Gabriel Garcia Marquez (11 page)

He mentions his friendship with Clinton. “Have you met? He's a wonderful guy! I never have such a good time as when I'm with him. AIDS is what he's really worried about these days, he's sincerely shocked and disturbed by how little attention the authorities are paying to the alarming spread of the disease into new zones, especially the Caribbean. They're not listening to him, but nobody knows more than he does about the issue.”

He takes us to see his home movie theater. “It's very difficult for me to make it to the normal screenings, I spend hours and hours giving out autographs at the door. This way they send the films here; otherwise, they invite me to private screenings.”

His passion for the seventh art isn't new: when he was young, he even dreamed of being a director, a dream his son Rodrigo, a constant presence at prestigious film festivals like Cannes, Locarno, and San Sebastián, later fulfilled. Rodrigo, in addition to having directed episodes of
The Sopranos
and
Six Feet Under
, is responsible for the feature films
Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her, Ten Tiny Love Stories
, and
Nine Lives
. “It's a good thing they're so excellent,” his father comments. “It would have been so horrible for me if I didn't think they were any good!” Rodrigo lives in Hollywood, and his brother Gonzalo lives in Paris. Both are currently staying with their parents, and they come and go as comfortably as they would have when they were children. Tomorrow, Gonzalo, a graphic designer and painter,
will explain to us that “Gabo wasn't one of those dads that plays a lot of games with you, but he talked to you a lot, and was very open with us about ‘grown-up' subjects. The kind of thing we'd do with him as kids was talk, and listen to music.”

García Márquez's attempt to keep his private life private is more and more successful as time passes, and he seems to have prevented his fame from robbing him of time for his sons, his grandchildren, and his friends. In the beginning, however, “fame nearly ruined my life, because it disturbed my sense of reality, much in the way power does. It condemns you to solitude, creates certain difficulties in communication that isolate you.”

Suddenly the phone rings, and the writer predicts: “It's Carmen Balcells, no question …” Mercedes picks up and, indeed, on the other end of the line the most famous literary agent in the world is speaking. The writer laughs heartily to himself: “See? The woman doesn't sleep. Nothing escapes her, she knows that we're talking to you right now … She has us under closer surveillance than ever.”

Carmen Balcells has been working with García Márqez since 1961, when no one believed in the young writer, who wouldn't become an international celebrity until the publication of
One Hundred Years of Solitude
(1967), which follows the developments of the Buendía family over several generations, as they encounter several characters including a baby with a pig's tail and a priest that flies. It is now considered the epitome of magical realism.

Rather than walk through Mexico City, Gabo suggests that we transport ourselves mentally to another city, namely Barcelona in the 1960s and '70s, where he lived for a time and wrote
The Autumn of the Patriarch
: “We arrived in 1967 with a two-meter-long alligator skin that a friend had given me. I was ready to sell it, because we needed the money, but I thought better of it and in the end we decided against it. It had traveled with us over half the world, as a kind of token of good luck. It all happened very quickly. When I lived in Barcelona I went from having nothing to eat—before, in Paris, I had even ended up asking for money in the Métro—to being able to buy houses for myself.

“I don't think that city surprised us much,” he explains. “It was as if we had already seen it. The reason I went there instead of anywhere else was Ramón Vinyes, that ‘Catalan wise man' who made an appearance as one of my characters in
One Hundred Years of Solitude
. In the Barranquilla of my childhood, he'd so vigorously ‘sold' the Barcelona he'd idealized in his memory, as an exile, that I was sure we had to go there.” When they moved to Spain, Mercedes Barcha and Gabo left behind the cosmopolitan, refined, and progressive Mexico, and the various circles of filmmakers, artists, and literary figures, full of exciting personalities and activities, for a calm Spain that was then in the final stages of Franco's regime. Barcha fondly remembers “it was all a little snobbish, the Barcelonans were just developing
discoteca
nightlife while here in Mexico there were already hundreds of them! There they even put on sombreros when they go out!”

“They were trying to outdo Paris,” recalls García Márquez.

“I've seen the show
Cuéntame
^†
and that's exactly how it was: Gabo and I had arrived in that world,” comments Mercedes, amused.

“It was as though there was some kind of covert loosening of morals, which centered around a
discoteca
called Bocaccio. To us it all seemed very old-fashioned,” Gabo agrees.

Barcha points out: “They—the Barcelonans—thought we would be the ones who were out-of-date, since we were from Latin America, but it was completely the opposite. I would walk down the street in my pants or jeans and people would stare at me like I was something very strange. One day I asked Luis Goytisolo's wife, ‘María Antonia, why are they always staring at me?' ‘Don't pay any attention to it,' she told me, ‘they do the same thing to me.' ”

The restrictions of Franco's regime weren't as stringent in Barcelona as they were in Madrid, the locus of political power, and the Garcías enjoyed the proximity of France. Gabo recalls, “We'd go to France to see the films we discovered in Perpiñán, like
Last Tango in Paris
. Sometimes we'd go to Paris for three days straight to get caught up on everything. Barcelona was our door into Europe: from there we relocated to London (where we learned English), Milan … We went to concerts, foreign plays … I thoroughly quenched my thirst for culture.”

Gabo and Mercedes experienced the bustling
gauche
divine
,
^‡
the evenings that never ended and the early mornings at Bocaccio, the blossoming of new literary journals, the political tension preceding Franco's death … They socialized with other writers who'd been drawn to Barcelona by “Mamá Grande” Balcells, like José Donoso or Mario Vargas Llosa, and they were visited by Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar, Pablo Neruda …

“Now I'm almost ashamed to say it, but those were very good years for us,” Gabo says. “In the Barcelona of the early seventies, people lived really well, though you feel bad admitting it. Only now, when you take a minute to think it over, you realize how sad it all was.”

Paradoxically, the Garcías left before democracy arrived: “We were in Bogotá when Franco died and, when we heard the news, we came back to Mexico. We thought that things were going to get very chaotic in Spain, that there'd be a lot of instability, and we weren't sure how the new Spanish government would react to
The Autumn of the Patriarch
, which was about to be published, and which narrated the decline of a dictator. I thought that they wouldn't believe I'd been inspired by Latin Americans, like Juan Vicente Gómez in Venezuela or ‘Papá Doc' in Haiti, who ordered that all the black dogs in his country be killed because he believed one of his enemies had been turned into one, or Maximiliano Hernández Martínez in El Salvador, who had all the street lights in the country covered
in red paper to combat a measles epidemic. I don't know how much sense this makes, but in the end Franco was for me too modern and civilized to be the dictator I had in my head and in my soul. You know, the best review of the book I ever had was from Omar Torrijos of Panama, forty-eight hours before his death, when he told me, ‘It's your best book: we're all exactly as you say.' ”

Gabo has a house in Barcelona, and says, “I keep going to that city, more or less every year, though my visit in 2005 caused too much commotion, because I hadn't gone in five years. When we arrive, it's always as though we never left. We wake up as if it were the most normal thing in the world, and we go out to eat with people who've been our friends forever. We go for walks and we watch ourselves grow older. We walk everywhere. They stop you sometimes, they yell at you from across the street, but with that distance Castilians always maintain, keeping their displays of affection in check. For example, we also went to Madrid a few times, where we have a lot of friends, but we didn't stay because we're more of a novelty there, whereas in Barcelona our presence has become quite commonplace. In Madrid, the word spreads to the journalists, the singers, the movie people, it turns into a constant celebration.”

Gabo continues trying to avoid the spotlight. He believes subtlety is always more effective, even in politics. He's maintained his friendship with Fidel Castro, but has distanced himself “through silence” from his more dogmatic stances, and has been instrumental in influencing the Cuban government to free political prisoners and soften their stances on certain issues. He's been politically active in many countries,
in everything from the liberation of bankers kidnapped in El Salvador to getting dictators to allow family members of dissidents to leave the country. In the course of this, he's had several experiences worthy of a James Bond movie or one of the novels written by his friend Graham Greene. For example, in 1995, Juan Carlos Gaviria's kidnappers demanded that he assume the presidency of Colombia.
^§
(The writer's response was: “Why would anyone choose to take on the responsibility of being the worst president of the Republic? … Let Gaviria go, take off your masks, and start promoting your ideas for change under the protection of the constitution.”) “I have always been more of a conspirator than a ‘signer,' ” he points out. “I've always achieved many more things by trying to straighten them out from the bottom up than by signing protest manifestos.”

One example of this covert diplomacy is that he now acts as a mediator for peace in Colombia, attempting to bring about some sort of agreement between the members of President Uribe's government and those leading the guerrilla group of the National Liberation Army (ELN). “Maybe we shouldn't talk too much about this, since it's still being worked out. It's not good to make declarations when you're in the middle of something. From the moment I was born, I've been hearing
talk of attempts to create peace in Colombia. Now, after much painstaking negotiation, they've finally agreed to have a conversation. I've participated in some of the first conversations in La Habana, and they went very well. I'm on good terms with both sides. These affairs, for a writer who's gotten used to success like me, are always very humbling, because in them so many different issues intersect.

“Violence has existed forever, and it's an ancient resident of Colombia,” he recalls. “What's at the root of it all is an economic situation that only increases the gap between the very rich and the very poor. And there's so much money in the cocaine business, tons of money! The day they stop that drug from being sold, everything will get much better, because that's what made everything get so much worse. The biggest producers in the world are all there. So much so that now they're not fighting for political power, like before, but instead for control of the drug. And the United States too is completely wrapped up in the whole thing.”

While posing for some pictures in the garden with his wife, Gabo says to her, laughing, “Now you see why I never give interviews, Mercedes. They start out seeming meek, and then they never leave. Now they're telling me to kiss you, what next? I bet they'd even ask me to say that I love you.” It'd be a superfluous statement, considering that they met when she was a thirteen-year-old girl and are still there before us, sharing their lives.

Before we leave, García Márquez asks us which Nobel laureates will be appearing in this series of interviews: “Ah, I see
that you've only chosen the good ones.” Confidently, every once in a while he grabs hold of his interviewer and it's impossible to see on his face any of the legendary shyness that, in Barcelona, made him be silent and tremble terribly whenever he had to speak in public. “I think that I must have social anxiety, like the Austrian Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek, because I can maintain a one-on-one conversation, but it terrifies me to address an auditorium of people. My shyness? I have the great advantage now that the people who come here are already intimidated … and that makes it easier for me.”