Welcome to García Márquez' Macondo.
........... García's career as a fiction writer remained publicly static during his time in Venezuela, but journalistically he took an odd turn: he left Momento and went to work for Venezuela Gráfica, a magazine commonly called Venezuela Pornográfica in Caracas. Solemn fictionists might be put off by such work, but García accepted it then and still accepts it. "I'm interested in personal life," he said, explaining that at the moment in Barcelona he was reading the memoirs of Jackie Kennedy's chauffeur. "I read all the gossip in all the magazines. And I believe it all." The Cuban revolution lifted him, for the first time in his life, out of journalistic fluff and fun and into advocacy. He opened the Bogotá office for Prensa Latina, went to Havana later, and in 1961 became assistant bureau chief in New York. He quit in mid-1961 during a wave of revisionism, in solidarity with his disgruntled boss; and with his wife Mercedes, the Barranquilla girl who had waited for him for three years until he married her in 1958, and his two-year-old son Rodrigo, he left New York, but not without a tropical memory of the city. "It was like no place else," he said. "It was putrefying, but also was in the process of rebirth, like the jungle. It fascinated me." The Garcías headed for New Orleans by Greyhound, passing through Faulkner country. García duly noted one sign advising DOGS AND MEXICANS PROHIBITED and found himself barred from hotels where clerks thought him Mexican. He had planned to return to Colombia, but Mexico, being a film capital, lured him, and on the urging of Mexican friends he changed plans and began slowly, and with much difficulty, a new career as a screenwriter. He wrote one short story in Mexico and then lapsed into a silence that lasted several years. ..................