Gabriel García Márquez

by Gerald Martin

  The working week was intense. At its end he took part in the journalists’ regular “cultural Fridays,” a euphemism for heavy drinking across the avenue in the Hotel Continental, where the El Espectador and El Tiempo hacks would meet up and exchange drinks and insults; sometimes they drank until dawn.12 He also participated in the Bogotá cine-club organized by another of the many energetic Catalan exiles the young writer would get to know over the years. His name was Luis Vicens; he had himself collaborated with the great critic Georges Sadoul on L’Écran Français and was now making a living in Colombia selling books as well as running the cine-club with two Colombians, the film critic Hernando Salcedo and the painter Enrique Grau. After the cine-club’s sessions he would go on to the inevitable party at the house of Luis Vicens and his Colombian wife Nancy, not far from the newspaper office.13

  Nevertheless this new, rather middle-class lifestyle in the world of the bogotanos could hardly replace the sheer fun and exhilaration, not to say interest, of life on the Costa. Early in his stay in Bogotá García Márquez wrote to Alfonso Fuenmayor:

  Your noble paternal concerns will be eased if I tell you that my situation here is still quite good, although the question now is to consolidate it. There is an excellent atmosphere in the newspaper and up to now I’ve been allowed the same privileges as the longest-term employees. However the sad part of the song is that I still don’t feel at home in Bogotá, though if things go on as they are I’ll have no option but to get used to it. As I don’t lead an “intellectual” life here I’m lost as to developments in the novel, because “Ulysses” [Zalamea Borda], the only genius I see here, is always buried in great big indigestible novels in English. Recommend me some translations. I received a copy of Sartoris in Spanish but it fell to pieces and I returned it.14

  His new-found prosperity did allow him to go back from time to time to Barranquilla, to visit his friends, to keep a watchful eye on Mercedes, to keep in touch with his roots—and of course see the sun; plus the bonus of simply getting out of Bogotá. Certainly the fact that he would appear in the credits for a film which Alvaro Cepeda would shortly direct, a short experimental movie entitled The Blue Lobster, suggests that his visits to the Costa were reasonably frequent.15

  By now his old friends had a new hang-out and the Barranquilla Group would become synonymous with a less portentous crowd, “the piss-takers of the Cueva,” as García Márquez would dub them five years later in his story “Big Mama’s Funeral.” Not long after he had left Barranquilla the gang had regrouped and moved the focus of their activities away from the old city centre to the Barrio Boston, not far from where Mercedes Barcha lived. Alfonso Fuenmayor’s cousin Eduardo Vilá Fuenmayor, a reluctant dentist (Mercedes had been one of his patients), started up a bar which was at first called The To and Fro (El Vaivén), the name of the store it had once been, but which the group later baptized “The Cave” (“La Cueva”—like the dockside bar in Cartagena). This place would become immortalized, like some sacred temple, in García Márquez-related mythology, although the man himself would never be able to go there with much regularity. So rowdy was it, with so much heavy drinking and fighting, that Vilá would eventually put up a sign which said, “Here the customer is never right.”

  Back in Bogotá, García Márquez was witness to one of the new military regime’s most notorious atrocities on 9 June 1954 as he returned in the late morning along Avenida Jiménez Quesada from a visit to his ex-boss Julio César Villegas, who was serving out his jail sentence in the Model Prison. He heard a sudden burst of machine-gun fire: government troops were firing on a student demonstration and caused heavy casualties, including several dead, before the horrified writer’s eyes. It was the event that ended the uneasy truce between the new government and the Liberal press. García Márquez’s radical political views had been quite unequivocal from the time of his early days in El Universal, only weeks after the Bogotazo; but this third experience of living in or close to Bogotá brought him to commit himself not only to a particular political ideology—socialism—but also, for a few years at least, to a particular way of viewing and interpreting reality and a particular way of expressing and communicating it technically. The result would be his political reportage, and the writing of the novels No One Writes to the Colonel and In Evil Hour and the stories of Big Mama’s Funeral. He had been longing for several years now to be given the opportunity to be a reporter; but El Universal and El Heraldo lived off international cables and, given their resources and, more to the point, the prevailing regime of censorship, hardly went in for serious reporting. Their mission, in many ways, was to publish something, anything, that was not the usual Conservative propaganda. The owners of El Espectador were made of sterner stuff. And they now had at their disposal a young writer who was fascinated by the variety of people in his country, by the things they did and the things that happened to them; a man who loved stories, who whenever possible turned his own life into a story and would now seize the opportunity to turn the lives of others also into narratives which would grip the imagination.

  In Colombia in those days the news was generally terrible. It was the height of the Violencia. Massacres of Liberals continued in rural areas, carried out by the oligarchy’s barbaric paramilitary assassins known as chulavitas or pájaros, and Liberal guerrillas were fighting desperate rearguard actions in many parts of the country. Torture, rape and the sadistic desecration of corpses were commonplace. Rojas Pinilla had imposed press censorship on 6 March and hardened it after the killing of the students in Bogotá. Ex-President López Pumarejo proposed a bipartisan agreement for running the country on 25 March, an idea which would bear fruit three years later with the invention of the so-called National Front but was not greeted positively at this time.

  All of this was in part the reflection in a peripheral country of the Cold War frenzy of the era. McCarthyism was at its height in the United States; Eisenhower even outlawed the Communist Party in August 1954 and McCarthy was finally censured by the Senate only in December of that year. Meanwhile the Communist bloc was working on the Warsaw Pact, which would be signed in May 1955. In Barranquilla García Márquez had listened more sympathetically to the communist rantings of Jorge Rondón than most of his friends and colleagues. During his last period in Barranquilla, several months after the death of Stalin in Moscow and several weeks after the Rojas Pinilla coup in Colombia, García Márquez had been visited by a man ostensibly selling watches who was in fact a Communist enlisting members for the Party, particularly among journalists, in exchange for his timekeeping wares. Not long after García Márquez arrived in Bogotá, where he was working from the start with politically progressive colleagues, another watch salesman came to visit and before long García Márquez found himself in contact with Gilberto Vieira, Secretary General of the Colombian Communist Party, who was living clandestinely just a few blocks from the city centre.16 It became clear to García Márquez that the Party had been watching him ever since he had worked with Cepeda on El Nacional and considered him promising material; but according to him it was agreed that his best use for the Party was in writing committed journalism which did not appear to compromise him in Party terms. The Party would seemingly continue to take this view of García Márquez’s activities down the years and usually supported his positions if at all possible.

  At the end of July Salgar suggested that García Márquez go to Antioquia to find out “what the fuck really happened” in the 12 July landslide. He found himself on a plane to Medellín where the hillside community out at La Media Luna, east of the city, had collapsed two weeks before with heavy loss of life. There were suspicions that the blame could be attributed to government corruption and jerry-building. García Márquez’s brief was to reconstruct the truth on the spot. The intrepid reporter would later confess that he was so nervous about flying that Alvaro Mutis travelled with him to calm his nerves and installed him in the upmarket Hotel Nutibara. When he was left alone there he felt sick with nerves and totally intimidat
ed by the physical challenge and the moral responsibility; he almost resigned from the newspaper on his first day in Medellín. After he had managed to calm himself he discovered that there was no one out by the Media Luna any more and so there was nothing to be added to the reports of journalists who had been there long before him. He hadn’t the faintest idea what to do. A violent rainstorm postponed his agony. He again considered fleeing back to Bogotá; finally sheer desperation, and a chance conversation with a taxi driver, prodded him into action. He began to think, truly think, about the event he was investigating: what might have happened, where he should go, what he should do. Slowly but with accelerating excitement, he discovered the joy of being a reporter-detective, the creativity of discovering—and in a way inventing—the truth, the power of shaping and even changing reality for tens of thousands of people. He realized that the idea of people travelling out to deaths they could not anticipate was his “angle” and he had a taxi driver take him straight out to Las Estancias, the zone from which most people who had died in the catastrophe had travelled. He soon discovered evidence of official negligence, both short term and long term (it seemed the landslide had been incubating for sixty years!), but also revealed an unexpected and more dramatic aspect of the tragedy, one that most readers would have preferred not to know: that many deaths had been due to people from other parts of the city trying to help without official guidance or assistance and thereby triggering a second landslide. He interviewed numbers of survivors and witnesses, and also the authorities, including local politicians, firemen and priests.17

  Then he started to write. Very likely it began as something out of Hemingway but by the time he finished it was pure García Márquez, with that inimitable presentation of life as a drama filled with the horrors and ironies of fate, the fate of human beings condemned to live in a world of unknown causes governed by time:

  Juan Ignacio Angel, the economics student standing on the ledge ran down below, preceded by a girl of about fourteen and a boy of ten. His companions, Carlos Gabriel Obregón and Fernando Calle, ran in the opposite direction. The first, half buried, died of asphyxia. The second, an asthmatic, stopped, gasping, and said, “I can’t go on.” He was never heard of again. “When I ran down with the girl and the boy,” Juan Ignacio said, “I came to a big hollow. The three of us threw ourselves to the ground.” The boy never got up again. The girl, who Angel was unable to identify among the corpses, got up for a moment but sank down again screaming in desperation when she saw the earth soaring above the hollow. An avalanche of mud crashed over them. Angel tried to run again but his legs were paralysed. The mud rose to his chest in a split second but he managed to free his right arm. He stayed like that until the thunder-like noises ceased and he felt in his legs, at the bottom of that dense and impenetrable sea of mud, the hand of the girl who, at the beginning, held on to him with desperate strength, then clawed at him, and finally, in ever weaker contractions, relaxed her grip on his ankle.18

  The sub-headings were almost certainly chosen by García Márquez himself: “The tragedy began sixty years ago”; “Medellín, victim of its own solidarity”; and “Did an old gold mine precipitate the tragedy?”19 He had learned how to convert his own world-view into a set of journalistic “angles.” “Gabo,” the best friend to his friends, had only recently been born; now the great story-teller “Gabriel García Márquez” had finally appeared on the scene. It was noteworthy that although he was pleased to blame the authorities for their part in the disaster, he was also concerned to tell the whole truth, including the involuntary contribution of so many well-meaning rescuers to the tragedy.

  The next piece of pioneering reporting was a series on one of Colombia’s forgotten regions, the department of El Chocó, on the Pacific side of the country. On 8 September 1954 the government decided to carve up the Chocó, an undeveloped, forested department, and distribute the pieces between the departments of Antioquia, Caldas and Valle. There were vehement protests and García Márquez was sent down with a cameraman, Guillermo Sánchez, to report on the conflict. The journey was so bad, in an aircraft so old, that he remembers it “raining inside the plane” and says that even the pilots were terrified. The Chocó, a department mainly inhabited by Afro-Colombians, reminded García Márquez at once of Aracataca and its hinterland. For him the proposed dismemberment of the Chocó was symptomatic of Bogotá’s cold and heartless mentality, though other commentators blamed the ambitious Antioquians. When he arrived he discovered that the demonstrations he had gone to report on had petered out—so he got a friend to organize some more! This ensured the success of his mission. After a few days, as the news item began to grow and other reporters flew in to cover it, the government cancelled its plan to restructure the four departments.20

  In late October it was announced that García Márquez’s new role model Ernest Hemingway was to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, just as Faulkner had been when he was in his Faulkner phase. García Márquez wrote a note under the “Day by Day” byline repeating comments he had made before about the Nobel Prize phenomenon, and this time downplaying the possible importance of an award which had already gone to so many “undeserving” writers and which, in the case of Hemingway, he speculated, must surely have been one of the less exciting occasions in a life “so full of exciting moments.”21

  The year 1955 would see the publication of García Márquez’s most famous newspaper story. It was based on an immensely long interview, in fourteen sessions of four hours each, with a Colombian navy sailor called Luis Alejandro Velasco, the only survivor of eight crewmen who fell overboard from the destroyer Caldas when she rolled out of control in late February—supposedly during a storm—on the way back from refitting in Mobile, Alabama, to her home port of Cartagena. Velasco survived on a raft for ten days without anything to eat and very little to drink. He became a national hero, decorated by the President and fêted by the media, including the new television service. All this up to the moment when García Márquez decided to interview him … The interviews, which were Guillermo Cano’s idea—García Márquez considered the story had gone cold—took place in a small café on Avenida Jiménez.22 Velasco had an astonishing memory and was himself an excellent narrator. But García Márquez had developed a facility for asking revealing questions and then highlighting the essence of the answers or getting to the most human aspects of the story. Velasco began by stressing the heroic point of view: the battle with the waves, the problem of controlling the raft, the fight against the sharks, the struggle with his mind, until García Márquez interrupted: “Don’t you realize that four days have passed and you still haven’t had a pee or a shit!”23 After each interview he would go back to the office in the late afternoon and write up the corresponding chapter until deep in the night. José Salgar would take them from him, sometimes uncorrected, and run them straight over to the printers. Guillermo Cano told García Márquez he would have liked it to run to fifty chapters. After the fourteen-part series had come to an end, El Espectador put out a special supplement on 28 April reprinting the entire story with what it claimed was “the biggest print run any Colombian newspaper has ever published!”

  García Márquez, with his rigorous and exhaustive questioning, and his search for new angles, had inadvertently revealed that the boat had not pitched and rolled in a violent storm but had sunk because it was carrying illegal merchandise which was improperly secured; and that regulation safety procedures were grossly inadequate. The story put El Espectador in direct confrontation with the military government and undoubtedly made García Márquez still more of a persona non grata, a troublemaker considered an enemy of the regime. Those who routinely question his courage and commitment should certainly reflect on this period in his life. García Márquez must undoubtedly have been a marked man and, although he has characteristically played down the dangers of the time, it is easy to imagine his feelings whenever he had to walk home late at night through a grim, lugubrious city floating uneasily in the tension of a milit
ary dictatorship. It is something of a miracle that he survived unscathed.24

  Many years later the story was re-published, after García Márquez became a world-famous writer. It was entitled The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor (Relato de un náufrago, 1970). Astonishingly, it became one of his most successful books, selling 10 million copies in the next twenty-five years. García Márquez never directly challenged the reactionary government in 1954–5 but in report after report he took up a point of view which was implicitly subversive of official stories and thus challenged the ruling system more effectively than any of his more vocal leftist colleagues, guided always by rigorous investigation, reflection and communication of the realities of the country. All in all, it was a sustained and brilliant demonstration of the power of the story-teller’s art and of the power and central importance of the imagination even in the representation of factual material.