ABBREVIATIONS
GM García Márquez
GGM Gabriel García Márquez
OHYS One Hundred Years of Solitude
Prologue: From Origins Obscure (1800–1899)
1. This section, despite its somewhat literary style, is based directly upon conversations with Luisa Santiaga Márquez in Cartagena in 1991 and in Barranquilla in 1993; and on Gabriel García Márquez’s (henceforth GGM’s) and his sister Margarita’s (henceforth Margot’s) own recollections.
2. This prologue and the next three chapters are based upon conversations with all the members of the García Márquez (henceforth GM) family and many members of the extended family over the period 1991–2008, as well as many journeys around the Colombian Costa from Sucre to Riohacha and beyond, some of them with GGM’s brothers. The most authoritative informants were Ligia GM, a Mormon, who considers it her duty to research her family’s history (it is to Ligia above all that I owe the family trees); Margot Valdeblánquez de Díaz-Granados, who spent long periods in her grandfather Colonel Márquez’s house in the 1920s and 1930s; Ricardo Márquez Iguarán, who in 1993 and 2008 gave me invaluable information on the family ramifications in the Guajira; and Rafael Osorio Martínez, who in 2007 gave detailed insight into Gabriel Eligio García’s family background in Sincé. GGM himself never had more than a general and rather vague knowledge of the details of this family history but his understanding of the underlying structure and dynamic of the genealogy is extraordinary and the stories of specific relatives blessed or cursed with colourful or dramatic lives form the foundation of his fictional oeuvre. In general a biographer of GGM also depends heavily on random snippets of information which appear from time to time in the Colombian press. The only previous biographical works are Oscar Collazos, García Márquez: la soledad y la gloria (Barcelona, Plaza y Janés, 1983), helpful but brief, and, most substantially, Dasso Saldívar, García Márquez: el viaje a la semilla. La biografía (Madrid, Alfaguara, 1997), on GGM’s life to 1967: its most useful contribution is the information it provides on the genealogical background to the two sides of the GM family and on his childhood and schooldays. Historically the first biographical study was Mario Vargas Llosa, García Márquez: historia de un deicidio (Barcelona, Barral, 1971), which is also a work of literary criticism: although factually unreliable, it is especially illuminating because most of Vargas Llosa’s information came direct from GGM in the late 1960s. Equally important is the book by GGM’s brother Eligio García, Tras las claves de Melquíades: historia de “Cien años de soledad” (Bogotá, Norma, 2001). GGM’s own most considered autobiographical reflections before his brilliant but not always accurate 2002 memoirLiving to Tell the Tale (London, Jonathan Cape, 1993) (its epigraph, “Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it,” must be taken as a warning) were those in Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, The Fragrance of Guava (London, Faber, 1988), though, taken as a whole, GGM’s weekly columns published in El Espectador (Bogotá) and El País (Madrid) between 1980 and 1984 were even more informative and illuminating but are unavailable in English. Juan Luis Cebrían, Retrato de GGM (Barcelona, Círculo de Lectores, 1989), is a biographical essay with excellent illustrations. Mendoza, The Fragrance of Guava and GGM, Living to Tell the Tale are the only key works on GGM’s biography available in English but Stephen Minta, Gabriel García Márquez: Writer of Colombia (London, Jonathan Cape, 1987) and Gene Bell-Villada, García Márquez: The Man and His Work (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1990) are also helpful. Literary-critical analyses (see esp. Bell, Wood) can be found in the bibliography.
3. On “natural children” see GGM, “Telepatía sin hilos,” El Espectador (Bogotá), 23 November 1980. See the family trees in the appendix for the way in which OHYS replicates the García Martínez and Márquez Iguarán family histories in their oscillation between legitimate and illegitimate unions.
4. See Guillermo Henríquez Torres, El misterio de los Buendía: el verdadero trasfondo histórico de “Cien años de soledad” (Bogotá, Nueva América, 2003; 2nd revised edition, 2006). Henríquez, a native of Ciénaga, believes that the Buendía family of OHYS is based on his own family, the Henríquezes, descended in part from Jews who migrated from Amsterdam to the Caribbean. While few readers will swallow Henríquez’s thesis whole, his book provides invaluable background and atmospherics to a reading of OHYS.
5. See GGM, Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 66–7, for a revised version of this episode. None of Nicolás Márquez’s “natural” children inherited his name: they all carried their mother’s surname.
6. Interview, Barrancas, 1993.
7. José Luis Díaz-Granados explained his relation to Gabriel García Márquez as follows when I first met him in Bogotá in 1991: “Colonel Márquez, when he was eighteen, had had a son by Altagracia Valdeblánquez; he was called José María and carried the maternal surname, Valdeblánquez: he was my mother’s father. Later Colonel Márquez married Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes, the aunt of my father, Manuel José Díaz-Granados Cotes, and had three more children, among them Luisa Santiaga Márquez Iguarán, mother of Gabriel García Márquez. In other words, I am the double cousin of Gabriel García Márquez.” This personal story was typical of the entanglements I came across, not only in the admittedly “exotic” Guajira but everywhere else I travelled in Colombia in the 1990s. Indeed JLD-G married a cousin in 1972!
8. Ligia García Márquez, interview, Bogotá, 1991.
9. There is reason to believe Argemira was one of the prototypes for Pilar Ternera, a central character of OHYS.
10. I owe my information on Gabriel Martínez Garrido, who should have been called Gabriel Garrido Martínez, to his grandson Rafael Osorio Martínez. His evidence made me realise that GGM could easily have been called Gabriel Garrido Márquez (or, indeed, Gabriel Garrido Cotes); and this made me further realise just how far-reaching was GGM’s decision to identify with his Liberal grandparents from the Guajira rather than his Conservative, landowning grandparents from Sincé (then in Bolívar department).
11. When Gabriel junior was married in 1958 and needed his birth certificate, the family would persuade the priest in Aracataca to change the names of his paternal grandparents so that they appeared as Gabriel García and Argemira Martínez.
1 / Of Colonels and Lost Causes (1899–1927)
1. See Ernesto González Bermejo, “GGM, la imaginación al poder en Macondo,” Crisis (Buenos Aires), 1972 (reprinted in Alfonso Rentería Mantilla, ed., GM habla de GM en 33 grandes reportajes (Bogotá, Rentería Editores, 1979) pp. 111–17), where GGM says he wants Latin American revolutions to cease to be “martyrologies”: he wants the continent and its people to start winning. His own life is a monument to this ambition.
2. See David Bushnell, The Making of Modern Colombia. A Nation in Spite of Itself (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1993), Eduardo Posada-Carbó, The Colombian Caribbean: A Regional History, 1870–1950 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996), and Frank Safford and Marco Palacios, Colombia: Fragmented Land, Divided Society (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001).
3. “Aunt Margarita was sixteen years older than my mother and there were various other children in the years between, all of them dead at birth: one baby girl, then two twin girls, and others … Uncle Juanito was seventeen years older than my mother and she called him ‘godfather,’ not brother.” Ligia quoted in Silvia Galvis, Los García Márquez(Bogotá, Arango, 1996), p. 152.
4. The Márquez Iguarán family’s closest relationship of all was with Eugenio Ríos, Nicolás’s nephew and business partner. His daughter Ana Ríos was only two when Luisa passed through but remembers everything her mother Arsenia Carrillo told her about those now legendary days. When her sister Francisca Luisa Ríos Carrillo was born on 25 August 1925 she was “baptized” by Luisa two weeks after her birth, and thus became her goddaughter.
5. I am grateful to Gustavo Adolfo Ramírez Ariza for a copy of the Gaceta Departmental of Magdalena for November 1908 which shows that Nicolás was imprisoned for “homicide” at Santa Marta on 7 November 1908 but had not yet been tried.
6. Saldívar, GM: el viaje a la semilla, p. 44.
7. See Mario Vargas Llosa and GGM, La novela en América Latina: diálogo (Lima, Milla Batres, 1968), p. 14. In OHYS the Nicolás role is played by José Arcadio Buendiá and Medardo becomes Prudencio Aguilar.
8. GGM in conversation, México City, 1999.
9. See Living to Tell the Tale, p. 40, for GGM’s version of this episode.
10. In Leaf Storm, pp. 51–4, GGM himself gives a romantic, Faulknerian version of what we could call the GM family founding myth, which blames the exodus on “the war” (and is indeed much less candid and “historical” than the still romanticized version he would give later in OHYS).
11. Henríquez, El misterio, contradicts Saldívar’s version of events, which follows the GM family line.
12. Aracataca is forty metres above sea level, eighty-eight kilometres from Santa Marta, and its average temperature is twenty-eight degrees (which is why this is GGM’s preferred working room temperature).
13. See Lázaro Diago Julio, Aracataca … una historia para contar (Aracataca, 1989, unpublished), an invaluable work of local history despite a tendency to consider GGM’s literary works as historiographical evidence in their own right.
14. These two words are much disputed in Colombia and it is reckless for a foreigner to get involved. It is generally agreed that costeños are the inhabitants of the tropical lowlands in the Caribbean or Atlantic north of the country. The original cachacos were the upper-class inhabitants of Bogotá, but many costeños have come to consider all inhabitants of “the interior” (mainly Andean) of the country as cachacos, sometimes including even the paisas or inhabitants of Antioquia. See GGM, Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 41–2.
15. Judith White, Historia de una ignominia: la UFC en Colombia (Bogotá, Editorial Presencia, 1978), pp. 19–20. Nevertheless Colonel Márquez was undoubtedly one of the town’s leading Liberals. (He had been President of the Liberal Club in Riohacha when still a young man.)
16. See Saldívar, GM: el viaje a la semilla, p. 50; White, Historia; and Catherine C. LeGrand, Frontier Expansion and Peasant Protest in Colombia, 1850-1936 (Albuquerque, New México University Press, 1986), p. 73.
17. See Living to Tell the Tale, p. 15, where GGM asserts—erroneously—that his grandfather was twice Mayor of Aracataca.
18. See ibid., p. 42, for GGM’s narration of this event.
19. See ibid., pp. 44–60, on their courtship, a surprisingly lengthy narrative given that GGM had already told the story another way in Love in the Time of Cholera (1985).
20. Ligia GM, in Galvis, Los GM, pp. 151–2.
21. GGM does not directly mention his father’s surname in his memoir, which is noteworthy, to say the least.
22. GGM himself would meet Pareja as a student in Bogotá, where Pareja was a law professor, had a bookshop and took a leading role in the 1948 Bogotazo.
23. Cited by José Font Castro, “El padre de GM,” El Nacional (Caracas), July 1972. See also J. Font Castro, “Las claves reales de El amor en los tiempos del cólera,” El País (Madrid), 19 January 1986.
24. This is the version GGM reconstructs in his first novel Leaf Storm (1955).
25. All can still be seen today, with the exception of the house, which was demolished early in 2007 to make way for a reconstructed version and a museum.
26. In Spanish: “La niña bonita de Aracataca.” Both Vargas Llosa and Saldívar use this phrase.
27. People in Aracataca told me they never saw Luisa out in the street in the 1920s.
28. Love in the Time of Cholera is based to a significant extent, as mentioned above, on the courtship between Gabriel Eligio and Luisa Santiaga. García Márquez relates in Living to Tell the Tale that Aunt Francisca was an accomplice of the young couple; but Gabriel Eligio was always insistent that she was his worst enemy. He called her the “guard dog” (“la cancerbera”).
29. Leonel Giraldo, “Siete Días en Aracataca, el pueblo de ‘Gabo’ GM,” Siete Días (Buenos Aires), 808, 8-14 December 1982. Gabriel Eligio would never change. Many years later he and his wife were asked in an interview what was their best memory. Luisa answered, “When Gabriel Eligio gave me the ring.” Gabriel Eligio answered, “My bachelor days, how I enjoyed them!”
30. Ligia GM, in Galvis, Los GM. Interview with Ruth Ariza Cotes, Bogotá, 2007.
31. Interview, José Font Castro, Madrid, 1997.
32. Vargas Llosa, Historia de un deicidio, p. 14.
33. See Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 59-60. In fact the house where they spent their honeymoon was the home of the Márquez Iguarán family next to the customs house in Riohacha. It was there, according to Ricardo Márquez Iguarán, who took me there in June 2008, where Gabriel Eligio’s “excellent marksmanship” led to GGM’s conception on the night of 12-13 June 1926. After two weeks the couple moved to another, more modest house in the next street.
34. Clearly there are mysteries relating to the reasons why Nicolás reluctantly assented to their marriage and why García Márquez’s birth date has always been such a problem. The most obvious explanation, here as everywhere else in the world, at all times and in all places, is that Luisa Santiaga got pregnant out of wedlock and (since the date of the wedding seems not to be in doubt) that Gabito was born well before 6 March (or on 6 March but well overdue) and for that reason was not baptized and registered (by what was after all a very respectable, official, law-abiding and God-fearing family) until he was three. Luisa Santiaga insisting on marrying the illegitimate, unqualified Gabriel Eligio despite parental opposition is a remarkable story. Since there seems no doubt of her love for Gabriel Eligio, it is possible that her only way of securing her parents’ reluctant agreement was to get pregnant. However, there is no more than circumstantial evidence for this.
2 / The House at Aracataca (1927–1928)
1. Mendoza, The Fragrance of Guava, p. 17.
2. See John Archer, “Revelling in the fantastic,” Sunday Telegraph Magazine (London), 8 February 1981. “One of the ways they kept me quiet at night was to tell me that if I moved dead people would come out of every room. So when darkness fell I would be terrified.” And Germán Castro Caycedo, “‘Gabo’ cuenta la novela de su vida,” El Espectador, 23 March 1977: “I’m not afraid of darkness. I’m afraid of big houses because dead people only come out in big houses … I only buy little houses because dead people don’t come out in them.”
3. Aida GM, in Galvis, Los GM, p. 99: “So then the grandson just sort of stayed in my grandparents’ house.” In one interview the grandson himself would tell a journalist, “My parents gave me to my grandparents as a present, to please them,” a version which reconciles contradictions in several of the others.
4. Luis Enrique GM, in Galvis, Los GM, p. 123.
5. See Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 32–6, for GM’s evocation of the house. My description is based on careful comparison of GGM’s memoirs, the architects’ analysis quoted in Saldívar, GM: el viaje a la semilla, and the version established by the architects responsible for the 2008 reconstruction.
6. See ibid., p. 34, where GM says the room had “1925” inscribed on it, which is the year it was completed.
7. Margot GM, in Galvis, Los GM, p. 65.
8. See Leaf Storm; and Living to Tell the Tale, p. 35.
9. GGM himself would later “remember” a visit from Uribe Uribe, although the General was assassinated fourteen years before he was born. See Living to Tell the Tale, p. 33.
10. Like the character in Leaf Storm based upon him, Nicolás was always wandering around the house looking for little odd jobs like tightening screws and touching up paint. GGM himself would adopt this practice in later years as a way of relaxing between bouts of writing; by that time he was wearing workman’s overalls in order to write.
11. See Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 33 and 73-4: GGM says she was “my grandfather’s older sister.”
12. See GGM, “Watching the Rain in Galicia,” The Best of Granta Travel (London, Granta/Penguin, 1991), pp. 1-5, where GGM describes Tranquilina’s ways with bread and hams, the like of which he never tasted again until he visited Galicia: though already eating something similar (lacón) in Barcelona in the 1960s had brought back the pleasures but above all the anxieties and solitude of his childhood.
13. Ligia GM, In Galvis, Los GM, p. 152.
14. GGM, “Vuelta a la semilla,” El Espectador, 18 December 1983.
15. See “Growing Up in Macondo: Gabriel García Márquez,” Writers and Places, transcript (BBC2 film, shown 12 February 1981, producer John Archer).
16. See Germán Castro Caycedo, “‘Gabo’ cuenta la novela de su vida. 6,” El Espectador, 23 March 1977, etc., for the image of the immobilized child, full of terror, and the obsession in his work with burials.
17. BBC2, “Growing Up in Macondo”: “Everyone in the family is Caribbean and everyone in the Caribbean is superstitious. My mother still is today, there are still many African and Indian belief systems operating inside Catholicism … I myself believe in telepathy, premonitions, the power of dreams in ways we still don’t understand … I was brought up in that world, am still profoundly superstitious and I still interpret my own dreams and operate largely through instinct.”
18. From my discussions with Margot Valdeblánquez based on her memories and family photographs; see also Saldívar, GM: el viaje a la semilla, pp. 96-7, based on the recollections of Sara Emilia Márquez.
19. BBC2, “Growing Up in Macondo.”
20. “Recuerdos de la maestra de GM,” El Espectador, 31 October 1982.
21. Story told by Gabriel Eligio to José Font Castro.
22. See Mendoza, The Fragrance of Guava, p. 18.
23. See GGM, “La vaina de los diccionarios,” El Espectador, 16 May 1982, in which he recalls his grandfather’s misplaced respect for dictionaries and confesses his own pleasure in catching them out.
24. From my discussions with Margot Valdeblánquez based on her memories and family photographs; see also Saldívar, GM, pp. 103-4, based on the recollections of Sara Emilia Márquez.
25. White, Historia, pp. 19–20.
26. See Gabriel Fonnegra, Bananeras: testimonio vivo de una epopeya (Bogotá, Tercer Mundo, n.d.), pp. 27–8.
27. Ibid., p. 191.
28. Ibid., p. 26.
29. See Catherine C. LeGrand, “Living in Macondo: Economy and Culture in a UFC Banana Enclave in Colombia,” in Gilbert M. Joseph, Catherine C. LeGrand and Ricardo D. Salvatore, eds., Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations (Durham, N.C., Duke, University Press, 1998), pp. 333–68 (p. 348).
30. GGM, Living to Tell the Tale, p. 18.
31. Saldívar, GM: el viaje a la semilla, pp. 54, 522.
32. There is no definitive history of this event and no consensus as to the number of civilians killed by the army. Inevitably most writers view it through their own ideological prism.
33. Carlos Arango, Sobrevivientes de las bananeras (Bogotá, ECOE, 2nd ed., 1985), p. 54.
34. See María Tila Uribe, Los años escondidos: sueños y rebeldías en la década del veinte (Bogotá, CESTRA, 1994), p. 265.
35. See Carlos Cortés Vargas, Los sucesos de las bananeras, ed. R. Herrera Soto (Bogotá, Editorial Desarrollo, 2nd edition, 1979), p. 79.
36. Roberto Herrera Soto and Rafael Romero Castañeda, La zona bananera del Magdalena: historia y léxico (Bogotá, Instituto Caro y Cuervo, 1979), pp. 48, 65.
37. White, Historia, p. 99.
38. Herrera and Castañeda, La zona bananera, p. 52.
39. Arango, Sobrevivientes, pp. 84-6.
40. Fonnegra, Bananeras, pp. 136-7.
41. Ibid., p. 138.
42. Ibid., p. 154.
43. José Maldonado, quoted in Arango, Sobrevivientes, p. 94.
44. White, Historia, p. 101.
45. See GGM, “Vuelta a la semilla,” El Espectador, 18 December 1983, in which he confesses that “it was only a few years ago I found out that he [Angarita] had taken up a very definite and coherent position during the strike and the killing of the banana workers.” It is extraordinary to discover that GGM did not know most facts relevant to the strike—not excluding the actions of his grandfather, Durán, Angarita and others close to him—at the time of writing OHYS.
46. Cortés Vargas, Los sucesos de las bananeras, pp. 170-71, 174, 182–3, 201, 225. Did GGM ever learn about the writing of these letters?
47. Transcripts of the documents, including Angarita’s testimony, can be found in 1928: La masacre en las bananeras (Bogotá, Los Comuneros, n.d.).
3 / Holding His Grandfather’s Hand (1929-1937)
1. See Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 11-13, 80 and 122-5, for memories of these two visits.
2. In ibid., p. 123, he has her saying “You don’t remember me anymore,” but this should probably be counted an example of poetic licence.
3. Margot was a disturbed child who would persist in eating earth until she was eight or nine years of age. She would inspire the characters of Amaranta and Rebeca in One Hundred Years of Solitude.
4. BBC2, “Growing Up in Macondo.”
5. “El microcosmos de GM,” Excelsior (Mexico City), 12 April 1971.
6. LeGrand, Frontier Expansion, p. 73.
7. Margot GM, in Galvis, Los GM, pp. 60–61. Evidently Margot and Gabito were thoroughly spoilt, as he acknowledges in “La conduerma de las palabras,” El Espectador, 16 May 1981.
8. It is generally believed in Aracataca that Nicolás bought and then rented out premises in the zone known as Cataquita which were turned into one of the “academias” or dance halls where both liquor and sex were freely available. See Venancio Aramis Bermúdez Gutiérrez, “Aportes socioculturales de las migraciones en la Zona Bananera del Magdalena” (Bogotá, November 1995, Beca Colcultura 1994, I Semestre, unpublished ms.).
9. BBC2, “Growing Up in Macondo.”
10. See Living to Tell the Tale, p. 82, on his lifelong fear of the dark.
11. See Carlota de Olier, “Habla la madre de GM: ‘Quisiera volar a verlo … pero le tengo terror al avión,’” El Espectador, 22 October 1982: “‘If my father were alive,’ says Doña Luisa, ‘he would be happy. He always thought that death would prevent him enjoying Gabito’s triumphs. He intuited that in time Gabito would achieve an outstanding position and often said, “What a pity I won’t be there to see how far this child’s intelligence will take him.”’”
12. See GGM, “Manos arriba?,” El Espectador, 20 March 1983, which notes that most visitors to the house wore guns.
13. See Nicolás Suescún, “El prestidigitador de Aracataca,” Cromos (Bogotá), 26 October 1982, pp. 24-7, which begins its portrait of GGM the child blinking like a movie camera and thus absorbing and processing the world and turning it into stories.
14. Margot GM, in Galvis, Los GM, pp. 64–5.
15. “La memoria de Gabriel,” La Nación (Guadalajara), 1996, p. 9.
16. Elena Poniatowska, “Los Cien años de soledad se iniciaron con sólo 20 dólares” (interview, September 1973), in her Todo México (Mexico City, Diana, 1990).
17. GGM told Germán Castro Caycedo, in “‘Gabo’ cuenta la novela de su vida,” El Espectador, 23 March 1977, that until he himself was waiting for money in Paris he had always considered this ritual something of a comedy.
18. Galvis, Los GM, p. 64. The Colonel also wrote frequently to his eldest son José María Valdeblánquez.
19. See GGM, “Vuelta a la semilla,” El Espectador, 18 December 1983, where GGM speaks with great familiarity—for the first time—of General José Rosario Durán’s house, which he and the Colonel must have passed, or even visited, on many occasions.
20. BBC2, “Growing Up in Macondo.” See GGM, Living to Tell the Tale, p. 84, on Father Angarita.
21. See GGM, “Memoria feliz de Caracas,” El Espectador, 7 March 1982; also Living to Tell the Tale, p. 43, on the Venezuelans in Aracataca.
22. See GGM, Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 24-32.
23. Saldívar, GM: el viaje a la semilla, pp. 67, 71-2.
24. Interview with Antonio Daconte (grandson), Aracataca, November 2006. See GGM, Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 18 and 87-8.
25. See GGM, Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 87-8 and 91-2.
26. GGM, “La nostalgia de las almendras amargas,” Cambio (Bogotá), 23 June 2000. Also on Don Emilio, see “El personaje equívoco,” Cambio, 19-26 June 2000.
27. BBC2, “Growing Up in Macondo.”
28. See Henríquez, El misterio, pp. 283–4.
29. Interview with Margot Valdeblánquez de Díaz-Granados, Bogotá, 1993.
30. See OHYS and Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 66-7, on the arrival of the seventeen bastards with ash on their foreheads.
31. BBC2, “Growing Up in Macondo.”
32. See GGM, Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 62–4.
33. See Galvis, Los GM, p. 59.
34. This was a traumatically confusing experience, to say the least. García Márquez has always said that he did not “meet” his mother until he was five years old. Clearly he must mean “remember,” because he must have seen her on at least one of the two visits to Barranquilla. In any case his first recollection, however conditioned by memory and desire, was a defining moment of his life, later recorded in both Leaf Storm and Living to Tell the Tale. To awareness of his grandmother, his aunts and the servants, then, was now added a concrete awareness of this new personage: his mother.
35. GGM, “Cuánto cuesta hacer un escritor?,” Cambio 16, Colombia, 11 December 1995. See Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 94–5, for GGM’s recollections and attitude to the school.
36. According to Fonnegra, Bananeras, pp. 96–7, a Pedro Fergusson was Mayor of Aracataca in 1929.
37. See GGM, “La poesía al alcance de los niños,” El Espectador, 25 January 1981.
38. Saldívar, GM: el viaje a la semilla, p. 120.
39. “Recuerdos de la maestra de GM,” El Espectador, 31 October 1982.
40. Margot Valdeblánquez, interview, Bogotá, 1991.
41. Saldívar, GM: el viaje a la semilla, p. 120.
42. See Saldívar, “GM: ‘La novela que estoy escribiendo está localizada en Cartagena de Indias, durante el siglo XVIII,’” Diario 16 (Madrid), 1 April 1989.
43. See Rita Guibert, Seven Voices (New York, Vintage, 1973), pp. 317-20, for GGM on the relation between his early drawing of comic strips and his desire for public performance, which he was ultimately too self-conscious to carry off.
44. BBC2, “Growing Up in Macondo.”
45. GGM, “La vaina de los diccionarios,” El Espectador, May 1982.
46. Luis Enrique GM, in Galvis, Los GM, pp. 123–4.
47. Family births: Gabito, Aracataca, March 1927; Luis Enrique, Aracataca, September 1928; Margot, Barranquilla, November 1929; Aida Rosa, Barranquilla, December 1930; Ligia, Aracataca, August 1934 (she remembers the house in Aracataca in Galvis, Los GM, p. 152); Gustavo, Aracataca, September 1936; then Rita, Barranquilla, July 1939; Jaime, Sucre, May 1940; Hernando (“Nanchi”), Sucre, March 1943; Alfredo (“Cuqui”), Sucre, February 1945; and Eligio Gabriel (“Yiyo”), Sucre, November 1947.
48. Mendoza, The Fragrance of Guava, p. 21. (My translation.)
49. See GGM, “La túnica fosforescente,” El Tiempo, December 1992; also “Estas Navidades siniestras,” El Espectador, December 1980, in which he says he was five when all this happened. In Living to Tell the Tale, p. 70, he says that he was ten on this occasion, not seven, as chronological laws would suggest.
50. In Leaf Storm, pp. 50–54, Martín, the character based partly on Gabriel Eligio, is both sinister (he uses Guajiro witchcraft, including sticking pins in dolls’ eyes) and bland; evidently he never loved Isabel (the character based partly on Luisa) but only wanted contact with the Colonel’s influence and money; and he left before his child (the character partly based on GGM) could have any memories of him-which of course is true of GGM’s own experience, except in that case Gabriel Eligio also took Luisa away; whereas in Leaf Storm GGM, in wish-fulfilment, has the mother to himself and sends the father away for ever.
51. “Recuerdos de la maestra de GM,” El Espectador, 31 October 1982.
52. Margot GM, in Galvis, Los GM, p. 61.
53. See Living to Tell the Tale, p. 85.
54. See Leonel Giraldo, “Siete Días en Aracataca, el pueblo de ‘Gabo’ GM,” Siete Días (Buenos Aires), 808, 8–14 December 1982.
55. GGM addresses this question in Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 82–4.
56. Margot GM, in Galvis, Los GM, p. 62. See Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 84–5, for GGM’s reflections on the return of his parents; note in particular that although refusing overtly to criticize his father he immediately starts talking about beatings, thereby showing that he associates his father with violence (for which, he says, Gabriel Eligio later apologized). Of course most parents physically chastised their children in those days.
57. See Margot’s recollections in Galvis, Los GM, p. 68.
58. GGM, Los cuentos de mi abuelo el coronel, ed. Juan Gustavo Cobo Borda (Smurfit Cartón de Colombia, 1988).
59. See Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 95–6.
60. Ramiro de la Espriella, “De ‘La casa’ fue saliendo todo,” Imagen (Caracas), 1972.
61. See Luis Enrique’s hilarious recollections of the journey to Sincé in Galvis, Los GM, pp. 124–5; also GGM, Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 96–7.
62. Interview with GGM, Mexico City, 1999.
63. I visited Sincé with GGM’s brother-in-law Alfonso Torres (married to GGM’s sister Rita, who had lived there) in 1998.
64. Margot GM, in Galvis, Los GM, p. 68.
65. Saldívar, “GM: ‘La novela que estoy escribiendo está localizada en Cartagena de Indias, durante el siglo XVIII,’” Diario 16, 1 April 1989. These are clearly very important statements. GGM’s stories and novels are obsessed with corpses but GGM himself seems never to have seen the corpses of people who were important to him until his father died in 1984. In his first story, “La tercera resignación” (1947), the narrator himself dies but his corpse does not decompose or get buried.
66. Guillermo Ochoa, “Los seres que inspiraron a Gabito,” Excelsior (México City), 13 April 1971. Of course he was not eight but ten when his grandfather died (in “El personaje equívoco,” Cambio, 19-26 June 2000, he says it happened “when I was not much more than five”); but he was indeed eight when his grandfather had his fateful accident and it was then that the life he had led until that moment, already threatened by the return of his parents and siblings, effectively came to an end.
67. Luisa Márquez, interview, Barranquilla, 1993.
68. Margot GM, in Galvis, Los GM, p. 69.
69. Luis Enrique, in Galvis, Los GM, p. 130. Did the always mischievous Luis Enrique know more about the “academy” and its antecedents than he lets on?
70. GGM, “Regreso a la guayaba,” El Espectador, 10 April 1983. On his relation to Aracataca, see also GGM, “Vuelta a la semilla,” El Espectador, 18 December 1983.
4 / Schooldays: Barranquilla, Sucre, Zipaquirá (1938–1946)
1. GGM, Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 128-29.
2. Ibid., p. 132.
3. Ibid., pp. 142–3.
4. Mendoza, The Fragrance of Guava, p. 19.
5. GGM, Vivir para contarla (Mexico City, Diana, 2002), p. 173. (My translation.)
6. Vivir para contarla, p. 163. (My translation.) The fact that he did survive was always attributed by Luisa Santiaga to the fact that she gave him cod-liver oil every day: see Guillermo Ochoa, “El microcosmos de GM,” Excelsior (Mexico City), April 12 1971: “‘The kid smelled of fish all day,’ his father says.”
7. The following sections on Sucre draw on my interviews with Señora Luisa Márquez de García in Cartagena and Barranquilla, 1991 and 1993, on a conversation with GGM himself in Mexico City in 1999, and on many conversations with all his brothers and sisters down the years—as well as on the published sources recorded in these notes.
8. Gustavo GM, in Galvis, Los GM, p. 185.
9. Living to Tell the Tale, p. 155.
10. Vivir para contarla, p. 188. (My translation.)
11. Juan Gossaín, quoted by Heriberto Fiorillo, La Cueva: crónica del grupo de Barranquilla (Bogotá, Planeta, 2002), pp. 87-8.
12. Saldívar, GM: el viaje a la semilla, is the best source on GGM’s time in the Colegio San Juan. But see also José A. Núñez Segura, “Gabriel García Márquez (Gabo-Gabito),” Revista Javeriana (Bogotá), 352, March 1969, pp. 31-6, in which one of the Jesuit teachers at the school retrieves some of GGM’s juvenile compositions.
13. Galvis, Los GM, p. 70.
14. GGM mentions this murder in Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 227-8.
15. The youngest, Yiyo, did not entirely agree: he once told me that all the younger children, the ones born in Sucre, were “hopeless,” including him, precisely because they were the only ones his father had delivered!
16. See Harley D. Oberhelman, “Gabriel Eligio García habla de Gabito,” in Peter G. Earle, ed., Gabriel García Marquez (Madrid, Taurus, 1981), pp. 281-3. Oberhelman interviewed Gabriel Eligio about his medical training and experience.
17. Guillermo Ochoa, “El microcosmos de GM,” Excelsior, 12 April 1971.
18. Living to Tell the Tale, p. 224.
19. GGM in conversation, Mexico City, 1999.
20. Rosario Agudelo, “Conversaciones con García Márquez,” Pueblo, suplemento, “Sábado Literario” (Madrid), 2 May 1981. In other versions GGM laughs this traumatic experience off; Living to Tell the Tale gives a kind of intermediate version; and Memories of My Melancholy Whores gives a fictionalized account.
21. Popular Caribbean musical genre whose style evolved out of the cumbia, Colombia’s traditional national dance rhythm.
22. Roberto Ruiz, “Eligio García en Cartagena. El abuelo de Macondo,” El Siglo, 31 October 1969.
23. Quoted by Gossaín in Fiorillo, La Cueva, p. 88. Gabriel Eligio later denied the intention to trepan.
24. See GGM, “El cuento del cuento. (Conclusión),” El Espectador, 2 September 1981, in which he recalls his adolescent days in Sucre (un-named) and states that they were “the freest years of my life.” On his attitude to prostitutes, see Claudia Dreifus, “Gabriel García Márquez,” Playboy 30:2, February 1983.
25. Living to Tell the Tale, p. 166.
26. My translation. See Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 168-71.
27. ibid., p. 174.
28. See GGM, “Bogotá 1947,” El Espectador, 21 October 1981 and “El río de nuestra vida,” El Espectador, 22 March 1981. The writer Christopher Isherwood visited Colombia in the 1940s and travelled on the David Arango. See his evocation of the journey in The Condor and the Cows (London, Methuen, 1949).
29. GGM, The Autumn of the Patriarch (London, Picador, 1978), p. 16.
30. Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 179-80.
31. The best evocation of this entire journey and the arrival in Bogotá is in Germán Castro Caycedo, “‘Gabo’ cuenta la novela de su vida. 1 and 2,” El Espectador, 23 March 1977.
32. GGM, “Bogotá 1947,” El Espectacdor, 18 October 1981.
33. GGM, Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 184-5.
34. The best source on the school at Zipaquirá is Saldívar, GM: el viaje a la semilla. Much of my information is based on an interview with a schoolmate of GM, José Espinosa, Bogotá, 1998.
35. Rosario Agudelo, “Conversaciones con García Márquez,” Pueblo, suplemento, “Sábado Literario” (Madrid), 2 May 1981.
36. See Aline Helg, La educacíon en Colombia 1918–1957: una historia social, economíca y politica (Bogotá, CEREC, 1987).
37. GGM, “‘Estoy comprometido hasta el tuétano con el periodismo político.’ Alternativa entrevista a GGM,” Alternativa (Bogotá), 29, 31 March-13 April 1975, p. 3.
38. See Juan Gustavo Cobo Borda, “Cuatro horas de comadreo literario con GGM” (interview 23 March 1981), in his Silva, Arciniegas, Mutis y García Márquez (Bogotá, Presidencia de la República, 1997), pp. 469-82 (p. 475).
39. Living to Tell the Tale, p. 196.
40. Quoted by Carlos Rincón, “GGM entra en los 65 años. Tres o cuatro cosas que querría saber de él,” El Espectador, 1 March 1992.
41. Margot García Márquez told me in 1993: “When Mamá was pregnant with Nanchi, it happened again. This time even Mamá got upset. She was in bed in the two-storey house in Sucre square and she wouldn’t get up. That time she even screamed at him. And Mamá was always incredibly sick, vomiting, with each of her pregnancies, she always lost weight, it was amazing but true. And I got really upset for her and wanted to do something about it, but she wouldn’t let me.”
42. Luis Enrique GM, Galvis, Los GM, p. 146.
43. Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 217-18.
44. Saldívar, GM: el viaje a la semilla, p. 156.
45. Darío too came from a small Caribbean town, he too was brought up away from his own mother, and he too had listened to an old colonel telling tales of war. Thirty years later García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch would be, among other things, a loving tribute to Darío’s poetic language.
46. Living to Tell the Tale, p. 205.
47. “La ex-novia del Nobel Colombiano,” El País (Madrid), 7 October 2002.
48. Vivir para contarla, p. 242. (My translation.)
49. See GGM, One Hundred Years of Solitude (London, Picador, 1978), pp. 29–30.
50. Living to Tell the Tale, p. 204.
51. Ibid., p. 193.
52. Ibid., p. 193.
53. See Saldívar, GM: el viaje a la semilla, p. 166; also GGM, Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 193-4.
54. See Germán Santamaría, “Carlos Julio Calderón Hermida, el profesor de GM,” Gaceta (Bogotá, Colcultura), 39, 1983, pp. 4-5.
55. In interviews after he became famous he frequently denied ever having written poetry: see, for example, his conversation with María Esther Gilio, “Escribir bien es un deber revolucionario,” Triunfo (Madrid), 1977, included in Rentería, ed., GM habla de GM en 33 grandes reportajes.
56. See La Casa Grande (Mexico City/Bogotá), 1:3, February-April 1997, p. 45, where the poem is published “thanks to Dasso Saldívar and Luis Villar Borda.”
57. Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 205-6.
58. Ligia GM, in Galvis, Los GM, p. 165: “When Gabito fell in love with Mercedes she was a girl of eight in a pinafore dress with little ducks on.”
59. See Beatriz López de Barcha, “‘Gabito esperó a que yo creciera,’” Carrusel, Revista de El Tiempo (Bogotá), 10 December 1982.
60. This was republished by Héctor Abad Gómez, “GM poeta?,” El Tiempo, Lecturas Dominicales, 12 December 1982. See also Donald McGrady, “Dos sonetos atribuidos a GGM,” Hispanic Review, 51 (1983), pp. 429–34. The most popular cumbia in Colombia, composed years later, is called “Colegiala” (“Schoolgirl”).
61. See GGM, “Memorias de un fumador retirado,” El Espectador, 13 February 1983.
62. Living to Tell the Tale, p. 200.
63. Vivir para contarla, p. 281. (My translation.) See also GGM, “El cuento del cuento. (Conclusión),” El Espectador, 2 September 1981, where he recalls how he discovered that María Alejandrina Cervantes’s brothel had become a convent school when he returned fifteen years later.
64. See Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 236–9.
65. OHYS, p. 301.
66. Interview, Cartagena, 1991.
67. In Mompox Mercedes had a close school friend called Margarita Chica Salas, who also lived in Sucre: she would shortly be involved in the drama surrounding the murder of Cayetano Gentile, a close friend of GM and his family.
68. Gertrudis Prasca de Amín, interview, Magangué, 1991.
69. GGM, Crónica de una muerte anunciada (Bogotá, Oveja Negra, 1981), p. 40. (My translation.)
70. GGM, “El río de nuestra vida,” El Espectador, 22 March 1981, mentions the “irrecoverable José Palencia.” See Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 239–43.
71. Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 243-4.
72. Saldívar, “GM: La novela que estoy escribiendo está localizada en Cartagena de Indias, durante el siglo XVIII,” Diario 16, 1 April 1989.
73. Ligia GM, in Galvis, Los GM, p. 158.
74. See GGM, “Telepatía sin hilos,” El Espectador, 16 November 1980, in which he states that Tranquilina died “almost one hundred years old.”
75. Aida Rosa GM, in Galvis, Los GM, p. 99.
5 / The University Student and the Bogotazo (1947–1948)
1. This chapter draws on a wide range of sources and conversations but especially on interviews with Gonzalo Mallarino (Bogotá, 1991), Luis Villar Borda (Bogotá, 1998), Margarita Márquez Caballero (Bogotá, 1998), Jacques Gilard (Toulouse, 1999, 2004) and Gustavo Adolfo Ramírez Ariza (Bogotá, 2007).
2. In M. Fernández-Braso, GGM: una conversación infinita (Madrid, Azur, 1969), p. 102, GGM remarks that the Colombian Academy considers even the Spanish Royal Academy “progressive” and talks of “protecting” the language (even against Spain!).
3. Kafka, “Letter to his Father” (November 1919). Kafka’s father never read this letter.
4. Interview, Bogotá, 1993. ALM was in fact a distant relation through a shared Cotes great-grandfather, as would later be discovered when they became friends.
5. Luis Villar Borda, interview, 1998. On this period see also GGM, “Bogotá 1947,” El Espectador, 18 October 1981.
6. See Juan B. Fernández, “Cuando García Márquez era Gabito,” El Tiempo, Lecturas Dominicales, October 1982. One of his key companions at this time was to be Afro-Colombian medical student Manuel Zapata Olivella, who would later intervene in his destiny in a decisive fashion on more than one occasion. Other important costeño students were Jorge Alvaro Espinosa, who introduced GGM to Joyce’s Ulysses, and Domingo Manuel Vega, who lent him Kafka’s Metamorphosis.
7. Alvaro Mutis, “Apuntes sobre un viaje que no era para contar,” in Aura Lucía Mera, ed., Aracataca/Estocolmo (Bogotá, Instituto Colombiano de Cultura, 1983), pp. 19–20, describes Mallarino on the 1982 Nobel trip as “our dean,” GGM’s oldest cachaco friend from the Bogotá period.
8. For important details about Camilo Torres and his decision to be a priest and subsequent departure, see Germán Castro Caycedo, “‘Gabo’ cuenta la novela de su vida. 2,” El Espectador, 23 March 1977.
9. Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, La llama y el hielo (Bogotá, Gamma, 3rd edition, 1989), pp. 9–10.
10. The direct translation would be “cock-sucking” because the image is of the owner of a fighting cock gazing ironically and provocatively at his adversary over the cock’s comb, while soothing it lovingly with his lips.
11. See GGM, “Bogotá, 1947,” El Espectador, 18 October 1981; and “El frenesí del viernes,” El Espectador, 13 November 1983, which recalls his desolate Sundays in Bogotá.
12. Gonzalo Mallarino, interview, Bogotá, 1991.
13. The second, “Celestial Geography,” was published on 1 July 1947.
14. See Germán Castro Caycedo, “‘Gabo’ cuenta la novela de su vida. 2,” El Espectador, 23 March 1977, on GGM’s farewell to Camilo Torres.
15. La Vida Universitaria, Tuesday supplement of La Razón, Bogotá, 22 June 1947. See La Casa Grande (Mexico City/Bogotá), 1:3, February-April 1997, p. 45, where this poem is republished “thanks to Dasso Saldívar and Luis Villar Borda.”
16. See Juan Gustavo Cobo Borda, “Cuatro horas de comadreo literario con GGM,” in his Silva, Arciniegas, Mutis y GM (Bogotá, Presidencia de la República, 1997), pp. 469–82, for one of the many versions of this story. Borges would later say that “The Metamorphosis” was the only story from this collection that he did not in fact translate.
17. Of course it isn’t the way Kafka’s grandmother talked—that, precisely, was the difference!
18. See John Updike, “Dying for love: a new novel by GM,” in The New Yorker, 7 November 2005: “A velvety pleasure to read, though somewhat disagreeable to contemplate; it has the necrophiliac tendencies of the precocious short stories, obsessed with living death, that GM published in his early twenties.”
19. GGM, Todos los cuentos (1947–1972) (Barcelona, Plaza y Janés, 3rd edition, 1976), pp. 17–18. (My translation.)
20. Ibid., pp. 14–15.
21. Ibid., pp. 17–18.
22. GGM tells the whole story to Germán Castro Caycedo, “‘Gabo’ cuenta la novela de su vida. 3,” El Espectador, 23 March 1977.
23. GGM, Collected Stories (New York, Harper Perennial, 1991), p. 24.
24. “La Ciudad y el Mundo,” El Espectador, 28 October 1947.
25. Living to Tell the Tale, p. 271.
26. Gustavo Adolfo Ramírez Ariza is preparing a major revisionist work on García Márquez’s relationship with and experiences in Bogotá.
27. GGM, Collected Stories, p. 19.
28. Luis Enrique GM, in Galvis, Los GM, pp. 132–3.
29. The ending -azo in Spanish conveys the idea of a violent blow by or against something.
30. See Gonzalo Sánchez, “La Violencia in Colombia: New research, new questions,” Hispanic American Historical Review, 65:4 (1985), pp. 789–807.
31. Interview, Bogotá, 1998. In “Bogotá 1947,” El Espectador, 18 October 1981, GGM states categorically that his papers disappeared in the fire which destroyed his pensión (with specific reference to “El fauno en la tranvía”). Living to Tell the Tale, p. 288, tells a different story.
32. See Herbert Braun, Mataron a Gaitán: vida pública y violencia urbana en Colombia (Bogotá, Norma, 1998), p. 326.
33. Ironically, his first revolutionary act was to help a looter smash a typewriter; García Márquez would later assure Castro that the typewriter was his!
34. See Arturo Alape, El Bogotazo: memorias del olvido (Bogotá, Universidad Central, 1983).
35. Interview, Margarita Márquez Caballero, Bogotá, 1998.
36. Rita GM, in Galvis, Los GM, p. 237.
6 / Back to the Costa: An Apprentice Journalist
in Cartagena (1948–1949)
1. Living to Tell the Tale, p. 304. This chapter draws on interviews with the GM family, with Ramiro de la Espriella (Bogotá, 1991), Carlos Alemán (Bogotá, 1991), Manuel Zapata Olivella (Bogotá, 1991), Juan Zapata Olivella (Cartagena, 1991), Jacques Gilard (Toulouse, 1999, 2004), Héctor Rojas Herazo (Barranquilla, 1998) and Marta Yances (Cartagena, 2007), among many others.
2. There are two excellent books on García Márquez’s time in Cartagena: Gustavo Arango, Un ramo de nomeolvides: García Márquez en “ El Universal” (Cartagena, El Universal, 1995) and Jorge García Usta, Como aprendió a escribir García Márquez (Medellín, Lealon, 1995), which appeared in a revised edition and with a slightly less inflammatory title in 2007: García Márquez en Cartagena: sus inicios liter arios (Bogotá, Planeta, 2007). Both claim more for the impact of the city upon his development as a writer than the evidence can perhaps sustain, but they both write as correctives to the majority view that it was the subsequent period in Barranquilla (1950–53) which was decisive. They were reacting above all against the work of the French scholar Jacques Gilard, who, in the 1970s, gathered together all García Márquez’s journalism in El Universal (Cartagena), El Heraldo (Barranquilla), El Espectador (Bogotá) and elsewhere. Whatever view is taken of this ongoing polemic Gilard’s contribution to García Márquez studies is unsurpassed and his prologues to the volumes of GGM’s Obra periodística are indispensable. No more than a handful of GGM’s more than 1,000 articles, essays and brief literary pieces published in the press between 1948 and 2008 have ever appeared in English. Specifically on this period, see Jacques Gilard, ed., Gabriel García Márquez, Obra periodística vol. I: Textos costeños 1 (Bogotá, Oveja Negra, 1983).
3. Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 3 06–16, tells the story of these days and weeks in great detail.
4. See profile of Rojas Herazo by GGM, El Heraldo (Barranquilla), 14 March 1950.
5. Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 313–14 and pp. 320–21. In Living GGM calls him “José Dolores.”
6. See “Un domingo de delirio,” El Espectador, 8 March 1981, in which GGM, back in Cartagena, talks about its magic and reveals that his favourite place used to be the wharf of the Bahía de las Animas, where the market used to be. See also “Un payaso pintado detrás de una puerta,” El Espectador, 1 May 1982.
7. Although, in Cartagena, it is thought that García Márquez did not acknowledge Zabala precisely because he learned so much from him, in 1980 García Márquez said to a journalist, Donaldo Bossa Herazo, “Zabala is a gentleman to whom I owe much of what I am.” (Arango, Un ramo de nomeolvides, p. 136.)
8. The two articles, both untitled, appeared in El Universal under the “Punto y Aparte” byline on 21 and 22 May 1948, six weeks after the Bogotazo.
9. These and all his other articles from this period can be found in Gilard, ed., Textos costeños 1.
10. See Gilard, ed., Textos costeños 1, pp. 94–5.
11. Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 324–5.
12. Ligia GM, in Galvis, Los GM, p. 169.
13. Arango, Un ramo de nomeolvides, p. 178.
14. García Usta, Como aprendió a escribir García Márquez, p. 49.
15. The phrase in Spanish was “tan modosito” (Arango, Un ramo de nomeolvides, p. 67).
16. Ibid., p. 275.
17. Franco Múnera, quoted by Ibid., p. 178. The detail is significant: in the racist Colombia of the 1940s, above all in Bogotá, the drum was a coded sign for costeño culture in general and black culture in particular; García Márquez’s explicit attachment to that instrument was, equally, a sign of an attachment to his regional culture and a gesture of defiance to the cachaco view of the world.
18. El Universal, 27 June 1948.
19. See GGM’s article on Poe in El Universal, 7 October 1949. On his relation with Ibarra Merlano, see Cobo Borda, “Cuatro horas de comadreo literario con GGM,” op. cit.
20. El Universal, 4 July 1948; see Arango, Un ramo de nomeolvides, p. 149. The article was republished in El Heraldo (Barranquilla), 16 February 1950, with the addition of the name Albaniña.
21. El Universal, 10 July 1948; republished with slight differences in El Heraldo, 1 February 1950.
22. Arango, Un ramo de nomeolvides, pp. 208, 222.
23. Luis Enrique GM, interview, Barranquilla, 1998.
24. Luis Enrique GM, interview, Barranquilla, 1993.
25. Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 333–9.
26. See GGM, “El viaje de Ramiro de la Espriella,” El Universal, 26 July 1949, which mentions both writers.
27. See Virginia Woolf, Orlando (New York, Vintage, 2000), p. 176: “But love—as the male novelists define it—and who, after all, speak with greater authority?—has nothing whatever to do with kindness, fidelity, generosity, or poetry. Love is slipping off one’s petticoat and—But we all know what love is. Did Orlando do that?” (My emphasis.)
28. The phrase was “mucha vieja macha”: see Arango, Un ramo de nomeolvides, p. 220.
29. Rafael Betancourt Bustillo, quoted by García Usta, pp. 52–3.
30. Arango, Un ramo de nomeolvides, p. 231.
31. But this would have involved, again, inventing so-called “magical realism” all on his own, and writers more than twice his age such as Miguel Angel Asturias (Men of Maize, 1949) and Alejo Carpentier (The Kingdom of This World, 1949) were only just getting round to this idea as García Márquez began to wrestle with “The House,” in a country whose fiction was painfully backward even by the Latin American standards of the time.
32. Vivir para contarla, p. 411. (My translation.)
33. See GGM’s articles on La Sierpe in Gilard, ed., Gabriel García Márquez, Obra periodística vol. II: Textos costeños 2 (Bogotá, Oveja Negra, 1983).
34. See Eligio García, La tercera muerte de Santiago Nasar (Bogotá, Oveja Negra, 1987), p. 61.
35. See GGM, “La cándida Eréndira y su abuela Irene Papas,” El Espectador, 3 November 1982.
36. Fiorillo, La Cueva, p. 95.
37. In Living to Tell the Tale, p. 350, he says he starts it now! On p. 363 he says it was never more than “fragments” anyway!
38. Arango, Un ramo de nomeolvides, p. 266.
39. Ibid., p. 243. Jaime Angulo Bossa recalls that in Cartagena in those days he and Garcí Márquez always shook one another’s left hand (Ibid., p. 302). Ironically enough, although critics have argued interminably as to whether García Márquez’s reading of modernist novels originated in Cartagena or Barranquilla, none of them seem to have noticed that his active political education undoubtedly began right there in Cartagena, due first to Zabala and then to Ramiro de la Espriella; politics was never the Barran-quilla Group’s principal concern.
40. See Juan Gossaín, “A Cayetano lo mató todo el pueblo,” El Espectador, 13 May 1981, in which Luis Enrique GM tells the extraordinary story of María Alejandrina Cervantes: her improvised brothel in Sucre was “a sort of office where we all met during the vacations … My mother never worried if it was late and Gabito hadn’t got home because she knew he was at María Alejandrina’s. I don’t know if people can understand the way things were thirty years ago without being scandalized …”
41. GGM, “Viernes,” El Universal, 24 June 1949. The book’s importance to him was such that, no doubt exaggerating, he would later attribute his entire understanding of the nature of time both in life and in fiction to having read Mrs. Dalloivay.
42. Gilard, ed., Textos costeños 1, pp. 7–10; Saldívar, GM, pp. 556–7.
43. GGM, “Abelito Villa, Escalona & Cía,” El Heraldo, 14 March 1950.
44. Arango, Un ramo de nomeolvides, p. 237.
45. Both Arango and García Usta take this line.
7 / Barranquilla, a Bookseller and a Bohemian Group (1950–1953)
1. Arango, Un ramo de nomeolvides, p. 222.
2. Ibid., p. 311. This chapter draws upon interviews with the GM brothers and sisters, Alfonso Fuenmayor (Barranquilla, 1991, 1993), Germán Vargas (Barranquilla, 1991), Alejandro Obregón (Cartagena, 1991), Tita Cepeda (Barranquilla, 1991), Susy Linares de Vargas (Barranquilla, 1991), Heliodoro García (Barranquilla, 1991), Guillermo Marín (Barranquilla, 1991), Quique Scopell (Barranquilla, 1993), Katya González (Barranquilla, 1991), Pacho Bottía (Barranquilla, 1991), Ben Woolford (London, 1991), Ramón Illán Bacca (Barranquilla, 1991, 2007), Antonio María Peñaloza Cervantes (Aracataca, 1991), Otto Garzón Patiño (Barranquilla, 1993), Alberto Assa (Barranquilla, 1993), Juan Roda and María Fornaguera de Roda (Bogotá, 1993), Jacques Gilard (Toulouse, 1999, 2004), Guillermo Henríquez (Barranquilla, 2007), Meira Delmar (Barranquilla, 2007), Jaime Abello (Barranquilla, 2007), and many others.
3. Conversation, Mexico City, 1993.
4. On the Barranquilla Group see especially Alfonso Fuenmayor, Crónicas sobre el grupo de Barranquilla (Bogotá, Instituto Colombiano de Cultura, 1978) and Fiorillo, La Cueva, which has outstanding illustrations. Fiorillo has produced several other invaluable works on cultural matters surrounding the group. On Vinyes, see Jacques Gilard,Entre los Andes y el Caribe: la obra amerkana de Ramón Vinyes (Medellín, Universidad de Antioquia, 1989) and Jordi Lladó, Ramon Vinyes: un home de lletres entre Catalunya i el Caribe (Barcelona, Generalitat de Catalunya, 2006).
5. “What, you are Subirats? Subirats, the mediocre translator of Joyce?” (Fuenmayor, Crónicas sobre el grupo, p. 43).
6. Fiorillo, La Cueva, pp. 46, 98.
7. See Alvaro Mutis, “Apuntes sobre un viaje que no era para contar,” in Mera, ed., Aracataca-Estocolmo, pp. 19–20, for examples.
8. See Fiorillo, La Cueva, p. 108.
9. Daniel Samper, Prologue, Antologta de Alvaro Cepeda Samudio (Bogotá, Biblioteca Colombiana de Cultura, 1977); also Plinio Mendoza, “Requiem,” La llama y el hielo.
10. See GM, “Obregón, o la vocación desaforada,” El Espectador, 20 October 1982.
11. “El grupo de Barranquilla,” Vanguardia Liberal, Bucaramanga, 22 January 1956, quoted by Gilard in GGM, Obra periodística vol. V: De Europa y América 1 (Bogotá, Oveja Negra, 1984), p. 15.
12. Fiorillo, La Cueva, p. 96.
13. Ibid., pp. 136–7.
14. Ibid., p. 58; in more recent times the singer Shakira’s father had a jeweller’s shop there.
15. The present writer was given an unforgettable tour of this zone by Alfonso Fuenmayor in 1993, not long before he died; Jaime Abello, director of GGM’s Foundation for New Ibero-American Journalism, gave me a splendid update in 2006.
16. It may have been Rondón who first introduced GGM to the world of communism. See “‘Estoy comprometido hasta el tuétano con el periodismo político: Alternativa entrevista a GGM,” Alternativa (Bogotá), 29, 31 March-13 April 1975, p. 3, where he mentions belonging to a communist cell “at the age of twenty-two.”
17. See the first paragraph of Living to Tell the Tale.
18. Fiorillo, La Cueva, p. 74. Eufemia’s brothel is another place given mythical status by references in García Márquez’s story “The Night of the Curlews” and One Hundred Years of Solitude. Many of the group’s escapades were later immortalized in both literature and local legend, such as the time when Alfonso Fuenmayor frightened a parrot down from a tree and it fell into the sancocho stew that is always boiling away in anecdotes about costeño brothels at this time; García Márquez, without thinking, picked up the saucepan’s great lid and the parrot met its destiny as a substitute for chicken in the fragrant bubbling stew. On prostitution and literature in Barranquilla see Adlai Stevenson Samper, Polvos en La Arenosa: cultura y burdeles en Barranquilla (Barranquilla, La Iguana Ciega, 2005).
19. Fiorillo, La Cueva, p. 93.
20. GGM told me this in Havana in 1997.
21. See Living to Tell the Tale, p. 363. In Memories of My Melancholy Whores her fictional re-creation will be called Castorina.
22. In Living to Tell the Tale he is called not Dámaso but Lácides.
23. Faulkner said this in his famous Paris Review interview, which made a big impression on GGM. For an early description of the Skyscraper and its inhabitants see Plinio Mendoza, “Entrevista con Gabriel García Márquez,” Libre (Paris), 3, March-May 1972, pp. 7–8.
24. “Una mujer con importancia,” El Heraldo, 11 January 1950.
25. “El barbero de la historia,” El Heraldo, 25 May 1951.
26. “Illya en Londres,” El Heraldo, 29 July 1950.
27. “Memorias de un aprendiz de antropófago,” El Heraldo, 9 February 1951.
28. “La peregrinación de la jirafa,” El Heraldo, 30 May 1950.
29. Saldívar, GM: el viaje a la semilla, refutes GGM’s story and asserts categorically that the visit to Aracataca with his mother was in 1952 and that GGM only said that it was in 1950 in order to make Barranquilla the place where Leaf Storm was first written and in order to make the journey with his mother its inspiration—whereas in fact, according to Saldívar, Leaf Storm was first written in Cartagena in 1948-9! Since at the time Saldívar asserted this GGM was planning to make the journey with his mother the point of departure for his entire memoir and the definitive confirmation of his literary vocation, Saldívar’s hypothesis is especially reckless—and, in my judgement, entirely mistaken.
30. Later he would use this memory to create his story “Tuesday Siesta” about the mother and sister of a dead thief who have to walk through the hostile streets of Macondo to visit his grave. Those who have read Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (1955), which had an enormous influence on GGM, starting with the first line of OHYS, will have noted that both the style and the content of this section of Living to Tell the Tale are reminiscent of Juan Preciado’s arrival in Comala at the start of Rulfo’s book. On Aracataca at this time, see Lázaro Diago Julio, Aracataca … una historia para contar (Aracataca, 1989, unpublished), pp. 198–212.
31. Ironically enough, the local historian Diago Julio says that 1950 was Aracataca’s most prosperous year since the 1920s (Ibid., p. 215).
32. Living to Tell the Tale, p. 26.
33. GGM, interviewed by Peter Stone for the Paris Review in 1981. See Philip Gourevitch, ed., The “Paris Review” Interviews, Vol. II (London, Canongate, 2007), pp. 185–6.
34. Said to me in 1999; and see Anthony Day and Marjorie Miller, “Gabo talks: GGM on the misfortunes of Latin America, his friendship with Fidel Castro and his terror of the blank page,” Los Angeles Times Magazine, 2 September 1990, p. 33.
35. In Living to Tell the Tale GGM says he barely spoke to his mother on the return journey; but in Juan Gustavo Cobo Borda, “Cuatro horas de comadreo literario con GGM,” he says that he immediately began to ask her about “the story of my grandfather, the family, where I’d come from.”
36. GGM, “°Problemas de la novela?,” El Heraldo, 24 April 1950.
37. Fiorillo, La Cueva, pp. 20–21.
38. El Heraldo, 14 March 1950.
39. Escalona remains the best-known composer of vallenatos and a national institution. See Consuelo Araujonoguera, Rafael Escalona: el hombre y el mito (Bogotá, Planeta, 1988), a biography by the woman who would stage the now traditional vallenato festivals in Valledupar until she was killed, apparently in a firefight between the army and FARC guerrillas, in September 2001.
40. See Fiorillo, La Cueva, p. 36.
41. See Living to Tell the Tale, Fuenmayor, Crónicas sobre el grupo, and Gilard, ed., Textos costeños 1.
42. See Fiorillo, La Cueva, pp. 186–7.
43. On GGM and Hemingway, see William Kennedy, “The Yellow Trolley Car in Barcelona: An Interview” (1972), in Riding the Yellow Trolley Car (New York, Viking, 1993), p. 261.
44. GGM, “Faulkner, Nobel Prize,” El Heraldo, 13 November 1950.
45. Eligio García, Tras las claves de Melquíades, pp. 360–61.
46. Carlos Alemán gave me a copy of the letter when we met in Bogotá in 1991. The Spanish version was later reprinted in Arango, Un ramo de nomeolvides, pp. 271–3.
47. Curiously, two years before, Gaitán had been buried in the courtyard of his house in Bogotá because it was feared that his tomb would attract unhealthy attention from both his admirers and his enemies.
48. “Caricatura de Kafka,” El Heraldo, 23 August 1950.
49. Martín is both sinister (he uses Guajiro witchcraft, including sticking pins in dolls’ eyes) and bland: a curious combination.
50. “El viaje a la semilla,” El Manifesto (Bogotá, 1977), in Rentería, p. 161.
51. GGM told Elena Poniatowska (interview, September 1973, in Todo México, p. 224), that he “has never been able to use Mercedes literarily because he knows her so well that he has no idea what she is really like.”
52. I talked to Meira Delmar about those days in November 2006.
53. Ligia GM, in Galvis, Los GM, pp. 165–6. Mercedes said the same to me in 1991.
54. See Antonio Andrade, “Cuando Macondo era una redacción,” Excelsior (Mexico City), 11 October 1970.
55. Aida GM, interview, Barranquilla, 1993.
56. See “El día que Mompox se volvió Macondo,” El Tieinpo, 11 December 2002. Margarita Chica died in Sincelejo in May 2003. The best source on the causes of this murder and its aftermath is Eligio García, La tercera muerte de Santiago Nasar (Bogotá, Oveja Negra, 1987).
57. See Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 384–6.
58. Ligia GM, in Galvis, Los GM, p. 154.
59. See Angel Romero, “Cuando GM dormía en El Universal,” El Universal, 8 March 1983, which would become a key source for Arango’s book.
60. Gilard, ed., Textos costeños 1, p. 7.
61. Gustavo GM, in Galvis, Los GM, p. 211; GGM mentions the incident in “El cuento del cuento,” El Espectador, 23 August 1981.
62. Living to Tell the Tale, p. 390.
63. García Usta, Como aprendió a escribir García Márquez, pp. 34–5.
64. Arango, Un ramo de nomeolvides, p. 274.
65. Ibid., p. 211.
66. Gustavo GM, in Galvis, Los GM, p. 194.
67. GGM, “Nabo. El negro que hizo esperar a los ángeles,” El Espectador, 18 March 1951.
68. It is also manifestly “Faulknerian.”
69. Saldívar says this visit was in 1949. This appears to be based on a false memory due to GGM having lived in Cartagena twice: in 1948–9 and in 1951–2. Mutis himself has always been clear that he used his position with the airline Lansa to travel to Cartagena to meet GGM and he did not work for Lansa until 1950.
70. GGM, “Mi amigo Mutis,” El País (Madrid), 30 October 1993. The fact that he did not meet Mutis until 1951 does not inhibit GGM from stating that he used to tell Mutis and Mallarino his stories in Bogotá in 1947-8: see “Bogotá 1947,” El Espectador, 18 October 1981.
71. See Santiago Mutis, Tras las rutas de Maqroll el Gaviero (Cali, Proartes, 1988), p. 366.
72. See Fernando Quiroz, El reino que estaba para mí: conversaciones con Alvaro Mutis (Bogotá, Norma, 1993), pp. 68–70.
73. Vaina. Colombianism: “whatsit,” “thingumajig.” A whole dissertation could be written on this word, which is an integral part of the Colombian national character. It is used, at first sight, when the speaker is unable or cannot be bothered to come up with a precise word. In a country, however, where speech is normally unusually precise, the use of vaina is almost always quite deliberate (while feigning spontaneity), a kind of national custom or even addiction, a way of leaving things imprecise, even a way of showing that one wishes to be free, un-pompous—or even, in the country where “the best Spanish in the world” is spoken, transgressive. And obviously, for vaina to mean “everything,” as here, rather than, as is usually the case, some insignificant object unworthy of a name, shows a still more ironic and irreverent attitude. The word is used overwhelmingly by male speakers—possibly because women are aware that it comes from the Latin vagina.
74. Vivir para contarla, p. 481. (My translation.)
75. In a 1968 interview, GGM said Vinyes consoled him over the rejection: see Leopoldo Anzacot, “García Márquez habla de política y literatura,” Indice (Madrid), 237, November 1968; but of course Vinyes had left in April of that year.
76. There were still some remarkable moments. One of the most memorable was “The Coca-Cola Drinker” (“El bebedor de Coca-Cola,” 24 May 1952), his salute to Ramón Vinyes following his death in Barcelona on 5 May, just before his seventieth birthday. It is a testament to the “wise old Catalan” but also to the vision and originality of Gabito himself, his last disciple, who found a way of saying goodbye which was at once irreverent, self-mocking and touching. It ended, “Last Saturday they called us from Barcelona to say that he’s died. And I’ve sat down to remember all these things; just in case it’s true.”
77. I interviewed Poncho Cotes in Valledupar in 1993. See Rafael Escalona Martínez, “Estocolmo, Escalona y Gabo,” in Mera, ed., Aracataca-Estocolmo, pp. 88–90, on their relationship.
78. Interview, Manuel Zapata Olivella, Bogotá, 1991. See Zapata Olivella, “Enfoque antropológico: Nobel para la tradición oral,” El Tiempo, Lecturas Dominicaks, December 1982.
79. See Ciro Quiroz Otero, Valknato, hombrey canto (Bogotá, Icaro, 1983).
80. (My translation.) This song won the composition prize at the Vallenato Festival in 1977. García Márquez’s knowledge of the virtually unknown vallenato genre in the 1940s had been deepened by Clemente Manuel Zabala and Manuel Zapata Olivella (both from the Bolívar side of the Costa) even before he met Escalona, but he had always loved the popular music of his region.
81. See GGM, “Cuando Escalona me daba de comer,” Coralibe (Bogotá), April 1981.
82. See, for example, “La cercanía con el pueblo encumbró la novela de Amãrica Latina,” Excelsior (Mexico City), 25 January 1988.
83. Vivir para contarla, p. 499. (My translation.)
84. Cobo Borda, Silva, Arciniegas, Mutisy García Márquez, p. 479.
85. See Plinio Mendoza, “Entrevista con Gabriel García Márquez,” Libre, 3, March-May 1972, p. 9, where GGM quotes the line and confesses that it may be the inspiration for The Autumn of the Patriarch.
86. In Chronicle of a Death Foretold his fictionalized self would also become an encyclopedia salesman, “during an uncertain period when I was trying to understand something of myself” (London, Picador, 1983), p. 89.
87. See map of the Colombian Atlantic/Caribbean Coast.
88. See Gilard, ed., Gabriel García Marquez, Obra periodtstica vol. III: Entre cachacos 1, p. 66.
89. Remembered in a letter from GGM Barcelona to Alvaro Cepeda Samudio Barranquilla, 26 March 1970. I am grateful to Tita Cepeda for sight of this letter.
90. Vivir para contarla, p. 504 (my translation); though Gilard was informed that GGM left first (Textos costenos I, p. 25).
91. This work won the National Short Story Prize for 1954. See Living to Tell the Tale, p. 454, where, as usual he affects indifference to both money and glory.
92. Cobo Borda, Silva, Arciniegas, Mutis y García Márquez, p. 480. GGM also says here that the novelist he most enjoys, who really sends his mind travelling, is Conrad—again, thanks to Mutis.
93. Vivir para contarla, pp. 506–7. (My translation.)
8 / Back to Bogotá: The Ace Reporter (1954–1955)
1. Interviews with Alvaro Mutis, Mexico City, 1992, 1994. For the purposes of this chapter I also talked with José Salgar (Bogotá, 1991; Cartagena, 2007), Germán Arciniegas (Bogotá, 1991), Juan Gustavo Cobo Borda (Bogotá, 1991), Ana María Busquets de Cano (Bogotá, 1991), Alfonso and Fernando Cano (Bogotá, 1993), Alvaro Castaño (Bogotá, 1991, 1998 and 2007), Nancy Vicens (Mexico City, 1994), José Font Castro (Madrid, 1997), and Jacques Gilard (Toulouse, 1999, 2004), among many others. In 1993 Patricia Castaño guided me on an expert tour of all the GGM-related sites in central Bogotá.
2. See Alfredo Barnechea and José Miguel Oviedo, “La historia como estética” (interview, Mexico 1974), reproduced in Alvaro Mutis, Poesía y prosa (Bogotá, Instituto Colombiano de Cultura, 1982), pp. 576–97 (p. 584).
3. Living to Tell the Tale, p. 439.
4. Oscar Alarcón, El Espectador, 24 October 1982, p. 2A. I interviewed Oscar Alar-cón, a cousin from Santa Marta whom GGM introduced into El Espectador, in 2007.
5. From my interview with Salgar, 1991.
6. “La reina sola,” El Espectador, 18 February 1954.
7. Gilard, ed., Entre cachacos 1, pp. 16–17. Gilard’s work is again indispensable for this period.
8. See Sorela, El otro García Mdrquez, p. 88. Sorela, a onetime journalist with Spain’s El País, has a number of illuminating insights into GGM’s journalism.
9. Gilard, ed., Entre cachacos I, is particularly severe on GGM’s film criticism.
10. Such consistency, reliability and—yes—humanity is what connects him so irresistibly to his immortal precursor, Cervantes.
11. Whereas he was more than happy to do so indirectly, much later in life, through film and journalism “workshops.”
12. Living to Tell the Tale, p. 450. See also José Font Castro, “Gabo, 70 años: ‘No quiero homenajes póstumos en vida,’” El Tiempo, 23 February 1997, for reminiscences of this period.
13. Interviews with Nancy Vicens, Mexico City, 1994 and 1997; on Luis Vicens, see E. García Riera, El cine es mejor que la vida (Mexico, Cal y Arena, 1990), pp. 50–53.
14. Quoted by Fiorillo, La Cueva, p. 262.
15. See Diego León Giraldo, “La increíble y triste historia de GGM y la cine-matografía desalmada,” El Tiempo, Lecturas Dominicales, 15 December 1982, both on La langosta azul and on his cinema criticism in Barranquilla and Bogotá. My friend Gustavo Adolfo Ramírez Ariza has pointed out that GGM’s costeño friends made—even more—frequent visits to Bogotá.
16. Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 463–5.
17. Gilard, ed., Entre cachacos 1, pp. 52–3.
18. GGM, “Hace sesenta años comenzó la tragedia,” El Espectador, 2 August 1954.
19. Published on 2, 3 and 4 August 1954 respectively.
20. GGM recalls this trip to “Urabá” in “Seamos machos: hablemos del miedo al avión,” El Espectador, 26 October 1980. One of his most detailed accounts of his manipulations, however, is in Germán Castro Caycedo, “‘Gabo’ cuenta la novela de su vida. 4,” El Espectador, 23 March 1977. See also Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 444–50. Daniel Samper, “GGM se dedicará a la música,” 1968, in Rentería, pp. 21–7, gives a particularly outrageous version of this anecdote: p. 26, “Y así fue como se salvó al Chocó.” See “GGM: ‘Tengo permanente germen de infelicidad: atender a la fama,’” Cromos, 1 January 1980, in which he goes even further (“we were modifying reality”), to the evident shock of some El País journalists.
21. “Hemingway, Nobel Prize,” El Espectador, 29 October 1954. The article is unsigned but Gilard is surely right in believing that the author is GGM.
22. Living to Tell the Tale, p. 472, says it was in GGM’s office in El Espectador.
23. GGM, talk given to El País, journalist’s course, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 28 April 1994.
24. Interview with José Font Castro, Madrid, 1997.
25. See “La desgracia de ser escritor joven,” El Espectador, 6 September 1981. Twelve years after its first appearance, when García Márquez was briefly back in Bogotá after the publication of OHYS, he found dozens of copies of this first edition for sale in second-hand bookshops at a peso each and bought as many as he could.
26. See Living to Tell the Taie, p. 482.
27. See Claude Couffon, “A Bogotá chez García Márquez,” L’Express (Paris), 17–23 January 1977, pp. 70–78, especiallyp. 74.
28. See Dante, Vita Nuova, chapter II.
29. Mercedes was an excellent high-school student and had thought of studying bacteriology at university but it seems that the endless imminence of her hypothetical marriage to Gabito eventually made her shelve such plans.
30. See Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 467–8, 470.
31. See Juan Ruiz, Arcipreste de Hita, El libro de buen amor (fourteenth century), so influential in Spanish culture and psychology. The theme of “crazy love” is mentioned on both the first page and—implicitly, through reference to its opposite, “good love”—the last page of Memories of My Melancholy Whores, his last novel, which GGM published when he was seventy-seven years old.
32. Mexico City, 1997.
33. See for example Claudia Dreifus, “Gabriel García Márquez,” Playboy 30:2, February 1983, where he states that Mercedes said it was best for him to go or he would blame her for the rest of their lives (p. 178).
9 / The Discovery of Europe: Rome (1955)
1. “‘Los 4 grandes’ en Tecnicolor,” El Espectador, 22 July 1955.
2. This chapter draws on interviews with Fernando Gómez Agudelo (carried out by Patricia Castaño, Bogotá, 1991), Guillermo Angulo (Bogotá, 1991, 2007), Fernando Birri (Cartagena, 2007, London, 2008), and Jacques Gilard (Toulouse, 1999, 2004), and discussions with many other communicants, including, notably, John Kraniauskas.
3. “‘Los 4 grandes’ en Tecnicolor.” For a different recollection of his journey see “Regreso a la guayaba,” El Espectador, 10 April 1983, in which he states, once again, that his intention was “to return to Colombia a few weeks later.”
4. Germán Castro Caycedo, “‘Gabo’ cuenta la novela de su vida. 4,” El Espectador, 23 March 1977. Castro Caycedo 4 and 5 give one of the best accounts of GGM’s experiences in Geneva.
5. Again Gilard’s work is essential: see Gabriel García Márquez, Obra periodística vol. V: De Europa y América 1 (Bogotá, Oveja Negra, 1984), p. 21.
6. Ibid.
7. Sorela, El otro García Márquez, p. 115.
8. In fact the Pontiff’s crisis, which had arisen when García Márquez was still in Bogotá, was already long past. But see “Roma en verano,” El Espectador, 6 June 1982, where GGM insists on this story and goes into detail.
9. Ibid. In Germán Castro Caycedo, “‘Gabo’ cuenta la novela de su vida. 5,” El Espectador, 23 March 1977, he states that he was in Rome “eight months, or a year.”
10. Excelsior (Mexico City), 19 March 1988, reported that La Stampa of Turin said that GGM’s Montesi articles threw no new light on the case. More to the point, given García Márquez’s handicaps, is whether the case was summed up better by any other journalist.
11. El Espectador, 16 September 1955, p. 1.
12. Karen Pinkus, The Montesi Scandal: The Death of Wilma Montesi and the Birth of the Paparazzi in Fellini’s Rome (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 2003), p. 2.
13. See ibid., p. 36, on Bazin’s What Is Cinema?
14. GGM, “Domingo en el Lido de Venecia. Un tremendo drama de ricos y pobres,” El Espectador, 13 September 1955.
15. “Roma en verano,” El Espectador, 6 June 1982.
16. GGM, “Confusión en la Babel del cine,” El Espectador, 8 September 1955. Over a quarter of a century later Rosi, by then a firm friend, would travel to Colombia, to make a movie of GGM’s novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold.
17. See Gilard, ed., De Europa y América 1, pp. 5–8.
18. See GGM, “Me alquilo para soñar,” El Espectador, 4 September 1983. Frida’s story is similar to that of Rafael Ribero Silva in Rome (mentioned in this chapter)—she went to Europe to be a classical singer.
19. Cf. GGM, “El mar de mis cuentos perdidos,” El Espectador, 22 August 1982, which relates GM’s sudden superstition, many years later, about leaving Cadaqués and never returning for fear of dying.
20. But see “Polonia: verdades que duelen,” El Espectador, 27 December 1981, in which, now that it was safe to do so, he stated categorically that his first and only journey to Poland was for two weeks in the autumn of 1955.
21. “90 días en la Cortina de Hierro. VI. Con los ojos abiertos sobre Polonia en ebullición,” Cromos, 2,203, 31 August 1959.
22. Ibid.
23. “La batalla de las medidas. III. La batalla la decidirá el público,” El Espectador, 28 December 1955.
24. GGM, “Triunfo lírico en Ginebra,” El Espectador, 11 December 1955.
25. GGM, “Roma en verano,” El Espectador, 6 June 1982. GGM characterizes the girl as one of the “sad whores” of the villa Borghese: “sad whores” would appear in the title of his last novel over fifty years later.
26. See “La penumbra del escritor de cine,” El Espectador, 14 November 1982, in which he gives a detailed appreciation of the role of script-writers, almost all of whom are anonymous, except for Zavattini.
27. Quoted by Eligio García, Tras las claves de Melquíades, pp. 408–9.
28. Ibid., p. 432. García Márquez would remark, many years later, and not of Fellini but of Zavattini: “In Latin America art has to have ‘vision,’ because our reality is often hallucinatory and hallucinated. Has no one suspected that the most likely source for the Latin American novel’s ‘magical realism’ is Miracle in Milan?”
29. Guillermo Angulo, interview, 1991. See also Guillermo Angulo, “En busca del Gabo perdido,” in Mera, ed., Aracataca-Estocolmo, p.85.
30. Eligio García, Tras las claves de Melquíades, p. 408.
31. Claude Couffon, “A Bogotá chez García Márquez,” L’Express, 17–23 January 1977, p. 75. GGM tells Couffon he went straight to the Hôtel de Flandre the first night.
10 / Hungry in Paris: La Bohàme (1956–1957)
1. This chapter draws on interviews with Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza (Bogotá, 1991), Hernán Vieco (Bogotá, 1991), Germán Vargas (Barranquilla, 1991), Guillermo Angulo (Bogotá, 1991, 2007), Tachia Quintana Rosoff (Paris, 1993, 1996, 2004), Ramón Chao (París, 1993), Claude Couffon (Paris, 1993), Luis Villar Borda (Bogotá, 1998), Jacques Gilard (Toulouse, 1999, 2004) and many other informants.
2. Paris being Paris, both hotels are still standing, though the H°tel de Flandre is now called the H°tel des Trois Coll°ges. GGM’s stay there was recorded by a plaque in 2007. His son Gonzalo and Tachia Quintana were in attendance when the plaque was unveiled.
3. Plinio Mendoza, “Retrato de GM (fragmento),” in Angel Rama, Novísimos narradores hispanoamericanos en “Marcha” 1964-1980 (México, Marcha Editores, 1981), pp. 128–39.
4. Ibid., p. 137. See also “GM 18 años atrás,” El Espectador, 27 February 1974.
5. Plinio Mendoza, La llamay el hielo; Plinio Mendoza, “GM 18 años atrás,” op. cit.
6. Incredibly, four years later, another great Latin American writer, GGM’s future friend Mario Vargas Llosa, would end up in an attic let by Madame Lacroix, and for the same reason.
7. On Otero Silva, see GGM, “Un cuento de horror para el día de los Inocentes,” El Espectador, 28 December 1980.
8. Mendoza, La llama y el hielo, pp. 49–51. (La llama y el hielo would cause a rift between Mendoza and GGM, and especially between Mendoza and Mercedes, who considered some of its revelations a betrayal of confidence and of their friendship.)
9. See Antonio Núñez Jiménez, “García Márquez y la perla de las Antillas (o Qué conversan Gabo y Fidel)” (Havana, 1984, unpublished manuscript). Núñez Jiménez gave me privileged access to this manuscript when I visited Havana in 1997. The story about Guillén is also told in GGM, “Desde París con amor,” El Espectador, 26 December 1982. In fact Perón—not in any case a dictator—had fallen in September 1955 and so it seems likely that the shout was for Peru’s Odría, who left power reluctantly on 28 July, or Nicaragua’s Somoza, who was assassinated on 21 September.
10. GGM, “El proceso de los secretos de Francia. XII. El ministro Mitterrand hace estremecer la sala,” El Independiente (Bogotá), 31 March 1956. These articles can be found in Gilard, ed., De Europa y América 1.
11. Mendoza, La llama y el hielo, pp. 19–20.
12. See Consuelo Mendoza de Riaño, “La Gaba,” Revista Diners (Bogotá), no. 80, November 1980, which records that GGM wrote to Mercedes three times a week but “was said to have had a Spanish girlfriend in Paris.”
13. Peter Stone, “García Márquez” (Paris Review, 1981), in Gourevitch, ed., The “Paris Review”Interviews, p. 188.
14. See Mendoza, The Fragrance of Guava, p. 56.
15. Quoted by Eligio García, Tras las claves de Melqutades, p. 403.
16. See Juan Goytisolo, Coto vedado (Barcelona, Seix Barral, 1985), pp. 209–12, on the Mabillon and other cafés and their connections.
17. This narrative is based on a long interview in Paris in March 1993.
18. Possibly the most complete version of GGM’s sufferings in Paris is given in Jean Michel Fossey, “Entrevista a Gabriel García Márquez,” Imagen (Caracas), 27 April 1969. But see also Germán Castro Caycedo, “‘Gabo’ cuenta la novela de su vida. 5,” El Espectador, 23 March 1977, for important details.
19. Agustín’s three friends, all tailors, are called Alfonso, Alvaro and Germán, the names of GGM’s best friends from Barranquilla.
20. Mendoza, The Fragrance of Guava, p. 26.
21. His uncle José María Valdeblánquez spent decades in the government bureaucracy in Bogotá; in 1993 I drank several large whiskies in Riohacha with García Márquez’s sardonic cousin, Ricardo Márquez Iguarán, who worked for years with Valdeblánquez in the pensions department in the late 1940s—“years and years, and we never paid out a single pension!”
22. The narrative of No One Writes to the Colonel takes place from early October to early December 1956—we know this because of the references to Suez. This means that it was written at the same time as the Colombian and Middle Eastern events it describes were taking place, not to mention during the period when GGM and Tachia Quintana were together—21 March to mid-December 1956.
23. My translation.
24. Sorela, Elotro GM, p. 133.
25. The story is framed in the same way that Chronicle of a Death Foretold, its contemporary, would be: a narrator who sounds like GGM talks to Billy in Cartagena many years later and then, in Paris, he investigates the hospital records to see when Nena checked in and talks to a functionary Billy consulted in the Colombian embassy.
26. See GGM, “El argentino que se hizo querer de todos,” El Espectador, 22 February 1984.
27. Gustavo GM, in Galvis, Los GM, p. 206.
28. Fuenmayor discusses this episode in Crónicas sobre el grupo de Barranquilla. GGM’s first novel Leaf Storm had been dedicated to Germán Vargas; the friends in No One Writes to the Colonel are called Alfonso, Alvaro and Germán: all three men will appear in OHYS, together with Ramón Vinyes (and Mercedes …). No wonder GM would repeatedly tell journalists that he wrote “so that my friends will love me more.” And who could be surprised that a man with his experience of family life in childhood would cling to the friends who had first made him feel that he belonged.
29. Quoted in Silvana Paternostro, “La mirada de los otros,” Página 12 (Buenos Aires), 5 May 2004.
30. GGM, “Georges Brassens,” El Espectador, 8 November 1981.
31. GGM, “Desde París, con amor,” El Espectador, 26 December 1982, in which he recalls working for the Algerian National Liberation Front. (Twenty-five years later, at the independence celebrations, he would say that it was the only struggle he’d ever been imprisoned for.)
32. GGM, “Desde París con amor,” El Espectador, 26 December 1982.
33. Couffon, “A Bogotá chez García Márquez,” L’Express, 17–23 January 1977, p. 76.
34. Plinio Mendoza, in Mera, ed., Aracataca-Estocolmo, pp. 100–1.
35. GGM, “Mi Hemingway personal,” El Espectador, 26July 1981.
11 / Beyond the Iron Curtain: Eastern Europe During the Cold War (1957)
1. Mendoza, La llama y el hielo, p. 21. This chapter draws on interviews with Plinio Mendoza (Bogotá, 1991), Luis Villar Borda (Bogotá, 1998), Guillermo Angulo (Bogotá, 1991, 2007), Hernán Vieco (Bogotá, 1991), Tachia Quintana (Paris, 1993), Manuel Zapata Olivella (Bogotá, 1991), Jacques Gilard (Toulouse, 1999, 2004) and others.
2. Even in the published articles about this journey, which he revised in 1959, García Márquez would still disguise Soledad as “Jacqueline,” a French graphic artist originally from Indochina, and Plinio as “Franco,” a nomadic Italian journalist. In the 1950s it was impossible for a Colombian even to travel beyond the Iron Curtain without risking the gravest political and personal consequences. See Gilard, ed., De Europa y América 1, p. 7.
3. GGM, “90 diás en la Cortina de Hierro. I. La ‘Cortina de Hierro’ es un palo pintado de rojo y blanco.” Cromos, 2,198, 27 July 1959. All these articles are collected in Gilard, ed., GGM, Obra periodistica vol. Vand vol. VI: De Europa y América 1 and 2.
4. GGM, “90 diás en la Cortina de Hierro. VI. Con los ojos abiertos sobre Polo-nia en ebullición,” Cromos, 2,199, 3 August 1959.
5. GGM, “90 diás en la Cortina de Hierro. II. Berlín es un disparate,” Cromos, 2,199, 3 August 1959.
6. GGM, “90 días en La Cortina de Hierro. III. Los expropiados se reúnen para contarse sus penas,” Cromos, 2,200, 10 August 1959.
7. Many years later Villar Borda would be the last Colombian ambassador to East Berlin.
8. In July 2004 Jacques Gilard told me, “On one occasion GGM said to me that he wasn’t sure whether he was a communist in Bogotá but he thinks he was. Certainly when he arrived in Vienna in 1955 and met up with Jorge Zalamea, who was attending a communist conference, he definitely considered himself a communist.” Which did not mean that he was a member of the party, of course.
9. GGM, “90 días en La Cortina de Hierro. III. Los expropiados se reúnen para contarse sus penas,” op. cit.
10. GGM, “90 días en la Cortina de Hierro. I. Berlín es un disparate,” Cromos, 2,199, 3 August 1959.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. García Márquez stated in his articles that only “Jacqueline” went back to Paris and that he and “Franco” stayed in Berlin and left the car there, travelling on by rail to Prague. This is to facilitate not only the incorporation of the May 1957 visit to Germany but also the 1955 visit to Czechoslovakia and Poland into the forthcoming July-August 1957 visit to the USSR and Hungary. Thus did three separate trips get folded, eventually, into one supposed trip of “Ninety days behind the Iron Curtain.”
14. Arango, Un ramo de nomeolvides, p. 88. The troupe was the Delia Zapata Folklore Group, about which García Márquez had written an article in Bogotá (“Danza cruda,” El Espectador, 4 August 1954), and, as fate would have it, the troupe was short of an accordionist and a saxophonist.
15. GGM, Paris to Tachia Quintana, Madrid, summer 1957.
16. The journey is described in GGM, “Allá por los tiempos de la Coca-Cola,” El Espectador, 11 October 1981.
17. GGM, “90 días en la Cortina de Hierro. VII. URSS: 22, 400,000 kilómetros cuadrados sin un solo aviso de Coca-Cola,” Cromos, 2:204, 7 September 1959. The four articles on the USSR, which would be published in Cromos, Bogotá, in 1959, were first published as two articles, “Yo visité Rusia” 1 and 2 in Momento, Caracas, 22 and 29 November 1957. Both sets are published in Gilard, ed., Gabriel García Márquez, Obra periodística vol. VI: De Europa y América 2 (Bogotá, Oveja Negra, 1984), but I quote here from the 1959 set because the articles are more complete and because they are integrated into an overall perspective.
18. Molotov would be ousted on 1 June 1957.
19. GGM, “90 días en la Cortina de Hierro. VIII. Moscú la aldea más grande del mundo,” Cromos, 2,205, 14 September 1959.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. GGM, “90 días en la Cortina de Hierro. IX. En el Mausoleo de la plaza Roja Stalin duerme sin remordimientos,” Cromos, 2,206, 21 September 1959.
23. Ibid. Cf. GGM, “El destino de los embalsamados,” El Espectador, 12 September 1982, in which the bodies of Lenin and Stalin are discussed, Evita Perón, Santa Anna and Obregón mentioned, and the delicate hands of Stalin, Fidel Castro and Che compared.
24. Mendoza, La llama y el hielo, p. 30.
25. Later GGM would meet another alleged dictator with exquisitely delicate hands, Comandante Castro, known to the world as “Fidel”—not even an uncle but everyone’s friend and comrade. By that time GGM himself would be everyone’s friend too: “Gabo.”
26. GGM, “90 días en la Cortina de Hierro. IX. En el Mausoleo de la plaza Roja Stalin duerme sin remordimientos,” Cromos, 2,206, 21 September 1959.
27. Ibid.
28. GGM, “90 días en la Cortina de Hierro. X. El hombre soviético empieza a cansarse de los contrastes,” Cromos, 2,207, 28 September 1959.
29. GGM, “Yo visité Hungría,” Momento (Caracas), 15 November 1957.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. Mendoza, La llama y el hielo, p. 32.
34. GGM, London to Luisa Santiaga Márquez, Cartagena (via Mercedes in Barranquilla), 3 December 1957.
35. Claude Couffon, “A Bogotá chez García Márquez,” L’Express (Paris), 17–23 January 1977, p. 76.
36. See Gilard, ed., De Europa y América 1, pp. 33–8.
37. See Anthony Day and Marjorie Miller, “Gabo talks: GGM on the misfortunes of Latin America, his friendship with Fidel Castro and his terror of the blank page,” Los Angeles Times Magazine, 2 September 1990: “‘Between high school and my first trip to socialist countries I was somewhat a victim of propaganda,’ he says. ‘When I returned [from Eastern Europe in 1957], it was clear to me that, in theory, socialism was a much more just system than capitalism. But that in practice, this wasn’t socialism. At that moment, the Cuban Revolution occurred,’ he says” (pp. 33–4).
38. On 15 November 1957, GGM published “I Visited Hungary” in Momento, and on 22 and 29 November, “I Was in Russia” 1 and 2, also in Momento. Almost two years later, end of July to end of September 1959, eleven further articles appeared under the general heading, “90 Days Behind the Iron Curtain,” in the weekly Cromos, Bogotá—three on Germany three on Czechoslovakia, one on Poland and four on the USSR (effectively repeating the 1957 articles); curiously, he does not repeat the Hungarian article. For a detailed reconstruction of the sequence of writing and publication, see Gilard, ed., De Europa y América 1, pp. 33–8.
39. Tachia Quintana, interview, Paris, 1993.
40. GGM, London, to Luisa Santiaga Márquez, Cartagena (via Mercedes, Barranquilla), 3 December 1957.
41. Gilard, ed., De Europa y América 1, p. 44.
42. GGM, “Un sábado en Londres,” El Nacional (Caracas), 6 January 1958.
43. GGM, Mexico City, to Mario Vargas Llosa, London, 1 October 1966.
44. GGM, London, to Luisa Santiaga Márquez, Cartagena (via Mercedes, Barranquilla), 3 December 1957. See Claudia Dreifus, “Gabriel García Márquez,” Playboy 30:2, February 1983, pp. 65–77, 172-8: Playboy: “How did Mercedes react [to his departure for Europe]?” GM: “This is one of the mysteries of her personality that will never be clear to me—even now. She was absolutely certain I’d return. Everyone told her she was crazy, that I’d find someone new in Europe. And in Paris, I did lead a totally free life. But I knew when it was over, I’d return to her. It wasn’t a matter of honor but more like natural destiny, like something that had already happened.”
45. Conversation, Mexico City 1993.
46. Conversation, Mexico City 1999.
12 / Venezuela and Colombia: The Birth of Big Mama (1958–1959)
1. See GGM, “Caribe mágico,” El Espectador, 18 January 1981. This chapter and the next one draw on conversations with Plinio Mendoza (Bogotá, 1991), Consuelo and Elvira Mendoza (Bogotá, 2007), José Font Castro (Madrid, 1997), Domingo Miliani (Pittsburgh, 1998), Alejandro Bruzual (Pittsburgh, 2005), Juan Antonio Hernández (Pittsburgh, 2004, 2008), who read this chapter in manuscript, Luis Harss (Pittsburgh, 1993), José Luis Díaz-Granados (Bogotá, 1991 and after), José (“Pepe”) Stevenson (Bogotá, 1991, Cartagena, 2007), Malcolm Deas (Oxford and Bogotá, 1991), Eduardo Posada Carbó (Oxford, 1991), Eduardo Barcha Pardo (Arjona, 2008), Alfonso López Michelsen (Bogotá, 1993), Germán Arciniegas (Bogotá, 1991), Ramiro de la Espriella (Bogotá, 1991), Jacques Gilard (Toulouse, 1999, 2004), Rafael Gutiérrez Girardot (Barcelona, 1992), Jesús Martín Barbero (Pittsburgh, 2000), Luis Villar Borda (Bogotá, 1998), Rita García Márquez and many others.
2. Mendoza, La llama y el hielo, pp. 35–6. See also GGM, “Memoria feliz de Caracas,” El Espectador, 7 March 1982.
3. Mendoza, La llama y el hielo, p. 89.
4. GGM, “No se me ocurre ningún título,” Casa de las Américas (Havana), 100, January-February 1977, pp. 85–9.
5. See the conclusion of The Autumn of the Patriarch, which was undoubtedly inspired by these celebrations in Caracas.
6. See Mendoza, La llama y el hielo, pp. 40–41; GGM returns to this episode in “Los idus de marzo,” El Espectador, 1 November 1981, and relates it to both The Autumn of the Patriarch and Chronicle of a Death Foretold.
7. Then as later, he would ignore Miguel Angel Asturias’s The President, based on Guatemala’s tyrant Manuel Estrada Cabrera, a novel which had been a sensation when it was published in Buenos Aires in 1948—by Losada, the publisher who had turned down Leaf Storm—and had won the same international book award when it appeared in French in 1952 that OHYS would receive eighteen years later.
8. See Mendoza, The Fragrance of Guava, pp. 80–90; and Ernesto González Bermejo, “García Márquez: ahora doscientos años de soledad,” Triunfo (Madrid), 44, 14 November 1970 (see Rentería, pp. 49–64).
9. See Gilard, ed., De Europa y América 1, pp. 50–51.
10. GGM, “El clero en la lucha,” Momento, 7 February 1958.
11. José Font Castro, interview, Madrid, 1997.
12. Eligio Garcia, Tras las claves de Melquíades, p. 232.
13. Rita GM, in ibid., p. 243.
14. Fiorillo, La Cueva, p. 266.
15. Mercedes Barcha, interview, Cartagena, 1991. Cf. Beatriz López de Barcha, “‘Gabito esperó a que yo creciera,’” Carrusel, Revista de El Tempo (Bogotá), 10 December 1982: “In 1958 Gabito came from Paris to Caracas and ‘one day he just turned up at the house.’ Two days later they were married.”
16. See Castro Caycedo, “Gabo cuenta la novela de su vida”: includes brief exchange with Mercedes.
17. See Alfonso Fuenmayor, “El día en que se casó Gabito,” Fin de Semana del Caribe, n.d. (see Fiorillo, La Cueva, pp. 265–7).
18. Rita GM, in Galvis, Los GM, pp. 46–47.
19. Eligio García, “Gabriel José visto por Eligio Gabriel, el benjamín,” Cromos (Bogotá), 26 October 1982, pp. 20–21.
20. Germán Castro Caycedo, “‘Gabo’ cuenta la novela de su vida. 3,” El Especta-dor, 23 March 1977.
21. Consuelo Mendoza de Riaño, “La Gaba,” Revista Diners (Bogotá), November 1980.
22. Domingo Miliani, “Diálogo mexicano con GGM,” Papel Literario, El National (Caracas), 31 October 1965.
23. Mario Vargas Llosa, conversation, Stratford, England, 1990.
24. Mercedes Barcha, conversation, Mexico City, October 1993.
25. Mendoza, La llama y el hielo, p. 46.
26. Mercedes Barcha, interview, Cartagena, 1991.
27. María Esther Gilio, “Escribir bien es un deber revolucionario,” Triunfo (Madrid), 1977 (see Rentería, pp. 141–5).
28. Eligio García, Tras las claves de Melqutades, p. 424.
29. Mendoza, La llama y el hielo, p. 44.
30. Domingo Miliani, “Diálogo mexicano con GGM,” Papel Literario, El National (Caracas), 31 October 1965.
31. See Consuelo Mendoza, “La Gaba,” Revista Diners (Bogotá), November 1980; Beatriz López de Barcha, “‘Gabito esperó a que yo creciera,’” Carrusel, Revista de El Tiempo (Bogotá), 10 December 1982; and Claudia Dreifus, “Gabriel García Márquez,” Playboy 30:2, February 1983, p. 178.
32. Sorela, Elotro GM, p. 185.
33. Eligio García, Tras las claves de Melqutades, p. 366.
34. GGM, “Mi hermano Fidel,” Momento (Caracas), 18 April 1958.
35. Núñez Jiménez, “GM y la perla de las Antillas.”
36. GGM, “No se me ocurre ningún título,” Casa de las Américas (Havana), 100, January-February 1977.
37. Mendoza, La llama y el hielo, p. 60.
38. Antonio Núñez Jiménez, En marcha con Fidel (Havana, Letras Cubanas, 1982), reproduces this speech.
39. Mendoza, La llama y el hielo, p. 67.
40. See Gilard, ed., De Europa y América 1, p. 53; and Mendoza, La llama y el hielo, pp. 67–8.
41. Mendoza, La llama y el hielo, pp. 75–7.
42. Mendoza’s account differs from GGM’s; in the former it was all Mendoza’s doing, in Bogotá not Caracas, and GGM was not in the picture. Mendoza agreed “on condition that the resourcing was right and that they also hire a friend of his in Caracas on the same salary.” GGM gives a quite different account in Núñez, “GM y la perla de las Antillas.”
43. Núñez Jiménez, “GM y la perla de las Antillas.”
44. Mendoza, La llama y el hielo, p. 71.
45. Interview, José Stevenson, Cartagena, March 2007. I also talked to Eduardo Barcha Pardo, Mercedes’s brother, in Arjona, in 2008. He was a student in Bogotá at the time, was drafted in to Prensa Latina, and stayed with his sister and her husband in their Bogotá apartment.
46. GGM, “Colombia: al fin hablan los votos,” Momento (Caracas), 21 March 1958.
47. José Luis Díaz Granados, interview, Bogotá, 1991; see also Consuelo Men-doza, “La Gaba,” Revista Diners, November 1980.
48. Mendoza, La llama y el hielo, p. 72.
49. GGM, “°Nagy, héroe o traidor?,” Elite (Caracas), 28 June 1958.
50. See Mendoza, “Entrevista con Gabriel García Márquez,” Libre, 3, March-May 1972, pp. 13–14, where Mendoza and GGM reminisce about Torres.
51. Mendoza, La llama y el hielo, p. 74.
52. Ibid., p. 71.
53. GGM, Collected Stories, p. 184.
54. Ibid., p. 200.
55. See Hernán Díaz’s portrait of GGM at the time he was working for Prensa Latina. The change of demeanour is evident and striking.
56. See Gilard, ed., De Europa y América 1, pp. 60–63.
57. Ibid., pp. 53–4. See also Gilard, “García Márquez: un projet d’école de cinéma (1960),” Cinémas d’Amérique latine (Toulouse), 3, 1995, pp. 24–38, and “‘Un carnaval para toda la vida,’ de Cepeda Samudio, ou quand García Márquez faisait du montage,” Cinémas d’Amérique latine (Toulouse), no. 3, 1995, pp. 39–44.
58. See Daniel Samper, “GGM se dedicará a la música,” El Tiempo, December 1968, in Rentería, p.24; and Saldívar, GM: elviaje a la semilla, pp. 389–90.
13 / The Cuban Revolution and the USA (1959–1961)
1. Mendoza, La llama y el hielo, pp. 87–8.
2. See E. González Bermejo, “Ahora doscientos años de soledad …,” Triunfo, November 1971 (in Rentería, ed., García Márquez habla de García Márquez en 33 grandes reportajes, p. 50); also Angel Augier, “GM en La Habana,” Mensajes (UNEAC, Havana), I:17, 10 September 1970. Aroldo Wall would later be an important link between Julio Cortázar and the Cuban Revolution.
3. Mendoza, La llama y el hielo, p. 88.
4. Sixteen years later the indomitable Walsh would be tortured and murdered in Buenos Aires by the Argentine military for his courageous opposition during the so-called dirty war. Cf. GGM, “Rodolfo Walsh, el escritor que se le adelantó a la CIA,” Alternativa, 124, 25 July-i August 1977. See also GGM, “Recuerdos de periodista,” El Espectador, 14 December 1981.
5. Núñez Jiménez, “GM y la perla de las Antillas.” See also GGM, “Recuerdos de periodista,” El Espectador, 14 December 1981, for different details.
6. Mendoza, La llama y el hielo, pp. 84–6.
7. Ibid., p. 81.
8. Arango, Un ramo de nomeolvides, p. 179.
9. See Eligio García, Tras las claves de Melquíades, pp. 474–9.
10. See Orlando Castellanos, interview with García Márquez in Formalmente Informal, Radio Havana, reprinted in Prisma delmeridíano (Havana), 80, 1–15 October 1976.
11. GGM, “Regreso a México,” El Espectador, 23 January 1983.
12. Kennedy, “The Yellow Trolley Car in Barcelona,” p. 258.
13. GGM, “Nueva York 1961: el drama de las dos Cubas,” Areíto, 21, June 1979, pp. 31–3.
14. Miguel Fernández-Braso, Gabriel Gárcia Márquez (Una conversación infinita) (Madrid, Azur, 1969), p. 31.
15. GGM, “El fantasma para el progreso,” El Espectador, 28 February 1982.
16. Núñez Jiménez, “García Márquez y la perla de las Antillas.”
17. GGM, “Nueva York 1961: el drama de las dos Cubas,” Areíto, 21, June 1979, p. 33.
18. CGM, New York, to Alvaro Cepeda, Barranquilla, 26 April 1961, mentions the “invasions” only at the very end of the letter.
19. Of course the counter-revolutionaries would accuse him anyway. See Guillermo Cabrera Infante, “Nuestro prohombre en La Habana,” El Tiempo, 6 March 1983. He claims to be one of “those who know his true biography” and then inadvertently demonstrates that this is false (or else himself deliberately misleads) when he claims that GGM fled New York as soon as he heard about the Bay of Pigs invasion, fearing that it would be successful. This story has been circulated by other influential anti-revolutionary writers such as Carlos Franqui and Carlos Alberto Montaner and is demonstrably untrue.
20. Mendoza, La llama y el hielo, p. 104.
21. Núñez Jiménez, “GM y la perla de las Antillas.”
22. Mendoza, La llama y el hielo, pp. 75–106.
23. GGM, New York, to Alvaro Cepeda, Barranquilla, 23 May 1961.
24. GGM, New York, to Plinio Mendoza, 29 May 1961.
25. Ibid.
26. Mendoza, La llama y el hielo, p. 106.
27. Ernesto Schóo, “Los viajes de Simbad,” Primera Plana (Buenos Aires), 234, 20–26 June 1967.
28. GGM, “Regreso a México,” El Espectador, 23 January 1983.
29. GGM, Mexico City, to Plinio Mendoza, Bogotá, 30 June 1961.
14 / Escape to Mexico (1961–1964)
1. See GGM, “Regreso a México,” El Espectador, 23 January 1983, in which he declares that he will never forget his date of arrival (2 July 1961!), because a friend called him next day to tell him about Hemingway’s death. However, a letter from GGM to Plinio Mendoza in Bogotá on 30 June 1961 disproves one of the best-loved legends about García Márquez, namely, that he arrived in Mexico City on the day Hemingway died. Not so. See also “Breves nostalgias sobre Juan Rulfo,” El Espectador, 7 December 1980, in which again he gets most of his dates and calculations about his time in Mexico wrong. Even the best memories are fallible.
2. This chapter and the two following draw on interviews with Plinio Mendoza (Bogotá, 1991), Alvaro Mutis (Mexico City, 1992, 1994), María Luisa Elío (Mexico City, 1992), Carlos Monsiváis (Mexico City, 1992), Francisco (“Paco”) Porrúa (Barcelona, 1992), Carmen Balcells (Barcelona, 1991, 1992, 2000), Berta Navarro (Mexico City, 1992), María Luisa (“La China”) Mendoza (Mexico City, 1994), Carlos Fuentes (Mexico City, 1992), James Papworth (Mexico City, 1992), Gonzalo García Barcha (Mexico City, 1992, 1994, Paris, 2004), Berta (“La Chaneca”) Hernández (Mexico City, 1993), Aline Mackissack Maldonado (Mexico City, 1993), Tulio Aguilera Garramuño (Pittsburgh, 1993), Manuel Barbachano (Mexico City, 1994), Margo Glantz (Mexico City, 1994), Augusto (“Tito”) Monterroso and Barbara Jacobs (Mexico City, 1994), Elena Poniatowska (Mexico City, 1994), Jorge Sánchez (Mexico City, 1994), Juan and Virginia Reinoso (Mexico City, 1994), Luis Coudurier (Mexico City, 1994), Vicente and Albita Rojo (Mexico City, 1994), Nancy Vicens (Mexico City, 1994), Ignacio (“Nacho”) Durán (Mexico City, 1994, London, 2005), Guillermo Sheridan (Guadalajara and Mexico City, 1997), among many others.
3. GGM, “Regreso a México,” El Espectador, 23 January 1983.
4. GGM, “Un hombre ha muerto de muerte natural,” México en la Cultura, Novedades (Mexico City), 9 July 1961; in the Núñez Jiménez conversation GGM says it was the Novedades people who told him Hemingway was dead, which is what he tells Plinio Mendoza in his letter of 10 July 1961.
5. On his feelings towards Hemingway see GGM’s comments in Alejandro Cueva Ramírez, “García Márquez: ‘El gallo no es más que un gallo,’” Pluma 52 (Colombia), March-April 1985. See also “Mi Hemingway personal,” El Espectador, 26 July 1981.
6. GGM, Mexico City, to Plinio Mendoza, Bogotá, 9 August 1961. See “Breves nostalgias sobre Juan Rulfo,” El Espectador, 7 December 1980, which gives a similar picture of the elevatorless building and apartment.
7. GGM, Mexico City, to Plinio Mendoza, Bogotá, 13 August 1961.
8. GGM, Mexico City, to Plinio Mendoza, Bogotá, 26 September 1961. GGM, Mexico City, to Alvaro Cepeda, Barranquilla, 4 December 1961, writes: “In May you have to come and baptize Alejandra, who will be born at the end of April. Don’t miss the opportunity because this is the last godchild we can offer you. After this we’re shutting up shop.”
9. GGM, “Mi otro yo,” El Espectador, 14 February 1982.
10. GGM, Mexico City, to Plinio Mendoza, Bogotá, 9 August 1961.
11. See GGM, “Breves nostalgias sobre Juan Rulfo,” on Rulfo; also Eligio García, Tras las claves de Melquíades, pp. 592–9.
12. GGM, Mexico City, to Plinio Mendoza, Bogotá, 13 August 1961.
13. “The Sea of Lost Time,” GGM, Collected Stories, p. 220.
14. GGM had recently been working in New York, mostly late at night, on Alvaro Cepeda’s film about Barranquilla’s annual carnival, financed by the Santo Domingo Aguila Beer firm.
15. See Darío Arizmendi Posada, “El mundo de Gabo. 4: Cuando Gabo era pobre,” El Mundo (Medellín), 29 October 1982.
16. Fiorillo, La Cueva, p. 105.
17. And Juan García Ponce would later live with Elizondo’s ex-wife, the mother of the daughter that García Márquez’s son would one day marry.
18. Eduardo García Aguilar, “Entrevista a Emilio García Riera,” Gaceta (Bogotá, Colcultura), no. 39, 1983.
19. GGM, Mexico City, to Plinio Mendoza, Bogotá, early December 1961.
20. GGM, Mexico City, to Plinio Mendoza, Barranquilla, April 1962.
21. See especially “La desgracia de ser escritor joven,” El Espectador, 6 September 1981, in which he says that having accepted this prize and the earlier one for “One Day After Saturday” in 1954 are his only regrets from his career as a writer.
22. GGM, Living to Teil the Tale, p. 231.
23. See Bernardo Marques, “Reportaje desde Cuba (I). Gabriel García Márquez: pasado y presente de una obra,” Alternativa (Bogotá), 93, 9–16 August 1976.
24. GGM, Mexico City, to Plinio Mendoza, Barranquilla, 16 June 1962. In a letter GGM, México City, to Alvaro Cepeda, Barranquilla, spring 1963, he confesses to having crashed the car while blind drunk.
25. GGM, Mexico City, to Alvaro Cepeda, Barranquilla, 20 March 1962.
26. In Saldívar, GM: el viaje a la semilla, p. 429, Mutis is quoted as suggesting that GGM never worked on The Autumn of the Patriarch in Mexico; but GGM, Mexico City, to Plinio Mendoza, Barranquilla, 1 July 1964, puts the issue beyond doubt.
27. José Font Castro, “Anecdotario de una Semana Santa con Gabriel García Márquez en Caracas,” Momento (Caracas), 771, April 1971, pp. 34–7, says that GGM read him the first part of The Autumn of the Patriarch in 1963 (p. 37).
28. GGM, Mexico City, to Plinio Mendoza, Barranquilla, late September 1962.
29. GGM, Mexico City, to Plinio Mendoza, Bogotá, 4 April 1962.
30. Not September 1963, as everyone, including Saldívar, recounts. See GGM, Mexico City, to Plinio Mendoza, Barranquilla, 17 April 1963.
31. Antonio Andrade, “Cuando Macondo era una redacción,” Excelsior (Mexico City), 11 October 1970, gives a different view, saying that Alatriste sacked GGM and in response to desperate pleas paid him some money for El Charro.
32. Raúl Renán, “Raúl 21,” in José Francisco Conde Ortega et al., eds, Gabriel García Márquez: celebración. 25° aniversario de “Cien anós de soledad” (Mexico, Universi-dad Autónoma Metropolitana, 1992), p. 96.
33. Ibid., p. 95.
34. Rodrigo García Barcha told me: “We always went to English-speaking schools. It’s one of Dad’s obsessions, he has a great complex about not being able to speak English and he was determined that we would be able to.”
35. GGM, Mexico City, to Plinio Mendoza, Barranquilla, 8 December 1963: GGM says he finished the script “this morning.”
36. GGM says he met Fuentes in 1961; Eligio García says 1962; Fuentes himself says 1963; Julio Ortega, Retrato de Carlos Fuentes (Madrid, Círculo de Lectores, 1995), p. 108, says 1964.
37. Carlos Fuentes, El Nacional (Mexico City), 26 March 1992. In Mexico, as elsewhere, GGM’s close relationships would be with the most important writers (with the exception of Octavio Paz, who was generally hostile to him). His warmest relationships, among the leading authors, would be with Fuentes and with Carlos Monsiváis.
38. Miguel Torres, “El novelista que quiso hacer cine,” Revista de Cine Cubano (Havana), 1969.
39. GGM, Panamá City, to Plinio Mendoza, Barranquilla, late October 1964.
40. GGM, Mexico City, to Plinio Mendoza, Barranquilla, late November 1994.
41. GGM, “Sí, la nostalgia sigue siendo igual que antes,” El Espectador, 16 December 1980.
42. Emir Rodríguez Monegal, “Novedad y anacronismo de Cien años de soledad,” Revista Nacional de Cultura (Caracas), 185, July-September 1968.
43. GGM, Mexico City, to Plinio Mendoza, Barranquilla, 22 May 1965, says he finished the script “a week ago” and it now has a definitive title, Tiempo de morir.
44. Miguel Torres, “El novelista que quiso hacer cine,” Revista de Cine Cubano (Havana), 1969; Emilio García Riera, Historia documental del cine mexicano (Mexico City, Universidad de Guadalajara, 1994), 12 (1964–5), pp. 229–33.
45. See Plinio Mendoza, “Entrevista con Gabriel García Márquez,” Libre, 3, March-May 1972, where he says that in Mexico he wrote film scripts (“very bad ones, according to the experts”) and learned all there was to know about the industry and its limitations (p. 13). He stated that the directors he most admired were Welles and Kurosawa but the films he had most enjoyed were II Generale della Rovere and Jules et Jim.
46. Emilio García Riera, Historia documental del cine mexicano, 12 (1964–5), pp. 160–5.
47. Miguel Torres, “El novelista que quiso hacer cine,” Revista de Cine Cubano (Havana), 1969.
48. José Donoso, The Boom in Spanish American Literature: A Personal History (New York, Columbia University Press/Center for Inter-American Relations, 1977), pp. 95–7.
49. His book would be called Los nuestros [Our People] in Spanish but the English title was more historically significant: Into the Mainstream.
50. Eligio García, Tras las claves de Melquíades, pp. 55–6, 469.
51. Luis Harss and Barbara Dohmann, Into the Mainstream: Conversations with Latin-American Writers (New York, Harper and Row, 1967), p. 310.
52. Ibid., p. 317.
53. Eligio García, Tras las claves de Melquíades, pp. 68–9.
54. Carme Riera, “Carmen Balcells, alquimista del libro,” Quimera, 27 January 1983, p. 25.
55. Eligio García, Tras las claves de Melquíades, p. 608.
56. He would tell Mendoza in a letter that he had the first sentence when he was seventeen!
57. Two examples: in The Fragrance of Guava GGM assures Plinio Mendoza categorically that he turned the car around (“It’s true, I never got to Acapulco,” p. 74) but in “La novela detrás de la novela,” Cambio (Bogotá), 20 April 2002, he states that they did drive on to Acapulco for the weekend (“I didn’t have a moment’s peace on the beach”) and got back to Mexico City “on the Tuesday.”
15 / Melquíades the Magician: One Hundred Years of Solitude (1965–1966)
1. GGM, “La penumbra del escritor de cine,” El Espectador, 17 November 1982.
2. Mendoza, The Fragrance of Guava, p. 80.
3. Poniatowska, interview, September 1973, Todo Mexico, op. cit., pp. 218–19.
4. See Alastair Reid, “Basilisk’s Eggs,” in Whereabouts. Notes on Being a Foreigner (San Francisco, North Point Press, 1987), pp. 94–118. Reid is excellent on the question of veracity and verisimilitude in García Márquez.
5. Eligio García, Tras las claves de Melquíades, p. 59. In a letter Paco Porrúa told me: “Gabo’s experience in Buenos Aires, lived in a kind of rapture of communion and enthusiasm, was undoubtedly very exceptional. The book in the street, the theatre in the street … Gabo was a popular personage in the streets and in the parties that took place night after night. There were scenes bordering on hysteria: it was surprising how many señoras from Buenos Aires said they had an uncle or grandfather identical to Aureliano Buendía” (Barcelona, 6 May 1993).
6. Carlos Fuentes, “No creo que sea obligación del escritor engrosar las filas de los menesterosos,” “La Cultura en Mexico, ¡Siempre! (Mexico City), 29 September 1965.
7. Saldívar, GM: el viaje a la semilla, p. 433.
8. See José Font Castro, “Anecdotario de una Semana Santa con Gabriel García Márquez en Caracas,” Momento (Caracas), 771, April 1971, pp. 34–7.
9. Eligio García, Tras las claves de Melquíades, p. 617.
10. Poniatowska, interview, September 1973, Todo Mexico, op. cit., p. 195.
11. I talked to María Luisa Elío about this in 1992 and to GGM in 1993.
12. Poniatowska, interview, September 1973, Todo Mexico, op. cit., p. 197.
13. Claude Couffon, “A Bogotá chez García Márquez,” L’Express, 17–23 January 1977, p. 77.
14. José Font Castro, “Anecdotario de una Semana Santa con Gabriel García Márquez en Caracas,” Momento (Caracas), 771, April 1971, p. 36.
15. Mendoza, La llama y el hielo, pp. 110–11.
16. Eligio García, Tras las claves de Melquíades, pp. 88–91. See also GGM, “Valledupar, la parranda del siglo,” El Espectador, 19 June 1983.
17. Eligio García, Tras las claves de Melquíades, pp. 505fr.
18. Ibid., pp. 570–71.
19. Carlos Fuentes, “García Márquez: Cien años de soledad,” “La Cultura en Mexico,” ¡Siempre! (Mexico City), 679, 29 June 1966.
20. Plinio Mendoza, The Fragrance of Guava, p. 77.
21. Fiorillo, La Cueva, pp. 105–6.
22. Ibid., pp. 268–9.
23. As Jorge Ruffinelli has perceptively pointed out, the only way to tell the story of this book’s writing, publication and reception (and the way it mainly has been told) is as a fairy tale (La viuda de Montiel [Xalapa, Veracruz, 1979]).
24. James Papworth, interview, Mexico City, 1994.
25. GGM, “Desventuras de un escritor de libros,” El Espectador, Magaztn Dominical, 7 August 1966.
26. GGM, Mexico City, to Plinio Mendoza, Barranquilla, 22 July 1966.
27. Claude Couffon, “A Bogotá chez García Márquez,” L’Express (Paris), 17–23 January 1977, p. 77. In Mendoza, The Fragrance of Guava, however, GGM says Mercedes alone took it to the post office (p. 75) … (Perhaps this was the second package?)
16 / Fame at Last (1966–1967)
1. Alvaro Mutis, quoted by Saldívar, GM, p. 498. This chapter draws particularly on conversations with Mutis (Mexico City, 1992, 1994), Tomás Eloy Martínez (Washington, 1997, Warwick, 2006, Cartagena, 2007), Paco Porrúa (Barcelona, 1992 and by letter), Eligio GM, José (“Pepe”) Stevenson, as well as many others.
2. Eligio García, Tras las claves de Melqutades, pp. 618–19.
3. See Claudia Dreifus, “Gabriel García Márquez,” Playboy 30:2, February 1983, p. 174.
4. See Eligio García, Tras las claves de Melqutades, pp. 32–3.
5. As reprinted in A. D’Amico and S. Facio, Retratos y autorretratos (Buenos Aires, Crisis, 1973), which included photos of GGM taken in Buenos Aires in 1967.
6. Ernesto Schóo, “Los viajes de Simbad,” Primera Plana (Buenos Aires), 234, 20–26 June 1967.
7. Mario Vargas Llosa, “Cien años de soledad: el Amadís en América,” Amaru (Lima), 3, July-September 1967, pp. 71–4.
8. See GGM, “La poesía al alcance de los niños,” El Espectador, 25 January 1981, where GGM, railing against literary critics, says that even Rojo doesn’t know why he put the reverse letter on the cover.
9. “Cien años de un pueblo,” Visión, 21 July 1967, pp. 27–9.
10. See, for example, “De cómo García Márquez caza un león,” Ercilla (Chile), 168, 20 September 1967, p. 29.
11. GGM, Mexico City, to Plinio Mendoza, Barranquilla, 30 May 1967.
12. Saldívar, GM: el viaje a la semilla, p. 500.
13. Tomás Eloy Martínez, “El día en que empezó todo,” in Juan Gustavo Cobo Borda, ed., “Para que mis amigos me quieran más …”: homenaje a Gabriel García Márquez (Bogotá, Siglo del Hombre, 1992), p. 24.
14. Ibid.
15. Saldívar, GM: el viaje a la semilla, p. 501.
16. Martínez, “El día en que empezó todo,” in Cobo Borda, op.cit., p. 25.
17. Ibid.
18. José Emilio Pacheco, “Muchos años después,” Casa de las Américas (Havana), 165, July-December 1987.
19. Quoted by Paternostro, Paris Review, 141, op. cit.
20. See Vargas Llosa, Historia de un deicidio, p. 80.
21. Ibid.
22. Emir Rodríguez Monegal, “Diario de Caracas,” Mundo Nuevo (Paris), 17, November 1967, pp. 4–24 (p. 11).
23. Semana (Bogotá), 19 May 1987, notes that OHYS was scarcely mentioned in the Colombian press at this time.
24. Mendoza, La llama y el hielo, p. 111.
25. Eligio GM, in Galvis, Los GM, p. 257.
26. See, for example, Félix Grande, “Con García Márquez en un miércoles de ceniza,” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos (Madrid), June 1968, pp. 632–41.
27. Iáder Giraldo, “Hay persecución a la cultura en Colombia,” El Espectador, 2 November 1967.
28. Alfonso Monsalve, “La novela, anuncio de grandes transformaciones,” Enfoque Internacional (Bogotá), 8, December 1967, pp. 39–41; reprinted in El Tiempo, “Lecturas Dominicales,” 14 January 1968, p. 4.
17 / Barcelona and the Latin American Boom: Between Literature and Politics (1967–1970)
1. GGM, Bogotá, to Emir Rodríguez Monegal, Paris, 30 October 1967.
2. GGM, Barcelona, to Plinio Mendoza, Barranquilla, 21 November 1967.
3. This chapter and the two following draw on interviews with Juan Goytisolo (London, 1990), Luis and Leticia Feduchi (Barcelona, 1991, 2000), Paul Giles (Barcelona, 1992), Germán Arciniegas (Bogotá, 1991), Germán Vargas (Barranquilla, 1991), Margot GM (1993), Eligio GM (1991, 1998), Jaime GM (Santa Marta, 1993), Mario Vargas Llosa (Washington, 1994), Jorge Edwards (Barcelona, 1992), Plinio Mendoza (Bogotá, 1991), Nieves Arrazola de Muñoz Suay (Barcelona, 1992, 2000), Carmen Balcells (Barcelona, 1992, 2000), Rosa Regás (Havana, 1995), Beatriz de Moura (Barcelona, 2000), Juan Marsé (Barcelona, 2000), José María Castellet (Barcelona, 2000), Tachia Quintana (Paris, 1993), Ramón Chao (Paris, 1993), Claude Couffon (Paris, 1993), Jacques Gilard (Toulouse, 1999, 2004), Roberto Fernández Retamar (Havana, 1995), Víctor Flores Olea (Providence, R.I., 1994), Rafael Gutié-rrez Girardot (Barcelona, 1992), Joaquín Marco (Barcelona, 1992), Annie Morvan (Paris, 1993), Paco Porrúa (Barcelona, 1992, and letter), Juan Roda and María Forna-guera de Roda (Bogotá, 1993), Alfonso López Michelsen (Bogotá, 1993), as well as many conversations with others.
4. On this and on Spain in general, see GGM, “España: la nostalgia de la nostalgia,” El Espectador, 13 January 1982.
5. Note that as late as 1978 GGM declared to Angel Harguindey of El País that if he were a Spaniard he would be in the Spanish Communist Party. (See Rentería, ed., p. 172). It should be emphasized that he always stressed that such decisions depended on the specific circumstances of the case.
6. Rosa Regás, interview, Havana, January 1995.
7. Luis and Leticia Feduchi, interviews, Barcelona, 1992 and 2000.
8. Both Rodrigo and Gonzalo García Barcha told me this.
9. Paul Giles, interview, Barcelona, 1992.
10. Carmen Balcells, interview, Barcelona, 1991.
11. Francisco Urondo, “La buena hora de GM,” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos (Madrid), 232, April 1969, pp. 163–8 (p. 163).
12. Dislike of critics would become almost an obsession for this man who had himself been an occasional critic in his journalism from 1947 onwards, and sometimes a cruel one (his review of Biswell Cotes’s book Neblina azul in El Universal, late 1949, is typical: see Gilard, ed., Textos costeños 1).
13. In 1973 the film director Pier Paolo Pasolini would agree with GGM about OHYS and its conception and would go even further in perhaps the most scathing attack ever launched against the writer and his book. See “GGM: un escritor indigno,” Tempo, 22 July 1973, an article characteristic of Pasolini’s fanaticism and exaggeration.
14. In the prologue to Strange Pilgrims (1992), GGM writes that after a few years in Barcelona he had a life-changing dream: he was at his own burial (Spanish entierro: it is important to remember that this concrete word is the one normally used in Spanish for “funeral”) and had a good time chatting to his old friends until the moment when he realized that they were leaving after the ceremony and he could not.
15. GGM talked about this repeatedly after 1967, to the irritation of many critics (none of whom, needless to say, were as famous as him). But compare Bob Dylan, Chronicles. Volume I (New York, Simon and Schuster, 2004): “After a while you learn that privacy is something you can sell, but you can’t buy it back … The press? I figured you lie to it” (pp. 117–18).
16. GGM’s aversion to OHYS may to some degree have extended to Buenos Aires, where fame first beset him. In a letter, Paco Porrúa, the midwife to his celebrity, told me: “When I met Gabo again in Barcelona, I noticed some changes. Above all I had the impression that Gabo no longer spoke with the inspired spontaneity of before, and that in some way he was constructing a new persona. Years later, in 1977, I saw him again in Barcelona and had a conversation with him and Mercedes about those days in Buenos Aires. Well, I embarked on a monologue about how wonderful those days had been. Gabo and Mercedes listened reluctantly, almost with an air of disapproval. Later I thought that the famous dream he had had in Barcelona about attending his own funeral had evidently pointed on to other deaths” (Barcelona, 6 May 1993).
17. See Franco Moretti, Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to García Márquez (London, Verso, 1996). Compare and contrast Pasolini’s response, noted above, with Moretti’s assessment of the book’s transcendental importance.
18. Fernández-Braso, Gabriel García Márquez. (Una conversación infinita), p. 27.
19. París: la revolución de mayo (Mexico, Era, 1968).
20. GGM, Barcelona, to Plinio Mendoza, Barranquilla, 28 October 1968.
21. Ibid.
22. GGM seems never to have made any comment on the Tlatelolco events even in his private correspondence. This is at first sight extraordinary given that he had lived in Mexico for six years (though probably explicable in the sense that he intended to return there), not least considering its similarity to the 1928 Ciénaga massacre, undoubtedly the best-known and most controversial episode alluded to in GGM’s entire oeuvre.
23. Beatriz de Moura, interview, Barcelona, 2000.
24. Juan Marsé, interview, Barcelona, 2000.
25. Julio Cortázar to Paco Porrúa, 23 September 1968. See Julio Cortázar, Cartas, ed. Aurora Bernárdez, 3 vols. (Buenos Aires, Alfaguara, 2000).
26. GGM, “El argentino que se hizo querer de todos,” El Espectador, 22 February 1984.
27. Carlos Fuentes, Geografía de la novela (Mexico, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993), p. 99. While they were in Prague Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata received the Nobel Prize for Literature in Stockholm. García Márquez would be an enthusiastic reader of his works.
28. Carmen Balcells, interview, Barcelona, 1991.
29. Gonzalo’s first child, Mateo, was born in 1987.
30. See Régis Debray, Les Masques (Paris, Gallimard, 1987) for a superb insight into the mind-set of the bien-pensant leftists of the 1970s.
31. Rodrigo García Barcha, interview, New York, 1996.
32. See “Memorias de un fumador retirado,” El Espectador, 13 February 1983, in which GGM recalls giving up smoking “fourteen years ago.”
33. See Eligio GM’s chronicle in Aracataca-Estocolmo (pp. 22–4): “Feduchi, the analyst of the thousand pipes, the one who helped GGM with the motivation of the murderers in Chronicle and helped him give up smoking, though ironically he couldn’t keep to it himself.”
34. See E. González Bermejo, “Ahora doscientos años de soledad …,” Triunfo, November 1971, in Rentería, p. 50.
35. John Leonard, New York Times Book Review, 3 March 1970. The New York Times published a favourable review on 8 March which it later included in 1996 as one of the reviews anthologized to celebrate the newspaper’s centenary.
36. See José Donoso, Historia personal del “Boom” (Barcelona, Seix Barral, 1983; 2nd revised edition with appendix by Ma. Pilar Serrano, “El boom doméstico”). English version, The Boom in Spanish American Literature: A Personal History (New York, Columbia University Press/Center for Inter-American Relations, 1977).
37. This relationship was a drama from start to finish. See Jacques Gilard and Fabio Rodríguez Amaya, La obra de Marvel Moreno (Viareggio-Lucca, Mauro Baroni, 1997); also Plinio Mendoza’s novel Años de fuga (1985) and La llama y el hielo.
38. Mendoza, La llama y el hielo, p. 120. On Barcelona and GGM’s relationships there, see especially pp. 120–25.
39. See Adam Feinstein, Pablo Neruda: A Passion for Life (London, Bloomsbury 2004), p. 351.
40. GGM, Barcelona, to Plinio Mendoza, summer (August?) 1970.
41. “GGM evoca Pablo Neruda,” Cromos, 1973 (quoted in Rentería), p. 95.
42. Julio Cortázar, letter to Eduardo Jonqui°res, 15 August 1970, Cartas, p. 1419.
43. María Pilar Serrano de Donoso, in José Donoso, Historia personal del “Boom,” p. 134.
44. Donoso, The Boom in Spanish American Literature, pp. 105–6.
18 / The Solitary Author Slowly Writes: The Autumn of the Patriarch and the Wider World (1971–1975)
1. Fiorillo, La Cueva, p. 271.
2. Juan Gossaín, “Regresó García Márquez: ‘Vine a recordar el olor de la guayaba,’” El Espectador, 15 January 1971.
3. It turned out that he was referring specifically to the trial of members of the Basque separatist group ETA in Burgos, in which three alleged terrorists had been sentenced to death.
4. This phrase would be translated rather delicately in English as “the fragrance of guava” when a book of interviews with that title later appeared.
5. Juan Gossaín, “Ni yo mismo sé quién soy: Gabo,” El Espectador, 17 January 1971.
6. Guillermo Ochoa, “Los seres que inspiraron a Gabito,” Excelsior, 13 April 1971.
7. Gonzalo García Barcha, interview, Paris, 2004.
8. See Lourdes Casai, ed., El caso Padilla: literatura y revolución en Cuba. Documentos (Miami, Universal, and New York, Nueva Atlántida, 1972), p. 9; and Jorge Edwards, Persona Non Grata (New York, Paragon House, 1993), p. 220.
9. The protest was published in newspapers all over the Western world, including, for example, the New York Review of Books on 6 May 1971.
10. In 2007 he allowed the Spanish academy to include a fragment from the book in the special edition of OHYS published that year.
11. This interview appeared in El Tiempo on 29 May 1971. Its importance was recognized by it being reproduced immediately in Prensa Latina (though with “limited”/“non-publishable” status), where it must have stimulated very mixed reactions, and later in the first number of Libre.
12. See Realms of Strife: 1957-1982 (London, Quartet Books, 1990), p. 153.
13. See Guibert, Seven Voices, pp. 330–32.
14. Interview with Julio Roca, Diario del Caribe, 29 May 1971.
15. “‘Cien años de soledad es un plagio’: Asturias,” La República, 20 June 1971.
16. See Félix Grande, “Con García Márquez en un miércoles de ceniza,” Cuader-nos Hispanoamericanos (Madrid), 222, June 1968, pp. 632–41.
17. “Gabo pasea con Excelsior y come tacos,” Excelsior (Mexico City), 12 July 1971.
18. Document in Casa de las Américas archive, Havana.
19. See Vargas Llosa’s reading of this story in Historia de un deicidio, pp. 457–77.
20. In June 1973 “The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira” would be published in Esquire. For a reading of Eréndira, see A. Benítez Rojo, “Private Reflections on GM’s Eréndira,” in The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective (Durham, N.C., Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 276–93.
21. See Jaime Mejía Duque, “La peste del macondismo,” El Tiempo, “Lecturas Dominicales,” 4 March 1973.
22. Juan Bosch, perpetual presidential candidate in the Dominican Republic, and overthrown by the Americans in 1965, also compared García Márquez with Cervantes in June 1971.
23. Poniatowska, interview, September 1973, Todo Mexico, pp. 202–3.
24. Carmen Balcells, interview, Barcelona, 2000. Cf. Ricardo A. Setti, Diálogo con Vargas Llosa (Costa Rica, Kosmos, 1989), pp. 147–50.
25. Eligio García, El Tempo, 15 August 1972.
26. Myriam Garzón, conversation, 1993.
27. See Excelsior, 5 August 1972: “En vez de yate, donativo político: García Márquez cedió su premio.”
28. See 17 August 1972 interview in Excelsior: “GM es muy embustero, dice su padre. Lo era de chiquito, siempre inventaba cuentos.”
29. See the interview given to Cromos after Neruda died, “GGM evoca a Pablo Neruda,” Cromos, 1973 (in Rentería, op.cit.).
30. Even MAS leader Pompeyo Márquez, in his article for Libre, 3 (March-May 1972), “Del dogmatismo al marxismo crítico,” pp. 29–34, had said that it was MAS’s policy never to adopt “anti-Soviet positions” (p. 33).
31. Mendoza, La llama y el hielo, pp. 196–7.
32. Fiorillo, La Cueva, pp. 161–2.
33. GGM, Barcelona, to Fuenmayor, Barranquilla, early November 1972. (See Fiorillo, La Cueva, pp. 162–3.)
34. “GGM evoca a Pablo Neruda,” Cromos, 1973, p. 96.
35. Excelsior, 13 May 1973. For a sober appraisal of the book’s writing, objectives and achievements over a quarter of a century later, see GGM, “Hoja por hoja y diente por diente,” Cambio, 2001.
36. In this respect it can be directly compared to Asturias’s The President (1946).
37. See Emir Rodríguez Monegal, “Novedad y anacronismo de Cien Años de soledad,” in his Narradores de esta América, Tomo II (Caracas, Alfadil, 1992).
38. Guillermo Sheridan and Armando Pereira, “GM en Mexico (entrevista),” Revista de la Universidad de Mexico, 30:6, February 1976.
39. Ibid.
40. GGM gives his best explanation of the timescale in Odete Lara, “GM,” El Escarabajo de Oro (Buenos Aires), 47, December 1973-February 1974, pp. 18–21.
41. See Northrop Frye’s concept of archetypal characters and seasons (symbolic phases) in Anatomy of Criticism (1957).
42. Sheridan and Pereira, “GM en Mexico (entrevista),” op. cit.
43. Juan Gossaín, “El regreso a Macondo,” El Espectador, January 1971. Cf. Conrad’s Nostromo (of which GGM’s book is a deliberately and grotesquely distorted descendant), in which the protagonist dies “from solitude.”
44. GGM, The Autumn of the Patriarch (London, Picador, 1978), p. 45 (my emphasis).
45. Ibid., p. 74.
46. Ibid., p. 180.
47. Ibid., p. 205.
48. Ibid., p. 39.
49. Ibid., p. 199.
50. Ibid., pp. 200–2.
51. Ibid., p. 203. Asturias had previously shown in The President that his dictator’s (Estrada Cabrera’s) character had been formed by a deprived childhood mitigated by the unceasing efforts of a devoted lower-class mother.
52. Carmen Balcells, interview, Barcelona, 2000.
53. Tachia Quintana (Rosoff), interview, Paris 1973.
54. The award had been announced in November of the previous year. See Excelsior, 19 November 1972.
55. Poniatowska, interview, September 1973, Todo Mexico, p. 194.
56. Excelsior, 10 September 1973. It was around now that GGM seems to have formed an understanding with Excelsior journalists. They seem to have been tipped off about his movements from this time and he received more coverage from them than any Mexican writer and, indeed, more favourable coverage than any Mexican writer, over the next fifteen years.
19 / Chile and Cuba: García Márquez Opts for the Revolution (1973–1979)
1. See Plinio Mendoza, “Fina,” in Gentes, lugares (Bogotá, Planeta, 1986), where he tells the extraordinary story of his journey to Chile via Arica with Fina Torres, then a photographer, directly after the coup. Mendoza was the only foreign journalist who got to Neruda’s house and saw his body just four hours after his death, and Fina Torres’s photographs were reproduced all over Latin America.
2. Reproduced in Excelsior, 8 October 1973.
3. Ernesto González Bermejo, “La imaginación al poder en Macondo,” Crisis (Buenos Aires), 1975 (reproduced in Rentería, op.cit). In this interview, conducted in 1970, GGM had said, “I want Cuba to create a socialism which takes account of its own conditions, a socialism which resembles Cuba itself: human, imaginative, joyful, without any bureaucratic corrosion.”
4. Juan Gossaín, “Ni yo mismo sé quién soy: Gabo,” El Espectador, 17 January 1971.
5. Guibert, Seven Voices, p. 333. On p. 329, however, GGM says that he is greatly disillusioned by the USSR, whose system “is not socialism.”
6. See Luis Suárez, “El periodismo me dio conciencia política,” La Calle (Madrid), 1978 (in Rentería, pp. 195–200).
7. In a letter, GGM to Plinio Mendoza, April 1962, he expounds the theory that El Tiempo readers are the key to Colombian elections.
8. This chapter is based in part on interviews with each of these three journalists: Antonio Caballero (Madrid, 1991, Bogotá 1993), Daniel Samper (Madrid, 1991), and Enrique Santos Calderón (Bogotá, 1991, 2007); and also on interviews with José Vicente Kataraín (Bogotá, 1993), Alfonso López Michelsen (Bogotá, 1991), Belisario Betancur (Bogotá, 1991), Hernando Corral (Bogotá, 1998), Julio Andrés Camacho (Cartagena, 1991), José Salgar (Bogotá, 1991), José Stevenson (Bogotá, 1991, Cartagena, 2007), Fernando Gómez Agudelo (Bogotá, 1993), Felipe López Caballero (Bogotá, 1993), Laura Restrepo (Bogotá, 1991), Jaime Osorio (Bogotá, 1993), Luis Villar Borda (Bogotá, 1998), Jesús Martín Barbero (Pittsburgh, 2000), María Luisa Mendoza (Mexico City, 1994), Elena Poniatowska (Mexico City, 1994), and many others.
9. See Margarita Vidal, “GGM,” 1981 Cromos interview reprinted in Viaje a la memoria (entrevistas) (Bogotá, Espasa Calpe, 1997), pp. 128–39.
10. Enrique Santos Calderón, “Seis años de compromiso: breve historia de esta revista y de las realidades que determinan su cierre,” Alternativa 257, 27 March 1980 (last issue).
11. No. 1, 15–28 February 1974. No. 2, 1–15 March 1974, included GGM’s “El golpe en Chile (II). Pilotos gringos bombardearon La Moneda.”
12. From English version, “Why Allende Had to Die,” New Statesman, London, 15 March 1974, p. 358.
13. Both would be published in 1975.
14. See Rafael Humberto Moreno Durán, Como el halcón peregrino (Bogotá, Santillana, 1995), p. 117. Moreno Durán says GGM was late for the party because he “had been at Miguel Angel Asturias’s funeral in Madrid.” I asked GGM about this in 2002 and he denied it. The timing would have been right but I was unable to ask Moreno Durán himself why he had stated this before he himself died in 2005. See also Julia Urquidi Illanes, Lo que Varguitas no dijo (La Paz, Khana Cruz, 1983).
15. See Donoso, Historia personal del “boom,” pp. 148–9.
16. “It seemed so strange, we had always travelled everywhere together” (Rodrigo García Barcha, interview, New York, 1996).
17. Núñez Jiménez, “GM y la perla de las Antillas.”
18. “Gabriel García Márquez: de la ficción a la política,” Visión, 30 January 1975.
19. Enrique Santos Calderón, interview, Bogotá, 1991.
20. The interview was reproduced in the New York Review of Books on 7 August 1975 in the form of a review of Agee’s book (Inside the Company: CIA Diary, Har-mondsworth, Penguin, 1975).
21. However, Sorela, El otro García Márquez, takes a very critical view of GGM’s relationship with López Michelsen down the years.
22. One of the most violent reactions was from Colombian left critic Jaime Mejía Duque, in “El otoño del patriarca” o la crisisde la desmesura, published in Medellín in July 1975 by none other than Oveja Negra, GGM’s own future publisher.
23. Lisandro Otero, Llover sobre mojado: una reflexión sobre la historia (Havana, Letras Cubanas, 1997), p. 208.
24. Alternativa, 40, 30 June-7 July, GGM, “Portugal, territorio libre de Europa”; 41, 7–14 July, “Portugal, territorio libre de Europa (II). ¿Pero qué carajo piensa el pueblo?; and 42, 14–21 July, “Portugal, territorio libre de Europa (III). El socialismo al alcance de los militares.”
25. See Excelsior, 5 June 1975, quoting Lisbon’s Diário Popular.
26. Excelsior, 30 June 1975.
27. Excelsior, 17 June 1975.
28. See Alternativa, 38, 16–23 June 1975, “GGM entrevista a Torrijos. ‘No descartamos la violencia.’”
29. Núñez Jiménez, “GM y la perla de las Antillas.” See also GGM, “Allá por los tiempos de la Coca-Cola,” El Espectador, 11 October 1981, which is really also blockade story concerning Che Guevara’s attempts to find a substitute for Coke in the early days of the Revolution.
30. See Alternativa, 51, 15–22 September 1975, “Cuba de cabo a rabo (I)”; 52, 22–29 September 1975, “Cuba de cabo a rabo (II). La necesidad hace parir gemelos”; 53, 29 September-6 October 1975, “Cuba de cabo a rabo (III). Final, si no me creen, vayan a verlo.”
31. Rodrigo García Barcha, interview, New York, 1997.
32. Enrique Santos Calderón, interview, Bogotá, 1991.
33. See, for example, María Luisa Mendoza, “La verdad embarazada,” Excelsior, 8 July 1981.
34. This is the $64,000 question that most journalists and many readers wish to discuss with GM’s unfortunate biographer as soon as they meet him.
35. Neither man has been willing to discuss the matter but I have discussed this incident with several eyewitnesses, including Mercedes Barcha, and with close associates of both men. In 2008 MVL himself published a play, Al pie del Támesis, in which the protagonist reflects on having punched his best friend thirty-five years before and never having seen him again.
36. See Perry Anderson, “A magical realist and his reality,” The Nation, 26 January 2004, a virtuoso comparison of the two men based on a reading of their memoirs. Once again GGM comes out on top.
37. Núñez Jiménez, “GM y la perla de las Antillas.”
38. Ibid.
39. See his personal testimony, Y Fidel creó el Punto X (Miami, Saeta, 1987).
40. Núñez Jiménez, “GM y la perla de las Antillas.”
41. “Felipe González: Socialista serio,” Alternativa, 129, 29 August-5 September 1977.
42. See “Felipe,” El Espectador, 2 January 1983, in which GGM recalls this first meeting in Bogotá.
43. “GGM entrevista a Régis Debray: ‘Revolución se escribe sin mayúsculas,’” Alternativa, 146–7, 26 December-20 January 1977–78.
44. GGM, “El general Torrijos sí tiene quien le escriba,” Alternativa, 117, 5–12 June 1977.
45. GGM, “Torrijos, cruce de mula y tigre,” Alternativa, 126, 8–15 August 1977.
46. See Graham Greene, Getting to Know the General: The Story of an Involvement (London, Bodley Head, 1984). Dedicated to “The Friends of My Friend Omar Torrijos in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Panama.”
47. See GGM, “Graham Greene: la ruleta rusa de la literatura,” El Espectador, 27 January 1982, and “Las veinte horas de Graham Greene en La Habana,” El Espectador, 16 January 1983.
48. See Ramón Chao, “García Márquez: El caso Reynold González,” Triunfo (Madrid), 29 April 1978, pp. 54–6.
49. Fidel Castro, interview, Havana, January 1997.
50. See for example Alternativa 94, 23–30 August 1978, “Turbay, el candidato enmascarado.”
51. See Sorela, El otro García Márquez, p. 249, on GGM’s relations with the San-dinista leadership.
52. See GGM, “Edén Pastora,” El Espectador, 19 July 1981.
53. See GGM, “Locura maestra, tomar palacio,” Excelsior, 1 September 1978: this was the lead article on the front page of the newspaper for that day.
54. GGM, “Edén Pastora,” El Espectador, 19 July 1981.
55. Excelsior, 21 December 1978.
56. See “Habeas: de verdad por los derechos humanos,” Alternativa, 194, 25 December 1978–22 January 1979.
57. In an interview in Paris with Ramón Chao and Ignacio Ramonet in October 1979, “La guerra de la información. Tres casos: Nicaragua, Vietnam y Cuba,” Alternativa, 237, 1–8 November 1979. GM would note that Lolita Lebrón and her Puerto Rican comrades had now been released by Carter, “though only out of electoral considerations.”
58. See “Habeas y los derechos humanos: despegue por lo alto,” Alternativa, 201, 26 February 1979, which announces that GGM has met Pope John Paul II on 19 January and the King and Queen of Spain on 3 February.
59. Quoted by El Tiempo on 8 February 1979.
60. “Gobierno de post-guerra: GGM entrevista a Sergio Ramírez,” Alternativa, 218, 21–28 June 1979.
61. This was around the time that GGM’s film script Viva Sandino, later also known as El secuestro and El asalto, was published.
62. Chao and Ramonet, “La guerra de la información. Tres casos: Nicaragua, Vietnam y Cuba,” Alternativa, 201, 26 February 1979.
63. On the McBride Report, see GGM, “La comisión de Babel,” El Espectador, 2 November 1980. See also Sorela, El otro García Márquez, p. 250, who states that there were eight meetings in 1980-81: four in Paris and one each in Stockholm, Dubrovnik, Delhi and Acapulco.
64. At the end GGM and his Chilean colleague, Juan Somavía, later Secretary General of the International Labour Organization, dissatisfied with the compromise reached by the commission, sent in a joint minority commentary.
65. These comments were made at a lunch in Mexico City given by the Federación Latinoamericana de Periodistas to Mexican President José López Portillo.
66. GGM, “Del malo conocido al peor por conocer,” El Espectador, 9 November 1980.
67. See “La Revolución Cubana me libró de todos los honores detestables de este mundo,” Bohemia (Havana), 1979, in Rentería, pp. 201-9: “I have no more ideas for books. Won’t it be marvellous the day I start to get them again.”
20 / Return to Literature: Chronicle of a Death Foretold and the Nobel Prize (1980–1982)
1. See GGM, “La comisión de Babel,” El Espectador, 2 November 1980.
2. Carmen Galindo and Carlos Vanella, “Soy más peligroso como literato que como político: GM,” second of two articles, El Día (Mexico City), 7 September 1981.
3. See GGM, “Georges Brassens,” El Espectador, 8 November 1981, and “Desde París con amor,” El Espectador, 26 December 1982. Many of the articles during this period have Parisian themes.
4. María Jimena Duzán, interview, Bogotá, 1991.
5. Enrique Santos Calderón, interview, Bogotá, 1991.
6. Consuelo Mendoza de Riaño, “La Gaba,” Revista Diners (Bogotá), November 1980.
7. Excelsior, 20 March 1980.
8. “Gabriel García Márquez. ¿Esbirro o es burro?,” El Universal, 17 May 1980.
9. Alan Riding, “For GM, revolution is a major theme,” New York Times, 22 May 1980.
10. See Juan Gossaín, “A Cayetano lo mató todo el pueblo,” El Espectador, 13 May 1981, p. 7a, an interview with Luis Enrique GM.
11. See Eligio García’s Crónica de la crónica, which compares the original events with the novel, and the novel and the original events with the film and the events of its production.
12. See GGM, “El cuento del cuento,” El Espectador, 23 August 1981, and “El cuento del cuento (Conclusión),” El Espectador, 30 August 1981.
13. See Sorela, El otro García Márquez, p. 255, on the 1980–84 articles.
14. GGM wrote a letter to Plinio Mendoza, 22 July 1966, in which he says—in 1966, immediately after completing OHYS but before it was published!—that he would like to do exactly this kind of journalism.
15. See John Benson, “Notas sobre Notas de prensa 1980–1984,” Revista de Estudios Colombianos, 18 (1998), pp. 27–37.
16. The four articles appeared in El Espectador between mid-September and early October 1980.
17. The name and subtitle of a U.S. TV series of a subsequent era.
18. “Sí, la nostalgia sigue siendo igual que antes,” El Espectador, 16 December 1980.
19. GGM, “Un domingo de delirio,” El Espectador, 8 March 1981.
20. Cobo Borda, “Crónica de una muerte anunciada: García Márquez sólo escribió su nueva novela cuando su mamá le dio permiso” (1981: later published in Cobo Borda, Silva, Arciniegas, Mutis y García Márquez, pp. 419–27).
21. See Sorela, El otro García Márquez, pp. 259–62, on this incident: he says he knows for sure that GGM was right about the threat.
22. See Cromos, 31 March 1981, “El viaje de GM: crónica de una salida antici-pada.”
23. See Vidal, Viaje a la memoria, pp. 128–39.
24. “GGM y su nuevo libro vistos a través de su editor,” El Espectador, 3 May 1981.
25. See Excelsior, 12 May 1981.
26. Excelsior, 7 May 1981.
27. See GGM, “Mitterrand, el otro: el presidente,” El Espectador, 24 May 1981.
28. Felipe González, interview, Madrid, 1997.
29. Excelsior, 4 August 1981.
30. “Torrijos,” El Espectador, 9 August 1981.
31. See Beatriz López de Barcha, “‘Gabito esperó a que yo creciera,’” Carrusel, Revista de El Tiempo, 10 December 1982.
32. Quoted by José Pulido, “No quiero convertirme en la estatua del Premio Nobel,” Muro de confesiones (Caracas, El Libro Menor, Academia Nacional de la Histo-ria, 1985), pp. 9–18.
33. See also “Habla GM: ‘Votaré por primera vez en mi vida por López,’” El Tiempo, 23 May 1982.
34. GGM, “Crónica de mi muerte anunciada,” El Espectador, 14 March 1982.
35. “Con las Malvinas o sin ellas,” El Espectador, 11 April 1982.
36. “Otra vez del avión a la mula. …! Qué dicha!,” El Espectador, 31 January 1982.
37. “Bangkok la horrible,” El Espectador, 28 March 1982.
38. “Peggy, dame un beso,” El Espectador, 4 April 1982.
39. “Como sufrimos las flores,” El Espectador, 6 December 1981.
40. Claudia Dreifus, “GGM,” Playboy 30:2, February 1983, pp. 65–77, 172–8.
41. Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, ed., El olor de la guayaba (Barcelona, Bruguera, April 1982).
42. María Esther Gilio, “Escribir bien es un deber revolucionario,” Triunfo (Madrid), 1977, in Rentería, ed., pp. 141–6.
43. This section is based on Núñez Jiménez, “GM y la perla de las Antillas,” pp. 69–103.
44. Ibid.
45. “Beguin y Sharon, premios ‘Nobel de la muerte’” El Espectador, 29 September 1982.
46. Alfonso Fuenmayor, “Transparencia de un Nobel,” in Mera, ed., Aracataca-Estocolmo, pp. 30–33.
47. See “Gabriel José visto por Eligio Gabriel, el benjamín,” Cromos, 26 October 1982, pp. 20–21.
48. See GGM, “William Golding, visto por sus vecinos,” El Espectador, 9 October 1983, in which GGM remembers when he heard the news about his own award in 1982.
49. Eligio García, “Así se recibió el Nobel,” Revista Diners (Bogotá), November 1982.
50. GGM, “Obregón o la vocación desaforada,” El Espectador, 20 October 1982.
51. GGM, “USA: mejor cerrado que entreabierto,” El Espectador, 7 November 1982.
52. See for example the Latin American Times for December 1982, cover story.
53. Joseph Harmes, “A spellbinding storyteller,” Newsweek, 1 November 1982.
54. Salman Rushdie, “Márquez the Magician,” Sunday Times (London), 24 October 1982.
55. See Mera, ed., Aracataca-Estocolmo, for the best insight into the Nobel experience and what it meant for Colombia.
56. Plinio Mendoza, “Postales de Estocolmo,” in ibid., pp. 96–103.
57. See Guillermo Cano, “Crónica anticipada de unas ceremonias,” El Espectador, 5 December 1982.
58. Anthony Day and Marjorie Miller, “Gabo talks: GGM on the misfortunes of Latin America, his friendship with Fidel Castro and his terror of the blank page,” Los Angeles Times Magazine, 2 September 1990.
59. Mera, ed., Aracataca-Estocolmo, p. 30.
60. Mendoza, “Postales de Estocolmo,” in ibid., p. 96.
61. Eligio García, “Gabriel José visto por Eligio Gabriel,” Cromos, 14 December 1982.
62. GGM, “Cena de paz en Harpsund,” El Espectador, 19 December 1982.
63. Beatriz López de Barcha, “‘Gabito esperó a que yo creciera,’” Carrusel, Revista de El Tiempo, 10 December 1982.
64. See El Espectador, 11 December 1982.
65. Mendoza, “Postales de Estocolmo,” in Mera, ed., Aracataca-Estocolmo, p. 98.
66. Ana María Cano, “Para leer en la mañana: El arrugado liquiliqui,” El Espectador, 13 December 1982.
67. Plinio Mendoza, “La entrega del Nobel: un día inolvidable,” El Tiempo, 12 December 1982.
68. Mendoza, “Postales de Estocolmo,” in Mera, ed., Aracataca-Estocolmo, p. 103.
69. “La cumbia del Nobel,” Gente (Buenos Aires), December 1982.
70. See Tom Maschler, Publisher (London, Picador, 2005), pp. 128–9.
71. Nereo López, “Humanas y hermosas anécdotas de la delegación folklórica colombiana en Estocolmo,” in Mera, ed., Aracataca-Estocolmo, pp. 91–5.
72. See Gloria Triana in El Espectador, 6 October 2002, “Hasta la Reina Silvia se divirtió.”
73. GGM, “El brindis por la poesía,” El Espectador, 12 December 1982.
74. Alexandra Pineda, “El Nobel Gabo piensa en El Otro,” El Espectador, 12 December 1982.
75. El Espectador, 10 December 1982.
76. Rita GM, in Galvis, Los GM, p. 249.
77. Eligio García, “La entrega del Nobel: Estocolmo fue una fiesta y una rosa amarilla,” El Mundo al Vuelo, Avianca, 64, February-March 1983.
78. Alvaro Mutis, “Apuntes sobre un viaje que no era para contar,” in Mera, ed., Aracataca-Estocolmo pp. 19–20.
79. El Tiempo, 12 December 1982.
21 / The Frenzy of Renown and the Fragrance of Guava: Love in the Time of Cholera (1982–1985)
1. GGM, “Felipe,” El Espectador, 2 January 1983.
2. “Diálogo de Gabo con Felipe González,” El Tiempo, 27 December 1982.
3. See Leo Braudy The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (New York, Vintage, 1986; 1997).
4. Sorela, El otro García Márquez, p. 259.
5. Roberto Pombo, “El año de GM,” Semana (Bogotá), January 1997.
6. David Streitfeld, “The intricate solitude of GGM,” Washington Post, 10 April 1994.
7. Juan Cruz, “Relato de un tímido,” El País (Madrid), 11 January 1993.
8. Rodolfo Braceli, “El genio en su laberinto,” Gente (Buenos Aires), 15 January 1997.
9. GGM, “Las veinte horas de Graham Greene en La Habana,” El Espectador, 16 January 1983.
10. Reproduced in Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Mea Cuba (London, Faber & Faber, 1994), p. 210.
11. GGM, “Regreso a Mexico,” El Espectador, 23 January 1983.
12. GGM, “Sí: ya viene el lobo,” El Espectador, 30 January 1983.
13. See Alfonso Botero Miranda, Colombia, no alineada? De la confrontación a la cooperación: la nueva tendencia en los No Alineados (Bogotá, Tercer Mundo, 1995).
14. Núñez Jiménez, “GM y la perla de las Antillas.”
15. GGM, “Regreso a la guayaba,” El Espectador, 10 April 1983.
16. Very unusually GGM hit back in “Con amor, desde el mejor oficio del mundo,” El Espectador, 24 April 1983.
17. GGM, “Cartagena: una cometa en la muchedumbre,” El Espectador, 5 June 1983.
18. GGM, “Contadora, cinco meses después,” El Espectador, 10 July 1983.
19. Tomás Eloy Martínez, “El día en que empezó todo,” Página 12 (Buenos Aires), 21 August 1988.
20. See GGM, “Bishop,” El Espectador, 23 October 1983.
21. See María Teresa Herrán, “GM ante el mito de Gabo,” El Espectador, 5 November 1983.
22. Laura Restrepo, interview, Bogotá, 1991.
23. GGM, “Vuelta a la semilla,” El Espectador, 18 December 1983.
24. See Claudia Dreifus, “Gabriel García Márquez,” Playboy 30:2, February 1983, p. 172.
25. Régis Debray, Les Masques (Paris, Gallimard, 1987), pp. 26–8.
26. See Arango, Un ramo de nomeolvides, p. 247.
27. Ibid., p. 120.
28. See Marlise Simons, “The best years of his life: an interview with GGM,” New York Times Book Review, 10 April 1988.
29. “GGM usa escritura computarizada,” Excelsior, 16 October 1984.
30. Chronicle of a Death Foretold, p. 93.
31. Arango, Un ramo de nomeolvides, p. 136.
32. Eric Nepomuceno, “GGM afronta en su nueva obra los peligros de la novela rosa,” El País, 28 August 1984.
33. Margot GM, in Galvis, Los GM, p. 67.
34. Eligio GM, in ibid., pp. 285–6. Remarkably, Tía Pa was in attendance at the time. She would die herself a year later.
35. Jaime GM, in ibid., p. 55.
36. Eligio GM, in ibid., p. 286.
37. GGM, “La vejez juvenil de don Luis Buñuel,” El Espectador, 1 August 1982. Not only Love in the Time of Cholera (1985) but also the seeds of Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004) lie in this article.
38. Marlise Simons (of New York Times), “Sexo y vejez: una charla con GM,” El Tiempo, 14 April 1985. In 1988 Simons would interview him again: Marlise Simons, “The best years of his life: an interview with GGM,” op.cit.
39. Yasunari Kawabata, La casa de las bellas durmientes (Barcelona, Luis de Caralt, 2001), p. 79.
40. María Elvira Samper, “Habla Gabo,” Semana, 13 May 1985.
41. The most obvious point of reference is Valéry Larbaud’s Fermina Marquez (Paris, 1911), about a beautiful Colombian girl in France and the loves she inspires. Its title was bound to attract GGM’s attention; then the plot also captured his imagination.
42. Semana, 9 December 1985.
43. Hernán Díaz, “Una historia trivial antes del huracán,” Revista Diners (Bogotá), September 1985.
44. Belisario Betancur, interview, Bogotá, 1991. It is to these circumstances that GGM’s later book News of a Kidnapping (1996) looks back, in order to set the political context for the events (1990–93) that he himself narrates.
45. “It’s taken me half a century to write about love,” Excelsior, 17 January 1986.
46. Thomas Pynchon, “The heart’s eternal vow,” New York Times Book Review, 10 April 1988.
47. GGM, in conversation, Mexico City, 1999.
22 / Against Official History: García Márquez’s Bolívar (The General in His Labyrinth) (1986–1989)
1. “‘Colombia está al borde del holocausto’: GM,” Excelsior, 28 July 1986.
2. In the Brazilian edition of Playboy, among other places; also in a debate with Günter Grass at the end of the 45th PEN Congress in New York in January 1986.
3. Núñez Jiménez, “GM y la perla de las Antillas.”
4. Interviews with Fidel Castro, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Fernando Birri, Alquimia Peña, Cacho Pallero, María Luisa Bemberg, Eliseo Alberto, Jorge Alí Triana, Lisandro Duque, Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, Jorge Sánchez, Ignacio Durán, Mario García Joya, Berta Navarro; conversations with Julio García Espinosa, Dolores Calviño, Stella Malagón, Martha Bossío, Miguel Littín.
5. Littín was best known for The Jackal of Nahueltoro, 1971; but he had also filmed García Márquez’s story Montiel’s Widow in Mexico in 1978, with Geraldine Chaplin in the starring role.
6. GGM, Clandestine in Chile (Cambridge, Granta, 1989).
7. This issue had distanced GGM from Mitterrand. France was still testing in the South Pacific. In July 1985, Greenpeace’s ship Rainbow Warrior had been sunk in Auckland harbour by French agents ordered—we now know—by Mitterrand himself.
8. “Con emotivo discurso de Gabo se instaló ‘reunión de los 6,’” El Tiempo, 7 August 1986. See GGM’s speech, “El cataclismo de Dámocles,” Conferencia Ixtapa, 1986 (Bogotá, Oveja Negra, 1986).
9. Gonzalo and Pía would marry in 1987 and a son, Mateo, García Márquez’s first grandchild, would be born in late September.
10. See Andrew Paxman, “On the lot with GGM” (interview), Variety, 25–31 March 1996.
11. Michel Brandeau, “Le tournage de ‘Chronique d’une mort annoncée,’” Le Monde, July 1986.
12. See La Razón, Buenos Aires, 7 December 1986, for text of GGM’s speech.
13. María Jimena Duzán, interview, Bogotá, 1991.
14. See espcially Marlise Simons, “GM on love, plagues and politics,” New York Times, 21 February 1988.
15. See Hugo Colmenares, “El demonio persigue las cosas de mi vida,” El Nacional, 22 February 1989, in Caracas.
16. See “Robert Redford es un admirador de GM,” Excelsior, 15 October 1988.
17. Elías Miguel Muñoz, “Into the writer’s labyrinth: storytelling days with Gabo,” Michigan Quarterly Review, 34:2, 1995, pp. 173–93, on GGM’s work at Sundance, August 1989.
18. See GGM, “Una tontería de Anthony Quinn,” El Espectador, 21 April 1982.
19. Newell’s previous films included Four Weddings and a Funeral, Donnie Brasco and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
20. See, for example, Larry Rohter, “GM: words into film,” New York Times, 13 August 1989.
21. See El coronel no tiene quien le escriba, guión cinematográfico por Paz Alicia Garciadiego (Mexico, Universidad Veracruzana, 1999).
22. Excelsior, 7 August 1990: New York Times reviews Salvador Távora’s adaptation of Chronicle of a Death Foretold in the Festival Latino. Mel Gussow said it would need a director with Buñuel’s genius to adapt GGM.
23. GGM, “Fidel Castro, el oficio de la palabra,” El País, 6 March 1988. See “Plying the Word,” NACLA, 2 August 1990.
24. GGM, Diatriba de amor contra un hombre sentado (Bogotá, Arango, 1994).
25. Osvaldo Soriano, “La desgracia de ser feliz,” Página 12 (Buenos Aires), 21 August 1988.
26. Osvaldo Quiroga, “Soledades de un poeta que no acudió a la cita,” La Nación (Buenos Aires), 21 August 1988.
27. It was said at the time that Monica Vitti had considered staging the play in Rome that year. Later it would be produced in Bogotá with Laura García as Graciela; in 2005 actress-singer Ana Belén played the part in Spain and in January 2006 Graciela Dufau, despite all her sufferings, revived the play in Buenos Aires. Despite the reservations of the critics, it is clear that actresses have enjoyed playing the role.
28. “GM sólo quiere hablar de cine,” Occidente, 3 December 1989.
29. “Cordial entrevista en Moscú de GM con Gorbachev,” El Espectador, 11 July 1987.
30. Excelsior, 21 July 1987.
31. See his voluminous “gratitudes” or acknowledgements in the published editions.
32. See Susana Cato, “El Gabo: ‘Desnudé a Bolívar,’” Proceso (Mexico City), 3 April 1989.
33. See GGM, “El río de la vida,” El Espectador, 25 March 1981.
34. “‘Me devoré tu último libro’: López a Gabo,” El Tiempo, 19 February 1989. On 29 July 1975, the 450th anniversary of the founding of Santa Marta, López Michelsen, the President of Colombia, met with Carlos Andrés Pérez of Venezuela and Omar Torrijos of Panama at San Pedro Alejandrino and paid homage to Bolívar, who had died there in 1830. A plaque commemorates the event. All three men would become close friends and allies of GGM over the next decade.
35. Belisario Betancur, Página 12 (Buenos Aires), 2 April 1989.
36. Excelsior, 21 March 1989.
37. María Elvira Samper, “El general en su laberinto: un libro vengativo. Entrevista exclusiva con GGM,” Excelsior, 5 April 1989.
38. See for example Oscar Piedrahita González, “El laberinto de la decrepitud,” La República (Colombia), 14 May 1989; and Diego Mileo, “En torno al disfraz lite-rario,” Clarín (Buenos Aires), 22 June 1989.
39. “El libro” (editorial), El Tiempo, 19 March 1989.
40. El Tiempo editorial, “La rabieta del Nobel,” 5 April 1989.
41. Excelsior, 28 March 1989. See also “’Mario ha ido demasiado lejos’: GM. ‘Admiro el valor de Vargas Llosa,’” Excelsior, 28 June 1989.
42. “GM no volverá a España,” El Espectador, 28 March 1989.
43. Excelsior, 28 March 1989.
44. Comité de la Carta de los Cien, “Open Letter to Fidel Castro, President of the Republic of Cuba,” New York Times, 27 December 1988.
45. The General in His Labyrinth (London, Jonathan Cape, 1991), p. 230.
46. The decision was a collective one, though Castro’s enemies assumed that he took a leading role; they also alleged that Ochoa had to be killed to conceal Fidel Castro and Raúl Castro’s own implication in the Caribbean drug trade.
47. 16 July, Sunday Mirror headline, “Shabby ghost at the feast,” compared her to Marie Antoinette.
48. “El narco-escándalo cubano. Siguen rodando cabezas militares,” El Espectador, 15 July 1989.
49. See Geoffrey Matthews, “Plague of violence scars land of magical beauty,” Guardian (London), 3 September 1989.
50. See “GM: ‘Hay que apoyar al Presidente Barco,’” El Tiempo, 20 August 1989.
51. “GM: ‘Castro le teme a la Perestroika,’” Excelsior, 22 December 1989.
23 / Back to Macondo? News of a Historic Catastrophe (1990–1996)
1. Most of these events are mentioned, whether briefly or at length, in GGM, News of a Kidnapping (London, Jonathan Cape, 1997).
2. “Condenada al fracaso, la guerra contra la droga: GM,” Excelsior, 3 November 1989.
3. See Anthony Day and Marjorie Miller, “Gabo talks: GGM on the misfortunes of Latin America, his friendship with Fidel Castro and his terror of the blank page,” Los Angeles Times Magazine, 2 September 1990, pp. 10–35, in which he states that the USA has an “almost pornographic obsession with Castro” (p. 34). If it were not for Castro, he adds, “the U.S. would be into Latin America all the way to Patagonia.”
4. See Excelsior, 9 February 1989.
5. Day and Miller, “Gabo talks,” p. 33.
6. Excelsior, 10 March 1990.
7. See José Hernández, “María es un texto sagrado,” El Tiempo, 10 March 1990.
8. Imogen Mark, “Pinochet adrift in his labyrinth,” Financial Times, 25 November 1990.
9. Reported in La Prensa, 5 September 1990.
10. “GM: sólo Fidel puede transformar a Cuba; EEUU siempre necesita un demonio,” Excelsior, 3 September 1990.
11. Excelsior, 27 January 1991; also “Llamamiento de Gabo por secuestrados,” El Tiempo, 27 January 1991.
12. “Gabo: ‘Es un triunfo de la inteligencia,’” El Tiempo, 20 June 1991.
13. “Redford: ‘Gabo es un zorro viejo,’” El Espectador, 3 March 1991.
14. Renato Ravelo, “El taller de GM,” La Jornada, 25 October 1998.
15. “Pide GM perdonar la vida a los dos infiltrados,” La Jornada, 18 January 1992.
16. Excelsior, 15 February 1992.
17. “GGM: “L’amour est ma seule idéologie,” Paris Match, 14 July 1994.
18. Excelsior, 31 July 1992.
19. Semana, 14July 1992.
20. “GM descubre la literatura y le gusta,” El Nacional, 10 August 1992.
21. Semana, 17 November 1992.
22. Semana, 29 September 1992.
23. “Nunca es tarde,” El Tiempo, 23 November 1992.
24. “GM desmiente en Cuba el rumor de discrepancias con Castro,” El País, 14 December 1992.
25. El Espectador, 11 January 1993.
26. Bill Clinton, Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World (London, Hutchin-son, 2007).
27. El Espectador, 28 January 1993.
28. Excelsior, 29 January 1993.
29. “GGM exalta ‘el talento’ de CAP,” Excelsior, 18 June 1993.
30. James Brooke, “Cocaine’s reality, by GM,” New York Times, 11 March 1994.
31. 24 March 1994. The statement was issued as a press release.
32. David Streitfeld, “The intricate solitude of GGM,” Washington Post, 10 April 1994.
33. Gonzalo Mallarino speech at Bogotá Book Fair in praise of GGM’s new book (22 April 1994), published in El Espectador, 25 April 1994.
34. Jean-François Fogel, “Revolution of the heart,” Le Monde, 27 January 1995.
35. A. S. Byatt, “By love possessed,” New York Review of Books, 28 May 1995.
36. Peter Kemp, “The hair and the dog,” Sunday Times (London), 2 July 1995.
37. Rosa Mora, “El fin de un ayuno,” reproduced in El Espectador, 17 April 1994.
38. See Silvana Paternostro, “Tres días con Gabo,” Letra Internacional (Madrid), May-June 1997, p. 13. Castro himself would recall this event in Granma in July 2008.
39. Unomasuno (Mexico City), 25 July 1994.
40. See Ernesto Samper, “Apuntes de viaje,” Semana, 3 March 1987. I interviewed Samper in Bogotá in April 2007.
41. “GGM: “L’amour est ma seule idéologie,” Paris Match, 14 July 1994.
42. “Querido Presidente, cuídese los sentidos,” El Tiempo, 8 August 1994.
43. “Una charla informal,” Semana, 6 September 1994.
44. La jornada (Mexico City), 14 September 1994.
45. Fiorillo, La Cueva, p. 85.
46. “GGM: “L’amour est ma seule idéologie,” Paris Match, 14 July 1994.
47. Susana Cato, “Gabo cambia de oficio,” Cambio 16, 6–13 May 1996.
48. See “Por qué Gabo no vuelve al país,” Cambio 16, 24 February 1997.
49. Norberto Fuentes, “De La Habana traigo un mensaje,” 13 March 1996. Fuentes’s Dulces guerrilleros cubanos would appear in 1999 and GGM would get a grim starring role in it.
50. Pilar Lozano, “Gabo da una lección a los ‘milicos,’” El País, 16 April 1996.
51. Enrique Santos Calderón, “Noticia,” El Tiempo, 5 May 1996. Santos Calderón notes that Newsweek has recently said that GGM is fixated on Pablo Escobar because he represents power, which is GGM’s true obsession, not politics. See Virginia Vallejo, Amando a Pablo, odiando a Escobar (Mexico City, Random House Mondadon, 2007), for a remarkable X-ray of Colombian politics and society in the era of Escobar.
52. Roberto Posada García-Peña (D’Artagnan), “Las Cozas del Gavo,” El Tiempo, 22 May 1998.
53. GGM, News of a Kidnapping, pp. 129–30. The FARC, in particular, would give credence to this statement with their practice of kidnapping for ransom over the following years. In 2008 they suffered a series of devastating blows, including the death of their leader, “Sureshot” Manuel Marulanda, the death through bombing of the second-in-command, Raúl Reyes, and the liberation of Ingrid Betancourt by the Colombian armed forces.
54. See, for example, Joseph A. Page, “Unmagical realism,” Commonweal, 16, 26 September 1997; and Charles Lane, “The writer in his labyrinth,” New Republic, no. 217, 25 August 1997. See also Malcolm Deas, “Moths of Ill Omen,” London Review of Books, 30 October 1997.
24 / García Márquez at Seventy and Beyond:
Memoirs and Melancholy Whores (1996–2005)
1. Darío Arizmendi, “Gabo revela sus secretos de escritor,” Cromos, 13 June 1994.
2. “La nostalgia es la materia prima de mi escritura,” El País, 5 May 1996.
3. Rosa Mora, “He escrito mi libro más duro, y el más triste,” El País, 20 May 1996.
4. Ricardo Santamaría, “Cumpleaños con Fidel,” Semana, 27 August 1996.
5. Rodolfo Braceli, “El genio en su laberinto,” Gente (Buenos Aires), 15 January 1997.
6. Jean-Fran°ois Fogel, “The revision thing,” Le Monde, 27 January 1995.
7. El País, 9 October 1996.
8. Pilar Lozano, “Autoexilio de Gabo,” El País, 3 March 1997.
9. “Clinton y GM en el Ala Oeste,” El Espectador, 12 September 1997.
10. El Tiempo, 7 June 1998.
11. “Pastrana desnarcotiza la paz. Con apoyo del BID se constituye Fondo de Inversión para la Paz (FIP),” El Espectador, 23 October 1998.
12. “Salsa Soirée: fete for Colombian president a strange brew,” Washington Post, 29 October 1998.
13. GGM and his colleagues withdrew their bid, convinced that Samper would turn it down. In an interview with me in April 2007 Samper denied that the decision had been taken but said flatly that “no government anywhere in the democratic world is obliged to favour its adversaries.”
14. Larry Rohter, “GGM embraces old love (that’s news!),” New York Times, 3 March 1999.
15. GGM, “El enigma de los dos Chávez,” Cambio, February 1999.
16. “Castro augura el fin del capitalismo en el mundo,” El País, 3 January 1999.
17. Rosa Mora, “GGM seduce al público con la lectura de un cuento inédito,” El País, 19 March 1999.
18. I was in England and García Márquez called me from Bogotá on 28 June after the diagnosis. He knew that I had had lymphoma in 1995. He said, “I have never in my life been as exhausted as I was when this started. There was not a scrap of energy left in me.” We talked about the course of the illness and what one could do to fight as effectively as possible; how to eat, how to think, how to live. “Well,” he said, “now you and I are colleagues.” I sensed that he was very shocked but determined to fight. But I was also aware that he was seventy-two years of age.
19. Jon Lee Anderson, “The Power of García Márquez,” The New Yorker, 27 September 1999.
20. El Tiempo, 23 September 1999.
21. See this piece of clairvoyance in The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), p. 181: “he stood up to the arguments of the sterile ministers who shouted ‘bring back the marines, general, bring them back with their machines for fumigating plague-ridden people in exchange for whatever they want.’”
22. Semana, 14 November 2000.
23. Juan Cruz, “El marido de Mercedes,” El País, 2 December 2000.
24. Guillermo Angulo, interview, Bogotá, April 2007.
25. 27 February 2001. The letter was circulated in newspapers around the world.
26. Freud was late for his father’s burial and had a guilty dream about it; he then failed to attend his mother’s funeral under the excuse of ill health.
27. See Richard Ellman on Joyce: “The life of an artist, but particularly that of Joyce, differs from other lives of other persons in that its events are becoming artistic sources even as they command his present attention” (James Joyce, new and revised edition [New York, Oxford University Press, 1983], p. 3).
28. Matilde Sánchez, “GGM presentó en Mexico sus memorias: ‘Es el gran libro de ficción que busqué durante toda la vida,’” Clarín (Buenos Aires), 24 March 1998.
29. Excelsior, 12 November 1981: “GM ends up talking about his memoirs, which he hopes to write quite soon and which will really be ‘False Memoirs’ because they won’t recount his life as it was, nor as it might have been, but what he himself believes it to have been.”
30. Caleb Bach, “Closeups of GGM,” Américas, May-June 2003.
31. El País, 19 July 2003.
32. Semana, November 2003.
33. Later, Love in the Time of Cholera would also be adopted by the Oprah Winfrey show.
34. See GGM, “El avión de la bella durmiente,” El Espectador, 19 August 1982, which was later adapted as a story for Strange Pilgrims.
35. Isaacs’s María is a partial exception.
36. María Jimena Duzán, interview, Bogotá, 1991.
37. GGM, Memories of My Melancholy Whores (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), p. 74.
38. Ibid., p. 45.
39. John Updike, “Dying for love: a new novel by García Márquez,” The New Yorker, 7 November 2005.
40. When I got home, reflecting on this conversation, I opened The General in His Labyrinth, to see if its last lines were, as I remembered, another hymn to the radiance of existence. In them the dying Bolívar is dazzled by “the final brilliance of life that would never, through all eternity, be repeated again.” Cf. GGM, “Un payaso pintado detrás de una puerta,” El Espectador, 1 May 1982, in which GGM recalls the emotions of his own radiant youth as dawn approached each morning in Cartagena.
Epilogue: Immortality—The New Cervantes (2006–2007)
1. Xavi Ayén, “Rebeldía de Nobel. GM: ‘He dejado de escribir,’” La Vanguardia (Barcelona), 29 January 2006.
2. Jaime GM, conversation, Cartagena, March 2007.
3. La Jornada, 8 April 1997, prints GGM’s text, “Botella al mar para el dios de las palabras.”
4. Ilan Stavans, “GM’s ‘Total’ novel,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 15 June 2007. Two years before Stavans’s text, Christopher Domínguez, in Mexico’s Letras Libres (December 2004), repeated an earlier statement that García Márquez was Latin America’s “Homer.” Similarly, Roberto González Echevarría, in a notable piece in Primera Revista Latinoamericana de Libros (New York), December 2007-January 2008, remarked that OHYS was immediately recognizable as “something perfect … a classic,” a book which had marked both his life and his career. All three are rigorous, sceptical critics not temperamentally inclined to write blank critical cheques nor indeed to give fulsome praise to left-of-centre writers.
5. Arango, Un ramo de nomeolvides, p. 91.
6. See GGM, “Un domingo de delirio,” El Espectador, 10 March 1981, where he satirizes the idea of building a convention centre in Cartagena. Ironies abound.
7. GGM, Cien años de soledad. Edición conmemorativa (Madrid, Real Academia Española/Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española, 2007; published in Colombia by Norma).
8. In this version he stated that he and Mercedes had mailed the second half first by mistake and that Paco Porrúa, the publisher, anxious to read the first half, had sent them the money they needed by return of post. Through its homage the academy had bound him definitively to the novel he had tried so hard to escape from, and his speech was not only a thank you to his wife but a kind of reconciliation with the book that had transformed both their lives forty years before.