The world recognizes Gabriel García Márquez as an extraordinary novelist—the beloved creator of Colonel Aureliano Buendía and of Macondo, of the epic love between Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza, of the death of Santiago Nasar, and of the colossal, solitary dictator of The Autumn of the Patriarch. For all of this, he received the maximum literary recognition possible, a Nobel Prize, and when he did, the Spanish-speaking world rejoiced at the sight of one of their own, “one of the seventeen children of the telegraphist of Aracataca,” standing before the Swedish monarchs to receive his distinction.
But García Márquez, or “Gabo”—the affectionate nickname by which he was known in the Hispanic world—was more than a novelist. He is also remembered for having been the friend and confidant of Fidel Castro and Bill Clinton, as well as Julio Cortázar and Carlos Fuentes and his other colleagues of the Boom, and for having been the husband of Mercedes Barcha and the father of two sons, Gonzalo and Rodrigo, and when he died in 2014, multitudes of people thronged to his funeral, which was held in the beautiful palace of Bellas Artes in the capital of Mexico, his longtime country of residence. When Juan Manuel Santos, who was then the president of Colombia, Gabo’s birthplace, said that he had been the best Colombian of all time, no one challenged the assertion.
In addition to all of that, Gabo was a journalist. Journalism was, in a sense, his first true love, and, like all first loves, it was the longest lasting. The profession of journalism helped form him as a writer, which is something he recalled forever afterward. His admiration for journalism reached the point where he proclaimed it, on one occasion, with his characteristic generosity, to be “the best job in the world.”
Gabo’s hyperbole was inspired by a sentiment of genuine respect and affection toward a profession that he made his own at the same time as he took his first steps as a writer. In 1947, his first year at the Universidad Nacional in Bogotá, Gabo’s first short stories were published in the daily newspaper El Espectador. He already wanted to become a writer, but had entered law school in order to please his father.
IT WAS NOT LONG, however, before Gabo’s academic life was interrupted by political violence. The April 1948 assassination of the charismatic Liberal politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in Bogotá triggered an outbreak of violent public unrest in the Colombian capital lasting several days. During the chaos, which became remembered as “el Bogotazo,” Gabo’s student residence went up in flames and the university itself was closed indefinitely. It was the beginning of a civil war between the country’s two main political parties, the Liberals and their rivals, the Conservatives.
The conflict, which would become known as “la Violencia,” would last a decade and cost the lives of some 200,000 people. Colombia would never be the same, and nor would the life of Gabo. To continue his studies, he moved to the city of Cartagena de Indias, on the Caribbean coast, and signed up at the university there. He also began to collaborate with a new local daily paper, El Universal, and, before long, gave up his studies altogether to devote himself to writing full-time. He soon began writing articles for El Heraldo, a newspaper published in the larger, neighboring city of Barranquilla, and he moved there in 1950. These were happy and formative years for Gabo, in which he was surrounded by other young creative personalities—writers, artists, and bohemians—with whom he became friends and who together made up the so-called Group of Barranquilla. While living in a flophouse that doubled as a bordello, Gabo eked out a living as a columnist, writing under the nom de plume “Septimus,” and he completed his first novella, Leaf Storm.
THIS ANTHOLOGY FOCUSES ON the unique journalistic legacy of Gabriel García Márquez via a selection of fifty of his articles published between 1950 and 1984. The pieces assembled here were selected by Cristóbal Pera, who worked with Gabo as an editor on his memoirs, culling from the exhaustive collection of Gabo’s journalism compiled by Jacques Gilard, the late French Hispanist, for his extraordinary five-volume anthology of Gabo’s work published in the 1980s.
The Scandal of the Century takes us from the early writings of the young, unknown Gabo of his Barranquilla days through nearly four decades, into the mid-1980s, when he was a mature, internationally renowned author. Among other things, this anthology reveals Gabo to have been blessed with abundant talent from the start, as well as an easygoing sense of humor, and a writer whose journalism is barely distinguishable from his fiction. Indeed, in his explanation for this selection, Pera tells us that he chose the works that most revealed Gabo as “the storyteller he was,” in which “the seams of reality are stretched by his unstoppable narrative impulse.”
In “Topic for a Topical Piece,” for instance, Gabo writes about the difficulty of finding an appropriate topic with which to begin a piece. “There are those who turn the lack of a topic into a topic for a journalistic piece. The choice is absurd in a world like ours, where things of imperceptible interest are happening.” After reviewing a series of curious stories appearing in the newspapers—including one telling of how the daughter of the Spanish dictator, the “Generalissimo” Francisco Franco, was getting married, and that her bridegroom, his future son-in-law, or yerno, was already being referred to as “el Yernissimo,” and another incident in which some youths were reported as having been burned for playing with “flying saucers,” Gabo makes it clear that it is possible to write an entertaining article, as he has just done, about nothing in particular.
In “An Understandable Mistake,” Gabo reveals more than anything else his urge to, as he used to say, “echar un cuento bien contado”—spin a good yarn. Adopting a Gothic noir tone, he narrates the circumstances in which a deeply drunk man nearly committed suicide by throwing himself out of his hotel window after seeing fish falling from the sky. In the course of the tale, we see that Gabo has riffed imaginatively on a pair of news items from the city of Cali.
Cali. April 18. Today, in the early hours of the morning, a stranger jumped out the window of his apartment located on the third floor of a building in the city. The decision seemed to have been due to the nervous excitement produced by alcohol. The injured man is now in the hospital, where his condition does not appear to be serious.
Cali. April 18. Inhabitants of the capital of the Cauca Valley had an extraordinary surprise today, as they observed in a downtown city street the presence of hundreds of small silvery fish, approximately two inches long, that appeared strewn all over the place.
IN 1954, Gabo returned to Bogotá to work for El Espectador, the national newspaper that had published his first short stories. He began by writing movie reviews, but he also penned articles about a wide range of things that caught his interest, everything from popular folklore to his reflections on events that intrigued him. In “Literaturism,” he writes of a horrifying murder that occurred in the Colombian interior, in Antioquia. With a tone of admonishment leavened by his customary black humor, Gabo notes, “The news has not earned—at the current exchange rate of the journalistic peso—more than two columns on the regional news page. It is a bloody crime, like any other. With the difference that these days there is nothing extraordinary about it, since as a news item it is too common and as a novel too gruesome. It would be best to recommend [to] real life [that it] exercise a bit more discretion.”
In “The Postman Rings a Thousand Times,” Gabo demonstrates once again that it is possible to write an interesting story about nothing very much with an exquisite piece about an address in Bogotá where the letters that never reach their destinations end up.
Gabo earned a national reputation with his dramatic 1955 serial, entitled The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, based on his interviews with Luis Alejandro Velasco, a crewman on the Colombian warship ARC Caldas and the sole survivor among seven sailors who were thrown overboard when the vessel lurched suddenly to one side. Gabo’s story was a huge success. Published in fourteen installments, the series simultaneously broke sales records for El Espectador and sparked controversy when it discredited the official account of events, which had blamed the disaster on a nonexistent storm, and asserted that the ship had, in fact, listed because it was overloaded with contraband cargo brought on board by the officers and crew. To extricate Gabo from the public storm, the paper’s editor sent him to Europe to report. It was the first time Gabo had been outside of Colombia.
FOR THE NEXT TWO and a half years, Gabo was El Espectador’s roving correspondent, traveling to Paris, Italy, and Vienna, and even to some of the countries of Eastern Europe on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Gabo wrote idiosyncratic pieces about whatever caught his interest—everything from a world leader’s summit in Geneva to the ostensible squabbles between two Italian movie celebrity actresses. He wrote another serialized story, as he had done with the Shipwrecked Sailor, about the mysterious death of a young Italian woman named Wilma Montesi; the mock-tabloid title of this book has also been borrowed from that story, “The Scandal of the Century.” Gabo even wrote, hilariously, about London’s famous fog. His prose was fresh, and his chronicles were sharp and laden with irony; he was a great “mamador de gallo,” as jokesters are known in Colombia, and the loyal fans he had acquired at home were ready to read anything he wrote.
In one of his dispatches, “H.H. Goes on Vacation,” Gabo expands artfully on the pope’s habitual drive from the Vatican to his palace of Castel Gandolfo, situated on the outskirts of Rome. In Gabo’s hands, the journey becomes a suspenseful epic. “The pope went on vacation. This afternoon, at five o’clock sharp, he settled into his own Mercedes, license plate SCV-7, and drove out through the Holy Office gate, to the Castel Gandolfo Palace, twenty miles from Rome. Two gigantic Swiss Guards saluted him at the gate. One of them, the taller and heftier one, is a blond teenager with a flattened nose, like a boxer’s nose, the result of a traffic accident.”
The story moves on, imbued with dramatic timing thanks to the trick of adding subtitles to the piece, including one about the high temperature of the day: “Ninety-five degrees in the shade” and another, “Accidents along the way,” in which Gabo informs us that His Holiness’s ten-minute delay in reaching his palace was caused by a truck blocking the way. The pope’s eventual arrival is shared in a confiding tone: “No one in Castel Gandolfo noticed which entrance the pope took into his holiday palace. He entered from the west side, into a garden with an avenue bordered by hundred-year-old trees.”
WHEN HE RETURNED to Latin America at the end of 1957, Gabo was recruited by a Colombian friend, Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, to come and work with him on Momento, a magazine published in Caracas, Venezuela. Mendoza had also accompanied Gabo on his journey to the countries of Eastern Europe. Gabo’s arrival in Caracas coincided with the onset of a politically convulsive era in Latin America. A short time after he arrived, in January of 1958, came the toppling of the Venezuelan dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez. It was the first popular overthrow of a dictator in a period when Latin America was governed almost exclusively by despots. What Gabo lived through in Venezuela’s volatile atmosphere over the next year sparked a political awakening in him.
Gabo returned briefly to Barranquilla to marry Mercedes Barcha, a beautiful young woman from the Magdalena River town of Magangué with whom he had fallen in love several years before, during his Barranquilla period. They returned to Caracas together. When Gabo’s friend Mendoza left Momento after a disagreement with the magazine’s owner, Gabo quit in solidarity and began writing for other publications as a freelancer. Two of his pieces from that time, “Only Twelve Hours to Save Him” and “Caracas Without Water,” which are included here, are classics of Gabo’s emerging literary style, in which his narration involves a detailed reconstruction of real-life dramas, conveyed with a suspense that is almost Hitchcockian, and focuses on a riddle that is only revealed at the story’s end.
IN JANUARY OF 1959, two weeks after Fidel Castro’s rebel army overthrew dictator Fulgencio Batista and seized power in Cuba, Gabo and Mendoza managed to travel to the island onboard a beat-up old plane that had been flown to Caracas by the triumphant “barbudos,” as the bearded rebels were known, to bring journalists back with them. For Gabo, the trip marked the beginning of a relationship with Cuba, and its revolution, that would last the rest of his life. About this first Cuban experience, he wrote memorably in “I Can’t Think of Any Title.”
In his text, Gabo situated the nascent revolution in the political context of the moment via a genial vignette about the Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén, whom he had known in Paris when both of them were lodged in the same seedy hotel in the Latin Quarter a few years before:
[E]ven in the cruelest times of winter, Nicolás Guillén maintained in Paris the very Cuban custom of rising (without a rooster) at the crowing of the first roosters, and of reading the newspapers as he sipped his coffee lulled by the sweet wind of the sugar mills and the counterpoint of guitars in the clamorous dawns of Camagüey. Then he opened the window of his balcony, also as he would in Camagüey, and woke up the whole street by shouting the news from Latin America translated from French into Cuban slang.
[…] So one morning Nicolás Guillén opened his window and shouted a single piece of news:
“The man has fallen!”
There was a commotion in the sleeping street because each of us believed the man who had fallen was his. The Argentinians thought it was Juan Domingo Perón, the Paraguayans thought it was Alfredo Stroessner […], the Guatemalans thought it was Castillo Armas, the Dominicans thought it was Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, and the Cubans thought it was Fulgencio Batista. It was Perón, actually. Later, talking about this, Nicolás Guillén painted a distressing panorama of the situation in Cuba for us. “The only thing I see for the future,” he concluded, “is a kid who’s getting a lot done over in Mexico.” He paused like a clairvoyant, and concluded:
“His name is Fidel Castro.”
As for his own arrival in Havana at the height of revolutionary fervor, Gabo recalled it the following way:
Before noon we landed between the Babylonian mansions of the richest of the rich of Havana: in the Campo Columbia airport, then baptized with the name Ciudad Libertad, the former Batista fort where a few days earlier Camilo Cienfuegos had camped with his column of astonished peasants. The first impression was rather comical, for we were greeted by members of the former military air force who at the last minute had gone over to the Revolution and were keeping to their barracks while their beards grew enough to look like old revolutionaries.
WITH THE PUBLICATION and spectacular success of One Hundred Years of Solitude, the year 1967 was one of the great milestones in the life of Gabriel García Márquez. From that moment on, Gabo and his family enjoyed economic stability and he was internationally acclaimed, deservedly so, as one of the great novelists of his era. For the next twenty years, Gabo remained at the literary pinnacle, publishing his other great works, such as The Autumn of the Patriarch and Love in the Time of Cholera. Much less well known to his millions of readers outside of Latin America, Gabo continued to be a journalist as well, albeit with an increasingly political focus.
The 1970s saw rising political tensions in Latin America ushered in by the Cuban Revolution and the violent counterinsurgency policies introduced by the United States to roll back communism. At this time, García Márquez embarked on a phase of militant journalism. When the socialist Chilean president Salvador Allende was brutally overthrown by General Augusto Pinochet in 1972, for instance, Gabo went so far as to declare that he would not publish another book until the regime had fallen. Although he didn’t follow through on that promise, he did begin to express his sympathies with leftist causes more openly from then on.
Together with some Colombian journalist friends, he founded Alternativa, a leftist magazine; he wrote articles and columns that were critical of U.S. policies and in favor of Cuba and of Fidel Castro, with whom he also began to develop a close friendship. He wrote a long and flattering article about the Cuban military expedition in Angola and another, included in this volume, entitled “The Sandinista Heist: Chronicle of the Assault on the ‘Hog House,’ ” in which he rendered the circumstances of a mass abduction of Nicaraguan parliamentarians by a group of Sandinista guerrillas as a heroic epic.
In the article “The Cubans Face the Blockade,” included in this anthology, Gabo used his narrative skills to make his readers understand the implications of the famous trade embargo—“blockade,” to the Cubans—which the United States had imposed against Cuba in 1961. He wrote:
That night, the first of the blockade, in Cuba there were 482,560 automobiles, 343,300 refrigerators, 549,700 radios, 303,500 television sets, 352,900 electric irons, 286,400 fans, 41,800 washing machines, 3,510,000 wristwatches, sixty-three locomotives, and twelve merchant ships. All these things, except for the wristwatches, which were Swiss, had been made in the United States.
It seems that a certain amount of time had to pass before the Cubans realized what those mortal numbers meant to their lives. From the point of view of production, Cuba soon found that it was not actually a distinct country but rather a commercial peninsula of the United States.
Because of texts like these, Gabo was widely criticized by conservative media in the United States and Latin America, which branded him, not altogether inaccurately, as a propagandist of the Cuban regime. Some went so far, more unfairly, as to call him Fidel Castro’s useful idiot. Gabo was undeterred by these critiques, however, and carried on supporting those causes he believed in, which were on the left, by and large, and definitely included advocacy for Cuba and the region’s left-wing causes. Behind the scenes, he also used his political access and Nobel clout to play a diplomatic role in efforts to broker dialogue between the United States and Cuba, as well as between Colombian guerrilla leaders and the government.
TOWARD THE END of the 1990s, Gabo was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer—and although he recovered from that illness, he became weaker in the final decade and a half of his life.
In 1996, before his health problems began, he published the book News of a Kidnapping, one of his few in-depth journalistic works, and the only one to become widely known internationally. It is the story of the terrifying ordeal of a group of influential Colombians, most of them journalists, who were taken hostage by Pablo Escobar in an effort to convince the Colombian government to abandon the extradition agreement for narcotraffickers it had signed with the United States.
In 1998, Gabo used part of the money he received from his Nobel Prize to buy Cambio, a magazine owned by a friend of his, and to relaunch it with a new team of editors and reporters. In Cambio he published some of his last pieces of journalism, including a profile of the singer Shakira, who is from Barranquilla, and another of the Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez. In the end, the magazine didn’t work out, but while it lasted, Gabo greatly enjoyed being immersed, once again, in “the best job in the world.”
In 1994, Gabo had launched the Gabriel García Márquez Foundation for New Ibero-American Journalism, with its headquarters in the place he had begun his reporting life all those years before, Cartagena de Indias. Gabo founded it for the purpose of imparting new journalistic techniques and providing encouragement to a new generation of Latin American journalists. In a conversation we had in 1999, he invited me to become one of the teachers at the foundation, enthusiastically describing his vision of a future hemispheric fraternity of reporters and chroniclers as a “mafia of friends” that would not only elevate the standards of Latin America’s journalism, but also help to fortify its democracies.
Remarkably, Gabo’s vision has come true, with the resulting paradox that one of the most emblematic authors of the Latin American Boom in fiction should also be regarded today as the maximum godfather of a new boom in Latin American journalism. But so it is. In the years that have transpired since its founding, thousands of journalists have attended the foundation’s workshops and have competed for the annual awards given out in the Gabriel García Márquez Journalism Prize. Many have attributed their later professional success to their stints with the “Gabo Foundation,” as they call it, and some have gone on to write books and found magazines and websites of their own, specializing in long-form journalism and investigative reporting.
After Gabo’s death, a law passed by the Colombian congress established that in his beloved Cartagena de Indias, there would be a permanent “Gabo Center,” to operate in tandem with his foundation, so that along with his other legacies, his devotion to journalism could be acknowledged and passed on to new generations.
—JON LEE ANDERSON