Requiem with Yellow Butterflies Read online

  One enduring origin story about One Hundred Years of Solitude has Gabo and Mercedes driving from Mexico City to Acapulco for a beach holiday with their two sons in 1965. Gabo, an inveterate myth-maker about his own life, claims the novel’s famous, time-collapsing first sentence – the one about the colonel facing the firing squad and remembering ice – appeared fully formed in his mind as he drove. At that point, so the story goes, having found the structure for the novel he’d had in his head for 18 years, he turned the car around, drove straight back to Mexico City, and didn’t get up from his writing desk for 18 months. This little scene – the novelist cancelling the family holiday to work on his masterwork – gives such a good condensation of the single-minded and ruthless egoism we associate with a particular modernist archetype of the great male writer that it was surely invented or embellished by Gabo. Gerald Martin, the English biographer who spent more than 15 years obsessively researching every detail of García Márquez’s life, says the holiday was cut short, rather than cancelled entirely. Still, many of the 2014 obituaries repeated it verbatim – never let realism inhibit magic.

  In fact, the flood of inspiration lasted little more than a year. The novel was drafted between July 1965 and August 1966. Generations of fans and scholars have forensically combed through every detail of García Márquez’s work routine across that period for insight into how the magic was wrought. The production of the manuscript, thanks to Gabo’s mythomania and our own hunger for stories, has become a well-known narrative in itself. We know Mercedes worked to support the family and that García Márquez would drop their sons to school at eight in the morning, writing until it was time to pick them up again at two in the afternoon. We know that he two-finger-typed his drafts on an Olivetti typewriter, in a tiny office called ‘the cave of the mafia’ that was perpetually filled with blue tobacco smoke. We know that he corrected the manuscript by hand and gave it to his secretary, Esperanza Araiza, who typed it up, corrected his patchy spelling, and secretly read sections to groups of enthralled friends. Araiza was apparently so immersed in the story that a bus nearly ran her down in the street one day in Mexico City (again, this sounds suspiciously like García Márquez’s fiction).

  I suspect all the attention to the material circumstances of writing in Gabo’s 2014 obituaries – what kind of ink did he use? What brand of cigarettes did he smoke? What colour flowers were in the vase on his desk while he wrote the great twentieth-century Latin American novel? – stem from a certain twenty-first-century nostalgia for the cultural authority of the novelist before the age of television and the Internet. The fixation upon these early twentieth-century artefacts conveys a longing for modernist authorship and its trappings: the idea of the writer as secular society’s spiritual representative, and as a transcendent agent outside the market.

  Looking back on One Hundred Years of Solitude from the vantage point of Gabo’s death, we are also looking back on the dawn of the age of electronic media – not to mention the age of global celebrity. The novel tends to win comparison with works of high culture pre-dating electronic media: the Bible, Cervantes, Dickens, Melville. In fact, it was an exact contemporary of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (the worldwide sales figures of the album and the book are roughly comparable). Forget Cervantes and Dickens, then, the best parallel in the Anglo-sphere for Gabo’s blend of popular appeal and cultural kudos is John Lennon, whose untimely death in 1980 fuelled a similar outpouring of grief from fans and earnest hagiography from journalists.

  It is possible to argue, with no disrespect to One Hundred Years of Solitude, that what truly marks it as a transitional work in literary history is its coincidence with the globalisation of the media and publishing industries. Certainly, it was among the earliest global blockbusters to have been produced by a writer of the so-called periphery. Gabo’s opus arrived at a time when technological change was elevating the phenomenon of celebrity to a new level in the West and enshrining a new reflexivity in our culture.

  García Márquez was an important figure in the shift towards what Joe Moran has called a ‘meet the author’ culture. Undoubtedly one of the most seductive storytellers of our age, he was also a masterly manipulator of his own image. In interviews and various published pieces of autobiographical writing (including his 2002 autobiography, Living to Tell the Tale), the story of his life is driven by powerful narrative archetypes: the starving, exiled writer and his wife risking everything for the sake of art, succeeding at last through love, talent and hard work. None of this is necessarily untrue. But to uncritically accept the author’s own version of his life, as many of the obituaries do, or to focus exclusively on his individual genius denies the role of geopolitics. For just as Gabo’s star was rising, the Cold War, especially the Cuban Revolution, was focusing Western publishers’ and readers’ attention on Latin America in an unprecedented way.

  The marketing phenomenon of the Latin American Literary Boom was already well under way by the time Gabo sat down at his typewriter in the Cave of the Mafia. High-powered friends in writing and publishing, such as Carlos Fuentes, German Vargas, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Paco Porrúa, built anticipation in the Mexican, Colombian, Peruvian and Argentine media for Gabo’s ‘Work in Progress’ (a name that deliberately echoed Joyce’s long-awaited Finnegan’s Wake). By 1967, he also had an influential Barcelona literary agent, Carmen Balcells of Seix Barral, who was a crucial figure for many of the Latin American writers of the Boom. The novel’s initial print run sounds small in retrospect, but at that time, in that context, it was a risk for his Latin American publisher, Sudamericana, to print 5000 copies instead of their standard print run of 3000 (the run increased to 8000 two weeks before printing due to a high number of pre-orders). Within three weeks of its publication date, June 1967 in Buenos Aires (July in Mexico City), One Hundred Years of Solitude was that rarest of beasts: a number-one bestseller with a heavyweight literary reputation.

  The process of going global took much longer than it would today, but momentum built steadily. Translations were published in Italian in 1968, French in 1969, and English in 1970. Unlike Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar, Latin American writers whose international fame was conferred by the French, García Márquez found his most receptive non-Spanish-speaking audience among English speakers. The Times in London devoted an entire broadsheet page to the first chapter of the novel. The New York Times praised it to the sky: ‘You emerge from this marvellous novel as if from a dream, the mind on fire.’7

  Such enthusiasm for his work in the USA might have surprised Gabo. Although he’d spent a brief period as a journalist in New York in the early 1960s, he was later denied a visa due to his energetic promotion of the Cuban Revolution through the Prensa Latina news agency. There were even death threats from US-based Cuban exiles around the same time. But increased US interest in Latin American writing in the 1960s makes sense in a geopolitical context, as translator Suzanne Jill Levine observes: ‘The South American novel became important to readers in North America because in 1959, with the Cuban Revolution, Latin America became a major player in hemispheric and world politics.’8

  US soft power boosted the profile of many Latin American authors during the Cold War. It was at this time that Latin American Studies was widely promoted as a discipline in US universities. The American Association of University Presses, backed by money from the Rockefeller Foundation, set about publishing and translating Latin American writing. For all the talk of strengthening cultural ties and better understanding ‘our neighbours to the south’, there was also an ideological function to this activity.

  Cuba’s propaganda organs had seized upon the new Latin American narrative as a cultural symptom of the revolutionary mood they hoped would soon sweep through the region. Offering Latin American intellectuals opportunities in the USA was seen as a counterbalance, an important weapon in the war of ideas. In this context, the Centre for Inter-American Relations promoted Latin American writers through its literature program. ‘Every Latin Am
erican writer who receives due recognition at our hands is a potential ally,’ said translator Harriet de Onís.9 Many gifted US translators, trained through these initiatives, went on to work for the large commercial publishing houses, such as Knopf, Harper and Row, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and Grove, which would bring the Latin American Boom to English-speaking readers.

  Unlike several high-profile peers, however, Gabo never renounced the Cuban Revolution, and never softened his criticism of US foreign policy – he more or less refused to speak English to the end of his days. It is ironic, then, that both of his outstanding English translators, Gregory Rabassa and Edith Grossman, should be North Americans who honed their skills under the patronage of the Rockefeller family. With Rabassa’s help, One Hundred Years of Solitude lifted García Márquez’s name out of the cultural moment that shaped him – decades of political violence in Colombia, the Cuban Revolution, US Cold War intervention in Latin America, the rise of a new urban middle class in Mexico – and made it possible to call him a universal writer.

  Not long after One Hundred Years of Solitude was published, Gabo moved temporarily to Barcelona, with Mercedes and the boys in tow. His trajectory from the periphery of ‘world literary space’ (Pascale Casanova’s term) to its traditional European centre was nearing completion. In 1982, he would stand on a podium in Stockholm dressed in a guayabera, a baggy white cotton shirt worn on formal occasions in the Caribbean, and accept the Nobel Prize for Literature. It was a gesture that asserted his proud Latin American identity. His acceptance speech, ‘The Solitude of Latin America’, begins by confronting Europe from outside, from the impoverished South: ‘Why is the originality so readily granted to us in literature so mistrustfully denied us in our difficult attempts at social change?’10 But by its conclusion the speech has shifted to talking of ‘man’ and ‘humanity’. This is the moment of consecration, the moment Gabo steps out of the local, national, regional and Spanish-language contexts of his work and becomes García Márquez – universal author.

  The rest is postmodernism. In the later part of his career, the novelist moved between Spain, Mexico and Colombia; he became a multimillionaire who could afford to keep homes in Paris, Barcelona, Cartagena and Mexico City, the last of these perpetually heated at 28 degrees to emulate the Caribbean; he continued to publish fiction and journalism, some of it critically lauded, nearly all of it bestselling; and he endured a level of media scrutiny not even his prodigious imagination could have foreseen. In the end, the ‘death of the author’ – if we understand this to mean the author’s loss of control over the narratives told about his life and work – didn’t come from radical reading practices within the academy, but from the postmodern media. García Márquez’s name and image, by the end of his life, could be made to mean anything. A prisoner of his own success, he withdrew from all but a few press commitments, and would often answer questions: ‘You’ll have to ask my official biographer, Gerald Martin.’

  Martin’s Gabriel García Márquez: A Life is strong on detail but heavily swayed by Gabo’s charismatic spell: ‘If ever a subject was worth investing a quarter of one’s own life in, it would undoubtedly be the extraordinary life and career of Gabriel García Márquez.’ The biography praises even Gabo’s last novel, Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004), a book that may or may not have been written by an author already suffering from dementia. That work should never have been published. As Gabo’s powers waned through the 2000s, it was left to his biographer to resurrect the Sovereign Author’s God-like narrative control. In Martin’s final chapter, ‘Immortality: the New Cervantes’, the cantankerous, elderly novelist employs the familiar ‘tu’ as he cheekily summons King Juan Carlos of Spain to the launch of the Royal Academy’s fortieth-anniversary edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

  ‘You, King,’ says Gabo. ‘What you must do is come to Cartagena.’11

  In fact, Gabo’s death is a story of lost authorial agency. Just before three in the afternoon on 17 April 2014, Fernanda Familiar, a Mexican journalist and friend of the García Márquez family, pushed past the crowd in the cobbled street outside his home, weeping. Though she refused to answer questions, the press waiting outside the great wooden doors knew what was coming. More than a month had passed since his last public appearance (his 87th birthday), and during that period he’d been hospitalised for a urinary tract infection. He died like a king: holed up in his mansion with reporters besieging the gate.

  Another family friend, the Colombian writer Guillermo Angulo, soon hurried inside, carrying a suitcase and wearing a hunting cap. He, too, refused to confirm the news, but at half past four it became obvious to all. A grey funeral car arrived, company logos covered in an effort to keep the location of the ceremony secret. The paper covering had become transparent with the humidity, and journalists were able to make out the text below: ‘García López Funerals’. As the vehicle departed, someone picked a bougainvillea flower from the vine growing between the building’s barred ground-floor windows and lobbed it onto the roof of the car. A statement on behalf of the family soon appeared on Twitter, written by Fernanda Familiar. Gabo would be cremated at a private ceremony that afternoon; a public memorial would be held on Monday at the Palacio de Bellas Artes.

  But the public couldn’t wait that long. There were soon so many well-wishers on the Calle Fuego that a security zone needed to be set up around the main entrance and garage to keep them away. Candles were lit and left along the footpath to be extinguished by the afternoon drizzle. Six months later, when R and I made our own pilgrimage to the house, there were still offerings laid on the doorstep. The security guard across the street asked us what all the fuss was about. He admitted he’d never heard of the writer: ‘But I will have to read him now.’

  That security guard’s impression of Gabo, like those of all his future readers, will be shaped by the writer’s fame. Already Gabo’s own narratives are hard to separate from narratives authored by others about him, most issuing from centres of institutional power far removed from the muddy streets of Aracataca-Macondo, and even from his adopted home of Mexico City. With the sale of García Márquez’s private papers for a cool US$2.2 million to the Harry Ransom Centre at the University of Texas, US-based Latin Americanists can now pore over Gabo’s manuscripts and private correspondence with Fidel Castro at their own convenience. Sensitive to the writer’s man-of-the-people image and politics, his family took the unusual step of requesting that large sections of the archive be digitised and made available online. Meanwhile, journalistic accounts of Gabo’s life and work, often full of half-truths and hyperbole, circulate and recirculate online, reaching an audience beyond academic critics’ and biographers’ wildest dreams, beyond even Gabo’s book sales. ‘With famous books,’ wrote Jorge Luis Borges, ‘the first time is actually the second, for we begin them already knowing them.’12 Roland Barthes put it another way: ‘the text is henceforth made and read in such a way that at all its levels the author is absent.’13

  ‘Gabo died today,’ R had told me. But I still didn’t know where she was. Together, but still apart, we’d spoken or messaged most days for two months, watching word of Gabo’s death surge across the Web like the stream of blood in One Hundred Years of Solitude that flows through Macondo’s streets – under doors, up gutters, around corners – until news of José Arcadio’s death reaches his mother. In 2014, the stream radiating from Mexico City and Colombia burst its banks. Tides of real or affected sentiment poured in from across the world, from politicians of the right and left to popular entertainers and the world of high culture: Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Dilma Rousseff, Raúl Castro, François Hollande, Shimon Peres, Mariano Rajoy, Shakira, Mario Vargas Llosa. By the time the mourning subsided, thousands of ordinary people had posted tributes online: ‘Men like him never die,’ wrote Gerardo in Cuba; ‘See you soon, Gabo,’ wrote Rubén in Peru.

  The fiction writer’s obituary is a strange genre. By surveying the public surface of a life, it excludes precisely those sharply re
ndered, subjective, intimate corners of experience that characterise good fiction. A chronological record of life events, publications and awards received cannot, by its nature, capture the sound of a great writer’s voice on the page. Even the obituaries that strove to imitate García Márquez’s style in some way – emphasising sensory detail and personal anecdote – gave a sense of a hollow or absence.

  Indeed, what emerged most clearly from Gabo’s obituaries as a whole was not his personality as a writer or as a man, but the way every portrait of him was really a portrait of its author and audience. Colombians worked through their pride at his success abroad, their dismay at being abandoned. Granma, the official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, praised him as a defender of the poor and an ‘indestructible’ friend of Fidel Castro.14 Peruvian journalists rushed out to interview their own Nobel Laureate, Mario Vargas Llosa, whose friendship with Gabo famously ended in a still-unexplained 1976 fist fight. Vargas Llosa’s words were then reproduced in Spanish-language newspapers around the globe: ‘A great writer has died whose work brought great prestige to the Spanish language,’15 he said, neatly shifting the focus from nationalist enmity – the Peruvian versus the Colombian Nobel Laureate – to the two writers’ common linguistic heritage, shared with their readers.

  The English-speaking world brought its own variety of perspectives to bear on Gabo’s death. US-based Cuban exiles were most critical: ‘Only a five-star scoundrel would put his literary fame in the service of a cause as vile and malignant as the Castro tyranny,’16 wrote Humberto Fontova in FrontPage Mag. The Economist grumbled about García Márquez’s ‘weakness for the halo of power’,17 while the New York Times balanced criticism of his closeness to Castro with acknowledgement that he sometimes personally interceded on behalf of political prisoners.