In 1980, I read out my favourite quote from The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel García Márquez, "The day shit is worth money, poor people will be born without an asshole," to a group of stunned young persons committed to serve in India's villages. In one brilliant snatch of a sentence, the best known writer in Spanish since Miguel de Cervantes had summarised the overarching reality of his times and his rage. I wanted my students to be informed by this as they embarked on their chosen mission.
García Márquez is rightly revered as the master of magical realism in his celebration of life amidst the heat and the miasma of life in a fictional Caribbean village, One Hundred Years of Solitude. His most popular novel is set in Macondo, a village not unlike Aracataca in Colombia where he was born and lived with his grandparents for the first eight years. It tells of fabulous happenings in the "city of mirages", which ultimately lead to its destruction when its patriarch, Colonel Aureliano Buendia, dies facing a firing squad, but not before hailing the purity and innocence of Ursula, the colonel's wife, as the saving grace.
The novel moves back and forth in time, between reality and imagination, with lyrical prose. The inventions of the locale and a bygone era are as much a product of the Márquez childhood spent listening to the unending stories of his grandparents, a part of the rich oral tradition, as the influence of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway on the young student who went far away from his beloved coast to Bogota to read law at the university before discovering his muse.
He started as a journalist, which was to remain his true love for life. His account of a sailor lost on a raft from a shipwreck also exposed corruption, earning him exile first in Rome and then in Paris. He continued to write, but life was hard. He had an epiphany about One Hundred Years of Solitude, and staked all his belongings to support himself while writing it. It was published in Argentina in 1966. The first edition was sold out in a week. Forty years later, the Spanish Royal Academy brought out a special edition, an honour previously bestowed only on Cervantes' Don Quixote.
As in case of many literary masterworks, García Márquez's personal life shaped most of his writing. His romantic classic, Love in the Time of Cholera, is an attempt to recall his parents' long courtship and married life. The love affair between two young people meets family resistance, he moves along, she marries a doctor approved by her father, and, eventually, the two meet again after the doctor's death, to resume from where they left off half a century ago. The seemingly mushy plot is embellished with such imagery and allusive power that it becomes a rapturous ode to life over death.
Yet the most powerful and repeated theme of the Márquez oeuvre is the descent of seeming saviours of an impoverished people into tyrants who die unmourned. Patriarch tells of a dictator, who was once the salvation his nation sought but became an insufferable autocrat, and reigned forever, at will, and even defying the clock and the calendar, until his death, leaving a rotting body for the vultures because no one dared to touch it.
The General in His Labyrinth is the account of the last months in 1830 of the life of Simón Bolívar, the great liberator of South America and at one time the unquestioned ruler of half the continent. His people now abhor him, and only a few trusted aides attend to him as he drifts in a ship down the Magdalena. He slips in and out of delirium, recalling both his grandeur and infamies.
García Márquez was eminently qualified to expiate on these concerns. His world has had a history of dictatorships, large and small, short and long, and rebellions and uprisings against them. He experienced first-hand the tyrannies of the Trujillos and the Batistas. He befriended a young revolutionary visiting Bogota during one of the periodic rumbles in the 1950s named Fidel Castro. That association lasted the rest of his life, even as he rebuked Castro at times. His last journalistic pieces included short takes on Venezuela's Hugo Chávez.
As India stands at the threshold of a regime change, a Márquez comment assumes unusual significance. The dying Patriarch discovers:
"A lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth, he had arrived without surprise at the ignominious fiction of commanding without power, of being exalted without glory and of being obeyed without authority when he became convinced in the trail of yellow leaves of his autumn that he had never been master of all his power, that he was condemned not to know life except in reverse, condemned to decipher the seams and straighten the threads of the woof and the warp of the tapestry of illusions of reality without suspecting even too late that the only livable life was one of show..."
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