Gabriel García Márquez

by Ilan Stavans

  When the English translation by Randolph Hogan was published in 1986, the publisher used García Márquez’s complete original title: The story of a shipwrecked sailor who drifted on a life raft for ten days without food or water, was proclaimed a national hero, kissed by beauty queens, made rich through publicity, and then spurned by the government and forgotten for all time. García Márquez felt somewhat detached from it, as if the volume had been composed by someone else. Still, it was greeted with enthusiasm. John Updike wrote in the New Yorker: “The starved, sun-baked, semi-delirious sailor, at last granted human contact, discovers within himself a primary aesthetic impulse: ‘When I heard him [the first man Velasco meets] speak I realized that, more than thirst, hunger, and despair, what tormented me most was the need to tell someone what had happened to me.’ Throughout Velasco’s narrative we feel the thinness of the difference between life and death—a few feet of heaving ocean separate him from his less lucky shipmates in the confusion after they were swept overboard, and a fragile cork-and-rope raft keeps him afloat, through the black night and burning day, in ‘a dense sea filled with strange creatures.’ The closeness of the living and the dead is one of García Márquez’s themes, but in this journalistic narrative it emerges without morbidity, as a fact among many. The factuality of the real sailor’s direct and artless telling bracingly mingles with the beginnings of the writer’s ‘magic realism.’”32

  Chapter 4

  New Horizons

  García Márquez continued writing fiction. In 1956, he published “Un día después del sábado” (One Day After Saturday).1 Increasingly, motifs jumped from a story to a novel and vice versa. For instance, this story connects Leaf Storm and One Hundred Years of Solitude in its depiction of a plague of dying birds and in the appearance of the Wandering Jew. Alfonso Fuenmayor told critic Harley D. Oberhelman that “the plague of dying birds was suggested to García Márquez by a sentence in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: ‘Birds froze in mid-air and fell like stones to the ground.’” García Márquez had marked that particular sentence in the margin of his copy of Orlando, which was in Fuenmayor’s possession.2

  When García Márquez accepted the corresponsalía in Europe in 1955, he was only twenty-eight; his knowledge of the world was extraordinarily limited. Leaving Colombia was a survival mechanism, but, perhaps more important, a stepping stone toward a broader, more cosmopolitan education as a writer.

  Paris, in particular, was a magnet. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, France had been the principal source of artistic and intellectual sustenance in Latin America. Having been under the oppressive influence of a stale Iberian culture until the so-called Age of Independence, which began around 1810, the newly independent republics looked to other foreign powers. In politics, the model was the United States, which, following its secession from England had institutionalized a democratic system of government based on separate but equally important branches of power—the executive, legislative, and judicial. But France was where ideas were discussed in earnest. Rubén Darío and other Modernistas spent time in Paris. The debt they owed to artistic movements such as Symbolism was substantial. Paris became a rite of passage for a long line of Latin American thinkers, poets, novelists, painters, and other artists, from César Vallejo and Vicente Huidobro to Alejo Carpentier and Octavio Paz.

  Among them were members of what would become El Boom: Julio Cortázar, who escaped Peronism in Argentina; Carlos Fuentes, a much-traveled urban dandy, who saw the French capital as a place where he could start building an international reputation; and Mario Vargas Llosa, who left what he considered “the parochial mores” of Lima to travel, first to Spain, then to Paris. All three belonged to the middle class in their respective countries, and felt the angst of being a subaltern citizen of modernity. Their region of the globe was perceived as backward, exotic, and primitive. In Spanish the term popularized by figures like Franz Fanon, author of The Wretched of the Earth, was subdesarrollado: underdeveloped.

  The ten years after the end of World War II were a period of reconstruction in Europe. A divided, bipolar Germany moved in opposite directions. In the West, the Nuremberg Trials were a public event that attempted to bring some closure to the Nazi atrocities. In 1955, West Germany became a sovereign state and joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, known as NATO, while England and France continued to rebuild their infrastructure. The East was rapidly adapting to the Soviet-style model, implementing a communism that curtailed free speech and individual entrepreneurship. Other countries in the Soviet Bloc—Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, etc.—had economic systems that celebrated a universal view of “the age of proletariat,” while they sought to preserve their distinct cultures. On May 14, 1955, eight communist countries, including the Soviet Union, signed a mutual defense treaty called the Warsaw Pact. It was meant as a counterpart to NATO.

  The note published in El Espectador regarding García Márquez’s departure announced that the first event he would cover as a European correspondent would be the July 18–23, 1955, meeting “de los cuatro grandes,” a summit of the four post–World War II powers to be held in Switzerland. The four were the United States, the U.S.S.R., England, and France.

  García Márquez’s itinerary in Europe has been the subject of debate. Although it appears to have been arranged in Colombia, it probably changed depending on where the news was. Jacques Gilard, who has scrutinized García Márquez’s European sojourn, stated that it isn’t clear exactly where the writer went and what he did. However, based on the historical records available, it is possible to make an objective approximation.

  Before his departure, García Márquez returned to Barranquilla to say good-bye to his friends. From there he flew on El Colombiano, the airline, to Paris, where he traveled to Geneva and on to Rome. He said he wanted to be in Rome just in case “the Pope dies of the hiccups,” so he could report on it. Although Pope Pius XII, also known as Hitler’s Pope because of his anti-Semitic beliefs, was sick, he wasn’t dying. In Italy, García Márquez attended the Venice Film Festival. Having reported for years on the film industry in Colombia, it was his dream to be there. From Venice he probably went to Paris, where he waited until the situation improved in Colombia. For García Márquez—who was still very much a country boy, in spite of his time spent in a number of metropolitan centers—the aire urbaine of Paris was alluring.

  García Márquez also traveled to Vienna, seemingly en route to Czechoslovakia and Poland. One thing is clear: since his days in the liceo of Zipaquirá, García Márquez was obsessed with having a firsthand experience of the Marxist societies of the Soviet Bloc. His teachers at the liceo had sparked his curiosity about the utopian societies overseas. He wanted to use his time in Europe to understand those realities. When he was twenty, García Márquez had, for a short while, belonged to a cell of Colombia’s Communist Party. He explained his participation in the following terms: “I was more of a sympathizer than a real militant.”3

  That sympathy is the subject of much debate. In 1983, García Márquez was asked by Playboy magazine if he was a communist. “Of course not,” he replied. “I am not and have never been. Nor have I belonged to any political party. Sometimes I have the impression that, in the United States, there is a tendency to separate my writing from my political activities—as if they were opposites. I don’t think they are. What happens is that, as an anticolonial Latin American, I take a position that annoys many interests in the United States. And so, simplistically, some people say I am an enemy of the United States. What I’d like to correct are the problems and errors in the Americas as a whole. I would think the same way if I were a U.S. citizen. Indeed, if I were a U.S. citizen, I would be even more of a radical, because it would be a matter of correcting the flaws in my own country.”4

  For García Márquez, spending time in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and other communist countries was a self-imposed requirement. Was equality a mere ideal or could it be fully
realized as a way of life? And could such a model be applicable to Latin America?

  He visited Prague and Warsaw. In the article “Polonia: verdades que duelen” (Poland: Painful Truths), García Márquez described his visit in the fall of 1955: “A dense, disheveled, depressed crowd wandered around disoriented through narrow streets . . . There were large groups of people who spent hours staring at shopping windows of state-owned department stores where new items were being displayed. The items looked old. At any rate, no one was able to afford them, since prices were sky-high.” He saw decrepit trolleys making their way in ghostlike city landscapes. García Márquez was impressed by the unpopularity of the ruling class. He described this unease especially among the young. The university, he stated, was a barrel of dynamite that could explode at any minute with the tiniest spark. The critiques of the system were obvious and implacable. He was struck by the influence of the Catholic Church. People looked as if they were lost in a labyrinth of confusion. He heard that the country wasn’t ruled by the dictatorship of the proletariat but by the Communist Party, who tried to impose the Soviet model on the country against all odds. His overall impression was that Poland was very far from the idealized socialism he had imagined while in school when he was twenty. Instead, it was a crude and sober reality, with an internal tension that would explode sooner or later. In other words, it wasn’t a revolution suited to the country’s internal conditions but one that followed a foreign model. “Un callejón sin salida,” a dead-end street.5

  García Márquez moved to Paris in 1956. While there, he learned that General Rojas Pinilla’s regime had shut down El Espectador. He decided to stay in France to work on his fiction. The decision was cathartic. His exposure to the European lifestyle was enormously rewarding. He needed to experiment, to learn, to test his talent. But he had no money. His newspaper salary, though small, provided for his basic sustenance. Without it, how would he survive? Through his contacts he could find freelance work, but the compensation would be minuscule. Plus, periodicals took a long time to send payment. García Márquez was prepared to be penniless. At least he was single. He didn’t have any other mouths to feed. With a deep breath, he jumped into the world of freelancing. He earned some money by returning empty bottles he found in the garbage.

  Being destitute sharpened his focus. He endorsed the model of the starving artist, the bohemian who, in order to achieve his dreams, needs first to hit bottom. Thanks to his friends, there was always someone to rely on. García Márquez began writing for El Independiente, a new newspaper, but it closed only two months after it was launched. Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza helped him from Venezuela, arranging for him to edit Elite. He wrote for Momento and other periodicals, often under several pseudonyms, some of which he would later forget. Jacques Gilard believes that García Márquez probably wrote under the pseudonym Gastón Galdós, although he wonders if the pseudonym was truly his. There is, of course, the coincidence of the first letter in both names matching his own. But García Márquez doesn’t remember. He told Gilard that sometimes he would rewrite notes by Ramiro MacGregor and in such cases he would use a pseudonym.6

  García Márquez’s desire to understand communism as a possible panacea for Latin America compelled him to return to the Soviet Bloc—specifically, to East Germany—in 1957, this time with his friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, whom he met in Paris that year. The trip lasted from June to September. He published “a series of chronicles” about his journey in the Colombian magazine Cromos and in the Venezuelan magazine Momento.

  García Márquez was ambivalent about his trip. He discovered that the People’s Democracies, as the countries in the Soviet Block used to be described, were no such thing. “They were not authentically socialists nor would they ever be if they followed the path they were on, because the system did not recognize the specific conditions prevailing in each country.” His strongest objection was that communism was an early form of globalism that pushed toward homogenization, which erased the differences and uniqueness on which each town, region, and country was built. “It was a system imposed from the outside by the Soviet Union through dogmatic, unimaginative local Communist parties whose sole thought was to enforce the Soviet model in a society where it did not fit.”7

  Unquestionably, the serial De viaje por los países socialistas (Journey through the Socialist Bloc) is García Márquez at his least impressive. The reportage is impressionistic but unin-formative; it failed to give the reader a sense of the historical, social, political, and cultural aspects of each place. However, García Márquez was pushing the relationship between journalism and literature to new territories.

  García Márquez said he was accompanied on his trip by Jacqueline, a French woman with roots in Indochina who was a designer for a French magazine, and Franco, an Italian freelance journalist who wrote for different periodicals in Milan. In truth, he was hiding the identity of two dear Colombian friends: Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza and Apuleyos Mendoza’s sister Soledad. They were also accompanied by Luis Villar Bordo, whom García Márquez had met during his student years at the Universidad Nacional de Bogotá. In a Renault 14, they drove from one Germany to the other, passing through Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin. The trip lasted no more than a couple of weeks.

  García Márquez and Apuleyo Mendoza then traveled with the dance troupe Delia Zapata to the Ukraine and Russia. García Márquez continued on to Hungary alone. The writer ranged wide and far afield, but his cumulative impressions were depressing.

  There was substantial readers’ interest in the chronicle of his travels but nothing close to the hoopla García Márquez had generated with his story about Luis Alejandro Velasco. However, twenty years later, in June 1978—as a sign of how his star was still on the ascendance more than a decade after One Hundred Years of Solitude—the series was published, albeit without his permission, as the book De viaje por los países socialistas: 90 días en la “Cortina de Hierro” by the Colombian publishing house Oveja Negra. As soon as García Márquez found out, he “made the book legal and included it in the volume of my complete works which are sold in popular editions on every street corner in Colombia. I haven’t changed a single word.” He added, the publication was “not, I imagine, out of any journalistic or political interest, but to show up the supposed contradictions in my personal political development.”8

  Oveja Negra did a first printing of a thousand copies, which sold out immediately in Colombia, the only territory where it was available. (The book still cannot be found elsewhere in the Spanish-speaking world.) In February 1979, there was a second printing of 9,500 copies. In December of the same year, a third printing of 10,500 was released. In May 1980, a fourth printing of 10,500 came out. By November, a fifth printing of 20,000 was issued, followed by a sixth printing of 10,000 in April 1982 and a seventh of 75,000 in December of the same year, when García Márquez received the Nobel Prize. In the parlance of the Spanish-language publishing industry, a printing is called either una edición or una reimpresión.

  If nothing else the sojourn through the Soviet Bloc allowed García Márquez to solidify his commitment to fiction. He realized that the connection between journalism and fiction was mutually beneficial and that they fed one another. Years later, he said, “Fiction has helped my journalism because it has given it literary worth. Journalism has helped my fiction because it has kept me in a close relationship with reality.” He added, “I’ve always been convinced that my true profession is that of a journalist. What I didn’t like about journalism before were the working conditions. Besides, I had to condition my thoughts and ideas to the interests of the newspaper.”9

  In November 1957, García Márquez went to London. One of his objectives was to learn English, which—as his European experience made clear—was crucial for a reporter and even for a novelist. García Márquez stayed in South Kensington, but he didn’t get a chance to become fully acquainted with the city. The British capital was expensive. He didn’t have much money, so he stayed in his hotel room most of the ti
me. His only income came from his work for Momento and El Independiente.

  Meanwhile, in Colombia, General Rojas Pinilla’s regime was overthrown. The Liberal and Conservative parties agreed to alternate in power, in a system called the National Front. At the suggestion of Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, Momento invited García Márquez to come to Caracas to work full-time for them. The magazine offered him a plane ticket, and he arrived in the Venezuelan capital the day before Christmas 1957.

  Venezuela, an oil-rich country that borders Colombia, was under military rule. Dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez had been in office since 1952. The nation’s economy was stable but, as is often the case in Latin America, the abuse of power meant the reduction of civil liberties. García Márquez landed in Caracas just as the Pérez Jiménez chapter was coming to a close. In January an uprising took place that led to rioting. In response, Pérez Jiménez fled the country for the United States, which not only had backed his government but had awarded him the U.S. Legion of Merit.