Gabriel Garcia Marquez (8 page)

MENDOZA
: You've also said it's the one you most enjoyed writing. Why?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Because it's the book I always wanted to write, and it's where I've gone furthest in my personal confessions.

MENDOZA
: Duly camouflaged, of course.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Of course.

MENDOZA
: It was also the book which took you longest to write.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Seventeen years in all. And I abandoned two versions before hitting on the right one.

MENDOZA
: So it's your best book?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Before I wrote
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
, I used to say my best novel was
Nobody Writes to the Colonel
. I rewrote it nine times and it seemed the least vulnerable of my works to me.

MENDOZA
: But you think
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
is even better.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Yes.

MENDOZA
: In which sense?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: In the sense that I did exactly what I wanted to do with it. This had never happened before. In my other books the story took over, the characters took on a life of their own and did whatever they fancied.

MENDOZA
: That's one of the most extraordinary things about literary creation …

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: But I felt I needed to write a book over which I could exercise strict control, and I think I did it in
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
. The theme demanded the precise structure of a detective story.

MENDOZA
: It's very odd that you never mention
One Hundred Years of Solitude
among your best books when many critics consider it is unsurpassable. Do you really feel so bitter about it?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Yes, I do. It nearly ruined my life. Nothing was ever the same again after it was published.

MENDOZA
: Why?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Because fame unsettles your sense of reality, almost as much as power perhaps, and it continually threatens your private life. Unfortunately, nobody believes this until they have to put up with it.

MENDOZA
: Is it that you feel the success of
One Hundred Years of Solitude
is unfair to the rest of your work?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Yes, it's unfair.
The Autumn of the Patriarch
is a much more important literary achievement. But whereas it is about the solitude of power,
One Hundred Years of Solitude
is about the solitude of everyday life. It's everybody's life story. Also, it's written in a simple, flowing, linear, and, I'd even say (I've said it before), superficial way.

MENDOZA
: You seem to despise it.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: No, but since I knew it was written with all the tricks and artifices under the sun, I knew I could do better even before I wrote it.

MENDOZA
: That you could beat it.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Yes, that I could beat it.

TWO INTERVIEWS BY DAVID STREITFELD

MEXICO CITY AND WASHINGTON, D.C
.

1993 AND 1997

My first interview with Gabriel García Márquez took place in late 1993 at his house in Mexico City. He was just finishing
Del amor y otros demonios,
a minor but charming work published in Spanish the next year and in English as
Of Love and Other Demons
in 1995, and was beginning to conceive a multivolume autobiography, the first and only volume of which was published in 2002. He was recovering from his first bout with cancer, a situation that fed his hypochondria and melancholy. The conversation, spread over two days, took place in a bungalow adjacent to the main house. Pleasant but not ostentatious, it was at once library, office and man-cave. It was very well heated
.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: (
Points to the tape-recorder
.) Do we really have to use that? I'm an enemy of the tape-recorder. It has an ear but no heart. You could take notes.

STREITFELD
: I write very slowly. So I'm afraid we must use it. Otherwise, this interview would last until next week.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Okay, then. I'm sorry I don't speak English.
The biggest mistake I ever made in my life was not learning how to speak English perfectly. (
Gestures in surrender
.) Ask me what you will.

STREITFELD
: You recently had a brush with lung cancer.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Yes. My prognosis is good. The tumor was benign. Well, it was malign but it had not spread. The doctors give me lots of optimism. I always said that if something like this were to happen, I wanted them to lie to me. So now they give me an impression that everything will be okay and I don't know if it's the truth or not. The check-ups remain terrifying. They might find something else. I recently had an appointment scheduled for Wednesday. On Saturday I was anxious. On Sunday, I thought I was going to die.

STREITFELD
: What happened on Monday?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: I moved the appointment up.

STREITFELD
: Has the cancer affected your work?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: I'm in more of a hurry. I used to say, “I can do this in twenty or thirty years.” Now I know there might not be another thirty years. But I try to get over this when I sit down to work. Hurriedness in creative expression is immediately noticed. In any case, using a computer is changing me more than the cancer. The first novel I wrote on a computer was “Love in the Time of Cholera.” I suspect it was the first novel written in Spanish on a computer by anyone.

On a typewriter I used to finish a draft and then give it to the typist, who would make a clean copy. It was a happy thing to see the new draft but the whole process would take a while. Now, with a computer, I just keep rewriting and rewriting. On a computer, a novel is infinitely correctible. It's so easy. You go on endlessly. But in the end it's faster. The proof is I used to put out a novel every seven years, now it's every two years.

STREITFELD
: And yet you still have time for journalism.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Journalism is my true vocation. It keeps my feet on the ground. Otherwise I'm like a balloon, I float off. Journalism keeps me nailed to reality. Curiously, as time goes on, I find the professions of fiction and journalism merging. The essence of literature and of journalism is the credibility they create. People are convinced by details. They say, “That's it, it's right”—even if it's wrong. My new novel, which takes place in Cartagena, is about a legend but it's filled with reportage. I look for details. Once I've found them, everything starts to happen.

STREITFELD
: You are famous both for the amount of research you do, and for not letting it show.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: I am still looking for some sources that will tell me what kind of a job someone would have had in the Vatican library, and there are some points of medieval medicine I need to double-check. That's why I have all these books. When I saw Hemingway's library in Cuba, I could tell
immediately what his profession was. A novelist has to be able to consult everything.

STREITFELD
: And reveal nothing.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: And reveal nothing. When you finish the novel, you should destroy all your notes and drafts. Magicians never show how the trick was done. A writer should be the same.

STREITFELD
: (
Beginning to perspire
.) You like it warm in here, eh?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: I can't think in the cold. Besides this house, I have an apartment in Bogotá, an apartment in Cartagena, a house in Cuernavaca, a house in Paris and a house in Barcelona. My friends laugh at me because they're all the same: white. I have the exact same computer everywhere, and the same temperature setting—the temperature of the Caribbean. Tomorrow, if I have to go to Barcelona or Bogotá, I just grab my diskette and put it in my pocket.

STREITFELD
: Why white and not, say, blue?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: When visitors see it's a white carpet, they immediately start to clean their feet on the mat. If it weren't white, they wouldn't bother.

STREITFELD
: You were born in 1927—although some sources say 1928.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: In my town, there were no civic birth certificates. I wasn't baptized until I was three. My father would say I was born in 1927. My mother said, “Let him be born whenever he wants to be born.” Clearly, she's a practitioner of the new journalism.

STREITFELD
: In either case, you're still a young man—not even seventy.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: It's curious how one starts to perceive the signs of growing old. I first started to forget names and telephone numbers, then it became more encompassing. I couldn't remember a word, or a face, or a melody.

STREITFELD
: That sounds grim.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: I've sort of given up worrying about it. Everyone is at the point of dying in life itself. I want to write a short book, a manual for growing old.

STREITFELD
: I've heard you get most of your ideas in the shower.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Yes, it's true. I work every morning, from about nine to two-thirty in the afternoon. Those were the hours in which my children were at school. But then I had the problem that I was thinking about the story through the afternoon and night. I realized I was thinking about my stories all the time, even when I slept. I'd wake up tired and bored.
So now from the moment I close the machine, I don't think about it at all until the next day.

I'm trying to develop a sports training attitude—I don't eat too much, only two whiskies at night. The first thing in the morning I read over what I did yesterday so I know what's ahead. I'm beginning to work out the day. I believe in inspiration—not in the romantic sense, or the Holy Spirit who determines what you write, but in the sense that I and the subject have an intimate communication. And then I get in the shower, and the ideas come.

STREITFELD
: It sounds very efficient. How long are you in the shower?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Oh, ten minutes. But I would like it to be even more efficient. I want someone to invent a pill in which you take it and you've already showered, brushed your teeth. The bureaucracy of everyday things is so tedious.

STREITFELD
: Doesn't the Nobel Prize get you released from many ordinary tasks?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: The only thing the Nobel Prize is good for is not having to wait in line. They see you in line, they take you right up to the front.

STREITFELD
: That's really the only thing it's good for?

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: Fame is like flying a jumbo jet, it's a very delicate business. Also, I can't complain anymore. The Nobel
implies a sort of dignity. You can't say what you want to say about someone who is bugging you. Mercedes is now the one who runs the bureau of rancor. All wives run the bureau of rancor.

My life changed after
One Hundred Years of Solitude
was published, when I discovered that a friend sold my letters to a library in the United States. I gave up writing letters so no one else would do that. Fame is a catastrophe in my private life. It's as if you could even measure solitude by the number of people around you. You're surrounded by more and more people, you feel smaller and smaller and smaller.

STREITFELD
: You have been famous for decades, ever since
Solitude
became an immediate sensation in 1967. You must be used to it.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: I was famous but no one noticed. After the Nobel it was different. I had a project I wanted to do for a long time: Go to some small town in Colombia, get out of the car and write a report on what that town is about. But I realized something. By the third day, all the correspondents in Colombia would be there watching me do this. I'm the news.

STREITFELD
: So you're turning to the past and writing your memoirs.

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
: William Faulkner says something unforgettable: that the best place for a writer to live is a bordello. There's a party every night, the best hours to work—the
morning—are always peaceful, and you have a very good relationship with the police. As a young man I was living in a cheap hotel in Barranquilla where prostitutes would take clients. It was the cheapest hotel in the city but I learned things. Once I saw the governor—well, I heard his voice in the hallway.