Gabriel García Márquez (13 page)

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 time. 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.

García Márquez was excited to be back in South America. One of the reasons for his return was Mercedes Barcha Prado. He had pledged eternal love to Mercedes four years earlier and he was eager to marry her. She had waited for him all this time. Three months into his Venezuelan stay, he traveled to
Barranquilla, where, at the church of the Perpetuo Sepulcro, the wedding took place on March 21, 1958.

Married life was full of promise. He told Mercedes about his dream of writing a novel called
La casa,
and he swore to her that when he reached the age of forty he would write his masterpiece. He was committed to his dreams, but he needed to support his wife. Thankfully, he was on staff at
Momento
—but not for long. A couple of months later, he and Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, who was
jefe de redacción,
roughly equilavent to managing editor, resigned from
Momento
in protest after the visit of Richard Nixon, then vice president of the United States, to Caracas, on May 13, 1958. There was rioting in the streets of Caracas, but the periodical wanted to distance itself from those events.
Momento
published an editorial note that claimed that the civil unrest didn't represent the feelings of most Caracas dwellers and that Venezuela and the United States were nations eager to explore their natural connections. Mendoza disagreed with the statement and published the text not as an editorial but as a news piece. This angered the editor in chief, Carlos Ramírez MacGregor, who reprimanded his
jefe de redacción.
Mendoza resigned abruptly and so did García Márquez.

His resignation was a fortuitous event. At the time, García Márquez was looking to concentrate on finishing a series of stories that would become part of the collection
Los funerales de la Mamá Grande
(Big Mama's Funeral); his departure from
Momento
gave him an unexpected six weeks off. He devoted them to “
La viuda de Montiel
” (Montiel's Widow), “
La maravillosa tarde de Baltazar
” (Balthazar's Marvelous Afternoon), and “
Rosas artificiales
” (Artificial Roses). According to Dasso Saldívar, the title story would be written by the middle of the following year in Bogotá.
¹⁰
But García Márquez couldn't afford to be unemployed for long.

Again with the support of his friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, he was named
jefe de redacción
at the frivolous
magazine
Venezuela Gráfica.
But at least he had a paycheck. He continued writing fiction. He devoted his energy to a novella about a military veteran whose pension was forgotten by the government. The only item of value the Colonel and his wife own is a rooster left behind by their son, whose fate isn't clear but whose memory the couple keeps alive through conversations and by preparing the rooster for an upcoming cockfight. The couple's destitution was a reflection of García Márquez's own financial situation. Entitled
El coronel no tiene quien le escriba
(No One Writes to the Colonel), the novella was first published in
Mito.