by Ilan Stavans
One Hundred Years of Solitude includes a scene memorializing the event: The strikers test the government forces. Soldiers begin shooting without warning, and then the bodies are taken away in a train. The following day, nobody is able to remember anything. García Márquez said that the massacre in the square, as he depicted it, was “completely true, but while I wrote it on the basis of testimony and documents, it was never known exactly how many people were killed. I used the figure three thousand, which is probably an exaggeration. But one of my childhood memories was watching a very, very long train leave the plantation supposedly full of bananas. There could have been three thousand dead on it, eventually to be dropped in the sea. What is really surprising is that now they speak very naturally in Congress and the newspapers about the ‘three thousand dead.’ In The Autumn of the Patriarch, the dictator says that it doesn’t matter if it’s not true now, because sometime in the future it will be true. Sooner or later people believe writers rather than the government.”11
The strike is the topic of another Colombian novel by García Márquez’s close childhood friend, Álvaro Cepeda Samudio: La casa grande (The Big House), originally published in 1954 (thirteen years before One Hundred Years of Solitude). It is unclear if Cepeda Samudio, who was born in 1926, witnessed the massacre. García Márquez includes a scene in the novel in which a child on his father’s shoulders watches the shooting. Some literary historians see this as an homage to Cepeda Samudio. In a foreword in the English translation of La casa grande, García Márquez writes: “This manner of writing history, arbitrary as it might seem to the historian, is a splendid lesson in poetic transformation. Without distorting reality or playing loose with the serious political and human aspects of the social drama, Cepeda Samudio has subjected it to a kind of purifying alchemy and has given us only its mythical essence, which will remain forever, far longer than any man’s morality, justice, and ephemeral memory. The super dialogues, the straight-forward and virile richness of the language, the genuine compassion aroused by the character’s fate, the fragmentary and somewhat loose structure which so closely resembles the pattern of memories—everything in this book is a magnificent example of how a writer can honestly filter out the immense quantity of rhetorical and demagogic garbage that stands in the way of indignation and nostalgia.”12
The siblings who followed García Márquez were born in different places, depending on where their parents were stationed. They include Luis Enrique (Aracataca, September 8, 1928), Margarita, aka Margot (Barranquilla, November 9, 1929), Aída Rosa (Barranquilla, December 17, 1933), Ligia (Aracataca, August 8, 1934), Gustavo (Aracataca, September 27, 1935), Rita del Carmen (Barranquilla, July 10, 1938), Jaime (Sucre, May 22, 1940), Hernando (Sucre, March 26, 1943), Alfredo Ricardo (Cartagena, February 25, 1946), and Eligio Gabriel (Bogotá, November 14, 1947). The family is close knit and shies away from publicity, although through the years they have agreed to speak with researchers. Silvia Galvis spent several years interviewing the siblings for a volume entitled Los García Márquez, which is composed of ten stand-alone personal essays based on extended conversations in which each sibling gives his or her version of what it was like to grow up together. His siblings include an engineer, a journalist, a businessman, a consul, a fireman, and a nun, the latter an ironic career choice given the anti-clericalism that defines García Márquez’s weltanschauung.
Jaime, the second child, was an engineer who, at García Márquez’s request, became director of the Fundación Nuevo Periodismo in Cartagena. The story of Eligio, the youngest, born in Sucre in 1947, is moving. His full name was Eligio Gabriel, and he grew up in his famous brother’s shadow. He once remarked, “there are different versions surrounding my name. The one I’ve heard most frequently is that when I was born my father held me in the air and said: ‘He is exactly like me; this one is a García and needs to have my name.’ Until that moment none of his children was called exactly like him: Gabriel Eligio. But when I was about to be baptized, my mother wondered how they could call me Gabriel if there was already a Gabito. Then my father, who disliked complications, responded: ‘Alright, then let’s call him Eligio Gabriel.’ It’s that simple and I believe it is true because my father was that way, never allowing to get too entangled in things.” He added, “Gabito has his own version, obviously, and it is that when I was born he had already left the house, that’s why my mother said: ‘We called him Gabriel and he left, but we need to have a Gabriel at home.’”13
In 1966, Eligio enrolled at the Universidad Nacional to study theoretical physics, but he decided that he preferred to write. He struggled; each time he published something, everyone asked him if he was related to the famous author of One Hundred Years of Solitude. He opted to use a shortened version of his name, Eligio García, as his pen name. Toward the end of his life he made peace with this and reverted to using his full name: Eligio García Márquez. He achieved peace in other ways. Beginning in 1974 he lived in Paris and London, where he worked as a correspondent for several Colombian periodicals, such as El Espectador. He was the editorial advisor of the magazine Cromos, and served as the general editor of his brother’s magazine, Cambio. In 1978, Eligio published the novel Para matar el tiempo (To Kill Time), and in 1982, a collection of interviews with Latin American writers and a companion volume to the movie adaptation of Chronicle of a Death Foretold, directed by Francesco Rosi. Shortly before his death on June 29, 2001, he released a book he had been working on for years, Tras las claves de Melquíades, an impressionistic study of how One Hundred Years of Solitude came to be.
García Márquez spent the first eight years of his life in his maternal grandparents’ house in Aracataca. His relationships with them were decisive. He called his grandfather Papalelo. “My grandfather was stocky, with a florid complexion, and the most voracious eater I can remember. He was the most outrageous fornicator, as I learned much later on.”14 It was his grandfather, who died in 1937, when the author was around ten years old, who took young García Márquez to the town of Ciénega to visit the Goleta that could go to Barranquilla.
In contrast, he had an intimate connection with his grandmother, from whom he learned the art of storytelling. The manner in which she related an outrageous anecdote in all seriousness, without a hint of surprise, was something he was accustomed to as a child but didn’t understand until much later—when he decided that telling stories was what he enjoyed most in life and what he wanted to do for a living. “What was most important,” García Márquez reminisced about Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes, “was the expression she had on her face. She did not change her expression at all when telling her stories, and everyone was surprised. In previous attempts to write One Hundred Years of Solitude, I tried to tell the story without believing in it. I discovered that what I had to do was believe in them myself and write them with the same expression with which my grandmother told them: with a brick face.”15 His grandmother, who was the inspiration for Úrsula Iguarán, arguably the most important female character in his magnum opus and the novel’s center of gravity, was prone to exaggeration, a device he later used with great skill as a narrator: “For example, if you say that there are three elephants flying in the sky, people are not going to believe you. But if you say that there are four hundred and twenty-five elephants flying in the sky, people will probably believe you.”16
“The strange thing,” García Márquez later told his friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, “was that I wanted to be like my grandfather—realistic, brave, safe—but I could not resist the constant temptation to peep into my grandmother’s territory.”17 García Márquez’s relationship with women was crucial in his upbringing. In Living to Tell the Tale, he writes: “I believe that the essence of my nature and way of thinking I owe in reality to the women in the family and to the many in our service who ministered to my childhood. They had strong characters and tender hearts, and they treated me with the naturalness of the Earthly Paradise.”18 A wide constellation of females, from relatives to servants, surrounded him
. There were his five aunts: Tía Elvira Carrillo, his grandfather’s illegitimate child and his mother’s half-sister; Tía Francisca Cimodosea Mejía, known as La Cancerbera; Tía Mama, a beloved cousin who had grown up with his grandfather and who raised García Márquez in Aracataca; Tía Wenefrida Márquez, his grandfather’s older sister; and Tía Petra Cotes, who died at the age of one hundred in the Aracataca home while sitting on a rocking chair in a hallway filled with begonias.
There were other women, too, such as Tía Margarita Márquez Iguarán, his grandmother’s sister, who died of typhus at the age of twenty-one and is arguably the model for Remedios the Beautiful, although the actual name may come from yet another aunt, Remedios Núñez Márquez, his grandfather’s eighth natural child. Such abundance of female models in his childhood marked him forever. In One Hundred Years of Solitude it was the Buendía women who grounded the family and safeguarded the collective memory. They were at the helm, raising the next generation, while the men explored the world, fought wars, and built their reputations. Women defined the home: what was morally acceptable and what wasn’t, what everyone’s diet was, who was a welcome visitor, and so on.
These home-bound women stood in sharp contrast to another type of woman: the intrusive mistress who often stole a family man away through concupiscence. Just as in One Hundred Years of Solitude, in García Márquez’s family husbands were constantly bringing home their out-of-wedlock offspring. Aside from his three children with Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes, Nicolás Ricardo had a total of nine illegitimate children. And García Márquez’s own father, Gabriel Eligio, had four: Abelardo García Ujueta, Carmen Rosa García Hermosillo, Antonio García Navarro, and Germaine (Emy) García Mendoza.19
And there were the maids, with some of whom García Márquez was physically intimate. One was Trinidad, the daughter of one of the workers in the family home. In his autobiography, García Márquez describes how she took away his innocence, as he put it. Trinidad was only thirteen. Suddenly music started to play from a nearby house. She held him so tightly that “she took my breath away.” He explains, “my intimacy with the maids could be the origin of a thread of secret communications that I believe I have with women and that throughout my life has allowed me to feel more comfortable and sure with them than with men.”20
García Márquez’s relationship with his own mother, however, was more distant.21 Her seriousness defined her in his eyes. He once said, “perhaps it comes from having gone to live with her and my father when I was already old enough to think for myself—after my grandfather died.” As a result of his parent’s itinerant life, which meant moving the family from one place to another, he didn’t live with his parents “under the same roof for very long because a few years later when I was twelve, I went off to school, first to Barranquilla and then to Zipaquirá. Since then we’ve really only seen each other for brief visits, first during school holidays and after that whenever I go to Cartagena—which is never more than once a year and never for more than a couple of weeks at a time. This has inevitably made our relationship distant.”22
Luisa Santiaga, while a somewhat peripheral female figure in García Márquez’s family constellation, was the family anchor. In March 1952, at the age of twenty-five—after having lived in the big cities of Barranquilla, Cartagena, and Bogotá—García Márquez returned to Aracataca with his mother to sell his childhood home for $7,000 to a couple of old peasants, or campesinos, who had recently won the lottery. That sentimental journey served as the opening episode in Living to Tell the Tale and was an invaluable narrative viewpoint from which to relate his foundational past. Luisa Santiaga was nothing if not practical. The character based on her in Love in the Time of Cholera is romantic but down to earth. And García Márquez has suggested that Úrsula Iguarán has some of his mother’s features.23
In spite of its seriousness, this relationship was more grounded than the one García Márquez had with his father. Gabriel Eligio didn’t come from Riohacha to Aracataca to visit García Márquez until several months after he was born, in large part because his in-laws had made it so difficult for him to be with Luisa Santiaga. The families made peace and he eventually came back, but after a period working as a telegraphist, he left town again to become a homeopathic doctor. This and his future departures, all apparently related to work, turned Gabriel Eligio into a ghostlike figure in García Márquez’s childhood.
In an article entitled “Vuelta a la semilla,” published on December 21, 1983, García Márquez wrote, “Contrary to what many writers good and bad have done across history, I have never idealized the town where I was born and where I spent the first eight years of my life. My memories of that time—as I have repeated so often—are the most clear and real I have, to the point that I’m able to evoke as if it was yesterday not only the appearance of each of the houses that are still preserved, but even to spot a crack that didn’t exist during my childhood.” García Márquez argued that trees always live longer than people and he believed that the trees in Aracataca were able to remember us, perhaps even better than we remember them. Yet, in spite of the similarities between Aracataca and Macondo, García Márquez remarked that every time he returned to his birth town he had the impression that it resembled less and less the fictitious one, with the exception of a few external elements, such as the unrelenting heat at two in the afternoon, its white and burning powder, and the almond trees that line its streets. On June 25, 2006, due to the international attention García Márquez had brought, there was a referendum to rename the town “Aracataca-Macondo,” although it failed due to a low turnout.
It’s been almost a century since García Márquez was born, and Aracataca has hardly changed. He is its only famous child and claim to glory. One dramatic transformation in recent years, not only in Aracataca but in the entire region, is the rise of a tourist trade that attracts hordes of people who love his books. García Márquez isn’t directly involved in these efforts. Local agencies, government-run as well as private, in Aracataca, Riohacha, Barranquilla, and, primarily, Cartagena, decided to capitalize on the attention the writer had brought to the region. In order to understand the phenomenon (literature as a magnet for tourism), I took a tour. I boarded a bus in Barranquilla that took me to Aracataca. The poverty I saw was moving. I spoke with local merchants, students, politicians, waitresses, journalists, policemen, and librarians, among others. They talked about the lack of financial support from the federal government, which remembers the town only when there is a García Márquez anniversary—an event that always brings an influx of tourists.
Aracataca, as I discovered, now parades tourists to some of the sites where García Márquez spent his childhood. Some of them are now even makeshift museums. There is, for instance, the Casa del telegrafista, behind the town church, where his father worked as a telegraphist. The visitor is able to see some of the early twentieth-century tools he used. The place is decorated with yellowed news clippings about the future Nobel laureate, his parents’ romantic liaison, and the publication of major works such as One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera among some sculptures and drawings by local talent. Given the site’s extraordinarily limited resources, most of the items on display are exposed to the elements—humidity being foremost among them—and are in a slow state of decay.
There is Doctor Antonio Barbosa’s pharmacy, where Gabriel Eligio would leave messages for his beloved Luisa Santiaga. Pharmacists play a curious role in García Márquez’s oeuvre. In the primal landscape of the Caribbean, à la Gustave Flaubert, they are the promoters of scientific knowledge in society. And there is the Iglesia de San José, where García Márquez was baptized, the Calle de los Camellones, where he played on his way to and from school, and the train station, where a yellow train arrived at 11 A.M. every day, a scene that is depicted in One Hundred Years of Solitude. García Márquez attended preschool and the first grade at a local Montessori school. The school was established by María Elena Fergusson, a teacher from Riohacha who taught h
im how to read and who first ignited his incipient interest in poetry. Years later, he confessed that as a child one of his favorite characters was Sleeping Beauty.
According to García Márquez, the most famous house in Aracataca belonged to the parochial priest Francisco C. Angarita, who baptized him and his entire generation. Father Angarita was famous for his irascible mood and his moralizing sermons. As a child, García Márquez didn’t know that Father Angarita had taken a very concrete and consequential position in support of the strike of the banana workers in 1928, and the priest was also an informant for Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the lawyer and later left-wing political figure martyred during El Bogotazo, who represented the case of the workers after the massacre.24 But for purposes of this biography, unquestionably the most important site in Aracataca is García Márquez’s family home.
“My most constant and vivid memory is not so much of the people but of the actual house in Aracataca where I lived with my grandparents,” he once said. “Every single day of my life I wake up with the feeling, real or imaginary, that I’ve dreamt I’m in that huge old house. Not that I’ve gone back there, but that I am there, at no particular age, for no particular reason—as if I’d never left it.”25
The family home, now known as the Casa Museo Gabriel García Márquez, has been reconstructed to satisfy tourists’ needs. The campesino couple who bought the house from García Márquez sold it to another family, who in turn sold it to the municipality, which planned to turn it into a museum. While changing hands, a large portion of the house was demolished to make room for a more modern structure. When the municipality finally bought it, a group of researchers studied the architecture of the town in the early decades of the twentieth century and analyzed the foundation of the house. Thanks to this endeavor, García Márquez’s family home is now restored to its original condition.