Free Gabriel Garcia Marquez by Gabriel García Márquez

good relationship with the police. As a young man I was living in a cheap hotel in Barranquilla where prostitutes would take clients. It was the cheapest hotel in the city but I learned things. Once I saw the governor—well, I heard his voice in the hallway.
    Faulkner was right. It was a good way to live. Every morning there was a big breakfast. I was very hungry then. This was in 1950. The desk clerk was a very thin man, missing one eye. A room cost about a dollar. I never got the same room two nights in a row. Once I said I didn’t have the money, explaining that I was a writer, a novelist, and that meant I didn’t get paid well.
    I showed him the manuscript—I was writing my first novel,
Leaf Storm
—saying, “This is my life, this means more than anything else. I’ll leave it with you, and tomorrow I’ll come back for it.” He said okay, and put it on the shelf. From that day on, whenever I had no money, I would leave the manuscript instead.
    STREITFELD : That was when you were first reading Faulkner and Hemingway. You’ve often spoken of your debt to them.
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : When novelists read another novelist’s work, they take it apart as if it were a machine. Nothing teaches you how to write a novel except another novel.
    STREITFELD : Faulkner gave you something else as well—a sense that all of the Caribbean, whether his Mississippi or your Colombia, was the same wild place.
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : I am a man of the coasts, not the interior, where Bogotá is. The officials, the serious people, lived in Bogotá. The coast got the bandits and adventurers. It is a synthesis of many cultures—Spanish, African, Indian. I believe many regions of the world are like this, full of wonder and mystery. Most people just don’t see it. The reality is what is so fantastic. There is nothing magic about it. It’s pure realism. I knew a woman in a small Colombian town who read
One Hundred Years of Solitude
and said, “I don’t like this book. When you were with us before you saw much better, more interesting things than what is depicted here.”
    STREITFELD : In your short story “Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane,” a passenger notices a beautiful woman and asks the ticket clerk if she believes in love at first sight. “Of course,” the clerk responds. “The other kinds are impossible.”
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : Yes, that’s my view. The problem with love is making it last. There’s a Brazilian writer I like to quote: Love is eternal as long as it lasts.
    STREITFELD : You came from a very large family—I believe eleven brothers and sisters. That affected you in many ways. And you have two sons.
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : Do you know why we didn’t have any more kids? We were afraid we didn’t have the means to educate them. And when we could, Mercedes said she was too old. So I tell all recently married couples to have as many kids as they want. Eventually, you’ll be able to support them.
    STREITFELD : You are a great and controversial friend of Castro’s. You’ve described him as a larger than life figure, who reads 50 reports a day, can be interviewed for 17 hours straight and eats 18 scoops of ice cream after lunch. He’s a Rabelasian if not a Marquesian figure.
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : When I first knew him, I was at Prensa Latina, nearly forty years ago. I was his friend when no one knew who he was. We both have the conviction that Latin America’s salvation is in its unity, and that the forces that prevent this come from outside Latin America. The destiny of Latin America is intimately tied to the United States. It’s like a transatlantic ocean liner. There’s first class, second class, all kinds of classes, but the day the boat sinks, everyone drowns. The sooner the United States realizes this, the better for everyone concerned.
    STREITFELD : How close are you to him?
    GARCÍA