Gabriel García Márquez (3 page)

In writing this biography, I follow García Márquez almost at every turn of his journey. I pore over his journalistic efforts in newspapers, such as
El Heraldo
(Barranquilla),
El Independiente
(Bogotá),
El Univer
s
al
(Cartagena),
El Tiempo
(Bogotá), and
El Espectador
(Bogotá), and magazines like
Elite
(Caracas). These took the form of news reports, political, social, and cultural commentary, travel writing, and chronicles of exceptional
events, such as the miraculous survival of a sailor lost at sea for twenty-eight days. This account, serialized as “The Story of a Shipwreck,” scandalized Bogotá in the mid-fifties.

I explore his connection with
El grupo de Barranquilla
, a cadre of dilettantes (writers, photographers, dancers) who orbited around Ramón Vinyes, known as
El sabio catalán
, or the wise Catalan, with whom he forged a lasting friendship. Some of them, such as Álvaro Cepeda Samudio, Álvaro Mutis, and Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, are essential to understanding García Márquez's Colombian footing and his transition to the European, Cuban, and Mexican periods. I study his connection to the Cartagena intelligentsia. I survey his sexual escapades and focus on his courtship of Mercedes Barcha Prado, his lifelong wife, whom he met at a high-school dance when he was nineteen and she thirteen. I examine his debt to William Faulkner and the influence Borges had on his oeuvre. I scrutinize the writer's block he experienced in the early sixties and his discovery of Juan Rulfo's fiction, which triggered the creative output that resulted in
One Hundred Years of Solitude.

I consider the camaraderie he forged with other Spanish-language writers, including Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and, to a lesser extent, Julio Cortázar, a connection that benefited them as a group in marketing terms but was put to the test by polarizing ideological issues in the late seventies. Unlike his literary colleagues, García Márquez was a
costeño
with an acute sense of place, someone who had traveled far beyond his humble origins without ever truly leaving them behind.

A crucial aspect in García Márquez's early years is his collaboration with Mexican filmmakers. Starting with his friendship with Mutis—who in turn was an acquaintance of Luis Buñuel—he slowly created partnerships with directors, producers, and actors that allowed him to be involved in a number of important movie projects, the most significant of which
were
El gallo de oro
and
Tiempo de morir.
The impact of these experiences on García Márquez seemed enormous. Not only are screenplays and other cinematic collaborations an essential component of his oeuvre but, to a large extent, his style was shaped by his exposure to the screen, both as spectator and screenwriter.

In short,
One Hundred Years of Solitude
is my aleph. I quote from it to shed light on García Márquez's life and vice versa. I'm enthralled by the way it isn't only a novel; it is a
bitácora
, an account of the most decisive events in Colombia until the sixties. It is also a retelling of the Bible, a summation of the painful colonial past of Latin America, and an autobiographical chronicle of García Márquez's friendship with important figures of the time. I pay as much attention to its inception as I do to the
rezeptiongeschichte.
I cover how the book is received in Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina, but especially in the United States, where García Márquez's posthumous reputation was forever cemented with the publication of Rabassa's translation.

To intellectuals in Latin America, García Márquez is a polemical figure. A close friend of Fidel Castro, for years he defended the Cuban Revolution against charges of censorship, corruption, and xenophobia. For scores of young writers, his influence has been both a blessing and a curse. Such is the power of his fiction that successive generations of writers have lived under his shadow, constantly asked to produce narratives with a magical realism bent, even when this style is alien to them. This love-hate relationship is palpable as a reaction to what has come to be known as Macondismo, a concept—or better, a full-fledge ideology—understood to be an index of continental, national, and regional validation. To be a Macondista is to celebrate Latin America as “undecipherable, beyond the code, and as a place whose very disjunctions are, in and of themselves, identifying characteristics.”
¹
The ambivalence is tangible
in the literary movement known as McOndo, which came about in the eighties and promoted the work of young voices, such as those of Alberto Fuguet and Edmundo Paz-Soldán. The movement's name was a refutation of Latin America as a geography populated by Macondos: provincial towns in the middle of the jungle, besieged by epidemics of insomnia.
²

The McOndista narratives were defined by hyper-realists à la Raymond Carver. They were about urban life, included a dose of crime and drugs, made constant references to popular culture, and addressed issues of globalization and sexuality. In an essay published in Salon.com, entitled “I am not a magic realist!” Fuguet stated: “Unlike the ethereal world of García Márquez's imaginary Macondo, my own world is something much closer to what I call ‘McOndo'—a world of McDonald's, Macintoshes and condos. In a continent that was once ultra-politicized, young, apolitical writers are now writing without an overt agenda, about their own experiences. Living in cities all over South America, hooked on cable TV (CNN
en español
), addicted to movies and connected to the Net, we are far away from the jalapeño-scented, siesta-happy atmosphere that permeates too much of the South American literary landscape.”

Parricide is an essential part of the process of growing up. The classics are references in opposition to which younger writers define themselves. However, García Márquez's towering reputation has only heightened with time. Will there come a period when his aesthetics are totally eclipsed? I believe that, like Cervantes, his standing is secure for the ages. While he will surely continue to be attacked,
One Hundred Years of Solitude
is an irreplaceable piece in the Latin American cultural puzzle. It contains the DNA of its people.

A word about names and the sequential approach I take. To keep my objective distance, I refer to my subject as García Márquez and not as the overly familiar Gabo, or even the diminutive Gabito. I also avoid referring to the author as
Márquez, as many in the English-speaking world are wont to do. Such simplification is an outright aggression to Hispanic onomastics. People in Spanish-language countries often have not one but two or three names. The popular singer José Antonio Jiménez doesn't go by José, nor is he known as Tony. Likewise with patronymics: Mario Vargas Llosa isn't Llosa to his readers in Lima. García Márquez always uses his two last names, the former referring to his paternal heritage, the latter to his maternal one. To drop one of them is a sign of laziness. I have respected the way names are articulated in interviews and newspaper clippings.

As for the chronology of events, I follow the biographer's mantra that a life lived and a life narrated must parallel each other. In other words, I move from García Márquez's childhood until the success of
One Hundred Years of Solitude
in a linear fashion. I deviate from it only to give a general picture—historical, social, and cultural—of the environment in which García Márquez moved. And I interrupt the sequence when discussing the reception of his work in the English-speaking world. For instance,
La hojarasca
appeared in Spanish, in book form, in 1955, but the English translation was published only in 1972. To avoid needless repetition, I discuss the volume's reception in Spanish and in English in the same section.

In October 1982, several months after my discovery of
One Hundred Years of Solitude
in a reading marathon that began one rainy April afternoon, I read the triumphant headline of the daily newspaper
Unomásuno:
“
Gabo gana el Nobel!”
The Swedish Academy in Stockholm had awarded García Márquez the Nobel Prize in Literature. The jubilation in Mexico City was uncontainable. There were special book editions. Literary supplements published entire issues dedicated to his odyssey, with comments by luminaries splashed everywhere. A new novel,
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
, had been released the year prior and was still topping best-seller charts.

His prize made Latin America feel proud. García Márquez was the fourth Latin American to be awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. Prior to him the recipients were Gabriela Mistral, Miguel Ángel Asturias, and Pablo Neruda. They were recognized for giving voice to the people through their art. García Márquez was singled out “for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts.” Seldom does the prize feel right, not only in the writer of choice but in the time of choice. That year, it most certainly did.

It was then that I came to recognize a phenomenon I call
Gabolatría:
the unstoppable need to adore García Márquez. This unofficial biography isn't one of its vicissitudes. Unlike hundreds of adulatory exercises published in the Hispanic world, where literary criticism doesn't thrive as a democratic activity and, thus, hagiography continues to be one of the cheap forms of reverence, this biography doesn't shy away from presenting an analytical view of García Márquez's life and career. After all, the task of the critic, as Mathew Arnold once put it, is to look at art as a manifestation of the complex forces that define us all the time.

In an anthology entitled
Los diez mandamientos
(The Ten Commandments), published in Argentina in 1966 and edited anonymously, Gabriel García Márquez, then a thirty-nine-year-old novelist, journalist, and screenwriter from Colombia, appended to his contribution, a story composed six years prior that would become a classic, “
En este pueblo no hay ladrones
” (There Are No Thieves in This Town), a self-portrait that is unique in its autobiographical value. The self-portrait reads:

My name, sir, is Gabriel García Márquez. I'm sorry: I don't like the name either, because it is a bunch of common places I haven't been able to identify for myself. I was born in Aracataca, Colombia, almost forty years ago and I'm not sorry about it yet. My zodiac sign is Pisces and my wife is Mercedes. Those are the two most important things that have happened to me in life, because thanks to her, at least until now, I've been able to survive by writing.

I'm a timid writer. My true vocation is that of a magician, but I became so clumsy while trying to do a trick that I have had to find refuge for my solitude in literature. In any case, both activities lead to the
only thing I've been interested in since childhood: to continue to be loved by my friends.

In my case, to be a writer is an outstanding merit because I'm quite a brute when it comes to writing. I've had to apply myself to an atrocious discipline in order to finish half a page in eight hours of work; I fight head on with each word and almost always it is the word that ends up winning, but I'm so stubborn I've been able to publish four books in twenty years. The fifth one, which I'm writing now, is coming out even slower than the others, since I have very few free hours left from so many creditors and a case of neuralgia.

I never talk about literature, because I don't know what it is, and, besides, I'm convinced the world would be the same without it. Instead, I know it would be completely different if the police didn't exist. I think, therefore, that it would have been more useful to humankind if instead of being a writer I had become a terrorist.
¹

Written amid his self-imposed seclusion in Mexico City, in the study he described as
La Cueva de la Mafia
(the mafia cave), this impressionistic mini-essay displays García Márquez's usual sarcasm toward literature as a serious yet treacherous profession. It reveals his penchant for meticulous, carefully chosen words. But the most valuable component of these four mirror-like paragraphs is their autobiographical voice: García Márquez describes his name as a conundrum and his profession as a curse. He is a writer, he argues, not out of choice—he would have preferred to be a
prestidigitador
—but out of necessity. Magic is what he professes to like most: the art of creating illusions with a simple sleight of hand, the capacity to make the supernatural natural and vice versa. While García Márquez tells the reader that he struggles with words, he won't
stay away from them for too long, for they are one of the only things he has: words and friends. Words are friends, of course, and through words he wants to achieve a single result: to be loved by those he loves.