MEXICO CITY -- Five hundred and two years to the day before I met Gabriel Garcia Marquez's editor for a drink to talk about the World Cup, the vanished world the writer eulogized in his work had one more night to exist. The conquistador Hernan Cortes camped outside the Aztec capital on June 8, 1512. As his men waited in the dark, no one from what is now known as the Spanish-speaking world spoke Spanish. So much of what we associate with Latin America -- language, violence, suffocating colonialism, the novels of Garcia Marquez, the unrest happening around the World Cup in Brazil, the passion the game evokes from Mexican border towns to the lighthouse at Cape Horn -- has its roots in those soldiers and that night. Everything in Latin America starts with the first invaders, even a soccer tournament, and that long roll of history is best understood through the writer whose words found the truth about this place more than anyone else.
The next day, Cortes and his troops entered Tenochtitlan and eventually conquered it, armor against skin, murdering and butchering and burning, and that spasm of violence gave birth to all the violence that has followed, the old world colonial powers and the cocaine cartels, the power-hungry dictators and the messianic despots, the Marxist revolutionaries and the United States, which has sent soldiers and banana companies and anti-communist spies south. Of the nine Latin American nations playing in the World Cup, every one of them has either had its government toppled by a U.S.-backed coup or been invaded by U.S. troops. From Cortes to Kissinger, the interlopers created the trauma that dominated the work of Garcia Marquez, the Nobel laureate who died at age 87 two months ago. The five hundred and two years of fighting off invaders, a state of being that Marquez came to call "solitude," fueled his books.
His editor, Cristobal Pera, sipped a scotch and seemed nostalgic.
"He has given the key to Latin America through his literature," Pera said.
A light breeze floated the smell of flowers into the open-air restaurant, overlooking a quiet park. Pera wore a trendy black blazer, his hair the color of straw. The first work he edited was Garcia Marquez's best-selling memoir, "Living to Tell the Tale," and Pera remembered the initial burst of pages from the master. They came over a fax machine, on slick paper, the text crossed and underlined with handwritten corrections. He felt awe with those words in his hand, words no one else had read. It was as if ghosts that only he could see floated through the streets.
"Don Gabriel," he called the writer, a term of extreme, old fashioned formal respect.
Finally one day, Garcia Marquez corrected him.
"Please call me Gabo," he said.
The World Cup starts tomorrow, the seventh to be held in Latin America, and the first to be held without Gabo, who was born three years before the tournament was created. He was as beloved as football in Central and South America, and Mexico, adored in the same way and for many of the same reasons. His magic realism mirrors the way the game lives in the Latin American consciousness. If he, for instance, had been a war correspondent camped with Cortes, he might have described the Aztec moon vanishing from the sky, and the lake turning red and the sky raining bullets, and that would have been more true than a description of smoldering fires and salted meat.
He wrote about the town where he grew up, and about the stories his grandfather told, filtering them through a little boy's imagination, mixing the real and the fantastical. His masterpiece, "One Hundred Years of Solitude," set in a fictionalized version of his home, which he called Macondo, told the story of a family he based on his own.
The character Jose Arcadio Buendia, based on his grandfather, was a descendent of those who escaped the attacking ships of Sir Francis Drake. Traveling away from civilization, through mysterious swamps, Buendia founded a village where for years no one ever died. Then outsiders arrived, and by the end of the book, nobody remembered the man who'd built the town, or the banana company who'd murdered 3,000 striking workers, or anything but a hot, dusty present which stretched on without beginning or end. For years after the banana company massacre -- which really happened in Garcia Marquez's hometown -- a relentless rain fell on Macondo, rotting the houses and washing away the blood, both literally and spiritually, and when it finally stopped, everyone had forgotten their ancestors. They'd been cut off from their own history, untethered and alone. "The past was a lie," he wrote, "that memory had no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered."
When Jose Arcadio Buendia died, after losing himself to the ghost world of the past, talking to apparitions no one else could see, a shower of tiny flowers fell on the town, trapping people in their homes and suffocating animals, a sheet of them raining down until a soft bed of flowers covered the streets. It was classic Marquez: something that could never happen yet seemed somehow more true than any description of the mourning for a great man. Buendia's death caused such a rift in the hidden forces of nature that the sky rained flowers.
Pera ordered another scotch. He misses his friend.
"Garcia Marquez," he said, "is a mixture of journalism and Kafka."
A mixture of journalism and Kafka also describes perfectly the images being beamed back from the streets of Sao Paulo, as cops fire tear gas grenades at legally protesting citizens, who love football but hate the collusion of FIFA and their government to fleece them of billions of tax dollars. As Gabo's literature occupied a middle ground between reportage and fantasy, his work also straddled two worlds: the one of literary critics, and the one of the millions who saw their own struggles play out on the pages of his books. Gabo used his Nobel Prize speech in 1982 to make the case for his fellow Latin Americans, describing their spirit.
"We respond with life," he said. "Neither floods nor plagues, famines nor cataclysms, nor even the eternal wars of century upon century, have been able to subdue the persistent advantage of life over death."
The rapture of this World Cup cannot fully exist without those plagues, famines and cataclysms, without the eternal wars, just as the games in Brazil with no context of the deep civic anger are 90-minute lies. Both Gabo and his readers understood that a football match is more profound, more powerful, more political than a mere game between 22 men. In America, the jock-sniffer sports industrial complex likes a bright line between games and politics, and gets awkward dealing with any blurring, like a parent trying to give the sex talk. In Latin America, that line has never existed. The examples go on and on. In 1978, the Argentine military dictatorship used the World Cup as a propaganda tool to hide their torture and murder of political enemies. In Chile in 1973, the military dictatorship executed prisoners in the main football stadium in Santiago and buried their bodies in the walls. In 1969, El Salvador and Honduras fought the Football War over maritime borders in the Gulf of Fonseca, the fighting sparked by nationalism brought on by a World Cup qualifier between the two nations. And though it's gone mostly unnoticed in the U.S., that war remains a spark away from starting anew. El Salvador's Navy recently killed a Honduran fisherman in the gulf under murky circumstances, and the Honduran government is saber rattling, while trying to ramp up military spending. San Pedro Sula, Honduras, is the most violent city in the world -- 41 of the top 50 are in Latin America -- and out in the gulf, boats play chicken. Fighting could start any day, as its national team awaits its first game in Brazil. It's as Gabo wrote near the end of Solitude, "She shuddered with the evidence that time was not passing, as she had just admitted, but that it was turning in a circle."
During his 1982 Nobel speech in Stockholm, clearly feeling the responsibility for the heavy weight of his past, he recounted the state of his world, forcing people to look at the place he called home. He said:
"Twenty million Latin American children died before the age of one -- more than have been born in Europe since 1970. Those missing because of repression number 120,000, which is as if no one could account for all the inhabitants of Uppsala. Numerous women arrested while pregnant have given birth in Argentine prisons, yet nobody knows the whereabouts and identity of their children who were furtively adopted or sent to an orphanage by order of the military authorities. Because they tried to change this state of things, nearly 200,000 men and women have died throughout the continent, and over 100,000 have lost their lives in three small and ill-fated countries of Central America: Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. If this had happened in the United States, the corresponding figure would be that of 1,600,000 violent deaths in four years. One million people have fled Chile, a country with a tradition of hospitality -- that is, 10 per cent of its population. Uruguay, a tiny nation of two-and-a half-million inhabitants which considered itself the continent's most civilized country, has lost to exile one out of every five citizens. Since 1979, the civil war in El Salvador has produced almost one refugee every 20 minutes. The country that could be formed of all the exiles and forced emigrants of Latin America would have a population larger than that of Norway."
Those are things that many people in Latin America feel but struggle to articulate. Garcia Marquez was born in Colombia, and lived mostly in Mexico City, and when he died, the presidents of both nations attended his funeral. So did thousands of ordinary citizens, who loved him not for the way literary scholars compare him to Faulkner and Dickens, but for the way he put words to their innermost thoughts, and for what those words represented around the world. Now the teller of their story is gone, so the mourning isn't only for the books he wrote but also for the ones he never got to write, and for the intimate truths he never got to speak out loud. His editor, sipping his scotch, remembered the Mexican school children who wrote Gabo's words on construction paper butterflies after he died. "What has been lost," Pera said, "is a way telling the history, or the essence of a country, or a continent, that could reach the world. That is something that is impossible to repeat."
The first game in Brazil is a day away, and everywhere around the tournament, there are uniquely Latin American dramas, about corruption, and violence, about passion and joy and pride. If Gabo were alive, his attention and passion would be focused on Brazil.
"He would see the World Cup as an incredible source of stories," Pera said.
Many stories coming out of Brazil live in the shadow of the kind of violence Gabo recounted in his speech. Garcia Marquez might argue that there is little difference between Cortes and United Fruit and FIFA, just degrees of malice and violence, according to the acceptable limits of the day. Long after the joy of the games fades away, the Brazilian anger will remain, metastasizing. As Gabo's friend, the late Chilean poet and fellow Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda wrote, "Love is so short, forgetting is so long."
The scenes from this World Cup will carry with them the quality of a Neruda poem, or a Garcia Marquez novel, with passion and violence existing side by side, journalism and Kafka, sprung from the same source. I'm spending the next month in Latin America, looking for both. The journey began in Mexico City, where I landed a little after one on a Sunday, June 8, and by 2 I'd checked into my hotel, a luxurious palace with a green courtyard where families sipped wine and ate fresh grilled meat. Just before 2:30, after dropping my bags in the room, I went downstairs to meet Leo, my translator, to set up a time to interview Cristobal Pera, which we'd do at an ivy-covered restaurant, followed by beers in a quiet, old cantina, then street tacos, then mescal, the kind of afternoon that always reminds me why a great day in Latin America is better than a great day anywhere else. I sat in a chair by the front door, and I heard a loud bang, like a firecracker, following by screaming and people running through the lobby, looking for a place to hide.
It was a gunshot.
This is journalism: A robber tried to steal the man's watch and he fought back, pushing the thief away. The thief pulled a gun and shot once. The victim's wife went into some sort of focused trance and found help. She wore gray slacks. Their black Audi A-8 sat directly in front of the hotel's doors, the driver's door still open. A small pool of blood grew slowly beneath the man's head and at first he didn't move. His wife returned with a stack of soft hotel towels and built a pillow on the volcanic rock bricks. He finally moved. When the ambulance arrived, they cut part of his pants off to get to the gunshot wound in his leg. The blood by his head came from the fall. His wife held his expensive brown shoes in her hand. An ambulance wheeled into the driveway to take him to the hospital, where he'd be treated and, luckily, released. His daughter looked distraught, kneeling on the ground by her dad, her mom kneeling next to her, a hand on her daughter's left knee.
"Mi papa," his daughter said.
This is Kafka: The ambulance rolled away, and the man's family stood in a watery-eyed silence, and then cars arrived at the hotel carrying more businessmen, who walked past the blood and the chalk circling the blood without breaking stride, jabbering away on Bluetooths. The vaguely Asian ethereal spa soundtrack continued to play, as it had played when the shot was fired and during the madness that followed.
The hotel car left behind the blood and chalk circle and turned into Sunday afternoon traffic, headed toward the leafy park across town and a trendy restaurant overlooking it. A gunshot didn't cancel our interview with Pera.
We stepped out of the car into a sudden rain.
The sky was bright and the drops weren't wet. I looked closer and couldn't believe it. The sky was delivering a shower of flowers, tiny and almost transparent, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, shaken from the trees by the breeze, covering the pavement and the awnings of the restaurants overlooking the park. We stepped inside and the wind picked up, howling, the sky turning dark. The waiters rolled down the plastic screens. No more flowers fell from the sky. A strong rain rolled through the city and washed everything away. The next morning, the sun rose 502 years to the day after Cortes destroyed one world and created another. We climbed into a black Suburban. The sidewalks stretched out flowerless and the hotel driveway was clean of the blood and the chalk, as if the shooting had never happened at all.