Gabriel García Márquez (17 page)

The publication of
One Hundred Years of Solitude
in 1967 almost single-handedly turned magic realism into a fashion. The prohibition against incest serves as the novel's leitmotif. The Buendías attempt to avoid it in a clan where cousins are physically attracted to one another, where the same prostitute satisfies the sexual needs of various generations of family men, where beauty defines certain women to such an extent as to make them celestial.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
was proof that Breton was right in his theory of Latin America as a region where the marvelous is synonymous with the bizarre and where unstoppable sexual impulses are allowed to run wild. García Márquez's saga also supported Franz Roh's assumption: Macondo on Colombia's Caribbean coast did not share the mores of the industrialized nations of Europe and the United States. Macondo was defined by exaggerated, fantastical features, such as the epidemic of insomnia that afflicts it at one point, with amnesia as a side effect, the furious rainstorms that sweep it, the unexpected descent of millions of butterflies, and so on. Even the daily noon arrival of a yellow train into town seems strange.

Just like the strange events in Lewis Carroll's
Alice in Wonderland
and Kafka's
The Metamorphosis,
these happenings are presented as nothing out of the ordinary. They may be abrupt, macabre, and magical to the unaccustomed reader, who may view them as childlike, primitive, ritualistic, and the stuff of myth, but to the people of Macondo they are perfectly normal. Therein lies García Márquez's true contribution.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
is written in a matter-of-fact way. The omniscient, third-person narrator isn't surprised by the plot. The plot unfolds like stories in the Bible: in a direct, noninterpretative, straightforward fashion. In Carpentier's words, magic realism was a different attitude toward reality: it portrayed its reality as normal.

Although it's clear that critics had known about the concept of magic realism for some time, setting the stage for the
reception of García Márquez's masterpiece, it is important to point out that he did not write his novel with that in mind. There is no record of him having read any of the essays I've discussed in this chapter. He wasn't a member of the obsessed literati (and never would be), who anxiously followed intellectual debates in literary supplements. There's a strong anti-intellectual quality to García Márquez's way of thinking, and he certainly did not write to satisfy other people's aesthetic needs. The mythical world of Macondo is authentic precisely because it is representative of his vision of the world.

One can argue that García Márquez himself had trained his readers. An example is
In Evil Hour,
which served as a preview of his future capabilities, although its provocative plot isn't successfully executed. It reads like a failed attempt at building the infrastructure of the large, ambitious theater of possibilities—and impossibilities—that Macondo would become approximately a decade later. Set in a small Colombian town, the narrative explores the reaction, both private and public, to the sudden appearance of mysterious lampoons posted everywhere that articulate in images and words the rumors about the political authorities and important events. There's a Freudian undercurrent in the novel: the posters serve as an outlet for the collective thoughts, both secret and unconscious, of the population.

Like other pieces in García Márquez's
opera prima,
there are references in
In Evil Hour
to places and characters in the author's later magnum opus, such as a passing comment about Colonel Aureliano Buendía visiting the fictional town. It reads, “on his way to Macondo to draw up the terms of surrender in the last civil war, [Colonel Buendía] had slept on the balcony one night during a time when there weren't any towns for many leagues around.”
¹⁶
Gregory Rabassa had an immediate, instinctual reaction to
In Evil Hour.
He thought it was a little gem, although he didn't see it as a foreshadowing of García
Márquez's masterpiece. “There are those who say that the town resembles Macondo,” Rabassa later wrote, “but I doubt that García Márquez fostered any such feelings for his magical creation. It may be that he was showing us the dark side of paradise in more strident terms.”
¹⁷

In early June 1961, García Márquez, Mercedes, and their almost-two-year-old Rodrigo arrived in Mexico City. He was in his mid-thirties, with just $100 in his pocket, the remnants of a sum Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza had wired to him. To support the family, García Márquez started working for a couple of advertising agencies, among them J. Walter Thompson. In the words of a journalist who met him at the time, he was “stocky, but light on his feet, with a bristling mustache, a cauliflower nose, and many fillings in his teeth. He wears an open sport shirt, faded blue jeans, and a bulky jacket flung over his shoulders.”
¹

People were impressed by his unpretentiousness. In an interview, he was described thus: “he talks fast, snatching thoughts as they cross his mind, winding and unwinding them like paper streamers, following them in one end and out the other, only to lose them before he can pin them down. A casual tone with a deep undertow suggests he is making a strategy of negligence. He has a way of eavesdropping on himself, as if he were trying to overhear bits of a conversation in the next room. What matters is what is left unsaid.”
²

El De Efe,
as the city was known (after its acronym for
Distrito Federal
), was an exciting cultural capital. With a
population of approximately four million people, it was brewing with all types of business deals. Barely two decades after the end of the
campensino
revolution—the first of its kind in the twentieth century, prior even to its Bolshevik counterpart in Russia—the populist president Lázaro Cárdenas, who had promised to give Mexicans what “rightfully belonged to them,” nationalized the oil industry and formed a state-run company called PEMEX.

That was in 1938, and the uproar that ensued pushed the nation's markets to an impasse. But Cárdenas's decision resulted in the so-called
el milagro mexicano,
the Mexican Miracle, a period of economic bonanza that lasted four decades, from 1940 to 1980. A single party was in power, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, known as P.R.I. Although it ruled with an iron fist, a democratic atmosphere prevailed (freedom of expression, openness to foreign investment, a thriving print, radio, and television media, and a multi-party system). However, the presidential election, which came up every six years, was always won by the handpicked P.R.I. candidate.

The city was defined by its cosmopolitanism. In the thirties
El De Efe
was a safe haven for refugees and exiles from the Spanish Civil War, who flocked to Mexico in hordes. Their presence redefined education, media, and publishing. During the early years of World War II, Mexico, although it was neutral, deployed a small battalion to fight in the European front, the
Escuadrón 201
(201st Air Fighter Squadron). It was attached to the U.S. Army Air Forces, which was engaged in the liberation of the Philippine island of Luzon in 1945. Rivalries and disillusionment in Russia and elsewhere brought Leon Trotsky and photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson and Tina Modotti, to Mexico. Some joined the communist circle of artists including Diego Rivera and his wife, Frida Kahlo, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Their relationships highlighted the intersection of politics and culture,
which defined the age. In 1945 the city welcomed other types of émigrés, from Jews who had survived the concentration camps to Russian, French, Italian, and German activists and intellectuals seeking a better environment.

Some time after García Márquez arrived in the Mexican capital, he received the news that one of his literary role models, Ernest Hemingway, had committed suicide, in Ketchum, Idaho, by shooting himself in the head with a shotgun. It was July 2, 1961, and Hemingway had been about to turn sixty-two.

What García Márquez most admired in Hemingway was his succinct, almost telegraphic narrative style, which had been inspired by popular crime fiction dime novels. He appreciated the way the American writer explored the crossroads of literature and history, his passion for reporting (Hemingway had started his career as a journalist), his readiness to use his war experience in his fiction, and his exploration of violence, overt and tacit, in human relationships. García Márquez had not only imitated Hemingway's style, he had closely followed his career. Upon hearing the news of his death, he wrote the essay “A Man Has Died a Natural Death,” published in
México en la Cultura,
the literary supplement of the newspaper
Novedades,
in which he argued that those who perceived Hemingway as a pulp author of the type linked to B-movies would be proven wrong by time, for Hemingway would eclipse so-called “major” writers.

García Márquez's reference to B-movies wasn't arbitrary. The cinema was one of his favorite pastimes and an artistic form that became an essential outlet for his talent. What had attracted him to
El De Efe
was an opportunity to fulfill his dream of writing for the screen. García Márquez had seen numerous Mexican comedies as well as high-brow art house releases. The city was the epicenter of a magnificent movie industry whose productions were enthusiastically received in Spain, Latin America, the Caribbean, and even the United States. Hollywood stars,
directors, and cameramen came to visit. The city was a magnet for European exiles, particularly from Spain.

Êpoca de oro,
the golden age of Mexican cinema, spanned from 1935 to 1960. World War II had crippled the film industries in Europe and the United States. Looking to take advantage of a market hungry for entertainment but incapable of satisfying the demand, the Mexican cinematic boom embarked on an effort to produce quality dramas that would not only attract audiences in the Spanish-speaking world but around the globe. Production costs were relatively inexpensive. The country had stellar actors and directors, as well as entrepreneurial producers eager to invest their money while exploring different horizons. Plus, modernity was fundamentally changing the way Mexican society behaved, a transformation that resulted in a plethora of stories about the struggle to accommodate to the new mores.

One of the oldest movie studios, Estudios Churubusco, which opened in 1945, was located in
El De Efe.
Its black-and-white films were produced at astonishing speed but with artistic integrity. The subject matter ranged from ranchero life, the cruelty and confusion of urban life, Catholic fervor in the countryside (During the
Cristero
uprising, a war was fought at the end of the twenties as a side effect of the
campesino
revolution. For some it was an anti-revolution, a response to the anticlerical articles of the Constitution of 1917.), to military recruitment during the Mexican Revolution and immigration to the United States. Fernando de Fuentes directed
Allá en el rancho grande
and
Vámonos con Pancho Villa.
Actors such as Pedro Infante, Jorge Negrete, Dolores del Río, and María Félix were courted by numerous production companies.

The
Êpoca de oro
established a new aesthetic. Mexico was portrayed as a land of contrasts, a nation where modernity coexisted with poverty, pre-Columbian traditions, and raw emotions. Actors depicted the poor in an unapologetic, even melodramatic fashion, exploring the labyrinthine paths of the
nation's collective identity. Gorgeous mestizo faces and an exuberant natural environment were showcased on the silver screen, mesmerizing audiences. This aesthetic was created, to a large extent, by cinematographers such as Gabriel Figueroa, who used the camera to depict the country in unique ways.

Equally significant was the emergence of
carperos
and other street comedians of astonishing magnetic power, such as Mario Moreno, better known as Cantinflas, and Germán Valdés, the
Pachuco
clown Tin Tan, whose blockbuster comedies used humor to explore political, social, ethnic, and religious tensions. (
Pachuco
is a term used to refer to Mexican American youths from the thirties to the fifties, known for their idiosyncratic attire, use of slang—which would later evolve into Spanglish—and rebellious spirit against the oppressive white establishment in the United States.) These actors ridiculed urban characters like
el peladito,
the charming hoodlum who entertains everyone with his verbal pyrotechnics but is incapable of holding a steady job, or the urban dweller who decides to cross the border and live in Los Angeles, where there was a growing population of Mexicans.

The growth of the film industry led to the opening of new, state-of-the-art theaters in middle- and upper-class neighborhoods in
El De Efe
and in major provincial cities, such as Monterrey, Guadalajara, and Puebla. But ticket prices were affordable for the lower class, beneficiaries of
el milagro mexicano.
There was a voracious audience who closely followed the industry and bought tickets on a weekly basis.