In the 1980s, with his international reputation secured, Gabriel García Márquez agreed to write a series of brief syndicated essays that appeared, among other places, in the newspaper El País in Spain. His biographer, Gerald Martin, says that these pieces amounted to "a kind of serialized memoir, a weekly letter to his friends, a circular to his fans, an ongoing public diary." Some of the material in those columns was, in fact, later reworked into the pages of his memoir, Living to Tell the Tale.
In one of these columns ("Ghosts of the Road," August 19th, 1981) he relates an incident that was said to have happened some fifteen years before. García Márquez and his family were traveling from Barcelona to southern France, when an unexplained sudden intuition made him slow down in advance of a curve. Several cars whizzed by him, and he remembers in particular one "healthy-looking Dutch woman" driving a van.
After passing us in perfect order, the three cars disappeared around the curve, but we found them again an instant later one on top of another, in a pile of smoking wreckage, embedded in an out-of-control truck in an oncoming lane. The only survivor was the Dutch couple's six-month-old baby.García Márquez connects the incident with another that supposedly happened "on May 20 on the Paris-Montpellier freeway": three young people pick up a woman who hails them from the roadside. After they drive for several miles, the woman, in terror, warns them of a dangerous curve ahead — and then simply vanishes. No accident occurs, but the young people report the mysterous disappearance to the police. The case is never resolved. García Márquez speculates that, after the accident he witnessed, the spirit of the Dutch woman might linger on the highway to warn future travellers of the danger ahead.
The tale of the "vanishing hitchhiker," is, of course, a well-known and well-travelled one, with many documented variants; it provided the title for Jan Brunvand's 1981 study of urban legends.
García Márquez briefly revisited the purported Paris-Montpellier incident in a column the following year entitled "Tales of the Road." In that piece he also touches on reports of a similarly eerie kind of occurence: a silent figure is seen sitting inside a car, apparently smoking a cigarette; the figure is later revealed to have been a corpse, posed to look like a living passenger to avoid the paperwork and fees associated with transporting a dead body from one jurisdiction to another. In one variant that García Márquez mentions a grandmother who dies during a beach vacation is wrapped up in a carpet and stowed on the roof rack of a car, which is then stolen when the family takes a brief break.
I recognized the gist of the corpse passenger story immediately: Cortázar had outlined a very similar tale in A Cetain Lucas a few years earlier (see my related post). It's possible that García Márquez had read Cortázar's version, or heard something like it directly from him (they were friends), but it seems more likely that both writers drew on urban legends that had been circulating for years and may well still be circulating to this day.
A selection of García Márquez's syndicated columns can be found in the posthumous collection The Scandal of the Century and Other Writings.
