Gabriel Garcia Marquez (3 page)

TRAVELING TOWARD EUROPE

“Yes … That's definitely why I'm going to Europe,” García Márquez says. “I'll leave Colombia next month and stay in France for a year to study film. I think I'll go to the film festival in Venice, before going to France … And already these days I'm not thinking as a writer but instead as a film director who can say in films the same things he says in books … Of course, the observation you've just made is entirely correct … If I want to be involved in movies, it's probably because I want to communicate my ideas to a larger audience … The cinema will enable this because more people go to the movies than read books … Of course this doesn't mean I'll stop writing, and if tomorrow I feel the urge to write a story I will write it—and, as I've said, I've almost finished my second novel.”

“Which do you find easier to write—a novel or a story?”

“It's definitely easier to write a novel than to write a story,” he replies. And then he adds, “Infinitely easier.”

“What was the name of your first published story?”

“I called it ‘The Third Resignation' and it was published in the
Fin de Semana
supplement of
El Espectador
, which was then edited by Eduardo Zalamea Borda.”

“Who is your favorite author?”

“Sophocles … Yes, Sophocles, go ahead and write it down. And another thing … To me
Oedipus Rex
is the best murder mystery of all time.”

“Why?” we ask him.

“Because in it the detective discovers in the end that he himself is the murderer …”

“In your opinion, which novel written by a Colombian is most in step with the trends of contemporary literature?”

“
Leaf Storm
,” its author replies without any hesitation. This response hasn't come as a surprise. We already knew that there was no other Colombian novel like his; we asked our question only to confirm our own opinion of the work.

LEARNING SLOWLY

“Which Colombian writer has, in your opinion, the most authentic literary calling?”

“It's hard to say … Because in Colombia, writers haven't realized that the first thing they have to do is learn to write … If the painter must first learn how to wield a paintbrush, the writer needs to know how to write before attempting to publish something … But because that requires sacrifice, discipline, continuous effort, our writers get discouraged, they feel they cannot set aside the large amount of time that they all need to set aside if they want to learn to write … And because of this, in the end, those who consider themselves writers don't begin by learning to write, and so they convince themselves that they don't have a real calling, and they give it up. See, all writers have something to
say, concepts to express, ideas … But, because they don't know how to write, they remain silent. That's what's going on.”

“Do you think our literature is in crisis?” we ask him.

“Yes, I think it is … I think there's a crisis; we are, without a doubt, emerging from it, and there's no question that we'll eventually get out of it completely. About this, I'm optimistic because I have faith in the future of our literature … But first, our writers, if that's really what they are, will have to learn how to write … Otherwise we won't overcome our current literary crisis …”

“What have you thought of the critical response to
Leaf Storm
so far?”

“Much too generous …”

“In your opinion, how can local newspapers best support young intellectuals?

“By not giving them any encouragement … By not publishing anything of theirs that isn't truly great. Really we don't have to worry about opening the doors of the newspapers to young writers. When they write something great, the doors will open on their own …”

The telephone has just rung. Someone is speaking, and García Márquez asks her to wait five minutes for us to finish our interview, which has already lasted two hours. Before we leave, we learn that he studied law for four years and then was on the faculty for six months, but that he doesn't remember anything from those studies because he spent all his class time writing stories …

We shake the hand he offers us, along with a polite, wide, and sincere smile, as he says goodbye. We leave feeling that the author of
Leaf Storm
is a strong and vibrant person who truly merits the admiration of those who have had the pleasure to know him and hear him speak.

INTERVIEW BY ERNESTO GONZÁLEZ BERMEJO

REVISTA CRISIS
,
ARGENTINA

1975

TRANSLATED BY ELLIE ROBINS

It's been said that “Lenin and the Beatles are the two most important things to come out of the twentieth century.” You could argue that Gabriel García Márquez, a synthesis of the two, is the third thing for Latin America. Now to find some new way to praise
One Hundred Years of Solitude
. I'll add just one thing, which I think is important: I believe that since the publication of that novel, we're much more aware of our identities as citizens of an enormous Latin American Macondo. Even Kissinger has turned to the novel in the course of his international Fu Manchu–style demagogy.

Since the coup in Chile more than a year ago—“a personal catastrophe for me”—he's given his life over to a noble obsession: supporting the Chilean resistance (“let's see if they start a revolution and I can get back to writing books”). If anyone proves that literature and activism aren't mutually exclusive, that in fact they're the opposite, it's him.

Now, as we walk with his wife Mercedes through the streets of old Stockholm and he observes that “Sweden smells like a first-class train carriage” and that “the Swedish are grown-ups even when they're very small,” he makes up his mind to eat some “spaghetti at Michelangelo in the
Gamla Stan,” since there's no alternative but to submit to an interrogation.

“Let's talk about literature,” he almost begs, “I haven't done that for a long time.” But after talking a little about
The Autumn of the Patriarch
, his film and TV projects, and the hundred stories he's writing in his free time, he'll be the one to return to Latin America; to the need to embark on a new kind of struggle, that of the imagination; and to Chile. Because he's the one who sent a telegram to “the murderer Pinochet” as soon as he found out that Allende had been killed, thinking that his fury might subside, “but as you can see, after all this time, my fury has not subsided.”

GONZÁLEZ BERMEJO
: Is
The Autumn of the Patriarch
coming out soon?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: It's with the editor. It'll be out in April. It's four hundred and fifty typed pages, much shorter than
One Hundred Years of Solitude
, which was more than seven hundred.

GONZÁLEZ BERMEJO
: We've been waiting for it for a long time. Onetti
^*
said a little while ago—and he's not the only one to think it—that
One Hundred Years of Solitude
must have weighed heavily on you while you were working on
The Patriarch
.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Every writer must write the book they're able to write.
The Patriarch
was more difficult for me than
One Hundred Years of Solitude
because I find each book more difficult than the last; the literary process gets more complicated every time.

GONZÁLEZ BERMEJO
: Why?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Because each book is a step forward.

GONZÁLEZ BERMEJO
: Precisely: after the seven-league stride of
One Hundred Years
, the next one can't have been easy.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: As far as my own personal process is concerned,
One Hundred Years
wasn't a larger step forward than the others.
No One Writes to the Colonel
took as much hard work as
One Hundred Years of Solitude
. For many years after
The Colonel
, I heard that I wouldn't be able to write anything like that again. I don't think of one book as being better or worse than the last; I just want to take that step.

GONZÁLEZ BERMEJO
: Onetti also said that you needn't have worried about giving
The Patriarch
a different treatment than
One Hundred Years
.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: But the subject matter demanded the treatment I gave it.

GONZÁLEZ BERMEJO
: Let's get to the subject matter, then.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Many people have said that
One Hundred Years of Solitude
is a symbolic distillation of the whole history of Latin America. If that's the case, then it's an incomplete history, because it doesn't say anything about the problem of power. That's the subject matter of
The Patriarch
. And now we can change the subject; let's not talk about it any more, since you'll be seeing it soon.

GONZÁLEZ BERMEJO
: Just one more thing: What did you discover about power while writing the book?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Many things. The thing is, when you write a book, you spend all day thinking about it. And I write my books so that I can read them.

My dictator says that power “is a lively Saturday”; he never finds out what kind of power he has; he fights for it every day; and toward the end, he says, “Damn it: the problem with this country is that nobody's ever paid any attention to me.”

GONZÁLEZ BERMEJO
: How old is the dictator?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Nobody knows; he was always very old.

GONZÁLEZ BERMEJO
: Tell me a little about the structure of the book.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: I can tell you that there's no dead time, that it goes from one crucial point to the next, that it's so
tightly packed that a few times I realized that I had forgotten something and had trouble finding a way to get it in.

GONZÁLEZ BERMEJO
: Is it a single movement?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: I'd say it's six, but it's not difficult to read; you'll see soon enough.

GONZÁLEZ BERMEJO
: What are your hopes for
The Patriarch
in terms of readership?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
:
One Hundred Years of Solitude
is about everyday life; I think that's why people were so interested in it. I don't know who it was that said that
One Hundred Years of Solitude
was the first picture of the intimate lives, the beds of Latin Americans; that's one of the things that grabbed readers most.

The Autumn of the Patriarch
might have fewer readers, because the problem of power, at the level I'm approaching it at, doesn't interest as many people. Although who knows if that'll be the case, because if you think about it, the problem of power comes up at home, at work, in taxis, everywhere.

GONZÁLEZ BERMEJO
: What's the central idea about power in the book?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: The disaster of individual power; if individual power doesn't work, the only thing left is its opposite:
real collective power. But let readers decide: you've already made me say too much about it.

GONZÁLEZ BERMEJO
: And after
The Patriarch
?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: I can tell you with my hand on my heart that I have nothing more to say in a novel; I've backed myself into a corner. So I'm terrified that I'll wake up one day and have nothing to do. I'm looking for a job, do you know of anything?

GONZÁLEZ BERMEJO
: I'm in the same position.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Until a job comes up, I'm working with Rui Guerra, the Brazilian director, on a film adaptation of “Blacamán the Good, Vendor of Miracles.” We've found that that story allows us to give a complete cinematic account of colonialism in the Caribbean, from the Spanish conquest to North American imperialism.

GONZÁLEZ BERMEJO
: I heard you were also doing something with Francesco Rosi.
^†

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Yes, we've been working on an idea for a few years. Rosi and I are old friends, and in the interludes between films, he comes to Barcelona or I go to Italy to see him.
I think we're nearly there now; what I can tell you in advance is that it will be a political film, quite an original discourse on imperialism—or at least, we think so.

GONZÁLEZ BERMEJO
: Any more visual work?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: For television. I wasn't very happy with the handling of the mechanics of La Violencia
^‡
in
In Evil Hour
. And now I've been given the opportunity—a rare one for a writer—to go back to it a little later. Now that I've had time to gain some perspective, and I think some maturity, I'm going to work on an adaptation of the novel for Colombian television, in twenty hour-long episodes. Little old ladies doing their knitting at three in the afternoon will watch something about La Violencia in Colombia, and whom it benefitted. And other people too.