Gabriel Garcia Marquez (6 page)

MENDOZA
: You and I learne something in Venezuela which has been a great help in life, namely, the link between bad taste and bad luck. The Venezuelans have a special word for this jinx attaching to pretentious people, objects, and attitudes. They call it
pava
.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Yes, it's an extraordinary defence mechanism that ordinary people's common sense has erected in Venezuela against the explosion of bad taste among the nouveaux riches.

MENDOZA
: You've made a complete list of objects and things with
pava
, haven't you? Can you remember any of them?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Well, there are the most obvious, the most common ones. Big conch shells behind the door …

MENDOZA
: Aquariums inside the house …

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Plastic flowers, peacocks, those embroidered Manila shawls … It's a very long list.

MENDOZA
: You also mentioned those young men in long black cloaks who entertain in restaurants in Spain.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: The student musical groups. There are very few things with more
pava
than those.

MENDOZA
: And formal dress?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Yes, but there are differing degrees. Tails have more
pava
than a dinner jacket but less than a frock coat. A tropical dinner jacket is the only item of this kind of dress which escapes.

MENDOZA
: Have you ever worn tails?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Never.

MENDOZA
: Would you never wear them? You would have to if you won the Nobel Prize.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: I've already had to put not wearing tails as a condition of my attending a function or ceremony on other occasions. What else can I do—tails have a jinx on them.

MENDOZA
: We also found other more subtle forms of
pava
. You once decided, for instance, that smoking in the nude did
not mean bad luck, but smoking in the nude while walking about did.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: And going around with nothing but your shoes on.

MENDOZA
: Of course.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Or making love with your socks on. That's fatal. It can never work.

MENDOZA
: What other things?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Disabled people who use their disabilities to play musical instruments. People without arms playing the drums with their feet or the flute with their ears, for instance. Or blind musicians.

MENDOZA
: I suppose certain words have a curse on them too. I mean words you never use when you're writing.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Yes, all sociological jargon—words like “level,” “parameter,” “context.” “Symbiosis” is a word with
pava
.

MENDOZA
: “Approach” is another.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Yes, “approach.” And what about “handicapped”? I never use “and/or” or “in order to” or “over and above.”

MENDOZA
: And do people have the same effect?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Yes, but it's better not to talk about them.

MENDOZA
: I think so too. There's one writer who carries
pava
with him wherever he goes. I'm not going to mention him by name because if I do this book will be doomed. What do you do when you meet people like that?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: I avoid them. Above all I refuse to sleep in the same place as they do. A few years ago Mercedes and I rented a flat in a town on the Costa Brava. We soon found out that a neighbor—a lady who'd come over to say hello—had
pava
. I refused to sleep there. I spent the day there but not the night. I went to sleep at a friend's house at night. Mercedes got really fed up about it, but there was nothing I could do.

MENDOZA
: What about places? Do they have this effect on you too?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Yes, not because they bring bad luck in themselves, but because at some time I've had a premonition there. This happened to me in Cadaqués. I know if I ever go back there I'll die.

MENDOZA
: You used to go every summer. What happened?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: We were staying in a hotel when that north wind which really sets your nerves on edge started blowing. Mercedes and I spent three days in our room unable to
go out. I had the sudden feeling, with absolute certainty, that I was in mortal danger. I knew that if I got out of Cadaqués alive I could never go back. When the wind stopped, we left immediately by that narrow, winding road. You known the one. I only breathed normally again when I got to Gerona. I'd had a miraculous escape, but I knew that if I went back I wouldn't be so lucky next time.

MENDOZA
: How do you explain your famous premonitions?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: I think they respond to bits of information or clues I pick up in my subconscious.

MENDOZA
: I remember that first of January 1958, in Caracas, when you instinctively felt something serious was about to happen any second and, in fact, it did. There was a totally unexpected air raid on the Presidential Palace right in front of our noses. To this day I ask myself how or why you had that premonition.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: It was almost certainly because when I woke up that morning in the hostel where I was living I heard the engine of a fighter plane. It must have stuck in my subconscious that something unusual was happening because I'd just arrived from Europe, where fighter planes only fly over cities in wartime.

MENDOZA
: Are your premonitions very clear-cut?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: No, they are very vague, like a kind of misgiving, but they are always related to something definite. Look, the other day in Barcelona, while I was tying my shoelace, I had this hunch that something had just happened at home in Mexico. Not necessarily anything bad. Just something. I was worried all the same because my son Rodrigo was leaving by car for Acapulco that day. I asked Mercedes to phone home. In fact something had happened at the very moment I was tying my shoelace. Our maid had just had a baby. A boy. I breathed a sigh of relief that the premonition had nothing to do with Rodrigo at all.

MENDOZA
: Your premonitions and intuition have helped you a lot. You have based many important decisions in your life on them.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Not only the most important. All of them.

MENDOZA
: All of them. Is that true?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: All of them. Every day. Every time I decide something I do it intuitively.

MENDOZA
: Let's talk about your manias. Which is your biggest mania?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: My oldest and most constant mania is punctuality. I was punctual even as a child.

MENDOZA
: You were saying that when you make a typing error you start the page again. Is that mania or superstition?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: That's sheet mania. To me a typing error or a crossing out is an error of style. (It can also be simply fear of writing.)

MENDOZA
: Do you have manias about clothes? I mean, do you have certain clothes which you don't wear because they bring bad luck?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Hardly ever. If it has
pava
I know before I buy it. Once, however, I stopped wearing a jacket because of Mercedes. She was coming back from school with the children and thought she saw me at one of the windows in the house with a checked jacket on. I was actually in another part of the house. When she told me this I never put that jacket on again. And I really like it, by the way.

MENDOZA
: Let's talk about the things you like, as they do in women's magazines. It's amusing asking you the things we always ask beauty queens at home in Colombia. What is your favorite book?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
:
Oedipus Rex
.

MENDOZA
: Your favorite composer?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Béla Bártok.

MENDOZA
: And painter?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Goya.

MENDOZA
: The film director you most admire?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Orson Welles, especially for
The Immortal Story
, and Kurosawa for
Red Beard
.

MENDOZA
: The film you most enjoyed?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
:
Il Generale de la Rovere
, by Rossellini.

MENDOZA
: Any other?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
:
Jules et Jim
by Truffaut.

MENDOZA
: Which film character would you most liked to have created?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: General de la Rovere.

MENDOZA
: Which historical figure interests you most?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Julius Caesar, but only from a literary point of view.

MENDOZA
: And the one you dislike most?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Christopher Columbus. He's really got
pava
. One of the characters in
The Autumn of the Patriarch
says so.

MENDOZA
: Your favorite literary heroes?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Gargantua, Edmund Dantes, and Count Dracula.

MENDOZA
: Which day do you dislike?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Sunday.

MENDOZA
: We know your favorite colour is yellow. But what shade of yellow?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: I described it once as the yellow of the Caribbean seen from Jamaica at three in the afternoon.

MENDOZA
: And your favorite bird?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: I've said that too. It's
canard à l'orange
.

3. WORK

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: In general, I think a writer writes only one book, although that same book may appear in several volumes under different titles. You see it with Balzac, Conrad,
Melville, Kafka, and of course with Faulkner. One of these books sometimes stands out far above the rest so that the author seems to be the author of a single, primordial work. Who remembers Cervantes's short stories? Who remembers
The Graduate Who Thought He Was Made of Glass
, for instance? But that can still be read with as much pleasure as any of his major works. In Latin America, the Venezuelan writer Rómulo Gallegos is famous for
Doña Barbara
, which is not his best work, and the Guatemalan Miguel Angel Asturias is known for
The President
, a terrible novel, not nearly as good as
Legends of Guatemala
.

MENDOZA
: If it's true every writer spends his life writing a single book, which would yours be? The book of Macondo?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: You know that's not right. Only two of my novels,
Leaf Storm
and
One Hundred Years of Solitude
, and some short stories published in
Big Mama's Funeral
, take place in Macondo. The others—
Nobody Writes to the Colonel
,
In Evil Hour
, and
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
—are set in another town on the Colombian coast.

MENDOZA
: A town with no train and no smell of bananas.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: … but with a river. A town you can only get to by launch.

MENDOZA
: If it isn't the book of Macondo, what would your one book be?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: The book of solitude. If you recall, the main character in
Leaf Storm
lives and dies in the most absolute solitude. Solitude haunts the central figure in
Nobody Writes to the Colonel
—the Colonel waits, Friday after Friday, with his wife and his cockerel, for a war pension which never comes. The Mayor who fails to win the town's confidence in
In Evil Hour
is a solitary figure too. In his own way, he knows the solitude of power.

MENDOZA
: Like Aureliano Buendía and the Patriarch.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Exactly. Solitude is the theme in
The Autumn of the Patriarch
and of course in
One Hundred Years of Solitude
.