Gabriel Garcia Marquez (9 page)

Faulkner was right. It was a good way to live. Every morning there was a big breakfast. I was very hungry then. This was in 1950. The desk clerk was a very thin man, missing one eye. A room cost about a dollar. I never got the same room two nights in a row. Once I said I didn't have the money, explaining that I was a writer, a novelist, and that meant I didn't get paid well.

I showed him the manuscript—I was writing my first novel,
Leaf Storm
—saying, “This is my life, this means more than anything else. I'll leave it with you, and tomorrow I'll come back for it.” He said okay, and put it on the shelf. From that day on, whenever I had no money, I would leave the manuscript instead.

STREITFELD
: That was when you were first reading Faulkner and Hemingway. You've often spoken of your debt to them.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: When novelists read another novelist's work, they take it apart as if it were a machine. Nothing teaches you how to write a novel except another novel.

STREITFELD
: Faulkner gave you something else as well—a sense that all of the Caribbean, whether his Mississippi or your Colombia, was the same wild place.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: I am a man of the coasts, not the interior, where Bogotá is. The officials, the serious people, lived in Bogotá. The coast got the bandits and adventurers. It is a synthesis of many cultures—Spanish, African, Indian. I believe many regions of the world are like this, full of wonder and mystery. Most people just don't see it. The reality is what is so fantastic. There is nothing magic about it. It's pure realism. I knew a woman in a small Colombian town who read
One Hundred Years of Solitude
and said, “I don't like this book. When you were with us before you saw much better, more interesting things than what is depicted here.”

STREITFELD
: In your short story “Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane,” a passenger notices a beautiful woman and asks the ticket clerk if she believes in love at first sight. “Of course,” the clerk responds. “The other kinds are impossible.”

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Yes, that's my view. The problem with love is making it last. There's a Brazilian writer I like to quote: Love is eternal as long as it lasts.

STREITFELD
: You came from a very large family—I believe eleven brothers and sisters. That affected you in many ways. And you have two sons.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Do you know why we didn't have any more kids? We were afraid we didn't have the means to educate them. And when we could, Mercedes said she was too old. So I tell all recently married couples to have as many kids as they want. Eventually, you'll be able to support them.

STREITFELD
: You are a great and controversial friend of Castro's. You've described him as a larger than life figure, who reads 50 reports a day, can be interviewed for 17 hours straight and eats 18 scoops of ice cream after lunch. He's a Rabelasian if not a Marquesian figure.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: When I first knew him, I was at Prensa Latina, nearly forty years ago. I was his friend when no one knew who he was. We both have the conviction that Latin America's salvation is in its unity, and that the forces that prevent this come from outside Latin America. The destiny of Latin America is intimately tied to the United States. It's like a transatlantic ocean liner. There's first class, second class, all kinds of classes, but the day the boat sinks, everyone drowns. The sooner the United States realizes this, the better for everyone concerned.

STREITFELD
: How close are you to him?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: He comes to my house in Havana every time he can. He tells me everything up to the point of state secrets.

STREITFELD
: People say you should be the Colombian ambassador to Cuba.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: But if I were ambassador he couldn't come to my house. Aside from that, I'd be a bad ambassador. If they offer, I'll say no. I would say, I've been a cultural ambassador all my life, that's enough.

STREITFELD
: I heard you bonded with Castro over literature.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: We have this great affinity. We're part of the literary culture. He's a great reader. I bring him books—quick, easy books to help him relax. The first book I brought him that he really liked was
Dracula
.

STREITFELD
: Your critics say hanging out with politicians is not going to be good for your writing.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: When I first started to write journalism, everyone said, “Now you're screwed because it will take up all your time and you won't be able to write fiction.” And that was when I was just getting started. When I started working in advertising for a while in 1963, they said the same thing. And again when I started making films. And again when I started talking about politics.

STREITFELD
: They are particularly critical of your association with Castro, who is not a big champion of human rights. When there is a petition demanding Castro do something, your name is never on it.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: I believe when people sign a petition, they make a great noise. They don't really care about the cause. They're just thinking about themselves—what the public is going to think of their petition.

STREITFELD
: You have achieved fame and success that no living writer has managed. Why go on writing?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: I think it's Rilke who says, “If it's possible to live without writing, do it.” There's nothing else in this world I like more than to write. And there's nothing that can keep me from writing. That's all I think about. I think I write because I'm afraid of death. If I didn't write, I would die.

STREITFELD
: Since you think about death so much, do you think about your funeral?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: If I could control it, it would be just my wife, my children. I'd be cremated and that's it. Unfortunately I know it'll be like the funeral of Big Mama in the story—nine days of funeral rites, the president and the Supreme Court and the pope in attendance, the national queens of all things that have ever been or ever will be.

Four years later, I saw him again when he came to Washington, D.C., for a very rare U.S. public appearance. He had taken a break from his memoirs to publish
News of a Kidnapping,
a documentary novel about the drug kingpin Pablo Escobar's war against Colombia. Based on scrupulous interviews—although not with Escobar, who was killed in December 1993—it took three years to research and write. We went to a popular bookstore cafe, where García Márquez's books were piled high but no one noticed that their author was right there
.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: That piece you wrote about me—it was all about death. Young people always think the old are going to die at any minute. They don't know that the youth mortality is much higher.

STREITFELD
: Something is the matter with your logic but never mind. Colombia seems in the process of self-destructing.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: I never talk about Colombian politics when I'm outside of Colombia.

STREITFELD
: Okay. So President Clinton is a big fan of yours. You're going to meet with him later today. What's on the agenda?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: I never talk about American politics when I'm in America.

STREITFELD
: Is death the only permissible topic?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: All I can say is I sent Clinton an early copy of
News of a Kidnapping
. He got it on the sixteenth of the month. Five or six days later, I got a letter. It was dated the seventeenth. He said he read it all in one sitting, from beginning to end. He also said, ‘Thank you for being the prophet of my presidency.”

STREITFELD
: I assume that is because of the comment you made that, if re-elected, Clinton would eventually be ranked
as one of the country's great leaders. Were you just flattering him?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: I said he's going to
be
a great president, and I still think he has the potential.

STREITFELD
: In
News of a Kidnapping
, you write that Escobar “had employees who spent the day engaging in lunatic conversations on his telephones so that the people monitoring his lines would become entangled in mangrove forests of non sequiturs and not be able to distinguish them from real messages … [Sometimes he] traveled in a public minibus that had false plates and markings and drove along established routes but made no stops because it always carried a full complement of passengers, who were his bodyguards. One of Escobar's diversions, in fact, was to act as driver from time to time.”

This all sounds almost as fantastical as the mad ruler in “Autumn of the Patriarch” selling the sea to the gringos, who take it away “in numbered pieces to plant it far from the hurricanes in the blood-red dawns of Arizona.” Is it really true?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: It's authentic. There's a journalist, a friend of mine, who was on that bus. Whether I'm working in journalism or literature, I'm always describing the same reality. There are some things about reality I don't use in my fiction because people wouldn't believe them. Escobar's employees were a hidden force that influenced the everyday life of the country that no one ever saw, up to the point that some people even doubted he existed.

STREITFELD
: As Colombia collapses, there are again calls for its most famous citizen to take over.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: When a country needs leaders, people look in the newspapers. They think anyone in the news qualifies. A tennis champion should become president, or so they think. Even Pablo Escobar thought he had the right be to be president.

STREITFELD
: There are so many rumors about you, sometimes unpleasant. There was a story that Escobar gave you money to write your book.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: That's a stupid thing to say, because I have more money than he did.

STREITFELD
: He was a billionaire.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Okay, I'm not a rich man. I'm just a poor man with some money.

STREITFELD
: You were also reported as saying you would not return to Colombia until President Samper and his corrupt cronies left office.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: I never said that. In fact, I am coming here from Colombia. What I said was, I wanted to stay there without ever leaving again. Then I realized the political and social reality right now is so intense I couldn't write in peace.

So I went to Mexico, which the press interpreted to
mean I wouldn't come back as long as Samper was president. For me to say I'm not going to come back to a country while a president is in power is to do him an honor, an homage that I will not give to anyone.

STREITFELD
: In the 1970s, you were widely reported as saying you would stop writing as long as Pinochet was in power in Chile. He was in power for 17 years.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: I never thought he'd last so long. Even though you may think it's not true, I really am a realist. Time convinced me I was wrong. What I was doing was allowing Pinochet to stop me from writing, which means I had submitted to voluntary censorship. I was sacrificing something that even the Chileans living under him weren't doing.

STREITFELD
: No wonder you try to say as little as possible in public. Someone always misinterprets it.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: I always have the impression it wasn't exactly what I said. Maybe it's me. I'm such a perfectionist, so precise. When I can't find the right word, I get very angry. For three months I was blocked in writing
The General in His Labyrinth
because I couldn't find the right adjective. Then I found it—“
aulico
,” meaning “relating to the court or palace”—and never even used it.