Gabriel García Márquez: The Last Interview Read online

  GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: THE LAST INTERVIEW

  AND OTHER CONVERSATIONS

  Copyright © 2015 by Melville House Publishing

  Introduction copyright © 2015 by David Streitfeld

  “A Novelist Who Will Keep Writing Novels” © 1956 by El Colombiano Literario, Published on June 26, 1956, in the Sunday supplement “El Colombiano Literario,” p. 1. Translation copyright © 2014 by Theo Ellin Ballew.

  “Power to the Imagination in Macondo” © 1975 by Revista Crisis. Reprinted by permission. Translation copyright © 2014 by Ellie Robins.

  “Women,” “Superstitions, Manias, and Taste,” and “Work” © 1983 by Verso Books. First published in The Fragrance of Guava. Translated by Ann Wright.

  “A Stamp Used Only for Love Letters” © 2014 by David Streitfeld. Some of the material appeared in different form in The Washington Post in 1994 and 1997.

  “ ‘I’ve Stopped Writing’: The Last Interview” © 2006 by La Vanguardia. Reprinted by permission. Translation copyright © 2014 by Theo Ellin Ballew.

  First Melville House printing: January 2015

  Melville House Publishing 8 Blackstock Mews

  145 Plymouth Street and Islington

  Brooklyn, NY 11201 London N4 2BT

  mhpbooks.com facebook.com/mhpbooks @melvillehouse

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  García Márquez, Gabriel, 1927–2014.

  Gabriel García Márquez : the last interview and other conversations; introduction by David Streitfeld.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-61219-480-6 (pbk.) – ISBN 978-1-61219-481-3 (ebook)

  1. García Márquez, Gabriel, 1927–2014–Interviews.

  2. Authors, Colombian–20th century–Interviews. I. Title.

  PQ8180.17.A73Z46 2015

  863′.64–dc23

  [B]

  2014043499

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION BY DAVID STREITFELD

  A NOVELIST WHO WILL KEEP WRITING NOVELS

  Interview by Alonso Ángel Restrepo

  El Colombiano Literario, Colombia

  1956

  Translated by Theo Ellin Ballew

  POWER TO THE IMAGINATION IN MACONDO

  Interview by Ernesto González Bermejo

  Revista Crisis, Argentina

  1975

  Translated by Ellie Robins

  WOMEN; SUPERSTITIONS, MANIAS, AND TASTE; WORK

  Three interviews by Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza

  From The Fragrance of Guava, Barcelona

  1983

  Translated by Ann Wright

  A STAMP USED ONLY FOR LOVE LETTERS

  Two interviews by David Streitfeld

  Mexico City and Washington, D.C.

  1993 and 1997

  “I’VE STOPPED WRITING”: THE LAST INTERVIEW

  Interview by Xavi Ayén

  La Vanguardia, Spain

  2006

  Translated by Theo Ellin Ballew

  About the Authors

  The Last Interview Series

  INTRODUCTION

  DAVID STREITFELD

  Everyone said it was like getting an audience with the pope. As in: Don’t even bother trying. If Gabriel García Márquez has something to say, he can publish it himself and get worldwide attention. Why would he filter his comments through you?

  I was the literary correspondent for The Washington Post, young and full of beans, scorning anything but the best and greatest. I revered García Márquez, as much for the scale of his accomplishment as for the actual texts themselves. One Hundred Years of Solitude was, as a perceptive critic once said, like a brick through a window. It let in the real life of the street, the noises and colors and sensations, and presented magical events—a trail of blood flowing across town and into a house, careful to avoid staining the rug; flowers from heaven—so straightforwardly they seem believable. Suddenly all the stories in Latin America were written in its shadow. Solitude was the most famous novel in the world, and perhaps the last (leaving aside the rather extra-literary case of The Satanic Verses) to have a demonstrable effect on it.

  Letters were faxed, entreaties were made, publishers were begged. Finally the word came: Present yourself at the house in Mexico City on this date at this moment in the afternoon, and the maestro will entertain your questions. It was late 1993. García Márquez was making the transition from revolutionary firebrand to elder statesman. His recent works, Love in the Time of Cholera and The General in His Labyrinth, had extended his reputation beyond Solitude. He never made public appearances in the United States even though the new president, Bill Clinton, was reportedly a big fan. His elusiveness cemented the legend.

  My spoken Spanish was weak, and while García Márquez was rumored to understand English quite well, he cannily refused to speak it. I came equipped with an excellent interpreter and a small gift, the newly published Library of America editions of Herman Melville. García Márquez insisted I inscribe them. I wondered if he thought I had somehow written them.

  His office was behind his house in a separate bungalow, a comfortable but not overly lavish place to write, read, and hide. One wall was covered with books in at least four languages. The fiction—Lewis Carroll and Graham Greene, but also writers as contemporary as Tobias Wolff—coexisted with a dictionary of angels, worn medical texts, a map of the Paris métro, biographies of obscure statesmen, and other necessities of a working library. Another wall had compact discs and a top-notch stereo system.

  Dressed all in white and looking very well fed, García Márquez was a dead ringer for the Pillsbury Doughboy. I was circling my first question, something that would straddle the line between assertive and respectful, when he interrupted. “Carlos Fuentes strongly encouraged me to talk to you,” he said.

  No doubt. After thirty-five years, Fuentes was still the impresario of Latin America literature. He loved brokering attention for his friends, which included everyone in the literary and diplomatic worlds.

  I began again, but again García Márquez interrupted. “I don’t do interviews anymore, but Jorge Castañeda said this must be an exception.” I had never met Castañeda, the author of Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left After the Cold War and an influential political theorist, but clearly my renown had reached far indeed. I nodded and started for a third time.

  “The Mexican ambassador in Washington is a huge fan of your work,” García Márquez said, as if merely stating the obvious, like the sun had come up this morning.

  I was used to being flattered by writers, to being told I was a Mozart of the pen. They routinely and without embarrassment offered up half-baked praise to people profiling them in the hopes of securing a halfway good notice. In that last moment before the Internet allowed writers to cut out the middleman and train the spotlight directly on themselves, reputations were still in the keeping of the media.

  This, however, was a master class. Unbidden, a movie abruptly played out in my mind’s eye: Mr. Ambassador, waiting by the embassy gate at six a.m. for a copy of the Post, hastily grabbing it from the delivery boy, and paging through, looking for my byline. Not finding it, he throws the paper down and returns, sulkily, to bed.

  García Márquez’s message was clear: You’re lucky to be here, and I’m lucky you’re on my side. After such supplication, who could ask brutal questions?

  A year or two later, I went to a lecture by Castañeda. Afterward, I went up to my great admirer, a copy of his book in my hand. He asked who I was so he could sign it, and I carefully identified myself. He betrayed no
flicker of recognition.

  With García Márquez, I was more amused than taken in. Once he finally let the interview get underway, he was as illuminating and charming as I expected him to be. He loved above all else talking about the books he was writing. More than most authors, he tried not to repeat himself, even as he got older and the temptation to revisit triumphs must have been acute. Anyone else would have written One Thousand Years of Solitude, taken the money, and ignored the inevitable thrashing by reviewers.

  Nor was he ever in a hurry. The story he discussed at length with me would not be published for more than a decade, as Memories of My Melancholy Whores. As it turned out, that brief tale was his last published work of fiction, although a mutual friend told me that García Márquez was playing around on his computer in the early years of the new millennium and found a lengthy tale he had finished and forgotten. I presume it will be published one day.

  What interviewers want from their subjects, of course, is action, not just words. One of García Márquez’s favorite stories about interviewing was the time many years earlier when a Spanish journalist wanted to talk to him. He invited her to tag along as he and his wife, Mercedes, went shopping, had lunch, and did other mundane things around Barcelona. At the end of the day, the reporter asked again for an interview—never realizing he had already given it to her. He told her—sweetly, no doubt—to get a different job, because she wasn’t cut out for journalism.

  If García Márquez had ever really offered such opportunities, those days were by now gone. We never moved from the couch. But he remained amusing and expansive until the end, as if I were a good friend he hadn’t seen in years. Then I reminded him that we were coming back the next afternoon. His face fell. How long, he seemed to be thinking, must I be charming to these Americanos?

  To soften the blow, the next day I brought my girlfriend along. García Márquez was famous even among the Latins for preferring the company of women. The interpreter from the previous day had a conflict, so Lisa and I waited outside the hotel for the highly regarded American journalist who would serve that day. And waited. Finally, an hour late, the fellow—let’s call him Gringo—showed up, full of swagger. “Traffic here is horrible,” Gringo explained. “Everyone is late all the time. No one cares. Don’t worry.”

  The journey to García Márquez’s house was endless. I felt that gnawing pit in my stomach of a disaster in the making. Finally we arrived and were ushered in. The maestro was understandably peeved, and perhaps only the sight of Lisa prevented him from throwing us out. He warned us that he was leaving soon for an appointment. I later learned that punctuality was a virtue he prized.

  We sat down on the couch again. I asked a simple warm-up question. How was the movie he had seen the night before? Gringo stumbled over the translation. García Márquez answered, “It was good,” and Gringo could not figure out what he was saying. I realized with growing horror that despite his eminent position with a leading U.S. newspaper, Gringo did not actually know more than a few words of Spanish. García Márquez was equally frustrated. The stories about him secretly understanding English were just that, stories.

  I persevered, sticking to simple subject-verb-object sentences. But on the second day, there was no magic show. We saw a tired, grumpy old man. I cut it short, which he appreciated, but asked some questions about Castro, which he did not. He hated being asked about Castro, which was the one thing his U.S. fans held against him. His only mellow moments came when he flirted with Lisa.

  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.

  A NOVELIST WHO WILL KEEP WRITING NOVELS

  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.”