Gabriel Garcia Marquez (5 page)

MENDOZA
: In
One Hundred Years of Solitude
, the women establish order while the men introduce chaos. Is this how you see the historical role of the two sexes?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: The allocation of roles between men and women in my books was quite unconscious and spontaneous before
One Hundred Years of Solitude
. It was the critics, especially Ernesto Volkening, who made me conscious of it. I wasn't too happy about having it pointed out, because now I no longer create female characters with the same spontaneity as I used to. However, analyzing my own books in this light, I have found that it does in fact correspond to my view of the historical role of the sexes: namely, that women uphold the social order with an iron hand while men travel the world bent on boundless folly, which pushes history forward. I've come to the conclusion that women lack any sense of history. Otherwise, they could not fulfill their primordial function of perpetuating the species.

MENDOZA
: Where does this idea of yours of the historical division of roles come from?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Probably from my grandparents' house,
listening to stories of the civil wars. I've always felt they wouldn't have happened if women didn't have that almost geological strength which enables them to face the world so fearlessly. My grandfather used to tell me how the men would go off to war, guns over their shoulders, not knowing even where they were going, without the slightest idea when they were coming back, and, naturally, without worrying about what was going to happen at home. That didn't matter. With only their strength and imagination to rely on, the women were left behind to keep the species going, to create new men to replace the ones who died in battle. They were like Greek mothers bidding farewell to their menfolk as they went off to war with the words “Come back bearing your shield or borne on your shield.” Alive or dead, that is, but not defeated. I've often wondered if these attitudes, so typical of Caribbean women, aren't the cause of our
machismo
. Or rather, if
machismo
isn't a product of matriarchal societies in general.

MENDOZA
: It seems to me that you're always attracted by the same type of woman—the Mother Earth figure designed for procreation and epitomized by Úrsula Iguarán in
One Hundred Years of Solitude
. But there are other women in the world (you must have met them) who are unstable, castrating, or simply flirts. What do you do with them?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: These women are usually looking for a father figure, so the older you get the more likely you are to meet them. All they need is some good company, a little understanding, and a little love, and they are usually
grateful for it. I say “a little” because of course their solitude is incurable.

MENDOZA
: Do you remember the first time you were excited by a woman?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: The first woman to fascinate me was the one I mentioned earlier, the teacher who taught me to read when I was five. But that was different. The first to actually excite me was a girl who worked in our house. One night there was some music in the house next door and, completely innocently, she asked me to dance with her in the garden. The contact of her body with mine—I must have been about six—was an emotional cataclysm I still haven't recovered from. I've never felt with the same intensity again or with the same sense of abandon.

MENDOZA
: And who has excited you most recently?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: I wouldn't be lying if I told you it was someone I saw in a Paris restaurant last night. It happens to me so often that I've stopped counting. I have this special instinct. When I walk into a place full of people, I feel a kind of mysterious signal drawing my gaze irresistibly toward the most intriguing woman in the crowd. Not necessarily the most beautiful, but the one with whom I obviously have a deep affinity. I never do anything, I just have to know she's there and I'm quite happy. It's something so pure and beautiful that even Mercedes sometimes helps me to locate her and choose the best vantage point from which to see her.

MENDOZA
: You claim not to have an ounce of
machismo
in your body. Could you give us an example to prove this to any doubting feminist?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Not all so-called feminists have the same notion of what
machismo
is, nor do their ideas necessarily coincide with mine. There are, for instance, feminists who really want to be men and this defines them straight off as frustrated
macho
females. Others affirm their feminity by acting in more aggressively male ways than any man. So it's difficult to prove anything at all in this area. You can't prove it in theoretical terms, you can only show it in practice.
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
, to cite just one of my books, is certainly both an exposé and a condemnation of the basic
machismo
within our society—a society which is actually matriarchal.

MENDOZA
: How would you define
machismo
, then?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: I would say that
machismo
in men and in women is merely the usurpation of other people's rights. It's as simple as that.

MENDOZA
: The patriarch is a sexually primitive man. His double reminds us of this as he's dying of poison. Do you think the fact affected his personality or his destiny?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: I think it was Kissinger who said that power is an aphrodisiac. History demonstrates that powerful people are often afflicted by a kind of sexual frenzy, but I'd say
my idea in
The Autumn of the Patriarch
is more complex than this. Power is a substitute for love.

MENDOZA
: Yes, in your books, those who pursue and achieve power seem incapable of loving. I'm thinking not only of the Patriarch but also of Colonel Aureliano Buendía. Is this inability to love the cause or the effect of their lust for power?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: The way I see it is that the inability to love is what drives them to seek consolation in power; but I'm not very good at these theorizings, which in my case are always
a posteriori
. I prefer to leave it to others who do it better and get a thrill out of it.

MENDOZA
: The lieutenant in
In Evil Hour
seems to have sexual problems. Is he impotent or is he, perhaps, homosexual?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: I never thought the lieutenant was homosexual, but I must admit that his behavior does arouse some suspicions. In fact, in one rough draft there was a rumor to that effect going around the town, but I took it out because it seemed too obvious. I preferred to let the reader decide for himself. There's no doubt about his inability to love, however, although I wasn't conscious of it when creating the character. I only realized it afterward when I was working on the personality of Colonel Aureliano Buendía. In any case these two characters and the Patriarch are linked through power, not through their sexual behavior. The lieutenant of
In Evil Hour
was my first real attempt to explore the mystery of power (at the very modest level of a small town mayor) and
the Patriarch was the most complex effort. The relationship between them is clear. Colonel Buendía could very well have been the lieutenant of
In Evil Hour
at one level and at another he could have been the Patriarch. I mean that his behavior would have been the same in both instances.

MENDOZA
: Do you really think the inability to love is very serious?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: I don't think there's any human misery greater than that. Not only for the person afflicted but for all those whose misfortune it is to come within his orbit.

MENDOZA
: Do you think there should be any limits on sexual freedom? What should they be?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: We are all hostage to our own prejudices. As a liberal-minded man, I believe that theoretically there should be no limit to sexual freedom. In practice, however, I can't escape the prejudices of my Catholic background and bourgeois society, and like most of us I fall prey to double standards.

MENDOZA
: You're the father of boys. Have you ever asked yourself how you would have been with daughters? Strict? Tolerant? Jealous, perhaps?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: I've only got sons and you've only got daughters. I can only say that I feel as jealous about my boys as you do about your girls.

MENDOZA
: You said once that all men are impotent but there is always a woman to solve their problem. Do you think our masculine inhibitions are as strong as that?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: I think it was a Frenchman who said, “There are no impotent men, only unfeeling women.” In fact, although not many admit it, every normal man finds any new sexual experience terrifying. I think the explanation for this anxiety is cultural. He's afraid of making a fool of himself, and in fact he does so, because his anxiety prevents him from performing as well as his
machismo
expects. In this sense we're all impotent and we can only come out of it with our self-respect intact thanks to a woman's understanding. This is not a bad thing. It gives love a special magic because every time is like the first time and each couple has to start from the beginning again as if it were their first attempt. The absence of this emotion and mystery is what makes pornography so boring and unacceptable.

MENDOZA
: You sometimes missed out having a woman around when you were very young, very poor and totally unknown. Now that you're famous there are opportunities galore, but the need to keep your private life intact has turned you into that rare species—the man who's hard to get. Don't you ever feel resentful deep down that fate has treated you so cruelly?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: It's not so much a concern for my private life that stops me being a public ladykiller, so to speak, as the fact that I don't see love as a quick lunge with no consequences.
I see it as a reciprocal relationship which simmers and grows, and it's impossible in my present circumstances to have more than one of these at a time. Of course I'm not talking about passing temptations which arise from vanity, curiosity, or even boredom and leave no trace at all, not even from the waist down. In any case, I've been pretty sure for some time now that there is no cosmic force capable of upsetting what you call the order of my private life; and we both understand well enough what that means.

2. SUPERSTITIONS, MANIAS, AND TASTES

MENDOZA
: You said once, “If you don't believe in God, at least be superstitious.” This is a serious subject for you.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Very serious.

MENDOZA
: Why?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: I believe that superstitions, or what are commonly called such, correspond to natural forces which rational thinking, like that of the West, has rejected.

MENDOZA
: Let's begin with the most common examples. The number thirteen. Do you really think it brings bad luck?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: I think it's just the opposite, actually. People in the know make out that it has a jinx (the Americans have been taken in, hotels there go from the twelfth
to the fourteenth floor) so that nobody else will use it and they'll be the sole beneficiaries. It is really a lucky number. The same is true of black cats and walking under ladders.

MENDOZA
: You always have yellow flowers in your house. What significance do they have?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Nothing awful can happen to me if there are yellow flowers around. To be absolutely safe, I need yellow flowers (preferably yellow roses)
and
to be surrounded by women.

MENDOZA
: Mercedes always puts a rose on your desk.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Always. What's happened quite a few times is that I'm trying to work and not getting anywhere, nothing's going right, I'm throwing away page after page. Then I look at the flower vase and find the reason … no rose. I shout for a flower, they bring it, and everything starts coming out right.

MENDOZA
: Is yellow your lucky color?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Yellow is lucky but gold isn't, nor the color gold. I identify gold with shit. I've been rejecting shit since I was a child, so a psychoanalyst told me.

MENDOZA
: One of the characters in
One Hundred Years of Solitude
compares gold to dog shit.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Yes, when José Arcadio Buendía discovers the formula for turning metals into gold and shows his son the result of his experiment, he says, “It looks like dog shit.”

MENDOZA
: So you never wear gold.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Never. I don't wear a watch, or a chain, or a gold ring or a bracelet. You won't see anything made of gold in my house either.