NEWS OF A KIDNAPPING. Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Translated, from Spanish, by Edith Grossman. Knopf. $25. 291 pp.@BYLI
On the evening of Nov. 7, 1990, Maruja Pachon left her office in downtown Bogota, climbed into the back of her new Renault, and asked the driver to take her home. Her sister-in-law and personal assistant, Beatriz Villamizar, was with her. Within half an a hour the car had been run off the road, the chauffeur shot and killed, and the women apprehended by eight masked men with silencers on their guns. Their captors insisted they would not be harmed – that the women’s job was to deliver a message to the government. Maruja and Beatriz were eventually taken to a cramped, filthy room where another prisoner, Marina Montoya, had been kept for three months. She didn’t even look up when they came in.
These quarters – with a single mattress on the floor, a boarded-up window, and a television that played incessantly – would be the three women’s home for the next several months. Two of them would get out alive. They would undergo the usual transformation of long-term hostages: wildly ambivalent emotions toward their captors, debilitating health problems, the shrinking of a psychic landscape that was counted by minutes but where time in fact held no greater counsel. Maruja and Beatriz, respectively the wife and sister of the politician Alberto Villamizar, were the last of 10 people kidnapped in a rash of crimes that autumn – all of them taken as a retaliatory negotiating tool by the country’s drug warlords, best known here as the Colombian cartel and commanded by the infamous Pablo Escobar.
The sweep and horrific reign of the cartel’s top guns _ known in Colombia as “the Extraditables,” because they were fighting to avoid U.S. prosecution – has now taken on the force of legend, signifying not just the random brutality of a cocaine regime but also the corruption and mayhem of a government that tried to stop them. Escobar was killed in a police shootout in 1993, at least removing that particular charismatic despot from the game. But the specificity of the story has been more elusive, gone the way of newspaper headlines and folklore. Its high-stakes personal drama is part of what drew the Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez to the subject _ to what he calls “only one episode in the biblical holocaust that has been consuming Colombia for more than twenty years.”
News of a Kidnapping is his literary reprisal for that holocaust, an effort to document the captivity of Pachon and Villamizar, and untangle the events that placed them in their squalid, makeshift prison.
Garcia Marquez was a reporter and foreign correspondent before he transformed world literature three decades ago with One Hundred Years of Solitude, and he has chosen for this nonfiction work an unadorned, reportorial style. He began the project with the aim of telling Maruja Pachon’s story, but quickly realized hers was inextricable from the other kidnappings of that vicious season.
Relying upon interviews with the surviving victims and their families, as well as the journal kept in captivity by kidnap victim Diane Turbay, a well-known journalist who was killed during a shootout, he has constructed a dark narrative that roams between the particularities of imprisonment and the labyrinth of governmental response.
This is a frustratingly complex story, full of failed negotiations and political egos, and Garcia Marquez has tried to humanize it. But News of a Kidnapping is written, understandably, from a Colombian’s perspective, with scant context of Escobar’s reign or the social upheaval of such tyranny. Medellin, for instance, headquarters of the cartel, has one chilling descriptor in the corpse of a young girl, flung onto a street and ignored even by taxi drivers – but the anecdote is buried in a sea of legal maneuverings and appears with little explanation. The cast of characters can be almost as confusing as that in One Hundred Years of Solitude, without the literary payoff.
Stunned by the gravity of his story – he calls the task of writing it “the saddest and most difficult of my life” – Garcia Marquez has chosen to strip it of images or detail he must have considered superfluous. You can feel the presence of the somber divining rod that must have led him this way, and yet the consequence is so barren, so dependent on red-tape conversations and journalistic telescoping, that the story is stilted, robbed of a great deal of power.
There are moments when News of a Kidnapping rises to great power, particularly upon the horrific occasions of the deaths of Montoya and Turbay. These are perfect vignettes, all too rare in a story of such epic proportion, but they help carry the book through its grayer corridors of narrative. And never does one doubt the simple heroism of the people who lived through the events of this book. Turbay’s mother, Nydia Quintero, was a former first lady of Colombia, and she appears here with a merciful dignity that seems superhuman. On the other side of the death of her daughter, she wrote to Escobar before his surrender, begging him to free the other hostages, “my heart overflowing with pain, forgiveness, and good will.” Not even Pablo Escobar could stand up to that.
