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NOW WHAT WAS he to do? The sixty-nine-year-old writer was still full of energy, still full of plans, still fascinated by politics and committed to “making a difference,” as Americans would say. But was he any longer a writer of fiction? The General in His Labyrinth was a historical novel, brilliantly fictionalized but still a historical novel. News of a Kidnapping, similarly, was a documentary novel, more documentary, indeed, than novel. The General, obviously, was about “then,” about how Colombia had started, two hundred years before; News was about “now,” about what Colombia had become. Both had been written with undeniable verve. But did García Márquez have within him another ambitious work of the creative imagination or was that great world-historical wellspring now effectively dry? The world was his oyster, no doubt about it, but it was no longer the world that had made him. Could he respond to this new world, this post-communist, post-utopian, postmodern universe that now lay before the weary planet on the threshold of the twenty-first century?
Truth to tell, hardly anyone had been responding fully to the new era. It was a lot for the world to ask of an old man, though García Márquez was certainly asking it of himself. This was an age of good literature but not an age of great works. In fact, since as long ago as the Second World War, there had been few writers—indeed few artists in any genre—about whom the public and the critics had been able to agree in the way that they had agreed, and still agreed, about most of the great artists of the modernist period between the 1880s and the 1930s. García Márquez was one of the few names, and One Hundred Years of Solitude one of the few titles, on everyone’s list of great writers and great works in the second half of the twentieth century. And he had added Love in the Time of Cholera, which also regularly appeared in charts of the “top fifty” or “top hundred” novels of the twentieth century. Could he add another? Should he even try?
Certainly he wanted to go on. He had said he had “come out completely empty” after two of his books, One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera.1 Somehow he had always found the determination, and eventually the inspiration, to find new topics and new forms and come up with the next project, a book that first he wanted to write, then needed to write, then absolutely had to write. Now was no different; he was still looking. Indeed, he told his interviewers that he wanted to “go back to fiction.” As usual he had a project. He had three short novels which together, he thought, might make an interesting book, another book about love; love and women. He told El País: “I’m surrounded by women. My friends are mainly women, and Mercedes has had to learn that that’s my way of being, that all my relationships with them are just harmless flirtations. Everyone knows by now what I’m like.”2
He added that he was beginning to lose his memory, on which his entire life and work had been founded. (This had happened to the autobiographically inspired protagonist of The Autumn of the Patriarch.) Yet ironically the shredder was the machine most used in his house. Lately, though, he had retrieved the drafts of Of Love and Other Demons and given them to Mercedes as a present. He seemed unaware that drafts had lost much of their magic—including financial—in the age of the computer because the computer conceals most genetic traces. Indeed, the evolution from handwriting to typewriting to computer production was one part of the explanation for the fading of the authorial aura in the mind of readers, and perhaps even for a loss of conviction in the mind of authors themselves. García Márquez had resisted this process better than most. And the destruction of most of his preparatory or unfinished works fitted his own strong conviction that it was the job of the artist to produce fully finished works on the classical model, though he would not have wanted to put it that way.
Retirement was a topic that was in the air and the omens were all bad. It was the autumn of all the patriarchs. Samper was obdurately refusing to resign, even though millions wanted him to do so. Carlos Andrés Pérez had been forcibly retired. Carlos Salinas had managed to see his term of office through but had been obliged to leave the country, threatened with jail or worse. No one had been able to force Fidel Castro into retirement but he would shortly be reaching three score and ten; the revolution itself was growing old and who could possibly replace him? Tellingly, García Márquez, instead of attending the launch of his book in Bogotá, went to visit another reluctant retiree, Felipe González, who, beset by allegations and scandals, had been voted out of office in Spain after thirteen years in the presidential Moncloa Palace in Madrid. García Márquez hastened to the Moncloa as soon as he arrived but the President was not at home and the writer found him alone with his bodyguards in the national park of Monfrague, like one more García Márquez character bereft of his power and glory.3 The last time they had met González had said, as they embraced: “Heavens, man, I think you are the only person in Spain who wants to embrace the President.” Now he declared himself relieved to be out of the job and on his way to retirement. He was about to be replaced by right-wing leader José María Aznar.
After an extended stay in Spain García Márquez travelled to Cuba to celebrate Fidel Castro’s seventieth birthday with him. It was another autumnal event, not dissimilar to the visit to Felipe González. Fidel was not thinking of retiring but he was in an unusually reflective mood. He, who lived so much in the future and so, in order to get there, had to conquer the present minute by minute, was for once thinking about the past, his own past. He had said he wanted no special celebrations but Gabo had declared that he and Mercedes would travel to Cuba anyway. Prompted by this insistence Fidel, who could not celebrate his birthday officially on the actual day—13 August—due to pressure of work, nevertheless turned up at García Márquez’s house that evening and was given his present, a copy of the new dictionary produced by Colombia’s linguistic institute, the Instituto Caro y Cuervo. Then, two weeks later, Fidel revealed a surprise of his own: he took Gabo and Mercedes, a few close associates, a journalist and a cameraman to Birán, the tiny town where he was born, “a journey into his past, his memories, the place where he had learned to speak, to shoot, to breed fighting cocks, to fish, to box, where he had been educated and formed, where he had not been since 1969 and where, for the first time in his life, he could stand in front of the graves of his parents and offer them some flowers and a posthumous homage which until that moment he had been unable to carry out.” Fidel escorted his guests around the town, went back to the old schoolhouse (he sat in his old desk), remembered his boyhood activities (“I was a cowboy, much more than Reagan because he was just a movie cowboy and I was a real one”), recalled his mother’s and father’s characters and eccentricities, and then, satisfied, declared: “I have not confused dreams with reality. My memories are free of fantasy.”4 García Márquez, who had been writing up his own memories lately—and in particular his return with his mother almost half a century before to the place where he was born—must have been given much food for thought.
In September, back in Cartagena, García Márquez spent some time at his new house. By now it was an open secret that he did not feel at home there, and not only because he and Mercedes were overlooked by the Hotel Santa Clara: they just didn’t feel comfortable; in fact, they just didn’t like it. An Argentinian journalist, Rodolfo Braceli, who had interviewed Maruja Pachón about her experiences in 1990–91 and about their representation in News of a Kidnapping, used his contact with her to find his way to an irritated but nonetheless forthcoming García Márquez, who was becoming increasingly reflective and philosophical in his interviews these days, like an old soldier out on a limb and at a bit of a loss: interesting and informative, even analytical but no longer focused on the one campaign that excluded all others—the next one—no longer as single-minded as in the past.5 He mentioned again that he was beginning to forget things, especially phone numbers, even though he has always been a “professional of the memory.” His mother now sometimes said to him, “And whose son are you?” Then other days she would get her memory back almost entirely and he would ask her about her recollections of his childhood.6 “And now they come out more because she’s not hiding them, she’s forgotten her prejudices.”
He told Braceli he had a lot of friends suddenly turning seventy and it had come as a surprise: “I’d never asked them how old they were.” His personal feeling towards death, he said, was: “fury.” He had never seriously thought about his own death until he was sixty. “I remember it exactly: one night I was reading a book and suddenly I thought, hell, it’s going to happen to me, it’s inevitable. I’d never had time to think about it. And suddenly, bang, hell, there’s no escaping it. And I felt a kind of shiver… Sixty years of pure irresponsibility. And I solved it by killing off characters.” Death, he said, was just like the light going off. Or being anaesthetized.
Clearly he was in a meditative, autobiographical mood—though the tendency had been evident, at least incipiently, since the end of Alternativa and the beginning of his weekly column in El Espectador and El País. Although he had destroyed most of the written traces of his private life and even of his professional literary activity, he had increasingly been thinking more about two particular aspects of his work. First, the how and the when, the technique and the timing. Clearly he was a master craftsman and increasingly aware that not everyone could tell stories the way that he or Hemingway could tell stories. Hence his script-writing “workshops” in Havana and Mexico City and now his journalism workshops in Madrid and Cartagena. Both were about story-telling: how to break reality down into stories, how to break stories down into their constituent elements, how to narrate them so that each detail leads on naturally to the next, and how to frame them in such a way that the reader or viewer feels unable to stop reading or watching. Second, the what and the why: he was averse, through his sense of “shame and embarrassment,” to emoting and introspection. But for some years now he had been taking more interest in identifying the lived raw materials of his own experience, which had been processed in different ways and for different literary and aesthetic purposes in his works down the years. It was, in part, a way of controlling his own story, of making sure that no one else could shape it without accepting most of his own interpretation. He had been controlling his image for thirty years; now he wanted to control his story.
In October García Márquez travelled to Pasadena, California, for the 52nd Assembly of the Inter-American Press Association (SIP), where there were two hundred newspaper owners present, together with Central American Nobel Peace Prize winners Rigoberta Menchú and Oscar Arias, as well as Henry Kissinger. Luis Gabriel Cano of El Espectador was elected next president of the organization and it was agreed that the next meeting would be held in Guadalajara. García Márquez, very concerned to front his new journalism foundation, gave a keynote speech declaring that “journalists have become lost in the labyrinth of technology”: teamwork had become undervalued and competition for scoops was damaging serious professional work. There were three key areas that needed attention: “Priority to be given to talent and vocation; that investigative journalism should not be considered a specialist activity because all journalism should be investigative; and ethics should not be an occasional matter but should always accompany the journalist as the buzz accompanies the fly.”7 (This last phrase would become the motto of his journalism foundation, the FNPI. Its key slogan would be: “Not just to be the best but to be known to be the best.” Very GGM.) García Márquez’s speech, like his new foundation, was mainly concerned with what individual journalists should do to improve their professional and ethical standards, whereas in the 1970s he would have been concerned in the first instance with the ownership of the press. But he was moving now in a different world. Probably only he would have even tried to carry off this double life whereby he debated the problems of the bourgeois press in formally democratic countries whilst loyally supporting the one country in the hemisphere, Cuba, where there had never been a free press and never would be while Castro was in power. And García Márquez’s syndicated articles were regularly reproduced in Havana in Granma and Juventud Rebelde. It was all much more difficult in an era in which he could no longer use the excuse of socialist objectives and the need to build a socialist economy. But if he had still been talking about all that, even supposing he had wanted to, he would not have been able to mix with magnates—one of his biggest donors would be Lorenzo Zambrano, a cement monarch from Monterrey—and would not have been able to persuade them to lay out their money.
Samper had announced before Christmas that he was bringing in a new television law which would set up a commission to decide whether channels were fulfilling their remit to be impartial. Everyone supposed that before long he would be cancelling QAP’s licence to broadcast—QAP was one of Samper’s most ferocious critics—and García Márquez would therefore be at the mercy of power for the first time since 1981. He went out of his way to announce that he would not be celebrating his seventieth birthday in Colombia. On 6 March he, Mercedes, Rodrigo and Gonzalo and their families would spend the day at a secret location away from the country.8 Inevitably his seventieth birthday had been registered in all the Hispanic newspapers. Now One Hundred Years of Solitude’s thirtieth birthday was also registered. Any excuse to get the name García Márquez in the newspapers; because he sold newspapers just as he sold books. Now it turned out that despite his insistence that he did not want “posthumous homages while I’m still alive,” he was intending to emphasize his absence from Colombia even more spectacularly by accepting a multiple anniversary celebration in Washington—of all places—in September, using the fiftieth anniversary of his first published story as the point of reference. Normally such celebrations in Washington would require cooperation, organization and ratification from the honoree’s national embassy. But García Márquez not only had an ongoing relationship with the man in the White House down the road but was also a close friend of the Secretary General of the Organization of American States, an institution in which even the USA, however hegemonic, was only primus inter pares. And it was Gaviria, by now disgusted with what he considered to be the embarrassment of Samper’s government and infuriated at what he considered to be Samper’s frittering of the inheritance that he, Gaviria, had left him, who used his contacts to arrange a series of events in honour of García Márquez which would culminate in a party at his own residence and a dinner at Georgetown University, with García Márquez and Toni Morrison, another Nobel Prize-winning novelist, as twin guests of the university Rector Father Leo Donovan.
The anniversary tendency had been developing down the years in Western culture as the great millennium approached. 1492, 1776, 1789: in the conditions of postmodernity these dates were becoming the temporal equivalents of theme parks. And in this sphere of things, García Márquez was well on his way to becoming a theme park all of his own, a monument without parallel in the literary world since Cervantes, Shakespeare or Tolstoy. He had become aware of it himself very soon after the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude, a book which had changed the world for all those who read it inside Latin America, as well as for many outside. Little by little he became aware that it was he who was the golden goose; the “frenzy of renown” that surrounded him was so furious, so contagious that in the end, for all his plans and stratagems and manoeuvres, it really didn’t matter what he did: he had entered the spirit of the age and he had also risen above and beyond the spirit of the age, into immortality, eternity. Marketing could work at the margins to increase it or diminish it but his magic was autonomous. He would be hard pressed to prevent the rest of his life from being one permanent celebration of his life, one long happy anniversary. How could he escape from this labyrinth? Did he any longer want to?
On 11 September he visited Bill Clinton for lunch at the White House. Clinton had already read News of a Kidnapping in manuscript but now García Márquez presented him with his personalized leather-bound copy of the English edition, “so it won’t hurt so much.” (Clinton had sent García Márquez a note when his publisher sent him the manuscript copy of News, “Last night I read your book from start to finish.” One of García Márquez’s publishers wanted to use this priceless puff on the cover when the book was eventually published. García Márquez responded, “Yes, I’m sure he’d agree; but he’d never write me another note.”) The two men discussed the Colombian political situation and, more generally, the problem of drug production in Latin America and drug consumption in the United States.9
And still Samper would not budge. A few weeks before the jamboree in Washington García Márquez had met up with the rising politician in the Santos family, Juan Manuel, to discuss the still-deteriorating Colombian situation. Santos had declared that he would be putting himself forward as a Liberal candidate for the next presidential elections in 1997. Whether they were conspiring, separately or together, to bring Samper down, only they could know, but they produced a “peace plan”—Santos, under pressure, would eventually say it was García Márquez’s idea (“We have to do something daring, we’ve got to get everyone talking so as to share out the defeat, because we are all of us losing this war”)—which would involve negotiations between all sectors of Colombian society: except the Samper government! Yet Santos denied, when the plan was unveiled in the second week of October, that he was trying to bring the government down. He and García Márquez flew to Spain—García Márquez went straight from Washington to Madrid—to talk to ex-President Felipe González (thereby snubbing the new right-wing President José María Aznar). However, Felipe González effectively killed the initiative by saying that he would only back it if Samper agreed to the negotiations and the United States and other powers gave their support.
In January 1998 Pope John Paul II, now old and sick, made his long-heralded visit to Castro’s Cuba, the result of arduous and difficult negotiations. (García Márquez had assured me in 1997 that the Pope was “a great man” whose biography I should read.) It was of course Fidel’s way of showing that Cuba, while maintaining its revolutionary principles, was capable of flexibility—he had even allowed Christmas to be reintroduced, on a one-off basis—and might be prepared to negotiate with the powerful of the earth. And who should be sitting at Castro’s side during the events involved in the visit but Gabriel García Márquez. Despite his long and extremely successful record of anti-communist activism, the Pope was also known to be anti-capitalist in many respects and firmly against the decadent aspects of the new consumer societies, which made his visit seem a risk worth taking. Unfortunately for Cuba and Castro, the event, which looked as if it might give Cuba huge amounts of favourable publicity, not least in the United States, was blown off the world’s television screens by the breaking scandal of Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. It was a double disaster: disastrous because the Pope’s visit never did make the global impact it might have done; and disastrous because Clinton, García Márquez’s friend, would be hugely weakened politically by the scandal and the subsequent moves to impeach him. Clinton would have to sit out the rest of his term, almost helpless, in just the way that Samper was doing. The ironies were unmistakable.
García Márquez decided not to return to Colombia for the first round of the elections in May. But he did send a televised message from his house in Mexico City explaining why he was supporting second-time Conservative candidate Andrés Pastrana and committing himself to “camellar con Andrés” (“slog with Andrés”). García Márquez supporting a Conservative! What would Colonel Márquez have said! The living members of his family viewed his gesture with disapproval and indeed stupefaction. But Pastrana was said to be close to the Miami Cubans and perhaps García Márquez thought that, in this and other ways, he might help with the Cuban situation. In return, García Márquez was supposed to be helping with education, officially Pastrana’s principal policy concern after concern number one, a peace process with the guerrillas.
García Márquez was savagely though reluctantly criticized by the Liberal press. “D’Artagnan” wrote a coruscating piece in El Tiempo which was evidently intended as an epitaph to the García Márquez who had intervened in Colombian politics up to this moment but was now apparently deceased. How much influence he would really have upon Pastrana’s administration is questionable. Neither he nor Andrés were seen “slogging,” whether together or separately.10 Gaviria, ever the clear-eyed pragmatist, tried to get Cuba voted back into the Organization of American States after a thirty-four-year absence but the resolution was vetoed, predictably enough, by the United States. This stymied Pastrana in advance—he was probably immensely relieved—and meant that García Márquez’s strategy for Andrés’s time in office was dead in the water before he even began, which no doubt explains why he would show such little interest in Colombian affairs over the next four years despite his promises of commitment. Clinton was interested not in improving relations with Cuba but in Pastrana’s “peace process,” with its promise of an end to the drugs trade, and in the autumn the President of the Inter-American Development Bank, a frequent visitor to García Márquez’s house in Mexico City, made a huge loan to Colombia to produce “peace through development.”11 Over the next four years, in the midst of all the local and international dramas, Pastrana would be one of the most honoured and fêted guests in Washington. On 27 October he made the first state visit by a Colombian president in twenty-three years, with García Márquez in attendance, surrounded by an eclectic collection of American “Hispanics” and “Latinos,” mostly musicians and actors.12 Such ceremonial would be Pastrana’s reward for his prior agreement to Clinton’s “Plan Colombia,” an anti-subversion policy reminiscent of Cold War strategies, a topic on which García Márquez made no explicit public statement at this time, though he must have been deeply embarrassed by it.
Having been deprived of his television slot at the end of 1997,13 García Márquez made an almost immediate decision to purchase Cambio, a magazine originally connected to the Spanish magazine Cambio 16, so influential during the Spanish transition in the 1980s. Cambio (“Change”—which happened to be Andrés Pastrana’s only slogan during his election campaign) was in direct competition with Colombia’s most influential weekly political magazine, Semana; it was something like the competition between Time and Newsweek. García Márquez heard that Patricia Lara, a good friend and colleague of his brother Eligio, was prepared to sell the magazine and he and María Elvira Samper, ex-director of QAP, Mauricio Vargas, Germán Vargas’s son (an ex-member of Gaviria’s government and a known critic of Samper), Roberto Pombo, a journalist on Semana, and others decided to make a bid (one which included Mercedes in her own right). By Christmas the deal was done—the new company was called Abrenuncio S.A. after the sceptical enlightened doctor in Of Love and Other Demons—and by late January García Márquez was beginning to write long headline articles—mainly about big-name personalities like himself (Chávez, Clinton, Wesley Clark, Javier Solana)—in order to boost sales. Larry Rohter of the New York Times talked to him the following year and recorded that “the night in late January 1999 that Cambio held a party to celebrate its rebirth, he stayed at the event until midnight, greeting two thousand invited guests. He then returned to the office, working through the night to write a long article about Venezuela’s new President, Hugo Chávez, which he finished as the sun was rising, just ahead of deadline. ‘It’s been forty years since I’ve done that,’ he said, delight in his voice. ‘It was wonderful.’”14
The Chávez issue of the magazine was particularly revealing. Colonel Hugo Chávez was the soldier who had tried to overthrow García Márquez’s friend Carlos Andrés Pérez. But he was also the man who, after coming to power in Venezuela, would come to the rescue of Castro’s Cuba in the new millennium by holding Fidel’s head above water through the sale of reliable cheap oil. Moreover he was a “Bolivarian” who argued for the independence and unity of Latin America and he was prepared to put Venezuela’s money where his mouth was. Since García Márquez was also working behind the scenes to help Cuba and unify Latin America, Chávez might have been expected to receive his full, albeit discreet support. But García Márquez was never more than lukewarm about Chávez, perhaps because he was compromised by his prior relationship with Pastrana and Clinton—whereas Chávez’s anti-Americanism was both permanent and virulent. García Márquez had met up with Chávez in Havana in January 1999 and had flown to Venezuela with him on his way back to Mexico. Afterwards he wrote a long article which was syndicated all over the world—making a lot of money for Cambio—and became very influential. It ended:
Our plane landed in Caracas at about three a.m. I looked out of the window at that unforgettable city, a sea of light. The President took his leave with a Caribbean embrace. As I watched him walk away, surrounded by his guards with all their military decorations, I had the odd feeling that I had travelled and talked with two quite separate men. One was a man to whom obstinate good fortune had given the opportunity to save his country; the other was an illusionist who could well go down in history as yet another despot.15
In fact García Márquez had been in Cuba with Castro—and the now equally ubiquitous José Saramago, a Nobel Prize winner who had remained a communist and an outspoken revolutionary—celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the Cuban Revolution. Fidel, wearing glasses, read out a speech saying that the world, in the era of multinational capitalism (for the magnates) and consumer capitalism (for their customers) was now “a gigantic casino” and the next forty years would be decisive and could go either way, depending on whether people realized that the only hope for the planet to survive was to end the capitalist system.16 Who knows what García Márquez thought of this, but his eyes looked those of a sick man, distant and distracted. Nevertheless he was putting in a huge effort to try to increase Cambio’s disappointing sales. An article even more widely distributed than the one on Chávez was “Why My Friend Bill Had to Lie,” which dismayed feminists around the world since instead of concentrating on the malign aspects of the Republican conspiracy to impeach Clinton, it cast him as just a typical guy pursuing sexual adventures—as all typical guys evidently did—and trying to conceal them from his wife and everyone else.
In Havana García Márquez had listened to Fidel calling for an end to capitalism, which was, he had said, entering the final stages of its devastation of the planet. Yet now, back in Europe in the last year of the twentieth century to meet yet another clutch of commitments and interview celebrities for his Cambio pieces, García Márquez became involved in a new organization, a strange mélange of intellectuals and magnates, which would be known as Foro Iberoamérica, whose ostensible purpose was to think about world development problems “outside of the box.” A kind of preliminary meeting was organized by Unesco, the Inter-American Development Bank and the new Spanish government in Madrid. It was in part a continuation of the García Márquez-Saramago show. In his brief contribution García Márquez declared that Latin Americans had lived an inauthentic destiny: “We ended up as a laboratory of failed illusions. Our main virtue is creativity, and yet we have not done much more than live off reheated doctrines and alien wars, heirs of a hapless Christopher Columbus who found us by chance when he was looking for the Indies.” He again mentioned Bolívar as a symbol of failure and repeated what he had said in his Nobel speech: “Let us get on quietly with our Middle Ages.” Later he read out one of his new stories, “I’ll See You in August,” a tale about adultery surely quite inappropriate for such a forum.17 Saramago, playing the role García Márquez used to play, proposed that everyone in the world “should become mulattos” and then there would be no need to argue about culture.
Weeks later García Márquez would find himself back in Bogotá attending the honorary enrolment of Carlos Fuentes and El País’s owner Jesús de Polanco in Colombia’s Caro y Cuervo Institute of Philology. He sat on the platform looking older than he had ever looked before, but said nothing. And then, just as in 1992, he found that the Bogotá altitude had triggered a level of tiredness he had not been aware of in Europe. And he collapsed. He disappeared from the public radar for some weeks, while Mercedes denied rumours of cancer and asked the press to be “patient” for a while. At first it was reported that he had some bizarre malady called “general exhaustion syndrome.” But everyone feared the worst. In the event the diagnosis was lymphoma, or cancer of the immune system.
Once again he had fallen ill in Bogotá and once again Bogotá had diagnosed his illness. This time however, given the gravity of the diagnosis, he went to Los Angeles, where his son Rodrigo lived, for a second opinion. Lymphoma it was. The family resolved that the treatment should take place in Los Angeles and García Márquez rented, first an apartment, then a bungalow in the hospital grounds. New treatments for lymphoma were constantly emerging and the prospects were quite different from the time when Alvaro Cepeda had to confront a similar challenge in New York. García Márquez and Mercedes called on Cepeda’s daughter Patricia, a translator and interpreter who had already helped them on previous visits to the United States, most notably for the meetings with Bill Clinton. Patricia was married to John O’Leary, a Clinton associate and fellow lawyer who was a former ambassador to Chile. Each month García Márquez, following his treatments and subsequent tests, would, as he later said to me, “go off to see the doctor to find out whether I was going to live or die.” But each month the reports were good and by the autumn he was back in Mexico City and making monthly visits to Los Angeles for check-ups.
In late November 1999 I flew to Mexico City to visit García Márquez. He was thinner than I had ever seen him and very short of hair. But he was full of vigour. I reflected again that throughout his life he had said that he feared death and yet he had shown himself one of the great fighters when the chips were really down. The meeting was emotionally charged because he knew that I had fallen sick with lymphoma four years before and survived.18 He had done nothing for months, he told me, but now he was looking again at his notes for his memoirs, and he read out to me the narrative of his birth. Mercedes exuded calm and determination but I could see that the effort was straining even her resources. Still, she was made for this situation and was clearly surrounding her husband with normality, including the normality of not making a fuss. Gonzalo and his children visited, and Grandfather behaved just as he always did.
García Márquez had recently told The New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson that “Plan Colombia,” agreed between Clinton and Pastrana, “could not work” and that the USA seemed to be moving back to an “imperial model.”19 In September he had threatened to sue the news agency EFE for 10 million dollars for reporting that he had “helped to negotiate U.S. military aid to Colombia.”20 Presumably this was his way of signalling his public separation from Pastrana and Clinton and their fateful “Plan.”21 Now he said to me: “As for Colombia, I think I’ve finally got used to it. I think you just have to accept it. Things are getting perceptibly better just at this moment, even the paramilitaries have realized that this can’t go on. But the country will always be the same. There has always been civil war, there have always been guerrillas, and there always will be. It’s a way of life there. Take Sucre. Guerrillas actually live in houses there, yet everyone knows they’re guerrillas. Colombians come and visit me here or in Bogotá and they say, ‘I’m with the FARC, how about a coffee?’ It’s normal.” I took this to mean that he was finally renouncing the effort to change this incorrigible country through direct political activity, not to mention an implicit recognition that to place his own reputation in the hands of political conservatives—in this case Pastrana and the American Republicans who had taken Clinton as their political prisoner—had been a step too far, as most of his family and many of his friends could have told him. Ironically the illness now provided a cover for a discreet withdrawal from these unhappy alliances. Time to turn back to his memoirs, perhaps.
He wrote occasional articles and kept in contact with Cambio and the Cartagena journalism foundation but mainly he stayed in Mexico City, kept out of the limelight and concentrated on his recovery and his visits to Los Angeles, where he and Mercedes were able to spend more time with Rodrigo and his family. Gabo and Mercedes also developed a close relationship with Cambio journalist and investor Roberto Pombo, who had married into the El Tiempo dynasty and was currently posted in Mexico City. He would be like a third son to Gabo and Mercedes over the coming decade. García Márquez would write increasingly autobiographical articles for the magazine—as well as an interview with Shakira—and would have a “Gabo Replies” section where he would compose an article inspired by readers’ questions. These articles would then be repeatedly advertised in the magazine and offered on a permanent basis to those who browsed the elecronic version on the Internet.
But of course his main activity would be the memoirs. He had often joked that by the time people got round to writing their memoirs they were usually too old to remember anything; but he had not mentioned that some people died before they even started the job. Completing the memoirs, now known as Living to Tell It (Vivir para contarlo), became his principal objective. Perhaps he remembered Bolívar’s dilemma near the end of The General in His Labyrinth: “He was shaken by the overwhelming revelation that the headlong race between his misfortunes and his dreams was at that moment reaching the finish line. The rest was darkness. ‘Damn it,’ he sighed. ‘How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!’”
He tried to keep out of politics but occasionally Cambio dragged him back in. It was edging perceptibly to the right in his absence, but so, the young journalists might have retorted, was he. Chávez was going from strength to strength as a populist leader of the Third World but García Márquez told me, “It’s impossible to talk to him.” Evidently Castro did not agree, since he and Chávez met and talked frequently. When I put this to him, García Márquez said, “Fidel’s trying to control his excesses.” Chávez would say in late 2002 that García Márquez had never made any contact with him since their meeting early in 1999 and that he much regretted this. Since Chávez was not so very different from Omar Torrijos of Panama—except that Chávez was much more powerful because he had oil and was democratically elected—it seems likely that beyond personal questions (including his friendships with Carlos Andrés Pérez and Teodoro Petkoff) García Márquez considered him too much of a loose cannon for the new era and for the behind-the-scenes diplomacy that he himself had been engaged in for the last decade.
One example of this was the news in November 2000 that the Mexican industrialist Lorenzo Zambrano of Monterrey, the king of Mexican cement (CEMEX), was to donate $100,000 for prizes to be awarded to winners of competitions organized by the Foundation for a New Ibero-American Journalism in Cartagena.22 Weeks later it was announced that media giant Televisa was to work with Cambio to produce a Mexican edition directed by Roberto Pombo. This was García Márquez’s world now. The inauguration of Mexico’s new right-wing President Vicente Fox coincided with a meeting of the Foro Iberoamérica, which this time involved not only García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes again, as resident intellectuals, but also Felipe González, ex-President of Spain; Jesús de Polanco, the owner of El País; international banker Ana Botín; Carlos Slim, the richest man in Mexico and destined to be the richest man in the world, for a while, by mid-2007, another personal friend of García Márquez; and Julio Mario Santo Domingo, the richest man in Colombia, yet another friend of García Márquez, now the owner of El Espectador and another generous donor to the Cartagena foundation. Whether García Márquez, as the president of an independent journalism foundation, should really have been hobnobbing with monopoly capitalists who happened to own great newspapers and television stations as part of their other holdings was not clear and has certainly never been publicly addressed by him. He now normally refused all comment to the press but remarked that he’d had no idea what he or anyone else was doing at the forum until he heard Carlos Fuentes’s excellent speech explaining the importance of an interface between the world of business and the world of ideas! As for Mexico, he hadn’t the faintest notion what was going on. He further entertained journalists by declaring that he was now just “the husband of Mercedes,” which some took as recognition of his new dependence on her and his gratitude for the way she had seen him through his recent and ongoing trials.23 He had recovered most of his hair and fifteen of the twenty kilos he had lost, though observers whispered that he had not recovered his sharp wits and full powers of expression. Perhaps the chemotherapy had accelerated the process of memory loss which he himself had been complaining about for some years.
He was well out of Colombia. His old friend Guillermo Angulo had been kidnapped by the FARC on the way to his country house outside Bogotá. Angulo, a man in his seventies, would be released months later; he told me he was sure García Márquez had something to do with his release, which was an exceptional event: most FARC hostages remained in captivity for years, like presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt.24 By the end of 2000 it was widely agreed that Andrés Pastrana was perhaps the weakest Colombian President of the post-1948 era. When an open letter was sent to Pastrana and George W Bush in February 2001 by luminaries such as Eric Hobsbawm, Ernesto Sábato and Enrique Santos Calderón, requesting that any joint Colombian-U.S. activity in Colombia should involve the United Nations and the European Community, the name of García Márquez was attached.25 Once again he was signalling his opposition to “Plan Colombia”: this meant burning his boats not only with Pastrana but also with Gaviria, who supported it.
In March Comandante Marcos led his unarmed Zapatista guerrillas into Mexico City as he had long been promising. García Márquez, with the help of Roberto Pombo, briefly escaped from retirement to carry out an interview for Cambio. The Zapatistas, who had attracted left-wing sympathy and support from all over the world, including many political pilgrimages by well-known intellectual and artistic figures down to Chiapas, were not the kind of organization García Márquez any longer spent time supporting. Indeed his silence about the sufferings of ordinary people, not least the displaced peasants of Colombia, caught in a nightmare world between the guerrillas, the paramilitaries, the landowners, the police and the army, is something that cannot fail to disconcert anyone observing his activities over the course of the years after 1980. But this was not a man who had ever made crowd-pleasing political statements for the sake of his own conscience: he had always been a deeply political and practical person who did what he thought was necessary and not—contrary to the assertions of his critics—what he thought would make him popular.
While García Márquez had been fighting his cancer his youngest brother Eligio had been fighting his own battles. Like Gabito he was struggling to finish a book, Tras las claves de Melquíades: historia de “Cien años de soledad” (Following Melquíades’s Clues: The Story of “One Hundred Years of Solitude”), while suffering from a terminal brain tumour. He was unable to finish the book as he would have wanted but he and his family and friends decided that it should appear before he died. By the time it was published in May Eligio was in a wheelchair and scarcely able to speak. He was the last of the Buendías and would die shortly after deciphering the family’s ancestral document, as had been uncannily predicted in One Hundred Years of Solitude. (Cuqui had been the first of the brothers and sisters to die, in October 1998.) Gabito did not find the strength to travel to Eligio’s funeral at the end of June.
On 11 September the twin towers of the World Trade Center of New York were brought down by civil airplanes piloted by A1 Qaeda jihadists and world politics changed dramatically, accelerating on the path to war that George W Bush had already seemed determined upon, though this was not quite the script that Bush had envisaged. García Márquez had recently been to Cuba to see Fidel Castro, who was rumoured to be in declining health. Two weeks after the horrors in New York, and three weeks after the release of Guillermo Angulo, on 24 September 2001, Consuelo Araujonoguera, Colombian ex-Minister of Culture and wife of the Procurator General of the Republic, was kidnapped by FARC guerrillas near Valledupar; almost a week later, on 30 September, she was found dead, apparently caught in crossfire. Known to the whole of the country as “La Cacica” (“the chief”), she was the principal promoter of Valledupar and its vallenato festival, a friend of García Márquez, Alvaro Cepeda, Rafael Escalona (she was also his biographer), Daniel Samper (until they fell out over a television biography he wrote), and Alfonso López Michelsen. Bill Clinton had met her and would write about her in his memoirs. She was one of the last people anyone would have imagined being killed by those who claimed to be the defenders of the Colombian people and their culture.
By January 2002 it was clear that García Márquez was going to make it. He was gradually returning to public life. Those who met him noticed that he was more hesitant, sometimes confused, lacking in memory, but looking well. For a man of his age—he would soon be seventy-five—and continuing commitments—he was still contributing to both Cambio and his journalism foundation—it was a remarkable recovery which testified again to his extraordinary vitality. That said, the delay in bringing out the memoirs suggested that he was not working as effectively as in the past. He had sent a first version to Mutis at the end of July 2001 but something had delayed his progress and he eventually called on his son Gonzalo and Colombian writer William Ospina to check facts and help fill the gaps in his failing memory. He was putting the finishing touches to the book when his mother, Luisa Santiaga Márquez Iguarán, died in Cartagena at the age of ninety-six. Her husband and two of her sons had died before her. Once again Gabito failed to make the funeral.26
On 7 August Alvaro Uribe Vélez, a renegade Liberal, was inaugurated as President of Colombia on an anti-guerrilla ticket. FARC guerrillas—the FARC were alleged to have killed his father—fired rockets at him during his inauguration. Once again Horacio Serpa, the Liberal candidate and loyal servant of Ernesto Samper, had lost out. The country was glad to see the back of Pastrana but in Uribe it seemed to be taking a big risk. He was a landowner from Antioquia with rumoured links to paramilitary forces. Nevertheless he would govern with extraordinary, almost frenetic energy and with a style at once populist and authoritarian which would keep his ratings almost eerily high. His election left Colombia, in the era of Chávez, Lula of Brazil, Morales of Bolivia, Lagos and Bachelet of Chile, and the Kirchners of Argentina, as the country with the only significant right-wing government in South America—though Colombians were well used to being out of step. Uribe would be a close ally and supporter of George W. Bush.
The time approached at last for the publication of the memoirs, which covered the period from García Márquez’s birth to 1955. At the last moment “Vivir para contarlo” (living to tell “it,” masculine, living to tell the act of living itself) changed to “Vivir para contarla” (living to tell “it,” feminine, living to tell “la vida,” life, the contemplation of life). The English translation, as usual, added an extra, romanticized dimension: “Living to Tell the Tale,” that is, surviving great adventures and then relating them—but not planning to do so in advance and not doing so as a way of life.27 Of course the English version had another point: these memoirs had been delayed by a drama, the drama of García Márquez’s fight against death, against cancer, and his heroic victory. Everyone, above all his readers, was aware of this.
He had been talking about his memoirs ever since the publication of his great novel about Macondo. That should have given his readers the clue to his deepest motivation as a writer. Going back was all he ever wanted, writing about himself was all he ever wanted; Narcissus wanted to return to his own original face but even his face, lost in time, lost in all the times, was constantly changing, never the same, so even if he had found that original—eternal, oracular—face he would have seen it differently each time it appeared to him. But it was what he wanted. In 1967 people hearing him talk about his memoirs must have thought: this man hasn’t lived enough. But Narcissus has always lived long enough to want to see if his face is still the same. Yet if he never had his own mother tell him his face was beautiful, then he was doomed always to look for her, find her, go back with her. And so the book would start with Luisa Santiaga’s search for her lost son in Barranquilla in 1950, bringing poignant memories of another journey she had made some sixteen years before:
My mother asked me to go with her to sell the house. She had come that morning from the distant town where the family lived, and she had no idea how to find me … She arrived at twelve sharp. With her light step she made her way among the tables of books on display, stopped in front of me, looking into my eyes with the mischievous smile of her better days, and before I could react she said:
“I’m your mother.”
Thus at the age of seventy-five, Gabriel García Márquez begins the story of his life with a scene in which, once again, his mother is afraid that he will not know who she is and has to introduce herself to him. That re-encounter, he would claim—it is the central theme of the memoirs—took place on “the day I was really born, the day I became a writer.”28 It was the day he had got his mother back. And they had gone back home together. Back to the beginning.
On the matter of his memoirs he had started to say a surprising thing to journalists as early as 1981: “García Márquez [has been] talking about his memoirs, which he hopes to write soon and which will really be ‘False Memoirs’ because they won’t tell what his life actually was, nor what it might have been, but what he himself thinks his life was.”29 Twenty-one years later he would be saying exactly the same thing. What on earth did it mean? Well, now he had an epigraph to clarify it: “Life is not what one lived but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.”
Living to Tell the Tale turned out to be his longest book. Like all his others it falls neatly—less neatly than usual—into two halves but the structural proof that the exercise had caused him serious problems is that each of the two halves ends with the least interesting—to him and also, unfortunately, to us—section related to the land of the cachacos: firstly the Zipaquirá section, 1943–6, and secondly Bogotá and El Espectador, 1954–5.
Though much of the writing is extraordinary it must be admitted that it is writing as wish-fulfilment: it conceals all the hurt (which is extraordinary given the way it begins). There are occasional digs at his father simply because of the character that he “is,” and not because Gabito himself feels any hostility or has any oedipal feelings or a world-view still shaped by the Márquez Iguarán side of the family. In general the book continues the sense of reconciliation—of making peace—initiated by Love in the Time of Cholera.Its author has been careful to send small—usually one-paragraph, sometimes one-line—compliments to all his friends and their wives or widows. There are no real intimacies or confessions. The book contains his public life and his “false,” invented life, but it does not contain much of his “private” life and very little indeed of his “secret” life.
The central theme is the narrator becoming a writer through both a growing and irresistible vocation and an unusual and privileged experience of life. (And not, for example, the narrator becoming a writer who at the same time is developing a sophisticated and serious political consciousness which will inform and shape what he actually writes.) The irony, of which he seems unaware (by the time he finishes this book he has lost some of the acute awareness he used to have), is that the book—and his life—are formed by and dominated by the period before he became aware of the vocation and indeed, strictly speaking, by the period before he himself could even read and write. García Márquez is perhaps uncomfortable with the autobiographical genre itself. As a writer he is an extrovert, both declarative and a fabulist. But when relating his own life he has more of a psychic need to conceal than to exhibit. Moreover in a memoir it can be disastrous to claim to know what you don’t know—from which much of the humour of One Hundred Years of Solitude itself, for example, derives—or to assert facts which are contradictory. Similarly the trademarks of the García Márquez style—hyperbole, antithesis, sententiousness, displacement—are far more problematical in an autobiographical work. When all is said and done, we are left with the irony of a García Márquez who exposed himself utterly in the barely penetrable The Autumn of the Patriarch and now conceals himself absolutely in the apparently transparent Living to Tell the Tale!
Of course it is obvious, on even the briefest of considerations, that García Márquez became obsessed by his memoirs not so much because of his alleged vanity but because it was the best way of combating his fame and his anguish by getting out his own story, his own version of his life and character. Despite the promise of the early pages, this was not a confessional work.
On 8 October 2002 Vivir para contarla was published in Mexico City, with extraordinary fanfare and truly staggering advance sales. The magician was back again. Back, indeed, this time, from the dead.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ WAS a great survivor by any definition. He had not only withstood the cancer treatments physically and mentally, he had completed the first volume of his memoirs—he really had lived to tell the tale—and had left an image of himself with which he personally was content and which, he knew, would also survive. The baby on the cover holding the biscuit was now a man of seventy-five and what a life he had led. It had taken him all those years to journey through the labyrinth we all of us have to travel, made up in part of the world and in part of our perception of it. García Márquez, looking back, had decided that he was born to invent stories and that he had lived more than anything else to tell the tale of existence as he himself had experienced it. The anxious child he had chosen to leave on that cover eternally looking for his mother had waited all those years to tell the world the story of how in reality he had found her again, got her back for ever, and how thereafter, born again as a writer, he had set out on the road that would make him a visionary who would enchant the world. It was tragically appropriate that it was at the very moment he started the final push to finish the work that she herself had lost her memory, and that at the moment he was putting the final touches to a book which was so much hers as well as his she should have passed on from the life he was there recording.
That first part of the memoirs, in which—as a matter of fact—his mother found him (not the other way round) and told him who she was and took him back to the house where he was born, the house she had left while he was growing from baby to boy, is, truly, an anthology piece, a great work of autobiographical creation by any measure, a story told by a great classical writer of modern literature. Really, it was that story above all that he had wanted to tell; all the others faded when held against the vivid colours of that journey and the passions that inspired its telling. The rest of the book was a pleasure to read, García Márquez talking directly, at last, about his remarkable life and times, but nothing in its nearly six hundred pages would equal the radiant triumph of the first fifty. Of course of all his books it was the one most certain to disappoint the expectations of its readers. But once they had adjusted to the realization that autobiographies—even the autobiographies of literary wizards—are rarely as magical as novels, most of them found it satisfying and agreeable and a book they would read again, even if the experience of reading it was like the experience of a warm, comforting bath which eased away all the hard knocks and bruises of life while growing colder, all too soon.
Within three weeks the book had sold an astonishing 1 million copies in Latin America alone. None of his books had ever sold faster. On 4 November García Márquez took a copy to President Fox in the palace of Los Pinos in Mexico City. Chávez of Venezuela had got hold of one and sent congratulations, waving it at the cameras during his weekly television broadcast and urging all Venezuelans to read it. On the 18th the King and Queen of Spain would land in Mexico City on an official visit; naturally they would make time for García Márquez. Presumably he gave them a copy.
In December he travelled once more to the Havana Film Festival and saw Fidel and Birri and his other friends. When he got back from the festival in January he gave what would prove to be his last personal one-to-one interview, not a sit-down affair but a kind of ramshackle amble through his Mexico City home and out across the garden and into the study with an American photographer, Caleb Bach. His secretary Mónica Alonso Garay was close at hand. She said her boss had a prodigious memory but it was notable that she frequently jumped in to answer questions on his behalf. He talked to Bach about the photograph of himself as a baby he had chosen for the cover of Living to Tell the Tale. He was pleased with the result. He said he had a twenty-seven-year-old parrot called Carlitos. And he revealed—having forgotten that he swore he would never do so—what his psychiatrist friend (Luis Feduchi) had told him in Barcelona in the 1970s that had made him give up smoking the same day he heard it: it would cause memory loss in later life …30
In March 2003 the United States and Great Britain invaded Saddam Hussein’s Iraq without United Nations approval on the pretext that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (as the invaders themselves did, of course, though it turned out that Iraq did not) and that it was harbouring Al Qaeda militants (which it was not; but after the invasion it would). Some said that 9/11 had changed the world for ever; others said that the U.S. response to 9/11, of which the Iraq invasion was merely the most far-reaching act, had changed the world much more, only not in the way that the invaders intended but in the way that the perpetrators of 9/11 had intended. Shock and awe for the Iraqis; stupefaction and disbelief for the rest of the world, not least García Márquez. The BBC Latin American website carried an article on the challenges of covering the war entitled “Living Not to Tell the Tale.” The United States opened a new prison camp at Cuba’s Guantánamo Bay, a zone it had occupied, like the Panama Canal, since the start of the twentieth century; there hundreds of alleged Al Qaeda militants arrested in Afghanistan and Pakistan were imprisoned for years and possibly tortured without any form of trial, on that island where, the United States had always insisted, Castro’s government had jails where his opponents were imprisoned for years and possibly tortured without any form of trial. There were no human rights on the island of Cuba, they said. Newspeak. It transpired that the Bush government now had an official invasion plan for Cuba. Just as soon as they had dealt with North Korea, Iraq and Iran, the “Axis of Evil…”
On 19 July El País carried a photo of the old man in Mexico City with the caption: “García Márquez does not allow himself to be seen. It is increasingly rare to see García Márquez at any public event.”31 On the occasions when he did appear, he refused all comment to the press. Evidently what El País really meant to say was: “Is there something wrong with García Márquez? Why is he hiding himself away? Is he ill? Why won’t he speak? Is he losing his memory? Is he finished?”
Meanwhile the memoir was published in English and French. Same cover. Same family photographs in the surrounding publicity. Not quite the success of the Spanish-speaking world but a very good reception in the English-speaking world, though much less so in France. To coincide with its publication, the New York PEN Club organized a special homage to García Márquez on 5 November 2003. Given PEN’s traditions of protecting free speech and the human rights of authors, this was a surprising decision in view of the onslaught, not least from Americans, against García Márquez over his Cuba links earlier in the year. One of the main organizers was Rose Styron, who was not only a friend of ex-President Clinton—who made a video presentation—but had also been at the fabled “Camelot” dinner for artists and intellectuals put on by President Kennedy and Jackie in the early 1960s.32 Many of New York’s top glitterati, literati and illuminati were present and must have been extremely disappointed by García Márquez’s failure to turn up even at this event. He was not entirely well, that was true; but he was also extremely disillusioned by developments in U.S. society and by U.S. policy both in Colombia and in the Middle East during George W. Bush’s presidency. He sent a party-pooping message to the act of homage which was not only undiplomatic—and ungrateful—but also one of the most pessimistic declarations ever made by this relentlessly upbeat personality. It was not a time, he said, for celebrations. Despite this, in January 2004 One Hundred Years of Solitude became an “Oprah Book” recommended by Oprah Winfrey’s mass-viewing television talk show in the United States. It leaped from number 3,116 in the sales list to number one.33
García Márquez felt unable to ignore big long-term commitments he had accepted in Mexico and attended most of them but still without any press declarations. He would just turn up like some benign old white-haired wizard and sit on the designated platform or hand over the appropriate prize. He still took part in such Cambio meetings as were held in Mexico, and Roberto Pombo looked after him there just as Carmen Balcells looked after him in Spain and Patricia Cepeda in the United States.
He had been hoping to be more energetic and adventurous. He and Mercedes had recently changed apartments in Paris. They had given up the small place in Rue Stanislas and bought a bigger one on the Rue du Bac, one of Paris’s most sought-after streets—right under Tachia’s. So now he owned the apartment beneath her in a curious kind of fidelity to an ill-starred love which had become a difficult and uncomfortable kind of friendship. He would have very few opportunities to visit the new apartment but his son Gonzalo and family set up there for a while when they moved from Mexico to Paris in 2003. (Gonzalo wanted to take up painting again.)
He had set aside the memoirs but he had been planning a novel entitled Memoria de mis putas tristes (“Memoir of My Sad Whores,” though eventually translated into English as Memories of My Melancholy Whores) for many years, at least a quarter of a century. When I saw him in Havana in 1997 it was the book he was currently thinking about and when we talked a year later it was clear that the book was well advanced. It is most likely that a first version was completed long before he published Living to Tell the Taleand that few significant changes were made between autumn 2002 and autumn 2004 when it finally appeared. Conceived originally as a long short story, it is hardly more than a novella but was publicized and sold as a novel.
In October, as the new work was being anticipated all around Latin America, he returned to Colombia and press photos showed him walking the streets of Cartagena, looking lost and confused, with Mercedes, his brother Jaime, now working for the journalism foundation, Jaime’s wife Margarita, and Jaime Abello, the long-term director of the foundation. Many people had predicted García Márquez would never return to Colombia again. They were confounded. And yet the old magician did not look entirely himself.
When the new novel finally appeared most of its readers were totally disconcerted. Simply told, it is the story of a man about to celebrate his ninetieth birthday who decides to have a night of passionate sex with an adolescent virgin and pays the madam of a brothel he used to frequent to arrange it for him. Although he does not take the girl’s virginity he becomes obsessed with her, gradually falls in love with her, and decides to leave her all his property. The man presents himself as utterly mediocre, a bachelor newspaperman who has never done anything of interest in his entire life until, at the age of ninety, he finds love for the first time. Strikingly, it is García Márquez’s only novel set in Barranquilla, though the city is not named.
It seems likely that instead of an image, the usual inspiration for García Márquez’s novels, this one began with its striking title, which stuck in García Márquez’s consciousness and waited down the years for the chance to become a novel. Yet the title is a problem. First, obviously, it is shocking (and presumably meant to be). “Puta,” “whore,” though more literary than “prostituta,” “prostitute,” is also less neutral and more derogatory. Some television and radio stations in Colombia refused to allow the word putato be uttered by their presenters. Secondly, the title bears no precise relation to the content of the book: the novel itself insists that what we have here is a “love story” and the only “whore” with whom the narrator has any sexual relation is the fourteen-year-old girl with whom he becomes obsessed and who appears never to have had a previous sexual relationship of any kind, paid or unpaid. Nor, as far as can be divined, is she “melancholy.” (Nor, come to that, is she ever awake.) The title is best understood as a line written embodying the distinctive poetic conceit, known as hyperbaton (the separation for effect of words that normally go together), of the influential Spanish Golden Age bard Luis de Góngora (1561–1627). If the line were by him the informed reader would deconstruct it as “My Sad Memories of Whores.” Or even: “I, Sad, Remember Whores.” Not that this resolves the problem of the plural: the only two whores in the main body of the novel are Delgadina, the girl, as mentioned, and Rosa Cabarcas, the madam (unless, and this would be profoundly significant, as we shall see, the title also includes a brief reference in the narrative to an ex-prostitute called Clotilde Armenta and, more specifically, the two-line reference to another madam, Castorina, at the very end of the book). A García Márquez on top of his form would have resolved the reader’s perplexities: here he (the intended reader is probably a he) is left with the impression that he has been conned by a title that suggested an altogether racier book. Though many readers may reflect that this one is quite racy enough.
García Márquez always acknowledged that the book was inspired by Yasunari Kawabata’s The House of the Sleeping Beauties, about an establishment where old men go to lie alongside drugged prostitutes whom they are not allowed to touch.34 (The epigraph itself is from that novel.) Yet the effect of this acknowledgement may be to conceal the fact that sexual relations between mature men and inexperienced adolescents are a recurrent motif in García Márquez’s work.
There are two social phenomena here which usually coincide but are analytically separate. The first is the attraction men feel for the woman as “girl,” the adolescent barely old enough or even (in the case of Remedios in One Hundred Years of Solitude, for example) not old enough to have sexual relations. (On the whole the more conventional Don Juan character would prefer to seduce older females, not least those who, married or betrothed, belong to other men.) The second is the obsession with virginity. InChronicle of a Death Foretold virginity, or the honour and shame syndrome associated with it, is the central focus of the drama; but the female protagonist, Angela Vicario, is not an adolescent. In Love in the Time of Cholera, however, Florentino Ariza, a man by then in his seventies, who manages to retain the affection of most readers, has a sexual relationship with his fourteen-year-old niece and ward, América Vicuña (the same initials as Angela Vicario), though—to be fair to him—he also has sexual relations with every other kind of woman imaginable.
The best-known exposition of this topic in all of literature is Nabokov’s Lolita, a controversial work if ever there was one. But why is the theme so prevalent in Latin American literature? (Not that an obsession with schoolgirls is confined to Latin American men.) It is often used in Latin American fiction as a symbol of the discovery and conquest of the continent itself, as a taking possession of the unknown and unexplored, as a desire for newness, for all that has not yet been exploited and developed. But this can hardly explain the apparent strength of the impulse in Latin American men themselves, beyond any literary fancy. One possibility is that although young women have always been seduced, violated or bought by older, wealthier and more powerful men in all cultures, adolescent boys in Latin America have typically had their first sexual experience with an older woman, usually a servant or a prostitute, and that many of them go on yearning for the first experience with an innocent and untutored adolescent that they never had when they themselves were still innocent and untutored adolescents. Romeo and Juliet has not traditionally been a theme common in Latin American literature or indeed in Latin American society itself.35
García Márquez decided to marry his own wife when she was nine (or eleven, or thirteen, the age varies). Clearly he gets some ironic or even perverse pleasure out of the mere assertion that she was only nine (as does Mercedes herself). But perhaps the real instinct was neither ironic nor perverse; perhaps he wished to reserve her in advance, to keep her, pure and unsullied, all for himself and for always. (Dante, of course, was happy to leave Beatrice unsullied even by himself.)
When García Márquez first discussed this novel with me he was seventy. But María Jimena Duzán—a friend of García Márquez’s who became a journalist as a teenager—remembers him telling her about the project in Paris when he was fifty.36 By the time the book was published he was nearly eighty. And his protagonist was ninety. Almost uniquely in modern literature, this extraordinary novelist had been writing about old people since he was a very young man. And the older he has got the more he has written about the attractions of very young women. Perhaps it is not surprising that a boy for whom his grandparents were so very important should have become obsessed with contrasts of youth and age (the very stuff of fairy stories). There is a remarkable contrast between the cover of Living to Tell the Tale, with the photograph of one-year-old García Márquez in sepia used in all editions across the world, and the Spanish-language edition of Memories of My Melancholy Whores, which has a photograph of an old man dressed all in white shuffling away, possibly off-stage, perhaps into the great beyond: as if turning his back on life for the last time (though the novel itself defies such an interpretation). It is impossible not to think of the many retired colonels who appear down the years in García Márquez’s fiction; but the picture also looks eerily like that same García Márquez, his body slimmed, his hair thinned, his powers waning, who had sat revising that novel before it was delivered to the press. Whether anyone had consciously planned this contrast we do not know.
Because the novel is written in the first person it has an interesting impenetrability quite foreign to most of García Márquez’s novels. Here no irony—the distance between the narrator and the character—impels us towards a critique or even a reliable interpretation of the protagonist. When the narrator—let us call him by his nickname, Mustio Collado, since we never learn his real name—writes on the first page that for his ninetieth birthday he decided to give himself a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin, we seem to get no clue as to how to react. When he talks of his morality and the purity of his principles we do not know whether to judge him from where we are today or whether to begin to accept that in his society (1950s Barranquilla) there would have been no necessary contradiction for a middle-class journalist like him to speak in this way.
Collado has never in his life had sex without paying for it. He dislikes complications and commitments. The girl procured for him is just fourteen, seventy-six years younger than he is. She is working class, her father is dead, her mother an invalid; evidently she has no older brothers; she is very dark skinned, has a pronounced lower-class accent, and works in a clothing factory. Collado wishes to think of her as a fantasy lover, a living but unconscious doll. He calls her Delgadina—somewhat grotesquely, since the Spanish ballad of that name is about a perverse and ruthless king who wishes to violate his own helpless daughter; but Collado doesn’t see the irony. One morning the girl leaves him a message on the mirror of their hotel room: “For the ugly papa.” 37 He doesn’t wish to know her real name (still less her real self).
Eventually, after a series of melodramas triggered only by the old man’s needs and fantasies, he decides that he truly loves the girl and makes all his possessions over to her in his will. He does not die on his ninety-first birthday, as he has come to fear, and the next morning goes out into the street feeling radiant and confident that he will live to be a hundred. (Naturally the reader reflects that the best thing for the girl would be for him to die at once.) “It was, at last, real life, with my heart safe and condemned to die of happy love (not crazy love) in the joyful agony of any day after my hundredth birthday.” It is the young who die for love in García Márquez’s books: love keeps the old alive.
In fact there are two other possible readings not yet mentioned by critics. First, that the once invulnerable, exploitative and inhuman old man is now susceptible because of “love” and is taken for a ride, with or without the girl’s knowledge, by the “malign” madam, Cabarcas, who has turned the impoverished Delgadina into a whore; and that she is still deceiving him between the end of the action of the novel (now most likely with the girl’s knowledge) and its writing. The novel never addresses the fact that absolutely everything the protagonist knows about Delgadina (other than the fruits of his pornographic fumblings and paedophiliac fantasizings) comes through the mediation of the brothel-keeper, who may have made up the girl and her love for her customer like any writer of romans roses or Hollywood movies, giving her audience—Collado—exactly what he desires. And of course Collado rejects all real details about the girl; he simply and quite explicitly doesn’t want to know. If this secondary plot is intended to be the primary—or corrective—plot, then the novel acquires a dimension of self-critique that is really very interesting. The least that can be said is that it converts the silly old fool into an object of contempt (though not pity), certainly for the reader and possibly for both the reader and the writer.
The other reading (not necessarily excluded by the first) is that Collado is a damaged personality. At the age of eleven he is introduced involuntarily to sex by an older woman who is also a prostitute, in the very building—in the book—where Collado’s father worked (which happens to be the building—in reality—where García Márquez cohabited with prostitutes when he worked for El Heraldo: the “Skyscraper”). The experience first traumatizes the boy and then turns him into a sexual addict. Since it was, apparently, Gabriel Eligio who organized a similar and a similarly traumatic experience for Gabito at a similar age, and since García Márquez has chosen to situate this—explanatory, exculpatory?—episode close to the very end of the book, it is possible that it is meant to provide an explanation for the old man’s inability to love or develop close relationships, for his obsession with prostitutes, and for his paedophiliac desire for that young virgin with whom, perhaps, he would like to have had his own first sexual experience if time could somehow be conjured anew and he could go back to his adolescence. If this were the case, it would inevitably induce the reader to ask himself whether the same analysis is to be applied retrospectively to the similar fantasies in all this author’s earlier novels; in which case this one, narrated by a protagonist now “free at last of a servitude that had kept me enslaved since the age of thirteen,”38 would be as ruthlessly self-exposing and self-critical as The Autumn of the Patriarch, written thirty years before. It would also suggest that the García Márquez who consciously forgave his father in the writing of Living to Tell the Tale continued, perhaps unconsciously (perhaps not), to blame him for childhood traumas whose effects were prolonged into adulthood. In short, just as in thememoir, written at the age of seventy-five, he had returned to the idea that Luisa Santiaga, who had abandoned him, feared he might not know her, so in Memories, written at the age of seventy-seven, he returns to the idea that the father who took his mother away when he was a baby subsequently perverted his sexual being when he was just beginning adolescence.
Memories is possibly García Márquez’s least-accomplished novel. But, as in all of them, even through the relative flatness and banality of the narrative here, a radiance of the imagination, and occasionally of the poetic faculty, shines through as it were from behind the silver screen. By this writer’s standards the book is weak, sometimes even embarrassing—in short, unfinished. But nevertheless, given the profundity of his underlying vision of the world, it has—because of its potential, which allows each reader to complete the story in the way that he or she desires—as many levels of ambiguity, ambivalence and complexity as any of his others—more than Of Love and Other Demons, for example; more also than Chronicle of a Death Foretold—because this book has both an unashamed and unattenuated flirtation with fantasy and a conventional moral dimension that most of the others quite deliberately lack. It is a fairy tale, albeit a disconcertingly lurid one.
One might say that in one way the ending takes García Márquez to the end of his literary and philosophical journey through life. When he realized, in his sixties, that he was going to die, he decided that he had to do everything fast, “without missing a strike.” When he contracted lymphoma in his seventies the compulsion became even stronger but he had to prioritize: thus because writing his memoir Living to Tell the Tale was, not altogether ironically, his most urgent objective, he forsook all other activities for a time and completed that book. By then it had become obvious that his memory was fading frighteningly fast and so he went into reverse, deciding that after managing to complete the autobiography he had to take things as they came. The narrator of Memories of My Melancholy Whores is in no hurry whatever at the end—we hurry on only to death—but is determined to live as long as possible and to take each day as it comes. Though he too has lived to tell his tale. The poignant, or paradoxical, side of this is that García Márquez only came to this patient wisdom—if wisdom it is—when physical reality no longer gave him any other choice.
John Updike, reviewing the book in The New Yorker in 2005, retrieved its possible motivations with his usual ingenuity and eloquence:
The instinct to memorialize one’s loves is not peculiar to nonagenarian rakes; in the slow ruin of life, such memory reverses the current for a moment and silences the voice that murmurs in our narrator’s ear, “No matter what you do, this year or in the next hundred, you will be dead forever.” The septuagenarian Gabriel García Márquez, while he is still alive, has composed, with his usual sensual gravity and Olympian humor, a love letter to the dying light.39
It turned out that García Márquez had two big reasons for returning to Cartagena at the time the novel appeared. There was to be another meeting of the Foro Iberoamérica. (His contributions to Cartagena’s conference and tourist income were by now considerable.) And before that the King and Queen of Spain were due in town. They arrived on 18 November and during their visit the old rascal engaged in social pleasantries with their Hispanic majesties and a possibly embarrassed President Uribe. If they asked him about the book he no doubt explained that it was inspired by the story of a Spanish princess sexually abused by her father the king. Of course he would have just been playing the fool. (Pictures of him sticking his tongue out at the proffered camera lens now regularly appeared in the newspapers.)
It seemed there were no more books to write. His new life—the end of his life, his retirement—could begin. In April 2005, after all the fears, and for the first time since he fell sick, he crossed the Atlantic, returned to Spain and France, and visited his apartments in Europe one more time. Again, the occasion of his journey was a meeting of the Foro Iberoamérica in Barcelona, a commitment that now seemed to outweigh all others. The press had been celebrating in advance that García Márquez was returning to Spain—this year was the 400th anniversary of the publication of Don Quixote—and particularly to Barcelona, where it was the Year of the Book. But when he arrived they reported that he seemed hesitant and even—it was implied—disorientated.
We had been out of contact for three years. I hesitated, then finally flew to Mexico City to talk to him in October. Mercedes had influenza so he came to visit me twice at my hotel. He looked quite different. He no longer had the appearance of the typical cancer survivor: he had still been shockingly slim and his hair was still short and thin when he completed Living to Tell the Tale in 2002. Now he looked as he always had; he was merely an older version of the man I had known between 1990 and 1999. But he was more forgetful. With suitable prompts he could remember most things from the distant past—though not always the titles of his novels—and engage in a reasonably normal, even humorous conversation. But his short-term memory was fragile and he was manifestly anguished about that and about the phase he seemed to be embarked upon. After we’d talked about his work and his plans for a while, he stated that he was not sure he would be doing any more writing. Then he said, almost plaintively: “I’ve written enough, haven’t I? People can’t be disappointed, they can’t expect any more of me, can they?”
We were sitting in huge blue armchairs in a secluded hotel lounge which looked out on Mexico City’s southern ring road. Outside was the twenty-first century, flying away. Eight lanes of traffic that never stopped.
He looked at me and said, “You know, sometimes I get depressed.”
“What, you, Gabo, after all you’ve achieved? Surely not. Why?”
He gestured towards the world beyond the window (the great urban thoroughfare, the silent intensity of all those ordinary people going about their everyday business in a world no longer his), then he looked back at me and murmured, “Realizing that all this is coming to an end.” 40