; and Bolívar’s overriding dream, the unity of Latin America, began to fade. He became a nuisance, the voice of an impractical idealism; others might never have been able to achieve the almost impossible feats which Bolívar had undertaken but they now considered themselves far more realistic than he in the post-emancipation situation. The prime example was Colombia’s Francisco de Paula Santander, Bolívar’s nemesis and, in García Márquez’s eyes, the paradigmatic cachaco. The novel begins at the moment when Bolívar has realized that there is no future for him in Colombia, despite all his achievements and continuing prestige, and begins the retreat from Bogotá, which is in effect the retreat from his own grandiose vision. At forty-six years of age, ailing and disillusioned, the great Liberator sets off down the Magdalena River on his way towards exile, though García Márquez suggests that Bolívar never finally gave up hope and was still intending to organize another expeditionary campaign of liberation, should that prove possible.
The novel is in eight chapters, and falls, once more, into two halves. The first half, chapters 1 to 4, narrates the journey down that great river that García Márquez himself would travel, over a century later, on his way to school.33 In Bolívar’s case, this last journey took place between 8 and 23 May 1830. The second half, chapters 5 to 8, narrates Bolívar’s last six months of life, 24 May to 17 December 1830, six months spent by the sea on that Costa which would later be the scene of García Márquez’s childhood and much of his youth. One of Spain’s best-loved poems, Jorge Manrique’s Verses on the Death of My Father, composed at the end of the medieval period, is known above all for the line, “Our lives are the rivers that flow down into the sea which is death.” And for one further verse which states that death is the “trap,” the “ambush,” into which we fall. Or, as García Márquez might say, following Bolívar himself, the “labyrinth” into which we fall. Although García Márquez does not mention Manrique, his novel follows exactly the same logic as Manrique’s great poem.
The subject of the title, “the General,” signifies power but the concept of “the labyrinth” suggests before the work even begins that not even the powerful can control fate and destiny. Of course such impotence may also imply exculpation of, even sympathy for, the powerful, which the infant García Márquez may have felt when Colonel Nicolás Márquez was the only “powerful”—protective, influential, respectable—person he knew. Is his entire oeuvre in some way reflecting upon the impossibility of holding on to that old man, the anguish of having as a “father” someone so old and vulnerable that the most important lesson you learn as a small child is that your only security, your beloved grandfather, must “soon” die? Such a lesson teaches that all power is desirable, essential, yet frail, false, transient, illusory. García Márquez is almost alone in contemporary world literature in his obsession with, indeed his sympathy with, men of power. And although he has always been a socialist this permanent note of aristocratic identification, however much moderated by irony (or even moral condemnation), may explain why his books have an apparently inexplicable power of their own: tragedy, it goes without saying, is greater, wider and deeper when protagonists are aggrandised by power, by isolation, by solitude and, not least, by their influence on the lives of millions of people and history itself.
By the time he wrote The General in His Labyrinth García Márquez had long been closely acquainted with Fidel Castro, undoubtedly a leading candidate for the number two position—after Bolívar—in the list of Latin America’s great men. Simply in terms of political longevity—almost half a century in power—Fidel Castro’s record is difficult to deny. And Fidel, García Márquez once told me, is “a king.” García Márquez himself, in contrast, has always insisted that he has neither the talent, the vocation nor the desire—still less the ability—to endure such solitude. The solitude of the serious writer is enormous, he has always averred; but the solitude of the political Great Leader is of quite another order. Nevertheless here, in this novel, although Bolívar’s character is, undoubtedly, based factually on that of the Liberator, many of his foibles and vulnerabilities are a combination of Bolívar’s, Castro’s and García Márquez’s own.
The central subject, then, is power, not tyranny. In other words, García Márquez’s books are sometimes seen from the side of the powerful, sometimes from the side of the powerless, but they are not primarily intended to inspire hatred against tyrants or the “ruling class”—unlike hundreds of protest novels written within the main current of Latin American literary narrative. His constant themes, constantly interwoven, are the irony of history (especially power turning to impotence, life turning to death), fate, destiny, chance, luck, foreboding, presentiment, coincidence, synchronicity, dreams, ideals, ambitions, nostalgias, longings, the body, will and the enigma of the human subject. His titles frequently refer to power (Colonel, Patriarch, General, Big Mama), power which is usually challenged in some way (“no one writes,” “solitude,” “autumn,” “funeral,” “labyrinth,” “death foretold,” “kidnapping”), and to the different forms of representation of reality as related to the different ways of conceiving and organizing time into history or narrative (“no one writes,” “one hundred years,” “time of,” “chronicle of,” “news of,” “memoir of”). His works almost always include the theme of waiting, which is, of course, merely the other side of power, the experience of the impotent. All the way through this novel, for example, Bolívar is announcing his departure, first from Bogotá, then from Colombia, but really of course he is leaving power, while pretending to himself that he is not leaving anything, least of all this life, though nothing can delay that inevitable departure. So waiting is again a huge theme; but delaying (which the powerful—Castro, for example—can do, and love to do) is a bigger theme here (Bolívar delaying his departure from Colombia, from power and glory, delaying accepting reality, death …).
Some of the impetus for the book must have come from García Márquez’s work on his Nobel Prize speech in which, like others before him, he felt it incumbent upon himself to speak as a representative not of one country but of a whole continent. Much of what he said on that occasion was tacitly “Bolivarian” and many of the ideas turn up again in the novel; indeed, the Nobel speech provides indispensable background to a reading and interpretation of the work. This is all the more ironic since García Márquez, as we have seen, was very slow to come to an awareness of “Latin America,” even during his stay in Europe. Only after visiting both the centre of capitalism and the centre of communism did he come to see that, despite his moral and theoretical attraction to socialism, neither system was the answer for Latin America because in practice both systems functioned primarily in the interests of the countries that advocated them. Latin America had to look after itself; and thus had to unify. Bolívar in the novel has trenchant views about the different European nationalities, favouring the British, of course, given the assistance Great Britain gave at that time to the South American liberation movements; the French come out badly; and the United States, in Bolívar’s own words, is “omnipotent and terrible, and its tale of liberty will end in a plague of miseries for us all.”
Such are the themes involved in the book and the central problems which structure it. But no matter how much research García Márquez had put into it, no matter how coherent its ideological design and the literary architecture which supported it, the novel would have failed absolutely if the central character had not come alive. And he does. García Márquez takes on the most famous and familiar of all Latin Americans and gives his own version, with breathtaking audacity and astonishing naturalness. Though this is certainly not his greatest work it may well be his greatest achievement because the magnitude of the challenge is there for all to see. Any reader familiar with biographies of Bolívar, on finishing this book, is likely to conclude that García Márquez’s version of the man, achieved in well under three hundred pages and containing the whole of the life within the journey completed in the last six months of it, will henceforth be inseparable from whatever image of Bolívar is carried down to posterity.
Bolívar is alive, though already mortally ill, from the very first page, where he lies naked—buried, one might say—in his morning bath. His nakedness shocked many readers—as it would shock them to find him vomiting, farting, copulating and cursing, or cheating at cards, or showing a petulant, childish side to his character far removed from the hagiographic vision so common in Latin American speeches and ceremonial. Yet the portrait is also of a man transfused by a touching gallantry: cast down, certainly, by his misfortunes, his rejections and his approaching death, yet never finally defeated even in the darkest and most hopeless of times. Bolívar becomes a García Márquez character in this novel, it cannot be denied; but part of this writer’s greatness is that the “Latin American character” is precisely what he has captured and rendered eternal, long before he turned to Bolívar, and the great Liberator is here revealed as the template for countless Latin Americans suffering, striving and sometimes succumbing in the arduous kingdom of this world. For all his own vanities and occasional arrogance, García Márquez, subjected to stresses that it is given to few other writers even to imagine, has himself, in turn, reacted to this aesthetic and historical challenge with a grace and a gallantry that few other writers are able to attain. Hence the moving impact the book makes upon most of its readers.
The novel’s publication was flagged up weeks before it eventually appeared. García Márquez has always boasted that he never attends the launch of any of his books and often suggests that he personally finds it demeaning to have to peddle as a commercial product something which for him is, in its original impulse, an aesthetic creation quite indifferent to whatever exchange value it may eventually have in the capitalist book market. But the truth is that even One Hundred Years of Solitude was publicized long before it appeared. And with each new book the hype increased. All this was why, years later, some people would begin to call him “García Marketing.”
On 19 February, the first reaction to the novel, read in typescript, was a letter from no less a reader than the ex-President of Colombia, Alfonso López Michelsen, whose response, “I devoured your latest book,” published in El Tiempo, was used to advertise the book before it even came out.34 López declared that García Márquez had shown an astonishing versatility: supposedly a magical realist, he had now written a naturalist work that Zola might have penned had he had the talent. López had been unable to put the book down: he said that although Bolívar’s story was known to everyone in Latin America, the reader was sucked in as if by a detective story. García Márquez’s original new thesis that Bolívar was still hoping to make a political comeback even on his deathbed was credible because “that’s the story with all of us who have gone out of power.” Later it would be revealed that ex-President Betancur had also read the book (he was less fulsome because of course its “liberal” interpretation was less acceptable to him, a Conservative, than to López),35 and the current Liberal President, Virgilio Barco, had stayed up into the night to finish it.36 Even Fidel Castro, that great admirer of Cuba’s own would-be liberator, José Martí, had read the novel and had been heard to declare that it gave a “pagan image” of Bolívar.37 No one was entirely sure what this meant, or whether it was good or bad.
There were innumerable reviews in newspapers and magazines all over the Spanish-speaking world. This was not only a new novel by the greatest literary name in the language but a portrait of the most important figure in the entire history of Latin America, whose persona and image were dear to millions, not least to the guardians of the Bolivarian flame, whether serious historians, ideologists or demagogues. Most of the reviews were extremely positive but, unusually for García Márquez but not surprisingly, there were also some determined attempts at demolition. A significant minority of critics argued that García Márquez’s overweening sense of his own glory had got in the way of his presentation of Bolívar—a presentation allegedly full of linguistic effects conceived as spectacle, like self-congratulatory fireworks, instead of the appropriate communication of Bolívar’s own possible subjectivity, plus a series of stock phrases and episodic structures whose true function was to draw attention to the García Márquez brand, with the novel as a mausoleum to the writer himself rather than to its protagonist.38
Predictably, perhaps, the most negative reaction came from García Márquez’s old bête noire, El Tiempo, which, in an editorial no less, found the work anti-Colombian:
But the book has a political background. During the course of its 284 pages the author cannot conceal his philosophy, especially in the ideological field. He gives vent to an unrepressed hatred for Santander and a cordial antipathy for Bogotá and its classic product the cachacos, whilst pointing out the General’s personal characteristics, attributing to his Caribbean origin the greater part of the impulse that carried him to glory. With great subtlety and skill he emphasizes Bolívar’s dictatorial personality and mulatto blood, as well as his earthy disposition, to create an impalpable comparison with Fidel Castro.39
This disturbing diatribe shows how offensive García Márquez’s appropriation of Bolívar seemed to the guardians of Colombia’s national identity: he had pressed every single button and the editorialist had evidently lost his cool. García Márquez, no doubt feeling the satisfaction of the warrior who has smoked his enemy out into the open, responded in kind: “I’ve said before that El Tiempo is a demented newspaper protected by a quite unusual impunity… It says whatever it wants against whoever it likes, without measuring the consequences or thinking about the political, social or personal damage it might do. Very few people dare to answer it back for fear of its immense power.” “We need to discover ourselves,” García Márquez concluded, “we don’t want Columbus to remain as our discoverer.” This was inevitably followed by a response from El Tiempo itself entitled “The Nobel’s Tantrum,” on 5 April; it declared that “García Márquez only accepts praise” and called him the “Baron of Macondo.”40
It was clear that something was happening both to García Márquez himself and to his reputation. His relationships with the great and the good were continuing to grow—political leaders such as Castro, Salinas and Pérez clearly thought they needed him more than he needed them—but the rest of the world was beginning to notice and in some quarters there was less indulgence than before. Moreover García Márquez himself seemed suddenly to be under increased stress—over his relationship with Castro and Cuba, unsubstantiated newspaper insinuations of sexual dalliances, waning middle age, the fear that his popularity was declining and that his political influence might follow—and was more inclined to overreact to attacks or to criticism. He seemed, for the first time, to be ever so slightly losing his touch. Colombian articles would say, and did say, that his fame and influence had definitively gone to his head and he was simply reacting from a loftier height of vanity, narcissism and hypersensitivity.
But of course things were more complex than this. The truth was that the Cold War game, which García Márquez played better than anyone, was almost over, even if few observers were predicting that the end would come as soon as November 1989. The climate had changed immeasurably and García Márquez’s manoeuvres were less confident and relaxed, and intuited as such by journalists who, even if they could not see the future in a crystal ball as clearly as he could, also responded inevitably to the changing atmosphere.
García Márquez had written the most talked-about book ever published on Bolívar—the most important politician in the history of Latin America—and had become embroiled himself, as he must have anticipated, in a whole series of political debates in different places and at different levels. His former friend Mario Vargas Llosa, meanwhile, was involved even more directly in matters political. Indeed he was running as a candidate to become the President of Peru on a neoliberal ticket. He and García Márquez had diverged radically about Peruvian affairs in the late 1960s when García Márquez, like most Latin American leftists, conditionally supported the progressive military regime of General Juan Velasco, whereas Vargas Llosa was against him; indeed, dislike for the military was something which characterized Vargas Llosa at all times, whereas García Márquez, always the realist, though personally non-violent, knew that no country, state or regime could survive without an army and thus the military always had to be given some form of respect. At the end of March García Márquez could be found wishing his former friend well, though with reservations: “In Latin America it is inevitable that a person who has a certain public audience ends up in politics. But no one had gone as far as Mario Vargas Llosa. I hope he is not being dragged along by circumstances but believes that he really can resolve the situation in Peru. Even with so many ideological differences, one can only wish, if he gets elected, that the presidency goes well for him, in the interests of Peru.”41 He added that when one is famous, “one should not be naive, so that no one can use you.” In the event, to the disappointment of most literary spectators, Vargas Llosa was defeated by the almost unknown populist Alberto Fujimori, who went on to become one of Latin America’s most notorious end-of-century rulers.
In March Spain confirmed what an irate García Márquez had been predicting for months, when it adopted European Community regulations which meant that Latin Americans would no longer be given automatic visas for entry to the Peninsula. In a fit of pique and monomania reminiscent of his Pinochet fiasco, he announced: “I will never go back to Spain.”42 Needless to say, he would have to change his tune, but he was genuinely affronted. Spaniards didn’t have visas when they arrived in Latin America in 1492, he snorted. Why, even Franco had allowed Latin Americans to become Spanish citizens. He told the press he had warned Felipe González that when Spain entered the European Union, “you’ll turn your backs on Latin America.” Now they had.43 The truth was that his relationship with González, though a close one, was continually troubled by two irremediable irritants. González had made the long march from clandestine subversion of the Franco regime to membership not only of the European Community but even of NATO, and so the interests of Spain were no longer “complementary” to those of Latin America, as the Spaniards were claiming, but antagonistic: Spain was now, really for the first time in its modern history, part of “the West,” as González himself would announce quite soon when Spain sent forces to the Gulf War against Iraq in 1991. Secondly, there was nothing González would have liked to do more than satisfy García Márquez’s constant demands for him to ease Cuba back into the international community of nations; but González found Castro’s dictatorial practices unacceptable—as well as inconvenient—in the world in which he now moved and was constantly irritated by what he perceived as Castro’s incorrigible stubbornness and inability to adjust to the way the world was moving. (Castro, needless to say, was increasingly convinced that González was a traitor to international socialism.)
Meanwhile Cuba was going through its own dramas. At the end of 1988 a so-called “Committee of One Hundred” had sent a letter to Castro condemning his country’s policies on human rights and demanding the release of all political prisoners: “On January 1, 1989 you will have been in power for thirty years without having, up to now, held elections to determine if the Cuban people wish you to continue as President of the Republic, President of the Council of Ministers, President of the Council of State and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. Following the recent example of Chile, where after fifteen years of dictatorship, the people were able to express their view freely on the country’s political future, we request by this letter a plebiscite so that Cubans by free and secret ballot could assert simply with a yes or a no their agreement or disagreement with your staying in power.”44
This had appeared nine months after García Márquez had published his pen-portrait of Fidel Castro, lovable conversationalist and good friend to his friends. It was signed in Paris by a wide array of celebrities and intellectuals, though in essence the Libre group (Juan Goytisolo, Plinio Mendoza and Mario Vargas Llosa) were again at the centre of the action, and again with their mainly French allies. It was their first big push since the Padilla Affair, given added impetus now that communism was tottering in Europe. The American names are not especially impressive, apart from Susan Sontag, nor were the Latin American ones (no Carlos Fuentes, Augusto Roa Bastos, etc.), but this was nevertheless a powerful challenge.
It was in fact the single most serious verbal attack on Castro and Cuba since 1971 and was, indeed, the more telling because it was not based on a single event or a single problem but on Cuba’s entire political system. And it was signed by a very large number of influential intellectuals who could not by any stretch of the imagination be called “right-wing.” Reagan and Thatcher’s virulent anti-communism, backed by the Pope and immeasurably bolstered by Gorbachev’s effective surrender, was rapidly changing the international climate and would in due course change the world. Fidel’s Cuba would be one of the most serious casualties. And 1989 would be the year of the apocalypse. It was almost unbelievable that whilst all these clouds were gathering, García Márquez was sitting, much of the time in Havana, writing a novel about the last days of another Latin American hero—the only one who could rival Castro—also considered by some historians to have turned into a dictator late in his career.
Disillusioning events in Cuba must have strengthened García Márquez’s desire to return to Colombia. At a time when Mario Vargas Llosa was beginning his quixotic campaign for the presidency of Peru, the Cuban government was arresting (on 9 June) and trying General Arnaldo Ochoa, its greatest military hero of the African campaign, that adventure whose coverage had allowed García Márquez to get so close to Fidel, Raúl and the revolution. Also on trial were two good friends of García Márquez, Colonel Tony la Guardia, a kind of Cuban James Bond, and his twin brother Patricio. García Márquez was in Cuba at the time teaching at the film school. The defendants were found guilty of smuggling narcotics and thereby betraying the Cuban Revolution and Ochoa, Tony la Guardia and two others were sentenced to be executed on 13 July 1989. Patricio la Guardia was sentenced to thirty years in prison.
Quite near the end of The General in His Labyrinth Bolívar, lost in the rain and sick of waiting and not knowing why, touches rock bottom and cries in his sleep. The next day he flees one of his worst memories, the execution of General Manuel Piar in Angostura thirteen years before. Piar, a mulatto from Curaçao, had consistently resisted the authority of whites, including Bolívar himself, on behalf of blacks and mestizos. Bolívar condemned him to death for insubordination, ignoring the advice of even his closest friends. Then, struggling with tears, he was unable to watch the execution. The narrator comments: “It was the most savage use of power in his life, but the most opportune as well, for with it he consolidated his authority, unified his command, and cleared the road to his glory.”45 All those years later, Bolívar looks at his valet José Palacios and says, “I would do it again.” (Which is what Colonel Márquez was reputed to have said after he killed Medardo Pacheco in Barrancas.) There was no need whatever for García Márquez to place this example of an act of utter ruthlessness carried out for reasons of state at the end of his penultimate chapter, where it becomes, irremediably, the last major drama, the last narrative action of the novel (albeit thirteen years before the end of Bolívar’s life and therefore shown in flashback). But he did. And so again, García Márquez’s extraordinary ability to anticipate major events is quite blood-chilling. Fidel Castro must have read this episode a matter of weeks before participating in the judgement on Ochoa’s fate. Did he remember it as he made his decision?46
One of García Márquez’s close friends had now executed another of his close friends. (Naturally Castro declared that the decision was not in his hands.) The executions caused García Márquez much heartache and severe political embarrassment. Tony la Guardia’s family appealed to him personally on more than one occasion. He gave his word that he would intercede with Fidel; if he did, it was without success.
He left Cuba before the executions and on the day they were carried out he was to be found with his friend Alvaro Castaño in Paris, where he met Jessye Norman and French Culture Minister Jack Lang, who was making final preparations for the bicentenary of another revolution which had ended up devouring its children. The following day García Márquez attended the celebration banquet for the 200th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. He had feared he might have to sit next to Margaret Thatcher (“eyes of Caligula, lips of Marilyn Monroe,” according to their host François Mitterrand) but was fortunate enough to sit next to the glamorous Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan, while Thatcher herself, who had declared that the French Revolution “foreshadowed the language of communism,” appeared, as one British newspaper put it, like a “ghost at the feast.”47 The following day García Márquez arrived in Madrid and said he had seen Fidel Castro “last week,” adding, lamely, that he had told Fidel he was “not only against the death penalty but against death itself.” He said that the execution of four soldiers of the revolution was “a very painful thing, a drama we have all suffered.” He said he had “very good information” that the dead men had been tried by a military tribunal and executed for treason, not drug-trafficking. And “treason is punishable by death all over the world.”48
A return to Colombia was part of his ambitious new strategy—was he resigned or, as the French say, retreating the better to leap forward?—but Colombia was now entering a new nightmare period perhaps unparalleled in all its previous experience. On 18 August 1989, Luis Carlos Galán, now the official Liberal candidate and perhaps the most charismatic Colombian politician since Gaitán, met the same fate as his predecessor when he was assassinated at a political rally on the outskirts of Bogotá by hit men acting for Pablo Escobar. Even Colombia, so used to horror, reacted with stupefaction and widespread despair.49 Once again, García Márquez sent no message to the widow Gloria Pachón, who had been the first journalist to interview him on his return to Colombia in 1966, but he declared the following day that the country “should support President Barco.” He then appealed publicly to the drug-traffickers “not to turn Colombia into an abominable country where not even they, their children or their grandchildren will be able to live.”50
Politically, this had been an extraordinary year. And yet the biggest event of all was about to take place: the fall, on 9 November, of the Berlin Wall. It was possible, as Margaret Thatcher had intimated, and as García Márquez himself had also divined, that two hundred years of Western history had come to an end. Now the demise of the USSR and of communism itself could not be far behind. In December García Márquez, who, for sure, was not passing on the real content of his conversations with Castro, confided to the world that “Fidel fears that the USSR will become infected by capitalism; and that the Third World will be abandoned.”51 He said that the USSR was still desperately needed as a counterweight to the USA and that if it withdrew its financial support from Cuba—for this was the great spectre confronting the revolution—it would be “like a second blockade.” He acknowledged that Cuba needed profound changes, some of which had been well under way long before perestroika. But Cuba’s enemies were continuing to oppose its reinsertion into “its natural world”—Latin America—because people would see it as a triumph for Fidel Castro. It was fortunate, García Márquez must have thought, that Felipe González and his PSOE government had been re-elected in Spain on 29 October, one of the few pieces of good news in an otherwise dismaying panorama.
From García Márquez’s perspective, one entire plank of progressive thinking and political action in the world was on the way to disappearance. What would follow was an unprecedented period of economic and social change; but whereas in the past great moments of change, however disorienting, were accompanied by explanatory political and social ideologies, now everything was driven by economic change itself and the associated ideology of globalization. And simultaneously it might seem as if all meaning was being sucked out of existence by technological and biological advances. Hence the desperate return to fundamentalist religion, born out of anxiety, fear or even despair. Some of this he thought but very little would he say. Whatever happened out in the material world, García Márquez would set about finding another way to be optimistic. It was how he had responded to all but the darkest moments; now he saw it as his duty to the planet.