by PETE HAMILL
SOURCE/Helmut Newton
In the lobby of the Hotel Capri, the ghosts of fifties gangsters are moving among the delegates of the ninth Havana film festival. The bulletin board announces screenings of movies about political torture. A Havanatur kiosk offers day-trips to the Hemingway Museum and Lenin Park. From the tourist shop which sells cigars and needlepoint portraits of Che Guevara, a compact man a few months short of sixty emerges with newspapers under his arm. He glances at his watch, then starts across the lobby.
“Gabo… “
…
The day following this forlorn expression of unrequited love in the presence of a star, I met with Gabriel García Márquez in the small Mediterranean-style villa known as a “protocol house” that his friend Fidel Castro provides for him when the 1982 Nobel Prize winner is in Havana. The house, in the suburb called Cubanacán, is one of many abandoned by the Havana rich when Castro triumphed almost three decades ago; with its “modern” furniture, dull abstract paintings, and vast swimming pool, it has a permanently transient feeling, like the houses provided for entertainers in Las Vegas. We talked in a corner of the living room. On this day, his wife, Mercedes, was elsewhere in the house. His son Rodrigo, a Harvard graduate who is now a filmmaker, came in for a moment, exchanged greetings in perfect English, then borrowed some money from his father, swearing a blood oath to pay him back. Rodrigo’s younger brother, Gonzalo, who is married and lives in Paris, had recently presented their father with his first grandchild. A servant brought coffee. A life-long socialist, Gabo now has homes or apartments in Mexico City, Cuernavaca, Barcelona, Paris, and Barranquilla, in his native Colombia. He obviously doesn’t believe that his politics should prevent him from living well. And yet there was a feeling on this afternoon that he inhabits this house but doesn’t truly live in it. He agreed.
“I live where my phonograph records are,” Gabo said with a shrug. “That’s Mexico.”
Next month, his latest novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, will be published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf in a first edition of 100,000 copies. He would dearly love to come to the United States to celebrate the occasion, but at the time of our talks, his plans were uncertain. For years, the ironheaded bureaucrats of the Reagan administration would not give him an ordinary tourist visa, a policy that at once angered and amused him.
“The country where my books are studied best is the United States,” he said. “Universities in the United States have made the best analyses of my books. But I can’t enter the United States, because they say I am a Communist, a friend of Fidel Castro. But tell me: if they don’t permit me to enter because my ideas are so dangerous, why don’t they prohibit my books? When I go to the United States, I go to New York to buy books, to buy records, to see movies and theater, to see two or three friends. I don’t really have time to disseminate my evil ideas. On the other hand, my books are everywhere.”
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