Gabriel Garcia Marquez (2 page)

García Márquez did few interviews in subsequent years, at least for English-language publications. I like to think it was my fault.

But he did talk to me again.

I was friendly with Patricia Cepeda, the daughter of one of García Márquez's friends back in the hungry days of Barranquilla, when he was just beginning to write and living in a whorehouse. Álvaro Cepeda died young but achieved immortality as a character in
Solitude
, whose manuscript Patricia kept in a safe deposit box.

In 1997, García Márquez and I met with Patricia as interpreter. The setting this time was more public. We went to a well-known bookstore café in Washington, D.C., Kramer-books & Afterwords. It was late morning. Washington, then as now, was not a place where people idled during the day, so the café was almost empty. The few slackers present did not look up from their cappuccinos. Their loss.

Perhaps because of Patricia's calming presence, I saw a third García Márquez not performing, not hassled, but truly relaxed. He loved to tease. I brought a few rare editions of his books, and he said I couldn't afford them on a journalist's salary and what was I going to do when the money was gone? Did I think he, the author of these books, was going to bail me out? He also said I was preoccupied with death, and when I had written up the first interview I tried to make it look like it was his preoccupation, not mine, which is an old trick. He pretty much nailed me there.

I saw him other times after that, more casual encounters. The last time was on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, where he was taking an afternoon stroll while Mercedes was browsing in one of the ultra-fashionable shops. He joked that he should go home and write something to pay for her purchases. Still mortified by Gringo's actions, I apologized again for him. (A few years later, Gringo won a Pulitzer prize, although not for writing about Mexico.)

In his sunset years, García Márquez did not feel compelled to say or publish anything at all. During one of his last public appearances, a radio reporter shoved a microphone in his face. “If I give you an interview I have to give an interview to everyone,” García Márquez patiently explained. The reporter was put out, as reporters so often are, and García Márquez tried to soften the blow. “I love you, young man,” he said.

García Márquez died in 2014, after several years of what is euphemistically termed “declining health.” I marked the occasion by rereading an early story, “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World,” a stunning parable of the way art exalts the most ordinary of lives. It is one of his greatest works, and I think the only time I surprised him in hours of interviews was when I told him so. “But it's a story for kids,” he said.

The second evening in Mexico City, he sent us off to a nearby restaurant. The food isn't great, he said, but you will have a good time. It was cavernous and dark, lit with torches on the walls and candles on the tables. The waiters fussed in a sympathetic way, and there was more silverware than I knew what to do with. They broiled an orange at the table, turning
it very fast over a flame to make a sweet coffee concoction. I had succeeded in what I had set out to do, and felt giddy enough to levitate. It was like being inside a García Márquez story, placed there by the master himself. Although the food, as he said, wasn't very good.

INTERVIEW BY ALONSO ÁNGEL RESTREPO

EL COLOMBIANO LITERARIO
, COLOMBIA

1956

TRANSLATED BY THEO ELLIN BALLEW

By now, the name Gabriel García Márquez is probably familiar even to those who read the daily paper but never pick up a novel. Newspapers have covered the story of
Leaf Storm
(
La Hojarasca
), which received such a favorable critical response, with a zealousness befitting its status as the greatest literary achievement our country has seen in months. It is our belief that the history of the novel will be divided into two eras: before
Leaf Storm
, and after—so completely does it transcend all that's preceded it.

When we learned that he was in Medellín for his job as a journalist—García Márquez is a staff writer for the newspaper
El Espectador
, where he published the popular series that recounted in a distinctively novelistic manner the experiences of a seaman named Velasco
^*
—we couldn't resist trying to interview him, in hopes of asking a few questions about his literary life, his interests, his reading.

We called to request a meeting and soon found ourselves
shaking hands with the author of
Leaf Storm
at seven at night in the lobby of Hotel Nutibara, as he was finishing up a conversation with the racing cyclist Ramón Hoyos, perhaps as part of his assignment for
El Espectador
.

Gabriel García Márquez, cordial and unaffected, asked that we follow him to his room on the eighth floor. We liked him immediately. After taking off his jacket and loosening his tie, he was ready to answer our questions.

A NOVEL WITHIN A NOVEL

“We've read that you spent five years writing
Leaf Storm
,” we say. “Is that true?”

“It is and it isn't … I began writing a novel in 1950. It wasn't the
Leaf Storm
that ended up being published. In the time just before 1950, I was working on a novel I called
La Casa
(
The House
). I was trying to write something like a history, you might say a biography, about a house, through the generations of people who lived there, because of course the house alone, without its inhabitants, was not an idea that lent itself to development. Still, in that first novel, I saw the house as the main character, and its inhabitants were something like the ‘motors,' or what imbued this work about the life of a house with action … In the end I'd filled up many notebooks and I worked out that if I published them they'd make a book with some seven or eight hundred pages … I decided to cut it down … I threw out about three or four hundred pages … When I set to work writing the new pages that would complete the novel, I suddenly discovered an idea
within the original idea, an idea that I thought might develop independently from the first one, that would form a new novel entirely. And I surrendered myself to that idea. When I first started, I thought the boy in
Leaf Storm
would tell the novel's entire story in monologues, but when I began writing I felt I needed another character, the mother of the boy, and later still another, which turned out to be the colonel. This explains the number of characters there are in the novel—three, not counting the hanged man, the doctor described in the monologues of these characters. This is why I think the process of writing
Leaf Storm
could be called spontaneous; that is to say, I just let it saunter out onto the paper as it came to me, and I hadn't drawn up any plan. Of course I was trying to do something like what Faulkner does in
As I Lay Dying
, where he has all his characters express themselves beautifully in interior monologues, and, maybe because he has so many characters, to prevent the reader from getting lost in the novel, notes the name of the speaker before each monologue begins.”

He's been speaking clearly, in a polite and convincing tone. We've put our cigarettes out and he orders some drinks for us, using the phone sitting on an illuminated table. As he pours his Coca-Cola into a cup, he comments, “I don't drink alcohol, except once every seven years!”

And he continues, while finishing his soda, “I've been surprised to see that, despite the modern tendency of my novel, any reader can understand it and discern its nuances … It's turned out to be an interesting experience; right now I'm hoping that one of
El Espectador'
s paper boys will read
it so I can get his opinion of it, and I'd like very much to know what the chauffeurs, shoe-shiners, and lottery ticket vendors think … I believe that the general public will like it … that it will be popular and that in this way it will prove that the contemporary novel can reach the masses … Anyone reading
Leaf Storm
can see that in the first chapter the author takes greater care to guide them through the monologues, so that it won't be hard to identify the character speaking at any moment … By the end of the work, the author leaves it to the readers to discover who is speaking on their own.”

“How much time did it take you to write
Leaf Storm
?”

“About a year. Of course I'm not counting the first efforts that I just mentioned, from which this new idea emerged … But in that year when I was writing, even if I do know that I was in Barranquilla for about half of it and in Cartagena for the other half, I ended up spending the whole time wandering through all the towns along that coast, including those in the Guajira: even when I didn't know where my bags were, I always knew where I was keeping the draft … I finished it and mailed it to Editorial Losada in Buenos Aires along with
Backwards Christ
by Caballero Calderón, and one of the two were going to be chosen for publication. They chose Caballero's and after that the draft of
Leaf Storm
was in Argentina for almost eight months. I got it back with a note saying that my work demanded a lot of effort from readers, and that this effort was not matched by the novel's literary quality … The
Leaf Storm
I sent to Buenos Aires had three parts; it was longer, maybe double the length of
what I ended up publishing. When I got it back from Editorial Losada, it didn't seem to have enough unity, I would have to rewrite it completely … I got rid of the third part, cut text here, added text there, such that in the end it was completely different. When I finally started talking to people in Bogotá about publishing the novel and they asked me to submit a draft, even then I wanted to cut more of it … I asked for a week's extension and got rid of a hundred pages more … I understood then that, during the five years I spent working on this novel, though I had thought that I needed to cut more, really there'd been something missing. And so you really have to write a lot, then cut, correct, tear many notebooks to pieces, before you can finally bring a few pages to the publisher …! It's at this point that someone who doesn't have a true calling to be a writer gets discouraged and declares him- or herself satisfied with just one book …”

THE SECOND NOVEL

“Are you currently working on a second novel?” we ask him.

“Yes,” he answers. “You see, the hundred pages that I mentioned a minute ago, the pages where
Leaf Storm'
s title came from, comprised something like a novel within a novel; the characters that paraded across those hundred pages that I cut from the draft only a moment before turning it into the publisher were not the same as the others in
Leaf Storm
; they seemed out of place there, even I couldn't recognize them as belonging to that first novel … Of course, the setting
through which they move is the same one that belongs to the colonel, his daughter and her son; it's Macondo … But the thing is that I like that setting … Because it feels familiar to me and because I believe there's a special charm to it, an inexplicable and poetic mystery, what's happening in the towns, what they're getting the last of … Already the towns like Macondo are not the same as they were before … My second novel will definitely have the same setting as the first, as will any others that I write, if I write them; it will be set in Macondo … And you won't be able to call it a continuation or a sequel to
Leaf Storm
 … It'll be like this, to explain a little more specifically: in my second novel I'm going to have some characters that live in the house next door to the one where the cadaver of the hanged man was left to sit … Those people, though they live in Macondo and are influenced by that same setting, will have different problems from the characters in
Leaf Storm
; you see how a distinct novel can be written, with the same setting and different characters … And that's why I believe that my novel is an example of
costumbrismo
 … I think that those writers that in Colombia are called
costumbristas
tried to do the same thing I propose for myself, and that is simply to give local customs and characters an air of universality such that they can feel familiar anywhere in the world … I can better explain the concept I have of the nature of
costumbrismo
 … 
Quixote
is
costumbrismo
to me … By which I mean, I define
costumbrismo
as any work that fulfills that same purpose, that exposes the local within the universal.

“My second novel, which will definitely be out within
the next few months, will be titled
Los Catorce Días de la Semana
(
The Fourteen Days of the Week
).”
^†

LITERATURE AND CINEMA

We've gotten off-topic while relighting our cigarettes. He has been speaking very passionately. We feel the urge to take careful note of every word, every thought, but it's impossible. The ideas crowding into his mind are converted into agile sentences streaming out of his mouth. If he is really this eloquent, he is surely always a good conversation partner.

“I believe,” he continues, “that the novel must have some purpose … Beyond being read by readers … The novel must have a goal, must contain some intention of the author's, distinct from the intention that it be read …” These last words convince us to share with him our thoughts when we learned, while following him into the elevator earlier, that on returning to Europe he plans to study filmmaking. We tell him that we think we see behind his impulse the same reasoning that brought the novelist Curzio Malaparte and the lawyer André Cayatte to direct films. These writers have come to believe that through film they can spread their ideas more efficiently. This is because the medium is accessible to the average contemporary person, who goes to the cinema to assuage today's universal need for diversion, and not just to the cult minority that reads books. We mention films
like The Forbidden Christ and those directed by Cayatte, in which one finds not only technical excellence, but also an obvious attempt to convey certain concepts and ideas to the viewers.