GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: I never said that. In fact, I am coming here from Colombia. What I said was, I wanted to stay there without ever leaving again. Then I realized the political and social reality right now is so intense I couldn’t write in peace.
So I went to Mexico, which the press interpreted to mean I wouldn’t come back as long as Samper was president. For me to say I’m not going to come back to a country while a president is in power is to do him an honor, an homage that I will not give to anyone.
STREITFELD: In the 1970s, you were widely reported as saying you would stop writing as long as Pinochet was in power in Chile. He was in power for 17 years.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: I never thought he’d last so long. Even though you may think it’s not true, I really am a realist. Time convinced me I was wrong. What I was doing was allowing Pinochet to stop me from writing, which means I had submitted to voluntary censorship. I was sacrificing something that even the Chileans living under him weren’t doing.
STREITFELD: No wonder you try to say as little as possible in public. Someone always misinterprets it.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: I always have the impression it wasn’t exactly what I said. Maybe it’s me. I’m such a perfectionist, so precise. When I can’t find the right word, I get very angry. For three months I was blocked in writing The General in His Labyrinth because I couldn’t find the right adjective. Then I found it—“aulico,” meaning “relating to the court or palace”—and never even used it.
STREITFELD: Speaking of quoting, there was a piece about you recently in The Paris Review by one of the students who attended your writing school in Cartagena. She quoted you as saying, “Writing never stops being difficult. Staring at a blank page, one gets the same anxiety as with sex, always anticipating if it’s going to work or not. There’s always the anguish.”
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: It’s been many, many years since I had the blank page problem—not since I read the quote from Hemingway where he said he stopped in the middle of a page, to leave himself a place to start the next day. That does work. The student was taking notes from a workshop that lasted a week. It’s really hard to quote well. I don’t have that anxiety with writing, or with sex.
STREITFELD: Maybe I shouldn’t have brought this up.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: It’s aggravating. One of the premises of my workshops is that journalism has to recover a sense of ethics. The only condition for the students is that they don’t make the workshop into an article. All of them say they will not write about it.
That student in The Paris Review did not respect that commitment. She wrote that piece, and all the other students then complained to me. She could have written an editorial commentary on what the workshop is like, but what she did is just a transcription. That’s the easy way to be a journalist.
STREITFELD: I liked one other quote from The Paris Review article, where you told the writers who had long sentences that you had to use “breathing commas.”
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: My idea of a literary text is actual hypnotism. It’s very important that the rhythm does not have any stops and starts, because when you have a stop or a start, the reader can escape. There are too many other books waiting. Any hurdle and the reader will go pick up something else. Commas may seem like a grammatical sign, but I use them for respiratory purposes. The reader must not wake up.
STREITFELD: I found a copy of one of your books in an edition I had never seen before. It was in Spanish, but it wasn’t from any of your regular publishers.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: It was a pirate edition. There are so many. The legitimate publishers are so hard to deal with that the pirated editions are always winning. But I’m somewhat grateful to the pirates, because I’m gaining readers.
Legitimate publishers are at fault for not competing with the pirates. The only difference between the two is that the pirates don’t pay royalties. But the legitimate publishers hardly pay royalties either.
STREITFELD: What are you working on now?
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: I’m writing a trilogy, a three-part novel of 200 pages each. The common thread is love stories between older people. Is love different when you’re old? I developed this notion in Love in the Time of Cholera but I am still writing so I can learn. In part I was inspired by Kawabata’s House of the Sleeping Beauties. Usually when I read a book by someone else that is good, I am very happy and I admire the writer. This is the only book I’ve ever read that has made me envious. I read it and said, Why didn’t I think of this?
STREITFELD: What is it about?
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: In Kyoto there is a house where aristocratic older men can go see beautiful young women. They are naked but drugged. If the men touch them they wake up and it breaks the rules. So they can only watch—and the men discover the immense pleasure of looking without touching.
It’s a beautiful book. One day I said, I am going to write something like this. The only thing I’m going to do is switch it to the Caribbean. The hardest thing is the fact that they’re drugged. That’s a very Japanese thing. It doesn’t really fit into our culture.
STREITFELD: This story seems a long way from those prostitutes you used to live with back in Baranquilla.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: In my story, the hero doesn’t worry about sex anymore, because it doesn’t depend on him, it depends on her. There’s a French proverb: there are no impotent men, only women who don’t know what to do.
It’s flattery, no? Once, in Caracas, I said that all men were impotent. Women were thrilled. They said I was their hero.
STREITFELD: There is a stamp in Colombia with your face on it.
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: I hope it’s only used for love letters.
“I’VE STOPPED WRITING”
THE LAST INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW BY XAVI AYÉN
LA VANGUARDIA, SPAIN
2006
TRANSLATED BY THEO ELLIN BALLEW
In February 2006, La Vanguardia’s magazine published what was to be García Márquez’s last interview, as part of a series of interviews with winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
In the immense human hotbed that is the Mexican plaza Zócalo—at once epicenter of the country’s power and setting for the most diverse protests—where landless people from the country, homeless people from the city, and women fleeing their own husbands’ violence can be seen camping out, several groups of indigenous people are purging passers-by of evil spirits in exchange for a few coins. We are tempted to engage their services, because in just a few hours our interview with Gabriel García Márquez will begin, a privilege few journalists have enjoyed since he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, and we’re tormented by the fear that at the last minute everything will somehow fall to pieces.
The cab driver knows the way to Pedregal de San Angel, a residential neighborhood built on top of volcanic rocks where movie stars, former presidents, and bankers have their homes.
After passing through the front gate and a quiet outdoor patio, we reach the living room, slightly out of breath from carrying the heavy Christmas gifts his friends from Barcelona asked us to bring along. Gabo and his wife, Mercedes Barcha, have lived here since 1975, when they left Spain, and have renovated and added onto the house continually. There are wooden beams, and countless clefts, windows, lace curtains, and apertures that let in the sun, illuminating, among other things, pictures of the writer’s five grandchildren, whose ages range from eighteen to seven, and a gigantic yellow doll that resembles some sort of rabbit.
While we wait, we flip through the books sitting on his coffee table, some filled with portraits of Nobel laureates and others with Richard Avedon photographs (a little later, Gabo will tell us: “That Avedon … He came here, he took my photo, and within fifteen days, he died—I never got to see it”). We walk through a garden with many flowers—including some truly spectacular orchids—on our way to the private study Gabriel García Márquez had built. We catch him sitting before his computer, not in a magical moment of composition but rather reading the
world news online. In a friendly manner, he asks us to take a seat and lets it be known that he is making an exception and only hesitantly submits himself to this interview because he hasn’t been able to hold out under the pressure of those close to him; here, he takes us by the arm and asks, in a whisper: “So now come on, tell me, how much did you guys pay my wife?”
The first meeting, then, takes place in his office, and is interrupted only by a few strident English sentences pronounced by his computer, as though the CIA were periodically chiming in. Gabo’s computer is the latest model and reflects every conceivable technological advance; it’s been many years since he abandoned his legendary typewriter. “I had to buy a computer as soon as they came out,” he boasts. “When I worked on a typewriter, I wrote one book every seven years, on average, and with a computer it’s come out to about one every three years, because it does so much of the work for you. I have several identical set-ups, one here, one in Bogotá, and another in Barcelona, and I always carry a floppy disk in my bag.”
As he speaks, he drinks Coke continually, an addiction superseded only by his need to be in constant contact with the news arriving by telephone, internet, fax, and mail about what’s happening in the world right now, especially in his native country, Colombia.
Hesitant to speak about his private life (“for that you can talk to my authorized biographer, the North American Gerald Martin, who really should have already published the book—I think that he’s waiting for something to happen to me …”), he tells us that “this year, 2005, I’ve gone ahead and taken a sabbatical. I haven’t sat down at my computer. I haven’t written a single line. And not only that: I have neither a project nor hopes of forming one. I never stopped writing before—this has been the first year of my life like this. I used to work every day, from nine in the morning until three in the afternoon, I used to say it was to keep my arm warm … but really it was because I didn’t know what else to do in the morning.”
“And now have you found something better to do?”
“I’ve found something fantastic: staying in bed and reading! Now I read all the books I never had the time to read … I remember that before I would suffer greatly when for whatever reason I wasn’t writing. I needed to invent some activity so I could live through till three in the afternoon, as a distraction from my anxiety. But now it’s turned out to be quite pleasant.”
“And the second book of memoirs?”
“I don’t think I’ll write it. I have some notes written, but I don’t want it to just be a professional operation. I’ve realized that if I publish a second volume, I’m going to have to say things I don’t want to say, because of some personal relationships that are not so good anymore. The first volume, Living to Tell the Tale, is exactly what I wanted it to be. In the second, I met a number of people that just had to come along and that—caramba, I don’t want them showing up in my memoirs. It would be dishonest to leave them out, because they were important in my life, but they didn’t end up being very kind to me.”
Though Gabo doesn’t give us any names, we can’t help asking about Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian writer who was a friend for a short period until, in 1976, he punched Gabo in public, here in Mexico, because of a personal incident that the two authors have left to be explained by “future biographers.”
“You don’t think it’s possible that, some day, there will be a reconciliation?”
His wife, Mercedes Barcha, who came into his studio a few minutes ago, responds abruptly: “If you ask me, at this point it’s too late. It’s been thirty years.”
“That many?” asks Gabo, surprised. “We’ve lived so happily these thirty years without ever having a need for him,” Mercedes affirms, before adding that “Gabo is more diplomatic than I am, and so you can say those words came out of my mouth alone.”
Returning to his unprecedented period of inactivity, the Nobel laureate clarifies that “my year-long sabbatical has ended, but already I’m coming up with excuses to prolong it through 2006. Now that I’ve discovered I can read without writing, we’ll see how long I can make it last. I think I’ve earned it. With everything I’ve written, you know? Though if tomorrow I come up with a novel, how marvelous it would be! Really, with the practice I have, it’d be no problem to finish: I’d sit in front of my computer and churn it out … but people can tell if you haven’t really put your guts into something. Over there behind me all the technological devices are turned on, ready to join in on the action the day that happens. I would love to come up with an idea, but I don’t feel the need to sit down and invent one. People should know that, if I publish anything else, it will be because it’s well worthwhile.
“You know,” he adds, “I don’t wake up scared in the middle of the night anymore, after dreaming about the deaths of the people from the stories my grandmother used to tell in Aracataca, when I was a little boy, and I think that these things are related, this and the fact that the ideas have stopped coming to me.”
His latest “idea” to date was Memories of My Melancholy Whores, a short novel published in 2004 that millions of readers all over the world hope won’t be his last. “It wasn’t even planned,” he reveals now. “Really, it comes out of an earlier plan; I’d imagined a series of stories like this one, all about prostitutes. A while back I wrote four or five stories, but the only one I liked in the end was the last; I realized that I couldn’t get as much out of the idea as I’d thought, that what I’d really been working toward was that one story, and so I decided to throw out the first ones and publish the last on its own.”
Another project he was working on, a project that has since been stalled, was the story of a man doomed to die after writing his last sentence. “But I thought: careful, it might happen to you …”
Gabo doesn’t seem distressed by his creative drought, and instead views it with a carefree attitude that’s very Caribbean. “My life hasn’t changed now that I’ve stopped writing, and that’s for the better! The hours it used to fill haven’t been commandeered by any harmful activities.”
The writer draws our attention to the large yellow doll we noticed when we first came in: “It was hand-made in Mexico, a gift from Felipe González,* who comes around here a lot.” We then start to talk about his fascination with power, and the different politicians and ex-politicians that visit him. “As a writer, I’m interested in power, because in it can be found all the greatness and misery of human existence.”
He mentions his friendship with Clinton. “Have you met? He’s a wonderful guy! I never have such a good time as when I’m with him. AIDS is what he’s really worried about these days, he’s sincerely shocked and disturbed by how little attention the authorities are paying to the alarming spread of the disease into new zones, especially the Caribbean. They’re not listening to him, but nobody knows more than he does about the issue.”
He takes us to see his home movie theater. “It’s very difficult for me to make it to the normal screenings, I spend hours and hours giving out autographs at the door. This way they send the films here; otherwise, they invite me to private screenings.”
His passion for the seventh art isn’t new: when he was young, he even dreamed of being a director, a dream his son Rodrigo, a constant presence at prestigious film festivals like Cannes, Locarno, and San Sebastián, later fulfilled. Rodrigo, in addition to having directed episodes of The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, is responsible for the feature films Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her, Ten Tiny Love Stories, and Nine Lives. “It’s a good thing they’re so excellent,” his father comments. “It would have been so horrible for me if I didn’t think they were any good!” Rodrigo lives in Hollywood, and his brother Gonzalo lives in Paris. Both are currently staying with their parents, and they come and go as comfortably as they would have when they were children. Tomorrow, Gonzalo, a graphic designer and painter, will explain to us that “Gabo wasn’t one of those dads that plays a lot of games with you, but he talked to you a lot, and was very open with us abou
t ‘grown-up’ subjects. The kind of thing we’d do with him as kids was talk, and listen to music.”
García Márquez’s attempt to keep his private life private is more and more successful as time passes, and he seems to have prevented his fame from robbing him of time for his sons, his grandchildren, and his friends. In the beginning, however, “fame nearly ruined my life, because it disturbed my sense of reality, much in the way power does. It condemns you to solitude, creates certain difficulties in communication that isolate you.”
Suddenly the phone rings, and the writer predicts: “It’s Carmen Balcells, no question …” Mercedes picks up and, indeed, on the other end of the line the most famous literary agent in the world is speaking. The writer laughs heartily to himself: “See? The woman doesn’t sleep. Nothing escapes her, she knows that we’re talking to you right now … She has us under closer surveillance than ever.”
Carmen Balcells has been working with García Márqez since 1961, when no one believed in the young writer, who wouldn’t become an international celebrity until the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), which follows the developments of the Buendía family over several generations, as they encounter several characters including a baby with a pig’s tail and a priest that flies. It is now considered the epitome of magical realism.
Rather than walk through Mexico City, Gabo suggests that we transport ourselves mentally to another city, namely Barcelona in the 1960s and ’70s, where he lived for a time and wrote The Autumn of the Patriarch: “We arrived in 1967 with a two-meter-long alligator skin that a friend had given me. I was ready to sell it, because we needed the money, but I thought better of it and in the end we decided against it. It had traveled with us over half the world, as a kind of token of good luck. It all happened very quickly. When I lived in Barcelona I went from having nothing to eat—before, in Paris, I had even ended up asking for money in the Métro—to being able to buy houses for myself.