Garcia Marquez Skewers a Hero--and Outrages a Nation

Gabriel Garcia Marquez has broken the rule of reverence for historic heroes, and the faithful are up in arms.

Roberto Belandia, secretary of the Colombian Academy of History, was fulminating the other day over Garcia Marquez’s latest novel.

“He uses history to darken the prestige of our institutions and heroes,” said Belandia, a portly man with gray hair and a small bow tie. “It is an anti-patriotic book.”

‘The Liberator’

The book, “The General in His Labyrinth,” is about Simon Bolivar, South America’s greatest hero. It depicts “the Liberator” in his latter days as a feeble insomniac with bad breath and gas, feverish and often delirious, rejected by Colombians and dejected by the failure of his health, the loss of his glory and the death of his dreams.

While such aspects of the Liberator’s life are not unknown, they are not usually emphasized. Nor is his fickle pattern of womanizing or his bitter quarrel with Francisco Santander, the other great hero of Colombian independence. But Garcia Marquez insistently probes these and other cracks in the legend.

“He unloads all his anger against the lofty Santander and against Colombia itself,” Belandia said at the Academy of History, where a Caesar-like bust of Bolivar faces the entrance from a colonial courtyard.

Belandia is not alone in his outrage. Since its publication here in March, “The General” has blown up a controversy echoed in hundreds of newspaper columns of often-blustery commentary. Enrique Santos, director of the daily El Tiempo, said there has been a torrent of letters to the editor, overwhelmingly indignant.

“Of every 10 persons who write, eight are against the book,” Santos said.

Garcia Marquez has further enraged his critics by saying, according to an interview granted to the Associated Press, that the profits from the sale of “The General” will go toward the creation of a research foundation that will set out to write Colombia’s true history.

“All I know is that we know nothing about history in Colombia,” Garcia Marquez was quoted as saying.

The controversy has as much to do with Garcia Marquez’s legend as with Bolivar’s. South America’s leading novelist and Colombia’s only winner of the Nobel Prize, “Gabo” is also a strident leftist and close friend of Communist Cuba’s Fidel Castro.

For conservative historians like Belandia, writers who defend “The General” as “humanized” history are part of an insidious trend.

“Writers of the left and especially historians, young historians, are intent on darkening the prestige of our republican and democratic institutions, attacking their creators and organizers,” Belandia said.

Hints of Marquez’s Return

Interestingly, while the novel has triggered a barrage of criticism against Garcia Marquez, it has coincided with hints that he may soon return from years of self-imposed exile.

He left Colombia in the late 1970s after hearing that he was under investigation for alleged links to anti-government guerrillas. Authorities said no proof had been found, but the author’s fame and political leanings made him a potential lightning rod in Colombia’s violent political climate.

In 1982, Garcia Marquez won the Nobel Prize for Literature, consolidating the international prestige that had grown steadily with the publication of “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” “The Autumn of the Patriarch” and other books.

After the publication of “The General in His Labyrinth,” the author told reporters in Mexico, where he lives, that he would like to return to Colombia’s Caribbean coast, where he was born. Gen. Jaime Guerrero Paz, the Colombian defense minister, told reporters here that Garcia Marquez was welcome to come home, and the author responded to the invitation with what he called “immense emotion” and “enormous gratitude.”

“I would return to Colombia at any moment,” he said. He told the Spanish magazine Cambio 16 that his next book, also planned as a historical novel, will be set in Colombia’s 18th-Century Caribbean port of Cartagena.

Garcia Marquez makes no apology for the controversy over “The General.” He accuses many Latin American historians of contributing to a Bolivarian myth and cult that hides the Liberator’s human nature.

In an interview with the Colombian news magazine Semana, he declared, “ ‘The General’ was written, among other reasons, so that they would not keep doing such things to the memory of Bolivar.”

Most histories of Bolivar concentrate on his battlefield genius in leading the liberation of five South American countries from Spanish colonial rule, starting with Venezuela and finishing with Peru and Bolivia, the nation named for him. They describe his youth as an aristocratic and wealthy orphan in Caracas, his plotting as a young exile in Europe and the Caribbean and his crowning glory as president of Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador and dictator of Peru.

Bolivar’s great dream was to unite the countries he freed in a huge nation that would rival the United States in power. The histories tell how that dream crumbled in regional rivalries, political differences and personal quarrels. But most of them have little detail on Bolivar’s final journey to his death on the Caribbean coast after the political winds in Bogota turned against him.

That painful journey, over craggy mountains, down the Magdalena River and finally to the city of Santa Marta, provides the story line for Garcia Marquez’s novel.

A Pathetic Figure

In the book, the general sometimes pauses for days, unsure of where he is going, as he agonizes in his poverty, sickness and disgrace. He is a pathetic figure, sometimes deeply depressed as he lies naked and sweating in his hammock, sometimes poignantly nostalgic as he recalls his youth, his women and his victories. At one low point, a faithful servant hears him crying in his sleep.

“Hearing the little whines, Jose Palacios thought they were from a stray dog taking shelter by the river. But they were from his master,” Garcia Marquez writes.

And sometimes, the general is consumed by regret. “I got lost in a dream looking for something that does not exist,” he laments in the book. Garcia Marquez infuriates many readers here by depicting Bogotanos as ungrateful persecutors of Bolivar and Colombians as divisive and conspiratorial.

“Every Colombian is an enemy country,” the general says in exasperation.

Some white Colombians also bridle at Garcia Marquez’s notion that Bolivar had a strain of African blood “from a paternal great-grandfather who had a son with a slave.” But the worst insult for many is Garcia Marquez’s portrayal of Santander as a villain.

“He treats him in the most contemptuous way, as if he were a liar who has betrayed Bolivar,” said Gabriel Camargo-Perez, another member of the Colombian Academy of History.

The book does have its prominent defenders. Maria Susana de Ojeda, a historian who administers a museum in what was once Bolivar’s Bogota home, said in an interview that “The General” should be read not as history but as a novel that artfully shows the hero as a human being.

“This is not going to lower the Liberator from the pedestal on which we have him,” she said.

At a publication ceremony, former President Alfonso Lopez Michelsen presented “The General” as a masterpiece of literature.

But an editorial in El Tiempo said Garcia Marquez subtly plays up Bolivar’s dictatorial personality “to create an impalpable comparison with that of Fidel Castro.”

‘Demented Newspaper’

Garcia Marquez counterattacked, calling El Tiempo a “demented newspaper.” The newspaper retaliated with another salvo: “The gigantic vanity of Gabriel Garcia Marquez allows only praise, reverence, hand kissing, bows and adulation over his works.”

Felix Burgos, sales manager for Garcia Marquez’s Colombian publisher, acknowledged that the controversy is good for sales of “The General.” The first edition was 700,000 copies, and Burgos said 80% of it has been sold. Normally, a Colombian best seller reaches a maximum of 60,000 copies, he said.

About 250,000 copies of “The General” were exported to other Andean countries where the publisher, Oveja Negra, has distribution rights. Burgos predicted that a second edition will come out in June or July.

Rights for publication in other countries have been negotiated by Garcia Marquez’s agent in Spain. Burgos said the English translation, to be published by Alfred A. Knopf of New York, will probably not be ready for the presses until next year.

FROM ‘THE GENERAL IN HIS LABYRINTH’ “When he returned to the bedroom he found the general at the mercy of his delirium. He heard him utter fragmentary phrases that fit into a single one: ‘No one understood anything.’ His body burned in a bonfire of fever. . .The general himself would not know the next day whether he was talking in his sleep or raving while awake, nor would he be able to remember it. It was what he called ‘my crises of dementia.’ ”

“It was the end. General Simon Jose Antonio de la Santisima Trinidad Bolivar y Palacios was leaving forever. He had seized from the Spanish dominion an empire five times as vast as the Europes, he had directed twenty years of war to keep it free and united, and he had governed it with a firm hand until the previous week, but at the hour of his departure. . .the only one who was lucid enough to know he really was leaving, and where he was going, was the English diplomat who wrote in an official report to his government: ‘The time he has remaining will barley be enough to reach the tomb.’ ”.