23
NINETEEN EIGHTY-NINE had been the most terrible year in Colombia’s recent history. In March Ernesto Samper, a future president, had received multiple bullet wounds in an assassination attempt at the El Dorado Airport and barely survived. In May paramilitaries attempted to blow up Miguel Maza Márquez, head of the DAS or secret police, who also miraculously survived. In August a leading presidential candidate, Luis Carlos Galán of the Liberal Party, was assassinated in full public view. In September the offices of El Espectador were devastated by another attack and the Hilton Hotel in Cartagena was bombed. The life of Galán’s replacement, César Gaviria, a party technocrat, had been threatened by the drug-traffickers as soon as he was nominated.1 In one attempt to kill him, in November, a civilian plane belonging to the national airline Avianca was bombed, with 107 dead, though Gaviria was not on board. In December another huge bomb was detonated in front of the DAS building in Bogotá, killing dozens of passers-by. And there were many other such episodes. All of this was new. Certainly there were no more people dying now than at the height of the Violencia in the 1950s but the vast majority of those had been anonymous deaths in the rural areas; indeed, the complaint that many had previously made about the Colombian political system was that almost anyone could be murdered except the candidates of the two traditional parties—unless (as was the case with both Gaitán and Galán) those candidates were rocking the consensual boat in which each party sailed alternately to comfortable prearranged victories in smooth political waters.
The difference, of course, was drugs. The traditional political parties were no longer entirely in control because a significant proportion of the national resources was no longer theirs to distribute in whatever ways would maintain the “stability” of their status quo. Other interests were now at stake. So now there were new targets. On 3 November Excelsior reported García Márquez as saying that the so-called “war against drugs” (the increasingly popular U.S. phrase) was “doomed to failure” as currently conceived.2He began to urge the need for renewed talks between government, guerrillas and drug-traffickers. Otherwise, he said, Colombia would end up as a victim of the United States’s own imperialist designs for the rest of the continent by fighting a proxy war on its behalf.
Just six weeks later everyone could see, who wished to do so, that once again García Márquez had shown that he knew his American hemisphere. In late December the United States under President George H. W. Bush, emboldened rather than relieved by the fall of the Berlin Wall, invaded Panama, killing hundreds of innocent civilians, and kidnapped a sitting Latin American president—their own creation, Antonio Noriega—for the first time in history. Sure he was a dictator, and a gangster, and a drug-runner, a real son-of-a-bitch (all of these were pretexts for the invasion); but he had been their son-of-a-bitch until just a few months before. Thus the USA returned to the policy of foreign invasions in precisely the year in which the Soviets acknowledged that their own great invasion, of Afghanistan, had been a mistake. García Márquez condemned the Panamanian intervention in Cuba’s Granma (21 December), despite his detestation of Noriega, but Granma was not a publication the U.S. authorities were known to take much notice of. Much new writing was on the wall, for sure; much old writing also.
In 1990 Colombia went on as it had in 1989. A group of “Notables,” leading public figures, apparently with support from President Barco, published an open letter proposing “less rigorous” punishment of drug-traffickers if they would bring the campaign of violence to an end. Leading elements of the Medellín cartel offered to halt the carnage and surrender cocaine-refining facilities in exchange for government guarantees. Not all the drug-traffickers went along with this proposal, however, and it soon broke down. A second presidential candidate, Bernardo Jaramillo, of the Unión Patriótica (ex-Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces, or FARC), was assassinated by the Medellín cartel in late March. (The FARC is the oldest guerrilla organization, whose founders originated from the left of the Liberal Party during the later phases of the Violencia and then founded the FARC as the armed wing of the Communist Party in the 1960s; it is also the guerrilla organisation with the deepest roots in the peasantry, in a country reputed to have, at the start of the twenty-first century, the largest number of displaced peasants in the world. When it attempted to take the electoral road in the 1980s, the FARC lost some 2,500 candidates and officials murdered by paramilitary death squads, often in league with government forces. Not surprisingly it returned to full-scale guerrilla war.) The Interior Minister, Carlos Lemos Simmonds, was accused by opponents of provoking Jaramillo’s murder and resigned. Then in late April a third presidential candidate, Carlos Pizarro, of another former guerrilla movement, M-19, was assassinated on an internal flight by a hit man who had been paid—so Pizarro’s brother alleged—by police or army-backed death squads. Meanwhile Pablo Escobar, the leading drug-trafficker, offered a bounty of 4,000 dollars for each policeman killed. Bombs exploded all over the country, killing hundreds of people. When the presidential elections were held, César Gaviria, Galán’s former chief of staff, won with 47.4 per cent of the vote. Only 45 per cent of the 14 million electorate went to the polls. A further offer by the drug-traffickers to suspend the violence was rejected by the new government. Gaviria’s programme included continuing a policy of firm repression of the drug cartels, and constitutional reform.
It was at this moment that García Márquez decided to make another effort to instal himself in Colombia. It has to be wondered whether he would have considered doing so at such a sombre time nationally if Cuba had not been so politically embarrassing to him. When he found his feet again and began to consolidate his new political strategy the objective would no longer be to advance the Cuban Revolution as such but to help save Fidel—if necessary, from himself.3 Now, on several occasions, García Márquez conceded—though he advanced it as an avant—garde intuition-that “we are in the first stages of a new and unpredictable era,” but then specified, perhaps less convincingly, that this new era “seems destined to liberate our thinking.”4 What he did not acknowledge was that this new era represented the defeat of everything he had always believed in. He decided to make not a clean breast of it but the best fist of it, and to act as if all that was happening was exactly what he had been hoping for: it was the reactionaries, first among them the U.S. government, who did not grasp the enormity of what was happening in the world and the scale of the opportunities that now awaited mankind. This, he argued, required everyone to reconsider their political convictions.5 It was, truly, a defining moment in his thinking.
Surely things could only get better? No, they immediately got worse. In late February, a few weeks after the example of Panama, the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, which had won power and held on to it in the teeth of American opposition, was voted out of office by a people weary of war and pessimistic about the future in a continent still dominated by the Colossus of the North. García Márquez was stupefied but managed to bluster that the Sandinistas would win the next election.6 Fidel Castro would not have been surprised by the Nicaraguan reverse but he must have been bitterly disappointed and fearful for his own country’s future. The truth was that Latin America as a whole was poorer at the end of the 1980s than it had been in the 1960s and most of its countries were heavily in debt. Economic backwardness and injustice were everywhere to be seen. One Hundred Years of Solitude was thought to have been a memorial to underdevelopment at the very moment when underdevelopment, thanks to the 1960s revolutions, was on its way out for ever. Far from it; in the 1980s Latin America seemed to be on its way back to Macondo.
Journalists pursued García Márquez everywhere in Colombia. As usual. He was already working on another historical drama about erotic passion to be entitled Of Love and Other Demons and now marked his return by announcing that he would be adapting Jorge Isaacs’s María (1867), Colombia’s best-known and most-loved novel before One Hundred Years of Solitude, for Colombian television, to be shown in October. He said it was a great challenge and a great responsibility but one he was looking forward to immensely. He was hoping to make the housewives of Latin America weep even more with the television version than their great-great-grandmothers—and his—had wept with the original novel in their laps back in the 1870s. “Love,” he declared—for María is indeed the best-known love story in the history of Latin America—“is the most important subject in the history of humanity. Some say it is death. I don’t think so because everything is connected to love.”7 He could not more succinctly have conveyed his own evolution in terms of a thematic centre of gravity.
Despite the announcement that he was “back”—viewed with inevitable scepticism by Colombians who had heard it many times before—García Márquez and Mercedes were soon on their way to Chile and Brazil, before returning temporarily to safe haven in Mexico. The visit to Chile was for the inauguration on 11 March of Patricio Aylwin, the first democratic President in Chile since 1973. Now García Márquez was finally able to get some satisfaction from seeing the back of Pinochet, who had also, like the Sandinistas, been voted out of office (though not out of Chile’s political life). García Márquez had encountered him in Washington in 1977 when the Panama Canal treaty was signed during García Márquez’s literary strike (due precisely to Pinochet being in power); now they were together again at a ceremony where the Chilean General must have felt much the less comfortable of the two. (The London Financial Times, appropriately, remarked that Pinochet was now “adrift in his labyrinth.”)8 García Márquez’s most notable experience was taking part in the symbolic gesture of reopening Pablo Neruda’s house at Isla Negra, a place of pilgrimage closed down by the dictatorship for seventeen years. He was accompanied by José Donoso, Jorge Edwards, the poet Nicanor Parra and Enrique Correa, General Secretary of the new government.
In August Gaviria, elected in May, came to power in Colombia at the age of forty-three. Almost his first policy initiative was to propose a National Constituent Assembly to reform the country’s system of government—the current constitution dated back to the country’s only costeño president, Rafael Núñez, in 1886—and this of course was exactly what García Márquez, who had always said that the old constitution was merely “theoretical,” would have wished Gaviria to do. (On 4 September El País asked rhetorically if García Márquez was a “Gavirista.”9 Not yet, was the answer. But he soon would be.) A new constitution would redefine the country and might lead to an entirely different future. García Márquez was proposed on 27 August as a candidate for the Constituent Assembly, tasked with drawing up the new document; the press would discuss his possible participation endlessly for the next few months, taking great pleasure in exposing the contradictions of a man who was a “friend of dictators” and who had never voted in his entire life.
Despite his constructive beginning, Gaviria was given no honeymoon by the drug-traffickers, and politics as usual continued in the very month of his inauguration. On 30 August Diana Turbay, journalist daughter of ex-President Julio César Turbay, and five other journalists were abducted by gangsters working for Pablo Escobar. On 31 August bandits attempted to abduct radio journalist Yamid Amat. These events and other similar cases would form the basis for García Márquez’s documentary novel News of a Kidnappingfour years later, though at this moment the pattern of events was not clear even to him. On 3 September he found the second phrase of his new slogan. The first was already familiar: “The times are changing and we have to adjust.” The second was new: “Only Fidel can change Cuba. But the United States always needs a bogeyman.”10 This was brilliantly ingenious but whether Fidel had been consulted about the need to change Cuba was in doubt. He was certainly not saying so publicly himself; but he would soon have to acknowledge Cuba’s economic orphanhood without the Soviet Union and with the U.S. embargo still in place and the so-called “Special Period” of unparalleled austerity would shortly be proclaimed.
In 1991 García Márquez improved his Colombian operation and confirmed his long-term intention to divide his life between Mexico and Colombia by installing his cousin Margarita Márquez, daughter of his late uncle Juan de Dios, as his local secretary in the spacious Bogotá apartment he and Mercedes had bought for their hitherto mythical return. But the month of García Márquez’s latest visit was another brutal one. Marina Montoya, a grandmother, was taken away from the other hostages captured by Escobar and murdered. The army attempted to rescue Diana Turbay on 25 January but she was killed as she attempted to flee her kidnappers. This provoked García Márquez—usually reluctant to make declarations in support of Colombian governments—to speak out. In a Radio Caracol interview on 26 January he said that the “Extraditables”—those liable to be arrested and sent to the United States for trial—should “respect the lives of journalists.”11 Hostage Beatriz Villamizar was released on 6 February, but Maruja Pachón and Pachito Santos, a member of the El Tiempo dynasty (and a future vice-president of the country), remained in captivity. To add to the chaos, there was also intense guerrilla activity around Bogotá itself. Meanwhile President Gaviria issued a statement in the United States declaring that on balance he still favoured extradition for drug-traffickers, a decision which ensured that the current levels of violence would continue or even increase. It seemed to be a war to the death between the drug cartels and civil society.
In July García Márquez returned briefly to Mexico to attend to his affairs and commitments there. Before he left, however, President Gaviria, who had perhaps been listening to García Márquez, had negotiated a sensational but profoundly controversial deal with Pablo Escobar through which the master criminal gave himself up in return for a reduced sentence and comfortable prison conditions—not in the United States, as the drug-traffickers all feared, but near his home city of Medellín. García Márquez described this agreement, which was certain to be condemned both by the Colombian right and by the USA, as a “triumph of intelligence.” He pointed out that the USA itself had a long history of negotiating with gangsters when there were reasons of state for doing so.12 It would be difficult to support all the agonizing twists and turns government policy would be obliged to take over the coming three years but García Márquez would do his best to be helpful.
And Gaviria would be helpful to him. When García Márquez got back to Colombia, he had important business to attend to which would demonstrate to all the doubters—of whom there were many—that he was committed not only to returning to the country on a long-term basis but also to participating in political life. He had decided to buy into the bid for a nightly television news bulletin, to be called QAP (taxi-driver slang for “ready, at your service, over to you”). The idea was Enrique Santos Calderón’s; other journalists involved were María Elvira Samper and María Isabel Rueda, and Julio Andrés Camacho, owner of the magazine Cromos, was a significant shareholder; as was García Márquez (though he would later claim that he was just “the holy spirit” of the enterprise). Not surprisingly, the Gaviria government gave the QAP a licence to begin broadcasting on 1 January 1992.
Meanwhile García Márquez and Mercedes were showing their commitment to the great return in the most tangible way of all. Following the purchase of the apartment in Bogotá they selected a location for a new house in Cartagena, a plot right on the seafront by the old city walls and next to the derelict Santa Clara convent, one of the city’s most beautiful colonial buildings. Colombia’s leading architect, Rogelio Salmona, who had helped García Márquez out in Paris in 1957, would lead the project. It seemed that Cuba was no longer García Márquez’s first priority. Or at least he was going to make it seem as if Cuba were no longer his first priority.
In August 1991, as part of his ongoing process of adaptation to the triumph of the liberal capitalist world, he at last entered the United States on a normal visa, for the first time since 1961. The new laws on communism and immigration had finally caused the name Gabriel García Márquez to be removed from the prohibition list. He had been waiting thirty years for a regular visa and now he entered the country to open the New York Film Festival held between 16 and 30 August. The prohibition had irritated García Márquez even more than he had been prepared to admit. For one thing, like most people on the Costa, not least the other members of the Barranquilla Group, he had never felt the visceral hatred for the USA and the lordly contempt for its culture which was so common among Latin American intellectuals and which they shared, of course, with many Europeans, most notably the French. (Ironically enough, Fidel Castro was also unprejudiced against the U.S. people and their culture; his lifelong love of baseball is just one example.)
In fact García Márquez’s objections to the USA had been overwhelmingly political in nature. He had been quick to notice that his American readers were significantly more enthusiastic than his European ones and much less troubled, surprisingly enough, by his extra-literary positions. His translations into English had always sold well and been well received by critics, and both his main translators, Gregory Rabassa and Edith Grossman, were Americans. In recent years he had been eager to build whatever links he could with progressive American film-makers, notably Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Red-ford and Woody Allen.13 And he had begun to appreciate New York much more now that he was visiting as a high-profile tourist and not under constant siege from Cuban anti-revolutionaries. So it was a great relief to have got his situation regularized. While he was in New York the attempted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev took place in Moscow; this would lead to the Soviet leader’s fall in December and the eventual disintegration of the USSR. García Márquez watched events on the television in his New York hotel room and discussed these and other world developments with none other than his former bête noire—only Pinochet had been a more hated figure—the ex-U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.14 Cuba was high on the agenda.
In the late autumn, having made his peace with the United States, Latin America’s most recent oppressor, García Márquez returned to its original colonizer, Spain. The year 1992 was fast approaching and with it the celebration of the 500th anniversary of the so-called “discovery of the New World.” The Spaniards, not always fully aware of how patronizing they can seem to Latin Americans, were dismayed when Latin Americans fell over one another to declare that they had not needed “discovering,” thank you very much—they, or their Indian forefathers and mothers, had discovered themselves many centuries before—and that it was by no means obvious to them that the arrival of the Spaniards in what they had mistakenly named the “Indies” in 1492 was a cause for celebration. The Spaniards hastily rebranded the forthcoming event the quincentenary of the “Encounter of Two Worlds” and engaged in some crisis diplomacy to get everyone back on board (so to speak). García Márquez had been one of the high-profile doubters. Yet secretly he must have been delighted at the prospect. His friend François Mitterrand had been in power for the celebration of the bicentenary of the French Revolution; now his Spanish friend Felipe González was in power for the organizing of the celebration of the half millennium since Europe’s arrival in the New World.
Always closely attuned to history, García Márquez had been working on an appropriate literary project for the occasion. Ever since the 1960s, and in a sense since he had actually lived in Europe in the mid-1950s, he had been toying with stories which communicated the reverse experience to the one being commemorated by the Spanish, namely that of Latin Americans arriving in Europe and confronting what for them was, despite everything, an alien culture. In a sense it was what he had recently been talking about with regard to Hispanic immigration into the United States, a kind of symbolic reverse colonization—some might even say a return of the repressed. He had outlined literally dozens of plots over the years and now he had decided to select the most promising ones, those which survived his final cull, to produce a collection that could appear in 1992. Some of them had emerged as late as the period 1980–84 when, just as he had written chronicles that would eventually turn into film scripts for the Difficult Loves series, so he had also produced stories that could be slipped into this new literary collection. García Márquez was never in a hurry to publish but he rarely missed an opportunity either; many of his projects remained ongoing for decades but found their way into artistic form—and into book form—in the end, and often at the ideal moment. Thus he delayed the completion and publication of his new novel Of Love and Other Demons and attended to his Europe-based tales.
He travelled to Barcelona, where he now had a sumptuous apartment on the Passeig de Graça or Paseo de Gracia, one of the city’s classiest addresses, in a block that had been refurbished by the prestigious architect Alfons Milà. After this he travelled round Europe, as if to stake his claim on the once-imperialist territory, part of which was busy recalling its adventures in his own region of the world, visiting Switzerland and Sweden among other countries. The main reason was that he had decided to call his new story collection Cuentos peregrinos. In Spanish the primary meaning of the word peregrino is the noun “pilgrim” but there is a second, adjectival meaning: “strange,” “surprising” or “alien”—hence the title of the English translation, Strange Pilgrims. He too was an alien pilgrim, less at home politically in the world than ever yet more determined than ever to put his best foot forward and think—or at least talk—positively. By now his projected short fiction collection was down to about fifteen stories but his visit to Europe, intended as a mere last-minute refresher course, more sentimental journey than practical update, put him in something of a panic. The Europe he remembered was not the Europe of today and neither of those Europes seemed to have been encapsulated in his book. He took hasty notes and then dedicated the next few months to an intense revision of the new book which, he had promised his agent and his publisher, would be ready in time to appear at the Seville Exposition the following July.
Unhappily, Cuba began the quincentenary year with another execution, that of an invading rebel Eduardo Díaz Betancourt. García Márquez himself made a public appeal for clemency, as did the leaders of even the countries most sympathetic to Cuba, but to no avail.15 The Cuban authorities judged that in Cuba’s circumstances deterring counter-revolution and terrorism was a matter of life and death. Mexico’s leading intellectual, the poet Octavio Paz, and the Latin American right had a field day and García Márquez had to scramble yet again to justify his relationship with the Cuban leader by explaining his record of getting prisoners pardoned and released. His own popularity was undiminished, however, at least with the Latin American people. When, in February, he made a brief appearance at a conference at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, just a few blocks from his house, the entire audience stood up as soon as he entered the auditorium and gave him a two-minute standing ovation.16 He was not even one of the participants. It happened everywhere he went. Latin America has not, historically, been a continent of winners but García Márquez was an undefeated and undisputed world champion.
Yet suddenly the champ was laid low by an unexpected enemy. He had been feeling tired for some time and had suddenly found it difficult to breathe when he got back into the thin air of Bogotá. He decided on a check-up. Doctors found a tumour a centimetre across in his left lung, due almost certainly to all the black tobacco he had smoked for all those years in front of all those typewriters. The doctors proposed an operation. He told the newsmen that both Fidel Castro and Carlos Salinas had called him before the surgery to wish him well. Castro offered him a private plane to Cuba with his personal doctor and Salinas lamented that he was not returning to Mexico for the treatment. García Márquez promised that Mexico would be his first stop after he recovered. He could have chosen to go to Cuba, Mexico or the United States but decided to have the surgery in Colombia. No metastasis was detected and the operation was deemed a complete success; he would have no breathing difficulties. His prospects were excellent and he was said to be in the best of spirits.
García Márquez had feared death all his life and had therefore also feared illness. Ever since he had become famous he had listened closely to doctors and had taken most of their advice about healthy living. Now, despite all his precautions, he had fallen ill. And almost nothing was more frightening than lung cancer. Yet he surprised himself and those who knew him. He took the challenge in hand, insisted on knowing all the facts about the illness and its likely prognosis, and was able to boast: “I mastered my life.”17 He was supposed to take six weeks of complete rest but on 10 June it was announced that he would be at the Seville Exposition in July, as scheduled, to launch not only the Colombian Pavilion but his own new book. By now it was known that there would be twelve “pilgrim stories,” and that the book was ready.
There was indeed almost a García Márquez takeover of the Seville Exposition. He became lord of the Colombian exhibition hall after his arrival in the Andalusian city, despite having declared in Madrid that there would not be a “Macondo Pavilion” in Seville.18(“Macondo” was a word he had not used for many years and its use now was a sign of things to come.) Just as he had in Madrid, he advertised his new book, Strange Pilgrims, of which 500,000 copies had been printed, at every opportunity. And the public clamoured for his autograph wherever he went. The Colombian politician and future presidential candidate Horacio Serpa, waiting to enter the Colombian Pavilion, heard two Spaniards commenting on the picture of García Márquez presiding over the banner advertising the twenty-fifth anniversary of One Hundred Years of Solitude: “And who is that guy?” “Oh, he’s the dictator of Colombia, he’s been in power twenty-five years now.”19 In fact it was the first time García Márquez had ever been present at the launch of one of his own books—it was after all 1992, and on Colombia’s national day!—and the crowds had to be controlled by the police. García Márquez even acted as President for a day because Pablo Escobar had escaped from prison and Gaviria had cancelled his journey to Spain. The Nobel Prize winner found himself opening a Colombian bottling plant in Madrid.
Strange Pilgrims brought together a collection of the first works by García Márquez set outside Latin America, and they all have a somewhat autobiographical air about them. The author states in his prologue that all except two of them (“The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow” and “Miss Forbes’s Summer of Happiness”) were completed in April 1992, though all were begun between 1976 and January 1982, in other words during the period when García Márquez was working for Alternativa and had resolved not to publish anything “literary” until Pinochet fell from power in Chile. It is, in retrospect, astonishing that he was working on these whimsical and in some cases rather slight creations at a time when he was interacting closely with Fidel and Raúl Castro and writing politically committed diatribes against the United States and the Colombian ruling class.
The stories are organized in no discernible order, whether chronological or thematic. The first, “Bon Voyage, Mr. President,” narrated in the third person, is many readers’ favourite, and is set in the 1950s in Geneva, the first place García Márquez went to in 1955, directly after landing in Paris. The protagonist, ex-President of the Caribbean republic Puerto Santo, has come from exile in Martinique to have medical tests in Switzerland. Like another story, “Maria dos Prazeres,” and his last novel, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, it tells the story of someone who discovers that death can always be postponed and is best forgotten about—a story, then, that probably became more relevant to the author in the final stages of preparing the collection. Here a charming but deeply cynical member of the ruling class wins over two well-meaning proletarians, justifying his own manipulations by saying, “They’re lies and they’re not lies. When it has to do with a president, the worst ignominies may be both true and false at the same time.”
García Márquez had decided to spend this quincentennial summer in Europe following his enforced stay in Bogotá. Strange pilgrimage. An invasion in reverse. Everyone who met him said he looked wonderful. “The doctors took out the only unhealthy things inside me,” he declared.20 Then he returned to Mexico. On 6 November Mercedes turned sixty and it was reported that she had received a huge floral tribute from President Salinas on her birthday.21 She had a whole phalanx of admirers among men of power and influence, many of whom even envied García Márquez a companion who showed—but never showed off—such an array of qualities, such good judgement, such permanent support. She was a consummate diplomat. This was not long after her husband was asked what he expected in the twenty-first century and he said that he thought women should take over the world to save humanity.22
Then, continuing this diplomatic revisionism, he took his first-ever political step against those totemic representatives of the Colombian left, the country’s guerrillas. He signed a letter sent to El Tiempo on 22 November by a long list of Colombian intellectuals, including the painter Fernando Botero. The letter was effectively in support of Gaviria’s recent decision to wage all-out war on the guerrillas, who had shown no interest in his peace overtures.23 The result, undoubtedly, would be to leave the guerrillas feeling isolated, especially by “petit-bourgeois intellectuals,” and to cause them to take an even harder line, which continues to this day. For García Márquez it was a huge decision but undoubtedly one consonant with the other decisions he had taken as a result of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Probably, as much as anything, he was hoping to have a quieter time following his illness. He did not want to be constantly urged to support the almost insupportable. He would never again have quite the influence with the Colombian left that he had enjoyed until that moment; but then the Colombian left would not have the influence it had before. Inevitably rumours spread still more widely that he would soon be moving away from Castro too; after all Fidel was the originator and the symbol of most of the guerrilla movements which had swept Latin America ever since the early 1960s. García Márquez laughed the rumours off. He would never abandon Fidel.24
He had dissociated himself from the guerrillas at precisely the moment that a new president was about to enter the White House in Washington. It was reported that Bill Clinton, the first Democrat President for twelve years, was “an enthusiastic reader of García Márquez.” Perhaps things were looking up at last: it had been widely reported that the Bush family had no books in their house and much preferred watching television.
García Márquez stayed on in Cartagena and on 11 January could be seen in a photo in El Espectador at the bullring talking with Augusto López Valencia, the President of Julio Mario Santo Domingo’s multinational company, Bavaria.25 The newspaper had no comment or explanation of their encounter. In previous eras García Márquez would have either ensured that such meetings were unknown to the world or would have provided some explanation, including serendipity. Not any longer. He too was now in the bourgeois world and was ready to commit himself to the market economy. As a socialist he had always been opposed on principle to charity (though, privately, he had always been generous to dependent individuals with his own money, whilst never drawing attention to the fact); but in the absence of any other form of income for causes in which he believed, he turned to a phenomenon that was returning to the Western world on a scale not seen since the last great triumph of monopoly capitalism at the time of the American “Gilded Age” in the late nineteenth century: public philanthropy. (Bill Clinton himself would eventually write a book on “Giving.”)26 He had a Cuban film foundation to run. And he was beginning to think of another major and similarly costly project, an institute of journalism. The overt socialist war, both armed and intellectual, was over, the class struggle was in abeyance, and he had become convinced that the cultural and political war of positions—acting as progressively as possible in the circumstances—was all that he could aspire to. Thus he began to cultivate the rich, famous and powerful more assiduously than before.
As part of his diplomatic self-redefinition, he had allowed his name to go forward to a Unesco “Forum of Reflection,” or forum of twenty-one “Wise Men,” as the Colombian press dubbed it, to discuss the planet’s growing problems within the so-called “new world order” at a time when Unesco had been under heavy criticism by the USA and the UK for just this kind of thing—costly international “junkets,” mere “talking shops” instead of concrete action. Of course talk had been thought dangerous in the powerhouses of the liberal West, for the first time in decades, since the advent of Thatcher and Reagan. Talk caused trouble and was mainly indulged in by leftists; and after all, what was the point of idle speculation when, as Thatcher herself had famously declared, there was “no such thing as society.” García Márquez was nominated by Luis Carlos Galán’s widow, Gloria Pachón, who was Colombian ambassador to Unesco in Paris, and of course by her boss, Gaviria. García Márquez said he was doing it as much for the sake of his country as for the world.27 Other members included Vaclav Havel, Umberto Eco, Michel Serres and Edward Said. The first meeting was held in Paris on 27 January 1993 and put García Márquez in touch with the first-ever Hispanic director of Unesco, the Spaniard Federico Mayor, who soon became a firm friend. As if to emphasise his enhanced dignity and respectability, and perhaps to impress the folks back home in the “Athens of South America,” he followed up his visit to Paris, home of the Academy mentality, with a broadside against the Spanish Royal Academy, author, he alleged, of “a geocentric dictionary.”28 Once again, in the past he would not have deigned to refer to academies. But this would turn out to be yet another extremely smart move in the longer term and would, again, put him in close touch with people—academicians, philologists, right-wing poets—on whom he would never previously have “wasted” his time. Before long he would be building links with the University of Guadalajara in Mexico, where he had recently developed a close relationship with its Rector, Raúl Padilla López, and he and Carlos Fuentes gave their support for Guadalajara’s Chair in honour of Julio Cortázar. Fuentes and García Márquez were already talking about ways of approaching the new U.S. President, Bill Clinton, presumed to be much more moderate—as well as more cultured—than his recent Republican predecessors.
In June, ignoring all his own complaints about distractions from writing, he was in Barcelona electioneering with Felipe González, creating a sensation in front of forty thousand PSOE supporters at one of González’s late rallies at Montjuïc. He would perhaps have done better to travel to Venezuela where another friend, Carlos Andrés Pérez, was entering a political crisis from which he would never recover. On 20 May Pérez was relieved of his functions as President of Venezuela, accused of stealing 17 million dollars of the nation’s money when he came to power in 1989. García Márquez sent a public message of support stressing Pérez’s courage in resisting several coup attempts against him—one by a soldier called Hugo Chávez, currently serving out a jail sentence—and his “magnificent sense of friendship” (what did that have to do with anything, many readers asked), though not exalting his great sense of integrity. Unfortunately García Márquez went still further and had the effrontery to criticize the institutions and representatives of the country and to imply that the accusations were a put-up job; he barely stopped short of criticizing the Venezuelan people.29 He would never be quite so popular in Venezuela again. His personal relationships with the powerful were beginning to cost him dear.
In October García Márquez met Gloria Pachón’s sister Maruja, by then Minister of Education in Colombia, and her husband Alberto Villamizar. The couple proposed that he should write a book about their experiences in 1990–91, when Maruja was kidnapped. He was still absorbed in the preparation of Of Love and Other Demons and asked for a year to think about it but to their astonishment he came back to them after just a few weeks and accepted. He was a man of sixty-six embarking on another demanding and exhausting project. The book would be called News of a Kidnapping. As it happened, by the time he had made his mind up two of the principal protagonists of the drama were dead: Father Rafael García Herreros, who had persuaded Pablo Escobar to give himself up, had died on 24 November 1992, and Escobar himself was gunned down by Colombian police in Medellín on 2 December 1993, only weeks after García Márquez’s first conversation with his former victims, Maruja and Alberto.
But just before Escobar was finally tracked down by the police came the pay-off for all García Márquez’s efforts with Gaviria. It was announced that Colombia was restoring its diplomatic links with Cuba. Castro, on his way back from attending the inauguration of a new president in Bolivia, had recently made a “private visit” to Cartagena—at last García Márquez had had the pleasure of greeting his friend on Colombian soil—and now, just a few weeks later, full relations were restored. Fidel in, Escobar out: this was a wonderful month both for Gaviria and for García Márquez.
At the end of the year the whole García Márquez family got together in Cartagena for the first time in many years. A historic photograph was taken of Luisa Santiaga and all her children. There would never be another such meeting.
García Márquez continued to keep busy; far too busy, surely. Almost no one knew it but, as usual, he was already at work on his next book before the last one was even published. But he needed to keep it secret for the time being. In March he travelled to Itagüí near Medellín in north-western Colombia with a number of American reporters, including James Brooke of the New York Times. Their objective was to visit the Ochoa brothers, the leading drug-traffickers after Escobar. Brooke recalled:
Presidents come and go but the owlish writer, universally known by his nickname, Gabo, endures… A day spent with Mr. García Márquez quickly sketched the dimensions of the man. At the airport in Cartagena, where he lives, travelers recognized the author in his black-rimmed glasses and repeated his nickname in awe. At a prison in Itagüí, outside Medellín, three convicted cocaine traffickers known as the Ochoa brothers tripped over themselves vying for the honor of serving him lunch. At a barracks in Neiva, uniformed helicopter pilots from Colombia’s anti-drug police ignored the national police commander and jostled for position in souvenir photos with the writer.30
This was the only journey García Márquez would make while researching News of a Kidnapping. Two years later he revealed that he had given Brooke and other journalists the slip and talked to Jorge Luis Ochoa by himself. He didn’t want his sources to be “burned” nor Ochoa to give a false version of their meeting.
Suddenly, just as García Márquez was looking forward to the publication of Of Love and Other Demons, Mexico, his refuge, his place of stability, began to implode, and Carlos Salinas, his great friend, began to move into difficulties that would eventually be greater even than those recently suffered by the hapless Carlos Andrés Pérez in Venezuela. First, down in Chiapas, in the Mexican south, a new indigenist movement, the Zapatistas, inspired by a mysterious and charismatic guerrilla leader known as “Comandante Marcos,” began to catch world headlines and Salinas seemed to be caught off guard and to have little idea what to do. But then, even more dramatically, the governing PRI’s official candidate for the upcoming elections, Luis Donaldo Colosio, a good friend of García Márquez’s, was assassinated in the north of the country, the first politician of his stature to die in this way since the bloody revolutionary period in the 1920s. Salinas himself was suspected by many observers of having planned the murder of his own successor, placing García Márquez in a situation not entirely different from the one he had faced four years earlier in Havana when his friend Tony la Guardia was executed by his friend Fidel Castro. He had got very close to Colosio and had high hopes that the somewhat unorthodox candidate might take the country in a more progressive direction. For the first time García Márquez broke his personal rule—and Mexico’s laws—by issuing a statement on the event and calling for calm in this country he loved.31 Colombia, Cuba, Venezuela, now even Mexico, all his citadels were falling: it was back to Macondo with a vengeance.
And García Márquez himself was wondering whether he had started on a decline of his own. He was interviewed in March and April by David Streitfeld of the Washington Post as the last preparations were made for the publication of Of Love and Other Demons.Streitfeld noted that García Márquez’s books were obsessed with death and so was their author, who felt that if he stopped writing he might die: “In more ways than the cancer, his body is beginning to betray him. ‘It’s curious,’ he says, ‘how one starts to perceive the signs of growing old. I first started to forget names and telephone numbers, then it became more encompassing. I couldn’t remember a word, a face, or a melody.’”32 No doubt this helped to explain why writing his memoirs had recently come to seem a much more pressing task than before.
On 22 April, in the midst of so much political chaos, Of Love and Other Demons was published. Its launch coincided with the Bogotá Book Fair, where his old friend Gonzalo Mallarino made an impassioned speech exalting his friend’s new novel. García Márquez had reached the summit of his powers, he declared.33 He had dedicated the novel to Carmen Balcells, “bathed in tears.” Once again it was set in Cartagena: late in 1949 a young journalist, working for a newspaper whose editor is Clemente Manuel Zabala, is sent to investigate a story. The old convent of Santa Clara is to be converted into a de luxe hotel and some of the oldest tombs have been opened for relocation. (García Márquez was making his peace with Cartagena past by mentioning—acknowledging—Zabala; and he was imagining his way in to Cartagena present because his new house was to be built right across the street from the old convent.) In one of the tombs there has appeared a skull with a torrent of bright red hair that has continued growing for almost two centuries and is now more than twenty-two metres long. The young journalist decides to investigate the case. The result is this novel.
The novel imagines that one December, late in the colonial period, a rabid dog bites several people in the market at Cartagena, including a girl with long red hair called Sierva María, who is just about to celebrate her twelfth birthday. Although her father the Marquis of Casal-duero is one of the wealthiest men in the city, he is also a weakling and has allowed Sierva María, unloved by her mother, to be brought up in the slave yard. Despite the fact that rabies does not develop, the Catholic Church believes that she is possessed by the devil—she has merely taken on African beliefs—and urges the Marquis to have her exorcised. She is taken to the convent of Santa Clara for supervision and the Bishop brings in one of the up-and-coming experts on possession and exorcism, Cayetano Delaura, a theologian and librarian destined, it is said, for the Vatican. The girl will never see the streets of Cartagena again.
Delaura, who has no experience or understanding of women, has a dream about the girl even before he meets her. She is in a room—which in his dream is the room he had as a student in Salamanca—looking out on a snow-covered landscape and she is eating grapes from her lap that never run out; if they did she would die. The girl he meets the next morning, tied hand and foot because of her rages, is exactly as he dreamed her. His first reaction is to tell the Abbess that the treatment she is suffering would turn anyone into a devil. His second reaction is to become obsessed with the child and to begin to explore the forbidden books in the library that only he is permitted to see. He finds a secret entrance to the convent, and begins to visit Sierva María every night, reciting poetry. Finally he declares his true feelings, embraces her, and they sleep together without quite completing the sexual act. But in April, nearly five months after she was bitten by the rabid dog, the process of exorcism begins. Her hair is cut off and burned. The Bishop officiates in front of all the authorities and nuns but collapses; Sierva María naturally acts like one possessed. Delaura’s misdeeds are discovered and he is condemned by the Inquisition as a heretic—which of course he is: indeed, he is guilty and Sierva María is innocent—and he is condemned to spend many years in a lepers’ hospital. Sierva María waits for him in vain and after three days she refuses to eat. She never understands why Delaura did not come back, but on 29 May she in her turn dreams about the field of snow but now she eats the grapes two at a time in her fever to get to the last one. Before the sixth exorcism she is dead but her shorn head is bursting with hair again.
This book is a further sign of García Márquez’s engagement with Cartagena. Love in the Time of Cholera may be interpreted as a re-encounter with his father, and with Colombia’s past, as well as an exploration of the conflict between marriage and sexual adventurism; above all, a book about the suburb of Manga, where his parents lived and where he had recently bought his mother an apartment. Of Love and Other Demons is about the old walled city, where García Márquez was having a new “mansion” built as he wrote the book; thus both novels have to do in an oblique way with his properties and his power. This time he was recovering the whole of Colombian history back to the late colonial period. The work has a sort of bleak, heavy authority—like some works by Alvaro Mutis—with few light features. Love in the Time of Cholera was written before the historic disasters of 1989; Of Love and Other Demons, though set in the colonial period, is conceived from the world after 1989 and is a much darker work. For all his optimistic declarations about the future, there is little doubt that in his deeper feelings García Márquez saw a world going backwards for the first time in two hundred years: backwards, in some respects, before the French Revolution and the Enlightenment, backwards before Latin America’s independence from Spain (now being reversed, at least in the economic sense), and backwards from the dreams of the socialist revolution of 1917. He was writing in a world where no revolution seemed conceivable and a Bolivarian conception that political action in Colombia is futile would again begin to dominate his thinking.
The use of dreams in this work—using elements of García Márquez’s own adolescent experience (his exile from home to a school in icy climes, his trunk, his book without a cover, his terrifying nightmares)—is stunning. The end of the novel, like De Palma out of Hitchcock, makes the blood run cold and reminds the reader that when this writer is fully focused, his powers of evocation are second to none. The last pages give the work a retrospective brilliance which it has perhaps not entirely earned. In particular, perhaps the greatest miracle, as the reader also noticed on the last page of The General in His Labyrinth, is how the writer gives us what we have come to expect—the same themes, albeit arranged in a different design, the same subjects, same structure, same style, same narrative technique—including what, perversely and paradoxically, we want most of all: to be stunned by the manner in which, within the familiar, this writer can nevertheless surprise us yet again in ways we somehow expect yet can never entirely anticipate. Like a journey on a literary roller-coaster, with the biggest churn of the stomach at the very end of the ride.
The book was generally well received, not least by academics, who were pleased to see García Márquez rather deliberately taking up the academy’s current “postmodern” preoccupations with feminism, sexuality, race, religion, identity and the legacy of the Enlightenment as it related to all these questions. Jean-François Fogel declared in Le Monde that García Márquez remained “one of the few novelists capable of evoking love without irony or embarrassment.”34 A. S. Byatt in the New York Review of Booksdescribed the novel as “an almost didactic, yet brilliantly moving, tour de force.”35 Peter Kemp in the London Sunday Times spoke of incredible events narrated in a calm style: “At once nostalgic and satiric, a resplendent fable and a sombre parable, Of Love and Other Demons is a further marvellous manifestation of the enchantment and the disenchantment that his native Colombia always stirs in García Márquez.”36 Despite everything, “Márquez,” as most English-speaking reviewers insisted on calling him, had woven his “magic” yet again.
AT THE TIME Of Love and Other Demons was published in Colombia, García Márquez made a visit to Spain to resume his practice of being elsewhere when a book of his was launched. He visited Seville again for the spring fair and attended some of the traditional early season bullfights. Rosa Mora of El País caught up with him in April and he told her that he had been working on his memoirs, especially the story of his return to Aracataca with his mother: “I think that everything I am came out of that trip.”37 But the memoirs had come to a halt again and in any case he was resolved that his next book should be some kind of reportage. Not only was he missing journalism, he said, but he had Unesco backing for one of his most cherished projects, a journalism foundation which would challenge the work of modern schools of communication since these, in his perception, “mean to do away with journalism.”
In recent years more journalists had been killed in Colombia than almost anywhere else in the world. There were also, unfortunately, many more spectacular and usually tragic stories to report in that country than almost anywhere else in the world. Nowhere had a higher murder rate; and almost nowhere else could boast Colombia’s toxic and terrifying mixture of terrorism, drug-trafficking, guerrilla warfare and paramilitary activity, combined with police and military responses that at times were almost as violent as the ills they were seeking to eradicate. César Gaviria was at the end of his hallucinatory four years in government and had striven heroically to prevent the country from sliding into outright anarchy but the next government, due to be elected in May, also had a nightmarish challenge on its hands. And of course García Márquez was working, still secretly, on a book (“some kind of reportage”) which would be based on the period just past. But he was not yet ready to make a full announcement because in this case it was absolutely crucial to conceal and protect his sources.
In June, back in Latin America, he was present at the 4th Ibero-American Summit of all the leaders of Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula, held in Cartagena. Gaviria had arranged the venue as outgoing President of Colombia. The King of Spain, Felipe González, Carlos Salinas de Gortari and Fidel Castro, as well as Gaviria, were all present at the meeting in what was now effectively García Márquez’s home town. All of them, even the King, were men García Márquez by now considered “friends”; though some Colombians sniped that García Márquez seemed to be a member of the Cuban delegation and indeed he offered himself as bodyguard to Fidel Castro: “I was there because it was rumoured they were going to try to assassinate Fidel. And Cuban security was not going to let Fidel take part in the parade, so I offered to accompany him in the horse-drawn carriage. I told them that here in Colombia, if I went with him, no one would dare to fire. So five of us got in the coach, all squeezed in together and joking about the situation. Just as I was telling Fidel I was sure nothing would happen, the horse reared up.”38 At this summit Carlos Salinas had proposed an “Association of Caribbean States,” to include Cuba. Fidel said that since Cuba was always excluded from everything, “by the will of those who run this world,” he much appreciated the invitation.39 And García Márquez was gratified that he was able to show the Cuban leader some results from all his energetic diplomatic activity.
Two weeks later the final round of the Colombian elections was held. The two candidates were Liberal Ernesto Samper and Conservative Andrés Pastrana. It was revealing about Colombia that Pastrana, a former mayor of Bogotá, son of a former president, and a well-known television news anchor, had been thought a certain dead man when he was kidnapped by one of the drug cartels in 1988, while Samper, who had just finished a term as Colombian ambassador in Madrid, had barely survived a hail of bullets at the airport of El Dorado in Bogotá the following year. Samper should have been a natural ally of García Márquez. He was on the left of the Liberal Party, he was the brother of his old friend Daniel Samper (a journalist with Alternativa and El Tiempo), and García Márquez had invited him and his number two Horacio Serpa to meet Fidel Castro in Cuba in March 1987. But that meeting had not gone well.40 As a populist Samper was more hostile to Castroism than a more conservative but also pragmatic politician such as Gaviria had proved to be. Samper was also a tough, sceptical, obdurate machine politician, very popular in the provinces despite his Bogotá background, with priorities that were different from those of García Márquez.
In the event Samper won the election but Pastrana cried foul immediately, having been passed a tape recording by the American secret services which seemed to suggest that Samper’s campaign manager had received a significant contribution from parties connected directly to the drug-trafficking cartels. This provoked a political and indeed constitutional crisis such as even Colombia had rarely experienced in its history and it would dog Samper’s entire four-year term as President. As a matter of fact it was never certain that he would actually manage to complete his period in office. García Márquez would always deny that he was opposed to the new President at the beginning of his administration but he would never give his unconditional support to Samper and indeed was already building his relationship with younger politicians such as Juan Manuel Santos, another “dauphin” of the El Tiempo dynasty, who had been Minister of Foreign Trade during the Gaviria period and had been designated by the outgoing government to greet the distinguished guests when they arrived at the Ibero-American Summit. García Márquez considered Santos a future president of Colombia and began to cultivate him. Santos would become one of Samper’s most formidable enemies—and from within his own party.
García Márquez took a team from Paris Match to see his new house being built in Cartagena and told them that he had been “waiting thirty years to build the perfect house in the perfect place.”41 Now at last his dream was coming true. Unfortunately a shadow, literally, had been cast over his plans. The Santa Clara convent, scenario of Of Love and Other Demons, had been converted into the five-star hotel the novel had mentioned fictionally when it was written in 1993, and all the rooms on the western side of the building directly overlooked García Márquez’s new home, still under construction, notably the terrace and the swimming pool.
On 7 August 1994, the day of Samper’s inauguration, García Márquez and Mercedes sent the new President a message of congratulations and best wishes, which was reprinted in the press, but it did not take a very suspicious mind to see that this was not an especially warm greeting and that it implicitly anticipated difficult times for the new government. Indeed, as the newspaper headlines revealed, it was a kind of warning: “Mr. President, take good care of your senses.”42 Events were taking on, undoubtedly, a Shakespearean turn. Things had been going so well for García Márquez recently, and they had started so badly for Samper almost from the day of his inauguration, that it is possible that the normally circumspect García Márquez began to overreach himself from the very beginning of Samper’s term.
However in September, at last, he finally gained access to the very centre of power on the planet when he and Carlos Fuentes were invited by Fuentes’s friend William Styron to meet Bill and Hillary Clinton at Styron’s house at Martha’s Vineyard. The owners of the Washington Post and New York Times were also present. García Márquez was hoping to talk about Cuba—only the week before he had persuaded Fidel to allow dissident writer Norberto Fuentes to leave the country—but unfortunately for him U.S.-Cuban relations were then going through one of their worst phases and it is said that Clinton refused to discuss Cuban affairs.43 They did discuss the Colombian crisis, however, and García Márquez made some defence of Samper and urged Clinton not to punish Colombia for Samper’s possible misdemeanours. Something the American President and the three writers were able to agree on, in a highly cordial meeting, was their shared enthusiasm for the work of William Faulkner. Fuentes and García Márquez were astonished to hear Clinton recite whole passages from The Sound and the Fury entirely from memory. As for Cuba, Clinton would find himself unable to resist the pressure from the Miami Cubans and a virulently anti-communist Republican Senate and would be forced to allow ever-harsher sanctions against the island state. There is little evidence that García Márquez’s future relationship with the most powerful man on the planet brought positive results either for Cuba or for Colombia, though there is no doubt that in terms of his own glamour and prestige it was certainly good for García Márquez.
The following month César Gaviria became Secretary General of the Organization of American States. Ironically enough Gaviria, a right-of-centre neo-liberal, found it difficult to pursue his own inclination of liberalizing hemispheric relationships with Cuba in the face of opposition from a Democrat President in the USA but he persisted in the endeavour. So now García Márquez had important relationships with the Secretary General of the Organization of American States, the Director General of Unesco, and the leaders of the United States, Mexico, Cuba, France and Spain. Only Colombia was missing. Meanwhile, on the occasion of Gaviria’s inauguration as Secretary General, Carlos Fuentes, always politically acute, said that Bill Clinton should “lose Florida but gain the world” and that Fidel Castro should “lose Marx but save the Revolution.”44 Neither man had any intention of heeding his advice.
On 20 September Alfonso Fuenmayor, the last essential representative—and the very heart—of the Barranquilla Group, died in Barranquilla. (Germán Vargas had died in 1991 and Alejandro Obregón the following year.) From the time his old colleague and mentor fell sick García Márquez had kept away, saying that he was “too much of a chicken” to confront his friend in such a crisis.45 Perhaps his own illness had made him superstitious about coming too close to death. Fuenmayor’s son Rodrigo and Group members Quique Scopell and Juancho Jinete attended the wake alone, with two bottles of whisky standing between the three of them. This left as García Márquez’s most prominent old friend Alvaro Mutis, who was still going strong.
In February García Márquez’s son Rodrigo married Adriana Sheinbaum in a quiet ceremony at the Hall of Record in East Los Angeles. The couple’s first child, Isabel, would be born on 1 January 1996 and the second, Inés, in 1998. The previous July García Márquez had assured Paris Match, “I have excellent relations with both my sons. They are what they wanted to be, and what I wanted them to be.”46 Rodrigo’s career as a film-maker in Hollywood would go from strength to strength.
On 5 March García Márquez carried out his first-ever interview for television, with Jack Lang, in Cartagena. He chose Sergio Cabrera, director of the highly praised movie The Snail’s Strategy, as his cameraman. Lang was in his last days as a minister. François Mitterrand, now a very sick man, had survived to the end of his two seven-year terms; he would die on 8 January 1996. The French Socialist Party was about to be voted out of office and would never be elected again during the rest of Jack Lang’s political career. García Márquez’s contact with politicians in France began to wane.
Now he formally launched his Foundation for a New Ibero-American Journalism, whose regular “workshops” would be held both in Barranquilla and Cartagena, though Cartagena would gradually assume precedence and become the operational centre. He loved the word “foundation,” like the word “workshop,” because, no doubt, they reminded him of his grandfather the Colonel, the man he always claimed had “founded” the town of Aracataca. This new foundation was García Márquez’s present to his adoptive Colombian city and the strongest symbol of his renewed commitment to the country and its well-being. (However, the foundation’s youthful director, Jaime Abello, was from Barranquilla, not Cartagena; the choice was certainly not accidental.) It would provide brief courses for young journalists from all over Latin America, with the incentive of García Márquez himself leading a significant number of them and other world-famous journalists such as Poland’s Ryszard Kapuściński and the USA’s Jon Lee Anderson also taking part.
By the time Of Love and Other Demons was published García Márquez had lost patience completely with the new Colombian President. In an interview with Mexican journalist Susana Cato in Mexico he barely concealed his frustration and contempt for Samper. She asked, “What are Colombians thinking of doing so as not to arrive at the twenty-first century in the same situation they are in today?” García Márquez replied:
How do you suppose we can think about the twenty-first century when we’re still trying to reach the twentieth? Just think that I’ve spent three years trying to make sure there is not a single false piece of information in a book about a country where we no longer know what is true and what is false. What future can there be for fiction if a presidential candidate does not realize that his sacred advisors are receiving millions of dollars of dirty money for his campaign? Where his accusers are not taken seriously because in the midst of the many truths they told, they also told a lot of lies. Where the President in turn sets himself up as the accuser of his accusers with the argument that they really did receive dirty money but didn’t use it in their campaign because they stole it… In a country like that, goddammit, we novelists have no option but to look for another job.47
It was a return to old arguments from a man protesting that he just wanted to record everyday naturalistic reality but that Colombia’s horrors went beyond ordinary notions of reportage. Macondo lived on.
Things went from bad to worse. García Márquez became concerned that his bodyguards, supplied by successive governments ever since the Betancur regime, were now poorly and inconsistently managed. They were changed so often that in the end more than sixty men had an intimate acquaintance with his lifestyle and personal details. This, in Colombia, was a highly dangerous situation in which to find oneself and made him wonder how safe he was in the country. He and Samper had continued to talk, with tension constantly increasing between them—some said García Márquez was even drinking more whisky—until they met, for the last time, over Easter 1996, in the apartment of the ex-Mayor of Cartagena, Jorge Enrique Rizo. García Márquez told Samper, who was about to be judged by Congress, that the constitutional reforms he was considering might be thought to be an advance payment to the congressmen for absolving him. Stung, Samper replied, “It must be those Gaviria supporters filling your head with stories.” García Márquez then retorted, “Kindly pay me some respect. Why when I give an opinion that coincides with what you want to hear is it me that is thinking but when it doesn’t it’s the opposition brainwashing me?” Samper tried to smoothe it over but García Márquez was heard to mutter, “There’s no more to be done here.” From that moment he began to withdraw from active participation in the nation’s affairs and he and Samper would not meet again for many years.48
The attacker could also be attacked, however. Cuban exile Norberto Fuentes, who had been a good friend of García Márquez, and whom he had only recently persuaded the authorities to release from the island, had recently written the first of several articles in which he not only showed that he felt no sense of gratitude to García Márquez but violently excoriated him for his role in the Cuban set-up whilst minimizing the extent of his influence and his achievements.49 As usual García Márquez declined to reply. But in April he did something that astonished all who knew him by giving a talk at the Higher Military School in Bogotá. Amidst some uneasy jokes he told them, ominously, that “President Samper holds the future of this country in his hand.” He also said, perhaps not very diplomatically, “We’d all be a lot safer if each one of you carried a book in your rucksack.”50 He spent Easter with the disgraced Carlos Andrés Pérez in Caracas. Did Samper reflect that García Márquez had criticized the Venezuelans for trying to get rid of their President as some Colombians were now trying to get rid of him?
On 2 April, just as excitement was growing about Of Love and Other Demons, whose launch was scheduled for the Bogotá Book Fair in May, a previously unknown group based in Cali, which called itself the Movement for the Dignity of Colombia, kidnapped ex-President Gaviria’s brother Juan Carlos, an architect. It was not the first time Gaviria’s relatives had been targeted. Colombia’s problem, the group announced in a communiqué, was “not legal but moral.” Although evidently a right-wing organization, they quoted García Márquez himself as saying that Colombia was “in the midst of a moral catastrophe” and asked him to take over as President from Samper because, they said, he was one of the few people in Colombia with “clean hands.” They also demanded that César Gaviria should resign as Secretary General of the Organization of American States. Since García Márquez was only a month away from publishing his new book about the problems of contemporary Colombia, since one of the main subjects of that book was Gaviria’s hard line in resisting the pleas from the families of kidnap victims, and since Gaviria himself was one of García Márquez’s main informants, the ironies of the situation were overwhelming. Enrique Santos Calderón said in El Tiempo: “García Márquez has said in an interview with Cambio 16 that he feels he is living through his own reportage. And indeed one shivers to see ex-President Gaviria in the same situation today as the families of the hostages were at that time, or to see the current ‘kidnap tsar,’ Alberto Villamizar, doing the same as he did five years ago when he was trying to free his wife Maruja Pachón.”51
Villamizar and Pachón were the principal protagonists of García Márquez’s next book, News of a Kidnapping. He had not written a work about contemporary Colombia since the time of No One Writes to the Colonel, In Evil Hour and Big Mama’s Funeral in the 1950s. The most political of his historical novels, The General in His Labyrinth, had made him deeply unpopular with the Colombian ruling class at precisely the moment when he was considering returning to Colombia for the long term. He was never likely, ironically, to ingratiate himself with Cartagena upper-class society—an upper-class costeño was never going to respect one of lower-class origins—even though he had devoted three books in a row to their “Heroic City” and even though, and indeed partly because, he now had the biggest, most glamorous and expensive house in town.
No, Bogotá was his target in Colombia, even though he was always uncomfortable there. That was where the power in the country lay. In some respects his next book was written mainly about—possibly even for—the Bogotá-based ruling class. His old leftist supporters would mainly not find it to their taste, but the Bogotá bourgeoisie would find it impossible to reject. Since the death of Luis Carlos Galán, by no means the last but somehow the culmination and symbol of the wave of murders and kidnappings terrorizing the nation, many Colombians had begun at last to convince themselves that their country was indeed hopeless. Galán had repeatedly refused offers from Pablo Escobar to join his campaign and to fund it. García Márquez had not been an associate of Galán’s nor indeed ever an admirer of those, like him, who seemed to feel themselves destined by some spiritual or providential mission. (Only Fidel was entitled to that pretension.) Galán’s replacement César Gaviria also seemed too cool, too serious, too clean-cut, too straight for García Márquez; but both men had needed a powerful friend in 1990 and each had something to offer the other; moreover neither was from Bogotá.
In fact the new book was an astonishing achievement. It would have been a remarkable feat for any writer at any time and all the more so, therefore, for a man who was sixty-nine when he completed it. Critics had been saying for years that García Márquez’s talents were better suited to dramas set in the distant past and that he—like most novelists—was perhaps not equipped to write about contemporary issues. Besides, most observers felt it was almost impossible for anyone to make sense of the chaos that was Colombia in those years and that to create a coherent plot and construct a compelling narrative about it seemed beyond the powers of anyone. Yet when the book appeared even those who disliked its attitudes and point of view agreed that the great story-teller had done it again and produced a top-class page-turner. Indeed, many said that they had not been able to go to bed without finishing the book and some even confessed to the feeling that if they did not complete the novel in one sitting the hostages who were its central characters might not be able to escape from their predicament: such was the power of the narrative. An obvious first question, then, is whether García Márquez sacrificed complexity for clarity in producing his X-ray of the country.
Certainly the author set out to encapsulate Colombia’s labyrinthine complexity within the dramas of seven central characters. The first is the heroine, Maruja Pachón, journalist, director of the film foundation Focine, sister of Gloria Pachón (the widow of Galán and recent ambassador to Unesco). The second, the hero, is Maruja’s husband Alberto Villamizar, brother of the second hostage, Beatriz Villamizar, who is Maruja’s friend as well as her sister-in-law; Alberto does all he can to get his sister (released first) and his wife out of their nightmare predicament. Francisco Santos (generally known as Pachito) is the third major figure, a top journalist with El Tiempo and son of its director Hernando Santos. (Today he is the Vice-President of Colombia.) The fourth is Diana Turbay, a television journalist, daughter of ex-President Julio César Turbay; she is captured with several colleagues who are gradually released one by one; then, tragically, she is killed during the army’s ill-fated operation to rescue her. The fifth is Marina Montoya, sister of a key member of the Barco government, the oldest of the hostages, the first to be taken, and the only one, eventually, to be murdered by the drug-traffickers. The sixth central character is President Gaviria, who perhaps ought to be the hero of the narrative and in some ways, given García Márquez’s close relationship with him, it is surprising that he is not. And the seventh is Pablo Escobar, who hardly appears but is of course the villain of the piece and the evil genius behind the entire drama, a man for whom García Márquez undoubtedly has extremely ambivalent feelings, not excluding admiration. Numerous family members and their servants, numerous minor drug-traffickers and their subordinates, and numerous government ministers and other public servants (including General Miguel Maza Márquez, head of the secret police and a cousin of the author’s), also appear. García Márquez gathers them all together, organizes them and expertly orchestrates the re-telling of the appalling drama.
He states in his prologue that this “autumnal task” was the “most difficult and saddest of my life.” It is surprising, then, that a book about something with no happy ending for either Colombia or many of the protagonists (Marina, Diana, an unnamed and quickly forgotten “mulatto” hostage) should have a contrived happy ending due entirely to its focus on certain protagonists and García Márquez’s own desire to be a “bringer of good news.” It is as if his brilliantly executed work of political journalism had been hijacked—kidnapped?—by another book with all the requirements and preconceptions of the Hollywood thriller and with a soap opera ending. We are persuaded to care desperately whether Maruja survives, although her chauffeur is killed on the fourth page of the narrative—despatched as clinically by the narrator as the real driver was by his killers—and never mentioned again (the same goes for Pachito Santos’s chauffeur). From the standpoint of narrative effectiveness, it seems not to matter how many other, inferior people die as long as the stars survive. Indeed, within the conventions of the thriller, the death of some makes a necessary contrast with the much-desired survival of the fittest. This is the cruel, even heartless art of the narrator of this book. He is, surely, a long way from Zavattini; or even the Fellini of La dolce vita.
The basic conception is an alternation between odd-number chapters dealing with the hostages and their kidnappers and even-number chapters dealing with the families and the government. In essence the drama of the story is, first, the ordeal of the hostages and their efforts to survive, negotiating daily life with their guards; second, the efforts of the families to negotiate both with the kidnappers and with the government for the release of the hostages. At a deeper level of course the real struggle is between the “Extraditables” and the government, with the hostages and their families merely the pawns, but García Márquez turns it as far as possible into a “human-interest” story. He concentrates above all on the four key figures out of the ten hostages: Maruja, Marina, Diana and Pachito. Of the four only Maruja and Pachito survive, being released within hours of each other on 20 May 1991 at the end of chapter 11; Marina and Diana die within two days of one another (23 and 25 January 1991), after many months in captivity, in chapter 6.
Conceived as a love story involving a crisis (a damsel in distress), a heroic struggle (a knight) and a successful homecoming, the book really ends at the conclusion of chapter 11, with Maruja’s joyful return to her apartment block, greeted with euphoria by all her friends and neighbours, and then last, and ecstatically, by her husband. García Márquez evidently wanted to show that even in Colombia—perhaps even for Colombia—there could still be a happy ending. Escobar’s surrender and death is a mere postscript to this story, as is the return of Maruja’s ring by the kidnappers which ends the narrative, and the final statement by Maruja herself that “All this has been something that should be written in a book.” But the treatment of Escobar’s death is intriguing. In soap operas and thrillers the demise of the villain, especially a villain of Escobar’s dimensions, is really the climax of the work. But here one senses that Escobar’s death, treated cursorily, disrupts the very conventions it seems tailor-made to bring to a climax.
Like most of García Márquez’s previous works, then, News of a Kidnapping is not about the lower orders (even as long ago as In Evil Hour the sudden appearance of the uprooted poor people in el pueblo came as a shock) but that absence matters more obviously and more crucially here. This is a book almost exclusively about upper middle-class people, including a number of significant right-wingers (the fathers of Diana Turbay and Pachito Santos are people García Márquez had previously opposed and condemned). The columnist Roberto Posada García-Peña (“D’Artagnan”) of El Tiempo, himself the servant of this ruling class, would launch a violent attack on García Márquez for “paying tribute to the Bogotá bourgeoisie.”52
Almost as disconcerting, García Márquez entirely excludes the U.S. dimension from his book. It was the drug-traffickers’ horror of extradition to the USA—Escobar’s “better a grave in Colombia than a cell in the United States”—that determined the conflict which is the motor force of the events narrated in the book, and which of course requires some kind of anti-imperialist critique. But, in a work that even criticizes the guerrillas—despite his Cuban associations—for “all kinds of terrorist acts,”53 the U.S. dimension is not dealt with at all, so that the entire causal-explanatory structure of the novel is distorted and unfocused. This is certainly not a book whose author would be embarrassed when, soon after publication, he presented it to Bill Clinton and it is not surprising that Clinton eventually appreciated its “human” side; there is no other side to this story. Which poses the hardest question of all: is this book actually written for the Bogotá bourgeoisie and Bill Clinton (“Us” and the U.S.) and not for “us” (the readers) at all? Or, to put it another way, is it written for “us” the readers, just as soap operas are written for us, in order to make us content with our station and to make us believe that the rich and famous are “just human beings…” “like us”?
And yet there is always more than one way of looking at a matter. It was of course García Márquez’s first Bogotá-based book. It took stock of contemporary Colombia from the time he decided to “leave” Cuba around 1990 (though he never actually left) and he decided to “return” to Colombia (though he never fully “returned”). More than a taking of stock, however, it was also a taking of power. It was in a sense a display of sheer prowess and an implicit answer to all his Colombian critics. He didn’t live there? Well, had any other contemporary Colombian been able to draw together all the complexities of the country’s recent history and make them coherent and comprehensible, as he had? He was a vain courtier, fawning to power? Well, look what a direct relationship to power could do: here was a “journalist” who, thanks to his prestige, could reach any level of “contacts” and “sources,” and those who couldn’t reach them could never get the “full story” as he could. His writing was becoming hackneyed, self-repeating, self-quoting and self-indulgent? Well, this was what this elderly man—of nearly seventy—could do.
Snide editorials in El Tiempo like those that greeted The General in His Labyrinth would have been rather beside the point in the face of a work and a writer who had so patently taken symbolic possession of the country. So this time they were notable by their absence. García Márquez had not shown it but from the time The General was published he had waited seven years for his revenge, for the level of satisfaction which this book now gave him. There were no girlish interviews to the press expressing his “insecurity” about the new work, as there had been when Of Love and Other Demons was published. “Take that,” said the torero. Surprising as it may seem, Colombia at last belonged to García Márquez, at the age of sixty-nine, in a way it never had before. One Hundred Years of Solitude had made Latin America belong to him, even the world; but not Colombia. One Hundred Years of Solitude was “Macondo,” sure; but everyone in Bogotá and the other great cities of the interior (Medellín, Cali) knew that Macondo was the Costa and they did not include themselves among its referents. Now they themselves were less confident and complacent; and now García Márquez had finally taken in the whole of Colombia, not just the Costa. The backbiting would continue for ever—in the nature of political and social life—but with far less conviction. He was untouchable now. And he would be able to do almost anything he wanted.
The question can still be repeated: in writing News of a Kidnapping for the cachacos in part through cachaco eyes, did he, in effect, give in to them; did he undermine, at his moment of victory (or even because of the nature of that victory), his entire moral and political trajectory? Perhaps he had become conservative in that tired and depressing way that old men become conservative. Or perhaps he finally recognized “political reality” and in particular “political reality after the fall of the Wall.” Or perhaps all he now wanted politically was to see Fidel and the Cuban Revolution symbolically resist the historical labyrinth until the great final labyrinth left them no further options. Or perhaps, still, he was refusing all those encircling realities, all those options and interpretations; perhaps, in the only way he knew how, García Márquez was maintaining his own dream all the way to the end. Perhaps. Certainly this is the question.
Naturally the book went to number one in the best-seller lists as soon as it was published. Although the reviews were overwhelmingly positive there were a few extremely aggressive and even abusive demolitions, especially from the United States, quite different in tone from even the El Tiempo reviews of The General.54 But García Márquez had surveyed his options and he’d made his choice. We can be sure he was satisfied.