Gabriel García Márquez

by Gerald Martin

  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 cou
p. 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.”