Free Gabriel Garcia Marquez by Gabriel García Márquez Page B

on the sixteenth of the month. Five or six days later, I got a letter. It was dated the seventeenth. He said he read it all in one sitting, from beginning to end. He also said, ‘Thank you for being the prophet of my presidency.”
    STREITFELD : I assume that is because of the comment you made that, if re-elected, Clinton would eventually be rankedas one of the country’s great leaders. Were you just flattering him?
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : I said he’s going to
be
a great president, and I still think he has the potential.
    STREITFELD : In
News of a Kidnapping
, you write that Escobar “had employees who spent the day engaging in lunatic conversations on his telephones so that the people monitoring his lines would become entangled in mangrove forests of non sequiturs and not be able to distinguish them from real messages … [Sometimes he] traveled in a public minibus that had false plates and markings and drove along established routes but made no stops because it always carried a full complement of passengers, who were his bodyguards. One of Escobar’s diversions, in fact, was to act as driver from time to time.”
    This all sounds almost as fantastical as the mad ruler in “Autumn of the Patriarch” selling the sea to the gringos, who take it away “in numbered pieces to plant it far from the hurricanes in the blood-red dawns of Arizona.” Is it really true?
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : It’s authentic. There’s a journalist, a friend of mine, who was on that bus. Whether I’m working in journalism or literature, I’m always describing the same reality. There are some things about reality I don’t use in my fiction because people wouldn’t believe them. Escobar’s employees were a hidden force that influenced the everyday life of the country that no one ever saw, up to the point that some people even doubted he existed.
    STREITFELD : As Colombia collapses, there are again calls for its most famous citizen to take over.
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : When a country needs leaders, people look in the newspapers. They think anyone in the news qualifies. A tennis champion should become president, or so they think. Even Pablo Escobar thought he had the right be to be president.
    STREITFELD : There are so many rumors about you, sometimes unpleasant. There was a story that Escobar gave you money to write your book.
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : That’s a stupid thing to say, because I have more money than he did.
    STREITFELD : He was a billionaire.
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : Okay, I’m not a rich man. I’m just a poor man with some money.
    STREITFELD : You were also reported as saying you would not return to Colombia until President Samper and his corrupt cronies left office.
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : I never said that. In fact, I am coming here from Colombia. What I said was, I wanted to stay there without ever leaving again. Then I realized the political and social reality right now is so intense I couldn’t write in peace.
    So I went to Mexico, which the press interpreted tomean I wouldn’t come back as long as Samper was president. For me to say I’m not going to come back to a country while a president is in power is to do him an honor, an homage that I will not give to anyone.
    STREITFELD : In the 1970s, you were widely reported as saying you would stop writing as long as Pinochet was in power in Chile. He was in power for 17 years.
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : I never thought he’d last so long. Even though you may think it’s not true, I really am a realist. Time convinced me I was wrong. What I was doing was allowing Pinochet to stop me from writing, which means I had submitted to voluntary censorship. I was sacrificing something that even the Chileans living under him weren’t doing.
    STREITFELD : No wonder you try to say as little as possible in public. Someone always misinterprets it.
    GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ : I always have the