Playboy Interview: Gabriel García Márquez

The Nobel Prize is at once the most prestigious and the least predictable of honors, so it was an unexpected pleasure for us when it was announced that the 1982 winner for literature was the Latin-American novelist Gabriel García Márquez. Not only has Playboy published his fiction for more than a decade but we had recently sent a reporter abroad to engage him in the most extensive interview of his career. So when it was announced that he would be making the traditional journey to Stockholm in early December to receive his award, we had the satisfaction of offering our readers a fortuitously timed interview. The world's literary community, however, may claim that the announcement was not unexpected. For years, critics had been waxing ecstatic about the author of "One Hundred Years of Solitude," hailing him as one of the world's great living novelists, comparing his work to that of William Faulkner and James Joyce. Indeed, among the literati, García Márquez--"Gabo," as he's known to his friends--has long been talked of as a Nobel contender. The only question was when, not if.

A few basic facts about García Márquez: He is the foremost practitioner of Latin America's "magic realist" literary style, a form in which fantasy and reality are blended into a uniquely New World form of storytelling; his masterly novel of life, love and revolution in a Latin-American village, "One Hundred Years of Solitude," has sold more than 6,000,000 copies in more than 30 languages; the book is a cult classic on American college campuses; before garnering his Nobel, García Márquez won every international prize worth having.

Beyond his literary accomplishments, García Márquez is a political activist, an advocate of social revolution in the Third World and in Latin America in particular. He is a close friend of many world leaders, including Cuba's Fidel Castro and France's Socialist President François Mitterrand. His leftist views and background have made him a controversial figure in the U.S.

When "One Hundred Years of Solitude" was published in the United States in 1970, critics fell over one another to pronounce García Márquez a genius. That was followed in 1975 with "The Autumn of the Patriarch," a wildly surreal work about a Latin-American dictator who's been in power so long that no one remembers how he got there. This April, Knopf will be bringing out his latest, "Chronicle of a Death Foretold," a story of sex, murder and retribution.

Born in the Colombian coastal village of Aracataca in 1928, the writer grew up in an atmosphere that made him a natural storyteller. Aracataca, he always said, was a wonderful place of "bandits and dancers." His grandfather told young Gabriel true tales of war, injustice and politics. His grandmother recited bedtime stories of the supernatural.

Since the age of 18, García Márquez knew that a big book about Latin America brewed inside him. As a young man, he studied law at the University of Bogotá--a pursuit he continued until, in the late Forties, he quit to eke out a living as a writer and a journalist. During the Fifties and Sixties, he lived the itinerant life of a reporter in Paris, Rome and Caracas, including a stint as a correspondent for Prensa Latina, revolutionary Cuba's news agency. On one brief trip back home in 1958, he married his childhood sweetheart, Mercedes Barcha. When not writing for newspapers, García Márquez wrote fiction: "Leaf Storm," "No One Writes to the Colonel," "In Evil Hour" and "Big Mama's Funeral," works that some scholars now consider first drafts of "One Hundred Years of Solitude." By 1965, free-lancer García Márquez found himself in Mexico City, supporting his wife and two sons. It was there that the idea for "One Hundred Years of Solitude" was crystallized.

In the years since its publication in 1967, García Márquez has found himself catapulted to wealth, political influence and the international renown reserved for movie stars and statesmen. The García family now maintains elegant residences in Paris and Mexico City, and he has used his influence to become an unofficial ambassador for leftist Latin America. He has tried unsuccessfully to ignore his fame, saying, "I detest being converted into a public spectacle."

Last year, Playboy gave journalist Claudia Dreifus the green light to try to question this unusual writer. Her report:

"To describe García Márquez as elusive is understatement. He does not answer letters, fearing that his correspondence may be sold at auction. His telephone seems to be perpetually out of order. I wrote to him at various addresses in Paris and periodically telephoned his agent in Spain. Nothing happened. Then, one afternoon in New York, Gregory Rabassa, the author's English-language translator, telephoned: 'Gabo is in New York, just for the afternoon. If you rush, you might catch him.'

"In a flash, I contacted García Márquez at his Park Avenue hotel. 'Mr. García Márquez, there's so much that's been written about you and so little of it is true,' I said. 'With a "Playboy Interview," you could clear up all the fiction. What's more, with the situation in Central America being what it is, North Americans would be interested in hearing a different voice speak on Latin-American realities. Why don't you tell us your side of the story?'

"García Márquez was intrigued. In March of 1981, he'd suffered the experience of having to flee his native Colombia after the military there tried to link him with a Castroite guerrilla organization. In the United States, he was having problems with the State Department, which, because of his Castro connection, would grant him only a limited U.S. entry visa. Yes, he would like to talk about all of that. Did I speak Spanish? he asked me.

"No.

"Did I speak French?

"A little.

"Well, what did I speak?

"My heart sank as I spoke the name of the most unlikely language for this situation--German. Both of us giggled at the ridiculousness of my answer. 'We'll figure something out,' García Márquez said. 'I'll see you in either Paris or Barcelona--your choice.'

" 'I prefer Paris,' I said.

" 'Ah, yes,' he laughed; then he added, 'This conversation is beginning to sound like a scene from a Dos Passos novel.'

"Two months later, we met at his charming modern apartment in a high-rise that towered over Paris. For nine days, we talked, argued and parried, with the nimble assistance of Patricia Newcomer, who did the translating chores from Spanish to English. Sometimes, the author's wife, Mercedes, a dark woman with a quiet manner, sat in on the sessions.

"Incidentally, our conversations about Latin-American politics occurred when El Salvador was in the headlines and before the outcome of last summer's Falklands conflict and the renewed tensions in Nicaragua. These discussions should be read within that context.

"Oddly enough, the playful black humor that is the trademark of García Márquez' writing came out only after lengthy coaxing. Gabriel García Márquez was giving an interview for posterity and, God, he was serious about it. Once, in a fruitless attempt to make him laugh, I took him a box of truffles from Paris' best chocolatier. In 'One Hundred Years of Solitude,' there's a priest who levitates every time he drinks chocolate. 'Will you levitate with these?' I asked.

" 'It only works with liquid chocolate!' he said glumly. And then he tossed the chocolates to a far corner of the room.

"Nonetheless, when García Márquez goes to Stockholm to receive his Nobel, he'll receive something he will doubtless appreciate more--$157,000 in cash, great acclaim and a certified place in the history of letters. It must be a delicious journey for García Márquez, the fabulist who began his writing in Aracataca, drawing cartoons of his grandmother's occult tales, the man who writes because he wants 'to be loved more.' "

[Q] Playboy: You have received numerous literary honors since the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude. You've been mentioned in connection with the Nobel Prize, and John Leonard of The New York Times once said, "The great American novel has been written by a Latin American." In view of that, do you find it ironic that because of your problem with the U.S. State Department, you have difficulty getting a visa every time you want to visit the U.S.?

[A] García Márquez: First of all, the great American novel was written by Herman Melville. As to my problem, as you politely call it, it has to do with my political thinking, which is no secret. It is unpleasant. It's as if I had a mark on my forehead, and it shouldn't be that way. I am one of the great propagandists for North American literature. I have said to audiences everywhere in the world that the North American novelists have been the giants of the century. Moreover, great cultural changes are taking place in the United States because of the influence of Latin America--and my work is part of that influence. I should be able to participate more freely.

[Q] Playboy: Why can't you?

[A] García Márquez: The whole business stems from the fact that in 1961, I worked for the Cuban news agency in New York. I wasn't even a bureau chief. From that time on, my wife and I were told that we were "ineligible for entry" when we wanted to visit the U.S. That went on until 1971, when Columbia University awarded me an honorary degree. Since then, I have had some sort of conditional visa that makes me feel insecure. It's a game established by the State Department. What is frightening is that the State Department can end the game whenever it wants to and exclude me from the United States forever. No cultured man can exist today without traveling frequently to the U.S.

[Q] Playboy: Despite your visa problems and your reported leftist views, it's clear that you have a real affection for Americans and American culture.

[A] García Márquez: Yes, the people of the United States are one of the peoples I most admire in the world. The only thing I don't understand is why a country that manages to do so many things so well cannot do better in choosing its Presidents. But we can talk about that later. I notice you haven't asked me the one question all interviewers start with.

[Q] Playboy: What question is that?

[A] García Márquez: You haven't asked me if I'm a Communist.

[Q] Playboy: We thought we would let the readers make up their own minds. Asking someone that question has ugly connotations in America, because of the McCarthy period.

[A] García Márquez: Yes, but the readers of Playboy will wonder why you didn't ask it anyway.

[Q] Playboy: OK. Are you a Communist?

[A] García Márquez: Of course not. I am not and have never been. Nor have I belonged to any political party. Sometimes I have the impression that in the United States, there is a tendency to separate my writing from my political activities--as if they were opposites. I don't think they are. What happens is that, as an anticolonial Latin American, I take a position that annoys many interests in the United States. And so, simplistically, some people say I am an enemy of the United States. What I'd like to correct is the problems and errors in the Americas as a whole. I would think the same way if I were a North American. Indeed, if I were North American, I would be even more of a radical, because it would be a matter of correcting the faults in my own country.

[Q] Playboy: Incidentally, why do you always use the words North America to describe the United States?

[A] García Márquez: It bothers me that the people of the United States have appropriated the word America as if they were the only Americans. America, in fact, begins at the South Pole and ends at the North Pole. When residents of the United States call themselves Americans, they are telling us they think of themselves as the only Americans. Actually, those people are residents of a country without a name.

[Q] Playboy: What do you mean?

[A] García Márquez: No name. They should find a name, because right now they have none. We have the United States of Mexico, the United States of Brazil. But the United States? The United States of what? Now, remember, that is said with affection. As I mentioned, I love North American literature. The only academy of letters I belong to is that of the United States. Critics in the United States are those who best understand my works.

[A] But as a Latin American, as a partisan for Latin America, I can't help but feel resentful when North Americans appropriate the word America for themselves. As I see America, it is like a boat--with a first class, a tourist class, a hold and sailors. We Latin Americans don't want to be in the hold of the boat and we don't want the North Americans to be in first class. Nor do we want to sink the first class, because if we do, the entire boat sinks. Our historical destiny--Latin America's and North America's--is to navigate this entire boat together. For another thing, Cuba is very much a part of this American ship. Sometimes I think it would be safer for the Cuban revolution if its people could get a tugboat and tow themselves elsewhere--somewhere other than 90 miles from Florida.

[Q] Playboy: Since we're playing God with geography, what else can we move?

[A] García Márquez: If one could do this, perhaps one could move rivers and oceans to where they are needed. Things are so unfair. In any case, it's already been done, no? Half of Mexico was taken and moved over to the United States. The United States did the same with Puerto Rico--for which we feel great nostalgia, because it is a Latin-American country. The same thing happens to many countries of Eastern Europe. I don't want to appear sectarian.

[Q] Playboy: Didn't you take a bus trip through the U.S. South in 1961 as a fairly broke reporter?

[A] García Márquez: Yes. I had recently read Faulkner and greatly admired him, so I made this trip by--what do you call it?--Greyhound, from New York clown to the Mexican border. I traveled by bus because I wanted to see the country from the small, dusty roads that Faulkner described--and also because I had almost no money.

[Q] Playboy: How did the region look?

[A] García Márquez: I saw a world very similar to my home town of Aracataca in Colombia. As a company town built by United Fruit, Aracataca had the same wooden shacks with roofs made of zinc and tin. In Faulkner's country, I remember seeing the small stores along the roadway with people seated out front with their feet up on railings. There was the same kind of poverty contrasting with great wealth. In some ways, it seemed to me that Faulkner was also a writer of the Caribbean, because of the great influence the area has had on the Gulf of Mexico and on Mississippi.

[Q] Playboy: We'll be talking extensively about your work, but let's pursue this question of literature and politics a bit further. You are fascinated by the relationship between the two subjects, aren't you?

[A] García Márquez: I'm fascinated by the relationship between literature and journalism. I began my career as a journalist in Colombia, and a reporter is something I've never stopped being. When I'm not working on fiction, I'm running around the world, practicing my craft as a reporter. It will interest you to know that I do every kind of journalism--except interviews. With interviews, the interviewer has to work much too hard. But to return to your question, what has happened is that I have, as a result of the success of my novels, this huge reputation--and, yes, I am a Latin American, and considering all that is going on in Latin America, it would be a crime not to be interested in politics. If I came from a part of the world that didn't have Latin America's enormous political, economic and social problems, I could ignore politics and live, very happily, on a Greek island. However, I am, indeed, Latin American, and so the only choice I have is to be an emergency politician.

[Q] Playboy: What does an emergency politician do?

[A] García Márquez: In my case, first of all, I am not a militant for any party. Nor am I involved in the politics of a single country. I feel myself Latin American in the broadest sense. As such, I use my international reputation to conduct what might be called extraofficial diplomacy. I have friends, at high levels, in governments in Europe and Latin America.

[Q] Playboy: Let's talk about one of your famous friendships--with Fidel Castro. It is a close friendship, isn't it?

[A] García Márquez: We are good friends. Ours is an intellectual friendship. It may not be widely known that Fidel is a very cultured man. When we're together, we talk a great deal about literature. Fidel is a fantastic reader. As a matter of fact, the friendship really began after he'd read One Hundred Years of Solitude, which lie liked very much.

[Q] Playboy: Castro once said of you, "García Márquez is the most powerful man in Latin America." If that is an accurate quote, how do you think he meant it?

[A] García Márquez: The phrasing doesn't sound like Fidel, but if he did say that, I'm sure he was referring to me as a writer, not as a political man.

[Q] Playboy: Are you saying you don't talk about politics with him?

[A] García Márquez: Well, it would be hard not to. But we don't really talk about politics that much. Most people find it difficult to believe that my friendship with Fidel Castro is almost totally based on our mutual interest in literature. Very few of our conversations concern the fate of the world. More often, we talk about what good books we've read.

[A] Whenever I go to Cuba, I always take Fidel a stack of books. Usually, upon my arrival in the country, I leave them with one of Fidel's aides and then I go about my business. A few weeks later, when Fidel and I finally get a chance to talk, he's read everything and there are 1000 things to talk about. Once, I remember, I left him a copy of Bram Stoker's Dracula, which is really an absolutely fantastic book but one that intellectuals consider unworthy. Well, I took that book to Fidel one night--about two in the morning. One always gets to see Fidel at that kind of odd hour. That's what his life is like. That night, he had many important state documents to read and consider. Well, we talked for about an hour, and then we met again the next day at noon. "Gabriel, you screwed me!" he said. "That book; I couldn't get a minute's sleep." He'd read Dracula from four in the morning till 11 A.M. And this is an aspect of his personality that few people know, and it is because of this that the friendship has developed. Contrary to what is said about us, we have never conspired on political subjects. Fidel thinks writers are meant to write their books and not to conspire.

[Q] Playboy: But people think you do, as you say, conspire with Castro, don't they?

[A] García Márquez: There are some in the government of Colombia, my own country, who think that. But let me really tell you about my friendship with Fidel, because perhaps this is the place to clear up the misunderstandings about it. I'll begin with a story I think is typical.

[A] In 1976 and 1977, I went to Angola to do a series of articles that was published in The Washington Post. On the way back from Angola, I stopped in Cuba. Well, in Havana, reporters from Reuters and Agence France Presse asked me for an interview. I told them that I had a seven o'clock plane to Mexico but that they should come by the hotel at four. Around 3:30, Fidel unexpectedly arrived for a talk. So when the journalists dropped by at four, the hotel staff told them they couldn't see me because I was with Fidel.

[A] I told Fidel my impressions of Angola for ten minutes, and then, I don't know why--perhaps because we were discussing the food shortages in Angola--he asked me if I'd eaten poorly there. "It wasn't bad for me," I said. "I managed to find a tin of caviar somehow and I was very happy." So Fidel asked if I liked caviar. And I said, "Very much." He told me that that was a purely cultural, intellectual prejudice and that he didn't think caviar was such an exquisite dish. Well, one thing led to another, and we continued talking for hours about food--lobsters, fish, fish recipes. The man knows everything there is to know about seafood. So when it came time for me to leave for my plane, he said, "I'll take you to the airport." At the airport, Fidel and I sat in the VIP lounge and talked more about fish--while the plane was held up.

[Q] Playboy: A VIP lounge at Havana's airport? Doesn't sound very socialist.

[A] García Márquez: It is socialist. There are two VIP lounges, as a matter of fact. Anyway, the reporters caught up with us at the airport and apparently said to each other, "If García Márquez has just come from Angola and Fidel has taken him to the airport, then they must be having an extremely important conversation!" So, when I left, the journalists came to the door of the plane and said, "Don't leave without telling us: What were you talking to Fidel about for all these hours?" I said, "I'd better not answer you. If I told you the truth, you'd never believe me."

[Q] Playboy: How do you go about maintaining a personal relationship with someone like Castro?

[A] García Márquez: It's difficult, obviously, because it is a friendship with limitations. Fidel is a man with few personal friends. It's inevitable, of course, given his job and his power. Once, someone asked him--in front of me--if he didn't feel the solitude of power. He said no. However, I wonder if those who have power really feel how alone they are.

[Q] Playboy: One of the rumors about you is that you give Castro a first look at your novels--before you submit them to your publishers. True?

[A] García Márquez: Well, with my most recent book, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, I sent him the manuscript, yes.

[Q] Playboy: Did he like it?

[A] García Márquez: Fidel? Yes! The reason I showed it to him is because he is a very good reader with a really astonishing capacity for concentration--and also because he's so careful. In many of the books he reads, he quickly finds contradictions from one page to another. Chronicle of a Death Foretold is structured as carefully as clockwork. If there had been an error in the works, a contradiction, it would have been very serious. So, knowing about Fidel's quick eye, I showed him the original manuscript hoping he might catch any contradictions.

[Q] Playboy: So you use the president of Cuba as a literary muse?

[A] García Márquez: No, as a good first reader.

[Q] Playboy: Knowing Castro as you do, do you have any insight into what the United States might do--or might have done--to change its relations with Cuba?

[A] García Márquez: Yes. I am absolutely convinced that in Jimmy Carter's plans for a second term was a solution for the problem of Cuban-U.S. relations. He would have lifted the blockade, restored normal relations, ended the harassment of Cuba by counterrevolutionary groups. Reagan, the instant he got into office, did the opposite. I'm sure that Carter would have solved the problem of those hostilities in the same manner John Kennedy wanted to when they killed him. Without a doubt, Kennedy was seeking a solution for Cuba.

[Q] Playboy: Why, in your opinion, have so many American Presidents--Kennedy included--had such an obsession with Cuba?

[A] García Márquez: For two reasons. The first is that Cuba, until the revolution, was practically a part of the United States. It was completely, completely United States territory. It was an incredible loss for the North American financial interests that controlled the country when the Cuban revolution proved a true revolution--both national and social. And that's the second reason for this obsession. Before Cuba, all revolutions in Latin America offered the possibility of sooner or later falling under the control of the United States. Cuba changed Latin-American history.

[Q] Playboy: Perhaps, but it also merely switched its dependency from the United States to the Soviet Union.

[A] García Márquez: A lot of that was artificial and caused by the U.S. economic blockade. The Cubans were very lucky that the Soviet Union provided aid when it did, because the United States was trying to starve them to death. But that doesn't mean that the situation isn't artificial. It is not possible for a country like Cuba to have all its energy sources 14,000 kilometers away indefinitely--an oil supertanker arrives there every 32 hours. Well, that has to change. It could change if the United States recognized that the Cubans are entitled to their own revolution in their own style--that they're entitled to it.

What many in North America don't realize is that Cuba has great affection for the people of the United States. If the blockade ended, there would be good relations. In the United States, for instance, one hears a lot of propaganda regarding Soviet cultural influence on Cuba. I believe the cultural influence of the United States on Cuba is quite a bit stronger. I remember, one night, sitting in a bar in Havana with a European journalist, and he was talking about the incredible Soviet domination of Cuba while a man played music on the piano in the bar. At the end of the two-hour conversation, I said to the journalist, "Did you notice the music the man at the piano has been playing?" Curiously, he hadn't played a single Soviet tune--it was all North American music. I wish Americans realized that kind of thing.

[Q] Playboy: For three years, you were writing a nonfiction book about Cuba. Rumor has it that you've decided to withhold publication of the book. Why?

[A] García Márquez: It's a long story. I've been working on that book for many years. Each time I go to Cuba, I find that my previous work has become outdated. Reality moves very fast in Cuba. Finally, I decided to cease work on the book and wait for the Cuban situation to become normal before I complete and publish it.

[Q] Playboy: You're quoted in the May 22, 1980, New York Times as telling a reporter that you'd decided not to publish the work because it was too critical of Cuba.

[A] García Márquez: All right. What I wrote is a very harsh, very frank book. It would be very easy for someone to quote out of context sentences that seem against Cuba. I don't want that to happen. But that's not my reason for withholding the book; I'm waiting for an event--perhaps the lifting of the U.S. blockade--before finishing it.

[Q] Playboy: Another friend in a high place is France's president, François Mitterrand. Is it true that you serve as an unofficial advisor for him on Latin-American affairs?

[A] García Márquez: Did you use the word advisor? No. President Mitterrand doesn't need advice on Latin America. Sometimes he needs information. Then we talk.

[Q] Playboy: Paris had a confrontation some time back with Washington when it decided to send military aid to the left-wing Sandinísta regime in Nicaragua. Is that the sort of thing you talk about?

[A] García Márquez: The decision to sell them the arms? No. Discussions on that matter, apparently, were very, very secret. But in the case of the commercial and economic help the Nicaraguans were seeking, that I knew about. The people now in power in Nicaragua, they're good friends. We worked together during the years they were fighting the Somoza regime. If you want to know what I told President Mitterrand about Nicaragua and, indeed, about the entire Central American situation, I'll be glad to repeat what I said.

[Q] Playboy: Please do.

[A] García Márquez: It's my view that the big problem in Latin America, in Central America in particular, is that the Reagan Administration interprets everything as a result of Soviet-American dynamics. Which is ridiculous. And also unrealistic. The Reagan Administration sees any nonconformity by the people of Latin America not as the end product of the miserable conditions in those countries but as some kind of Soviet operation. In believing that, the Reagan Administration is creating a self-fulfilling prophecy--just as Kennedy did with Cuba in the early Sixties. I happen to know the Sandinístas very well, and I know they are making great efforts to work out their own system--independent of any world power. Unfortunately, the Nicaraguans are now facing all kinds of internal conspiracies and raids from the old Somoza forces operating out of Honduras and attempts to destabilize the government by elements funded by the United States. At the same time, the Nicaraguans have a desperate need for funds for food, development and self-defense. If the West refuses them that, they will be forced to seek it from the only government that will give it to them--the Soviet Union.

[Q] Playboy: How do you see the situation in El Salvador? Do you think Reagan sees it purely as evidence of more Soviet activity?

[A] García Márquez: I think what the United States Government wants in Central America are governments it can control. Fortunately--or, depending on what you believe, unfortunately--the U.S. can't get that without war. It's hard to know what Reagan's motives are. He must know that the case he makes--that El Salvador is the victim of a Soviet conspiracy--can't be true. If he doesn't know that, we're in a very dangerous situation, because it means that the President of the United States is completely misinformed. No, I prefer to think that Reagan and his advisors are playing some political game.

[Q] Playboy: Do you believe that the Soviet Union is expansionistic?

[A] García Márquez: I believe that the Soviet Union will take advantage of situations--especially when the United States refuses to support the nonconformist side. But to get back to El Salvador, it's a very dangerous situation. When you contemplate possible scenarios, you think that the world might be coming to a very great conflagration. First of all, we're not talking about a war in El Salvador alone. If the United States intervened there as it did in Vietnam, the war would soon spill over to all of Central America--perhaps all of Latin America. Yes, the United States might go into Central America militarily, because that is a weak place. Then, as a next step, the U.S. might create a Naval blockade to prevent the Cubans from helping the Central Americans. While I don't think that Cuba would do anything as preposterous as provoke a war with the United States, it certainly would defend itself against a North American invasion--which would also be a possibility.

[Q] Playboy: You are obviously negative about Reagan's foreign policy, but do you think it's very different from that of his predecessor?

[A] García Márquez: Very different. When it came to Latin America, Carter was extremely well informed, and during the last few years of his office, he was greatly influenced by the late General Omar Torrijos, the former leader of Panama. Torrijos was one of my closest friends, and I know of many of the things that were said between them. I know, for instance, that Carter and Torrijos together were trying to work out a negotiated political solution for the problems of El Salvador. Carter's policy on signing the Panama Canal treaties was a major step in improving relations between the United States and Latin America. The treaties, for which he fought hard, proved to be the most important of all Carter's international policies. When he signed them, he showed that the United States was beginning to deal with Latin America in a fair way. And, also, Carter's human-rights policies were often commendable. I admit that when he was in power, I thought his human-rights campaign was a façade, window dressing. However, with the advent of Reagan, I've changed my mind.

Under Carter, for purely psychological reasons, the Latin-American dictators felt watched, uncertain. In the United States, the power structure has never been monolithic. So, during Carter's term of office, you had the Pentagon and the CIA telling the dictators not to worry. You also had the State Department, at the same time, telling them that they had to respect the human rights of their citizens. The double message made the dictators feel insecure. As a result, those of us who are involved in human-rights work were able to rescue many people. However, since Reagan's election, you have Jeane Kirkpatrick running off to Chile and telling Augusto Pinochet that his is the kind of "authoritarian democracy" Latin America needs. Since her visit, it's impossible to get one prisoner out of Pinochet's jails! Nor can we get answers from the Argentine government about the 15,000 Argentine citizens who've disappeared. Carter took away support from the dictators to the greatest possible extent; Reagan gives them more support than should be possible.

[Q] Playboy: You mentioned your friendship with Torrijos, who died in a plane crash in 1981. Is it true that you've developed an ulcer since his death?

[A] García Márquez: Who told you about that?

[Q] Playboy: It's just a report we heard. Why does the question upset you?

[A] García Márquez: Because it's impossible for me to have any privacy anymore. Absolutely nothing is private!

[Q] Playboy: Well, did Torrijos' death cause you to get an ulcer?

[A] García Márquez: Yes and no. I have a chronic problem in my duodenum that is affected by stress. Some years ago, the ulcer hemorrhaged, but it was fine for the longest time. But then, when Torrijos died, I was terribly upset. He was a dear friend of mine. No, he was more than that. I considered myself one of his closest friends. Aside from that, he was an extremely important man for Latin America. Moreover, I barely missed joining him on the fatal flight. As you can well imagine, all that taken together caused my ulcer to hemorrhage.

[Q] Playboy: You almost took the fatal flight?

[A] García Márquez: Yes. Several days before the crash, it struck me that I hadn't seen Torrijos in the longest time. That bothered me. Thinking it was time to talk and catch up with things, I called him and ended up joining him on Contadora Island. We stayed, in fact, in the house where the shah had lived.

[Q] Playboy: The house the shah hated so much?

[A] García Márquez: Yes. I'd never seen Torrijos in a better mood. He was working a lot on the problems of El Salvador. He was convinced that a negotiated political solution was possible and that the only obstacle was that the United States might not cooperate. Carter, he said, would have accepted a negotiated settlement, but things were different with Reagan. So, after spending some time at Contadora, we flew to Panama City. We spent some time together, and then he left for an unknown place and left word that a plane would be sent shortly for me to join him. Another day passed, he was still gone and I decided to go back to Mexico. I left a message for him saying I'd come back another time and we could finish our conversation. Two days later, he was killed in the crash. Now, if I hadn't gone back to Mexico, I would have been on that plane, too--Torrijos had very specifically invited me on that trip.

[Q] Playboy: You don't think the crash was anything but an accident, do you?

[A] García Márquez: There is as much probability for it to have been an accident as not. But I would like to say I have many doubts.

[Q] Playboy: Torrijos may have been a friend of yours, but in the American press, he was often described as a military strong man, which is a code phrase for military dictator. There are some who think it odd for the author of The Autumn of the Patriarch and a military strong man to be best friends.

[A] García Márquez: Well, a great many things are said in the U.S. press--some good, some bad, some right, some wrong. In the case of General Torrijos, he was one of Latin America's greatest nationalist leaders. His place in Latin-American history will be very high. Torrijos was, above everything, his own man. No one could ever accuse him, unlike so many others, of being a tool for North American interests. He had made the recovery of the canal the most important thing in his life, and his success with it will make him a major figure in Latin-American history. People loved him. After he died, his funeral and the emotion it caused in Panama showed that he was even more loved than he himself had imagined. I'm sure that those in North America who called him a dictator had to reconsider when they saw the enormous public outcry over his death.

[Q] Playboy: You are surely aware that there is a feeling among some Americans and Europeans that Latin-American politics are hopeless and a certain brutality will always prevail in your political affairs.

[A] García Márquez: Yes, it is a notion I encountered when I first traveled to Europe in the Fifties and when I was asked, "How can you live in such savage countries as exist in South America, where people kill one another for political reasons?"

[Q] Playboy: And how did it make you feel?

[A] García Márquez: Furious. To some extent, it is an unfair analysis. Our countries are only 170 years old; European countries are much older than that and have gone through far more atrocious episodes than what we in Latin America are going through. That we should seem savage to them now! We have never had as barbarian a revolution as the French Revolution! The Swiss--cheese makers who consider themselves great pacifists--were Europe's bloodiest mercenaries in the Middle Ages! Europeans had to go through long periods of bloodshed and violence to become what they are today. When we are as old as the European countries, we'll be much more advanced than Europe is now, because we will have both our experience and theirs to draw upon.

[Q] Playboy: You haven't lived in Colombia regularly since 1955. Why? Is it that writers simply never can go home again?

[A] García Márquez: No, no, no. That hasn't happened by any great design. It's more by a series of accidents in my life. Yes, it's true that I now live half the year in Mexico and the other half in Europe. This began in 1955, when I left Colombia during the dictatorship of [Gustavo] Rojas Pinilla. When I left, it was to work in Europe as a journalist. But then Rojas Pinilla closed down my newspaper, and I found myself stranded in Paris--where I stayed for three years. After that time, I returned to South America and married Mercedes, and we moved to Venezuela, where I worked as a journalist. Then, after the triumph of the Cuban revolution, I worked for the Cuban news agency Prensa Latina in New York. Later, the family lived in Mexico, where I worked on movie scripts and, eventually, on One Hundred Years of Solitude. Well, one thing led to another, and I just never found myself returning to Colombia for more than a few months. After the success of One Hundred Years of Solitude, I had the resources to live anywhere in the world I wanted. But then Colombia became a problem for me. In Colombia, I am national property, national patrimony. All Colombians act accordingly. I have not one ounce of privacy. Nevertheless, until that recent mishap I had, I returned to Colombia periodically--for a few months, for a year, to live.

[Q] Playboy: What "recent mishap"?

[A] García Márquez: Well, the Colombian government--like several other governments--refuses to believe that I talk with Fidel Castro only about fish and seafood. So, when I was in Colombia in 1981, there was a very unpleasant incident. I had just seen Fidel in Cuba two or three weeks earlier. One day, while I was in Colombia, a left-wing guerrilla group, M-19, staged a landing in the southern part of the country. After the guerrillas were captured, the government tried to get them to declare that I had coordinated the landing with Fidel Castro. Me, personally! Fortunately, I have many friends in Bogotá, and whenever anything is said in front of more than three people, one of them tells me. Three sources told me of attempts being made to link me to M-19. There was, apparently, a dinner at the presidential palace, where, in the presence of the president and the top military chiefs, my alleged involvement with that group was discussed. The guerrillas, meanwhile, were being held, tortured and told to sign confessions implicating me.

[A] Well, when I heard that, I was alarmed, to say the least. My sources told me not to worry--the government wouldn't dare touch me, because I was too important. But it seemed to me that it might like to make an example out of me to show that it had no respect for anyone. What I did was go immediately to the Mexican embassy and ask for diplomatic protection in order to leave Colombia.

[A] Now, that caused a great scandal for the Colombian government. It officially stated there was nothing against me and that I was just probably trying to get publicity for my new book. There has since been a trial of the guerrillas, and several of them said they were tortured and asked to sign those confessions. One did sign. What I've done, as a result, is sue the Colombian military for abuse of authority. It's a little difficult for me to talk about this, because by the time this interview appears, the political situation in Colombia may well be completely changed.

[Q] Playboy: When you had to flee Colombia, were you frightened? Death squads, after all, seem to have become a major South American institution.

[A] García Márquez: Not at all. The government just wanted to make a gesture at my expense--it was nothing more than that. If it wanted to kill me, it could have just done it on any street corner. No, what it wanted was something different. The Reagan Administration and its allies in Latin America would like to revert to the situation of the early Sixties when Cuba was completely isolated. If the government could prove that a personal friend of Fidel's had coordinated a guerrilla landing, then it could justify breaking diplomatic relations with Cuba. Which is what it did, anyway, after that incident.

[Q] Playboy: You seem pretty sure the Reagan Administration is out to bludgeon the Latin-American left wing. If a left-wing president were elected in, say, Colombia, as Salvador Allende was elected in Chile in 1970, do you think the present Administration would cause his overthrow?

[A] García Márquez: I'm absolutely certain that would happen. Chile all over again, yes. Carter wouldn't have done such a thing, but Reagan wouldn't hesitate. However, that isn't likely to happen. Internal conditions in Colombia are different from those in Chile in the early Seventies.

[Q] Playboy: Let's move on to a discussion of your work. Some admirers of One Hundred Years of Solitude have said that in telling the saga of the Buendía family, you've managed to tell the complete history of Latin America. Are the critics exaggerating?

[A] García Márquez:One Hundred Years of Solitude is not a history of Latin America, it is a metaphor for Latin America.

[Q] Playboy: In one of your short stories, The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother, a young prostitute tells her lover, "What I like about you is the serious way you make up nonsense." Is that Gabriel García Márquez talking about himself?

[A] García Márquez: Yes, that is an absolutely autobiographical statement. It is not only a definition of my work, it is a definition of my character. I detest solemnness, and I am capable of saying the most atrocious things, the most fantastic things, with a completely straight face. This is a talent I inherited from my grandmother--my mother's mother--Doña Tranquilina. She was a fabulous storyteller who told wild tales of the supernatural with a most solemn expression on her face. As I was growing up, I often wondered whether or not her stories were truthful. Usually, I tended to believe her because of her serious, deadpan facial expression. Now, as a writer, I do the same thing; I say extraordinary things in a serious tone. It's possible to get away with anything as long as you make it believable. That is something my grandmother taught me.

[Q] Playboy: For our readers who may need a summary, One Hundred Years of Solitude traces six generations of the Buendía family in the mythical village of Macondo. It begins with the founding of the village in a time when "the world was so recent that many things lacked names," and ends with the last of the Buendías, an infant born with the tail of a pig, being carried away by ants as the Buendía line is extinguished. Between all that, Macondo experiences the "banana fever," the "insomnia plague," 32 civil wars, revolution, counterrevolution, strikes and a rain that lasts nearly five years. You describe these events in a style called magic realism, in which the fantastical and mythical are blended with the everyday--a priest who levitates when he drinks chocolate, for instance--so let's begin by asking you how much of your fiction has a basis in real life.

[A] García Márquez: Every single line in One Hundred Years of Solitude, in all my books, has a starting point in reality. I provide a magnifying glass so readers can understand reality better. Let me give you an example. In the Eréndira story, again, I have the character Ulises make glass change color every time he touches it. Now, that can't be true. But so much has already been said about love that I had to find a new way of saying that this boy is in love. So I have the colors of the glass change, and I have his mother say, "Those things happen only because of love.... Who is it?" Mine is just another way of saying the same thing that has always been said about love: how it upsets life, how it upsets everything.

[Q] Playboy: Over the past 20 years, we've seen an explosion of magic-realist novels from Latin America. What is it about the Latin world that encourages writers to work in this wild mixture of the real and the surreal?

[A] García Márquez: Clearly, the Latin-American environment is marvelous. Particularly the Caribbean. I happen to come from the Caribbean part of Colombia, which is a fantastic place--completely different from the Andean part, the highlands. During the colonial period of Colombian history, all the people who considered themselves respectable went to the interior--to Bogotá. On the coast, all that were left were bandits--bandits in the good sense--and dancers, adventurers, people full of gaiety. The coastal people were descendants of pirates and smugglers, with a mixture of black slaves. To grow up in such an environment is to have fantastic resources for poetry. Also, in the Caribbean, we are capable of believing anything, because we have the influences of all those different cultures, mixed in with Catholicism and our own local beliefs. I think that gives us an open-mindedness to look beyond apparent reality. As a child growing up in the Caribbean village of Aracataca, I heard wonderful stories of people who were able to move chairs by simply looking at them. There was a man in Aracataca who had the facility for deworming cows--for healing their infections--by standing in front of the beasts. He would stand in front of the cow and the worms would start coming out of the head of the cow. Now, it's true that I once saw that.

[Q] Playboy: How do you explain it?

[A] García Márquez: Ah, if I could explain it, I wouldn't be trying to tell you about it now. That seemed marvelous to me as a child, and it still does.

[Q] Playboy: Let's talk about the real-life prototypes of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Was your grandmother the prototype for Úrsula Buendía, the matriarch of the novel?

[A] García Márquez: Well, she is and she isn't. They are both bakers by trade, and they are both superstitious. But all my characters are composites of people I've known. I take parts of an individual's personality and I paste them together with pieces of other people. As for my grandmother, I lived with her in my grandfather's house from the time I was born until I was eight. My grandfather's house was a house of many women--my grandmother, my grandfather's sister, others. My grandfather and I were the only two males there. The women were incredibly superstitious, crazy--crazy in the sense that they were people with imagination. Doña Tranquilina, my grandmother, had the capacity for saying the most extraordinary things without any tact. I'm not sure what her origins were, but she was probably Galician. Galicia is a very strange region of Spain--extremely mystical and tied to the occult. With my grandmother, every natural event had a supernatural interpretation. If a butterfly flew in the window, she'd declare, "A letter is coming today." If milk boiled over on the stove, she'd say, "We must be careful--someone in the family is sick." When I was a child, my grandmother would wake me in the night and tell me horrible stories of people who, for some reason, had a presentiment of their death, of the dead who appeared, of the dead who didn't appear. Often, our house in Aracataca, our huge house, seemed as if it were haunted. All those early experiences have somehow found themselves in my literature.

[Q] Playboy: Can you give us an example?

[A] García Márquez: Certainly. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, a group of yellow butterflies always precedes the appearance of Mauricio Babilonia, the lover of Meme Buendía. The realistic base of this story is that there was an electrician who came to our house in Aracataca to fix things. Once, after his visit, my grandmother found a butterfly--which she quickly hit with a dish towel--in the kitchen. "Every time that man comes into this house, we get butterflies," she declared. My grandmother was always saying things like that. She also played the lottery a lot, though she never won. Never.

[Q] Playboy: Did you mean it to be ironic that her name was Doña Tranquilina?

[A] García Márquez: For a crazy woman, she was very tranquil. Her restlessness was only mental. She was never in any great physical hurry.

[A] Now, my grandfather Nicolás Márquez was the opposite. He was the only person I communicated with in the house. The world of the women--it was so fantastic that it escaped me. But my grandfather brought me back to reality by telling me stories about tangible things--items from the newspapers, war stories from the time he was a colonel on the liberal side in the Colombian civil wars. Whenever my grandmother or my aunts said something particularly wild, he'd say, "Don't listen to that. Those are women's beliefs." My grandfather also had a great practical sense--which I think I inherited from him. Among my friends, it is often said that I'm one of the few writers they know who have a practical sense. It is that practical sense that I use for politics. And also for everyday life. I have a great sense of safety. I am very worried about preventing accidents--I take precautions so that they don't happen. I prefer stairs to elevators. I prefer anything to planes. That practical sensibility is not typical of poets. And if, someday, I become a patriarch, a patriarch in the political sense, it will be for that reason--not because I have real power. My friends always consult me on practical matters, and that is something I got from my grandfather.

[Q] Playboy: You say your grandfather told you stories of his war experiences. Those stories must have been as disconcerting as your grandmother's tales of the supernatural.

[A] García Márquez: Actually, no. When he spoke of the civil wars, he spoke of them as almost pleasant experiences--sort of youthful adventures with guns. Nothing like the wars of today. Oh, certainly, the civil wars had many terrible battles and many, many deaths. But during that time, my grandfather also had a great many love affairs and he also fathered a great many children.

[Q] Playboy: The central character in One Hundred Years of Solitude, Colonel Aureliano Buendía, the son of José Arcadio Buendía, fathers 17 illegitimate children with 17 women during 32 civil wars. Did Nicolás Márquez have 17, too?

[A] García Márquez: Who knows? The exact number will never be known. As late as 15 years ago, I met people for the first time who turned out to be aunts. According to my mother, there were 17. She was one of the two children who came from the marriage.

[Q] Playboy: So, many of your grandfather's fond memories of the Colombian civil wars were really fond memories of all these sexual liaisons.

[A] García Márquez: Well, I think he liked sex--with or without war. To my memory, he was one of the great fornicators.

[Q] Playboy: Oh?

[A] García Márquez: "Fuckers," as you say in good English.

[Q] Playboy: That must have irritated your grandmother.

[A] García Márquez: It was curious about her. My grandmother was a very, very jealous woman. But when she'd hear of one of those children's being born, she reacted like Úrsula Buendía: She took it into her household. My grandmother said that the family blood couldn't just wander out there, lost. Anyway, she loved all those children a lot. There was a point in that house when you couldn't tell which children came from the marriage and which didn't. My grandmother was also a very strong woman. When my grandfather went off to the war, she didn't have any news of him for a year. She took care of the house and the security of the family until, one night, there was a knock on the door. In the dark, in the early hours of the morning, someone said, "Tranquilina, if you want to see Nicolas, come to the door now." And so she ran and opened the door and she could see these men on horseback passing, but she didn't see him. All she saw was the horses leaving town. It was a year later before she received any further news of him.

[Q] Playboy: It sounds as if Úrsula is your favorite character.

[A] García Márquez: Yes. She holds the world together. That is contrary to what I saw in real life--as a child. The women in my grandfather's household were often quite unworldly. However, I believe that in most cases, women are the practical sex. It's men who are the romantics and who go off and do all kinds of crazy things; women know that life is hard. Úrsula is a prototype of that kind of practical, life-sustaining woman. After Úrsula, I most like her great-great-granddaughter Amaranta Úrsula. Of all the Buendía offspring, she's the one who most resembles the original Úrsula--but without the older woman's complexes and prejudices. Amaranta Úrsula is Úrsula again--but emancipated now, with the experiences of the world, with modern ideas. However, living in the atmosphere created by Colonel Buendía--the atmosphere of the conservative triumph--she is not permitted to develop her personality. The history of Latin America is a series of such frustrations.

[Q] Playboy: While your grandfather was telling you war stories, did he also tell you about the 1928 banana strike? In One Hundred Years, Macondo's banana workers, employees of a company that could be United Fruit, go on strike. Three thousand of them are massacred in the Macondo town square, and their bodies are shipped in boxcars to the sea. Thereafter, none of the Macondo townspeople recall the strike; the only one who remembers is a Buendía, and for him, the recollection is the source of his madness.

[A] García Márquez: That episode didn't come from any storytelling. It is, more or less, based on historical reality. The reasons, the motives and the manner in which the events around the strike occurred were exactly as in the novel--though there were not 3000 dead, of course. There were very few deaths. If 100 people had been killed in 1928, it would have been catastrophic. I made the death toll 3000 because I was using certain proportions in my book. One hundred wouldn't have been noticed. I was also interested in achieving a certain imagery: I wanted the bodies to be taken away in a train, a train such as the ones that were loaded with clusters of bananas. I did research and found that to fill such a train, you'd need at least 3000 bodies. Three thousand in 1928 would have been all the residents of the town.

[Q] Playboy: So that is how nonfiction gets transformed into art?

[A] García Márquez: Let me tell you something very curious about that incident. Nobody has studied the events around the real banana strike--and now when they talk about it in the newspapers, even once in the congress, they speak about the 3000 who died! And I wonder if, with time, it will become true that 3000 were killed. That is why, in The Autumn of the Patriarch, there is a moment when the patriarch says, "It doesn't matter if it is not true now; it will be with time."

[Q] Playboy:One Hundred Years of Solitude opens with this line: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover the ice." Did your grandfather Nicolás Márquez ever take you to discover the ice?

[A] García Márquez: Well, yes. Something like that. Aracataca was a tropical town--and living there, as I did, in the days before refrigeration, I had never seen ice. One day, my grandfather took me to the company store of the United Fruit Company--Aracataca was a banana center--and he showed me a crate filled with ice-packed fish. Whatever it was that was inside the boxes was so cold that it seemed to me to be boiling. I touched the inside of the box and felt burned. "But this is boiling," I said to my grandfather. And he told me, "No, on the contrary, it is very cold." And then he gave me this substance to touch--and it was ice. From that period of my life, and from my life in general, what remain for me are flashes of memory that I hardly analyze. I prefer only the sensations they leave.

[Q] Playboy: Your stories are always full of smells.

[A] García Márquez: Yes. Odors. I think the evocative power of the sense of smell is the greatest of all the senses, greater than that of taste or hearing.

[Q] Playboy: There is an almost erotic sense of smell in all your literature. Is that your way of dealing with sexual passion?

[A] García Márquez: Yes. It's a matter of my own character.

[Q] Playboy: Of all the sensuous pleasures in life, which matters most to you?

[A] García Márquez: Eating.

[Q] Playboy: Eating? Really? Why?

[A] García Márquez: Well, it is a matter involving feelings--it is impossible to explain. But what I like most is to eat.

[Q] Playboy: OK. To return to your own life history, how did you come to live with your grandparents?

[A] García Márquez: It's a story that's common in the Caribbean. My parents were poor. My father worked as a telegraphist. When my father wanted to marry the daughter of Colonel Nicolás Márquez, her family opposed it; my father had a reputation for going with too many women. So, after the wedding, my father took a job in another town far from Aracataca. When my mother became pregnant with me, in a gesture of reconciliation, my grandparents said, "Come have the baby in our house." Which she gladly did. After a while, my mother returned to the village my father was working in, and so my grandparents said, "Leave Gabriel with us to raise." The family was poor and, as I said, extended families are common in the Caribbean. Later on, when my parents returned to Aracataca, I went on living with my grandparents--where I was mostly very happy. I did that till I was eight, when my grandfather died.

[Q] Playboy: Did you feel abandoned by your mother?

[A] García Márquez: No, I just thought life was like that. Perhaps, in another kind of society, I might have felt abandoned. But in the Caribbean, it's perfectly natural to live with grandparents and aunts and uncles. It is true that for the longest time, my mother was a stranger to me. I remember one morning being told to dress up because my mother was coming for a visit. I have no memory of her before that. I remember going into a room, and there were many women sitting there and I felt disconcerted, because I didn't know which one was my mother. She made some kind of gesture that made me realize that it was she. And she wore a dress from the Twenties, really from the Twenties, with a low waistline and a straw hat. She looked like Louise Brooks. Then she embraced (continued on page 172)Gabriel García Márquez(continued from page 77) me and I became very frightened, because I felt I didn't love her. I'd heard one was supposed to love one's mother very much, and it seemed evil that I didn't. Later on, when my parents moved to Aracataca, I remember going to their house only when I was sick. I'd have to stay overnight, and I would be given a purgative of resin oil. It's not a pleasant memory.

[Q] Playboy: Was it painful for you when your grandfather died?

[A] García Márquez: No. I practically didn't realize it. Besides, as an eight-year-old, I didn't have any clear notion what death meant. Having a Catholic upbringing, I probably thought he'd gone to heaven and was very content.

[Q] Playboy: We ask about his death because you've often told interviewers that nothing interesting has happened to you since you were eight.

[A] García Márquez: What I mean is that after that I went to live elsewhere with my parents, and I feel that all my writing has been about the experiences of the time I spent with my grandparents.

[Q] Playboy: Is your contemporary life less interesting than your childhood?

[A] García Márquez: It has less mystery. I don't have a grandmother to make up marvelous things for me.

[Q] Playboy: The Aracataca of your childhood must have been a marvelous place.

[A] García Márquez: I think of it as a horrible boom town. It was a banana center for the United Fruit Company--a place where people came to enrich themselves as quickly as possible. But what happens in such a place is that when it suddenly turns into a crossroads for the world, it inevitably fills up with fantastic elements.

[Q] Playboy: It's odd that you call Aracataca a horrible boom town. Macondo, the mythic town you created out of Aracataca, is thought to be one of the most charming villages in literature.

[A] García Márquez: Well, what has happened is that Macondo is a town built with nostalgia. The virtue of nostalgia is that it eliminates all the disagreeable aspects from one's memories and leaves only the pleasant ones.

[Q] Playboy: How did the idea come to you to create Macondo out of the memories of Aracataca?

[A] García Márquez: Well, One Hundred Years of Solitude really began when I was a very young man--perhaps 20 years old. I tried to write a novel about the Buendía family titled La Casa: the house. The entire drama was to take place in the house--nothing outside. After writing a few chapters, I felt I was not yet ready to write a book as big as that. What I decided to do was start something easier and progressively learn how to write. Mostly, I wrote short stories. Around that time, when I was about 21, my mother asked me to take a trip with her to Aracataca--and that visit had a decisive impact on my career as a writer. You see, at that point, I was living in Barranquilla, a Caribbean city not far from Aracataca. My grandparents had both died, and my mother wanted to sell their house.

[A] At first, I was very happy with the idea of returning to Aracataca. But when we got there, I was staggered. The town had not changed at all. I had the sensation that I had left time, that what had separated me from the town was not distance but time. So I walked along the streets with my mother and I realized that she was going through something similar. We walked to the pharmacy, which belonged to people who'd been close friends of the family. Behind the counter sat a lady working on a sewing machine. My mother said, "How are you, my friend?" When the woman finally recognized her, she stood up, and they embraced and cried and said absolutely nothing for more than a half hour. So I had the feeling that the whole town was dead--even those who were alive. I remembered everyone as they had been before, and now they were dead. That day, I realized that all the short stories I had written to that point were simply intellectual elaborations, nothing to do with my reality. When I returned to Barranquilla, I immediately sat down and wrote my first novel [Leaf Storm], which takes place in Macondo. Incidentally, on that trip, my mother and I passed a banana plantation that I had often seen as a child. There was a sign on the place; it was called Macondo.

[Q] Playboy: When did One Hundred Years finally begin taking shape in your mind?

[A] García Márquez: The trip I described took place around 1950. After that first effort, I made a second try at the novel in Mexico in 1963. I had, by then, a clearer idea of the structure but not of the tone. I didn't know yet how to tell the story so that it would be believed. So, again, I took to writing short stories. But one day, in 1965, I think, I was going to Acapulco by car. And all of a sudden--I don't know why--I had this illumination as to how to write the book. I had the tone, everything!

[Q] Playboy: It came to you as a vision?

[A] García Márquez: Sort of. It was as if I had read everything that was to be in it. So I returned to Mexico City and sat down for the next 18 months to write from nine in the morning till three in the afternoon. I had a family--a wife and two small sons--and I had been supporting them by working in public relations and fixing up movie scripts. All that had to cease so I could write my book. But we had no income, so I pawned our car and gave Mercedes the money. From then on, Mercedes had to be like the women in the Colombian civil wars: She had to run the household and keep life going while I campaigned.

[A] She performed all kinds of wondrous feats. Every day, somehow, she made sure I had my cigarettes, paper, everything I needed to write. She borrowed money. She got credit from stores. When the book was finished, it turned out that we owed the butcher some 5000 pesos--which was an enormous sum. Somehow, the rumor had gotten around the neighborhood that I was writing a very important book, and all the shopkeepers wanted to collaborate. At one point, I realized that Mercedes could not go on anymore alone. I then dropped work on the novel and did a radio script. But the minute I started doing that, it gave me an unbearable migraine headache. Nothing could cure it--the doctors gave me all kinds of things.

[A] Finally, when I went back to my novel, the pain went right away. It took 18 months for the book to be finished. But when it was done, we still had all kinds of problems. Once, toward the end of it all, the typist who had the only copies of many of the chapters of the book was hit by a bus. So the only copies of half the book went flying all over a Mexico City street. Fortunately, the bus didn't kill her, and she was able to get up and reassemble the manuscript. Finally, when it was finished, we needed 160 pesos to send it off to the publisher in Buenos Aires. Mercedes had only 80 pesos left. So I divided the manuscript in half, mailed half off and then pawned Mercedes' Mixmaster and hair drier to pay for the other half. When Mercedes heard that the last of our possessions had gone into postage, she said, "Well, now, all we need is for this novel to be bad!"

[Q] Playboy: How did the book's title come to you?

[A] García Márquez: That came almost when I was writing the last page. Until then, I had no idea what to call the book. I had long abandoned the title La Casa. When I made the decision, I made some calculations and discovered that more than 100 years of solitude had passed, but it wouldn't have sounded right to call the book One Hundred and Forty-three Years of Solitude. I rounded off the number. It proved to be a good decision. The book was accepted and published in 1967, then became internationally well known when it was translated into English and published in the United States in 1970.

[Q] Playboy: Will One Hundred Years of Solitude ever be made into a movie, as rumored?

[A] García Márquez: Never. Producers keep offering me enormous sums for the rights, but I refuse. The last offer, I believe, was $2,000,000. I don't want to see it turned into a movie, because I want readers to go on imagining the characters as they see them. That isn't possible in the cinema. In movies, the image is so definite that the spectator can no longer imagine the character as he wants to, only as the screen imposes it on him.

When I studied the way movies were made, I realized there are limitations in the form that do not exist in literature. I've become convinced that the novelist's work is the freest work that exists. You are totally your own master.

[Q] Playboy: Like God?

[A] García Márquez: Well, somewhat. The problem is that, unlike God, you can't kill characters so easily. You have to kill a character when it really dies. That is what happened to Úrsula Buendía. If you work it out, she must be 200 years old. While I was writing One Hundred Years, I realized frequently that she had lived too long, and I tried to have her die. However, she continued. I always needed her for something. She had to be kept until she died naturally.

[Q] Playboy: There is also a rumor that there were 1000 pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude that you burned. True?

[A] García Márquez: False. But it's curious how in all legends there are elements of truth. After I finished One Hundred Years, I threw out all the notes and documentation so there wouldn't be any trace of them left. That way, the critics would have to take the book on its own merits and not go looking in the original papers. Whenever I write a book, I accumulate a lot of documentation. That background material is the most intimate part of my private life. It's a little embarrassing--like being seen in your underwear.

[Q] Playboy: Or having someone learn the secrets to your magic?

[A] García Márquez: Sure. It's like the way magicians never tell others how they make a dove come out of a hat.

[Q] Playboy: Toward the ending of One Hundred Years of Solitude, you wrote, "Literature was the best plaything that had ever been invented to make fun of people." Do you think that's true?

[A] García Márquez: Actually, it was said by a friend of mine and I put it in the book.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think it's true?

[A] García Márquez: I think it's fun when you start to control your book. There isn't anything more wonderful than writing when you truly have the book in your grip. That is what I call inspiration. There is a definite state of mind that exists when one is writing that is called inspiration. But that state of mind is not a divine whisper, as the romantics thought. What it is is the perfect correspondence between you and the subject you're working on. When that happens, everything starts to flow by itself. That is the greatest joy one can have, the best moment. I am never better and my house is never better and my relations with everybody are never better than when a book is turning out well.

[Q] Playboy: The last chapter of the novel is filled with lots of jokes and personal asides. You've written Mercedes in as a character and many of your friends, too. Why is that?

[A] García Márquez: Because I was having fun. It was the end of my 18-month siege, and the book was advancing nicely at that point; I had the feeling nobody could stop it, that I could do anything I wanted with it, that the book was in the bag. In that state, I was so happy, especially after the early agonies, that I started to make those private jokes. There are many more jokes in that section than are apparent to the casual reader. Friends see them and they die laughing, because they know what each one refers to. That was a book that had to be finished with great joy--because, in another sense, it is a very sad book. Like life, no?

[Q] Playboy: Yes, it is a very sad book. It seemed to say progress is impossible in Latin America; the dreariness of Latin-American political life means that social change can never happen; all things are bound to repeat themselves. It's the common political interpretation.

[A] García Márquez: I know. I hear that critique a lot. Once, I had a problem with literature professors in Cuba who said, "One Hundred Years of Solitude is an extraordinary book, but it has the defect of not giving solutions." To me, that is dogma. My books describe situations. They don't have to give solutions. But with One Hundred Years, I did want to give the idea that Latin-American history had such an oppressive reality that it had to be changed--at all costs, at any price! In any case, One Hundred Years of Solitude doesn't say that progress isn't possible. It says that Latin-American society is so full of frustrations and injustices that it would dishearten anyone. That really indicates a society that must be changed.

[Q] Playboy: We've talked extensively about One Hundred Years of Solitude. Does it offend you when readers act as if it is the only book you've written?

[A] García Márquez: Deeply. I've often read reviews that said that One Hundred Years was the definitive Latin-American novel. That's ridiculous! If it were the definitive book, I wouldn't have gone on writing. Frankly, I think The Autumn of the Patriarch is, as a literary work, much more important. It's more important as an experimental book. It was a book I couldn't complete until I had the financial security provided by One Hundred Years of Solitude, because it was a book that required a lot of time and money to do.

[Q] Playboy: Does it bother you when people say they find The Autumn of the Patriarch too hard to read?

[A] García Márquez: It was a difficult book for me to write! Yes, it's true that to read it, a certain literary initiation is needed. Yet I'm hoping that, in time, it will prove as easy to read as my other books. When Ulysses came out, it was thought unreadable. Today, children read it. If you ask me, the only shortcoming of One Hundred Years of Solitude is that it is too easy to read.

[Q] Playboy:The Autumn of the Patriarch is a novel about the death of a Latin-American dictator--a popular theme, it seems, in Latin-American literature. Was there anything special in your own life that motivated it?

[A] García Márquez: Well, again, the roots of this book are in the Aracataca of my childhood. In the town, as I was growing up, lived many Venezuelan exiles--this was during the time of the dictator Juan Vicente Gomez. As often happens with exiles, the dictator became a mythical character. In exile, they magnified him. Their vision of Gomez is part of what motivated the book. But there were other sources, too.

[Q] Playboy: When scholars and critics have tried to make elaborate interpretations of your work, you've always put them off. Once, you said something like this: "One Hundred Years is not the universal book it is made out to be. It is just the story of the Buendía family, of whom it is prophesied that they shall have a son with a pig's tail; and in doing everything to avoid this, the Buendías do end up with a son with a pig's tail." Now, surely, you were doing a little legpulling there?

[A] García Márquez: Well, that is the plot. But it is an exaggeration about as large as that of critics who try to find explanations and symbols where there are none. I maintain that in the entire book, there isn't a single conscious symbol.

[Q] Playboy: So you're amused by your many followers who read One Hundred Years word for word.

[A] García Márquez: No. I rather feel a sort of compassion for them. Books are not meant to be read word for word. There is an academic tendency to find not what is in a book but what is beyond the book. In other words, an autopsy.

[Q] Playboy: Nonetheless, Alastair Reid, the New Yorker writer who is one of the great scholars of your work, claims that the real meaning of One Hundred Years is that "no one will ever know us. We all live alone on this earth in our own glass bubbles." Has Reid read your book correctly?

[A] García Márquez: Absolutely correctly. I'm convinced that everyone has a totally secret and personal part of his personality that is never communicated or revealed. Mercedes and I, for instance, have a very good relationship--we've been together for 25 years. Yet we are both aware that we have obscure areas that neither person can enter. And we've been respectful of that, because we know there's no way to fight it. For instance, I don't know how old Mercedes is. I didn't know her age when we married, and she was very young then. When we travel, I never look at her passport or identity card. On airplanes, I'll fill out our landing cards and leave blank the section on hers that requires the birth date. Of course, this is a game. But it's a game that represents very well how there are impenetrable areas that none of us can ever go near. I am absolutely sure that it is impossible to know a person completely.

[Q] Playboy: Is the loneliness of One Hundred Years of Solitude a reflection of that?

[A] García Márquez: No. I think that this is something that everyone has felt. Everyone is alone anyway. Compromises and agreements of a social nature are made, but the being is alone. For example, as a writer, I communicate with a lot of people--and quite easily, too. But when I sit down to write, which is the essential moment in my life, I am completely alone. Nobody can help me. Nobody knows exactly what I want to do--and sometimes I don't even know. I can't ask for help. It's total solitude.

[Q] Playboy: Is that frightening?

[A] García Márquez: No. It no longer scares me, because I've shown I can defend myself alone rather well at the typewriter. But I do think that everyone, everyone is afraid of that. When you open your eyes in the morning and you are surrounded by reality, the first feeling is always fright.

[Q] Playboy: You grew up in a part of the world where the influence of Freud and psychoanalysis was minimal. Could the kinds of phenomena Westerners call the unconscious really be the same kinds of things a magic realist might describe?

[A] García Márquez: Yes. Maybe. But I never go into those areas. I like to leave the unconscious where it is. To do that has given me good results as a writer.

[Q] Playboy: How do you feel when critics make a psychoanalytic interpretation of your work?

[A] García Márquez: I don't have much admiration for that. Nothing I do is consciously that way. I understand that literary work, especially fiction, exists on the edge of the unconscious, but when somebody tries to explain that unconscious part of my work, I don't read it.

[Q] Playboy: How about another approach: Could it be that magic realism is not so much the surreal as the everyday world seen by a more acute eye?

[A] García Márquez: Well, it is true that I have a great sense of observation. But the other part of it is that I am from the Caribbean and Caribbean people are capable of believing anything. We are very much affected by the influences of so many diverse cultures--African, European, our local beliefs. That gives us an open-mindedness to look beyond apparent realities.

[Q] Playboy: Do things happen to you that don't happen to other people? A mutual friend told us he believed you were telepathic.

[A] García Márquez: Extraordinary things do happen often to me. I can imagine they happen to others. The bad thing is that none of this can be systematized. You don't know what a premonition or a telepathic phenomenon is until after it happens. That happens with almost all prophecies--prophecies are always coded. For example, I was on a train recently, traveling to Barcelona. Back home in Mexico, a girl who works in our house was expecting a baby at any moment. So on the train, as I was taking my shoe off, I had the impression that something concerning us was happening in Mexico. I said to Mercedes, "Teresa has just given birth." When we arrived in Barcelona, we telephoned and they told us the exact time when Teresa had given birth. It was more or less when I had said it was in my premonition. Visions are not precise, but they are like magic whispers. I think this happens to practically everyone, but because of their cultural background, people don't believe it or they don't appreciate it or they don't recognize it. You really need a kind of innocence about the world to see those things.

[Q] Playboy: One memorable scene in One Hundred Years is of a priest who levitates when he drinks hot chocolate. How did that idea come to you?

[A] García Márquez: Well, there was a real priest in Aracataca who was thought to be so saintly that people said he rose off the ground whenever he raised the chalice during Mass. When I took that episode and wrote about it, it just didn't sound believable to me. If I don't believe something, neither will the reader. So I decided to see how believable it was with other vessels and liquids. Well, he drank all sorts of things and nothing worked. Finally, I had him drink Coca-Cola and that seemed to be just the thing! However, I didn't want to give Coca-Cola free advertising, so I gave him hot chocolate, which also proved believable. Truly, if he'd gone with Coca-Cola, we would have seen billboards in Latin America that said, Get Off the Ground with Coca-Cola.

[Q] Playboy: We've heard that you did one draft of The Autumn of the Patriarch and threw it away because it read too much like a clone of One Hundred Years. True?

[A] García Márquez: Partly true. I tried the book three times. The first time I wrote it, I based it on a memory I had of Havana in 1959. I had been covering the trial of one of Batista's big generals. He was being tried for war crimes in a large baseball stadium. What interested me, as I watched him, were the literary possibilities in his situation. So when I sat down to write The Autumn of the Patriarch, I thought I could use the form of a monolog by the dictator as he sat in the middle of the stadium. However, as I began writing, the idea quickly fell apart. It wasn't real. Latin-American dictators, the great ones, all either died in bed or escaped with huge fortunes. For a second try, I decided to write the novel as if it were a fake biography--that version did turn out to be, stylistically, more like One Hundred Years. So, sadly, this version was eliminated. Honestly, I don't understand why so many people wanted The Autumn of the Patriarch to be like One Hundred Years. I suspect that if I wanted commercial success, I could go on writing One Hundred Years for the rest of my life. I could cheat, as they do in Hollywood: The Return of Colonel Aureliano Buendía. What I finally decided to go with is a structure based on multiple monologs--which is very much the way life is under a dictatorship. There are different voices who tell the same thing in different ways.

[A] Then, after some time, I reached another block. I personally had never lived under one of the old dictatorships. To make the novel work, I wanted to know what daily life was like in a very old dictatorship. While I was writing, there were two of interest: in Spain and in Portugal. So what Mercedes and I did was move to Franco's Spain, to Barcelona. But even in Spain, after a certain moment, I realized that something was still missing in the atmosphere of the book; things were too cold. So, again, to get the right mood, we moved. This time to the Caribbean--we'd been away a long time. When I arrived in Colombia, the press asked me, "What have you come here to do?" I said, "To try to remember what the guava fruit smells like." Mercedes and I traveled to all the Caribbean islands--not taking notes, simply living. When we returned to Barcelona, the book just streamed forth.

[Q] Playboy: Your latest novel, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, is being published this year. Didn't we read somewhere that you said you'd never publish another novel while the Pinochet government remained in power in Chile? Pinochet is still running Chile and your book is out. What happened?

[A] García Márquez: Oh, that was just something I said to the press after The Autumn of the Patriarch was published. I was angry. I'd worked seven years on that book, and the first thing they asked me was. "What are you doing next?" When I get asked questions like that, I invent all sorts of answers--anything to make them happy. As it happened, when I finished The Autumn of the Patriarch, I didn't have plans for another novel.

That answer eliminated that disagreeable question from many an interview.

[Q] Playboy: We were told that you often make up stories, little fictions, when you give interviews.

[A] García Márquez: Who said so?

[Q] Playboy: Well, you just did, for one. But that is one of the many legends going around about you--that you "improve" on the stories you tell in your interviews.

[A] García Márquez: My problem is that I have great affection for journalists, and when I'm fond of a person, I may create something, the way a short story is created, to make sure he or she gets a different kind of interview.

[Q] Playboy: Have you invented anything in this interview?

[A] García Márquez: In which interview? In ours? Now? No! On the contrary, I have tried to refute all the fiction there is about me.

[Q] Playboy: Good. Can we return for a moment to Chronicle of a Death Foretold? In that work--indeed, in almost all your books--you write with great warmth about prostitutes. Is there a particular reason for that?

[A] García Márquez: Well, I have fond memories of prostitutes and I write about them for sentimental reasons.

[Q] Playboy: Is the brothel the place where young Latin-American men learn about sex?

[A] García Márquez: No, it's more feudal than that. Brothels cost money, and so they are places for older men. Sexual initiation actually starts with servants at home. And with cousins. And with aunts. But the prostitutes were friends to me when I was a young man. Real friends. The environment I grew up in was very repressive. It wasn't easy to have a relationship with a woman who wasn't a prostitute. When I went to see prostitutes, it wasn't really to make love but more to be with someone, not to be alone. The prostitutes in my books are always very human and they are very good company. They are solitary women who hate their work. With prostitutes--including some I did not go to bed with--I always had some good friendships. I could sleep with them because it was horrible to sleep alone. Or I could not. I have always said, as a joke, that I married not to eat lunch alone. Of course, Mercedes says that I'm a son of a bitch.

[Q] Playboy: The women in your books are very strong. They are the ones who take care of the business of life.

[A] García Márquez: It's true in my house as well. Mercedes takes care of everything. And my literary agent is also a woman. I am completely supported by women. For me, it's almost a superstition. When I know a woman is involved in something, I know it will turn out well. For me, it is very clear that women hold up the world.

[Q] Playboy: The whole world--not half of it?

[A] García Márquez: Women are concerned with daily reality, while men go around doing all sorts of crazy things. I find that women have a great virtue in that they lack historical sense. They're interested in the reality of today, the security of today.

[Q] Playboy: They don't go off and make 32 civil wars, like Aureliano Buendía, you mean.

[A] García Márquez: No, they stay at home, run the house, bake animal candies--so that the men can go off and make wars. Another virtue women have is that they are much more loyal than men. The only thing women won't forgive is being betrayed. If, from the beginning, one sets the rules of the game, no matter what they are, women generally accept them. But what they can't stand is if the rules are broken somewhere along the way. If that happens, they can be absolutely unmerciful. On the other hand, men's major virtue is tenderness.

[Q] Playboy: Tenderness?

[A] García Márquez: Right. Tenderness is inherent not to women but to men. Women know that life is very hard.

[Q] Playboy: If women have no historical sense, as you said, how do you explain such women as Eva Perón, Indira Gandhi and Golda Meir? Not to mention Joan of Arc?

[A] García Márquez: Well, I'm speaking in general terms. You bring up fine and great exceptions.

[Q] Playboy: Are you glad to see your sons growing up in a world where men and women are more at ease with one another?

[A] García Márquez: Ah, this is wonderful. I'm dying of envy. Sometimes, when I tell my sons of what it was like for me when I was young, they hardly believe me. For instance, they read Chronicle of a Death Foretold, which is the story of an atrocious crime in which two brothers kill a man. A girl is married, and on her wedding night, her husband returns her to her parents because she is not a virgin. So the two brothers kill the man they believe deflowered her. Now, that was a totally common drama in Latin America during my time. But when my sons read it, it seems like science fiction to them.

[Q] Playboy: How did you meet Mercedes?

[A] García Márquez: The whole story is in Chronicle of a Death Foretold. We lived in the same town, Sucre, when we were young. We became engaged in 1952, when I was working for the Bogotá newspaper, El Espectador. Before the wedding, the paper gave me the opportunity to go to Europe as its foreign correspondent. So I had to choose between doing something I'd always wanted to do and the wedding. When I discussed this with Mercedes, she said, "It's better for you to go to Europe, because if you don't, you'll blame me for the rest of our lives." And so I went. The original plan was for me to stay only a month. However, I wasn't in Europe very long when the dictator Rojas Pinilla shut down El Espectador, leaving me stranded in Paris and broke. So I cashed in the return part of my airplane ticket and used the money to continue living in Europe. I stayed three years.

[Q] Playboy: How did Mercedes react to that?

[A] García Márquez: This is one of the mysteries of her personality that will never be clear to me--even now. She was absolutely certain I'd return. Everyone told her she was crazy, that I'd find someone new in Europe. And in Paris, I did lead a totally free life. But I knew when it was over, I'd return to her. It wasn't a matter of honor but more like natural destiny, like something that had already happened. From Paris, I wrote to Mercedes every week. And after we were married, whenever something happened that she was unhappy with, she'd say, "You can't do this, because in your letter from Paris, you said you would never do such a thing." Finally, I told her, "I want to buy back all your letters." [Mercedes has been quietly listening to this part of the conversation] How much did I pay for them, Mercé?

[A] Mercedes Barcha: One hundred bolívars.

[A] García Márquez: That was cheap.

[A] Mercedes Barcha: It sure was.

[Q] Playboy: What did Mercedes do with the money?

[A] García Márquez: I have no idea. [Mercedes smiles] What I did was burn the letters. And now I'm truly glad I did that, because if the letters still existed, someone would be after them for publication.

[Q] Playboy: A man who has many literary honors thrust on him has to make more than his share of grandiose pronouncements--and you have. Is there anything more you'd like us to know about the quiet man, the private man behind all those pronouncements?

[A] García Márquez: No. I think we've missed very little. Of course, there are obscure zones in every human being that no one ever touches. But I think that readers of interviews don't want to go into those zones. They prefer to find the person as they want him to be.

[Q] Playboy: Then who are you?

[A] García Márquez: Me? I am the shyest man in the world. I am also the kindest man. On this I accept no argument or debate.

[Q] Playboy: Well, since you are the kindest and the shyest human being on the face of the earth, what would you say your greatest weakness is?

[A] García Márquez: Ah, you've asked me a question I've never been asked before! My greatest weakness? Umm. It's my heart. In the emotional-sentimental sense. If I were a woman, I would always say yes. I need to be loved a great deal. My great problem is to be loved more, and that is why I write.

[Q] Playboy: It's fortunate that your writing has brought you so much love. Even people who hate your politics love your books.

[A] García Márquez: Yes. But I'm insatiable. I still need more love.

[Q] Playboy: You make it sound like being a nymphomaniac.

[A] García Márquez: Well, yes--but a nymphomaniac of the heart. And now, what I want is for you to transmit to the readers in the United States this impression of me--with absolute sincerity. I'm very afraid there might be someone in the United States who doesn't love me, and I want that person to love me because of this interview.

[Q] Playboy: All right. But we'll give equal time to one last grand question. What do you think the meaning of your life has been so far?

[A] García Márquez: I can answer you, perhaps, by telling you what I would like to have been in life if I had not become a writer. I'd want to have been a piano player in a bar. That way, I could have made a contribution to making lovers feel even more loving toward each other. If I can achieve that much as a writer--to have people love one another more because of my books--I think that's the meaning I've wanted for my life.

"The State Department can end the visa game whenever it wants to and exclude me from the U.S. forever."

"It bothers me that the people of the U.S. have appropriated the word America as if they were the only Americans."

"Reagan sees any nonconformity by Latin America not as the end product of misery but as some kind of Soviet operation."

"Since the visit of UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick to Chile, it's impossible to get one prisoner out of Pinochet's jails!"

"That we Latin Americans should seem savage to Europeans! We have never had as barbarian a revolution as the French Revolution!"

" 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' is not a history of Latin America, it is a metaphor for Latin America."

"My grandfather liked sex--with or without war. To my memory, he was one of the great fornicators."

"Mercedes was like the women in the Colombian civil wars; she kept life going while I campaigned."