The Scandal of the Century Read online

  ALSO BY GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

  No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories (1968)

  One Hundred Years of Solitude (1970)

  The Autumn of the Patriarch (1976)

  Innocent Eréndira and Other Stories (1978)

  In Evil Hour (1979)

  Leaf Storm and Other Stories (1979)

  Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1982)

  The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor (1986)

  Clandestine in Chile: The Adventures of Miguel Littín (1987)

  Love in the Time of Cholera (1988)

  The General in His Labyrinth (1990)

  Strange Pilgrims (1993)

  Of Love and Other Demons (1995)

  News of a Kidnapping (1997)

  Living to Tell the Tale (2003)

  Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2005)

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  English translation copyright © 2019 by Heirs of Gabriel García Márquez

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: García Márquez, Gabriel, 1927–2014, author. | McLean, Anne, [date] translator.

  Title: The scandal of the century : and other writings / Gabriel García Márquez ; translated by Anne McLean.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2019. | Translation of: El escándalo del siglo : textos en prensa y revistas (1950–1984).

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019001736| ISBN 9780525656425 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780525656432 (E-book)

  Subjects: LCSH: García Márquez, Gabriel, 1927–2014—Translations into English.

  Classification: LCC PQ8180.17.A73 A2 2019 | DDC 864/.64—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019001736

  Ebook ISBN 9780525656432

  Cover photograph by Ulf Anderson / Getty Images

  Cover design by Carol Devine Carson

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  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Gabriel García Márquez

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Foreword

  Editor’s Note

  The Presidential Barber

  Topic for a Topical Piece

  An Understandable Mistake

  The Lonely Hearts Killer

  Death Is an Unpunctual Lady

  The Strange Idolatry of La Sierpe

  A Man Arrives in the Rain

  The House of the Buendías (Notes for a Novel)

  Literaturism

  The Precursors

  The Postman Rings a Thousand Times

  The Aracataca Tiger

  H.H. Goes on Vacation (fragment)

  The Scandal of the Century

  The Disappearing Women of Paris—Are They in Caracas?

  “I Visited Hungary” (fragment)

  The World’s Most Famous Year

  Only Twelve Hours to Save Him

  June 6, 1958: Caracas Without Water

  Misadventures of a Writer of Books

  I Can’t Think of Any Title

  The Sandinista Heist: Chronicle of the Assault on the “Hog House”

  The Cubans Face the Blockade

  The Specter of the Nobel Prize

  Telepathy Without Strings

  The New Oldest Profession

  Yes, Nostalgia Is the Same as It Ever Was

  Horror Story for New Year’s Eve

  Magic Caribbean

  Poetry, in Children’s Reach

  The River of Life

  María of My Heart

  Like Souls in Purgatory

  Something Else on Literature and Reality

  My Personal Hemingway

  Ghosts of the Road

  Bogotá 1947

  Tales of the Road

  My Other Me

  Poor Good Translators

  Sleeping Beauty on the Airplane

  Writer Wanted

  Obregón or the Boundless Vocation

  Literature Without Pain

  From Paris, with Love

  Return to Mexico

  Okay, We’ll Talk About Literature

  That News Board

  Return to the Seed

  How Do You Write a Novel?

  Foreword

  The world recognizes Gabriel García Márquez as an extraordinary novelist—the beloved creator of Colonel Aureliano Buendía and of Macondo, of the epic love between Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza, of the death of Santiago Nasar, and of the colossal, solitary dictator of The Autumn of the Patriarch. For all of this, he received the maximum literary recognition possible, a Nobel Prize, and when he did, the Spanish-speaking world rejoiced at the sight of one of their own, “one of the seventeen children of the telegraphist of Aracataca,” standing before the Swedish monarchs to receive his distinction.

  But García Márquez, or “Gabo”—the affectionate nickname by which he was known in the Hispanic world—was more than a novelist. He is also remembered for having been the friend and confidant of Fidel Castro and Bill Clinton, as well as Julio Cortázar and Carlos Fuentes and his other colleagues of the Boom, and for having been the husband of Mercedes Barcha and the father of two sons, Gonzalo and Rodrigo, and when he died in 2014, multitudes of people thronged to his funeral, which was held in the beautiful palace of Bellas Artes in the capital of Mexico, his longtime country of residence. When Juan Manuel Santos, who was then the president of Colombia, Gabo’s birthplace, said that he had been the best Colombian of all time, no one challenged the assertion.

  In addition to all of that, Gabo was a journalist. Journalism was, in a sense, his first true love, and, like all first loves, it was the longest lasting. The profession of journalism helped form him as a writer, which is something he recalled forever afterward. His admiration for journalism reached the point where he proclaimed it, on one occasion, with his characteristic generosity, to be “the best job in the world.”

  Gabo’s hyperbole was inspired by a sentiment of genuine respect and affection toward a profession that he made his own at the same time as he took his first steps as a writer. In 1947, his first year at the Universidad Nacional in Bogotá, Gabo’s first short stories were published in the daily newspaper El Espectador. He already wanted to become a writer, but had entered law school in order to please his father.

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS NOT LONG, however, before Gabo’s academic life was interrupted by political violence. The April 1948 assassination of the charismatic Liberal politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in Bogotá triggered an outbreak of violent public unrest in the Colombian capital lasting several days. During the chaos, which became remembered as “el Bogotazo,” Gabo’s student residence went up in flames and the university itself was closed indefinitely. It was the beginning of a civil war between the country’s two main political parties, the Liberals and their rivals, the Conserv
atives.

  The conflict, which would become known as “la Violencia,” would last a decade and cost the lives of some 200,000 people. Colombia would never be the same, and nor would the life of Gabo. To continue his studies, he moved to the city of Cartagena de Indias, on the Caribbean coast, and signed up at the university there. He also began to collaborate with a new local daily paper, El Universal, and, before long, gave up his studies altogether to devote himself to writing full-time. He soon began writing articles for El Heraldo, a newspaper published in the larger, neighboring city of Barranquilla, and he moved there in 1950. These were happy and formative years for Gabo, in which he was surrounded by other young creative personalities—writers, artists, and bohemians—with whom he became friends and who together made up the so-called Group of Barranquilla. While living in a flophouse that doubled as a bordello, Gabo eked out a living as a columnist, writing under the nom de plume “Septimus,” and he completed his first novella, Leaf Storm.

  * * *

  —

  THIS ANTHOLOGY FOCUSES ON the unique journalistic legacy of Gabriel García Márquez via a selection of fifty of his articles published between 1950 and 1984. The pieces assembled here were selected by Cristóbal Pera, who worked with Gabo as an editor on his memoirs, culling from the exhaustive collection of Gabo’s journalism compiled by Jacques Gilard, the late French Hispanist, for his extraordinary five-volume anthology of Gabo’s work published in the 1980s.

  The Scandal of the Century takes us from the early writings of the young, unknown Gabo of his Barranquilla days through nearly four decades, into the mid-1980s, when he was a mature, internationally renowned author. Among other things, this anthology reveals Gabo to have been blessed with abundant talent from the start, as well as an easygoing sense of humor, and a writer whose journalism is barely distinguishable from his fiction. Indeed, in his explanation for this selection, Pera tells us that he chose the works that most revealed Gabo as “the storyteller he was,” in which “the seams of reality are stretched by his unstoppable narrative impulse.”

  In “Topic for a Topical Piece,” for instance, Gabo writes about the difficulty of finding an appropriate topic with which to begin a piece. “There are those who turn the lack of a topic into a topic for a journalistic piece. The choice is absurd in a world like ours, where things of imperceptible interest are happening.” After reviewing a series of curious stories appearing in the newspapers—including one telling of how the daughter of the Spanish dictator, the “Generalissimo” Francisco Franco, was getting married, and that her bridegroom, his future son-in-law, or yerno, was already being referred to as “el Yernissimo,” and another incident in which some youths were reported as having been burned for playing with “flying saucers,” Gabo makes it clear that it is possible to write an entertaining article, as he has just done, about nothing in particular.

  In “An Understandable Mistake,” Gabo reveals more than anything else his urge to, as he used to say, “echar un cuento bien contado”—spin a good yarn. Adopting a Gothic noir tone, he narrates the circumstances in which a deeply drunk man nearly committed suicide by throwing himself out of his hotel window after seeing fish falling from the sky. In the course of the tale, we see that Gabo has riffed imaginatively on a pair of news items from the city of Cali.

  Cali. April 18. Today, in the early hours of the morning, a stranger jumped out the window of his apartment located on the third floor of a building in the city. The decision seemed to have been due to the nervous excitement produced by alcohol. The injured man is now in the hospital, where his condition does not appear to be serious.

  Cali. April 18. Inhabitants of the capital of the Cauca Valley had an extraordinary surprise today, as they observed in a downtown city street the presence of hundreds of small silvery fish, approximately two inches long, that appeared strewn all over the place.

  * * *

  —

  IN 1954, Gabo returned to Bogotá to work for El Espectador, the national newspaper that had published his first short stories. He began by writing movie reviews, but he also penned articles about a wide range of things that caught his interest, everything from popular folklore to his reflections on events that intrigued him. In “Literaturism,” he writes of a horrifying murder that occurred in the Colombian interior, in Antioquia. With a tone of admonishment leavened by his customary black humor, Gabo notes, “The news has not earned—at the current exchange rate of the journalistic peso—more than two columns on the regional news page. It is a bloody crime, like any other. With the difference that these days there is nothing extraordinary about it, since as a news item it is too common and as a novel too gruesome. It would be best to recommend [to] real life [that it] exercise a bit more discretion.”

  In “The Postman Rings a Thousand Times,” Gabo demonstrates once again that it is possible to write an interesting story about nothing very much with an exquisite piece about an address in Bogotá where the letters that never reach their destinations end up.

  Gabo earned a national reputation with his dramatic 1955 serial, entitled The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, based on his interviews with Luis Alejandro Velasco, a crewman on the Colombian warship ARC Caldas and the sole survivor among seven sailors who were thrown overboard when the vessel lurched suddenly to one side. Gabo’s story was a huge success. Published in fourteen installments, the series simultaneously broke sales records for El Espectador and sparked controversy when it discredited the official account of events, which had blamed the disaster on a nonexistent storm, and asserted that the ship had, in fact, listed because it was overloaded with contraband cargo brought on board by the officers and crew. To extricate Gabo from the public storm, the paper’s editor sent him to Europe to report. It was the first time Gabo had been outside of Colombia.

  * * *

  —

  FOR THE NEXT TWO and a half years, Gabo was El Espectador’s roving correspondent, traveling to Paris, Italy, and Vienna, and even to some of the countries of Eastern Europe on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Gabo wrote idiosyncratic pieces about whatever caught his interest—everything from a world leader’s summit in Geneva to the ostensible squabbles between two Italian movie celebrity actresses. He wrote another serialized story, as he had done with the Shipwrecked Sailor, about the mysterious death of a young Italian woman named Wilma Montesi; the mock-tabloid title of this book has also been borrowed from that story, “The Scandal of the Century.” Gabo even wrote, hilariously, about London’s famous fog. His prose was fresh, and his chronicles were sharp and laden with irony; he was a great “mamador de gallo,” as jokesters are known in Colombia, and the loyal fans he had acquired at home were ready to read anything he wrote.

  In one of his dispatches, “H.H. Goes on Vacation,” Gabo expands artfully on the pope’s habitual drive from the Vatican to his palace of Castel Gandolfo, situated on the outskirts of Rome. In Gabo’s hands, the journey becomes a suspenseful epic. “The pope went on vacation. This afternoon, at five o’clock sharp, he settled into his own Mercedes, license plate SCV-7, and drove out through the Holy Office gate, to the Castel Gandolfo Palace, twenty miles from Rome. Two gigantic Swiss Guards saluted him at the gate. One of them, the taller and heftier one, is a blond teenager with a flattened nose, like a boxer’s nose, the result of a traffic accident.”

  The story moves on, imbued with dramatic timing thanks to the trick of adding subtitles to the piece, including one about the high temperature of the day: “Ninety-five degrees in the shade” and another, “Accidents along the way,” in which Gabo informs us that His Holiness’s ten-minute delay in reaching his palace was caused by a truck blocking the way. The pope’s eventual arrival is shared in a confiding tone: “No one in Castel Gandolfo noticed which entrance the pope took into his holiday palace. He entered from the west side, into a garden with an avenue bordered by hundred-year-old trees.”

  * * *

  —

&
nbsp; WHEN HE RETURNED to Latin America at the end of 1957, Gabo was recruited by a Colombian friend, Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, to come and work with him on Momento, a magazine published in Caracas, Venezuela. Mendoza had also accompanied Gabo on his journey to the countries of Eastern Europe. Gabo’s arrival in Caracas coincided with the onset of a politically convulsive era in Latin America. A short time after he arrived, in January of 1958, came the toppling of the Venezuelan dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez. It was the first popular overthrow of a dictator in a period when Latin America was governed almost exclusively by despots. What Gabo lived through in Venezuela’s volatile atmosphere over the next year sparked a political awakening in him.

  Gabo returned briefly to Barranquilla to marry Mercedes Barcha, a beautiful young woman from the Magdalena River town of Magangué with whom he had fallen in love several years before, during his Barranquilla period. They returned to Caracas together. When Gabo’s friend Mendoza left Momento after a disagreement with the magazine’s owner, Gabo quit in solidarity and began writing for other publications as a freelancer. Two of his pieces from that time, “Only Twelve Hours to Save Him” and “Caracas Without Water,” which are included here, are classics of Gabo’s emerging literary style, in which his narration involves a detailed reconstruction of real-life dramas, conveyed with a suspense that is almost Hitchcockian, and focuses on a riddle that is only revealed at the story’s end.