The Sale of a Sea, Drop by Drop

Fiction's Prophecy #7

Yesterday I opened Google Maps to frame a visual representation of the European continent, the better to imagine what might be coming next. Horrified by last week’s flagrant betrayal of our friends abroad, I wanted to understand if the world is beginning to remake its territories and borders to resemble what Orwell predicted almost 80 years ago: three mega-states which he named Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia.

But the map page opened straight to that zone that comprises the southern coast of the United States and the northern coast of our Latin American neighbors. There it was dead center on the screen: “The Gulf of America.” Just below, separated by the island nation of Cuba, was the body of water labeled “The Caribbean Sea.” And so my mind swung from the prophecies of that British visionary of ultimate authoritarianism who has become in many ways a chief narrator for our time, to another kind of visionary: the Columbian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

The two authors—in their fictions and in their public personas—could not be more different. Orwell teases us with hope, then yanks the football away, while the man who is affectionately called “Gabo” alleviates the darkness with magical imageries, as of Remedios the beauty floating up into the clouds, and of the stalwart 150-year-old matriarch Ursula shrinking to such a tiny size that her grandchildren kept her in a cupboard, and fed her with a teaspoon. Though he writes (for example) of a boatload of 2000 children willfully and cruelly drowned at sea, his prose is steeped in the fantastical and takes on the qualities of ancient myths; heroes, villains and victims are so flattened into allegory that they arouse in us neither fear nor favor.

Here is the passage that, on seeing “Gulf of America” on the official map of the search engine most used in the whole wide world, released a memory buried deep in the decades of time since I read Marquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch:

... so they took away the Caribbean in April, Ambassador Ewing's nautical engineers carried it off in numbered pieces to plant it far from the hurricanes in the blood-red dawns of Arizona, they took it away with everything it had inside, with the reflection of our cities, our timid drowned people, our demented dragons ...

The central character of Marquez’s 1963 novel, though unnamed by the author, names himself “general of the universe”; but despite delusions of invincibility his greed drives him into bankruptcy, and he is forced to sell off the Caribbean Sea to the even greedier Americans. “Either the marines land,” says the Ambassador, “or we take the sea, there's no other way, your excellency." And so, they take the sea, drop by drop, and it is the technological wizardry of American engineers that makes this feat possible.

Over the past four weeks a few bad men have produced a seismic shift, and the majority of us, with all sincerity and in relative sanity, continue (almost hourly) to ask: “How did this happen?” Gabriel Garcia Marquez replies to today’s question with these lines from a half-century ago:

They brought the Bible and syphilis, they made people believe that life was easy, mother, that everything is gotten with money, that blacks carry a contagion, they tried to convince our soldiers that the nation is a business and that the sense of honor is a brother invented by the government so that soldiers would fight for free.

Though Marquez drew heavily upon the various and plenty dictatorships of Latin America, and (it is said) upon the reign of Franco in Spain, he casts the American contribution to his tale of unbridled power only as capitalism run amok. But now The Autumn of the Patriarch resonates newly in our country, and it does not take much imagination to attach some of Marquez’s stark and pithy axioms from this great novel to the happenings of the past few weeks. “The oppressed are not voiceless, they are silenced,” surely hits home. “Dictatorship thrives on ignorance,” and also, “the most dangerous weapon is an educated mind,” recall one of the most telling proclamations of our 47th president: “I love the uneducated.”

Of DOGE’s ruthless purge of thousands of erstwhile federal workers that delivered compassion and sustenance out into the far-flung world, Marquez wrote in advance: “[T]he corridors of power are paved with the bones of the innocent.” And reading of the willing José Ignacio Saenz de la Barra who operates fiendish instruments of torture so that the “general of the universe” is shielded from the horror, we cannot help but think of one Stephen Miller waiting ghoulishly in the wings, lusting to mete out cruelty couched in executive orders.

There is some solace in the fact that after some 200 years of rule, the general finally dies:

. . . (and) the vultures got into the presidential palace by pecking through the screens on the balcony windows . . . and at dawn on Monday the city awoke out of its lethargy of centuries with the warm, soft breeze of a great man dead and rotting grandeur.

But this part of the story does not fall at the end of Marquez’s novel; it is the first sentence. Would that we could write our own grand ending now, at a point that still seems like a beginning, before the plot unfolds with who knows what kinds of unspeakable things: century-long friends discarded, children murdered, water sold off drop by drop.

All quotations are from: Gabriel García Márquez, The Autumn of the Patriarch. Translated by Gregory Rabassa, Alfred A. Knopf, 1976.

Remedios the Beauty and grandmother Ursula are characters in Marquez’s more widely known novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude.