GABRIEL Garcia Marquez lives on the Street of Fire, at the corner of the Street of Water. The house is in a neighbourhood called Pedregal de San Angel at the foot of Mount Ajusco, in the southern reaches of gargantuan Mexico City. It is a Friday afternoon in early spring at five o'clock.
The front door bell rings, and the door is opened by his assistant. The host will be a little late. In the meantime, the visitor is invited to await him in the salon, which is bathed in the fragrance of nardos flowers.
She speaks a little about the cool weather, and a little about the cloud of smog that sulks above the city. About, her boss, she says: "he's an easy going, charming man; you'll soon see. She began working for him not long ago, and is now reading Patriarch's Autumn for the first time. She expresses her amazement at the book's complex structure and at that moment, the jingling of keys is heard. Into the salon bursts the writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
He is a shorter man than one expects, and thinner too, with a mop of hair and bushy eyebrows. He is wearing blue, woollen pants, a brown checked jacket and mustard tie. And he is speaking fast. "You can already understand that promptness is not one of my outstanding qualities," he says and shakes the visitor's hand firmly. He has just returned from lunch, which took a while, since "there were all these important people there and it was hard for me to leave in the middle". He apologises and immediately suggests moving over to the cabin where he does his writing, in the verdant back yard of the house. As Garcia Marquez opens the door, the visitors are startled by the rush of moist, hot air. "I set the temperature to simulate the weather of the Caribbean. It gives me inspiration. It's the only way I can write," he explains.
It's a big room with a comfortable lounging area and a rich library that covers two entire walls. A computer and printer occupy one end of a dark wooden rectangular table. Garcia Marquez sits down in his armchair. The conversation veers from a discussion of modern Spanish to Judeo Spanish, Ladino.
He immediately gets up and grabs a large dictionary off a bookshelf, in which he finds 11 different explanations for the word Ladino. After reading the entire entry out loud, he declares the dictionary to be the book which has had the greatest influence on his life. "All of these shelves are filled with dictionaries. This is my working library - it has the books I need for my writing. Sometimes I need to kill off a character and I don't know how, and then I use this book." He pulls out The Writer's Complete Crime Reference Book, in which appear detailed directions for carrying out the perfect murder. "A writer of novels must be knowledgeable in all fields," he sums up.
Since Garcia Marquez is already standing, he takes advantage of the opportunity to show off some more of the contents of the library. "Actually, music interests me more than literature. Not only does it interest me more, I love it more."
He especially loves the Hungarian composer Bella Bartok and Beethoven and Latino American rhumba, bolero and paso doble beats. Soon, he says, everything will be on discs. "I believe that even books will disappear. Something about them is very primitive."
You also write your letters on a computer?
"I don't write letters."
It can't be so. The man whose books are loaded with letters of courtship, love letters, letters with murder threats, letters that never get opened, letters that are only found posthumously, the man who wrote The Colonel has Nobody to Write to Him" - he, of all people, doesn't write letters?
It's a sad story, he says. "Many years ago, a friend of mine who was having financial problems sold some personal letters to a certain university, including some of my own. It was a huge embarrassment for me. Since that time, I haven't written letters. So I spend a little too much money on overuse of the telephone and sometimes I send a fax. Aside from that, over the years, my handwriting has declined and if I have to write anything down - such as corrections in the margins of a printed manuscript - I myself can't understand anything at all. In my childhood I had very beautiful handwriting but over the years I have lost it."
Garcia Marquez was born Saturday, March 6th, 1927 in the town of Aractaca, four kilometres south of the Macondo banana plantation (owned by the US multinational United Fruit company). Aractaca is in the swamp filled Santa Maria region, not far from northern Colombia's Caribbean coast.
Gabriel is the eldest son of Luisa Santiaga Marquez and Gabriel Ekijio Garcia. However, the first eight years of his life were spent with his maternal grandparents, Tranquilina Iguaran and Colonel Nicholas Marquez. He grew up in a big house through whose front gates moved a constant procession of cousins, nephews, grandchildren, and even the colonel's own illegitimate children. His grandmother and aunts looked after the household and took care of him. He remembers them telling him completely fantastic tales, all the while with expressionless faces and without so much as a raised eyebrow.
On several occasions in the past, Garcia Marquez has stated that all of the experiences and the details he relates in his books and even his literary style, were already set during his childhood in his grandmother's house. Can one infer from this that every author essentially has one story, which he simply tells and retells?
"First of all, I think that an author is born, not created. He is born with the gift and with the calling and all that is needed is to learn to write. Secondly, I don't believe that there's a single line in all of the books I've written that does not relate to my childhood. Childhood is the great source of all of my writing, and nostalgia is the principal raw material which forms the basis of my writing. I don't mean the nostalgia of boy, those were the days, rather in the taking in of life from a certain perspective."
Would it be true to say that you have taken your memory and made it into a vocation?
"I have made my living off of my memory all of my life and this fact worries me quite a lot now for I have started to sense that it is betraying me. For example, I have a list of faces and a list of names in my head but am unable to connect between them."
GARCIA MARQUEZ wakes at 5 a.m. After a quick coffee, he spends three hours reading. "If I don't read during that time of the day, I just don't get to read at all." He prints what he has written the previous day and makes corrections by hand. By 8 a.m. he sits down at the computer, enters the changes and then keeps on writing until 2.30 p.m. Garcia Marquez does not regard writing as an act of inspiration. Nor, even, does he consider it work. "To my mind, writing is carpentry," he claims.
When he's working on a new piece of furniture, he doesn't let anyone peek. Garcia Marquez doesn't let anyone have a look until the first draft is complete. At this point, the text is still full of mistakes and full of doubts, and written, by his own definition, only "more or less" but certainly not what he will end up publishing. "The machine that works the hardest in this house is not," he reveals, "the computer and not the copying machine and not even the refrigerator but the shredder. They say that the quality of a writer is measured more by what he tears up than what he publishes. I always destroy all of the draft versions. It was only this year that, for the first time, as a present, I gave my wife, Mercedes, the 11 drafts that led to the final version of On Love and Other Devils.
Why shred?
"First of all, because of the shame. A critic who would read these drafts would know what lies I had told and which contrivances I had constructed, and I don't wish to be known in this way. I also destroy the earlier drafts because these days such material is considered very valuable goods. You would be paid any sum you could name for the original hard copies with my hand written corrections. Personally, I would be greatly pained if I were to end up making my living from samples of my handwriting rather than from books."
After writing and destroying many drafts, he arrives at the point where he needs an outside perspective. He has a group of friends, always the same people, to whom he sends copies of the manuscript. "They read it," says Garcia Marquez, "and tell me a few truths; some of them don't even tell me all the truth. Later, when they read the completed book, they still tell me, `Oh how wonderful, this is really how I thought it had to be but I didn't dare tell that to you'."
Now he is asked if these friends are well known personalities. Garcia Marquez, who has until now spoken forthcomingly and at a rapid clip, suddenly sounds hesitant. "Umm... yes.
He pauses, silent. At last he mumbles a reply: "The circle includes psychologists, an architect and two writers."
You have the nerve to give your own manuscript to another writer?
"Well, they're friends. Besides, they relate to reading as work. They know that they are bearing a heavy responsibility. After all, I am liable to expose them as having passed over a mistake without commenting upon it," he smiles. "But they always catch the rough spots. We debate a lot and argue, and at the end I just do what I want. For I am the master of the house here, I am the author, I am the ruler over the typewriter."
The first of his readers, Garcia Marquez later elaborates, is always his friend Alvaro Mutis, the Columbian author. It was to Mutis that Garcia Marquez declared in 1964: "I'll never write again."
The writer had experienced a four year drought and had not managed to publish even a single literary work. One day he went with his wife and two young children on a vacation. Then and there, on the road from Mexico City to Acapulco, he found to his amazement that he was able to recite word for word the book he had wanted to write since he was 15. The family Opel immediately took a u turn to head back home.
On the way, Garcia Marquez asked his wife Mercedes to look after the family finances for the next six months, during which time he would write his next book. Gabriel Garcia Marquez sat in his workroom for eight hours a day and wrote a history of the Buendia dynasty from Macondo. Eighteen months later, with the family's debts amounting to some $10,000, the manuscript was finally sent to a publisher.
"One Hundred Years of Solitude was like an explosion," he recounts. "All the while that I was writing my five previous books, I had the feeling that something was missing but I didn't know what. I only knew that I wanted to write a book in which everything happens. I had noticed that the most fantastic, supernatural things happen in real life in the Caribbean islands. So I reasoned that if my grandmother had told me such stories and I had believed them, why not write the same way?"
THE first book he had ever read was A Thousand and One Nights. It was just after he had learned how to read. Young Gabo found the chapters of the unbound book in a dusty crate and began to read: "I saw that a bottle was opened and that a genie emerged and I read about a woman who cut into the belly of a fish and found a diamond the size of an almond. I thought to myself, why don't I have the guts to write like that? After all, my mother had told me stories like that and my grandmother told me even more imaginative tales, in the most absolutely natural manner. I asked myself why carpets could fly there and people would believe it. Well, I can't write about flying carpets because in my village there are no carpets, but there are straw mats. So the mats fly and so will people.
"So I now had a literary and aesthetic definition of what I wanted to write. But I still lacked vital elements: style and tone. I asked myself again why I believed these tales when my grandmother told them. I understand that it was because of her facial expression. When she was telling a story, she would seem wholly convinced, deep down, of what she was telling. This was how it was - it simply happened just this way. So I told myself that this was how I have to write a book, with absolute conviction. That was the formula for One Hundred Years of Solitude."
Garcia Marquez sent the manuscript to the Sud Americana publishing house in Buenos Aires. Usually, for an author of his stature they would have printed a trial run of no more than 3,000 copies, in order to see how the book would sell. Instead, they printed 8,000 copies at once. "I even sent them a letter `You're crazy!'," Garcia Marquez recalls. "My previous book, The Colonel Has Nobody to Write to Him, had sold only 70 copies."
The first edition ran out in a matter of days. At the beginning, they would
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