Gabriel García Márquez (24 page)

Pablo Neruda . . . devoted a morning with us to major book hunting in second-hand bookshops. He walked among the crowds like an invalid elephant, with a childish interest in the internal mechanisms of every single thing. The world, to him, seemed like an immense wind-up toy . . . I have never met anyone closer to the idea we have of a refined gluttonous Renaissance Pope . . . Matilde, his wife, put a bib on him which looked more like something out of a barber's shop than a dining-room. But it was the only way to stop him from bathing himself in sauces. That day . . . was a typical example. He ate three whole lobsters, pulling them apart with a surgeon's mastery, and at the same time devoured everyone else's wishes with his eyes, and picked at a bit of everyone's, with a delight in eating that was contagious: Galician clams, Cantabrian barnacles, Alicante prawns . . . And all the while, just like
the French, all he talked about was other exquisite dishes, especially the prehistoric seafood of Chile which he carried with him in his heart.
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With the publication of
One Hundred Years of Solitude
having established him as the commanding leader of
El Boom,
García Márquez spent the next three years trying to satisfy the growing interest of his international public. This entailed responding to interviewers, participating in public dialogues, and taking care of his literary affairs.

In August 1967, he met Vargas Llosa for the first time in Caracas, Venezuela, specifically in Maiquetía, where Simón Bolívar International Airport is located, a few miles from La Guajira. Caracas had recently suffered an earthquake. Vargas Llosa was coming from London, where he had been teaching, to receive the Premio Rómulo Gallegos for his novel
La casa verde.
García Márquez was arriving from Mexico, to participate in the XIII Congreso Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana. In his book
García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio,
published by Barral in Barcelona four years later, Vargas Llosa wrote that their airplanes landed almost at the same time. “That's the first time we saw each other's faces. I remember his very well that night: distraught as a result of the fear of flying—of which he is viscerally scared—uncomfortable with the photographers and journalists that were cornering him. We became friends and spent the next two weeks together, which was the time the conference lasted, in that Caracas which, with dignity, buried its dead and swept the debris from the earthquake. The very recent success of
One Hundred Years of Solitude
had turned him into a popular character; and he enjoyed the role: his colorful shirts blinded the brainy professor during the plenary sessions; he told journalists, with a stone face like his Tía Petra's, that his novels were written by his wife but he signed them because they were very bad and Mercedes didn't want to shoulder the
responsibility; asked by television if Rómulo Gallegos was a great novelist, he meditated and responded: ‘In Canaima there is a description of a rooster that is quite good.' But behind all those games there is a personality increasingly fed up with his role as a star. There is a shy person for whom it is torture to speak in front of a microphone or in public. On August 7, he was unable to refuse participating in a seminar at the Ateneo in Caracas, titled ‘The Novelists and the Critics,' in which he was scheduled to deliver a fifteen-minute talk about his own work. We are sitting together, and before his time came, he infected me with his infinite terror: he was ashen, his hands were sweaty, he smoked like a chimney. He spoke while seated, at a speed during the first few seconds that made us all be at the edge of our seat, and finally pulled off a story that brought down the house.”
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From Caracas, García Márquez traveled to Bogotá and continued to Lima, where he'd been invited by the Universidad de Ingeniería to talk about his life and work. He then visited Buenos Aires for the Premio Primera Plana, went to Colombia, and returned with his family to Barcelona, where they lived. He told Daniel Samper: “There is no day in which I don't get calls from two or three editors or the same amount of journalists. Since my wife is the one who answers the phone, she has to say that I'm not in. If this is glory, it's a piece of crap. (No, you better don't state that because that line in printed form will look ridiculous.) But it's true. One doesn't even know who one's friends are. So I'll start by saying that I won't give any more interviews because I'm up to my eyeballs. I came to Barcelona because I thought that here no one would know me but the problem is the same. At first I said: no more radio or television but I'll say yes to the printed media because they are my colleagues. But no more printed media either. The journalists come, we end up getting drunk together until two o'clock in the morning and they end up leaving what I said out in their
reportage. Also, I never go over what they write. In the last two years, every published statement of mine is nonsense.”
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Elsewhere, García Márquez said, “I was once asked, I can't remember where, how my life differed before and after that book, and I said that after it ‘there are four hundred more people.' That's to say before the book I had my friends, but now there are enormous numbers of people who want to see me and talk to me—journalists, academics, readers. It's strange . . . most of my readers aren't interested in asking questions, they only want to talk about the book. That's very flattering if you consider case by case, but added up they begin to be a problem in one's life. I would like to please them all, but as that's impossible I have to act meanly . . . you see? For instance, by saying I'm leaving town when all I'm really doing is changing hotels. That's how vedettes behave, something I always hated, and I don't want to play the vedette. There is, besides, a problem of conscience when deceiving people and dodging them. All the same I have to lead my own life, so the moment comes when I tell lies. Well, that can be boiled down to a cruder phrase . . . I say, ‘I've had it to the balls with García Márquez!'”
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His
El Boom
colleagues were simultaneously in awe and envious of his ascent to stardom. In his personal history of the period, José Donoso argued that from 1967 on, things had obviously changed for the region. It was no longer a backwater forgotten by the rest of the world. Donoso stated that “the triumph at the level of commotion and scandal of García Márquez's novel—and I must clarify that the ‘scandal' is a product, above all, of how unbearable it is to some people that a book of such literary quality can be an unprecedented public success—has made it the
only
novel whose sales may justifiably be called ‘substantial.' And only as of 1969 could the Colombian novelist enjoy the ‘luxury' of living where and how he wants and of writing when he wants, besides taking
pleasure in imposing his own conditions on the publishers and the movie producers who surround him.”
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By 1969, García Márquez managed to keep the hoopla at bay, at least to some degree. Finally able to give up screenwriting and freelancing to become a professional writer, his biggest challenge was to establish a routine. He told Rita Guibert, an Argentine journalist compiling a book of conversations with seven Latin American writers, that he always woke up very early, “at about six in the morning. I read the paper in bed, drink my coffee while I listen to music on the radio, and about nine—after the boys have gone to school—I sit down to write.” He wrote without any interruption “until half past two, which is when the boys come home and noise begins in the house. I haven't answered the telephone all morning . . . my wife has been filtering calls. We have lunch between half past two and three.”

“If I've been to bed late the night before,” García Márquez added, “I take a siesta until four in the afternoon. From that time until six I read and listen to music—I always listen to music, except when I'm writing because I pay more attention to it than to what I'm writing. Then I go out and have coffee with someone I have a date with and in the evening friends always come to the house. That seems to be an ideal state of things for a professional writer, the culmination of all he's been aiming at. But, as you find out once you get there, it's sterile. I realized that I'd become involved in a completely sterile existence—absolutely the opposite of the life I led when I was a reporter . . . Yes, there's a natural tendency—when you have solved a series of material problems—to become bourgeois and shut yourself in an ivory tower, but I have an urge, and also an instinct, to escape from that situation—a sort of tug-of-war is going on inside me.”
¹⁶

One Hundred Years of Solitude
was translated into dozens of languages, but García Márquez was unhappy with the Russian
edition. The translation by Valeri Stolbov was censored by the Soviet regime and a number of supposedly erotic episodes were eliminated. Stolbov defended the deletions as “unimportant,” stressing that the structural bulk of the narrative remained intact and that Soviet readers were able to access García Márquez's novel just like anybody else in the world. When asked in 1979 by a journalist how an essential ingredient in the Colombian writer's universe could be eliminated, the Russian translator answered: “Yes, it's true, we cannot divorce the erotic element, something profoundly human, of García Márquez's oeuvre. But I want to be clear that we didn't have a censoring spirit; had we had one, we wouldn't have published the book altogether. One must take into consideration that the novel had the largest printing ever in the history of the world. In the Socialist world itself, three and a half million copies represent something altogether inconceivable, such as the ‘black market.'” Stolbov added that the novel was being sold on the Moscow streets for far more than its retail price in bookstores.
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Arguably, the most prominent translation is that of Gregory Rabassa into English. But it is crucial to understand the cultural climate in which it arrived. In the October 1968 issue of
Atlantic Monthly,
Lionel Trilling—the famed professor of English at Columbia University, whose work on Matthew Arnold, Sigmund Freud, and Henry James made him one of the most influential literary critics of his time (he was the first Jew to get tenure in the English Department at Columbia)—responded to a question from student David Shapiro about teaching old and new literary works from Latin America and Africa. “Well, Mr. Shapiro, I've read this Latin American literature. It has, I think one might say, an anthropological interest.”
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This type of condescension was typical among educated readers, despite the fact that a number of influential books from Latin America were already available in English. To the old boys' club, the region was synonymous with primitivism and backwardness.

The end of the sixties marked the apogee of the Beat Revolution. There was a sense that the rigid educational system that had defined the United States for generations needed to change. But the period was first and foremost about racial equality. The struggle for civil rights for blacks manifested in marches, boycotts, strikes, and building takeovers. Leading literary voices, such as Jack Kerouac and Allan Ginsberg, called for a new way of looking at things. Their interest in pre-Columbian and Oriental religions was tangible in their work. For many, the discovery of Latin American literature was a door to another reality, one ignored by the intellectual and political establishment. The magic realism of García Márquez allowed American readers to appreciate how the Spanish-speaking countries to the south evolved in parallel to the United States.

The late sixties also saw the rise of the Chicano Movement—led by Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Reies López Tijerina, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, and others—which brought to the nation's attention the plight of itinerant farm workers in the Southwestern states, especially Arizona, Colorado, Texas, and California. The image of the
mexicano
in the media at the time was of an illiterate mestizo picking lettuce, strawberries, and oranges in the fields. Hence Lionel Trilling's suggestion that the culture was lacking in sophistication. As a professor, he supported a literary canon defined by the European masters, from the ancient Greeks such as Sophocles to early twentieth-century greats such as Kafka, Proust, and—among Trilling's favorites—Isaac Babel, the Russian author of short stories in the mode of Maupassant. To him, Latin American novels didn't belong in the classroom as serious literature capable of exploring universal themes and motifs.

García Márquez's first work to appear in English was
No One Writes to the Colonel
in 1968, which included “Big Mama's Funeral.” For the translation of
One Hundred Years of Solitude,
Julio Cortázar recommended Gregory Rabassa to García Márquez. But Rabassa was busy working on Guatemalan Nobel Prize laureate Miguel Ángel Asturias's “banana trilogy” for Delacorte:
Mulata
(in Spanish
Mulata de tal,
written in 1963, translated in 1967),
Strong Wind
(
Viento fuerte,
1950, English 1969) and
The Green Pope
(
El papa verde,
1954, English 1971). Cortázar, whose novel
Hopscotch
had been translated by Rabassa in 1966 for Pantheon and for which Rabassa received the National Book Award, advised García Márquez to wait. As a general rule, Rabassa did not read a novel before he translated it, to allow the thrill of discovery to inspire his work.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
was an exception. “People who had read the novel in Spanish were talking about it intelligently, sometimes not so intelligently, but always with a kind of awe. I suppose that this should have scared me off, but in manners of translation and a few other things I don't frighten easily and I was ready to take it on.”
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