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New Spring for the patriarch
• Gabriel
García Márquez marks his 80th birthday surrounded by
the splendors of fame that he never imagined in his
days of listening to fabulous tales in Aracataca
BY
PEDRO DE LA HOZ — Granma daily staff writer —
•
VERY much the Nobel laureate, with the applause and
veneration that accompanies that immense merit, I
saw Gabriel García Márquez take refuge in a room of
the Casa del Caribe in Santiago de Cuba, his face
deathly pale after having witnessed the sacrifice of
a four-legged animal to an African deity. “I know
that blood purifies, but the victim’s pain is too
much for me,” he commented, sinking into a wicker
easy chair.
A
German diplomat in Havana wanted to show him, from
end to end, sample by sample, for an interminable 40
minutes, the contents of his garden. At the end of
the detailed account, he asked the writer for his
impressions. García Márquez strung together four
emphatic words: “It’s all very German.”
During that time, he suddenly appeared in the
newsroom of Granma International. He abducted
another Gabriel, editor Gabriel Molina, to venture
into an apartment building in La Habana del Este in
search of Angel Augier, hoping to satisfy his
nostalgia for the days they shared together on the
reporting staff of the Prensa Latina news agency. It
was literally an ascent into heaven: the elevator in
the building where the poet lived was broken.
Just
three of the thousands of Cuban anecdotes about
Gabriel José de la Concepción García Márquez can
help us to remember how his long marriage to fame
has not spoiled the spirit or apprehensions of a man
who was born exactly 80 years ago (March 6) in
Aracataca, a humid town in the Colombian Caribbean,
swept by the memory of political wars and the
decadence of the banana plantations. A man who early
on defined his literary vocation based on an
accumulation of fabulous tales that he heard from
his grandmother, Tranquilina Iguarán.
A
man who, for Cubans, is just like one more Cuban,
because of his unwavering solidarity, his ideas and
trips through the island, and above all, because of
his close friendship with Fidel, whom he portrayed
with the following eloquent and accurate words:
“When he talks with people in the street, his
conversation takes on the expressiveness and raw
frankness of real feelings. They call out to him:
Fidel. They surround him without risk, call him the
familiar “you,” argue with him, contradict him,
demand from him, with a channel of immediate
transmission through which the truth circulates
furiously. That is when the unusual human being is
discovered, which the brightness of his own image
blocks from sight. This is the Fidel Castro that I
think I know: a man with austere and insatiable
dreams, with a formal, old-style education, with
careful words and subdued manners, incapable of
conceiving of any idea that is not a colossal one.”
Almost everywhere in the world, despite an intense
body of fiction writing that includes titles like
La mala hora (In Evil Hour), La hojarasca
(Leaf Storm), El coronel no tiene quien le
escriba (No One Writes to the Colonel), El
otoño del patriarca (The Autumn of the
Patriarch), “Los funerales de Mamá Grande” (“Big
Mama’s Funerals”), El amor en los tiempos del
cólera (Love in the Time of Cholera), Crónica
de una muerte anunciada (Chronicle of a Death
Foretold) and Memoria de mis putas tristes
(Memories of My Melancholy Whores), and an abundant
amount of journalistic production par excellence, he
is identified as the author of Cien años de
soledad (100 Years of Solitude), published in
Buenos Aires in 1967 by Editorial Sudamericana
publishers, with an initial printing of 8,000, which
has increased with time to no less than 30 million
copies in 35 languages.
Precisely in a city so dear to him, Cartagena de
Indias, at the 6th International Congress on the
Spanish Language at the end of this month, a
special, popular and academic edition of Cien
años de soledad will be launched, edited by the
author.
A
reluctant subject of tributes and interviews, Gabo
was unable to escape from the din that accompanied
festivities for his birthday. On March 5, in
Cartagena, where that city was hosting its 47th
International Film Festival, there was a roundtable
discussion featuring Chilean Miguel Littin, Costa
Rican Hilda Hidalgo, Mexican Jaime Hermosillo,
Colombians Lisandro Duque and Jorge Alí Triana, and
Argentine Fernando Birri, one of the founders of the
International Film and Television School in San
Antonio de los Baños, together with García Márquez
himself, to evoke their experiences in taking the
writer’s stories to the big screen.
Film, perhaps more than writing, is García Márquez’
great passion, since his youth at the Experimental
Center in Rome, a space he shared with his friends
Birri and Cubans Alfredo Guevara, Tomás Gutiérrez
Alea and Julio García Espinosa, at the side of
Italian master screenwriter Cesare Zavattini.
For now, we know that at least five movies are in
process to be premiered this year: super-production
El amor en los tiempos del cólera, directed
by Englishman Mike Newell and starring Giovanna
Mezzogiorno, Javier Bardem and Catalina Sandino
Moreno; Memoria de mis putas tristes, by Dane
Henning Carlsen, with script by the celebrated Jean
Claude Carriere; El otoño del patriarca, by
Bosnian Emir Kusturica; Del amor y otros demonios,
by Costa Rica Hilda Hidalgo, a student of the writer
in his workshops at the San Antonio de los Baños
School, and a family production, headed by his son,
Rodrigo García Barcha: a new version of Tiempo de
morir (A Time to Die). |
