Redeemers (47 page)

Where public life is concerned, Martin follows the journalist García Márquez—in those days a star reporter for the Colombian newspaper
El Espectador—
as he makes his way through East Germany, Poland, Hungary, and the Soviet Union. He notes, for example, the writer's strange fascination with Stalin's embalmed corpse: “nothing impressed me so much as the delicacy of his hands, with their thin transparent nails. They are the hands of a woman.” In no way, says Gabito, did he resemble “the heartless character whom Nikita Khrushchev denounced in an implacable diatribe.” Martin also records García Márquez's “intoxication” at the physical proximity of János Kádár, the man who suppressed the Hungarian uprising and whose actions he tries to justify. Upon learning of the execution of the rebel leader Imre Nagy, García Márquez criticizes the act not in moral terms, but as a “political mistake.” “It should perhaps not surprise us,” says Martin, in one of his few moments of critical boldness, “that the man who wrote it, who at the time clearly believes that there are ‘right' and ‘wrong' men for particular situations and who quite cold-bloodedly puts politics before morality, should eventually support an ‘irreplaceable' leader like Castro through thick and thin.”

The pages dedicated to the writing of
One Hundred Years of Solitude
are genuinely exciting, but Martin's conclusion seems excessive. He calls the novel a work—a mirror—in which the continent at last recognizes itself, and establishes a tradition. If it was Borges who sketched in the frame, it is García Márquez who provides the first truly great collective portrait. So that Latin Americans would not only recognize themselves but would now be recognized everywhere, universally.

The enthusiasm with which we all read that extraordinary novel did in fact lead to it being seen as a kind of bible (which is what Carlos Fuentes maintained), or at least an “American Amadis” (this was Vargas Llosa's phrase); but the truth is that García Márquez's world was not a complete reflection of Latin America. At least two essential elements were missing from his fictional account: the Indians and the Catholic faith.

Still, it was an hallucinatory mirror of the Caribbean, which is no small thing. Yet the opinions were not unanimously glowing. Two great Latin American writers did not like the book, both committed to aesthetic perspectives very different from Gabo's.

Jorge Luis Borges commented that “
One Hundred Years of Solitude
is all right, but it would be better if it was twenty or thirty years shorter.” And Octavio Paz's verdict was also harsh: “García Márquez's prose is essentially academic, a compromise between journalism and fantasy. Watered-down poetry. He is the continuation of two currents in Latin America: the rural epic and the fantastic novel. He is not untalented, but he is a dilutor.”

 

III

In the beginning was the representation of power: in the short novels, then in
One Hundred Years of Solitude
(with its powerful colonels, but always old and lonely, despondent, “beyond glory and the nostalgia for glory”) and finally, in 1975, in
The Autumn of the Patriarch
, García Márquez's own favorite among his books. In 1981, he told the critic Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza that this novel was “a poem about the solitude of power.” It was a theme that aroused his emotions: “I have always believed that absolute power is the highest and most complete realization of being human.” But he also claimed that there was a hidden dimension to the novel: “the book is a confession.” Martin accepts this idea and asserts that the book has the moral zeal of an “autocriticism.” The ambitious, lascivious, repugnant, cruel, and solitary—above all, solitary—patriarch would be García Márquez himself: “a very famous writer who feels terribly uncomfortable with his fame” and tries to free himself through an autobiographical confession.

The Autumn of the Patriarch
was not the first novel about a tropical dictator written in Spanish in the twentieth century. Already in 1926, the Spanish writer Ramón del Valle-Inclán published
The Tyrant Banderas
(about an imaginary Caribbean dictator).
Mr. President
, based on the life of Guatemalan dictator Manuel Estrada Cabrera, came out in 1946, a novel by the Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1967. According to the Guatemalan novelist Au-gusto Monterroso, a number of Latin American writers in early 1968—Monterroso mentions Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, Cortázar, Donoso, Roa Bastos, Alejo Carpentier, but not Gabriel García Márquez—agreed on a plan to publish books about the dictators of their respective countries. The project was never carried out. “I was afraid I would end up ‘understanding' and ‘feeling pity' for him,” said Monterroso, who would have had the grim task of portraying Somoza. Against this background, it would seem that García Márquez undertook the eventual writing of his dictator novel more in a spirit of competition than contrition.

He had spent years turning it over in his head, and he had produced extensive drafts. He would “teach” Asturias and the others “how to write a real dictator novel.” And if
The Autumn of the Patriarch
proved anything, it is that the subject of tyranny makes a good fit with the expressive demands of magic realism.

The abruptness and the arbitrariness of the dictator, his use of power as a form of personal expression, his Dionysian intoxication with his own strength, are natural fodder for the fusion of reality and fantasy. The patriarch “only knew how to express his most intimate yearnings through the visible symbols of his colossal power.” He aspired to be a historical and even cosmic thaumaturge, to alter the forces of nature and the course of time and distort reality. In a way García Márquez's patriarch is reminiscent of Camus's Caligula: “Behold the only free being in all of the Roman Empire. Rejoice: at last an emperor has come to teach them freedom . . . I live, kill, wield the rapturous power of the destroyer, next to which the power of the creator seems a caricature.”

These excesses form part of the experience, and the memory, of many countries. The esteemed Venezuelan writer Alejandro Rossi knew something about this “inherited iconography.” Writing in 1975, and not inclined toward magic realism in its most “adolescent and elemental” form (as it manifests itself occasionally in
The Autumn of the Patriarch
), Rossi praised the “intense and beautifully crafted images,” the “intricacies and art” of the prose, and the “often perfect rhythms” of the work—but he objected to its substance:

 

The incorporation of so many familiar elements turns the book into an elaborate and brilliant exercise that nevertheless does not change our historical and psychological view of dictatorship.
The Autumn of the Patriarch
aesthetically explores a worn-out and exhausted vision of ourselves. García Márquez's skill and unquestionable stylistic accomplishments almost never transform the underlying substance, which remains buried in the novel's cellar, untouched by any literary spark. In that sense it is a Baroque book . . . a sealed literary net that sometimes—though with perfect manners—suffocates its narrative subject matter.

 

Setting aside the issue (however important) of language, the narrative of the novel is a continuous recording of the tyrant's subjectivity: his nostalgias, his fears, his sentiments. And the simplicity of his inner world is morally offensive: only rarely does the reader encounter reflections on the obligations and the dilemmas of power, or ruminations on evil, debasement, or cynicism, much less a hint of any crisis of conscience. The top tier of the dictator's consciousness is reserved for his private anguish: the sacrifices that he made for his mother, the chronicle of his lusts and his “unrequited loves.” It would almost seem as if the dictator has no public life, only private passions. The historical figure is curiously exempted from history. Conversely, the characters who surround him have no space of their own: everything they think, say, and do is a part of public life, because it revolves around the dictator. In a story in which the central axis is a despot's lyrical and emotional “I,” everything else is reduced to a stage on which that “I” unfolds. The victims are props.

When García Márquez centers on the despot, it is not to expose or analyze the inner complexity of a man of state, but to inspire compassion for a sad, solitary old man. The dictator is a victim of the Church, the United States, a lack of love, his enemies, his collaborators, his orphanhood, natural disasters, poor health, ancient ignorance, bad luck. After he rapes a woman, she consoles him. There is also the fantastic conceit of the retirement home for dictators who have fallen into disgrace, where they spend their afternoons in exile playing dominoes. Their nostalgia assures them immunity. By blurring the reality of power and turning dictatorship into a melodrama, the novel dehumanizes the victims and rehumanizes the dictator.

The Autumn of the Patriarch
's prose is an overwhelming and uncontainable torrent that sweeps through eras, continents, and characters; the narrative itself becomes autocratic. The book opens with an eighty-seven-page paragraph, a torment (at times delightful) for the reader, which García Márquez justified by saying that “it is a luxury that the author of
One Hundred Years of Solitude
can permit himself.” In this book, there is room only for the consciousness of the dictator. Everything happens through, for, and in the perception of the patriarch. He is the omniscient narrator, the author of a country. Other consciousnesses are secondary, derivative, or nonexistent. “Devoted to the messianic pleasure of thinking for us . . . he was the only one who knew the true dimensions of our fate,” García Márquez writes. And “in the end, we could no longer imagine what we would be without him.” “He alone was the nation”—and the novel.

The book differs in many ways from
Mr. President
, which is more of a surrealist novel—poetic, political, and revolutionary—but perhaps the main difference is that in Asturias's book it is not only the voice of the tyrant that is heard. Street beggars speak, as do civilians and military men, in anger and in self-criticism, people with evolving lives of their own, who grow angry, who are capable of criticizing themselves. In Asturias's novel their voices are honored, and experiences of prison and torture are described. When depicting abuse, corruption, and the whims of power, the tone is not just unequivocally critical, it is contemptuous. There is no immunity. In
The Autumn of the Patriarch
, by contrast, the victims are part of the scenery, never active participants in the story.

“The political aspect of the book is a great deal more complex than it seems and I am not prepared to explain it,” García Márquez declared when he finished his novel. And he would proceed to put his fame at the service of a cause—the Cuban Revolution—headed by a man who, paradoxically and more and more over the years, would come to resemble the patriarch of the novel. “In this absolutely ruthless cynicism about human beings, power and effect,” writes Martin, “we find ourselves forced to consider that power is there to be used and that ‘someone has to do this.' ” Based on this “Machiavellian” view of history—the adjective is Martin's—the biographer believes that he understands why García Márquez “would go straight . . . to seek a relationship with Fidel Castro, a socialist liberator who was, as it turned out, the Latin American politician with the potential to become the most durable and the most beloved of all the continent's authoritarian figures.”

Perhaps
The Autumn of the Patriarch
represented the final literary exorcism of the “duel” involving the writer's grandfather, in which the word “tyrant” softens gently into “patriarch.” The patriarch dictates the whole novel, with no breaks, periods, commas, or air for anyone to breathe, except him. It is the novel in which the ghost of Medardo Pacheco would disappear for all eternity. His voice is silenced, to be heard no more. And after depicting the patriarch in literature, it was time to seek him out in real life. Martin confirms this: it was “Fidel Castro, the only man, his own grandfather figure, against whom he could not, would not dare, would not even wish, to win.”

From Macondo to Havana: a miracle of magic realism.

 

ALTHOUGH ONE
of García Márquez's bits of reporterly advice was to “poison the reader with credibility and rhythm,” in his vast body of journalism he did not practice magic realism so much as socialist realism. In Spanish his articles fill no fewer than eight fat volumes, the pieces dating from 1948 to 1991. They have not been translated into English, and Martin barely skims them.

The first series of García Márquez's journalism is important because it gives a glimpse into the secrets of his “basic exercises,” his “literary carpentry.” The second (1955–57), which covers his reporting from Europe and America, has more political content but nowhere near as much as his key political articles, written between 1974 and 1995 and gathered in
Por la libre
and
Notas de prensa
—one thousand pages in all.

In three pieces of reportage, written after a long stay in Cuba in 1975 and titled “Cuba de cabo a rabo” (Cuba from One End to the Other), published in August/September of that year by the magazine
Alternativa
(founded by García Márquez in Bogotá in 1974), Gabo expressed an absolute faith in the Revolution as it was incarnated in the heroic figure of the Comandante (whom García Márquez had not yet met): “Every Cuban seems to think that if one day no one else were left in Cuba, he alone, under the leadership of Fidel Castro, could carry on the Revolution, bringing it to its happy conclusion. For me, frankly speaking, this realization was the most exciting and important experience I have ever had.”