Nikola is a bartender at the representative hotel Libertas . An intelligent and resourceful Herzegovinian, he came up with a cocktail he called the Furious Horse and slush tips from foreign guests. Those who start drinking it in the evening do not leave the bar for a long time. "How are you, my friend?", he would greet me when he saw me, but he never offered me his bartending specialty. He would often treat me to a double whiskey, but I couldn't count on his cocktail. He knew that if I tried the Raging Horse, I would ask him how he made it, and he wanted to keep it a secret from me.
But he was really a good friend. Whenever he thought there was something interesting going on at the hotel, he would call me and say, "Come, there's good material for you." Most often, that "material" was not usable, but it was worth trying.
"Come," he said, "there's a famous writer in the hotel. Some Marquez. He drank three of my cocktails last night, there were a dozen people around him."
It was the middle of January 1979, it had been raining for days accompanied by wind and I didn't feel like leaving the apartment. But if it's Marquz... I took his book One Hundred Years of Solitude with me.
"What are you going to drink?" Nikola asked me.
"Whatever I do, you see what kind of apocalypse I came for."
"You journalists only drink whiskey. But only if it's free," he laughed.
Soon Božo Rafajlović, Tanjug's correspondent from Madrid, appeared at the bar. We met last summer when he was in Dubrovnik. He told me that the UNESCO Commission on Communications was meeting at the hotel and that Gabriel Garcia Marquez was also there. Could he arrange an interview with him for me? He would try, but it was unlikely that he would agree. "He is one of the busiest people here... Wait ten minutes," he said. He soon returned: "He agreed, but only for a short statement. We will meet here around 12 o'clock." When I first read One Hundred Years of Solitude – BIGZ's paperback edition – I could not have imagined that a few years later I would personally meet the author of a cult book of Latin American literature.
Around 12 o'clock, Marquez and the much taller Rafajlović appeared together. Marquez was wearing a dark blue jacket, light pants and a white shirt without a tie. I am wearing short burgundy boots, which are his favorite shoes. So this is the king of magical realism - short in stature, with a mustache and thick, bushy black hair. He found himself in Yugoslavia for the first time. A local photographer, a friend of mine, took a few shots and left.
As soon as we sat down on the couch in the corner of the spacious hall, Marquez drew my attention to the fact that I could count on a conversation of no more than half an hour, and that, as always when he talks about literature, he would speak in Spanish, and his friend Božo Rafajlović would translate. He wanted us to cut to the chase. "Let's see, then, what interests you? Let's begin..."
Of course, I was interested in many things, but there was no time for it. However, even if I just had a coffee with Marquez, that would be a big deal for me. I wanted to hear how the writer explains his unusually high popularity in the world, especially in Europe?
Answering my question, Marquez emphasized that the popularity of his books in Europe cannot be separated from the popularity of Latin American literature, from the works of Borges, Cortazar or Vargas Llosa...
"You asked me what is the reason for this popularity? I think that Latin American literature is popular on the European continent primarily because of its truthfulness. The truthfulness of this literature reaches the heart and that is why it is so popular. However, I must add that contemporary Latin American literature is not as new as it may seem to Europe. Europe only got to know the leading writers of Latin America a few years ago. However, we started writing and publishing a good twenty years ago.
What also made us famous and popular was the Cuban revolution. So, to explain, we have been working for a long time, we have been writing for a long time, but we did not penetrate Europe earlier because there was no 'bell' that would attract attention and allow the echo of our literature. It was necessary for the revolution to happen in Cuba so that Europe and the world would become interested in other facts of the green continent, which were distant and unknown to Europeans until then. That is how Latin American literature was discovered. The fact that we needed that historical event to achieve the popularity that we are talking about today is both interesting and tragic. On the other hand, it was necessary for the echo of our European popularity to return to Latin America so that readers in our countries would understand that these are great, famous and good writers.
I cautiously approached the essence of the matter, reminding Marquez of a sentence from his novel Autumn of the Patriarchs, which reads: 'It doesn't matter that it doesn't seem plausible to you today, sooner or later it will be true.'"
"I think that sentence could serve as the motto of my entire literary process. Take the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. I don't think it's my most important book, but that's okay. It's certainly the most translated and printed book. People read that book in different parts of the world. I got letters from them. And it seemed to them all that they were reading the history of their own family. That's the thing, I think."
I brought with me a borrowed old cassette player with a large microphone. I didn't know then that it was the most disgusting thing I could do. Marquez despised the device. He didn't even like watching the reporter record the conversation. He believed that the conversation should be remembered and reconstructed, as he does with his ideas. However, it was as if that damn bulky cassette player forgave me the moment I knocked on the door of his childhood.
"Dabome, I can tell you a lot about that. I think I can say that everything that I experienced in my childhood, up to about the age of eight, that it was all written down in my books. I am convinced that I had a happy and contented childhood. Certainly, I suffered like any small child, but still I had access to what I think was one reality. I lived in a family and social circle where myths were intertwined with reality, and prejudices mixed with science. That's how Latin America was. That gave me the opportunity to explain and describe the situation as real. I think it was that environment that awakened in me the need to write and talk about reality.
My childhood lasted only eight years, because then a total change in my life took place. Until I was eight years old, I lived in the house of my grandparents, my mother's parents, where, in fact, I experienced everything that I describe in my books. With the death of my grandfather and grandmother, who nurtured and raised me, I was forced to change my family circle and it seems to me that I spent the rest of my life trying to explain and interpret my first childhood. That's why I say that I had a happy and good childhood. Because if it hadn't been like that, I don't know what would have come of it all."
I uncover one secret of Marquez's creativity, one by one, and ask him how he comes up with ideas for writing. I get an unexpected answer – none of his books are based on any idea.
"I don't even think I have an imagination. My literary process is qualified by critics as 'magical realism'. Believe me, I know nothing about that. In fact, the basis of all my books is an image. For example, in the story of Ojarasco , I give the image of a child who is forced to sit in a corner, because the elders scared him by telling him that the spirits of all the dead will come out if he moves from there. It seems to me that I, in fact, transmitted that image by seeing myself with Starting from that picture, the starting point for the novel was a picture of a man who was waiting for the arrival of a ship. The novel One Hundred Years of Solitude is based on a picture of a grandfather who sees and touches the ice for the first time in his life the basis of everything, the image of a man who I found myself completely alone in a room full of cows. What is called the unconscious has an exceptional importance in literary creation. In this respect, images have, at least for me, a special power and strength to move and construct. As for me, I don't think I've ever created based on ideas. I don't like to theorize, I like to write. I rejected theorizing as my own intellectual incapacity, and that's why I start from a picture, which encourages me to see and perceive reality."
Although an atheist and a communist, even as a mature man, Marquez believed in the various miracles he heard about in childhood and weaved them into his novels and stories. This is how the immortal literary history of the fictional South American village of Maconda and the family of its founder José Arcadia Buendia was born.
He was forty years old when his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude was published in 1967.
Marquez preempted me by mentioning the second great love of his life: "You must know that I consider myself as much a writer as a journalist." I knew a lot about that and he was glad when I mentioned some important facts from his journalistic career, which he started after interrupting his law studies in Bogotá. Born into a poor family living in the province of northern Colombia, he was strongly left-wing. Such were his reports and columns. He lived hard and changed his papers and places of residence. In one of them, he lived bohemianly on the top floor of a brothel. After a political report, published in the newspaper El Espectador , he had to flee from Colombia, first to Rome, then to Paris, where he lives in poverty, spending his days at, as he said, the "university of the streets".
"I left to find a place where I could do something for Colombia, which is to write," adds Marquez. "I've said many times that life is like a story - it's not how long it is, but how good it is. I think Hemingway's Cat in the Rain the best short story ever written. We met only once, completely by accident. I recognized him suddenly walking along the boulevard of St. Michele in Paris on a rainy day in the spring of 1957. He looked so alive among the book stalls that even today it is hard for me to imagine how he was only four years away from death. His writing craft was genius. And Hemingway, as you know, was a journalist."
Marquez looked at his watch. I got to ask him what he thinks about journalism today.
"I'm nostalgic for my youth as a journalist. I'm very busy here, I didn't come here as a tourist, but to work. And yet, we've been talking for an hour. I think that speaks volumes about my relationship to journalism. I was engaged in journalism during a difficult period of my life. It helped me not only to travel a lot and see a lot, but also to master the difficult craft of writing."
I asked him to write a dedication for me on the book One Hundred Years of Solitude. He hesitated for a moment or two and, looking into my eyes, asked: "I see that you bought my book, but have you read it?" "Sure," I said. Marquez took the book and wrote on the only blank page: "Para Gojko, de sui amigo Gabriel". (For Gojko, from friend Gabriel).
We greeted each other and hugged.
I put the cassette player in my bag and headed towards the big semi-circular bar where my friend Nikola was preparing his Raging Horse .