Love and Solitude
On the eve of the publication of his latest novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez—Gabo, as he’s known—talks to Pete Hamill in Cuba about fame, power, solitude, love, an his best friend, Fidel Castro.
BY PETE HAMILL
JULY 14, 2011
The day following this forlorn expression of unrequited love in the presence of a star, I met with Gabriel Gabriel García Márquez in the small Mediterranean-style villa known as a ”protocol house” that his friend Fidel Castro provides for him when the 1982 Nobel Prize winner is in Havana. The house, in the suburb called Cubanacán, is one of many abandoned by the Havana rich when Castro triumphed almost three decades ago; with its ”modern” furniture, dull abstract paintings, and vast swimming pool, it has a permanently transient feeling, like the houses provided for entertainers in Las Vegas. We talked in a corner of the living room. On this day, his wife, Mercedes, was elsewhere in the house. His son Rodrigo, a Harvard graduate who is now a filmmaker, came in for a moment, exchanged greetings in perfect English, then borrowed some money from his father, swearing a blood oath to pay him back. Rodrigo’s younger brother, Gonzalo, who is married and lives in Paris, had recently presented their father with his first grandchild. A servant brought coffee. A life-long socialist, Gabo now has homes or apartments in Mexico City, Cuernavaca, Barcelona, Paris, and Barranquilla, in his native Colombia. He obviously doesn’t believe that his politics should prevent him from living well. And yet there was a feeling on this afternoon that he inhabits this house but doesn’t truly live in it. He agreed.
In the lobby of the Hotel Capri, the ghosts of fifties gangsters are moving among the delegates of the ninth Havana film festival. The bulletin board announces screenings of movies about political torture. A Havanatur kiosk offers day-trips to the Hemingway Museum and Lenin Park. From the tourist shop which sells cigars and needlepoint portraits of Che Guevara, a compact man a few months short of sixty emerges with newspapers under his arm. He glances at his watch, then starts across the lobby.
A middle-aged woman in a yellow dress places herself between the man and the exit. Gabriel Gabriel García Márquez smiles. Her eyes glaze. She murmurs some words, he nods, says yes, he remembers her, of course, yes, it was at that other film festival in. . . or was it Barcelona? She hands him a card, and he slips it into the pocket of his suit, bows politely, and resumes his passage. His dark-brown eyes are at once amused and wary. He walks with a dandy’s insouciance, like Jack Benny. He is not wearing a necktie or socks.
“Gabo!”
A man this time, portly and mustached, carrying books, looking wintry in the tropical light. Words are exchanged, genuine smiles, nods. This is clearly an acquaintance. Off to the side, bellboys watch and whisper as the two men embrace and then say good-bye. Gabo. The name moves through the air. Jesus, it’s Gabo. A woman in jeans and a paisley blouse hurries to the elevators. Then two East German women come over, wearing the blessed-out grins of teenyboppers, followed by another man. Gabo is polite, exchanges greetings, keeps moving. He feints to the left, pirouettes to the right, directly into the imposing figure of a handsome young woman. She says something; his expression replies: why not? He leads her to a couch beside the Havanatur kiosk. She digs into a large leather bag and produces some books. He signs them for her. Then he rises, nods gallantly, and moves at last down the steps and out the door into the hot Havana afternoon. The woman in jeans rushes out of the elevator, arms full of books, looking lost, as she sees him slide into a waiting car.
“Gabo. . .”
The day following this forlorn expression of unrequited love in the presence of a star, I met with Gabriel Gabriel García Márquez in the small Mediterranean-style villa known as a ”protocol house” that his friend Fidel Castro provides for him when the 1982 Nobel Prize winner is in Havana. The house, in the suburb called Cubanacán, is one of many abandoned by the Havana rich when Castro triumphed almost three decades ago; with its ”modern” furniture, dull abstract paintings, and vast swimming pool, it has a permanently transient feeling, like the houses provided for entertainers in Las Vegas. We talked in a corner of the living room. On this day, his wife, Mercedes, was elsewhere in the house. His son Rodrigo, a Harvard graduate who is now a filmmaker, came in for a moment, exchanged greetings in perfect English, then borrowed some money from his father, swearing a blood oath to pay him back. Rodrigo’s younger brother, Gonzalo, who is married and lives in Paris, had recently presented their father with his first grandchild. A servant brought coffee. A life-long socialist, Gabo now has homes or apartments in Mexico City, Cuernavaca, Barcelona, Paris, and Barranquilla, in his native Colombia. He obviously doesn’t believe that his politics should prevent him from living well. And yet there was a feeling on this afternoon that he inhabits this house but doesn’t truly live in it. He agreed.
“I live where my phonograph records are,” Gabo said with a shrug. “That’s Mexico.”
Next month, his latest novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, will be published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf in a first edition of 100,000 copies. He would dearly love to come to the United States to celebrate the occasion, but at the time of our talks, his plans were uncertain. For years, the ironheaded bureaucrats of the Reagan administration would not give him an ordinary tourist visa, a policy that at once angered and amused him.
“The country where my books are studied best is the United States,” he said. ”Universities in the United States have made the best analyses of my books. But I can’t enter the United States, because they say I am a Communist, a friend of Fidel Castro. But tell me: if they don’t permit me to enter because my ideas are so dangerous, why don’t they prohibit my books? When I go to the United States, I go to New York to buy books, to buy records, to see movies and theater, to see two or three friends. I don’t really have time to disseminate my evil ideas. On the other hand, my books are everywhere.”
Gabo illustrated his point with an anecdote, as he so often does. Occasionally over the past decade, while traveling from Mexico to Europe, he ahs been allowed to stop over in New York for forty-eight hours. On one such stopover, he went to Bloomingdale’s department store with some Colombian friends. One of them had a camera with her and wanted to have a photograph taken with Gabo in front of the store. They went outside.
“We stopped the first woman we saw, a redhead carrying a briefcase,” Gabo said. ”She agreed to take our photo. And when she looked through the lens, she suddenly said, ‘You’re Gabriel García Márquez!’ I said yes. She took the photo. And then she opened her briefcase and took out a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude. That she recognized me: all right. That she had read the book: O.K. But that she was carrying it with her?” He laughed out loud. ”And that’s the country that I have trouble entering!”
For years, when he applied for a visa at any United States consulate, the clerks often told him how much they admired his writing, and even asked for autographs, before turning down the application. In late December, all of that changed when the U.S. Congress passed an amendment to the McCarran-Walter Act that effectively ended the exclusionary policy. The case of Gabriel García Márquez was specifically raised during the debate. Gabriel García Márquez was not a Communist, but he was a friend of Fidel Castro, and until this amendment was signed into law, that was sufficient to keep him out.
“What else could it be?” he said.
That friendship, which began in the 1960s, baffles some of his most fervent admirers. Even people on the left wonder how a writer of such style, irony, and humor could remain friendly with Castro, a busted Leninist valise who hasn’t had a fresh idea in twenty years. Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist who in 1971 published an entire book about Gabriel García Márquez, has publicly criticized Gabo for maintaining a friendship with a man whose regime often jails writers or drives them into exile, and in general smothers free literature. In The Autumn of the Patriarch, Gabriel García Márquez wrote one of the great indictments of the dictators who have plagued Latin-American history; today, after Stroessner of Paraguay, the longest-running dictator in the hemisphere is Fidel Castro.
The explanation is more literary than historical. The friendship is clearly a union of what Gabriel García Márquez calls the solitude of fame and the solitude of power. Like most people who become well known, he has personally experienced the former.
“It is very difficult to distinguish between those who invite you to their homes because they like you,” he said during one of four long interviews, ”and those who invite you to their homes to show you off. One result is that you feel more and more isolated. That’s why I’ve come to think that nothing resembles the solitude of power so much as the solitude of fame.”
Castro, he says, experiences this isolation in a different way.
”Fidel knows very well the expression ‘the solitude of power,’” Gabriel García Márquez said. ”We’ve spoken about it a lot. And he has read The Autumn of the Patriarch. He says that he doesn’t accept the solitude of power. But I say to him that one of the main characteristics of the solitude of power is not knowing that you are in the solitude of power.”
The essential problem is an insulation from information. Castro reads hundreds of cables every day, meets with his advisers, takes frequent trips around the Cuban countryside to check his government’s performance.
“Nevertheless, I believe that he doesn’t escape the solitude of power,” Gabriel García Márquez said. He sipped some coffee. ”There is a point at which it is difficult to know what you know and what you don’t know. And there is a moment in which you know only what you want to know. Unfortunately, in Fidel’s case, I believe that many people lie to him, or hide the truth, or give him partial truths. And what such people hide is often the most essential part. But maybe that’s inevitable. It happens to everybody in power⎯in all countries.”
He believes that Castro is often personally alone (a situation that might have deepened, according to others, since the death in 1980 of his companion, Celia Sánchez). And he cites an example from his own life to illustrate the way power an fame can lead to actual physical solitude.
“Mercedes and I were alone in the house one night, and we started calling up friends to see whom we could dine with. They were all out. And we ended up dining alone, because not one friend called us, thinking that we must have many dinners to go to. Now, that’s minor, small. That solitude doesn’t hurt anyone but yourself. But the solitude of power can hurt entire nations.”
When Gabriel García Márquez is in Havana (as the head of the Foundation of Latin American Cinema, he spends about half the year there now), Castro often stops by the house in Cubanacán twice a day. Sometimes he makes himself something to eat in the kitchen. He talks. When there’s time, they go fishing together. Often, they discuss books.
“He reads books almost every day,” Gabriel García Márquez said. “Most are books on economics, politics, or history. But about fifteen years ago, he told me he was tired of reading documents. I told him that one way of taking a break from documents is to read best-sellers. I don’t even read some of them myself. I don’t have time. But books like that don’t take a lot of effort to read.”
When making a trip to Havana, Gabriel García Márquez fills a suitcase with such books. Castro, a nocturnal being, has a small light in his limousine and often reads them while driving around at night. Occasionally, they truly absorb him.
“For example,” Gabriel García Márquez said, “I brought him Dracula, by Bram Stoker. That’s a book I’ve read, and it’s a great book, full of gothic horror, very well written, very erotic, not at all like the movies made from it. I remember Fidel and I were fishing at the beach. We stayed up talking until two in the morning, and then I gave him Dracula. The next day, when he came down to breakfast, his eyes were all swollen, and he said to me, ‘¡Qué cabron! The bastard! I couldn’t sleep!’”
Gabriel García Márquez obviously understand that Cuba is hardly the socialist paradise that his generation of Latin Americans hoped it would be. But his judgments about it are more aesthetic than political. He thinks the Communist Party daily, Granma, is a useless rag. He repeats the Cuban joke that there are three kinds of movies in Cuba: “the good, the bad, and the Soviet.” Cuban bookstores groan with unread tomes by Lenin and even the unspeakable Brezhnev, but young Cuban writers⎯and ordinary citizens⎯can’t find Hemingway, Faulkner, or even Gabriel García Márquez, and have extraordinary difficulty getting their own work into print. One reason is the chronic shortage of paper in Cuba, which is still subject to an American embargo. The result is a ”cultural catastrophe.” Gabo speaks with contempt about the Communist bureaucrats who order up thousands of copies of boring ideological tracts that end up unsold, unread, and rotting in warehouses, while other books don’t get published. ”Some bureaucratic imbeciles decides that this book is counterrevolutionary or that that book is not ‘politically positive,’ and they don’t publish them. But then they do publish totally idiotic books.” He said of one such tract, ”A convict wouldn’t read it while taking a shit.”
At lunch one day, he repeated a joke he had heard last year in the Soviet Union, and he implied that it had a Cuban context.
“A Soviet dog goes to Paris, and he meets a French dog. The French dog recognizes that he is from the Soviet Union, and asks why he has come to Paris. ‘Is it to eat our wonderful French food?’ ‘No,’ the Soviet dog says, ‘we have wonderful food too in the Soviet Union.’ ‘Is it to piss on our wonderful trees in the Luxembourg Gardens?’ ‘No, no,’ says the Russian dog, ‘we have wonderful trees back home in Moscow too.’ ‘Ahhh, then you must be here to make love to our beautiful and sexy French female dogs.’ The Russian shakes his head no and says, ‘We have beautiful and sexy female dogs back home too.’ The French dog is puzzled. ‘Then why did you come to Paris?’ And the Soviet dog says: ‘To bark.’”
I asked Gabo one day if he speaks with Castro about such things.
”We speak about everything,” he said quietly. ”But I would no sooner tell him how to run Cuba than he would try to tell me how to write a novel.”
His political identification with Castro, he says, comes from a shared vision of the future integration of Latin America, one he personally feels is ”not Communist, but pluralist.” He says that the major force in achieving that vision (which he traces back to Simón Bolívar) will be not Fidel Castro but the World Bank. ”Latin-American unity is being achieved by the foreign debt.” He sees the Latin-American alliance as being ”in no way against the United States, but in collaboration with the United States.” The vision gets him excited: ”Imagine an independent and autonomous Latin America, allied with the United States, in a world of peace and creativity! Sooner or later, that will be. I see it as an enormous ocean liner. There are first-class passengers, there are tourist passengers, steerage passengers. But if the ship goes down, we all go down together!”
Before I went to Havana, I called Rubén Blades, the Panamanian singer, who knows Gabo well, and has made an album of songs based on the writer’s short stories. He told me, “make sure you meet Mercedes. She’s the most important person in his life.” Gabriel García Márquez agrees; he says that she is still the most interesting person he’s ever met. The former Mercedes Barcha Pardo is a handsome woman in her mid-fifties, with dark, intelligent eyes. She handles all of the family finances, runs the household, oversees the sometimes abrupt moves of the man who calls himself ”a nomad.” She obviously allows Gabo his moments on the public stage; during our interviews, she never made an appearance. But together at lunch, there is between them the sort of humorous affection that comes only from long years as partners, through the joint terrors of hardship and success. She indulges his extravagances, corrects his imprecisions, and certainly doesn’t play the timid adjunct to the Great Man. A visitor gets the impression that she has been doing this since they met in Sucre, Colombia, when she was thirteen and he was eighteen, and Gabo immediately proposed marriage.
“Looking back,” he once told his friend the writer Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, ”I think the proposal was a metaphorical way of getting around all the fuss and bother you had to go through in those days t get a girlfriend.”
Whatever the reason for that initial romantic impulse, the love affair endured. In 1958, twelve years after they met, they were married in Barranquilla, and immediately departed for Venezuela, where Gabriel García Márquez was working for a magazine. Gabo had been writing fiction for twenty years when he had his great success; he had never received a cent in royalties, and supported himself with journalism, including a stint in New York as a correspondent for Prensa Latina, the Cuban news agency. (He resigned when the Stalinists of the Cuban Communist Party began to take over.) In all of his wanderings, Mercedes has been at his side. And by all accounts, he could not have completed One Hundred Years of Solitude if Mercedes hadn’t persuaded their landlord in Mexico City to let the rent slide for seven months. Those who know them say that she resembles many of the women in his fiction; they are almost always practical and stable, while the machos around them plunge into their personal extravaganzas. She has helped construct walls around him that protect his privacy, ensure his creature comforts, and allow him to write.
“You write better with all your problems resolved,” he said. ”You write better in good health. You write better without preoccupations. You write better when you have love in your life. There is a romantic idea that suffering and adversity are very good, very useful for the writer. I don’t agree at all. I don’t go so far as some writers, who jog every day. But I do believe that you have to be in almost athletic condition to write every day.”
He diets rigorously (”because I love eating”), tries to swim every day if a pool is handy, and drinks sparingly (”I hate waking up with a headache”). A decade ago, after years as a four-packs-a-day man, he gave up smoking (although Mercedes did not, a fact, Gabo says, ”that worries me very much”). His friends cite this regimen as an example of his discipline; he insists that he is not by nature a disciplined man.
“What I like most is the world of the *farándula,*of show business, nightlife,” he said. “To me, it’s enchanting to run around with singers, actresses, staying up all night, going to all sorts of parties. I’d like to run around with many beautiful women, different every day. And never work. To be a bum. To get up at any hour, without thinking.” A pause. ”But then I couldn’t write. And the only thing I ever wanted to in life was write.”
One afternoon, we talked about the new book, Love in the Time of Cholera, in which he pulls off a very difficult trick: he parodies the clichés of romantic fiction while simultaneously embracing them. He even provides an astonishing happy ending.
“I believe one thing,” he said. ”All my life I have been a romantic. But in our society, once youth is gone, you are supposed to believe that romantic feeling is something reactionary and out of style. As time passed and I grew older, I came to realize how primordial these sentiments are, these feelings. . . And as I approached sixty, I also realized that I was becoming more and more like my parents were when I first knew them.”
Gabriel García Márquez was part of a large family; his parents had twelve children, and, he adds with delight, ”my father had four before he got married.” Gabo was raised by his maternal grandparents until he was eight, and proudly remembers his grandfather as ”the biggest eater I can remember and the most outrageous fornicator.” When Gabo was growing up in Aracataca, thirty miles from Colombia’s Carribbean coast, and later in Cartagena, the lives of all the people around him seemed charged with the stuff of romantic melodrama.
“I realized at some point a few years ago that I wanted to be sincere,” he said. ”I had sacrificed my whole life to thinking in rather ideological or intellectual terms, while putting sentiments and feelings a little to one side. I wanted to break from all that and write a book that was totally romantic. Ad without being afraid of using the elements of romanticism: melodrama and sentimentality.”
He conceived a love story that takes place over more than half a century; it is full of anguished passions, sudden flights, absurd sacrifices, awful poetry, clandestine letters. And Gabriel García Márquez found most of his material close at hand.
“Since I was a little boy, I had heard my parents tell stories about their love affair, and these stories always appeared to me a little ridiculous. As I came closer to sixty, they seemed less ridiculous to me. They appeared more sublime and much more beautiful. So what I did was ask them to tell me more and more, tell me about their life together and their love.”
In the novel, the character called Fermina Daza is clearly based on the writer’s mother, Doña Luisa, who is still alive in Colombia at age eighty-four. The young man named Florentino Ariza, who falls instantly in love with Fermina when he is eighteen and she is thirteen, is based on his father, Gabriel Eligio García; (and partially on himself when he first met Mercedes). Both his father and the fictional Florentino are telegraph operators, and when Gabo’s mother was sent away by her family in order to cool a romance which they disapproved of, the young lovers maintained contact through the telegraph operators scattered throughout the mountains of Colombia (as do the characters in the novel). Juvenal Urbino, the third member of the triangle, is a doctor, which is what Gabo’s father started out to be; in some ways he is a projection of the man his father might have been if he had been able to finish his medical studies at the University of Cartagena.
”All of the first part of *Cholera,*the part about the juvenile love affairs, is literally the story of the love affair of my father and mother,” Gabriel García Márquez said. His mother’s family objected to his father not only because he was a mere telegraph operator but, worse, because he was a conservative, when they were liberals. ”Starting from there, I could easily imagine how my parents would have reacted if the opposition to their marriage had triumphed. If they had met again at the age they were when I started questioning them, what would the love of these old people have been? That was when I departed from their real love story to the fiction that they had not married and had met each other again at eighty. Because, you see,” he said, smiling broadly, ”during my investigation, I had also learned that they were still⎯at that time⎯making love!”
While preparing to write the novel, Gabriel García Márquez thought a lot about popular culture. “I am a great admirer of the bolero,” he said, singling out the songs of Agustín Lara. ”And I am fascinated by the telenovela—that form of soap opera that is so popular in the Spanish language. I believe most telenovelas are bad because they don’t have any literary quality. But the facts and the situations are real. They are the situations of life.” He smiled. ”We don’t know who said, for the first time, ‘I love you with all my heart’—but he was a genius, no?”
He began to reread certain books: Flaubert’s Sentimental Education and a number of books about plagues. One of his favorite books is Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (which he persuaded Fidel to read); he also read the plague section in Manzoni’s The Betrothed, and went back to the plague scenes in Oedipus Rex. It is certainly no accident that at various points in the novel the symptoms of cholera resemble the symptoms of romantic love.
“I’ve always had an obsession with plagues,” he said. “For one sole reason. In all my readings on plagues, I have noted that they always provided a motive for big fiestas, grand saturnalias, great occasions of joy. They remind me how, as we near the end of this century, when we are in great trouble and live with the permanent fear of a nuclear accident, people are spending more than ever. There’s no room on airplanes. There’s no room in hotels. There’s no room in the theaters, and the movie houses are always full. It’s like a time of plague, although I never conceived this novel as a metaphor for the time of AIDS. No, this book was conceived and largely written before we knew about that.”
Above all, he thought of the various, often absurd aspects of romantic love.
“Love has always exited, but, for most of us, being in love is an embarrassment,” he said one afternoon, grinning. “It is almost as if it were a form of plague, and we always look for a way to hide the signs. Love is total weakness. But since we are such machos, we don’t want to acknowledge that. In my novel, everybody is happy to be madly in love. There is no Latin American who has never secretly written love poems. Later, when they grow up, these verses embarrass them, and they hid them and say that nobody can see them, so that nobody can say that they surrendered to love. But now. . . now I get the impression that love is back in fashion.”
Although the new novel is not set in his mythical Macondo, and is hardly an example of Latin-American “magical realism,” it remains pure Gabriel García Márquez. And he is one of the few great modern writers who can make a reader laugh out loud.
“An author of radio soap operas said something once that appears to me to be extremely insightful,” he said. ”When someone asked him to what he attributed the success of his radionovelas, he said, ‘I start with the assumption that people want to cry, and all I have to do is give them the pretext.’” Gabriel García Márquez looked at me in a deadpan manner. ”I try to do the same, and the result is that people laugh.”
Even with all the traveling he does, Gabriel García Márquez writes almost every day. This has become much easier, he says, “since I made the greatest discovery of my life: the word processor.” One of those writers who need to make every page perfect as they go along, he was averaging a page of finished copy a day until he started using a word processor. ”Now I can do twenty, thirty, even forty pages a day! If I’d had this machine twenty year ago, I’d have published two or three times as many books.” He has a computer in each of his homes and carries his floppy disks with him when he travels. Since finishing the new novel, he has completed a play and is working on some movie scripts. He hasn’t reread the new novel. “I agree with Hemingway, who once said, ‘A finished book is like a dead lion.’”
With the help of Mercedes, he has also learned to deal with the solitude of fame. “It’s a war of self-preservation,” he said. But he has discovered that there are always new problems. He no longer writes letters, for example, because a few years ago he discovered that a person he thought was a friend was selling his letter to an American university. ”I don’t want my letters turned into merchandise,” he said. ”They belong to my private life.” One consequence of this decision is that he runs up staggering telephone bills, calling friends all over the world. “It’s got so bad,” he says with a laugh, “that I’ve been thinking of writing some letter and then selling them to pay the phone bills.”
At one point I asked him the old and standard question: why does he write? He gazed out the sliding glass doors that opened onto the green lawn and the still, Hockney-like swimming pool. He sighed.
“I can only give a literary response to that question, and it is not a lie: I write so that my friends will love me more. I have always said that. I don’t seek admiration. Or recognition. Or glory. I want them to love me. That’s the truth. That’s sincere. But it’s also very sad. In some cases where I believed they loved me, they did not; they loved to be with me because I’m famous. And it ended up being very depressing, because you begin to doubt—it’s very difficult to overcome that doubt.”
He sat back in the comfortable chair and made a little steeple with his fingers.
“But to answer the question about why I write: I am reminded of a phrase from Rilke. I don’t know the exact words, but it goes more or less like this: ‘If you believe that you can live without writing, don’t write.’ So: I don’t know why I write. But I know I could not live without writing.”
In the 1950s, Gabo wrote in a short story, “For Europeans, South America is a man with a mustache, a guitar, and a revolver.” Through the force of his talent and one giant masterpiece, he has helped erase that stereotype forever. There is certainly more to come. At one point, I asked him what he would be doing in the year 2000. He did some quick arithmetic, shrugged, and said, ”I’ll be seventy-three. My father died at eighty-four, and my mother is eighty-four. So I know with absolute certainty what I’ll be doing: I’ll be writing a novel.”
VANITY FAIR
RIMBAUD
Décès de Mercedes Barcha, veuve et inspiratrice de Garcia Márquez
DRAGON
PESSOA
Morre Mercedes Barcha, a mulher que tornou possível o sucesso de García MárquezRIMBAUD
Décès de Mercedes Barcha, veuve et inspiratrice de Garcia Márquez
DANTE
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