Gabriel García Márquez Read online

  In recent decades, literary biographies written in Spanish have multiplied in the hands of Iberian publishers. There are several on Borges, a couple on Mario Vargas Llosa, and one on García Márquez himself. None strike me as rigorous enough. In English, there is a handful on Borges, among others. I have written this book as a biographical investigation with an English-language reader in mind. I wouldn’t have embarked on it had I not become aware of the pleasures the genre provides in the hands of practitioners like Leon Edel, whose multivolume life of Henry James is a tour de force—better even than James’s own tranquil life at his desk.

  The traditional biographer—like James Boswell whose meticulous work ethic is derived from a Protestant sensibility—is eager to record everything, including minutiae, to squeeze the meaning out of a subject’s every thought and action, to dissect a person’s behavior for the sake of posterity. In a sense, the methodical biographer is akin to a vampire, sucking the subject’s blood. Or better yet, like a dybbuk, inhabiting his body and soul, walking, eating, and dreaming with him at all times. These images may be grotesque, but they are not altogether inaccurate. By choice, the biographer doesn’t quite surrender his own self in order to become someone else. What he does is gather all the possible ingredients of another person’s existence and retrace his journey from one point to another. Needless to say, the biographer’s subjectivity is constantly in question. It is his vision of el otro, the suspect’s path as interpreted by the fastidious detective. The best meditation I know on the biographer’s quest is Julio Cortázar’s novella The Pursuer, about the impossible attempt to pin down a fictional jazz master whose profile resembles that of Charlie Parker.

  Other biographies are punctilious in their delivery of even the most anodyne detail. My quest is not to accumulate facts, for data isn’t knowledge. I am most interested in the background to One Hundred Years of Solitude: what prompted it and what were the conditions under which it was gestated? In other words, I am after the raw material of literature. Where does a writer find his inspiration? How does he transform life into fiction? My interest is at once on García Márquez’s personal travels and in the historical backdrop against which that traveling unfolded.

  This biography of Gabriel García Márquez covers a little over four decades, from his birth in 1927 in the small Caribbean coastal town of Aracataca in Colombia to 1970, when Rabassa’s English translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude was released by Harper & Row in the United States, three years after its explosive publication in Latin America. I trace the author’s journey against the tapestry of the principal historical, ideological, and cultural events that shaped Latin America during that period. He lived in almost a dozen places, mostly for extended periods, including Aracataca, Barranquilla, Bogotá, Cartagena, Barcelona, Paris, and Mexico. For most of that time García Márquez was, to a large extent, an unknown newspaper reporter and columnist, as well as a screenwriter. He was astoundingly prolific, publishing sundry pieces, sometimes at a bi-weekly rate, if not more often. He built an enviable reputation as an imaginative journalist. But it was in García Márquez’s short fiction—stories and novellas, some of which were first published in periodicals—where his true talent emerged. In these pieces the fabulous universe of Macondo and its inhabitants slowly took shape. Equally significant was the way in which he devised a carefully calibrated style (in the words of a reviewer, with García Márquez, every sentence is a surprise and the surprise is, in general, “really an extension of our knowledge or feeling about life, and not simply a trick”) and plots that were unique to his native environment. It wasn’t until after he turned forty that his fortune radically changed, though not always for the better. García Márquez is known to have resented the merciless scrutiny fame brought to his private life. My narrative concludes at that point.

  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 Universal (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 you
ng 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.

  Chapter 1

  Aracataca

  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.

  Finally, in his mordant self-portrait García Márquez wonders if instead of having become a writer, it would have been more useful for him and for humankind
had he been a terrorist. That is the writer’s ultimate dream: si en vez de escritor fuera terrorista, to be a saboteur, to be remembered for reformulating the rules of the game. The word choice is ominous, but he isn’t being literal. He isn’t referring to the use of violence with the intention of coercing society. Instead, he embraces metaphor as a form of persuasion: in subtle, tangential, enchanting ways he is ready, through literature, to unsettle the establishment.

  Gabriel García Márquez was born in the small town of Aracataca, on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, on a hot and humid Sunday, March 6, 1927, at 9 A.M., as a rainstorm was descending on the coast. Rumors circulated for some time that the actual place of his birth had been Riohacha—the capital of the province La Guajira, where his mother had spent most of her pregnancy—but those proved untrue. For years his birth date was mistakenly given as March 6, 1928. The Library of Congress in Washington still quotes that date, as do scores of reference volumes.2 The confusion stems from various factors. There were no official papers like a birth certificate issued and his was a large family. Furthermore, the author himself seems to have nurtured this misunderstanding.

  His immediate younger sibling, Luis Enrique, once said that for years he “believed he had been born on September 8, 1928, after his mother’s nine-month pregnancy. But it happened that in the year of 1955, Gabito wrote The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor in El Espectador and had complications with the government of [General Gustavo] Rojas Pinilla. So he had to leave the country, for which he needed a certain document, and I don’t know why but Gabito ended up as having been born on March 7, 1928, that is, the same year I was born, something that leaves me in a difficult situation: either I am the only six-month old that weighed four kilos of whom there had been any notice, or I am almost his twin. He never rectified that date.”3 Eventually, the truth was uncovered as myriad biographers from the nineties onward, among them Dasso Saldívar and Gerald Martin, corroborated the information.4 In March 2007, celebrations took place worldwide to commemorate his eightieth birthday and the fortieth anniversary of the publication, in June 1967, of his magnum opus, Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude).