Free Gabriel Garcia Marquez by Gabriel García Márquez Page A

MÁRQUEZ : He comes to my house in Havana every time he can. He tells me everything up to the point of state secrets.
    STREITFELD : People say you should be the Colombian ambassador to Cuba.
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : But if I were ambassador he couldn’t come to my house. Aside from that, I’d be a bad ambassador. If they offer, I’ll say no. I would say, I’ve been a cultural ambassador all my life, that’s enough.
    STREITFELD : I heard you bonded with Castro over literature.
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : We have this great affinity. We’re part of the literary culture. He’s a great reader. I bring him books—quick, easy books to help him relax. The first book I brought him that he really liked was
Dracula
.
    STREITFELD : Your critics say hanging out with politicians is not going to be good for your writing.
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : When I first started to write journalism, everyone said, “Now you’re screwed because it will take up all your time and you won’t be able to write fiction.” And that was when I was just getting started. When I started working in advertising for a while in 1963, they said the same thing. And again when I started making films. And again when I started talking about politics.
    STREITFELD : They are particularly critical of your association with Castro, who is not a big champion of human rights. When there is a petition demanding Castro do something, your name is never on it.
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : I believe when people sign a petition, they make a great noise. They don’t really care about the cause. They’re just thinking about themselves—what the public is going to think of their petition.
    STREITFELD : You have achieved fame and success that no living writer has managed. Why go on writing?
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : I think it’s Rilke who says, “If it’s possible to live without writing, do it.” There’s nothing else in this world I like more than to write. And there’s nothing that can keep me from writing. That’s all I think about. I think I write because I’m afraid of death. If I didn’t write, I would die.
    STREITFELD : Since you think about death so much, do you think about your funeral?
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : If I could control it, it would be just my wife, my children. I’d be cremated and that’s it. Unfortunately I know it’ll be like the funeral of Big Mama in the story—nine days of funeral rites, the president and the Supreme Court and the pope in attendance, the national queens of all things that have ever been or ever will be.

    Four years later, I saw him again when he came to Washington, D.C., for a very rare U.S. public appearance. He had taken a break from his memoirs to publish
News of a Kidnapping,
a documentary novel about the drug kingpin Pablo Escobar’s war against Colombia. Based on scrupulous interviews—although not with Escobar, who was killed in December 1993—it took three years to research and write. We went to a popular bookstore cafe, where García Márquez’s books were piled high but no one noticed that their author was right there
.
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : That piece you wrote about me—it was all about death. Young people always think the old are going to die at any minute. They don’t know that the youth mortality is much higher.
    STREITFELD : Something is the matter with your logic but never mind. Colombia seems in the process of self-destructing.
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : I never talk about Colombian politics when I’m outside of Colombia.
    STREITFELD : Okay. So President Clinton is a big fan of yours. You’re going to meet with him later today. What’s on the agenda?
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : I never talk about American politics when I’m in America.
    STREITFELD : Is death the only permissible topic?
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : All I can say is I sent Clinton an early copy of
News of a Kidnapping
. He got it