Gabriel García Márquez (12 page)

In 1955 a terrific story—not without ideologically explosive elements—about the shipwreck of a Colombian vessel and the life at sea of the sole survivor, magically fell on his lap. García Márquez's story, serialized in fourteen consecutive issues, was
a sensation. He had by far the most readers in his life, and he and the serial received a great deal of attention.

A decade and a half later, while living in Barcelona, García Márquez wrote: “February 28, 1955, brought the news that eight crew members of the destroyer
Caldas,
of the Colombian Navy, had fallen overboard and disappeared during a storm in the Caribbean Sea. The ship was sailing from Mobile, Alabama, in the United States, where it had docked for repairs, to the Colombian port of Cartagena, where it arrived two hours after the tragedy. A search for the seamen began immediately, with the cooperation of the U.S. Panama Canal Authority, which performs such functions as military control and other humanitarian deeds in the southern Caribbean.”
²⁷
The search went on for four days. Then it was abandoned. A week later, Luis Alejandro Velasco washed ashore on the beaches of northern Colombia. He had survived on a raft for ten days.

The sequence of events was established by the various sources involved. Velasco became a media darling. General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla's government used him as an emblem of courage. The nation was curious about and enchanted by this survivor, and Velasco began to profit financially from his story. He was hired by an agency to sell watches because his own watch didn't malfunction. And he was contracted to promote a line of shoes because, again, his own shoes held up during the ordeal.

Public curiosity about Velasco dwindled. At which point, the sailor showed up on his own accord at
El Espectador,
offering to sell his full story. Everyone was skeptical, mainly because it seemed that the fellow was so hungry for attention that he was capable of inventing anything in order to get it. The survivor's offer was declined. Velasco left and by sheer chance, he and Guillermo Cano were going down the newspaper building's staircase at the same time. They spoke and Cano changed his mind. He asked García Márquez to do an
extensive interview with the shipwrecked sailor. Not only was the reporter available, he was known to have a sweet and patient way with interviewees.

As the dialogue between reporter and survivor unfolded, García Márquez realized that what he had was a treasure. He explained: “My first surprise was that this solidly built twenty-year-old, who looked more like a trumpet player than a national hero, had an exceptional instinct for the art of narrative, an astonishing memory and ability to synthesize, and enough uncultivated dignity to be able to laugh at his own story.”
²⁸

He and Velasco met over twenty sessions of six hours each. García Márquez tried to poke holes in his story. He was fascinated by the complexity of the tale, which was “so detailed and so exciting that my only concern was finding readers who would believe it. Not only for that reason but because it seemed fitting, we agreed that the story would be written in the first person and signed by him.”
²⁹
Only when the report-age was published in book form was García Márquez's name attached to it.

There were more surprises in stock. At one point, García Márquez asked Velasco to talk about the storm, but the sailor replied that there had been no storm. Subsequently, García Márquez learned that it wasn't a storm that had caused the disaster but heavy winds that tossed the ship's cargo and its eight sailors into the sea. But the ship might have withstood the winds had it not been for the weight of its cargo. What was it carrying? García Márquez discovered that the ship was transporting black market goods: refrigerators, television sets, washing machines, etc. Army ships were not allowed to take such merchandise from the United States to Colombia.

When García Márquez's story was published in
El Espectador,
there was enormous interest. General Rojas Pinilla's government
was initially enthusiastic—until the revelations about the illegal cargo and other embarrassing details began to appear. The newspaper managed to find some of the other sailors and asked for permission to print some of the photographs the sailors had taken with their own cameras. The publication of those images brought ridicule upon Rojas Pinilla's administration. The sailor's courage in the struggle against nature had become, in the public imagination, about contraband and government corruption. The initial exhilaration had given place to deceit.

García Márquez was in a tight bind. His life was in jeopardy. To protect him, the newspaper dispatched him to Europe as a correspondent. In Latin America there is a long tradition of sending persecuted intellectuals, artists, dissidents, and diplomats abroad. Sometimes these trips are organized hastily. This one was meticulously planned. García Márquez was already in Europe when he found out that the offices of
El Espectador
had been shut down.

García Márquez's story about the shipwrecked sailor was published as a book by Tusquets in 1970. He said that he had not read the story in fifteen years and that the request to bring it out between two covers came from an editor. “I have never quite understood the usefulness of publishing it,” he stated in the preface, which was entitled “The Story of This Story.” “I find it depressing that the publishers are not so much interested in the merit of the story as in the name of the author, which, much to my sorrow, is also that of a fashionable writer. If it is now published in the form of a book, that is because I agreed without thinking about it very much, and I am not a man to go back on his word.”
³⁰
He added: “There's not a single invented detail in the whole account. That's what's so astonishing. If I had invented that story I would have said so, and been very proud of it, too. I interviewed that boy from the Colombian navy—as I explain
in my introduction to the book—and he told me his story in minute detail. As his cultural level was only fair he didn't realize the extreme importance of many of the details he told me spontaneously, and was surprised at my being so struck by them. By carrying out a form of psychoanalysis I helped him remember things—for instance, a seagull he saw flying over his raft—and in that way we succeeded in reconstructing his whole adventure. It came out with a bang! The idea had been to publish the story in five or six installments in
El Espectador
but by about the third of the way there was so much enthusiasm among the readers, and the circulation of the paper had increased so enormously, that the editor said to me, ‘I don't know how you're going to manage but you must get at least twenty installments out of this.' So then I set about enriching every detail.”
³¹

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

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.