A selection of Gabriel García Márquez’ selected newspaper and magazine articles translated into English came out in May. The Scandal of the Century and Other Writings will delight and inform – and mislead.
What’s not to like about a book by an international literary superstar that has Laredo in it? Stand aside in envy Dallas, Houston, and Hebbronville!
Anne McLean’s wonderfully readable English translation makes this slice of García Márquez’ enormous output as a journalist conveniently and attractively accessible to the English-reading audience.
Cristóbal Pera, a director at Vintage Español in the Penguin-Random House conglomerate, selected and published the 50 articles in the original Spanish as El escándalo del siglo. The five-volumes of García Márquez’ complete collected journalism amount to over 3500 pages. Recent re-editions of them go for $50 a volume, making them inaccessible to readers without access to a university library. To publish this new collection in Spanish and English has been a welcome surprise to readers on both sides of the Rio Grande/Río Bravo and the militarized line in the sand from El Paso to Tijuana.
Both editions are beautifully made books that are a delight to read, whether at the breakfast table or in an overstuffed armchair, stretched out on a beach towel or in a hammock, scrunched up with other commuters on the bus or train to work, or in a familiar bed.
If you’ve read One Hundred Years of Solitude you need no introduction to the pleasures of reading García Márquez.
The Scandal of the Century is to the world-famous novel as a cocktail party’s hors d’oeuvres are to a five-course holiday banquet, both treats – just in different sizes. The articles are mostly just a couple of pages long, and the one long-form piece, the 60-page “The Scandal of the Century” that gives the book its title, originally appeared in 12 installments. You can read one of them in fewer than 10 minutes.
No need to say that García Márquez is an enchanting storyteller. What may look at first like an article about a dull factoid is alchemically transmuted into story gold as you read. Such was his gift, and, as we read these texts, we accept it with gratitude.
[Brief aside: I’ve avoided the almost universally used nickname “Gabo.” No doubt the legion of extended family members, co-workers, sycophants, groupies, writers, and journalist pals around the world were taught to address Gabriel with the familiar apodo “Gabo.” I won’t pretend that the two of us are pals. Lucky you who didn’t waste years grinding your teeth during two-and-a-half-hour seminars on la nueva novela latinoamericana listening to yahoos from cultural backwaters like Enid, Oklahoma blithely tossing around “Gabo this” and “Gabo that” as though they were old drinking buddies. Such miseries scar you for life. I’ll stick with the double surname, thank you.]
If you are interested in García Márquez development as a writer, the first 20 pieces in the collection were written between 1950 and 1966, years in which he was a full-time newspaper man.
They are interesting anticipations of the kind of writing that made his One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1967 such a masterpiece. Two of the pieces published in Colombian newspapers, “A Man Arrives in the Rain” and “The House of the Buendías,” are actually short stories. Published in 1954, they are the first of García Márquez’ fictions to appear in print.
If you have succumbed to the effete vice of metafiction, then there’s the early article “Topic for a Topical Piece,” “Tema para un tema,” from 1950 that turns the lack of an adequate topic for the day’s “Jirafa” column into the topic of piece itself.
The column begins with layers or irony: “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 incalculable interest are happening.”
The ironic “of incalculable interest” tone runs through the article’s catalog of ridiculously inconsequential topics of the day, news stories about which he might have written, but didn’t. Incalculable interest, indeed: “Brazil will not have a surplus of coffee at its disposal this year.” This is the awful dullness of so much news that used to fill the otherwise empty square inches of newspaper pages in the old pre-post-Gutenberg days. When newspapers were still printed on wood-pulp paper and despairing editors filled empty spaces at deadlines with the equivalent of Lorem ipsum placeholder texts, it was a time for humorous contests for the Most Boring Headline. One 1980s boringest headline winner was “Worthwhile Canadian Initiative.” That yawner was closely followed by runners-up “Prevent by Locking House, Detectives Urge” and “Chill Falls on Warming Relations Between Australia and Indonesia.” These contests were themselves space fillers standing in place of real news.
García Márquez had empty newspaper inches to fill, too.
In the frame story of “Topic for a Topical piece,” a deadline approaches, the presses are inked and waiting, and the journalist must deliver copy. Septimus, García Marquez’ nombre de pluma, hands the editor his 700-word piece about having nothing important to write about just in time. For someone who supposedly could find nothing to write about, he manages to get in a sarcastic jab at the banality of newswire stories, censorship, and journalists’ poverty. Looking for something to write about, in mock despair he checks the comic strips for ideas: how ‘bout “Clark Kent Fights Superman?” Nothing there, so he moves on to ransack the society pages, “Two are getting married when life is so expensive and the weather is so hot,” and “Generalissimo Franco’s daughter marries a gentleman who will henceforth be called el Yernísimo.”
The newsroom clock ticks on inexorably, and in the pathos of pretending to remember his poor family (Fact Check: García Márquez wouldn’t marry his childhood sweetheart Mercedes Barcha until eight years later) depending on him as breadwinner and having run out of cigarettes, Septimus finishes the article with a flourish:
“We write the first sentence: ‘There are those who turn the lack of a topic into a topic for a journalistic piece. The choice is absurd… ¡Caramba, pero muy fácil! ¿No es cierto? …but so damn easy! Isn’t it?”
¡Jajajá! The end is the beginning, an ouroboros… — reminds you of a novel called One Hundred Years of Solitude!
Amusing selections like “Topic for a Topical Piece” can be read as ingenious bits of metajournalism or as a journalist’s potboiler. You can also think of them as heirs to a centuries-old tradition of writing about writing and embedded fictions in Spanish literature, a tradition that includes Don Quixote and Lope de Vega’s brilliant tongue-in-cheek sonnet about how to write a sonnet, “Soneto de repente.”
Although it seems like it, the listicle wasn’t invented in the early days of online journalism. The name maybe, but not the article in list form. As if to prove to us in advance that there is nothing new under the sun, García Márquez produced a perfect pre-Buzz Feed example of the genre in his 1954 article about the Bogotá dead letter office, complete with an 18th-century spoiler title:
The Postman Rings a Thousand Times.
A Visit to the Cemetery of Lost Letters
Which Is the Destination of Correspondence That Can Never Be Delivered. Letters for the Invisible Man.
An Office Where Nonsense Is Entirely Natural.
The Only Persons with Legal Authorization to Open the Correspondence.
Of course, this nods at the in-the-know readers with its allusion to James M. Cain’s 1934 novel and the 1946 Hollywood film adaptation The Postman Always Rings Twice. There’s also a wink of complicity at those who remember that, unlike the title of the García Márquez’ article, the title of the novel and film noir made no sense, there being no postman in either one.
Among the lost letters of “The Postman” we bump into quintessential García Márquez themes. The truth-stranger-than-fiction and outlandish “you can’t make this $#1+ up” realities of daily life in the Third World make their unsurprising appearance. Thousands of what we picturesquely call in English ‘dead letters’ were undeliverable because they had incorrect or incomplete addresses. They bore addresses like, “José, Bogotá” or believe-it-or-not, “Para la señora que todas las mañanas va a misa de cinco y media en la Iglesia de Egipto.” The six civil servants tasked with deciphering clues on the envelopes had the legal right to open the letters in search of more information, but mostly it was to no avail.
“But even this legal recourse is futile in the majority of cases: the text of the letter gives no clue. And something stranger: of every hundred envelopes stamped and posted with a mistaken address, at least two have nothing inside. There are letters without letters.”
Cartas sin cartas. This sense of the everyday absurdity in a backward country donde el disparate es completamente normal in 1954 will be one of the consistent atmospherics of Cien años de soledad 13 years later.
Readers from more rationally functional societies in the developed world would soon be calling this ‘magical realism.’
Another early article, also from 1950, “An Understandable Mistake,” has its own dose of magical realism, this one pointing back to Kafka’s Metamorphosis, which García Márquez has invoked in a thousand interviews as the book that showed him how to write.
The article in Barranquilla’s El Heraldo begins, “It was Tuesday in Cali. The gentleman, for whom the weekend was a murky timeless period — three days without trace — had been decorously and obstinately raising glass after glass until midnight on Monday.”
This is not quite the stuff of the police blotter section, but the piece proceeds to jump completely beyond the conventions of newspaper reporting, and the narrator turns into a fiction writer. He brings us into the third-floor hotel room with the hallucinating drunk, so we can hear the phantom voices he hears and feel the headache lurking over his bed. We eavesdrop shamelessly on his interior monologue and listen to his gasps of dismay.
And then comes the climax when (“too far-fetched!” we’re thinking, or “oh, he’s hallucinating!”) a shiny fish blows in through the open window and flops around on the floor by his bed. How could there be a fish in Cali, 40 miles inland from the Pacific coast? But there it was, a shiny dancer at his feet! He staggers through his vertigo to the window and jumps.
The Colombian version of the Ray Milland character in Lost Weekend opens his still-red eyes the next day in a hospital bed with a few bandages on minor injuries, but no pain. His memory works again, and he remembers the three-day bender, the hotel room, the shiny fish, and the jump. Oh, well…
Bored, he picks up a newspaper and reads a note about his three-story fall to the street of the day before. The alcohol-fueled madness had passed. He feels calm.
But when he turns to the next page, he is brought up short by a second article. It brings back to him in a flash “the headache that prowled around his bed” back at the hotel in his delirium tremens. The astonishing second article was just this:
“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.”
So ends “An Understandable Mistake” with a shot glass of high-proof magical realism: the sudden appearance of flying fish in a mountain valley miles from the ocean.
Of course, this is García Márquez and Colombia, where the extraordinary happens on every page and every day. There is no explanation, nothing to bring the fantastic event back to the common-sense realm of what seems normal. The only subjective words in the little note are “extraordinary surprise.”
This is a typical instance of the famous magical realism of García Márquez. Events that violate the laws of nature and contradict our sense of how the world works just happen: the trickle of blood from a suicide’s head wound runs through the house, out the door, down the street, and into the kitchen where the dead man’s mother is cracking eggs to make bread. A beautiful young woman ascends into the clouds enveloped in the bedsheets she was hanging on the clothesline. A secret lover is caught because he sneaks into the house accompanied by a flock of yellow butterflies.
The simple trick that García Márquez uses to create these patches of magical realism is the narration of fantastical events with specific, vivid details. As he never tired of repeating in interviews, he used “a journalistic trick which you can also apply to literature. For example, if you say that there are elephants flying in the sky, people are not going to believe you. But if you say that there are four hundred and twenty-five elephants flying in the sky, people will probably believe you. One Hundred Years of Solitude is full of that sort of thing.”
Yes, it is.
In “An Understandable Mistake” it is the specifically silver of their glistening and the exactly two-inch length of the fish that make us believe.
But there was another secret ingredient in the salsa de realismo mágico: the deadpan tone. It is a cliché that García Márquez learned to how to tell such belief-stretching tales so convincingly in press rooms. He didn’t discourage this notion. In a 1982 interview with The New York Times, he said that the “tricks you need to transform something which appears fantastic, unbelievable into something plausible, credible, those I learned from journalism. … The key is to tell it straight. It is done by reporters and by country folk.”
Reporters, yes, but also la gente del campo.
Their traditional way of telling stories was the crucial second part of his apprenticeship for becoming a magical realist. In interviews over the years García Márquez rarely failed to credit his maternal grandmother, Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes de Márquez, known to everyone as ‘Mina,’ with the unique combination of implausibilities and a deadpan tone in the stories she mesmerized him with when he was a boy.
“She would tell things that sounded supernatural and fantastical. But in a completely natural way. The most important thing was the expression she had on her face. In my first attempts to write One Hundred Years of Solitude I tried to tell the story without believing what I was writing. I discovered that I had to believe in the stories. But even more important was to write them with the same expression my grandmother used when she told them, ‘with a brick face’ (con cara de ladrillo), as she called it.”
No matter how often he claimed that the reality of Colombia, and by extension of all Latin America, was surreal and poorly suited to conventionally realistic forms of narrative, the real magic of García Márquez’ writing was the combination of a newspaper man’s flat tone and Mina’s brick face.
“Something Else on Literature and Reality,” (1981) lunges forward in the first sentence with, “A very serious problem that our disproportionate reality poses for literature is the insufficiency of words.” The by then stereotyped magical realist muses in the last paragraph, “Latin American and Caribbean writers have to admit, hand on hearts, that reality is a better writer than we are.” A clever paradox for sure, but is it true? Where was that supposedly great writer ‘Latin American Reality’ when Doña Bárbara, La vorágine, and María were being written?
The last third of Scandal of the Century consists of op-ed opinion features, essays generally about his books and fame after the 1982 Nobel Prize, appearing in the cosmopolitan, left-liberal Madrid daily, El País. They are slight pieces written in a whimsical tone. Included is a nostalgic recreation of life on the Magdalena River in the 1930s when García Márquez took side-paddle river boats on five-day voyages upstream from his home on the north coast to school in Bogotá every year. There are reminiscences of artist friends, “Obregón or the Boundless Vocation,” and autobiographical episodes, “Return to Mexico,” as well as travel writing, “The Magic Caribbean.”
Reading the later El País pieces you miss the joy of the early journalism. Perhaps the burden of unexpected fame that came with the success of One Hundred Years of Solitude was wearing him down. Several of them, “Poetry in Children’s Reach,” “Literature Without Pain,” and “Okay, We’ll Talk About Literature,” complain of the absurd freight of academic interpretations his writing had been commandeered to haul across the intellectual badlands of university lecture halls and scholarly journals.
The 1982 Nobel Prize was a mixed blessing, and it eventually became a specter that haunted him. The breathtaking novelty of One Hundred Years had turned into an easily imitated literary tic, and an international audience was hungry for another novel just like it. The pressure of being expected to crank out another hit like the last one, the demand for a sequel to One Hundred Years of Solitude, for the literary equivalent of a Hollywood movie franchise complete with Roman numerals, was equaled only by the pressure on Jagger and Richards to record another “Satisfaction,” and Lennon and McCartney another “Sgt. Pepper.” It’s hard to be a rock star.
In “My Other Me,” his tribute to “Borges y yo,” the wistful regret for the peace and quiet of uninterrupted free time like those of his days before Cien años is in every line.
García Márquez’ otro yo “will go on feeding off my legend, richer than anyone could be, young and handsome forever and happy until the last tear, while I continue growing old without remorse in front of my typewriter, far from his delusions and excesses, and going out to find my lifelong friends every night to drink the usual drinks and miss unconsoled the smell of guava. Because the most unfair thing is this: the other is the one who enjoys the fame, but I am the one who gets screwed (el que se jode) by living it.”
This bitter taste makes even the most light-hearted El País texts of the last third of the collection less fun to read than the exuberant articles written in Colombia of the first hundred pages. It got worse: by the 90s García Márquez would have to endure the mockery of younger Latin American writers. They joked about his Macondo and wrote about what they called ‘McOndo,’ the no-longer exotic reality of their rapidly developing societies. For them mágicorrealismo was their fathers’ generation’s thing, another literary convention standing in their way.
At the headwaters of this meandering I said that The Scandal of the Century is misleading.
That sounds more provocative than it should. It is not nearly as confrontational, however, as the book’s review in Commonweal by Catherine Addington, a young scholar at the University of Virginia: “García Márquez’s fatal flaw, as ever, is his abundant male chauvinism. In his fiction, it’s pervasive and inescapable: inert matriarchs, enchanting prostitutes, and young girls constantly raped, killed, or killing themselves, rarely shown in possession of any interior life. In his nonfiction, it’s simply crass.”
This is not a unique complaint: it is part of the historical process of reassessing García Márquez’ writing in the academic stock market. His shares are trading at lower multiples than they did 25 years ago, and the regrettable 2004 novella, Memoria de mis tristes putas, led to a substantial sell-off by literary investors.
That The Scandal of the Century misleads does not refer to anything García Márquez himself did or wrote. The misleading is in editor Cristóbal Pera’s selection of articles.
In his lifetime García Márquez was famous for his public commitment to left-wing causes. His admiration for Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution was matched only by his love for the Nicaraguan Sandinistas and Salvador Allende’s socialist revolution in Chile, no matter how hard his magical realist epigones try to forget it. García Márquez wrote hundreds of newspaper articles in support of his commitment to socialism.
Perhaps editor Pera thought this was so well known that there was no need to include more than three political pieces in The Scandal of the Century, “I Can’t Think of Any Title,” “The Sandinista Heist: Chronicle of the Assault on the ‘Hog House’ ” and “The Cubans Face the Blockade,” both from the late 70s. None is written in the strong political tone of other contemporary pieces. The “I Can’t Think of Any Title” piece is a series of humorous episodes the writer experienced in Havana during the early days of the Cuban Revolution, and “The Sandinista Heist” reads like the screenplay for a caper movie like Oceans 11. The politics of the Nicaraguan Marxist-Leninist rebels are lost in the breathless, film-ready, minute-by-minute drama of their armed takeover of the capitol building.
Or perhaps Pera considered the hundreds of partisan articles and opinion pieces not as well written. Maybe the hundreds of politically committed articles, some of which became books (Chile, el golpe y los gringos 1974, Viva Sandino 1982, Clandestine in Chile 1982, El asalto 1983, and Changing the History of Africa: Angola and Namibia 1991, and Noticia de un secuestro 1997), being swept under the rug was part of a sanitizing project to keep García Márquez a safe, entertaining tourist guide to the Third World rather than a fellow-traveler who had many harsh things to say about the international adventures of his huge American audience’s government. The García Márquez who founded the leftist periodical Alternativa in 1974 and was a regular contributor to it until its demise in 1980 is conspicuously absent from The Scandal of the Century.
My point is: readers of this volume whose political awareness is lulled to sleep by the narcotic draughts of magical realism have a hard time not getting the wrong idea. García Márquez charmed readers with stories of silver fish falling from the sky and beauties who levitate into the sky in a cloud of bed linens, but we ought to remember that he also wrote a gory account of the United Fruit Company’s 1928 suppression the banana workers’ strike in Macondo. There was nothing magical in that part of One Hundred Years of Solitude, just as there was none in the historical massacre.
The nostalgically remembered Laredo of our childhood is the setting for one of the political essays omitted from the collection. The column “USA: mejor cerrado que entreabierto” appeared in El País November 10 1982. It is an extended complaint about the decades of arbitrary mistreatment García Márquez suffered at the hands of the US State Department over visas. His close association with Fidel Castro and his work at the Cuban press bureau Prensa Latina in New York during the early 60s had earned him a place of honor on the blacklist of communists and communist sympathizers who could not enter the United States.
But this was not the only time García Márquez wrote about Laredo. The 1983 “Return to Mexico” article in Scandal of the Century tells the story of his 12-day Greyhound bus odyssey in May 1961 from New York to the Mexican border with Mercedes and their infant son Rodrigo. It was a pilgrimage to the land of his literary hero, Faulkner. Unfortunately, the little family was denied hotel rooms and lunch counter seats, not because ‘there was no room in the inn,’ but because they were Meskins. They barely survived the diet of hamburgers de cartón molido and milk shakes. If the Deep South of 1961 was bad, poor Laredo gets this off-hand insult: “the terrible life of Yoknapatawpha County had paraded before our eyes through the window of a bus, and was as true and as human as in the novels of the old master. However, all the emotion of that experience went all to hell (se fue al carajo) when we reached the Mexican border, dusty and dirty Laredo that was already familiar from so many movies about smugglers.”
This is, I think, an anachronism. In 1961 he would not have been “already familiar” with Laredo from movies about smugglers, because there were no such movies. However, there were Mexican movies about the narcos beginning in 1977 with Camelia la Texana and La banda del carro rojo on to the 1983 El traficante that would have been well known to García Márquez with his deep connections to the Mexican film industry.
Not that it matters for the black eye he gave our civic pride, but García Márquez, writing 22 years after the difficult trip, also gets it wrong about “sucio y polvoriento Laredo.” In fact, the border town was Nuevo Laredo.
Consider the sentences that immediately follow the “dusty and dirty Laredo” phrase
“The first thing we did was go into a cheap restaurant for a hot meal. The first thing they served, instead of soup, was a dish of tender, yellow rice. ‘Praise the Lord,’ Mercedes exclaimed, ‘I’d stay here forever to keep eating this rice.’”
That restorative food was not served in Laredo. We know because when the couple returned to Nuevo Laredo in 2008 for the dedication of the new García Márquez-Estación Palabra library in the old train station building, they were taken after the ceremony to revisit the historic Restaurante Alicia on Guerrero next to the Aduana. There at the Alicia the couple enjoyed the same delicious arroz frito they had 57 years earlier.
The two Laredos of “USA: Better Closed than Ajar,” are the setting for an absurd episode that introduces the even greater absurdity of García Márquez’ visa problems.
The 1982 article tells a story about a trip to the border in 1964.
“Around eighteen years ago I went with Mercedes and our two boys to the border town of Nuevo Laredo, where there is an iron bridge that has one foot in Mexico and another in the United States. The three of them went across to the other side to request a return visa to Mexico, since theirs had expired. Mine had, too, of course; but I couldn’t go with them to the other side, because the United States had denied me even a simple three-hour permit to cross the bridge. Crowds of people were crossing in both directions without a pause.”
Indulgent Laredoans will be charitable with the misremembering writer. We know that the iron bridge over the Rio Grande was the railroad bridge and that the International Bridge for pedestrians, chiveras, bicycles, cartoneros, and automobiles was rebuilt in concrete after the Flood of ’54.
The mistake is insignificant for the story that continues.
“I sat down on a wood bench in front of the Mexican side of the bridge and settled in to read some magazines in Spanish and English while my family made the rare trip abroad. They took less time than we all expected, but before returning something happened that I can’t delete from my memory: it so happened that Mercedes wanted to bring me back a sweater as a gift, but she couldn’t decide on the color. So she stood in front of the door of a clothing store over yonder in the other world and from the sidewalk there she showed me the available colors until I indicated which one I preferred.”
The vivid theatricality of the long-distance sweater choice over an international boundary with the husband and wife waving and gesticulating, standing like rocks amid streams of people flowing over the border is funny and touching. Separated from each other by arbitrary government legalisms and a mean-spirited vendetta, the crazy antics of the loving couple, the man at the Mexican end of the bridge and the wife on the sidewalk of Laredo’s Convent Avenue must have drawn confused glances and smiles from drivers and pedestrians. If we can’t smile without second thoughts about Gabriel waving at Mercedes on the International Bridge in 1964, it’s because history has since washed up and stranded many more and even more desperate, voiceless refugees on to that riverbank.
The vignette was a perfect illustration for García Márquez of his ongoing difficulties with America.
“I have this episode etched in my memory, not only for being so unusual and funny, but because it seems to me to be a good example of the extremes of ridiculousness to which other people’s stupidity can lead someone.”
The rest of the piece has additional anecdotes of extremos de ridiculez in obtaining visas to enter the United States for endowed lectures or to receive honorary doctorates at American universities, or for book tours and public readings. Other Latin American writers, his friends Julio Cortázar and Carlos Fuentes had similar headaches with visas, but he observes without names that there were, on the other hand, those who never had visa issues, “However, there are many writers, artists, and professors from Latin America who are not victims of this same system of discrimination. That is to say: we are allowed to enter the United States when we are going to be of service. If not, they deny us with the musty old argument of communist ties.”
Serviceable cultural figures from abroad who celebrated America were welcome. Cubans who remained in Cuba called these cultural figures gusanos. Those who didn’t fawn must have been communists. Nowadays I suppose they would be categorized as terrorists.
García Márquez ends the article leaving nothing half-said or mealy-mouthed:
“This all seems to me not only stupid, but also futile: if they block our entry, it would be reasonable to block our books, too, for if the backroom geniuses (los talentos ocultos) of the Justice Department thought about it for a second they would realize something that Hitler discovered, and it is that books are more dangerous than those who write them. The fact that this doesn’t matter to the United States Government suggests that the blocked entry is not a defensive act by American society as its government leaders say it is, but a simple imperialist punishment of its critics (un simple castigo imperial contra sus críticos.)”
In The Scandal of the Century, the image of García Márquez has had airbrushed out the inconvenient truth that the beloved magical realist of Colombia was also a journalist who spent decades writing no-holds-barred criticism of the United States. In that he found no “insufficiency of words.”
When I stumbled across “USA: Better Closed than Ajar” five years ago in a search for something else, I read it and laughed at the image of the couple waving at each other across the bridge, my bridge, the one I crossed so many times. Several years later I saw an old postcard with a photo of the International Bridge looking north toward Laredo and the United States. It was from approximately the time the events in the article took place. As I looked at, I remembered the “Mejor cerrado que entreabierto” vignette with a start. In the postcard image it was obvious that you can’t see past the structure over the toll booth and the US Immigrations and Customs buildings. Convent Avenue on the Laredo side was hidden from view.
So, was García Márquez fibbing?
I called my Laredo insider sources and asked whether the story could possibly have happened as told in the article. No one had ever considered the question of whether you could see up Convent from the Nuevo Laredo side of the bridge. And a wood bench where you could sit there by the bridge?
The consensus answer was an unambiguous “No. Probably not. Well, maybe. Yes.”
I imagine that when García Márquez sat at his typewriter thinking of the “extremes of ridiculousness brought about by other people’s stupidity” he remembered the long-ago episode in Laredo. The relevance of the story was that Mercedes and the boys could cross the border to go to the Mexican Consulate, but he couldn’t, and the absurdity of the sweater purchase was the perfect illustration of his absurd visa situation.
In García Márquez there is often what editor Cristóbal Pera referred to as “a narrative tension between journalism and literature, where the seams of reality are stretched by is unstoppable narrative impulse.” By this measure, I’d say “USA: Better Closed than Ajar” is an excellent example of that sort of reality-stretching, donde las costuras de la realidad se estiran por su incontenible impulso narrativo.
L.N., my Laredo haberdasher friend, informed me that his store, located exactly where Mercedes Barcha might have shopped for a sweater for her husband, had frequent women customers from Mexico buying clothes for husbands or boyfriends who, for whatever reason, could not cross into the U.S. These shoppers would leave a deposit, take everything from shirts to pants to suits — and even sweaters! — out of the store and over to the Mexican side of the bridge where the men were waiting to try them on. If the style, fit, or color wasn’t right, the women would bring them back and exchange them for something better. In fact, the store’s tailor would go with the wives or girlfriend to measure clothes for alterations out in the middle of the International Bridge!
Now that is funny.
It is also true, but it illustrates no Big Issue. The open-air fitting room on the bridge is just another example of how “The Gateway to Mexico” city had many uniquely odd ways of doing things – and many of them were good for a laugh.
So, did García Márquez meet Mercedes out in the middle of the bridge to pick the color of his new sweater as many other couples had done? Perhaps.
And did the storyteller’s habit of bending the truth to fit the shape of the story lead him to tell a story that couldn’t survive a fact-check? Could be.
This strikes me as the likeliest explanation.
Great storytellers are servants of the story, not the facts.
García Márquez once compared journalism and fiction:
“In journalism just one fact that is false prejudices the entire work. In contrast, in fiction one single fact that is true gives legitimacy to the entire work. That’s the only difference, and it lies in the commitment of the writer. A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it.”
After all, it’s not a thirst for facts that bring us to García Márquez. We come to a great storyteller ready to believe. We want, above all, an “unstoppable narrative impulse” to sweep us away from skepticism all the way downstream to a satisfyingly deep Lake Falcón of belief.
