Gabriel García Márquez (19 page)

Although it was a cornerstone of his career, García Márquez's work for film never produced first-rate movies, neither did the ones for which he wrote an original screenplay, nor those for which he adapted his own or others' fiction. It wasn't for lack of trying. His filmography (always in connection with the screenplay; he never acted or directed) is long. The reason for this handicap may be intrinsic: García Márquez is a visual writer who fills the page with vivid, baroque images that resist adaptation. No screenwriter, no film director, no matter how dexterous, has been able to match the Colombian's fertile imagination. It may be argued that the best screen adaptations of his work are those in which the director uses a subtle, naturalistic style, and gives up any attempt at competing with literature. In an interview with Rita Guibert, García Márquez said that the starting point of his novels is “a completely visual image. I suppose that some writers begin with a phrase, an idea, or a concept. I always begin with an image.”
⁸
In another interview years later, he was asked if cinema had treated him badly. García Márquez responded: “No, cinema hasn't treated me badly as far as what has been screened, but for other reasons. Things have gone badly because although I've worked more for
cinema than for literature, I don't manage to do all I would like to. I would like cinema as a form of artistic expression to have the same value in Latin America that literature has at the moment.”
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In 1965, Carlos Fuentes and García Márquez embarked on what is arguably the most inspiring and fruitful cinematic endeavor of the period. Together, they developed the plot for a story for which García Márquez wrote his first original screenplay,
Tiempo de morir
(A Time to Die). Shot in Pátzcuaro, in the state of Michoacán, from June 7 to July 10, 1965, it was the first feature film directed by Arturo Ripstein. García Márquez was present on location, and assisted with the production. The cast included Marga López, Jorge Martínez de Hoyos, Enrique Rocha, Alfredo Leal, and Blanca Sánchez. Inspired by the Western, it is the story of a man who returns to town after eighteen years in prison for murder. He intends to get on with his life, but the victim's son won't allow it.

It was through García Márquez's friendship with Fuentes and his involvement in the film industry that one of the most significant moments in his Mexican period took place: his discovery of Juan Rulfo's oeuvre. By the time García Márquez arrived in
El De Efe,
Rulfo was already a popular writer and a cult figure. Later, García Márquez would say that during his first six months in the city, everyone frantically spoke to him about Rulfo. It isn't difficult to guess why he reacted positively to the buzz.

Juan Rulfo was born in 1917 (although the exact date is under dispute, because he might have given the wrong year in order to avoid the military draft), in the small town of Sayula, Jalisco, Mexico. His father was killed when he was little, and his mother died when he was around ten. Rulfo came from a family of landowners ruined by the Mexican Revolution and the
Cristero
war. He was strongly attached to the countryside, especially to the indigenous population. He moved to Mexico
City, where he audited classes at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México but never enrolled as a full-time student. Largely self-taught, he read voraciously (though he was never bookish) and began to put pen to paper. In the end, he published only two, equally slim, books: the collection of stories
El llano en llamas
(The Burning Plain, 1953) and the novel
Pedro Páramo
(1955). They were enough to turn him into one of the most influential figures in Latin American literature.

Rulfo's language is sparse, Hemingwayesque. Although brief, his stories are powerful explorations of the human response to despair. They focus on the ordeal of
campesinos
deprived of a means to survive. “Do You Hear the Dogs Bark?” for instance, is structured as a monologue by a father carrying on his back his wounded son as he tries to find a doctor for the boy. In “Luvina,” a visitor plans to go to a ghost town inhabited only by women, children, and the elderly. All the men had left long ago. Many of García Márquez's famous stories were being crafted in those years, between the time just prior to his arrival in
El De Efe
and the late sixties. Among them, “There Are No Thieves in This Town,” “Tuesday Siesta,” and “One of These Days” have a genuine Rulfo feel: a similar concern for the indigent, an emphasis on the little disturbances that comprise life, and an attraction to the countryside.

Anyone who reads
Pedro Páramo
will recognize the extent to which it inspired García Márquez's masterpiece. Rulfo created a fictional town, Comala, where the novel's protagonist goes in search of his father. The Homeric echoes of the short volume are stronger than any you will find in
One Hundred Years of Solitude,
and there is more psychologizing in it as well. The Faulknerian recreation of an alternative reality in the Latin American heartland mesmerized García Márquez. (Uruguayan author Juan Carlos Onetti created the fictional town of Santa María, which features in
The Brief Life
[1950], among other books.) But Rulfo wasn't a full-fledged endorser
of magic realism. He was a slender, somewhat wooden, rather shy person who spoke little and socialized less. Discovering him, though, was a coup de grace for García Márquez: here was a writer of tantalizing talent who didn't court public applause. Reading Rulfo made him aware of his own potential.

In 1964, García Márquez collaborated with Fuentes on a screenplay adaptation of Rulfo's short story “
El gallo de oro
” (The Golden Cock), an experience that surely triggered his renewed enthusiasm for literature. Roberto Gavaldón was the director, and Gabriel Figueroa was the cinematographer. Set in rural Mexico, the plot contains similar motifs to those in García Márquez's
No One Writes to the Colonel:
Dionisio is a humble
campesino
who is given a dying rooster. Dionisio feeds the rooster and brings it back to health in order to enter it in a cockfight at the feria of San Juan del Río. The rooster beats an opponent from an important farm owned by Lorenzo Benavides, whose lover, Bernarda Cutiño, aka “La Caponera,” is impressed. Lorenzo tries to buy Dionisio's rooster, but Dionisio refuses until La Caponera seduces him. The film's cast included the famous Mexican actors Ignacio López Tarso, Lucha Villa, and Narciso Busquets.

García Márquez's sojourn in the Rulfian universe had another chapter. Fuentes had written the screenplay of
Pedro Páramo,
but the movie's director, Carlos Velo, didn't quite like it and asked García Márquez to doctor it. A good number of people got involved, and García Márquez was never listed in the credits, which turned out for the best. Produced by Barbachano Ponce, the film
Pedro Páramo
was a flop. Subsequent adaptations were equally unsatisfying.

Adapting such a demanding work of literature for the silver screen is a daunting task. The novel is full of ambiguities. It is hard to tell, for example, who of the characters is alive and who isn't, and whether incest is at the heart of the novel.

García Márquez was always conscious of his debt to Rulfo, whose work, in his view, he became well acquainted with as a result of his activities in the Mexican film industry. In an interview with Miguel Fernández-Braso, he openly admitted that he had lifted—i.e., plagiarized as a form of tribute—a sentence from Rulfo's
Pedro Páramo.
Since then, there has been enormous speculation about which sentence it was. Perhaps it is in chapter ten, where Remedios the Beautiful is described as “
no era un ser de este mundo,
” not a being of this world. In Rulfo's novel, Susana San Juan is described as “
una mujer que no era de este mundo.
”
¹⁰
In a speech entitled “
Asombro por Juan Rulfo
” (Astonishment for Juan Rulfo), delivered on September 18, 2002, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of
The Burning Plain,
García Márquez described the writer's block he suffered after finishing his first four books, and how his discovery of
Pedro Páramo
in 1961 opened his way to the composition of
One Hundred Years of Solitude.
He noted that, altogether, Rulfo's published works “add up to no more than three hundred pages; but that is almost as many, and I believe they are as durable, as the pages that have come down to us from Sophocles.”

One should take the diagnosis of writer's block, as presented by García Márquez, with a grain of salt. The block was more conceptual than real. García Márquez felt that he had reached a certain limit with his stories and novellas and was ready for something larger and more ambitious. He might not have considered these highlights a true sign of productivity, but in those years García Márquez saw the publication of new editions of three of his books. He had kept the manuscript of
In Evil Hour
with him, from its inception in Paris, through his trips to Bogotá, Caracas, New York, and now Mexico City. He hoped his work in an advertising agency and in the movie industry would open the door of the publishing world to him, but nothing materialized and he was disappointed. So when Mutis and
another friend, Guillermo Angulo, suggested that he submit the novel to the 1961 Premio Esso de Novela in Colombia, sponsored by the transnational oil company, he did.

The judges were surprised by the untitled anonymous manuscript. The Academia Colombiana de la Lengua, which administered the prize, awarded it to the book, thinking it had been authored by Mutis, who had worked for the oil company in Bogotá. Germán Vargas collected the $500 prize. But the experience turned traumatic. A pernicious editor in charge of overseeing the book through the production process had taken the liberty of changing its style, replacing the stylized Colombian rhythms with a Madrileño's voice. When García Márquez received a copy, printed in the Madrid-based Imprenta Luis Pérez, he was furious. He wrote a letter to
El Espectador
declaring that edition, now titled
In Evil Hour,
an orphan. Only when the novel was reprinted (simultaneously with new editions of a couple of his other novellas), six years later, in Mexico City, by the elegant Ediciones Era, with its original voice reestablished, did he acknowledge its paternity. By then, he was already deep into the crafting of
One Hundred Years of Solitude.

García Márquez had a better experience with the publication of
No One Writes to the Colonel,
which was released in August 1961 in Medellín under the editorship of Alberto Aguirre. Thanks to Aguirre's enthusiasm and to the support of some of his friends in
El grupo de Barranquilla,
the novel, in my mind a stunning masterpiece, received critical accolades and was embraced by the public. The third item by García Márquez to appear at the time (published in English in
Esquire
magazine) was the novella
The Incredible and Sad Story of Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother.

In these three volumes García Márquez began to build a counterpart to Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. Elements continue reappearing as the reader goes from one narrative
to another and beyond. For instance, as a motif (or better, as an obsession), the young woman pushed into prostitution by her grandmother was already present in his early work. In the short story “
El mar del tiempo perdido
” (The Sea of Lost Time, 1961), the character Herbert comes across an anonymous prostitute who, in order to pay a large debt, has to go to bed with hundreds of men. The story of Eréndira has precisely that theme. And in
One Hundred Years of Solitude,
a similar scene takes place.

In the
New Republic,
Martin Kaplan praised
Innocent Eréndira:
“García Márquez's fictional universe has the same staggeringly gratifying density and texture as Proust's Faubourg Saint-Germain and Joyce's Dublin. As his friend Mario Vargas Llosa said of
One Hundred Years of Solitude,
García Márquez's is ‘in the tradition of those insanely ambitious creations which aspire to compete with reality on an equal basis, confronting it with an image and qualitatively matching it in vitality, vastness, and complexity.'” Kaplan added that since the death of Neruda in 1973, García Márquez was arguably “the best of the Latin Americans; as testimony from both the United States and Europe accumulates, his early reception as a great regional writer is giving way to a climate in which Proust and Joyce can be invoked by enthusiasts without worried sidelong glances at the critrical pack.” But Kaplan saw
Innocent Eréndira
as a minor work. “‘For me, literature is a very simple game, all the rules of which have to be accepted,' [García Márquez] has said, and for the twenty years that he's stuck to that conviction he has beggared Houdini. The early stories, with their O. Henry punch lines, purple atmosphere, and ‘experimental' ambitions, are simply less fun—and less haunting—than the later work.”
¹¹

Luis Harss and Barbara Dohmann, two interviewers who visited him (the former would be instrumental in helping García Márquez find a publisher for
One Hundred Years of
Solitude
), asked him how a story took shape. He writes, they stated, “without a set plan, in a sort of total alert, registering imponderables. He has no cut-and-dried recipe by which to perform.” “I have firm political ideas,” he told them. “But my literary ideas change according to my digestion.” Harss and Dohmann added that García Márquez tells a story “less to develop a subject than to discover it. Theme is less important than wavelength. His facts are provisional, valid not as statements but as assumptions, what he feels today he may discard tomorrow. If in the end not everything adds up to a net result, it is perhaps because we must subtract, not add, to reach a final balance. His world has no beginning or end, no outer rim. It is centripetal. What holds it together is inner tension. It is always on the verge of taking concrete shape, but remains intangible. He wants it that way. Its relation to objective reality is that of an eternally fluctuating mental portrait where resemblances at any given moment are striking but tenuous.”
¹²