Gabriel García Márquez: The Last Interview Read online

  He’s been speaking clearly, in a polite and convincing tone. We’ve put our cigarettes out and he orders some drinks for us, using the phone sitting on an illuminated table. As he pours his Coca-Cola into a cup, he comments, “I don’t drink alcohol, except once every seven years!”

  And he continues, while finishing his soda, “I’ve been surprised to see that, despite the modern tendency of my novel, any reader can understand it and discern its nuances … It’s turned out to be an interesting experience; right now I’m hoping that one of El Espectador’s paper boys will read it so I can get his opinion of it, and I’d like very much to know what the chauffeurs, shoe-shiners, and lottery ticket vendors think … I believe that the general public will like it … that it will be popular and that in this way it will prove that the contemporary novel can reach the masses … Anyone reading Leaf Storm can see that in the first chapter the author takes greater care to guide them through the monologues, so that it won’t be hard to identify the character speaking at any moment … By the end of the work, the author leaves it to the readers to discover who is speaking on their own.”

  “How much time did it take you to write Leaf Storm?”

  “About a year. Of course I’m not counting the first efforts that I just mentioned, from which this new idea emerged … But in that year when I was writing, even if I do know that I was in Barranquilla for about half of it and in Cartagena for the other half, I ended up spending the whole time wandering through all the towns along that coast, including those in the Guajira: even when I didn’t know where my bags were, I always knew where I was keeping the draft … I finished it and mailed it to Editorial Losada in Buenos Aires along with Backwards Christ by Caballero Calderón, and one of the two were going to be chosen for publication. They chose Caballero’s and after that the draft of Leaf Storm was in Argentina for almost eight months. I got it back with a note saying that my work demanded a lot of effort from readers, and that this effort was not matched by the novel’s literary quality … The Leaf Storm I sent to Buenos Aires had three parts; it was longer, maybe double the length of what I ended up publishing. When I got it back from Editorial Losada, it didn’t seem to have enough unity, I would have to rewrite it completely … I got rid of the third part, cut text here, added text there, such that in the end it was completely different. When I finally started talking to people in Bogotá about publishing the novel and they asked me to submit a draft, even then I wanted to cut more of it … I asked for a week’s extension and got rid of a hundred pages more … I understood then that, during the five years I spent working on this novel, though I had thought that I needed to cut more, really there’d been something missing. And so you really have to write a lot, then cut, correct, tear many notebooks to pieces, before you can finally bring a few pages to the publisher …! It’s at this point that someone who doesn’t have a true calling to be a writer gets discouraged and declares him- or herself satisfied with just one book …”

  THE SECOND NOVEL

  “Are you currently working on a second novel?” we ask him.

  “Yes,” he answers. “You see, the hundred pages that I mentioned a minute ago, the pages where Leaf Storm’s title came from, comprised something like a novel within a novel; the characters that paraded across those hundred pages that I cut from the draft only a moment before turning it into the publisher were not the same as the others in Leaf Storm; they seemed out of place there, even I couldn’t recognize them as belonging to that first novel … Of course, the setting through which they move is the same one that belongs to the colonel, his daughter and her son; it’s Macondo … But the thing is that I like that setting … Because it feels familiar to me and because I believe there’s a special charm to it, an inexplicable and poetic mystery, what’s happening in the towns, what they’re getting the last of … Already the towns like Macondo are not the same as they were before … My second novel will definitely have the same setting as the first, as will any others that I write, if I write them; it will be set in Macondo … And you won’t be able to call it a continuation or a sequel to Leaf Storm … It’ll be like this, to explain a little more specifically: in my second novel I’m going to have some characters that live in the house next door to the one where the cadaver of the hanged man was left to sit … Those people, though they live in Macondo and are influenced by that same setting, will have different problems from the characters in Leaf Storm; you see how a distinct novel can be written, with the same setting and different characters … And that’s why I believe that my novel is an example of costumbrismo … I think that those writers that in Colombia are called costumbristas tried to do the same thing I propose for myself, and that is simply to give local customs and characters an air of universality such that they can feel familiar anywhere in the world … I can better explain the concept I have of the nature of costumbrismo … Quixote is costumbrismo to me … By which I mean, I define costumbrismo as any work that fulfills that same purpose, that exposes the local within the universal.

  “My second novel, which will definitely be out within the next few months, will be titled Los Catorce Días de la Semana (The Fourteen Days of the Week).”†

  LITERATURE AND CINEMA

  We’ve gotten off-topic while relighting our cigarettes. He has been speaking very passionately. We feel the urge to take careful note of every word, every thought, but it’s impossible. The ideas crowding into his mind are converted into agile sentences streaming out of his mouth. If he is really this eloquent, he is surely always a good conversation partner.

  “I believe,” he continues, “that the novel must have some purpose … Beyond being read by readers … The novel must have a goal, must contain some intention of the author’s, distinct from the intention that it be read …” These last words convince us to share with him our thoughts when we learned, while following him into the elevator earlier, that on returning to Europe he plans to study filmmaking. We tell him that we think we see behind his impulse the same reasoning that brought the novelist Curzio Malaparte and the lawyer André Cayatte to direct films. These writers have come to believe that through film they can spread their ideas more efficiently. This is because the medium is accessible to the average contemporary person, who goes to the cinema to assuage today’s universal need for diversion, and not just to the cult minority that reads books. We mention films like The Forbidden Christ and those directed by Cayatte, in which one finds not only technical excellence, but also an obvious attempt to convey certain concepts and ideas to the viewers.

  TRAVELING TOWARD EUROPE

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

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

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

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

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

  “Who is your favorite author?”

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

  “Why?” we ask him.
/>   “Because in it the detective discovers in the end that he himself is the murderer …”

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

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

  LEARNING SLOWLY

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

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

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

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

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

  “Much too generous …”

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

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

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

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

  * The reference is to García Márquez’s series of articles about the shipwreck of a Colombian Navy vessel and the sole survivor, Luis Alejandro Velasco, later translated into English and published as The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, Knopf, 1986.

  † The next work he published, in 1961, was El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (No One Writes to the Colonel).

  POWER TO THE IMAGINATION IN MACONDO

  INTERVIEW BY ERNESTO GONZÁLEZ BERMEJO

  REVISTA CRISIS, ARGENTINA

  1975

  TRANSLATED BY ELLIE ROBINS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  GONZÁLEZ BERMEJO: Why?

  GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: Because each book is a step forward.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  GONZÁLEZ BERMEJO: How old is the dictator?

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

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

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

  GONZÁLEZ BERMEJO: Is it a single movement?

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

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

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

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

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

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

  GONZÁLEZ BERMEJO: And after The Patriarch?