Gabriel García
Márquez:
the Writer's Reason
"...this autumnal task, the
hardest and saddest of my
life.".
GGM
Photo by Enrique Hernández D'Jesús
ay I begin, perhaps, by the modest personal confession that there were
moments, while I read Noticia de un secuestro (News of a Kidnapping) in
which I felt a strange tremor in the hands of a certain lack of air in the lungs or the
inevitable claustrophobia of an aged prisoner who is unable to erase these marks, and
bears them within, as a curse? What is Noticia de un secuestro? I understand
that this is a banal question; but it must be made, no matter if genres are confused and
give birth to a yet unknown genre. Spontaneously, in one of his pages, García Márquez
calls it a report. Is it a report, a novel, or a story? Or is it all these
and more? From a Colombian, Latin American and world-wide perspective, why not
agree that it is a story, told or written such as a story is seldom told or written?
Kidnappings are one of the great pests of our age, and not solely an Latin American
aberration, since it occurs throughout the world.
A description so exceptional and moving (the kidnapping in all its dimensions and
implications), the kidnapping in itself, the kidnapped, the kidnapper, the families,
society, the Government, the immensity of the web that sustains it, enables García
Márquez to transcend fiction, and transpose the limits of reality, leaving it naked before
our eyes; since nothing is as difficult to understand as a human drama of this nature,
which is generally lost in diversity: either the condition of the kidnapped, the ransom
price, or the darkness of the kidnapper.
Noticia de un secuestro is a portrait of Colombia, as well as a portrait
of the world in which we live, a brutal x-ray of our dying century. There are several ways
to read this admirable book. One is abstract: the novel that excites us and generates
suspense in each paragraph; the novel that delights us due to the ever-surprising
imagination of the story-teller, who seduces us and leads us through unpredictable
labyrinths. Another is real: reading the book as history, a document, a testimony, as
an autopsy of the web of interests that are opposed, contradictory, incompatible, which
we have come to call "society". One may think that our inability to read Noticia de
un secuestro simply as a novel is a tragedy, a penance or adjudgement. Maybe,
somewhere, in a place unspoiled by the pest of violence, some remote monastery, a
monk, untouched by our time, may achieve this feat. The rest of us, mere mortals, are
fatally yoked to unavoidable atonement.
Should anyone ask: what is the reason for literature? He may find the answer in
Noticia de un secuestro. No more and no less. Literature serves to unveil us,
disrobe us and place us before a mirror. Either us, the people, or entire countries,
wherever they are and whoever they are. Nothing so perverse as the reason for this
book: drugs, drug dealing, violence and the strife for power, or the impunity of
power.
Nothing so tragic as the role of a President of a Republic under the weight of
human siege and drama, his doubts between the State Reason and human feelings, the
inevitable inflexibility that may dehumanize him, since he becomes dehumanized, or
disappears, or denies himself.
Nothing as tragic as the suffering, the uncertainty, the minute-to-minute torture
of the victims, of the hostages chosen at random, as pawns in a demented chess game.
Nothing as tragic, as pathetic as the lives of the kidnappers (also kidnapped in the same
suffocating cell), condemned to kill or die, because this live is worthless, and nothing so
sorrowful, so deplorable, as living a worthless life. Our memory bears the tattoos of the
first reading, and the second, inevitable, rereading, in the gruesome death of Marina
Montoya and her end in a common grave pit, the son who identifies the body because
his hands are identical. In this death, all the tattoos cluster together: In the
amphitheater, after she was washed with a pressure hose, her son looked at her teeth,
and doubted for a moment. He seemed to recall that Marina lacked the left premolar,
and the body had a complete set of teeth. But when he examined her hands, and placed
them over his, and no traces of doubt were left: they were identical. Cunning
Alfred Hitchcock never achieved the suspense of these pages: in Noticia de un
secuestro there is no place for artifice, no feint, no deception.
Parallel to the sinister drama of Marina Montoya, Maruja Pachón or Beatriz
Guerrero, Francisco Pancho Santos, or Diana Turbay and her team of
reporters, Juan Vitta; Richard Becerra, Orlando Acevedo and the German Hero Buss
and his family (Alberto Villamizar, Pedro Guerrero, Hernando Santos, ex-President
Julio César Turbay and his former wife, Nydia Quintero), and the protagonists of the
main duel, President Gaviria and the indecipherable and all-powerful Pablo Escobar
and the Extraditables, is the drama of Colombia, which García Márquez
describes with terrifying ciphers:
-During the first two months of 1991, two hundred thousand assasinations
-twenty per day- had been committed, and one massacre every four days. An agreement
between almost all armed groups had decided on the most ferocious escalation of
terrorist violence in the country's history, and Medellín was the center of urban action.
Four hundred fifty-seven policemen had been murdered during the course of a few
months.
Noticia de un secuestro may be read as a novel if you are fortunate
enough to be a cloistered monk, ignorant if the world in which we live. Otherwise, if
you belong to the human race of this dying century, fetch a bookrest so that your hand
will not shake while you read this history book, written as history is seldom written,
this bestial drama (exclaims the author), which, tragically, is only an
episode of the biblical holocaust that has consumed Colombia for over twenty
years.
Reproduced with permission of the author and of El UNIVERSAL from its June 9th edition.
URL: http://www.internet.ve/analitica
Message to the Editor: editorva@ccs.internet.ve
