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Gabo was... simply... a higher being.
Every time you read one of Gabo's books,
you feel like you want to read more from him.
His charm. His special way of looking at life.
The most famous writer to come out of South America and the whole world.
He is our greatest pride, the greatest that we, Cataqueños, could ever have.
The literary world
is in mourning this afternoon,
as Colombian Nobel prize winner Gabriel García Márquez
has just passed away in Mexico City.
...we, fable weavers, who believe everything,
feel entitled to believe that it is not too late
to undertake the creation of the opposite utopia.
A new and sweeping utopia of life,
where there is no one to decide for others, down to the way they die,
where love is really true and happiness is possible,
and where the families condemned to live one hundred years of solitude
will have, at last and forever,
a second chance on earth.
García Márquez was the first contemporary classic I read.
And One Hundred Years of Solitude was one of the novels
that made me realize that this was what I wanted to do with my life.
No one can be a writer if they're completely satisfied.
All of literature is born from a certain dissatisfaction
with life, with one's life story, with the world as it is,
and writing is an attempt to correct these deficiencies.
How on earth did a boy who came from a small town on the Caribbean coast
end up writing a book that transformed
twentieth century Western literature?
First, one must look for the answers in his childhood.
Gerald Martin has spent two decades researching the details of his life.
It was a small town of between five and ten thousand inhabitants.
It was unknown to the world and it still is.
At the same time, it was going through its most important moment.
The United Fruit Company was everywhere in northern Colombia.
There were Gringos, Jamaicans, people from all over the Caribbean
coming to work in Aracataca.
So obviously, as it was a booming town, there were a lot of quarrels, fights,
a lot of alcohol, brothels, and plenty of violence.
It was a town where lots of things happened.
Macondo, the magical world in his books,
was inspired by Aracataca, where he spent the first nine years of his life.
"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad,
Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon
when his father took him to discover ice.
Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses back then,
built on the bank of a river of clear water
that rushed along a bed of massive, white
polished stones that looked like prehistoric eggs.
The world was so new that many things did not have a name,
and, in order to mention them, it was necessary to point at them."
He was born in his grandfather's house.
His mother and her husband, Gabriel Eligio, had been banished.
Her family was one of the wealthiest in Aracataca and they did not approve
of her marriage to someone who was from a "grim" area of northern Colombia.
He was an adventurer, a romantic.
When the boy turned one year,
his parents, Luisa Santiaga and Gabriel Eligio moved to Barranquilla.
She had had another child and took that child with her,
leaving Gabriel behind.
What was that child bound to think?
That he had been, "abandoned."
"It's a recurring dream which persists even now.
What is more, every single day of my life I wake up with the feeling,
real or imaginary, that I have dreamt of myself in that house.
It is not that I have returned to it, but I am there all the same.
My age is unknown and I have no particular reason to be there.
It is as though I had never left that big, old house."
It was the greatest of joys, because when you're a child,
you love big spaces to run, jump and do whatever you want.
Even more so when we knew it was our grandparents' house,
where we could do anything we wanted
because nothing was forbidden there.
When his family moved out, at that moment they left...
They went to work elsewhere, I obviously don't remember exactly where.
Little Gabo was then left under the care of his grandfather and grandmother.
To his grandfather,
he was his little Napoleon, as he called him,
and little Gabo spent a lot of time with him.
My grandfather was a very considerate person,
perhaps due to his lifestyle and his earnest nature.
My grandparents were somewhat cultured,
even without having had a formal university education or anything.
Grandma was superstitious.
She would instill fear in us about everything.
We were all cowardly and easily-frightened.
If anyone suddenly opened an umbrella inside the house,
she would tell them to close it or someone would die.
Little Gabo would ask her why and the question scared her.
He was the darling of the house.
In the afternoon, you would hear
frogs croaking in the garden
and she would tell them: "Come by tomorrow and I'll give you salt."
Because she believed that they were witches.
To me, it was a very strange life.
The women who lived before my grandmother
lived in a supernatural world.
A fantasy world where anything was possible.
Where the most wonderful things were commonplace,
but Grandpa was probably
the most concrete person that I've ever met.
And he told me stories about the Civil War.
The vicissitudes of politics.
He spoke to me as if I were an adult.
So my life was divided between these two worlds.
García Márquez's grandfather,
Colonel Márquez, played a crucial role in the Thousand Days' War,
the civil war between conservatives and liberals,
in the early twentieth century.
It left an incredibly negative legacy in Colombia.
On festivities,
when Gypsies arrived and the fruit vendor, the candy vendor arrived,
the circus would come.
I remember that magician doing prestidigitation things.
He did all these magic tricks that fascinated little Gabriel.
On the one hand, there was fascination for the intense life of the people,
on the other, there were fears and experiences that were hard to explain.
My thesis is that García Márquez thought...
he was buried in his grandfather's house.
Living in a house of elderly people.
A grandfather who talked about death all the time,
a grandmother, who was an extraordinary, superstitious woman,
and, according to whom, there were ghosts everywhere.
It was an eerie, magical childhood, with all those things he made up.
But at the same time, it was also a very bleak childhood.
When he was nine years old, his father came looking for him.
García Márquez went off to live with his parents for the first time.
If Aracataca is Macondo, Sucre is the darker,
more sinister town of his other early works.
My dad, I think, was a regular guy,
he had a license to practice homeopathy,
so he combined this trade with a pharmacy he owned,
and in this way he was more or less capable of supporting the family.
Gabito used to say that he held some sort of suspicion
because my dad was a strong guy.
His father was sometimes away for months
and left the family incredibly impoverished.
García Márquez was his mother's rock.
My mom always liked us to use the right word,
she read us stories from the Sunday paper.
We got to primary school, already knowing how to read
because she had taught us.
When he was a child in Sucre,
I think he was quite innocent.
His father was very different from the Colonel.
His attitude towards sex and relationships with women...
was more typical of what you would expect from the coast.
Isidro Álvarez is a writer from Sucre who shows me around the key places,
and I worried a bit about
the possible rift between fiction
and the reality that I was about to see.
Here in this space, just outside the village,
was the location of La Hora,
the brothel where all young men in this town lost their virginity.
García Márquez was also initiated there, when he was barely twelve years old,
by one of the girls who worked at the place.
In most of his interviews,
he says it was a wonderful thing,
and that he discovered sex and that somehow... "Thanks dad", and so on.
However, there is an interview...
that he later confirmed with me,
where he says it was the scariest thing that ever happened in his life.
Later he had many other far more positive experiences in his teenage years.
Shortly after this radical change in his life,
he heard of the death of his grandfather.
Its impact further strengthened his perpetual horror of death.
I think that was the breaking point, because he later states
that after his grandfather's death, nothing seems to be of interest to him.
When Grandpa died, the world was over, it was completely over,
but the memory of Grandpa, who supported me the most
so that I could do what I most wanted,
which was to express myself. That was Grandpa's memory.
It's hard to forget a grandfather like that.
It would take García Márquez many years
to transform the reality of his childhood into fiction.
The diverse themes and atmospheres in his books,
the war stories, his grandmother's ghosts,
the world, sex, the fear of incest,
all of that is rooted here.
It is very difficult to imagine
what Colombia was like in 1943.
I was in a house
where a sibling was born every year.
Then I realized that leaving was the only possible alternative,
so I decided to go from Barranquilla to Bogota,
to sit for a scholarship exam.
I went on a boat that crossed the Magdalena River.
It normally took eight days to get there,
but if the boat broke down, depending on the time of year,
it could take up to fifteen or sixteen. You never knew.
Besides, you didn't mind if the boat broke down. It was a party.
That boat was at times a two-week party,
where you danced, where García Márquez sang
all the songs he knew by heart, non-stop.
Gabito was a born musician,
I was convinced he had become a singer.
The Magdalena River quickly became a metaphor,
because it was the route he took to get from his culture, his family,
to the distant, cold, remote places of the Colombian capital and its environs.
The coldness and remoteness were not only geographical, they were also existential.
I arrived alone in Bogota, in 1943,
at four in the afternoon, at Savannah Station,
and found a gray city, an ashen town,
with rain, with trams
that would throw sparks when they touched corners
and in which everyone held tight, while standing up.
All men were dressed in black and wore hats,
and there wasn't a single woman in sight.
The first thing García Márquez noted, was the deep despair
he felt upon arriving in this icy, rainy city,
then seeing a line of people that went around the block and bursting into tears
at the realization of his loneliness in this hostile place,
where he didn't know anyone.
The first days of his new life were marked by drizzle and cold.
He was surrounded by people he didn't know.
These things combined lead García Márquez to two revelations
that I consider crucial, in order to understand his literary vocation.
These revelations are solitude and nostalgia.
I had written, perhaps, not one but two stories.
I put them in an envelope
and sent them to El Espectador.
The following Saturday, I went outside,
went into a café on Seventh Street
and saw a guy who had opened the literary supplement of El Espectador.
It showcased the title of my story, covering the width of eight columns.
It was published in Eduardo Zalamea's section "The City and the World",
with a note
in which he stated that he hoped the supplement's readers had realized
that a new writer had been featured, a writer they'd never heard of.
And he paid a great a deal of compliments to this writer,
And my thought at that moment
was that I'd got into a hell of a mess,
because there was no way back,
so I had to remain a writer for the rest of my life.
"He was in his coffin, ready to be buried, and yet he knew he was not dead.
He knew that if he tried to get up, he would be able to do so with ease,
at least spiritually,
but it wasn't worth it, it was better to let himself die there,
dying of death, which was his illness."
This meeting must have taken place around 1947.
It was at a café, in Bogota. Back then downtown Bogota was full of cafés.
I was to meet up with an old friend who had been a fellow student at school
and who had been in university with García Márquez.
I was talking to her when Gabo,
as we now call him, walked in.
He was the typical guy from the Caribbean.
He was too exotic for Bogota back then.
He was flirting with the waitress too,
and I started to stare at him in horror.
He was there for a while and then left.
I think he had a beer or something. He paid and left.
Then my friend told me, "Look, that boy is in university with me,
but he's a lousy, lousy student.
His life is totally crazy, he lives around here in a student home,
he drinks booze" and so on.
"It's a pity", was our conclusion.
He's got talent, but he's a lost cause.
He returned to Sucre during the holidays.
The ambitions of the family, which had eleven children by then,
were all focused on his career in Bogota,
Meanwhile, he had fallen in love with a local girl.
What was here Isidro?
It was the home of the Barcha Pardos.
Mercedes Barcha lived in Sucre, right in this house.
It was a pharmacy owned by Demetrio,
and García Márquez went there to talk to Demetrio.
It was as if he was more in love with Demetrio Barcha than with Mercedes.
He fell in love with Mercedes when she was nine and he was fourteen.
He would walk around the pharmacy where Mercedes worked
because he did not dare to talk to her.
Mercedes was in those days an archetype to him.
She ignored me.
Men really go for that, for being ignored.
Pieces of Mercedes have been scattered throughout my books, pieces everywhere,
entire characters
who appear in One Hundred Years of Solitude, one even bearing her name.
García Márquez always knows
where to be when things are happening.
Gaitán was a great popular leader.
As a journalist, I knew
Castro's rallies, also Peron's,
and they cannot compare with the passion
elicited by Jorge Eliecer Gaitán.
He was a different type of liberal.
Everyone thought that he was two or three months
away from becoming President.
He was killed while I was walking with my father.
I was there. We heard the three shots.
I went down, and got there before everyone else
because they had just caught the murderer
and I was left kneeling in front of Gaitán's body.
García Márquez, was at his student house, some 330 yards away from the scene.
He could go out, see the body, see the crowd.
Gaitán's supporters could not accept what had happened.
They burned the whole city center,
burned García Márquez's student house.
They burned everything.
Not only did this split Colombia's history in two,
it also divided Colombia's literature in two,
because a whole literary phenomenon began to emerge from there,
it was called "the novel of violence". This concerns García Márquez directly
because narrating the violence
had also become an obsession to him.
He would try to do this, departing from the theory that
what matters in the novel of violence is not the dead,
but the living who are left in a cold sweat, in their hiding places,
waiting for the moment when death will finally catch them.
He fled to the coast, but not to his home.
He went to Cartagena,
and arrived with nothing, no possessions, no money.
He went looking for work.
García Márquez moved from Bogota to Cartagena in a state of despair,
not knowing where he'd sleep, where he'd live, where he'd work.
A few months earlier, on the 8th of March of that year,
the newspaper El Universal had just been launched.
Clemente Manuel Zabala greets the young García Márquez.
Zabala got excited when he asked: "what is the young man's name"?
and heard: "Gabriel García Márquez."
He said, "are you the one who published some stories
on the Saturday supplement? I liked them very much.
And the following day, García Márquez's first piece was published.
It was about the oppressive state
in a militarized Cartagena.
"We, city dwellers, had already become used
to the brass throat announcing the curfew.
The clock at the mouth of the bridge,
looming again over the city,
with its clean, whitewashed convalescence,
had lost its standing as a familiar thing,
its irreplaceable place as a domestic animal..."
It's really good...
Journalism soon lead him to Barranquilla,
a much more open and cosmopolitan city,
where he made friends who would change his life.
García Márquez met a group of people,
journalists, writers, sculptors, painters, hunters, fishermen,
a very mixed bag... bohemians.
The Barranquilla group is one of the most important things
that happened to García Márquez.
It was a group of people that devoured the world
through literature, through painting.
A group of people that held literature as the most important thing in life,
but it was not something that had to be taken seriously.
Ramón Vinyes, a Catalonian expatriate, and a bit of an adventurer,
who had come to Barranquilla at the turn of the century,
introduced them to authors, and transmitted a notion of literature,
which I believe, defined in more than one way, García Márquez's vocation.
It's that whole idea of never letting others read one's drafts,
yet constantly telling them the story one is writing.
Telling it to friends, telling it to the wife, telling it to the people.
To García Márquez, literature
was never something that could be understood without friendship.
His mother went to Barranquilla, looking for him,
asking him to go with her to Aracataca, for the first time,
ever since he had left as a child, so that they could sell the house.
He has said many times that he had an epiphany at that moment.
Upon going to Aracataca and seeing for the first time, after so long,
the dusty streets, the broken houses.
Upon witnessing thus the passing of time,
he became aware, for the first time, of the value of his own experience.
After several drafts, he finally had a novel
of which he was relatively proud. He sent it to Argentina,
to a publishing house, Editorial Losada,
and Guillermo de Torre, Borges' brother-in-law,
not only rejected the novel, but also advised him in a note
to find something else to do.
"Literature is not for you."
It was obviously devastating.
Leaf Storm, which was the novel, is undoubtedly...
nobody says it, but I state it right here and right now,
is one of the first major avant-garde works in Latin America.
It is an extraordinary thing.
For a young man of 22 or 23 years of age,
it was almost a miracle.
He then returned to Bogota
and with the help of a friend, Alvaro Mutis,
he got a job in the El Espectador newspaper.
Gabo came to El Espectador and the first impression he had,
according to others, I got to meet Gabo later...
This man showed up in these colorful shirts...
and everybody went "who is this nut?".
His native Caribbean flair emerged, even in his behavior.
Throughout his life, Gabo gradually changed those colors.
But esthetically speaking, he wanted to be very different from us,
folks who lived in Bogota.
He wrote film reviews and enjoyed it, but eventually got a bit bored of it.
He wanted to be a reporter.
He ceased to be the typical
Latin American chronicler,
who writes inventive, imaginative things.
García Márquez started writing articles that were simultaneously literary works.
"The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor" is impressive
because this is a story that appeared
in all of the papers, all of them.
After working a month and a half on "The Shipwrecked Sailor",
he sat down, he went back, he traced the story back
and began to write it as if it were a novel.
Well, El Espectador's sales soared.
People were buying El Espectador just to read
the next chronicle García Márquez would publish,
regarding a story that everyone had already told.
This was clear proof of how García Márquez was learning
to transform a reality that had been told a thousand times
into something new.
At that moment, he already had, like a magician,
the technique to fascinate the public.
He would still need some time to learn
how to use it in his own stories, with the material from his own biography.
El Espectador sent its star reporter to Europe, as a correspondent.
The first dream of my life finally came true.
This dream was to be able to sit down and write,
without anyone bothering me.
And I sat down to write No One Writes to the Colonel.
I knew the story of my grandfather,
who waited his whole life for his pension,
as a veteran of the civil war,
but this pension never came.
I met up with friends who were Colombian poets and writers
and we talked a lot about literature. When Gabo showed up at that café,
I had already received the book Leaf Storm, his first novel.
I was very interested and we started talking,
but we had read the reviews and thought that Colombian critics
exaggerated when they compared it to Proust and stuff like that,
so we criticized the novel.
We said it was strongly influenced by Faulkner.
We found him a little presumptuous.
He had changed completely.
He no was no longer the boy from the coast but a formally dressed guy.
He was somewhat distant.
He had been heavily influenced by the world of Bogota.
Two days later, I invited him to dinner and it started snowing.
When we left the restaurant, Gabo looked at Boulevard Saint-Michel.
It was completely white. White trees, white cars,
and then he shivered.
He had never seen snow, ever,
he'd read a lot of stories about it, but had never seen it.
His face trembled and he said "shit"
and ran off,
like footballers when they score a goal, exactly like that.
He would run and raise his arms, and fall down.
We then became friends.
I had invited a friend to one of my poetry recitals,
he was a very nice Portuguese guy,
who had met Gabriel at the Geneva Conference.
Gabriel says he told him,
"a lady reciting poetry is the most boring thing ever.
No way, I'll wait at the café."
The Mabillon Café.
We actually went down there and I met him there.
He was kind of... he looked just like an Arab.
He looked Algerian,
because he had that big mustache, like Arabs always do,
he had curly hair, he was this thin.
He was not my type at all. Not at all.
From the very start, I was fascinated by the way he spoke.
He spoke with such magical images.
I would say, "what a wonderful twilight"
and he would say "it's my gift to you."
He was very tender. The word is tenderness,
a great tenderness.
Poets are almost always prophets.
Gabriel himself was a bit of a sorcerer, a bit of a prophet.
He was with me and we walked down Boulevard Saint-Michel.
It suddenly occurred to me to buy Le Monde
and I read the news about El Espectador closing down.
I said, "look, they closed your newspaper".
He wasn't able to pay the hotel.
Madame La Croix, the owner, an exceptional woman,
didn't throw him out. She put him up, in an attic, on the top floor,
and he lived there, writing.
Problems began to arise there,
because I could not see myself working,
and going to and fro, trying to make a living,
while he did nothing but write.
Write and write and write.
And I would often say to him,
"that's not possible, you have to do something".
And he didn't know how. He only knew how to write.
The hardest thing began then, yes.
Because this story, I don't know. I've never wanted to talk about this.
Having a child was impossible, absolutely impossible.
I did my best not to have it.
There was no reaction from him. He was totally devoted to me.
I mean, anything I'd wanted could have happened.
At that very instant, I finally decided to leave,
and that is when he said goodbye at the station.
He followed the train for a little while, like that, you know what happens,
the train starts off slowly and then goes straight off and that's it.
We were sad, because, in spite of it all,
there was this strong bond between us all the same.
We stayed friends, in spite of it all.
"The woman continued in a smooth, fluent, merciless tone.
'Everybody will win with the rooster, except us.
We're the only ones who don't have a cent to bet.'
'The owner of the rooster is entitled to twenty percent.'
'You were also entitled to get a position
when they made you break your back for them in the elections,'
the woman replied.
'You were also entitled to a veteran's pension
after risking your neck in the civil war.
Now everybody has their future assured and you're dying of hunger,
completely alone.'
'I'm not alone, ' the Colonel said..."
He wouldn't give up writing,
he wouldn't, and finally, he gave me... I was one of the first readers...
of No One Writes to the Colonel.
I had always thought that this story would suit a comedy,
but when I was in Paris, I would take some money from the nightstand,
I'd go downstairs, eat at the corner and go back up
until the day I no longer had a single penny.
I started sending an S.O.S. to friends.
This was the seventh floor, no elevator,
and I would go down, I'd see there were no letters for me,
and I would then go back up and add one more page.
Then there was a moment when the story,
what I was writing, matched reality.
and that is why I think, against the opinion of all the critics,
that the best book I've written,
I mean, if I've ever written a masterpiece,
said masterpiece is No One Writes to the Colonel.
He had a very hard time getting No One Writes to the Colonel published.
García Márquez went back to journalism.
But first, he traveled around Eastern Europe with his friend, Plinio.
They had a close look at Soviet Socialism and experienced it first hand.
They suffered, in various ways and degrees, something akin to disappointment.
García Márquez returned to Latin America
to work with Plinio and, three months later,
he married Mercedes, in Barranquilla.
She was a woman who was absolutely allergic to excess,
an organized woman, discreet.
From the start, he chose a woman,
who was simultaneously elegant, somehow superior, intelligent,
but who was also local. She was from the coast.
"A socialism that can be touched with the hands
is the type of socialism that Cubans
are building, according to their needs and possibilities,
with exemplary passion and seriousness,
but always laughing and putting into each of their acts that deep spark of madness
that is perhaps their most ancient and fruitful virtue."
We were there when Fidel arrived in Havana,
but as Venezuelan journalists.
We were there, in Cuba, and we saw the arrival of Fidel,
heard his first speech there, in the square.
We had a wonderful impression of Cuba.
The Cuban revolution was an apotheosis in Latin America,
a revolution of the young, it was very sexy.
In 1959, Cuba was the place to go if you were a young Latin American.
Gabo found this atmosphere and tried to stay.
García Márquez was already in love
with the figure of Fidel Castro from the very start.
García Márquez was in Cuba.
He and Plinio went there right away. They wanted to see what was going on.
Both remained convinced socialist revolutionaries.
They soon had the chance to be in Prensa Latina, the new Cuban agency.
Both accepted right away.
We became great friends with Masetti,
the General Director of Prensa Latina.
He was a very strong, very firm Argentinian guy,
and he discovered there was a problem
within the agency: the communist journalists would gather aside
and would plot to gain control over the agency.
That did not sit well with Masetti, who would say,
"we're all with the revolution, there's no need to meet separately."
He fired them from the agency,
convinced that Fidel supported his decision.
And suddenly, I was at the apartment with Masetti,
when news arrived that the agency
had appointed a new director,
and that the communist group
had completely taken over.
So, I submitted my resignation, I went looking for Gabo,
who was in Prensa Latina, in New York,
highly threatened by Cuban exiles.
Mercedes waited for me at the airport,
with my godson Rodrigo, and told me, "Gabo has also resigned."
When he left Prensa Latina, in 1961,
his relationship with Cuba was very difficult.
While all Latin American writers,
even the more or less liberal, borderline conservatives ones,
made the pilgrimage to Cuba, García Márquez did not go.
That story about García Márquez having a close relationship
with Cuba, in the 60's, is false.
He said to me, "I'm going to Mexico, no matter what.
I have no money to go by plane,
I'll go by bus with Mercedes and your godson,
you'll send me what you can."
And all I could send him were 150 dollars.
He got to Mexico with 20 dollars.
Gabo would have his main home in Mexico for the rest of his life.
After getting married, he surprised everyone who knew him.
A surprisingly responsible man.
García Márquez gradually got to the point where he never did what he wanted.
He was always frustrated, yet always successful.
He worked in advertising, worked in film.
He didn't do what he wanted, but was a successful screenwriter,
with a very nice house, a car,
clothes for him, for his wife, for his family.
He went to to the poshest parties in Mexico City.
Carlos Fuentes was about 35 years old when they met.
They couldn't be any more different.
García Márquez was a guy who had spent the past 15 years in literature
and still had nothing to show,
while Carlos Fuentes had written in 1958 the first great novel
that preceded the arrival of the Latin American boom generation.
He knew everybody, he moved with incredible ease
between worlds, Mexican, Latin American...
Additionally, his intellectual and vital generosity had no bounds.
He suddenly got what he had long been waiting for.
This gentrified, alienated, but seemingly happy
García Márquez traveled to Acapulco with his family,
driving their white Opel,
when he suddenly saw the novel he had tried to write for over 20 years.
He would say, "I'm going to write a very dangerous novel
because it is not a safe novel, but a novel that has... magical things.
I'm going to tell things the way my grandmother did."
The tone, the first paragraph of One Hundred Years of Solitude,
came to him almost like an apparition.
He said to Mercedes: "Look, I'm sick of it all,
I can no longer do what we're doing, you know my ambitions,
I know it's a huge risk,
but I want to be devoted to writing. What do you say?"
I remember we were halfway,
when the owner of the house called Mercedes and said,
"Madam you owe three months' rent"
and Mercedes covered the phone and asked me:
"how much longer until you finish the book?"
I told her "about six months."
She then said, "look sir, not only do we owe three months,
we're going to owe you six more."
And then the guy told her,
"and you'll pay it all within seven." And she said, "yes, all of it."
And he said, "if you give me your word,
I have no problem waiting."
She covered the phone and whispered,
"word, I gave my word." Then she said, "word of honor."
This is the creation that is known as magical realism.
That perfect structure, describing a whole world from its birth to its death
in 20 chapters, all of them with the same number of pages.
One Hundred Years of Solitude is the story of a town called Macondo,
through the vicissitudes of a single family, the Buendía family.
The world is understood in such a way that the line between the supernatural,
the legends, the superstitions and the real, everyday world
is practically invisible.
On the other hand, normal events are narrated in a supernatural fashion.
These are the absolute essentials of what we call magical realism.
It began to become aware of the continent and of its own Latin American identity.
Macondo then ceased to be
a transposition of Aracataca,
and became a metaphor for all of Latin America.
It had immediate effect.
Back then, press runs were of 500 copies.
With García Márquez, even at the start, they printed five or six thousand copies,
because they had the vision, they knew.
That's when García Márquez became
the biggest selling author in the history of Latin America.
"When they woke up, with the sun already high in the sky,
they were speechless with fascination.
Before them, surrounded by ferns and palm trees,
white and powdery in the silent morning light,
was an enormous Spanish galleon."
In one of the first public readings he made,
as he stepped down after reading, he found Mercedes crying
and the whole audience was nearly levitating,
entranced by the magic effect of the reading.
García Márquez instantly knew he had found something.
He realized that he told stories that had never been told in Spanish.
García Márquez always remembers the years in Barcelona
as one of the happiest periods of his life.
He came here with his wife, Mercedes Barcha, and their two sons,
Rodrigo and Gonzalo.
He experienced in Barcelona the biggest metamorphosis a writer can go through.
He went from having financial problems to being a rich writer.
He was spellbound, he told this to his friends as if he couldn't believe it,
I live off the income generated by my book, it's amazing isn't it?
He was a genius, no doubt,
so with a genius you can set up a political party,
a religion, or a revolution,
and I replied that I chose the revolution,
because thanks to García Márquez,
I brought about revolution in the publishing world.
Carmen Balcells revolutionized the global literary market,
while staying a mother figure to her writers.
One Hundred Years of Solitude is the big bang of literature in Spanish.
Every reader of that book
immediately felt an urgent need
to share it with two, three, five people.
The impact was absolute and decisive.
It was a readers' phenomenon.
That great metamorphosis that García Márquez went through in Barcelona,
from being an unknown author to becoming the world's most famous writer,
deeply transformed him.
He was terribly shy. His friends in Barcelona
said he couldn't speak in public.
He had to learn here about coping with fame,
and the interest of the media. He acquired sophistication.
Another close friendship came about
with another future Nobel laureate, Mario Vargas Llosa.
These were also years of growing political tension
between Latin American intellectuals, regarding the situation in Cuba.
Heriberto Padilla was a poet, he was openly critical of the revolution.
He was soon arrested by state security.
And he was eventually given the chance to confess in public.
It was a demeaning spectacle
in which someone vilified himself.
Mario Vargas Llosa proposed to draft a letter, not a critical one just yet,
but a letter to let Fidel know
about our concerns regarding this arrest,
and to highlight the importance of his intervention.
Everybody signed, Cortázar, everyone, everyone.
We just needed Gabo's signature.
I wasn't able to find Gabo and inform him over the phone.
But I came into the office one day and said, "we have to add Gabo's name,
I assume all responsibility.
Let's add Gabo's name, because that's what he thinks."
Vargas Llosa was one of the great leaders
of the anti-Cuban, anti-Fidel movement.
García Márquez refused to sign. Plinio signed for him.
As García Márquez later said, "he signed for me, but I would not have done it."
Gabo didn't sign.
The letter appeared everywhere.
We already began to think very differently about Cuba.
An unexpected change in the life of García Márquez was about to occur.
The paradox is that his enormous fame
would make him retire from literature for a while.
The new novel, The Autumn of the Patriarch,
was a commercial failure.
It was the story of a lonely, obsessive, all-powerful dictator.
Many have seen in it a reflection on the new life of García Márquez.
A life inside that horrible thing called fame.
I think this is an excellent example
of critics' stupidity.
"The book is not likable, the book falls halfway."
It is a frustrated book,
It is a book written entirely
from personal experience, which is encrypted in the story.
If someone is curious enough
to read it with a different key,
and, instead of thinking of a dictator,
they think of a famous writer,
then the book will probably be easier to understand.
"Useful idiot at your service. Political and personal friends overseas
wonder how we explain the paradox
of this magazine stating that there is no freedom of the press in Colombia,
when this sole printed statement is proof that there is.
They basically wonder what sort of country this is,
where such things can still happen,
while the rest of the continent is a jungle of gorillas."
It was a time of political turmoil and social upheaval.
That was the period when I became friends with García Márquez.
Following the Pinochet coup against Allende,
Gabo openly declared his famous break-up with literature.
His literary strike was a refusal to ever write again
unless Pinochet fell.
These quotes from Gabo, they are fantastic aren't they?
"I am sick of García Márquez."
I couldn't believe he spoke ill of himself.
He said things, such as: "I'll spend my fame on politics."
Gabo was perhaps at his most radical moment.
Che died in 1967. Many of the guerrilla attempts
from the 1960's were introduced, got established and eventually failed.
Many people died.
From 1973 onwards, there was a shift to the far right
in many countries in Latin America.
There was a violent outbreak of repression.
García Márquez wanted to know to whom he could donate
a $10,000 dollar literary prize that the University of Arizona had granted him.
He called me and said,
"Well, I need a good human rights committee to hand in this award".
I said: "Gabo there are no human rights committees here."
So he said: "Hell, make one up! Found it, damn it!"
Later, along with a group of friends from different political persuasions,
we wanted to start a magazine.
A leftist magazine in Colombia.
We already had a name for it: Alternativa.
I said, well, Gabo owes me one.
I called him and pitched it, and Gabo went "no, no, no,"
but I put a lot pressure on him.
Gabo got into a political-journalistic project,
this gave way to the development of militant journalism.
He wrote articles every month, which were additionally world exclusives.
They were looking for the lost dream of the Latin American revolution.
In the magazine we sympathized, if you will, with the armed struggle in general.
The M19 was the first group to ever mention national dialog and peace.
The M19 represented something new.
A group of intellectuals from universities
who were coming to replace
a series of guerrillas that had been, until then, almost exclusively rural.
So Gabo's interest was piqued by M19 because,
after such a spectacular appearance, and massive success,
its discourse dealt with stopping the armed struggle and making peace.
So that's where Gabo began supporting peace initiatives.
During the 1970's, García Márquez became aware of his power.
He gradually began to approach Cuba.
He thought that Fidel was, perhaps,
a prisoner of the communist hardliners.
Just imagine, Fidel had completely isolated himself
from the intellectual, cultural world.
With a few exceptions, everyone in the Cuban revolution
had severed
from the progressive intellectuals of the 1960's.
The return of a figure like García Márquez was crucial.
He had an intellectual and literary fascination
with the phenomenon of power,
particularly with Latin American caudillos and dictators.
I think Fidel later came to embody, in part, that fascination.
Leaving aside any allegiance
with the Cuban revolution, any possible political affinity
or the fact that both men were Caribbean personalities,
everything had been set up to establish
some sort of mutual attraction by the time they finally met.
Some might say a fatal attraction, right?
But it's not like Gabo was issuing pro-Cuba manifestos all the time.
He simply did not join those who condemned Cuba.
He used to say, "I don't want to be used. So any criticism I make
will be used by Americans and imperialists and so on to...
I don't want to join that chorus.
Next week,
the New Latin American Cinema Foundation
will receive a donation from the Cuban government
and we will never cease to feel grateful for it,
due to the unprecedented generosity as well as the timeliness,
and the personal dedication put into it
by the world's least known filmmaker:
Fidel Castro.
His relationship with Fidel is one of the most controversial
things about his life.
He has a great sense of humor,
but I think he's very cautious with jokes because sometimes
he goes a little overboard and immediately says, "I'm only joking."
He thanks President Castro for his invitation to lunch today.
We were discussing how you are the new Hemingway.
I hope to be the old Hemingway!
No, no, you cannot accuse García Márquez of being a communist.
He's been trying to persuade me for 30 years, but hasn't been able to.
The richer he becomes, the harder to persuade him.
Give up everything you own and follow me.
That was what Christ said, give up everything you own and follow me.
But it is better to follow you, without giving up everything I own.
We'll go with everything I have.
I questioned him myself and he insisted that they were friends,
but he additionally used this friendship for the benefit of other people.
They were friends.
They went on yacht trips, they went diving, they drank wine together. Yes.
And at the same time, Fidel kept people imprisoned in the island.
Gabo insisted that he used his friendship
to get them out of jail.
And that this did not affect his friendship with Fidel.
This intrigues us all,
but he insisted that things were indeed like that.
I think that the fundamental elements
about Cuba are its resistance
and its permanent and firm defense of sovereignty,
in the face of a blockade that has been on for over 30 years.
I think that this hurt García Márquez. It hurt his image,
his credibility as an intellectual, as an author.
He came across as someone who glossed over or avoided criticizing
the obvious human rights abuses and violations in Cuba.
I used to tell him,
"Are you still hanging out with that bearded guy?
What are you doing with that man?"
And he said,
"And you turned rightwing when you were a lefty".
And so on and so forth, but they were all jokes.
So we took it like that.
But the important bit is, whenever I was asked
to sign a letter to see if Padilla or Norberto Fuentes,
or any other Cuban writer could be released,
I said, "Wait, if you want to help this writer,
I have a much more powerful resource than a signed letter.
I then called Gabo and said, "Help me, Gabo."
And we freed many poets. We freed many poets and writers.
He became a very useful person.
He never changed his position, regarding the communist world,
nor was he a communist. Not at all.
But he was friends with Fidel, he was.
Gabo's political position always sparked in Colombia,
a lot of controversy.
This is a rightwing country, deeply so, because of the war.
And Gabo was convinced that this country had to achieve peace.
He became obsessed with it, that provoked a reaction from the right,
to the point where he was practically deemed a guerrilla supporter.
Military intelligence services began to build some sort of file
to implicate him as an accessory to subversion,
as a collaborator of M19.
Gabo obviously knew they would take him to trial,
and that's when he decided to seek asylum in the Mexican Embassy.
I really preferred to return to Mexico in the safest possible way,
which was through the embassy.
I have nothing to hide.
Never in my life have I fired a weapon,
other than the typewriter.
But I really could not tolerate that the Colombian government,
or rather, some sectors of the Colombian government
pulled a publicity stunt to detain me,
even if it was just for questioning.
But, was there really a warrant for your detention,
according to the reports that you received?
I cannot possibly know. The thing is,
I received three different versions from different sources,
as well as an anonymous call.
And frankly, I preferred to save my skin,
than give my wife, my children and my family
the opportunity to receive the deepest sympathies
and the funeral wreaths from the presidents of the Republic.
"On the day they were going to kill him,
Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning
to wait for the boat on which the Bishop would arrive.
He had dreamt he was going through a grove of timber trees,
where a gentle drizzle was falling,
and for an instant he was happy in his dream,
but when he awoke he felt completely spattered with bird shit.
'He always dreamt of trees,'
told me Plácida Linero, his mother, twenty-seven years later,
recalling the details of that fatal Monday."
It was very curious that his next novel, Chronicle of a Death Foretold
was about a private, family matter,
30 years earlier, and that it is devoid of political references.
It is a novel narrated by a man,
whom we immediately identify as García Márquez
and who acts as the chronicler of the story he is trying to tell.
He asks questions, investigates, reports and thus sets up
a false chronicle, a fictional chronicle.
It was a major publishing milestone.
It was the first million copy edition.
García Márquez had been thinking of the Nobel prize
since he was 20 years old.
It's surprising but true.
He perfectly knew that he deserved the Nobel prize,
but he also knew that
those who prepare the ground properly, often reap the important things.
To what extent was his literary ambition a calculated matter?
I think there's a high degree of intuition there.
His books were stories that he had been brewing in his head for 20 or 30 years.
He never wrote a book less than 20 years after having first thought about it.
But something unconscious pointed to him the right time
to sit down and write this book. It was that fantastic intuition
he had of his place in the world, for every moment of his life.
Extra!
Gabriel García Márquez has just won the Nobel Prize in Literature!
I repeat! Gabriel García Márquez,
Nobel Prize in Literature.
Now that we see you on this plane, you don't seem to be afraid of flying.
It's because it is the first time I fly as a Nobel prize winner.
This gives me a certain confidence.
The Nobel was a general joy.
When they invited us,
Mercedes and I went out to buy clothes.
Everyone should be here for the picture, come here, everyone.
Can we take a bath later?
Gabriel was so happy.
He was like a little boy, like a little boy who'd won the lottery.
Is this the most important moment of your life?
No, the most important moment of my life was when I was born.
But I am very happy anyway.
The party was wild, like nothing you've seen before.
Gabriel told me that the queen, who was sitting beside him,
said that she loved the cumbia because all these women had come down
going "ta, ta,ta" with their skirts.
And he said he told her:
"Look, this literature thing is only a hobby,
I am, in reality, a cumbia master."
That's what he said, it was one of those silly things he loved saying.
Gabriel García Márquez has already garnered
every single success in the literary world.
Does García Márquez expect to become a politician?
No, my biggest dream is to write a great novel.
Haven't you written a great novel yet?
You always think that the next one will be the best one.
And the day I stop thinking that, I will cease to be a good writer.
Is García Márquez writing right now?
Not today, no.
I mean,
when they asked me how I'd feel if I won the Nobel prize,
I always said I would be as delighted as any other writer,
but that it would also be, in my perspective, a personal tragedy.
And it has been true in the sense that it has disorganized my life.
It has even interrupted the novel I was writing.
It has upset my private life.
And my goal, once I return from Stockholm,
is to declare the pleasant
and somewhat confusing episode of the Nobel prize a closed chapter.
And I will try to be a good writer.
He was very aware of the Nobel myth
and had even written several columns on the subject.
According to this myth,
no Nobel laureate has written anything of value after winning the prize.
The book he wanted to write at the time
was some sort of personal family challenge
because it involved getting close to his father.
García Márquez always forgave everyone
and the person who was the hardest for him to forgive
was his dad. He finally managed to do it.
I was very afraid of him. He scared me as much as my teacher.
Was he very strict?
No, no. The thing is, he had a sense of authority
that I never managed to understand.
I understand him much better
now, that I myself am a father and especially now that I am a teacher.
Love in the Time of Cholera is the meticulous biography
of his parents' love.
A love that is at first challenged,
a topic García Márquez favored,
but then overcomes all obstacles in the end.
The entire geography in the novel is authentic.
I wrote it here, in Cartagena.
I used to work all morning.
In the afternoon I would take a walk
around the portico of the sweet vendors, just to hear phrases, to hear words.
I would wander, looking for the places where my characters lived.
I worked by locations, as if I were making a film,
and I would invariably end up at my parents' home
every afternoon, in order to ask them about their love story,
I would ask him first, then I'd ask my mother some other times.
I always did this separately, otherwise, it was hard to get the real information.
All of the information they gave me,
the less metaphorical one,
the less poetically transposed,
is the account of their love.
Because I wanted them to be exactly verbatim.
Everything, how they met exactly,
how they were separated. The journey she made.
The way he communicated with her,
by pegging all of the telegraph offices
in the region of Magdalena, in the region of Valledupar.
All of my novels are about love.
You see that, even if I try to conceal it. All of them are romance novels.
It is the great book of their reconciliations.
It's a soap opera, but it's a soap opera written by Flaubert.
It's as if Love in the Time of Cholera were the flipside
of One Hundred Years of Solitude.
One Hundred Years of Solitude is a novel in which
all the forces of love, sex and passion combined
are insufficient to prevent the ultimate destruction of the world.
In Love in the Time of Cholera,
love accomplishes its ultimate goals.
Love is the ultimate redemption.
It is what saves us.
It is a terribly risky book because it is a love story with a happy ending.
Around the time he was writing the novel, he used to say
on interviews: "I'm going to make happiness fashionable."
He set out to do that and succeeded.
We began to discover a story that we never thought would reach the places it reached.
It wasn't only the guerrillas, there was something bigger we didn't know of.
It turned out to be drug trafficking.
In 1976, Pablo Escobar was in jail for drugs.
Guillermo Cano was the first journalist
who realized what was happening in this country.
Gabo grew professionally at El Espectador. Gabo loved the newspaper.
Gabo was a close friend of Guillermo Cano.
Guillermo sent me to the Havana film festival.
"Tell Gabo I want him to write an article,
a speech, a few words
on the seventy years of El Espectador."
And I got there.
Gabo told me, "I don't want to write anything about Colombia.
I love El Espectador, but I'm not writing anything about Colombia."
He said, "I won't write anything about that country.
If you write something, they kill you."
I told Gabo he was exaggerating. "Don't be a liar. It's not that bad."
This revealed the pain that Gabo felt,
after half Colombia had said all sorts of things about him.
And around the third day, I was coming out of the cinema
when someone said, "García Márquez is looking for you."
And I found Gabo and Gaba on the verge of tears.
And Gabo said, "See? I told you! That fucking country!
That country is not worth anything.
They killed my friend, Guillermo Cano."
Gabo was very upset.
He found death difficult to handle.
But Gabo's most impressive gesture was to send the article,
and he wrote a piece on Guillermo Cano that was so spectacular,
I cried every time I read it.
"President Fidel Castro was telling me a gripping story,
at a party, among friends,
when I heard Mercedes' tremulous voice, nearly whispering:
'Guillermo Cano has been killed.'
The murder had taken place fifteen minutes earlier
and someone had rushed to the phone to give us a very brief account.
Teary-eyed, I barely had the strength to wait for the end
of Fidel Castro's phrase.
Bewildered by grief as I was, the only thing in my mind
was the usual impulse to call Guillermo Cano,
so that he would tell me the full story
and then we could share together the anger and pain of his death."
It was a very challenging phenomenon.
And the bombs that exploded back then, exploded all across the country.
Even Peru's Shining Path in its heyday
would pale, compared to Escobar's actions during that period.
I don't think there's been a period of terrorism quite like it.
In Medellin, at the start of 1989,
he began to pay for the death of all policemen
and killed, one by one, some 400 policemen in just a couple of months.
"Two men opened Maruja's door and another two opened Beatriz's.
The fifth man shot the driver in the head, through the glass,
but the silencer made it sound no louder than a sigh.
Then he opened the door, pulled him out,
and shot him three more times as he lay on the ground.
It was another man's destiny:
Angel María Roa had been Maruja's driver for only three days,
and he was displaying for the first time his new dignity, with the dark suit,
the starched shirt and black tie, the trademarks of a minister's chauffeur."
News of a Kidnapping is a return to his country.
It is also a return to the elite who has gone
through the terrible ordeal of kidnapping
in Pablo Escobar's heyday.
Gabo returned to journalism at some point.
He returned several times, in his attempts to launch magazines,
creating the New Journalism Foundation in the mid 90's.
We're a group of journalists
who thought there was an opportunity to become independent
and make a proposal to make a television news show
created exclusively by journalists.
We wanted to start with people with no habits, freshly out of college.
We practically started a kindergarten.
It was nice to see him sitting beside the trainee journalists.
They really learned, sitting next to him. He was unpretentious, devoid of arrogance.
If you speak to any of the journalists who worked at QAP
you'll hear nothing but admiration
and a profound love.
In many Latin American countries, journalists are just messengers.
Or advertising salespeople.
He wanted to raise the bar,
so that journalists honored
his definition of the profession, as the best in the world.
That effort to be respected as a journalist by journalists
in News of a Kidnapping.
To do things right.
To reconstruct what seems an impartial truth
and leave it impartially on the page.
News of a Kidnapping. When the first version is produced,
he grabs the book, grabs a normal postal box and writes,
"Bill Clinton, White House, Washington."
I was invited to a State Dinner
and when I was in the greeting line,
President Clinton says to me "I read the book".
What was the President of the United States telling me?
What book could he be talking about?
He was a little distressed because the book obviously shows
the complexities of Colombia.
The complexity of the drug trafficking problem in Colombia.
The threats, the kidnappings. The terrorism.
Gabo's message through literature,
clearly establishes his moral conscience.
It is a strong humanist argument.
It's not that he approached all the presidents and all leaders, no.
There had to be a certain compatibility with him and his way of thinking.
I think that, if things had been a little different,
we could be here talking about how Gabo and Clinton
managed to put an end the U.S. blockade of Cuba.
It didn't happen,
but it came pretty close, and it came pretty close, thanks to Gabo.
"The truth is, every time I return to the town of Reality
I find it looks less like the town of Fiction
The trees from the towns tend to live longer than human beings
and I have always suspected that they remember us too,
perhaps better than we remember them."
The setting is Sucre.
Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a masterpiece by García Márquez.
The language it uses is deeply its own,
and it enriches reality, magnifies it.
One notices the magic of García Márquez,
in the struggle of Santiago Nasar,
who was, in real life, Cayetano Gentile, one of his great friends,
against a verdict that has been passed
in a realm he does not understand.
The struggle of the murderers,
who are dragged by forces beyond them.
One of the clashes that haunted him in his life as a writer was
man against his fate.
This is what the locals say.
That morning, Santiago Nasar was coming back from delivering some steers
from one of the farms on the outskirts of town
and came from the side of the alley
of María Amalia Sampayo, the Big Mama,
He was coming down that alley and the Vicario brothers or the Chica Salas
were opposite, at Clotilde Armenta's tavern.
They were there, waiting and scrutinizing the entire square.
Upon seeing him round the alley,
they came out behind him to stab him.
A little earlier he had tried to go into his house, but it was closed.
He tried to enter through the back,
so he looked for ways to reach the fatal alley.
The Chica Sala brothers caught him at the bottom of the alley
and cut him to pieces
at 9:30 am, on January 22, 1958.
At that moment, I was already dressed to go to school.
Then I heard, "they killed Cayetano."
I ran out.
When I got there,
the doctor took his stethoscope off
and tried to give Cayetano's mom a shot, to sedate her or something.
-"What are you going to do?" -"To calm you down."
-"But..." -"This will tranquilize you."
She said, "No, why would you calm me down?
He's my son, I have to mourn him. I need to mourn him."
In recent years, I noticed that Gabo
was losing his memory.
What remained of the original Gabo was his tenderness.
He carried on being affectionate, tactile, kind.
Having been a man so obsessed with memory,
it's incredible his life ended this way.
I think that this is part of his life,
part of the experience he had.
It had to be this way.
I think that the cycle is now closed.
He said, "you're writing about me." I said, "yes."
"And you're going to say that I had it all planned, right here in my head."
I said, "perhaps" and he went, "well, it's not true.
I never knew where I was going, how far I was going.
It was impossible to know where I'd end up.
All I did was push, like pushing a cart. Push and push and push...
without knowing whether you'll get there or not."
A writer's tempo
can only be measured like music.
It starts when he's seven years old
and ends when he dies.
Not dying is the only option I accept.
I think it is the single most important thing you have in life.
Being alive is what matters,
and I think death is a trap.
It's a betrayal that they set on you, without giving you a choice.
The fact that it is all going to end sounds grim to me.
Our involvement in the matter is null, until it comes.
I think it is unfair.
What can we do to avoid it?
Write a lot.