The Scandal of the Century

by Gabriel García Márquez

  Bogotá was a remote, lugubrious city back then, where an inclement drizzle had been falling since the beginning of the sixteenth century. I suffered that bitterness for the first time on an ill-fated January afternoon, the saddest of my life, when I arrived from the coast just thirteen years old, in a black wool suit of my father’s that had been tailored to fit me, with a vest and hat, and a metal trunk that had something of the splendor of the holy sepulcher. My lucky star, which has so rarely failed me, did me the immense favor of making sure no photo exists of that afternoon.

  The first thing that caught my attention in that somber capital was that there were too many hastening men in the streets, that they were all dressed like me, in black suits and hats, and, conversely, I could not see any women. The huge Percheron horses that pulled the beer wagons in the rain caught my attention, as did the pyrotechnical sparks from the streetcars as they turned the corners under the rain, and the stopped traffic to let the interminable funerals pass by under the rain. They were the gloomiest funerals in the world, with high altar carriages and horses decked out in black velvet and feather hoods, and corpses of good families who think themselves the inventors of death. Under the fine drizzle of the Plaza de las Nieves, as a funeral pulled out, I saw a woman on the streets of Bogotá for the first time, and she was slender and stealthy, as poised as a queen in mourning, but I was left forever with half the illusion, because her face was covered by an impenetrable veil.

  The image of that woman, which still flusters me, is one of my few nostalgic memories of that city of sin, in which almost everything was possible, except making love. That’s why I have said on occasion that the only heroism of my life, and that of others of my generation, is having been young in the Bogotá of that time. My most salacious fun on Sundays was to take the blue-glassed streetcars, which for five centavos revolved unceasingly from Plaza de Bolívar to the Avenida de Chile, and spend those desolate afternoons there that seemed to drag the interminable tails of many more empty Sundays. The only thing I did during the journey in vicious circles was to read books of verses and verses and verses, at a rate perhaps of a block of poems for each city block, until the first streetlights came on in the eternal rain, and then I’d make my way through the taciturn cafés of the old city in search of someone who’d do me the charity of sharing conversations about the verses and verses and verses I’d just read. Sometimes I’d find someone, who was always a man, and we’d stay until after midnight drinking coffee and smoking the butts of the cigarettes we’d smoked ourselves, and talking of verses and verses and verses, while in the rest of the world all of humanity was making love.

  One night as I was returning from my solitary poetic festivals on the streetcar, something happened to me for the first time that deserved to be told. It happened that at one of the stations in the north a faun had boarded the streetcar. That’s what I said: a faun. According to the Dictionary of the Real Academia Española, a faun is “a demigod of the woodlands and countryside.” Each time I reread that unhappy definition I regret that its author had not been there that night when a flesh-and-blood faun boarded the streetcar. He was dressed in the style of the day, like a chancellor on his way home from a funeral, but his bullock’s horns and billy goat beard gave him away, and the well-groomed hooves under his fancy trousers. The air was pervaded by his personal fragrance, but no one seemed to notice that it was eau de lavanda, maybe because the same dictionary had repudiated the word “lavender” as a Gallicism that means agua de espliego.

  The only friends I told such things were Álvaro Mutis, because he found them fascinating even though he didn’t believe them, and Gonzalo Mallarino, because he knew they were true even if they weren’t exactly factual. On one occasion, the three of us had seen in the atrium of the Church of San Francisco a woman who was selling toy turtles whose heads moved in a surprisingly natural way. Gonzalo Mallarino asked the woman if those turtles were alive or if they were plastic, and she replied:

  “They’re plastic, but they’re alive.”

  Nevertheless, the night I saw the faun on the streetcar neither of the two answered their telephones, and I was suffocating from the urge to tell someone. So I wrote a short story—the story of the faun on the streetcar—and I mailed it to the Sunday supplement of El Tiempo, the editor of which, Don Jaime Posada, never published it. The only copy I kept burned in the boardinghouse where I was living on April 9, 1948, the day of the Bogotazo, and that’s how national history did us a double favor: one for me and one for literature.

  I couldn’t avoid these personal memories as I was reading the delightful book Gonzalo Mallarino just published in Bogotá: Historias de caleños y bogoteños. Gonzalo and I were at the Faculty of Law at the Universidad Nacional at the same time, but we did not attend classes as regularly as we did the little university café, where we dodged the drowsiness of legal codes by exchanging verses and verses and verses of the vast universal poetry we both could recite by heart. At the end of classes, he went home to his family house, which was big and pleasant among eucalyptus trees. I went back to my gloomy boardinghouse on Calle Florián, with my friends from the coast, borrowed books, and tumultuous Saturday dances. Actually, it never occurred to me to ask Gonzalo Mallarino where the hell he was in the many hours we didn’t spend at the university, while I went all around the whole city reading verses and verses and verses on the streetcars. It took me thirty years to find out, reading this exemplary book, where he reveals with so much simplicity and so much humanity the other half of his life in those times.

  October 21, 1981, El País, Madrid

  Tales of the Road

  Many years ago I was waiting for a taxi on a central avenue in downtown Mexico City, in broad daylight, when I saw one approach that I didn’t think of flagging down, because there was someone sitting in the passenger seat. However, when it was closer I realized it was an optical illusion: the taxi was free.

  Minutes later I told the driver what I’d seen, and he told me with absolute openness that it was by no means a hallucination of mine. “It happens all the time, especially at night,” he told me. “Sometimes I’ll be driving around the city for hours without anyone flagging me down, because they always see someone sitting beside me.” In that comfortable and dangerous seat that in some countries is called “the dead man’s position,” because it is the most affected in accidents, and was never so worthy of the name as in the case of that taxi.

  When I told Luis Buñuel this episode, he said, with great enthusiasm: “That could be the beginning of something really good.” I’ve always thought he was right. For the episode is not in itself a complete story, but it is, undoubtedly, a magnificent takeoff point for a written or filmed story. With one serious drawback, of course, and that’s that everything that happens next would have to be better. Maybe that’s why I’ve never used it.

  What interests me now, however, and after so many years, is that someone has just told me the same story again as if it just happened to him in London. It’s strange, as well, that it should have been there, because London taxis are different from those in the rest of the world. They look like hearses, with little lace curtains and purple carpets, soft leather seats and supplementary ones to accommodate up to seven people, and an interior silence with something like a funereal oblivion to it. But in the dead person’s place, which is not to the right but to the left of the driver, there is not a seat for another passenger, but a space for luggage. The friend who told me in London, assured me, however, that it was in that place where he saw the nonexistent person, but that the driver had told him—unlike what the Mexican one told me—that maybe it had been a hallucination. Now then: yesterday I told all this to a friend from Paris, and he was convinced that I was pulling his leg, because he says he was the one who it happened to. Besides, he told me, it happened to him in a more serious way, since he told the taxi driver what the person he’d seen at his side looked like, described the shape of his hat and the
color of his bowtie, and the driver recognized him as the specter of a brother of his who’d been killed by the Nazis during the German occupation of France.

  I don’t think that any of these friends are lying, as I didn’t lie to Luis Buñuel, I just want to point out that there are stories that happen all over the world, always in the same way, and without anyone ever being able to establish for sure whether they’re true or whether they’re fantasies, or to decipher their mystery. Of all of them, maybe the oldest and most recurring I heard for the first time in Mexico.

  It is the eternal story of the family whose grandmother dies during their vacation at the beach. Few formalities are as difficult or as expensive or require more legal paperwork as that of transporting a cadaver from one state to another. Someone told me in Colombia that they had to sit their corpse up between two living persons in the back seat of their car, and even put a lit cigarette in his mouth when they were passing the highway controls, to deceive the countless barriers to legal transport. So the Mexican family rolled the dead grandmother up in a carpet, tied her with cords, and secured her to the roof rack of the car. During a break in the journey, while the family was having lunch, the car was stolen with the grandmother’s body on top, and they never found any trace. The explanation they gave for the disappearance was that the thieves had maybe buried the body in a deserted spot and dismantled the car in order, literally, to get rid of a dead weight.

  There was a time when that story was repeated all over Mexico, and always with different names. But the different versions had something in common: the one who was telling it always said he was a friend of the protagonists. Some, as well, gave their names and addresses. So many years later, I’ve heard the same story in the most distant parts of the world, including Vietnam, where an interpreter told me as if it had happened to a friend of his during the war. In every case the circumstances are the same, and if you insist, you’ll get the names and addresses of those it happened to.

  A third recurring story I’ve known for less time than the others, and those who have the patience to read this column every week might remember it. It is the chilling story of four young French people who last summer picked up a woman dressed in white on the Montpellier freeway. All of a sudden, the woman pointed ahead with a terrified index finger, and yelled, “Careful! That curve is dangerous!” And she vanished in that instant. I read the story in various French newspapers, and it made such an impression that I wrote an article about it. I thought it surprising that the French authorities hadn’t paid attention to an event of such literary beauty, and also that they’d closed the case without finding a rational explanation for it. However, a journalist friend told me a few days ago in Paris that the reason for the official indifference was something else: in France, that story has been repeated for many years, even since long before the invention of the motorcar, when wandering ghosts on nocturnal roads requested the favor of a lift in the stagecoaches. This made me remember that also among the tales of the conquest of the west of the United States a legend is repeated of the solitary traveler who traveled all night in the passenger wagon, along with the old banker, the novice judge, and the pretty northern girl, accompanied by her governess, and the next morning at dawn only his place was empty. But what has most surprised me is discovering that the story of the lady in white, just as I took it from the French press, and just as I told it in this column, was already told by the most prolific among us, and that’s Manolo Vázquez Montalbán, in one of his few books that I hadn’t read: The Angst-Ridden Executive. I discovered the coincidence from a photocopy a friend sent me, who also already knew the story from years ago and from a different source.

  The copyright problem with Vázquez Montalbán doesn’t worry me: we both have the same literary agent of all els altres catalans, and she will take care of distributing the rights to the story to whomever they belong. What does worry me is the other coincidence of this recurring tale, the third I’ve discovered: that it also takes place on a road. I’ve always known an expression, which I cannot now find in any of the many many useless dictionaries I have on my shelves, and it’s an expression that surely has something to do with these stories: “Son cuentos de caminos”—They’re tales of the road. The problem is that the expression means they’re lies, and these three that haunt me are, without doubt, complete truths that happen ceaselessly over and over again in different places and to different people, so nobody forgets that literature too has its souls in purgatory.

  January 27, 1982, El País, Madrid

  My Other Me

  A short while ago, after waking up in bed in Mexico, I read in a newspaper that I had delivered a literary lecture the previous day in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, on the other side of the ocean, and the conscientious correspondent had not only provided a detailed reckoning of the event, but also a very subtle synthesis of my exposition. But the most flattering thing for me was that the subjects of the review were much more intelligent than could ever have occurred to me, and the way in which they were laid out much more brilliant than I could have done. There was only one problem: I hadn’t been in Las Palmas, neither the previous day nor in the previous twenty-two years, and I’ve never delivered a lecture on any subject in any part of the world.

  It often happens that my presence is announced in places where I am not. I have told all the media that I don’t participate in public acts, or pontificate at universities, or exhibit myself on television, or attend promotions of my books, or get involved in anything that might turn me into a spectacle. It’s not out of modesty that I refuse, but something worse: shyness. And it’s not hard for me, because the most important thing I’ve learned to do after forty years is to say no when I mean no. However, there’s never a shortage of abusive promoters who announce in the press, or in private invitations, that next Tuesday, at six in the afternoon, I will be at some event I’ve never heard of. At the hour of truth, the promoter apologizes to the audience for the dereliction of the writer who promised to come and didn’t come, adds a few drops of nastiness about sons of telegraph operators whose fame has gone to their heads, and ends up winning over the benevolence of the crowd and is able to do with them what he wishes. At the beginning of this ill-fated artist’s life, that sort of evil trick began to cause me erosions in my liver. But I’ve consoled myself a little by reading the memoirs of Graham Greene, who complains of the same thing in his funny final chapter, and has made me understand that there’s no remedy, that it’s nobody’s fault, because another me exists and is wandering loose out in the world, without any sort of control, doing everything I should do and don’t do.

  In that sense, the strangest thing that has happened to me was not the invented lecture in the Canary Isles, but the hard time I had a few years ago with Air France, due to a letter I never wrote. In reality, Air France had received an angry and bombastic protest, signed by me, in which I complained of the mistreatment I had been the victim of on that company’s flight from Madrid to Paris, on a specific date. After a rigorous investigation, the firm had imposed sanctions on the flight attendant in question, and the public relations department sent me a very kind and contrite letter of apology to Barcelona, that left me perplexed, because I had never actually been on that flight. Even more: I always fly so frightened that I don’t even notice how anyone treats me, and all my energy goes into gripping my seat with my hands to hold it up in order to help the plane stay up in the air, or trying to keep children from running in the aisles for fear they’ll break through the floor. The only undesirable incident I remember was on a flight from New York in an airplane so overloaded and oppressive that it was hard to breathe. Midflight, the stewardess gave each passenger a red rose. I was so startled that I opened my heart to her. “Instead of giving us a rose,” I said, “it would be better to give us a couple of inches more space for our knees.” The beautiful girl, who was obviously descended from the brave lineage of conquistadors, answered me dauntlessly: “If you don’t l
ike it, you can get out here.” It did not occur to me, of course, to write any letter of protest to an airline whose name I don’t wish to recall, but rather I ate the rose, one petal at a time, chewing unhurriedly its medicinal fragrance against anxiety, until I caught my breath. So when I received the letter from Air France I felt so ashamed for something I had not done that I went in person to the offices to clear things up, and there they showed me the letter of protest. I wouldn’t have been able to repudiate it, not just the style, but because it would have been very hard work for me to discover that the signature was fake.

  The man who wrote that letter is, without doubt, the same one who gave the lecture in the Canary Isles, and the one who does so many things I only occasionally get wind of by chance. Often, when I go to a friend’s home, I look for my books on their shelves with a distracted air, and write a dedication without their noticing. But more than twice I have found that my books are already signed, in my own handwriting, with the same black ink I always use, and in the same fleeting style, and signed with an autograph missing only one thing to make it mine, and that’s for me to have written it.

  I have been just as surprised to read in an improbable newspaper some interview I never gave, but that I could not in all honesty reprove, because it corresponds line for line with my thinking. Even more: the best interview with me that has been published to this day, the one that best expresses and in the most lucid way the most intricate nooks and crannies of my life, not only in literature, but also in politics, in my personal tastes, and in the joys and uncertainties of my heart, was published a couple of years ago in Caracas, and it was invented down to the last breath. It made me very happy, not just for being so accurate, but because it was signed with the full name of a woman I didn’t know, but who must love me very much to know me so well even if only through my other me.