EPILOGUE
BUT LIFE HAD NOT yet finished with Gabriel García Márquez. Though a few weeks after our last meeting in México City one might have thought so. In January 2006 he gave a surprise interview to Barcelona’s La Vanguardia newspaper—a surprise at least to those who were by then accustomed to the fact that he no longer talked to the press. But this was no spur-of-the-moment matter. It seemed possible that there had been a family meeting which had decided, given the circumstances, on a formal “last statement” followed by withdrawal. Then silence.
Mercedes was present at the interview at the family home in México City—at the previous one, three years before, it had been Mónica, his secretary—and it was Mercedes who put an end to the conversation, as the reporters seemed to indicate in their piece. García Márquez himself said little—the report was more a narrative than a dialogue—and when he was asked a question about his past life he said, “You will have to ask my official biographer, Gerald Martin, about that sort of thing, only I think he’s waiting for something to happen to me before he finishes.”1 It was true that I was taking a long time. But such “ardent patience,” to quote the title of Antonio Skármeta’s novel about Pablo Neruda’s postman, had now been rewarded by the discovery, after fifteen years, that I was the great man’s “official” biographer and not just a “tolerated” one, as I was given to explaining. If only I’d known!
It seemed to be a matter of working out how much longer he could appear in the public eye and under what conditions. He could not be relied upon to give clear or accurate answers to direct and unexpected questions and he was capable of forgetting what he had said five minutes before. I was no expert on the different forms and progressions of memory loss but my impression was that the condition was moving rather steadily. It was hard to see a man who had made memory the central focus of his entire existence beset by such a misfortune. “A professional rememberer,” he had always called himself. Yet by the time his mother died she had been unaware of who she was and who her children were. His half-brother Abelardo had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease for three decades. Their younger brother Nanchi was apparently developing it. Eligio had died of a brain tumour. Gustavo had returned from Venezuela with signs of memory loss. And now there was Gabito’s condition. “Problems with the noddle,” Jaime said to me. “It seems to be the family thing.”2
García Márquez was now almost seventy-nine. (Ever since the spectacular celebrations for his seventieth birthday he had given up pretending that he had been born in 1928. One might say he had started to act his age.) Notwithstanding his uncertain condition, which no one in his inner circle was inclined to reveal and about which the media maintained a surprisingly discreet silence, the question of his eightieth birthday had to be confronted. As part of Spain’s long-term programme of cultural diffusion the Spanish Royal Academy had begun, after 1992, to organize triennial congresses to celebrate the Spanish language and its literatures around the Hispanic world. At the first, much delayed congress, in Zacatecas, México, in April 1997, García Márquez had famously suggested that traditional Spanish grammar and spelling should be “retired.”3 Although this had caused controversy, even affront, the academy, so authoritarian in the past, was by then far too diplomatic and strategic an institution to allow a writer of García Márquez’s stature to become a renegade and he was invited to visit the academy itself and meet its officers during a visit to Madrid in November of that year. Still, in 2001 he declared that he would not be going to the second congress in Zaragoza, Spain, as a protest against Spain’s policy of requiring visas from Latin Americans for the first time in its history. He said that Spain seemed to be declaring itself a European country first and a Hispanic one second. Controversy continued in 2004, when he was not invited to the third congress in Rosario, Argentina (a country he had always superstitiously avoided revisiting in any case). José Saramago, the Portuguese Nobel Prize winner, then declared that if García Márquez were not invited he would not go either, whereupon the academy declared that there had been an administrative oversight and of course the Colombian Nobel Prize winner was invited. García Márquez still did not attend. But the 2007 congress was scheduled for Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, the city where García Márquez now had his principal home in Colombia and which he had exalted in two memorable novels.
Moreover, in 2004 the academy had launched a mass-market edition of Cervantes’s Don Quixote to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the publication of that most important book in the history of Spain and its various literatures. What an idea it would be if for 2007, in Cartagena, the academy could follow this up with a similar edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude, to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of its first publication and García Márquez’s own eightieth birthday. First a Spanish genius, then a Latin American one. After all, many critics compared the Colombian novel to its illustrious predecessor and argued that it already held and would for the foreseeable future continue to hold the same significance for Latin Americans as Cervantes’s work held, first for Spaniards, then for Spanish Americans as well. Of course some would disagree. But one critic who had not always been a devotee of García Márquez would shortly declare, using a very twenty-first-century analogy, that One Hundred Years of Solitudehad tapped into the “DNA” of Latin American culture and had been inseparable from it since its first publication in 1967.4 Like Cervantes, García Márquez had explored the dreams and delusions of his characters which, at a certain time in history, had been those of Spain during its great imperial period and had then, in a different form, become those of Latin America after independence. Moreover, like Cervantes, he had created a mood, a humour, indeed a sense of humour, which was somehow instantly recognizable and, once it came into existence, seemed to have always been there and was an integral part of the world to which it referred.
In April 1948 García Márquez had fled from Bogotá and travelled to Cartagena for the first time in his life. In that beautiful but decadent and run-down colonial city he had met newspaper editor Clemente Manuel Zabala and had been invited to become a journalist on a recently founded daily named, perhaps appropriately, El Universal. On 20 May 1948 the new recruit had been saluted in the pages of his new literary home. On 21 May, 358 years to the day after a certain Miguel de Cervantes wrote to the King of Spain asking for employment abroad, “possibly in Cartagena,” the new recruit’s first column had appeared.5 Cervantes never made it to Cartagena, nor indeed to any part of the Indies: he never saw the New World, though he would help to create an even vaster new world—Western modernity—in his books and those books would travel to the new continent despite the Spanish prohibition against the reading and writing of novels in the recently discovered dominions. In April 2007, to coincide with the Royal Academy congress in Cartagena and the arrival of the King and Queen of Spain, a new statue of Cervantes was installed on the harbour-front in the old colonial port.
For most of his life Cervantes had been unappreciated and frustrated. Whereas García Márquez, as his eightieth birthday approached, was one of the best-known writers on the planet and a celebrity who could hardly have achieved more fame and recognition in his own continent had he been a footballer or a pop star. The Hispanic international establishment was planning to give him in life the kind of recognition that Cervantes only acquired, gradually and over centuries, after his death. When García Márquez won the Nobel Prize in 1982 there had been seven weeks of celebratory media coverage in Latin America from the moment the news was announced in October until the moment the King of Sweden presented him with the award in December. When he reached seventy in 1997 there had been a week of festivities in March, accompanied by extensive news items in the press, and then another week in September when the fiftieth anniversary of his first short story was celebrated in Washington, with a party organized by the Secretary General of the Organization of American States and a visit to the White House to see his friend Bill Clinton. Now he was about to celebrate reaching his eightieth birthday, the sixtieth anniversary of his public debut as a writer, the fortieth anniversary of the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the award of the Nobel Prize. And so his friends and admirers began to plan a period of eight weeks in March and April 2007 to match those seven unforgettable weeks in 1982.
Many steps had already been taken to turn García Márquez into a living monument. The Barranquilla Group’s old haunt “The Cave” had been ingeniously relaunched as part museum and part bar-restaurant by a local journalist, Heriberto Fiorillo. There had been a move to rename Aracataca as Aracataca-Macondo on the model of Proust’s Illiers-Combray; unfortunately, although most residents appeared to be in favour, not enough of them had turned out for the referendum and the proposal fell. Now the local and national authorities agreed to convert Colonel Márquez’s old house in Aracataca, where little Gabriel had been born, into a major tourist attraction—it was already a somewhat ramshackle though evocative museum—and it was resolved that the remains of the old house should be demolished and a carefully researched reconstruction carried out.
So March 2007 arrived. The annual Cartagena Film Festival was dedicated to García Márquez. And, appropriately enough, Cuba was the “highlighted country.” (In April García Márquez would be the featured writer at the Bogotá Book Fair at the moment when Colombia began its year’s reign as the “World’s Capital of the Book.” Circles within circles, everything coinciding, as in a dream.) Almost all the films based on García Márquez’s books were shown and many of the directors who had made them were in attendance, including Fernando Birri, Miguel Littín, Jaime Hermosillo, Jorge Alí Triana and Lisandro Duque. But although the festival ran through his birthday García Márquez himself did not turn up. When he was asked why, he retorted, “Nobody invited me.” It was not one of his most successful jokes; but how could he not be forgiven? On 6 March a birthday party accompanied by vallenato music was held in a top Cartagena hotel—appropriately enough, a hotel named “Passion”—without the principal guest, who celebrated more quietly with his family elsewhere. After this, tension began to mount. Many of the posters announcing the Royal Academy event—known in Spanish as the “Congreso de la Lengua” (Congress of the Language or—it is the same word—the Tongue) featured a photograph of García Márquez, the advertised guest of honour, sticking his tongue out at the viewer. This acknowledgement of the famous writer’s well-known sense of humour was no doubt intended to signal that the academy itself had a sense of humour but even if that were true it was doubtful that it would extend to the possibility of the celebrity guest failing to turn up at the party they had so carefully prepared for him.
In the middle of the month yet another great event, the annual meeting of the Inter-American Press Association, was held in Cartagena. There were two guests of honour: Bill Gates, the computer magnate, who was the richest man in the world (though within a few months García Márquez’s billionaire friend Carlos Slim of México would overtake Gates), and Gabriel García Márquez himself, who, although not willing to speak, had promised to turn up. He did so only on the last day but his appearance, as usual, caused a sensation and, as usual, immediately put all other participants in the shade. It was a big moment for Jaime Abello, the Director of García Márquez’s journalism foundation, and García Márquez’s brother, another Jaime, by now the Assistant Director. It was also a big moment for the Spanish Royal Academy, which, along with all of Colombia, was able to breathe a discreet sigh of relief.
Witnesses reported that Gabo looked very well. Although somewhat hesitant, he was in good humour and seemed on good form. Contrary to my assessment a year before, he seemed to have stabilized his condition and had evidently resolved, while no longer giving interviews, to confront both the malady and his public with the optimism and gallantry that had characterized him in easier times. Friends and admirers were flying in to Cartagena from all over the world, as well as the hundreds of linguists and other academics attending the Royal Academy congress. There were huge concerts with international pop stars, smaller vallenato performances, a profusion of literary events and many other fringe activities. The weather was glorious. Just as, three years before, the academy had produced a new mass-market version of Don Quixote to accompany the previous congress, so now it launched its new critical edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude. It was no surprise that it included essays by two of his best literary friends, Alvaro Mutis and Carlos Fuentes; what got everyone talking was that there was also a long piece by—of all people—Mario Vargas Llosa. Had there been a reconciliation? Certainly for the essay to be included both men would have had to agree. Though what Mercedes Barcha felt about the decision was not known.
Days before the inauguration Julio Mario Santo Domingo, Colombia’s richest and most powerful businessman, now the owner of El Espectador, hosted a special party—a kind of belated birthday party—at which the guests of honour were Gabo and Mercedes. It was held on the top floor of another of Cartagena’s luxury hotels—in which the King and Queen of Spain would stay in the following week—and guests included Carlos Fuentes, Tomás Eloy Martínez, ex-President Pastrana, The New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson taking time out from the Iraq War, ex-Vice President of Nicaragua and novelist Sergio Ramírez, and many other luminaries and beautiful people from Bogotá, Cartagena and, especially, Barranquilla. Champagne, whisky and rum flowed in profusion to lubricate the sweetest of lives and the omnipresent rhythms of the vallenato throbbed deep into the night. In corridors and on balconies party-goers whispered the big question. Would Gabo be giving a speech at the ceremony to honour him on the first day of the congress? And if so …
The great day dawned: 26 March 2007. Several thousand people filed in to the Cartagena Convention Centre, on the site where García Márquez used to eat and drink late at night after working in El Universal in 1948 and 1949.6 Many of his friends were there and most of his family, though not his sons. Ex-Presidents Pastrana, Gaviria and—astonishingly—Samper were all present, as was ex-President Betancur, who would be on the podium with the other speakers, which would include the current President, Alvaro Uribe Vélez. The day was asphyxiatingly hot but most men were wearing dark suits, Bogotá-style. Carlos Fuentes, generous as ever, was due to give the special eulogy of his friend; Tomás Eloy Martínez, recovering from a brain tumour, was also due to speak. So were the Director of the Royal Academy, Víctor Garcia de la Concha, and the former Director of the Instituto Cervantes, Antonio Muñoz Molina. So were the President of Colombia and the King of Spain. So was García Márquez.
When García Márquez and Mercedes walked in the entire audience rose to its feet and applauded for several minutes. He looked happy and relaxed. The two groups on the podium, García Márquez and his entourage (Mercedes, Carlos Fuentes, the Colombian Minister of Culture, Elvira Cuerdo de Jaramillo) and the academy entourage on the other side of the stage, got themselves organized and seated. Members of the expectant audience could scarcely believe their luck to be there. On a huge screen behind the protagonists the television coverage showed the arrival of the King and Queen of Spain, Don Juan Carlos and Doña Sofía, and watched them mounting the stairways and striding along the corridors of the vast convention building until their arrival inside the auditorium was announced.
There were many speeches, including the King’s, most of them more interesting than such occasions usually produce. The stand-out speech was that of García de la Concha, whose task it was to present García Márquez with the first copy of the Royal Academy edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude.7 He told an indiscreet story, having previously asked King Juan Carlos’s permission to do so. It transpired that when the academy first thought up the idea of honouring García Márquez at this congress García de la Concha had asked the writer’s permission to go ahead with the organization of the event. García Márquez had said he was in agreement but “who I really want to see is the King.” The next time García Márquez saw Juan Carlos he passed on the message himself: “You, King, what you have to do is come to Cartagena.” (The “you” was conveyed in the Spanish familiar: “tú.”) This double- or treble-edged anecdote brought a huge collective howl of laughter made up of different ingredients—depending on each person’s interpretation and whether the listener was a Spaniard or a Latin American, a monarchist or a republican, a socialist or a conservative—followed by a protracted ovation. Did this Latin American not know his place? Worse, did he just not know how to speak to a king? Or, worst of all, did he feel superior to the King of Spain and had he thus talked down to him? Those close to the podium noticed that when García Márquez approached the monarch and shook his hand he did so with the Latin American student salute—one man’s thumb entwined around the other’s—which spoke rather of an encounter of equals. The Bourbons had lost Latin America in the early nineteenth century; now Juan Carlos was doing his best to make amends both diplomatically and economically.
The most dramatic moment for those who knew was the beginning of García Márquez’s own speech. He started hesitantly and stumbled over the first sentences but gradually got into his stride. More than a speech, it was a sentimental reminiscence of the time, in México, when he and Mercedes were living in poverty and hoping that one day he would hit the jackpot and publish a best-selling book. It was an authentic fairy story—“I’ve still not got over my surprise that all this has happened to me”—and also, the audience felt, a message of thanks and recognition to the companion who had seen him through those hard times and all the other times, good and bad, over the last half century. Mercedes looked on anxiously and sombrely and prayed that this man who had got through so many challenges would get through this one too. He did: he finished with the story of the two of them mailing half the manuscript from México City to Buenos Aires in 1966 because they were too poor to mail the whole thing.8 The ovation that greeted the speech’s conclusion lasted many minutes.
Earlier, in the midst of the proceedings, another announcement had electrified the auditorium. “Ladies and gentlemen, Señor William Clinton, ex-President of the United States, has arrived in the building.” The crowd rose as the most famous man on earth made his way down to the front of the hall. The King of Spain, five Presidents ofColombia and now the most popular ex-President of the most powerful country in the world—some observers reflected that the only superstars missing were Fidel Castro, ailing in Cuba, and the Pope in Rome. Once again it had been demonstrated that if García Márquez was obsessed with—fascinated by—power, power was repeatedly, irresistibly, drawn to him. Literature and politics have been the two most effective ways of achieving immortality in the transient world that Western civilization has created for the planet; few would hold that political glory is more enduring than the glory that comes from writing famous books.
WE WERE ABLE to have only the briefest of conversations before I left Cartagena. It was the end of many things.
“Gabo, what a wonderful event,” I said.
“Wasn’t it,” he said.
“You know, many people around me were weeping.”
“I was weeping too,” he said, “only inside.”
“Well,” I said, “I know that I will never forget it.”
“Well, what a good thing you were there,” he said, “so you can tell people we didn’t make up the story.”