LOVE AND AGE: A TALK WITH

GARCIA MARQUEZ
By MARLISE SIMONSAPRIL 7, 1985
Continue reading the main storyShare This Page

 Share
 Tweet
 Email
 More
 Save

About the Archive

This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start
of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared,
The Times does not alter, edit or update them.

Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other

problems. Please send reports of such problems to archive_feedback@nytimes.com.
VIEW PAGE IN TIMESMACHINE

April 7, 1985, Page 007001Buy ReprintsThe New York Times Archives

GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ is in the midst of a new novel, and a
predictable order is imposed on his life. The 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature is
behind him and so is the publication of his most recent novel, ''Chronicle of a
Death Foretold.'' Still, his fans seek out the 57- year-old author of ''One
Hundred Years of Solitude'' - the book that made him a celebrity.

His days now are like his writing - planned meticulously and carried out with
carefree style. After six hours at the typewriter, he divides the remainder of
the day between reading and listening to music, and friends, writers,
politicians - people he calls my ''critics, protectors and co-conspirators.''

At times he lives in Cartagena, on Colombia's Caribbean coast, not far from

where he was born. The area remains a rich source for him, replenishing his
imagination with the myth and anecdote that find their way into his writing.
 But he and his wife, Mercedes, always return to the highlands and Mexico
City, where he writes in the privacy of a studio in his garden. This is where the
shy yet gregarious writer and I talked in late February. He has said that his
novel in progress has to do with aging. I asked him to discuss his approach to
old people in fiction:

You're writing a happy love story, as you've called it, a love affair between two
very old people.

It's the story of a love that begins when the boy and girl are very young. But it
is suspended. It stays in a cocoon. It's renewed when they are in their 80's.

It began with an idea, an image I had. The point of departure for a book for
me is always an image, never a concept or a plot. The first image I had for this
book is that of an old couple fleeing by boat. An old couple, happy on a boat,
dancing on the deck. But I don't want to talk about the book yet. That will
bring me bad luck. You've always said that a writer spends the rest of his life
writing about his youth. Now you're inventing a peiod of your life that you
haven't lived yet.

Yes, I'm anticipating. But in a way I've always done that since I was young.
My two first books (both published in the United States as the title stories of
collections) were about old people. In ''Leaf Storm,'' an old man no longer
knows what to do and hangs himself. And '' No One Writes to the Colonel'' is
about an old man waiting for a letter that never arrives. If I think about it,
about all those characters in ''One Hundred Years of Solitude,'' I always seem
to have observed my elders. I've never written about children.

Continue reading the main story

Perhaps because as a child you lived for some time with your grandparents?

Yes, that was very important. Basically my grandparents were the models for
many of the people in my books because I knew how they talked, how they
behaved. To make sure the characters were real, I would always use my
granparents as a reference point. But I was trying to reflect the behavior of
my elders without really penetrating what was happening inside them.

I am beginnig to become conscious of old age now. This book I'm wirting
obliges me to think six hours a day about things I had never seriously
explored: old age, love and death. It is having an effect on me. You leave a lot
of yourself in a book, but a book leaves you with a lot of reflections. I never
thought so seriously about death until I began to try and see how it affects
people in their old age. I was used to my characters never dying. They were
living endlessly.

Except the ones that were hanged, shot or otherwise assassinated.

Yes, through violence. But they didn't die of old age, there was no aging
process. Now that I'm getting older, I'm concerned with how age affects the
sentiments, which after all is the most important.

Sex, well I don't know, but I have the impression that sex does not end as long
as you don't want it to end. While a person does not give up sex, sex does not
give up the person. What you cannot do is to stop for a long time because
then it is very hard to start up again. So you always have to keep the engine
running. It is something I'm dealing with in this book. I don't care what age
the characters are, if they've had a continuous sex life, they go on. I don't
know if this is a fantasy I'm having. But at least I know that my grandfather,
who died very old, was still active.

Did you study old age or read how other writers have treated it?

No, I don't work that way. I only read Simone de Beauvoir's book ''The
Coming of Age.'' I try to let the writing, the imagination and invention tell me
the secrets of old age. I imagine that afterward, specialists and old people
themselves may say that it's not like this. So it may have to be the old age of
my book and not that of life.

Curiously, I heard that someone in Colombia just published a study about old
age in ''One Hundred Years of Solitude.'' I haven't read it. I was told it was
done by a gerontologist who said that the treatment of old age was very well
done. For me it was sheer intuition. I wrote the book when I was between 38
and 40.

What I don't do is prepare myself to deal with an overall theme. I may consult
on small points. For ''One Hundred Years of Solitude'' I didn't study the
economic or social conditions of Colombia. I could have made a serious
investigation about the drama of the foreign banana companies. But I asked a
few questions and look what happened. I went to check how many dead there
were in the banana workers' strike of 1928. It was a tremendous national
scandal. It's not exactly known, but I was told about 17. For my book, 17 dead
would have been a joke. I needed enough bodies to fill a train. I wanted the
train instead of being loaded with bananas to be loaded with corpses. History
was against me, with 17 dead. That would not even fill a wagon. So I put
3,000. And so not long ago, during a commemoration of the event, someone
in a speech talked about the massacre of the 3,000 compatriots.

So what I'm trying to say is that I don't make a study. I am not inclined to
theorizing. I do not want to turn any of my experiences into theory and I also
read very little literary theory. But of course I may look up some episodes
someone has written or check some statistics.

What did you learn from Simone de Beauvoir's book?

I was very impressed by it. It's a study, a book of reflections on old age, and it
includes statistics. Nevertheless, one aspect that is not dealt with much
interests me a great deal. And that is the sex life of the aged. It is mostly dealt
with statistically. What interest me is: why is there a tendency to look upon
the sexual activities of the aged with aversion. I don't understand why it
should be.

It is one of the points I am working out in the book. The couple are not
allowed to marry when he is 22 and she is 18 because they are told they are
very young. And when they again consider marriage, he is then 82 and she is
78, they're told they can't because they're very old. As far as I'm concerned,
this tendency to see the sex life of the aged as repugnant is unjust. There is no
doubt that some old people who can have no sex life masturbate until their
death.

My parent in some way are the model for the book - maybe not the model, but
many of the experiences are theirs. My parents were married for 60 years,
they had 16 children, my mother had a child after she was 42. I've always
been very curious to know what happened between them after they were 70.
My father died when he was 84. I talked to him about this in very general
terms. But you know how it is in Latin America, you don't dare ask such
questions, not of one's parents or anyone else.

You've said how much you've always liked being able to drop in at your
parents' home every day when you're in Colombia.Now your father has just
died (in December). Do you feel his absence has changed you?

Since the age of 13 or 14, I haven't lived with my parents. So I've always felt a
visitor at home. And this helps me cope better with the emptiness my father
left behind. My brothers and sisters who always lived at home are very
disconcerted. No one had died in that family - there are the 16 children, 34
grangchildren and 14 great-grandchildren.

But the death of one's father brings the certainty of death closer. And it
creates a certain haste. This haste you get not only from a father's death, you
get it anyway as you age. As time is passing, you get the impression that you
have to work faster. And above all, to start preparing for a useful old age.

How do you see that?

Well, for me it's suffieient to be able to write, I can be useful until I'm a
hundred years old if I can write. My subject is life and the subject gets larger
the longer I live.

Do you think a lot about growing old?

I'm beginning to. My main fear is the failing of the body. There will be a
moment that diets or exercises won't do any good, that the body wastes away.
I feel I'm reaching the age of the ''never'': I never felt this before, I never had
this pain, I never breathed this way, I never had to go to the bathroom so
many times during the night, I never woke up so early.

But the most interesting is what happens in one's heart. that is still a mystery.
I'm very curious, as I'm writing this book, to see how the characters go on
behaving. It's a true investigation. I could almost say that one writes the novel
to see how it will turn out. And to be able to read it.

Do you work very differently now than when you were young?

The writing process is very different. When you are young, you write almost -
well, every writer is different, I'm talking about myself - almost like writing a
poem. You write on impulses and inspiration. You have so much inspiration
that your not concerned with technique. You just see what comes out, without
worrying much about what you are going to say and how.On the other hand,
later, you know exactly what you are going to say and what you want to say.
And you have a lot to tell. Even if all of your life you continue to tell about
your childhood, later you are better able to interpret it, or at least interpret it
in a different way.

When you are older, when the inspiration diminishes, you depend more on
technique. If you don't have that everything collapses. There is no question
that you write much more slowly, with much more care, and perhaps with
less inspiration. This is the great problem of the professional author.

When I was 20, I wrote a daily story for a newspaper and at times even some
editorials on the same day. Then at night when everyone had left the
newsroom, I would stay to write a short story or work on a novel.

There is a story called ''The Night of the Curlews,'' one of my first. It was the
time when we put out a weekly literary magazine in Barranquilla, called La
Cronica. At one point the editor suddenly found he was left with two empty
pages. So in the evening I sat down and wrote that story.

I couldn't do that today. If I had it completely worked out, I would still need
at least two or three weeks to write it. Worse, not many years ago, I wrote a
story of 15 pages and bought a package of 500 sheets of paper. when I
finished the story, I had used up all 500 to write the 15.

Besides, I always used to write at night and write smoking. It's disadvantage
of youth that you almost always write when you are tired. You sit down only
after you've done everything you have to do to make a living. Then with time
you become more of a professional and you organize your life.

When the time came that I no longer had to work in a newspaper and could
only write, I found it very hard to sit down in the morning and write during
the day. Then, as I got older, I had to stop smoking. I had never written a
word without smoking.So I had a choice, wait until I get used to not smoking,
or learn to write without it right away. I tried right away and it was extremely
difficult. Only then I realized that I used to stop writing not because I was so
tired but because I was so intoxicated from the cigarettes. I'm much older
now but I wake up feeling fresh.

Another great difference between one age and another to me is memory. I

never used to write down all the ideas that occur to me while writing.I
believed that if I forgot them they were not important, and the ones that
really mattered were those I remembered. Now I write them all down. It
makes me very anxious to know that I thought of something but I forgot,
something I was going to say, that I read, where I read it, a melody I cannot
recall. At a certain age, you begin forgetting names, things. It's a real cause of
anguish that one has to learn to overcome. It's not easy. A lot of one's work
deals with form and you can get obsessive or desperate about a detail. So now
I take notes. I'll scribble a phrase, or a point I may need tomorrow. There are
advantages and disadvantages in aging.

I've come to realize though, there is one thing for which you need to be young.
And that is to learn the technique of writing, the tricks of the trade. If you
don't learn that when you're young, you won't when you're old.

After the Nobel Prize you said that success, the prize, are a burden that makes
it more difficult to write. Do you still feel that way?

It's a private joke of mine that I have been famous for a long time but nobody
knew about it. No, recognition is not a burden for me. I've always had my
projects and I haven't changed them. I was working on this book before the
prize and I'm still writing it. But it is disturbing for one's private life. It brings
many outside interferences, distractions, interruptions. There are many
requests to do things, to attend events, they take a lot of time, people don't
like to be refused.

Perhaps it's an excess of vanity, but I've always felt all this was going to
happen. My commitment to my writing is no different, it's always been very
deep. Even in journalism.

Now all my newspaper stories have been dug up in Colombia, whatever I

wrote since I was 18. Six volumes have already been published and there are
two or three to go.

Imagine the shock I got when I heard people wanted to do this. Then I
realized it was going to happen anyway, sooner or later. Or they wait till I'm
dead and do it then. So I figured the best thing was to have control over it. I
read almost all of them and I don't have to regret anything. There are no great
gaffes and no important contradictions. But I've always known that whatever
you write down, it will pursue you, even after you're dead. There it is. You
cannot say, I didn't write that.
 But fame has not created greater pressures?

You could ask me if today I'm more frightened than before when I sit down to
write. All my life I've been frightened at the moment I sit down to write.

Every day?

Every day. Terribly frightened.

When will you finish the book you're writing now?

Someone asked me the other day how much longer I was going to be in
Mexico this time. I said, not how much time, but how many pages. I have
about 180 pages to go. That means 180 days. It's a matter of three months, I
think.

We were talking about how from a very young age you were already writing
about old people. How would you feel about doing children's stories, now that
you are growing old?

I already tried writing children's stories. It did n't work. Once I wrote one and
I showed it to my two sons who were very small then. They gave it back to me.
They said: ''Papa, you think that children are really dumb.''

The TimesMachine archive viewer is a subscriber-only feature.