Original subtitles

A FILM BY YVES BILLON AND MAURICIO MARTINEZ-CAVARD

Now that barks dog

Now that crows cock

and the brays burro and warbles bird

and the whistles watchmen and grunts swine

and the dawny rose fields the broad gilds

I come to sigh my heaves window your beneaths.

This is how Colombian literature started. I'm sure that very few people remember that.

Colombia, March 6, 1927.

A torrential rain is falling down on banana plantations

surrounding a small village called Aracataca.

That day, Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born

in the tropical department of Atlántico.

55 years later, his masterpiece is awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature

which makes him famous all over the world.

ENCHANTED LITERATURE

Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses,

built on the bank of a river of clear water

that ran along a bed of polished stones,

which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs.

The world was so recent that many things lacked names,

and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.

Every year during the month of March

a family of ragged gypsies would set up their tents near the village,

and with a great uproar of pipes and kettledrums

they would display new inventions.

From the day I was born, I knew that I was going to be a writer.

I wanted to be a writer. I had the will and the inclinations.

I had the state of mind and the aptitude to be a writer.

I've always written. I've never thought I could do something else.

And I never thought I could make a living off it.

I was willing to starve to death but be a writer.

An obstinate narrator willing to make any sacrifices in order to write

he created with One Hundred Years of Solitude a new vision of the world.

Macondo is a village in the Caribbean, as well as a whole continent.

But what lies in the origins of the world?

A novel in which everything is true and reminds of a dream.

A horror story which doesn't scare.

All this makes a child turn into a witcher.

Leave your child alone.

Let his soul guide him.

At the origin, there was grandfather, Nicolás Márquez, the Colonel.

At the turn of the century, a young man from a respectable family

he joins the Thousand Days' War that is ravaging the country.

The Colonel has a friend, a dear brother-in-arms named Medardo Pacheco.

But one cursed day in October 1908 the two men come face to face in a duel.

It's a matter of honor. The Colonel kills Pacheco,

and it's as if he had killed himself.

His suffering is infinite. He leaves his native town for a forgotten village

across Sierra Nevada.

Twenty years later, the Colonel has a daughter named Luisa,

the apple of his eye.

She falls desperately in love with the local telegraph operator.

The Colonel and his wife Tranquilina are fiercely opposed to the relationship.

Eventually, the couple get married. Louisa names her first son Gabriel.

As if to make up for the insult to father, the child is sent to his house.

Until the age of 8, García Márquez lives with his maternal grandparents in Aracataca.

Tranquilina and the Colonel, together with numerous women of the house

tell him about the world.

The important thing is that we were the only two men in the house

otherwise full of women.

It was a very strange life for me

because the women, headed by my grandmother

lived in a supernatural world, a fantastic world where everything was possible

and where the most marvellous things were routine.

And I got used to thinking that way too.

But my grandfather was probably the most down-to-earth person I've ever known.

The stories he told were the stories of the civil war and politics.

And he talked to me as if I was a grown-up.

So my life was divided between these two worlds:

the concrete one of my grandfather in which I spent most of my time

because he devoted a lot of time to me

and the one of the women in which I stayed alone at night.

When it was opened by the giant, the chest gave off a glacial exhalation.

Inside there was only an enormous, transparent block with infinite internal needles

in which the light of the sunset was broken up into colored stars.

Disconcerted, knowing that the children were waiting for an immediate explanation,

José Arcadio Buendía ventured a murmur:

“It’s the largest diamond in the world.”

“No,” the gypsy countered. “It’s ice.”

And now, she'll delight you by guessing the prize number.

First prize!

The age of Jesus Christ!

When my grandfather died, this world ended.

My family left Aracataca and I went to live with my parents with whom I'd never lived.

There was a different culture and a completelly different reality there.

But the memory that made me want to express myself

is the memory of my grandfather.

And besides, he gave me a vision of a country

which was his country, where he had lived during the civil war

especially under the command of General Uribe.

It's hard to forget a grandfather like that.

Uprooted from this enchanted world that was Aracataca

the child plunges in his memory in search of the faces, houses, trees, smells, stories.

García Márquez didn't know yet that

this nostalgy that would never leave him was to become the source of his writing.

Many years would pass before an unplanned return to Aracataca

during a decisive trip rendered him the keys to the world that he thought was lost.

Tonight Gabriel García Márquez will read for us the first chapter

from his book of memoirs.

He will also read to us the second chapter from his inexhaustible book of desires.

And before I could react she said: "I'm your mother."

"I've come to ask you to please go with me to sell the house."

She did not have to tell me which one, or where,

because for us only one existed in the world:

my grandparents' old house in Aracataca

where I'd had the good fortune to be born

and where I had not lived again after the age of eight.

Neither my mother nor I, of course, could even have imagined

that this simple two-day trip would be so decisive

that the longest and most diligent of lives would not be enough for me

to finish recounting it.

There's a long way to go before the reunion.

A new separation comes to trouble his childhood.

Before he turns 16, he wins a scholarship and has to leave the Caribbean.

Overcome with sadness, he gets on board a steamboat

which takes him along the Magdalena River to the ridges of the Andes.

His destination is Zipaquirá with its modest Varones National Lyceum.

A young man born in a warm climate, he has trouble adapting to the cold

and fog of the mountains.

He tries to shut out nostalgia by reading.

He reads passionately, especially poetry:

poets of the Spanish Golden Age

but also Rubén Darío, Porfirio Barba Jacob, Pablo Neruda and others.

A while later, he starts studying law in Bogotá.

He doesn't like the city.

His Caribbean passion and zest clash

with cold streets full of people dressed in black.

Once again, books help him survive.

He tries to write his first books but to no avail. Until he discovers Kafka.

I tried to write stories but I felt that

even though I knew the storyline, I didn't know how to write it.

All the attempts until then were failures.

Something was lacking.

And after I enrolled on the faculty of law in Bogotá

one night when I came back to the dormitory...

I had a friend who read a lot there, and he brought a small yellow book.

It was the only book he had at that time, so I went to bed and started reading.

I read everything I could come across then.

So I opened the book and it read:

"One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams,

he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug."

I remember how I almost fell out of bed at that moment.

It was a revelation: if somethinglike this can be done, then I'm interested in it.

Before that I probably thought that it wasn't possible

despite having devoured One Thousand and One Nights.

But there was a very important thing which was the method.

There was a method for telling a story.

And I didn't have it.

It was a real revelation for me. After that,

I wrote a story called La tercera resignación

which was published in El Espectador. I wrote it based on that reading.

And starting from that time, in all my writing I followed the modern novel.

And I've stuck with it up until now.

García Márquez publishes three stories in Bogotá's major newspaper El Espectador.

His talent of a storyteller is noticed by Eduardo Zalamea,

renowned writer and critic.

From its independence, Columbia lived in the state of almost permanent

social and political unrest.

In late 40s, the new civil war and its militia wreak more havoc on the country.

A popular presidential candiate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán

is assassinated in Bogotá on April 9, 1948.

An enraged crowd lynches his murderer and devastate the city.

The dormitory where García Márquez lives is destroyed by fire

and the writer sees in it the signal for returning to the Caribbean.

I lost everything: my first typewriter which my father gave me

and some manuscripts which today I'm glad were lost.

After this, I went to Cartagena to continue my studies.

I was in the middle of the second year then.

So I came to Cartagena and finished the second year.

But when I started the third year, I realized I wasn't interested anymore

because I was completely obsessed with literature and journalism.

Once, while I was still studying, I was looking for something to do

and I went to the office of El Universal in San Juan De Dios Str. in Cartagena.

There, I saw a man sitting behind the counter and writing.

I came up to him and said...

I don't know why but I felt very shy.

I'd always been that way but even more so at that moment.

Besides, I was getting myself in something that I knew nothing about.

But I said to him, "I want to work here."

He asked, "What do you do?" I said, "I write."

"And what's your name?" I told him my name.

It turned out, he'd read my stories in El Espectador.

It was Clemente Manuel Zabala. He said, "Sit down and write a piece."

I was happy.

And that day I became a journalist.

Having written numerous articles and columns,

García Márquez arrives at an original and bold concept of a news report.

He also founds a journalism school in Cartagena.

All the writings of García Márquez the journalist are marked

by strong engagement -

a literary, civic and political engagement.

I'd say I came to journalism because I believed

the main thing was not to write literature but to tell stories.

And within this way of thinking

journalism, and especially the news report, should be considered a literary genre.

This is what I believe even though many journalists themselves

refuse to accept a news report as a literary genre.

Deep down they even view it as inferior.

But I believe, a news report is a story

based fully on real events.

A fictional story is also based on real events.

No fiction is fully made up. It's only an elaboration of experience.

So I considered journalism another stage in my apprenticeship

not only literary but overall development of my ability to tell stories.

Among the stories García Márquez wants to tell

are ones about drug cartels and corruption in Colombia

as well as kidnappings and murders of numerous journalists.

He tells the story of yet another civil war

which seems on the point of depriving the whole country of a future.

Easy money, a narcotic more harmful than the ill-named "heroic drugs,"

was injected into the national culture.

The idea prospered: The law is the greatest obstacle to happiness;

it is a waste of time learning to read and write;

you can live a better, more secure life as a criminal than as a law-abiding citizen

- in short, this was the social breakdown typical of all undeclared wars.

It was my most difficult, most complicated and most bleak book.

But I hope that it can serve as a mirror for Colombians

so that we can see ourselves clearly in order to solve our problems.

He becomes instantly famous due to the success of One Hundred Years of Solitude

and has to get used to fame, sometimes embarrassing, since

he knows it's synonymous with influence.

He fights for human rights, creates Habeas, a foundation

charged with helping political prisoners

and travels around the continent as an emerging politician.

Meeting with top figures of the world becomes almost routine.

And his friendship with Fidel Castro is already the stuff of legend.

He publicly states his position. As a result,

he receives death threats and is denied visas.

His straightforwardness and his leftist sensibilities cause a stir.

Cinema was for me more than just a hobby.

And I wrapped up very little of it.

And when push came to shove, we found ouself in the crazy situation

of making war against mainstream 20th century culture.

and we ended up in cinemas that had comfy seats but no roof.

Where you watched films beneath the stars, with the full moon and...

I was so into cinema that when I came to El Espectador

I convinced them to let me write film criticism.

Many years after The Blue Lobster, his manifesto of the Caribbean surrealism

García Márquez goes to the city which is still the indisputable mecca

of Latin-American cinema - Mexico City.

He meets directors, producers and actors,

writes scripts adapting the stories of Juan Rulfo.

Rulfo offers him a new freedom

- the freedom to manipulate time to better reconstruct it.

However, cinema is a complicated and risky enterprise.

Disappointed, García Márquez gives up cinema to dedicate himself to literature.

I loved cinema so much

that I thought I'd do it as much as literature

and as much as journalism.

It was for me yet another way of telling stories about life.

In 1985 García Márquez establishes a cinema school in Cuba.

What happened with cinema was

I realized that it was much more difficult to make a movie than I'd thought.

It seemed impossible, given the industrial demands,

the financial demands and the huge number of people who have to be on the set

to tell an intimate story, a story of an individual soul.

Prepared for another long, fruitless battle

I answered with more calm than I had shown before:

"The only thing I want in life is to be a writer, and that's what I'm going to be."

The train stopped at a station that had no town,

and a short while later it passed the only banana plantation along the route

that had its name written over the gate: Macondo.

I had already used this word in three books as the name of an imaginary town

when I happened to read in an encyclopedia

that it is a tropical tree resembling the ceiba

that it produces no flowers or fruit

and its light, porous wood is used for making canoes

and carving cooking implements.

The path that leads to Macondo goes through the Barranquilla port.

Of all the goods that flood the docks

the most valuable ones for García Márquez are Spanish translations

of English and North American novelists imported from Buenos Aires.

His impatience to read them leads him to become a literary advisor of a bookseller.

So I kept developing within the framework of this new novel

whose principal representatives at the time were Hemingway and Faulkner

but there were also many others: Dos Passos, Steinbeck, Lewis etc.

And I really got down to studying

how it was done.

And I discovered a great affinity between the novels of the American South

and the life that I had known back in Aracataca.

The reason was simple:

Aracataca was a banana-growing town

and it had been founded by United Fruit Company.

And the layout of the town was very similar to the towns of the American South.

So I didn't know if Faulkner wondered and moved me

because of what he told about his land

or because it reminded me of Aracataca and my childhood.

And so I began to realize

that the source of my writing was inside of my guts,

and not in things I was reading in Bogotá.

It wasn't in any literature at all.

Reading North American writers helped me discover it.

But what I discovered was that I carried it inside me.

So it became my way.

The first stop on this way is called Leaf Storm.

It is written in Barranquilla and based on the return to Aracataca.

He then sets out to write a monumental novel, The House.

But the undertaking is too grand.

He puts it aside in favor of another project, In Evil Hour.

This novel didn't see the light until after a new twist in the writer's life

- a trip to Europe.

García Márquez is sent to Paris as a correspondent for El Espectador,

but the newspaper is shut down, following the orders of dictator Rojas Pinilla.

García Márquez is left to his fate, penniless.

While he's finishing In Evil Hour, another story haunts him

and imposes itself as evidence.

He writes it in one fell swoop as if to get rid of it.

No One Writes to the Colonel

could only have been written in Paris

because when I was stranded there I was constantly waiting for a cheque.

I was living in a hostel and every day I went downstairs

to see if there was a letter.

As soon as the concierge saw me he gave me a sign, and I went back to my room.

I had a return ticket,

I had it cashed in, put the money in a drawer,

took out a bit every day for food,

and I was writing all day. I was happy

that El Espectador had been shut down because I didn't have to work there anymore

and I could devote myself fully to literature.

"It hasn’t occurred to you that the rooster might lose.”

“He’s one rooster that can’t lose.”

“But suppose he loses.”

“There are still forty-five days left

to begin to think about that,” the colonel said.

The woman lost her patience.

“And meanwhile what do we eat?” she asked,

and seized the colonel by the collar of his flannel night shirt.

She shook him hard.

"What do we eat?”

It had taken the colonel seventy-five years

- the seventy-five years of his life, minute by minute - to reach this moment.

He felt pure, explicit, invincible at the moment when he replied:

“Shit”.

What was important for me in Paris

was the perspective it gave me on Latin America.

Because I, being from here, was nothing more than a guy from the coast.

Nothing more than a Caribbean, which essentially I am.

A Caribbean.

I was still Caribbean there but I was a Caribbean who knew

what his culture was.

And within which overall culture my Caribbeanism existed.

I went to cafés and met Argentinians

Central Americans, Mexicans,

Caribbeans from various countries.

Curiously, it was the time of dictators.

There was Rojas Pinilla in Colombia

Pérez Jiménez in Venezuela

Odría in Peru

Trujillo in Santo Domingo

Perón in Argentina...

There was a dictator in almost every country.

There was Batista in Cuba.

I lived in a small hostel in the Latin Quarter.

And in the hostel across the street lived Nicolás Guillén,

the poet who we all came to see often, as a pilgrimage.

Each of us on the lookout for his own country.

And one morning - he woke up very early, like in his native Camagüey -

he shouted, "The dictator has fallen!"

And all of us rushed outside because each of us thought it was his dictator.

And so what happened to me was

something that had to happen sooner or later:

I put aside all my literary obligations

and focused on my political obligations.

I don't regret it. That's what mattered at the time.

But in order to get out of it, I had to go back to the original idea

that the writer's obligations have to do not only with political reality

but with the whole reality.

This is what I learned in Paris.

After years of working and searching, after disappointments and doubts

García Márquez goes back to the path that leads to Macondo.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is born after 40 months of seclusion.

Later, many more books come out of this magical crucible.

Gabo [= Gabriel] opens up a lyrical and enchanting world,

that tells the story of a miserable and grandiose humanity.

For a long time, I'd had the idea of writing

a novel in which everything would take place.

And I knew that for that, I needed all the memories from Aracataca:

fantasies, superstitions, anxieties.

Originally, I planned

that everything would happen in the house.

That's why I wanted to call the novel The House.

But very soon I realized it wasn't possible. But at least, it had to be within Macondo.

And even though Colonel Buendía wages wars all over Central America

the story only takes place within Macondo.

News comes from outside, but the perspective is always from Macondo.

This is more or less what I wanted to do

with a novel in which everything would take place.

But my favorite book is Love in the Time of Cholera.

This is the book that's going to last.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is a mythical book.

I'm not denying its merits

but Love in the Time of Cholera is a book about people and the way we really are.

As he passed the sewing room, he saw through the window

an older woman and a young girl sitting very close together on two chairs

and following the reading in the book that the woman held open on her lap.

The lesson was not interrupted

but the girl raised her eyes to see who was passing by the window

and that casual glance was the beginning of a cataclysm of love

that still had not ended half a century later.

For many years we had to listen to the same story

of this love contrary to circumstances

which finally ended in marriage.

For Love in the Time of Cholera I interviewed both of them

but I did it like a reporter and each of them separately.

When they were together, they contradicted each other and ended up arguing.

So I talked first to my father, then to my mother

and afterwards put together a complete story.

So the story in Love in the Time of Cholera is precisely the story of their love.

Florentino Ariza would hire a Victoria after a hard day at the office

but instead of folding down the top, as was customary during the hot months

he would stay hidden in the depths of the seat, invisible in the shade,

always alone, and requesting unexpected routes

so as not to arouse the evil thoughts of the driver.

In reality, the only thing that interested him on the drive

was the pink marble Parthenon half hidden among leafy banana and mango trees

a luckless replica of the idyllic mansions on Louisiana cotton plantations.

Love in the Time of Cholera takes place in Cartagena.

Using the convoluted backdrop of an old colonial city

García Márquez plays with stories from his own life.

One has three lives: public life, private life and secret life.

In all three there are women.

For some reason unknown to me, I get on better with women than with men.

I find it easier to communicate with them.

I think it's because I know them well.

I'll give you a useful marriage tip.

Women always say that problems in the couple are solved by talking.

On the contrary: when you talk about a problem, it surely ends in a row.

You have to trust, forget it and move on.

When I realized it, I never argued with a woman again.

You don't talk about it, you just move on.

Remember this. You'll thank me later.

I've always said that

I owe my literary education to traditional culture.

I've studied other cultures but what really sustains

and drives me is traditional culture.

I haven't studied it, but I'm impregnated with it.

It's not a matter of studying it academically, it's a matter of living it.

I'm always living it. And neither my fame nor travels have separated me from it.

I always keep up do date with what's going on over there

and what songs are being sung.

The writer, nourished by the singing of his people,

recycles and embalms it to its own glory.

Above all, he's a craftsman of literature.

Each text is the result of strict discipline,

of everyday encounter with words,

the fruit of painfully acquired mastery of the technique of story-telling.

Writing fiction is a hypnotic act.

The writer tries to hypnotize the reader so that

he doesn't think of anything except the story you're telling.

It takes an enormous quantity of nails, screws and hinges

to make sure he doesn't wake up.

This is what I call craft. It's the skill of telling a story, of writing

or of making a movie.

Inspiration is one thing, but the storyline is something different.

How to lay out this storyline and convert it into a literary truth

that really captivates the reader?

It can't be done without craft.

When you manage to captivate the reader

you succeed in conveying to him a breathing rhythm

that cannot be interrupted, because if it does, the reader will wake up.

And when you achieve this rhythm

you soon find out that there's a lopsided phrase

in terms of rhythm

and so you have to add

one or two adjectives in order to maintain the rhythm.

These adjectives don't have to be there.

They're there so that the reader doesn't wake up.

That's craft.

On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at 5:30 in the morning

to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on.

He'd dreamed he was going through a grove of timber trees

where a gentle drizzle was falling

and for an instant he was happy in his dream

but when he awoke he felt completely spattered with bird shit.

It reminds me of the beginning of Kafka's The Metamorphosis.

"On the day they were going to kill him,

Santiago Nasar got up at 5:30 in the morning."

That means, the reader won't escape your there,

because he's knows they're going to kill him.

And he's going to follow this character, until they kill him,

how they kill him and where they kill him.

But when I finished the first chapter, I encountered a problem.

He still hadn't been killed.

And I realized that the reader would do the same thing I would

- go to the ending and check if he would be killed or not.

So I wrote that they'd killed him.

At the end of the first chapter there's a line: "They've already killed him."

So now the reader didn't have to check the last page to see if he would be killed

but had to read the whole book line by line to learn how he would be killed.

It took García Márquez seven years of meticulous work

to write One Hundred Years of Solitude, the novel that became legendary.

But the The Autumn of the Patriarch disturbed his readers.

The reason is that it's revolves around the timeless figure of the dictator

an old half-insane general who embodies the permanent nightmare of the continent.

The tyrant's delirium, it's a disturbing image

of the tragic and profuse life of the Caribbean.

Take as long as you like, father, he said to him, holding his hand in his

for he had an immediate confidence in that jaundiced Abyssinian

who loved life above all things

he ate iguana eggs, sir general, he loved cockfights

the humor of mulatto women, dancing the cumbia, just like us, sir general, the whole bag

if you could only have seen him mingling with the human scum

off the shabby sailing ships that weighed anchor loaded with fags and green bananas

loaded with shipments of unripe whores for the glass hotels of Curaçao

for Guantánamo, father, for the saddest and most beautiful islands in the world

that we go on dreaming about until the first light of dawn, father, remember...

When One Hundred Years of Solitude was published

the first thing that shocked me was that it was me.

I had never thought that I'd have such a success and cause such a scandal.

And then when I realized that I didn't just have to keep writing

but that I had to keep writing after One Hundred Years of Solitude.

I'd never thought that it would happen to me

and that I would find myself in such a difficult situation.

And I realized that I had to write something completely different.

If I sat down to write, what came out

was exactly like One Hundred Years of Solitude.

I could have written the second, third and fourth volumes.

I could have continued to write in the same way

but deep down I knew that what I wanted to say was something else.

So how would I go about it?

The question complicated even further when I realized that

readers were expecting another One Hundred Years of Solitude

in the sense that

I had barely had any readers

none of my books had sold more than a thousand copies.

So when One Hundred Years of Solitude came out in 8,000 copies

and then 10,000 every month and so on

plus later translations all over the world

I realized that the readers I had

were only readers of One Hundred Years of Solitude

and that they were expecting another One Hundred Years of Solitude.

And I wasn't going to do that because it wouldn't have been honest.

So I had to write an anti-One Hundred Years of Solitude.

So I started practising

another way of telling a story.

And I wrote The Autumn of the Patriarch. When it came out, it was a failure.

I didn't sell at all because people felt it had nothing to do with

One Hundred Years of Solitude.

And now it's my most studied book.

But changing my style was a real problem.

The ties that connect García Márquez with his readers

convoluted and complex, are unbreakable.

His voice is the voice of the desperate ones.

However, he says, probably speaking about himself,

that the solitude of fame can only be equalled by the solitude of power.

These days, the craftsman of words is writing his memoirs

to ignore the monuments that are being erected to honor him.

I never reread my books out of fear.

But today I realize that this is a duty of the writer

and a matter of honesty.

I have to reread my books in order not to keep writing the same thing.

So I'm reading them in the same order as I wrote them.

I have to say, with all the honesty and vanity, that I like them a lot.

But they're not the books that I'd have to write today.

So I'm learning to write all over again

by writing about my memories

of how I wrote those books.

And by doing that, try to free myself from myself.

And I'm going to get it done.