Redeemers (45 page)

Moreover, like the first Christians who expected this world to end in their lifetimes and a new, radiant, and eternal world to become their possession forever, Che was certain that he lived in a time of apocalypse. Like the dwellers in the catacombs, he would come into the light and see the new world with his own eyes.

One additional element of his feelings perhaps completes the Christian picture, or at least suggests it: the call for love. But it is not the Christian concept of universal love. In his
Socialism and Man in Cuba
, in a passage that would become widely quoted, he wrote: “the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love . . . Our vanguard of revolutionaries should idealize this love for the peoples, for the most sacred causes and make it entire, indivisible.” It is not of course universal love, but love for “the people” and for the comrades fighting beside you. And the rite is not Communion but battle, violence, and, when necessary, death. And the injunction certainly does not include loving your enemies.

Aside from his emphasis on revolutionary love, Che's life had been filled with fury and with hatred. In a sense, he kept playing the rugby of redemption, filled with a sense of certainty beyond any doubts. Perhaps the moment when he acquired it appears in his travel diaries of 1952. He may have incubated the idea in Miami, as an effect upon him of his journey across Latin America. He wrote it down in Buenos Aires and called it “Note on the Margin.” It is a passage totally different from the rest of his journal. He sets his words within an imagined (or remembered) scene in which he receives a political illumination from a mysterious unnamed figure, described as a European exile who has fled his native country. Che had not yet become a dedicated Marxist, let alone a revolutionary, yet the violent words were a premonitory vision of action. In the rambling, melodramatic paragraphs, the young man of twenty-five seems to be experiencing a conversion to revolutionary rage:

 

Now I knew . . . I knew that when the great ruling spirit deals the enormous stroke that divides all humanity into only two opposing factions, I will stand with the people and I know, because I see it printed on the night, that I, the eclectic dissector of doctrines and psychoanalyst of dogmas, howling like a man possessed, will charge against barricades and trenches, I will stain my weapons with blood . . . I already feel my nostrils flaring, savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood, of enemy death.

 

It is a dialogue, an encounter of Che with himself, one voice and another voice of his imaginary universe, as if a firmly united self were born from the experience, without hesitations, a kind of surrender without questions, without doubts, almost without thought: a form of faith.

At one point in his life, he had written, “[I have] no house, no wife, no children [though by then he had them all], no parents, no brothers, my friends are those who think as I do and so long as they do . . . and yet, nevertheless, I am happy, I feel that I am something in life. I feel not only a powerful inner force, which I have always felt, but also the capacity to inject it into others.” He is like the violent incarnation of a Christian apostle, guided by his confidence in being able to communicate “the good news” and conversion to others. But only those who think like him are his good neighbors.

Che held to his beliefs as a Catholic might cling to the dogmas of his faith. Hatred for him was a creative emotion. In his well-known “Message to the Tricontinental” in 1967, before going to Bolivia, he praises “hate as a factor of the struggle, which drives a man beyond the natural limitations of the human condition and converts him into an effective, selective, cold killing machine. That is how our soldiers have to be.” He was not incoherent, nor cowardly, nor weak. If his captors in Bolivia had left him alive, what would he have done? He was never willing to compromise on his principles, or to accept negotiation. Redeemers do not negotiate.

Did he win or lose? After his death, one, two, three thousand Ches set out to emulate him. Did they win or lose? In practice, the option chosen by Che ended, for the most part, with the defeat of the guerrillas by repressive armies. Trapped between those violent extremes the people of their countries endured hunger and illness and often chose the road of emigration. They were the beloved objects of redemption but had not been consulted on the best route to achieve it. When the guns went quiet, those who were left would prefer the ballot box to the whir of bullets.

PART IV

Politics and the Novel

 

 

8

Gabriel García Márquez

IN THE SHADOW OF THE PATRIARCH

All dictators, from Creon onwards, are victims.

—
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

 

In the course of writing his memoirs, Gabriel García Márquez was to remember—many years after the event—that distant afternoon in Aracataca, Colombia, when his grandfather set a dictionary in his lap and said, “Not only does this book know everything, it's the only one that's never wrong.” The boy asked, “How many words are in it?” “All of them,” his grandfather replied.

Anywhere in the world, if a grandfather presents his young grandson with a dictionary, he is giving him an instrument of knowledge; but Colombia was not just anywhere. It was a republic of grammarians. During the youth of García Márquez's grandfather, Colonel Nicolás Márquez Mejía, who was born in 1864 and died in 1936, a number of presidents and government ministers—almost all of them lawyers and partisans of the Conservative faction—published dictionaries, language textbooks, and treatises (in prose and verse) on orthography, philology, lexicography, meter, prosody, and Castilian grammar. Malcolm Deas, a scholar of Colombian history who has studied this phenomenon, claims that the obsession with language expressed by the cultivation of these sciences—their practitioners, Deas notes, insisted on calling them “sciences”—had its origin in an urge for continuity with the cultural heritage of Spain. By claiming “Spain's eternal presence in the language,” Colombians sought to take possession of its traditions, its history, its classic authors, its Latin roots. This appropriation, preceded by the foundation in 1871 of the Colombian Academy of Language, the first offshoot in America of the Royal Spanish Academy, was one of the keys to the long period of conservative hegemony—it lasted from 1886 to 1930—in Colombian political history.

García Márquez's grandfather is a prominent figure in the writer's early novels, and he was no stranger to this politico-grammatical history. Colonel Nicolás Márquez Mejía fought in the ranks of the legendary Liberal general Rafael Uribe Uribe (1859–1914), one of the few genuine military autocrats (
caudillos
) in Colombian history. His story in turn inspired the character of Colonel Aureliano Buendía in
One Hundred Years of Solitude
. A tireless and hapless combatant in three civil wars, a soldier in the civic battles between Conservatives and Liberals, Uribe Uribe was also a diligent grammarian. During one of his stays in prison he translated Herbert Spencer, and in 1887 he wrote the
Diccionario abreviado de galicismos
,
provincialismos y correcciones de lenguaje
(Abbreviated Dictionary of Gallicisms Provincialisms, and Proper Usage), which seems to have had moderate commercial success.

In 1896 the general stood alone in Parliament against sixty Conservative senators. Finally the crushing majority left him no choice but, in his own words, to “give the floor to the cannons.” Uribe Uribe was the central protagonist of the bloody Thousand Days War in 1899–1902, which ended with the signing of the Peace of Neerlandia. The signing was witnessed by Colonel Márquez, who years later would receive his former general at the family home in Aracataca, near the scene of the events. Uribe Uribe was assassinated in 1914. Two decades later, his lieutenant presented his eldest grandson not with a sword or a pistol, but with a dictionary.

This tome that anywhere else would be an instrument of knowledge was, in Colombia, an instrument of power. Influence and power would eventually come to this grandson, Gabriel García Márquez, though not in his wildest tropical dreams could Colonel Márquez have imagined the prodigious
ars combinatoria
that his grandson—whom he called “my little Napoléon”—would apply to that dictionary, the “almost two thousand big, crowded pages, beautifully illustrated,” which “Gabito” set out to read “in alphabetical order, with little understanding.” García Márquez won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, and his most important novels have been translated into many languages. With their extraordinary force of storytelling, their poetic intensity, their prose so flexible and rich that at moments it actually seems to include all the words in the dictionary, these books are read everywhere. And rightly so. His hometown is the site of literary pilgrimages. In Cartagena de Indias, the walled port city where the young reporter García Márquez endured years of hardship, the taxi drivers point out the “Prize House,” one of several that “Gabo” owns in cities around the world. The fond nickname reflects the popular sympathy that he inspires.

In 1996, García Márquez settled an old score in Colombian history by heading a small revolution against the dictatorship of dictionaries. To the horror of the Royal Spanish Academy and its American counterparts gathered in Zacatecas, Mexico, the celebrated author—lord and master of “Spain's eternal presence in the language”—declared himself in favor of the abolition of formal spelling criteria. The snub was the final victory of liberal Colombian radicalism over conservative grammatical hegemony. The ghosts of General Uribe Uribe and Colonel Márquez would have smiled in satisfaction. And Fidel Castro too, who had once said that he shared “the scandalous theory, probably sacrilegious for the academies and doctors in literature, about the relativity of the words in a language.” But when García Márquez gave him a gift for his seventieth birthday, Fidel praised it as the “most fascinating” of his gifts, a “real jewel.” It was a dictionary of the Spanish language.

“I write so my friends will love me,” García Márquez has said repeatedly. One of those friends is the dictator of Cuba. In Latin American history, no bond between pen and scepter has been as strong, as intimate, as enduring, as mutually beneficial, as the alliance between Fidel and Gabo. In 1915, when the great Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío (an important influence on García Márquez) was old, ailing, and in need of assistance, he accepted the support of the Guatemalan dictator Manuel Estrada Cabrera and even dedicated some laudatory poems to him. Castro's political motives for his public association with the great writer are not hard to understand, and they are as clear as those of Estrada Cabrera: for him the possible dividend is an increase in legitimacy. But what motivates García Márquez, who, unlike Rubén Dario, is certainly, at this stage of his life, under no economic pressure at all? Through a voluminous biographical study by the English scholar Gerald Martin (
Gabriel García Márquez: A Life
), the psychological origins of this extraordinary relationship come into clearer focus. They can be traced back to the family house in Aracataca, and especially to the bond between the young Gabo and his personal patriarch, Colonel Márquez. There lies the seed of his fascination with power: coded, elusive, but magically real, like the story of the dictionary, symbolically passed from the Colombian colonel to the Cuban
caudillo
through the hands of the writer.

 

“
LIFE IS
not what one lived but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it,” writes García Márquez in the epigraph to his memoirs. This is how he has remembered, reworked, and in various ways recounted a tragic incident in his grandfather's life. It took place in 1908, in the city of Barrancas. García Márquez mentions it in
Living to Tell the Tale
as a “duel,” an “affair of honor” in which the colonel had no choice but to confront an old friend and former lieutenant. The man was “a giant sixteen years younger than he was,” married and the father of two children, and his name was Medardo Pacheco. The quarrel—in this version—began with “a base remark” about Medardo's mother that was “attributed” to García Márquez's grandfather. The public explanations for this insult failed to calm Medardo's rage, and the colonel, his “honor wounded,” challenged him to a duel to the death. There was no fixed date for the encounter, and it took the colonel six months to settle his affairs and ensure his family's future before he went off to meet his destiny. “Both men were armed,” García Márquez notes. The mortally wounded Medardo collapsed into “the underbrush with a wordless sob.”

A previous version of this story, told in an interview with Mario Vargas Llosa, omits the duel: “At some point he had to kill a man, when he was very young . . . it seems there was someone who kept hounding him and challenging him, but he took no notice until the situation became so difficult that he simply put a bullet in him.” According to García Márquez, the town was on his grandfather's side, so much so that one of the dead man's brothers slept “at the door to the house, in front of my grandfather's door, to prevent the family from coming to avenge his death.”

“You don't know how a dead man weighs on you,” his grandfather repeated more than once, unburdening himself to Gabito, who listened raptly to his war stories, and who has emphasized the importance of this episode in his life: “It was the first incident from real life that stirred my writer's instincts and I still have not been able to exorcise it.” Precisely in order to conjure it away, he chose to re-create it not as it really happened but as “one remembers it in order to recount it.”

Perhaps the first literary reworking of the incident came in 1965, in his script for the film
Time to Die
, by the Mexican filmmaker Arturo Ripstein: After languishing for years in prison, Juan Sáyago returns to the town where he killed another man, Raúl Trueba, due to an incident at a horse race. Sáyago wants to rebuild his house and win back the woman he left behind, but the dead man's sons, convinced that their father was killed in a sneak attack, have been waiting for him all this time and they aim to exact their revenge. The script absolves the protagonist: “Sáyago didn't kill an unarmed man”; he didn't kill “dishonorably”; “he killed him face-to-face, the way men kill.” In the end Sáyago has no choice but to kill one of Trueba's sons, face-to-face, and later he is shot—in the back, dishonorably, while unarmed—by the other.

The same scene recurs in
One Hundred Years of Solitude
, transformed into a cockfight, after which Aureliano Buendía orders the insolent Prudencio Aguilar to find a weapon so that they may confront each other on an equal footing. Only then can he kill Aguilar with a sure thrust of his spear. Like Colonel Márquez in real life, the first Aureliano embarks on an exodus with his family that leads him to found a new town: the real Aracataca, the magical Macondo. But new horizons do not dissipate the shame. Both characters, real and imaginary, live in the grip of “terrible remorse.” Both refuse to repent, and both insist: “I'd do it all over again.”

After interviewing the descendants of eyewitnesses, Gerald Martin reconstructs a diametrically different version. “There was nothing remotely heroic about it,” he concludes. Medardo's mother was the spurned lover of the boastful colonel; the offended son wanted to cleanse his honor. Colonel Márquez (who was forty-four years old at the time) chose “the time, the place, and the manner of the final showdown.” He killed Medardo dishonorably: Medardo was unarmed. In the
Departmental Gazette
in the town of Magdalena for that November, the colonel's imprisonment for “homicide” is mentioned. After a stay in jail, like his literary avatars, he did not return to Barrancas (where he may well have received the same treatment as Juan Sáyago), but instead set out on the momentous journey to Aracataca, in the hope that the new banana bonanza would bring him prosperity and conjure away the past.

The bond between grandfather and grandson explains Gabito's need to create that original fiction and to cling to it. “We were always together,” remembers García Márquez in his memoirs. They even dressed alike. At home “the only men were my grandfather and me.” Separated in early childhood from his parents and surrounded by a herd of “evangelical women”—his grandmother, his aunts, Indian maids—“for me, grandfather was complete security. Only with him did my doubts disappear and did I feel my feet firmly on the ground and myself firmly established in real life.” “Beached in the nostalgia” of that stout and half-blind old man with his black-rimmed spectacles, the grandfather who celebrated his grandson's “birthday” each month and praised his precocious talent as a storyteller and made him retell the plots of movies when he came home from the theater, García Márquez viewed his grandfather with a worshipful and indulgent sentimentalism, as the incarnation of love and power. “I was eight when he died . . . something of me died with him . . . since then nothing important has happened to me.” In Martin's opinion, this was no exaggeration: “One of the strongest impulses in García Márquez's later life was the desire to reinsert himself into his grandfather's world,” which meant inheriting “the old man's memories, his philosophy of life and political morality,” a political morality that fit into a single phrase: “I'd do it all over again.”

 

A CENTRAL
element in the political consciousness of García Márquez is his anti-imperialism. It is expressed (and originally formed) with genuine facts and literary elaborations around the subject of the United Fruit Company. In
One Hundred Years of Solitude
, as in
Living to Tell the Tale
, Aracataca is not just a company town (with its plantations, railroads, telegraph offices, ports, hospitals, and fleets), but also the scene of the “Biblical curse” of Yankee imperialism, a sweeping historical force whose “messianic inspiration” stirred the hopes of thousands (among them García Márquez's grandparents) only to befoul the waters of the original paradise, disturb its peace, and exploit its people. In its wake, this “plague” left behind only the “leaf-trash,” the “scraps of the scraps it had brought us.” At the start of his memoirs, recalling his return to the place of his birth with his mother at mid-century, García Márquez portrays his childhood surroundings as Caribbean apartheid: the “private . . . forbidden city” of the gringos, with their “slow blue lawns with peacocks and quail, the houses with red roofs and screens on the windows and little round tables with folding chairs for eating, among palm trees and dusty rose bushes . . . These were fleeting visions of a remote and unlikely world that was off limits to us mortals.” Are these historical facts, or good stories? Lived reality, or reality reworked in order to be recounted?