MARÍA LUISA ELÍO: He gave me pieces to read. What Gabo had written at night, he would read us parts the next day . . . And from that first moment you realized it was a marvel. He knew it.
GUILLERMO ANGULO: No, he didn’t know. In fact, he was very doubtful that it would be a good novel. When it was published, he sent me a copy. I read it. I liked it a great deal. He sent me another copy. I don’t have my copy because I had to pass it on to Germán Vargas, and Germán Vargas had to pass it on to Plinio. And I ought to tell you something that I don’t believe anyone has told you and that no one is going to tell you: Plinio reprimanded him because it was anti-Communist. “What? The country’s full of problems and you’re writing a fairy tale?”
MARÍA LUISA ELÍO: One isn’t a fool and I can be very cutting where literature is concerned. I mean, whomever it is can be a very famous writer, and if I don’t like it, I don’t like it. So I read it and I knew that this Señor García Márquez was very great. I didn’t doubt it for a second . . .
I thought the book was really good. But I’ll be frank with you: to that degree, no.
SANTIAGO MUTIS: They lost control of the situation. Abroad and in Colombia too. Because Gabo became an event, a phenomenon. Everyone kneeled down before him. I don’t know whether Gabo tells this or Tomás Eloy Martínez. One week after they published the novel there, Gabo travels to Buenos Aires not because of One Hundred Years of Solitude but to be a judge at a fiction competition. One night they go to the theater, and when Gabo goes in someone recognizes him, the entire audience gets up and applauds him. That’s where it began. And it hasn’t stopped! It didn’t stop. Ever. That is, they never left him alone.
RODRIGO MOYA: On November 29, 1966, Gabriel García Márquez visits me in my home in the Condesa Building, accompanied by his wife Mercedes, so that one of my photographs would illustrate the first edition. I took the photographs in my house, which had a good deal of natural light. He arrived wearing a plaid jacket. He loved those plaids. He looked impassive but he certainly was conscious of the camera. He was conscious that he had created a masterpiece. He had already written a great deal, he had already had success, and throughout the work you can breathe the certainty that only geniuses have. I had that impression then. Of course, not the magnitude. Gabo was just thirty-nine years old. But a foretelling of what was to come.
B.C.
BEFORE CIEN AÑOS DE SOLEDAD
Photo of wedding between Gabriel
Eligio and Luisa Santiaga.
1
The Son of Luisa Santiaga and Gabriel Eligio
How the son of the telegraph operator in Aracataca begins to collect stories in the cradle
RAFAEL ULLOA: Gabo wasn’t born in 1928, but in 1927. He says he was born in ’28 to coincide with the slaughter on the banana plantations,* but it was his brother who was born in ’28.
LUIS ENRIQUE GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: Until 1955 I thought I had come into this world on September 8, 1928, after my mother’s nine months of pregnancy. But it happened that in that year of 1955, Gabito wrote The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor in El Espectador and he had difficulties with the government of General Rojas Pinilla. Then he had to leave the country, for which he needed a certain document, and in that document, I don’t know why, it was stated that Gabito was born on March 6, 1928—that is, the same year I was born, something which left me in a difficult situation: either being the only six-month premature baby on record who weighed ten pounds two ounces, or almost his twin. He never corrected the date, but the one who was born in 1928, in Aracataca, Magdalena, was me. Gabito was born on March 6 of ’27.
RAMÓN ILLÁN BACCA: Luisa, Gabo’s mother, was a well-regarded person. They were what we would call well-regarded people. What were well-regarded people back then? They were people valued by the people of the provincial upper class, because we’re talking about the upper-class people of Santa Marta. As the Bogotanos would say: “You’re decent people from the hot land.” Luisa studied at the Colegio de la Presentación in Santa Marta, which was the secondary school for the high class. But they were just well regarded. That is, they were people invited to some parties and not to others. It all depends on what party it was. Señor García, his father, I don’t think he was even well regarded.
RAFAEL ULLOA: Gabriel Eligio García is the father. My mother is first cousin to García Márquez’s father. So my mother told me a little about family issues. And I’m a great fan of García Márquez. I’ve read all his books. I’m from Sincé, of course. It’s the hometown of this gentleman’s father. Sincé, spelled with a c. The town was called San Luis de Sincé. But for people it was Sincé.
CARMELO MARTÍNEZ: Luisa Santiaga, Gabito’s mother, was a white lady, short, with a wart right here. White. The same age as my mother. My mother was born in 1904 and Luisa in the same year. She’s about ninety-six years old. She doesn’t know anything anymore.
RAFAEL ULLOA: Carlos H. Pareja is from Sincé and is related to Gabito’s father. And, well, Carlos had good connections. He helped Gabo’s father so he could begin to study medicine but he ran out of dough and then, since he was in a bad situation, they told him: “Don’t fuck around, do something. Find a job.” And then he was appointed telegraph operator in Aracataca. When he went there he fell in love with Luisa Santiaga Márquez, who was the daughter of Colonel Márquez. His mother was a very peaceful woman, Luisa Santiaga Márquez. She was a good friend of my mother’s.
JAIME GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: They say that Gabriel Eligio García, my father, came to Aracataca as a telegraph operator and saw Luisa, my mother, one day and liked the girl right away. One day he approached her and said: “After carefully analyzing the women I’ve met in Aracataca, I have reached the conclusion that the one who suits me best”—that’s how he said it, suits me—“is you. I want to marry you, think it over; but if you decide not to, tell me and don’t worry, because I’m not dying for you.” I think what happened was that he was dying of fear that she would turn him down, and to protect himself he made that ridiculous declaration. And I think so because we’re all the same: very affectionate with our women.
RAMÓN ILLÁN BACCA: Not even the colonel, Luisa’s father, wanted Gabriel Eligio. He was on a lower level, and the people cared a great deal about these levels back then because they were small places and everyone lived closer together.
LUIS ENRIQUE GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: From the beginning, the marriage was nomadic. They married in Santa Marta, went to Riohacha for their honeymoon and settled there; they returned to Aracataca when Gabito was about to be born, and then, when I was about four months old, we went to Barranquilla; all that moving around in just two and a half years, between June 1926, when they married, and January 1929, when we went to Barranquilla. As you know, Gabito stayed in Aracataca with our grandparents.
CARMELO MARTÍNEZ: He was raised by his maternal grandparents, who didn’t call him Gabrielito but Gabito, and so he was called Gabito. I call him Gabito. Not Gabo.
RAFAEL ULLOA: Besides, Colonel Márquez was a liberal and had fought in the War of a Thousand Days.* And this guy [Gabriel Eligio], who was from Sincé, was a Goth [a Conservative]. “Don’t fuck with me, I don’t want anything to do with that sonuvabitch Goth here. Send the girl to another town.” Then, since Gabriel Eligio was a telegraph operator, he began to send Luisa messages along the telegraph wires and in the end they married because they couldn’t hide.
PATRICIA CASTAÑO: In 1926, when this Señor García arrives in Aracataca as a telegraph operator and they [Luisa Santiaga’s family] begin to oppose him, they decide to take this trip so that this gentleman will forget about her and they can introduce her to her family that had remained in Barrancas, and to her new friends. They leave Aracataca and go down toward Valledupar, they go around the Sierra. And they pass through Valledupar and through Patillal until they come to Barrancas. It’s the first time that Tranquilina [Gabo’s grandmother] goes back there. It was very far. It looked as if it were on the corner, but it was very far and they spent two or three months getti
ng there. There wasn’t even a highway. We’re talking about 1926 or ’27. They traveled by mule along horse paths at the edge of the Sierra, and they stayed there. They kept in touch through the telegraph operators. There I heard that she kept the telegrams under the fireboxes in the stove. Who would have thought of looking for them there? Imagine that beneath every firebox there was something like a metal plate. And she placed the letters beneath that firebox. She knew that messages went from telegraph office to telegraph office. Back then they were called Marconi. She knew that in the telegraph office was his message that arrived on yellow paper.
We went to Barrancas with Gerald Martin, the English biographer, and several of García Márquez’s siblings. They took us to the places where there are pools in the river, where they had outings, and there are references in her letters to their going on an excursion to the river. Then yes, that trip was marvelous and the most impressive thing is that fireboxes still exist. There are fireboxes in a back corner of some houses. You still find people who cook on these fireboxes or who keep the firebox on the floor.
AIDA GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: Gabito’s arrival united the family, because when my father came from Riohacha to Aracataca, Gabito had been born and thanks to that they gave him a warm welcome; and so everything was arranged, and since my grandparents were the godparents at the baptism, they also became compadres. My grandfather Nicolás began to call my father “my compadre Gabriel Eligio.” And then it happened that the grandson was staying, staying to live in my grandparents’ house. Then Luis Enrique was born and my parents went to live in Barranquilla, where Margot was born, who was always sick because she ate dirt (like Rebeca in One Hundred Years of Solitude). My granny went to Barranquilla to visit and she thought Margot was undernourished, so then she told my mother to let her take her, that she would give her iron and take care of her, and so Margot began living with my grandparents too. In Barranquilla my father had a successful pharmacy; my mother went back and forth between Aracataca and Barranquilla to visit my grandparents and to see Gabito and Margot.
CARMELO MARTÍNEZ: Gabriel García Martínez was dark, Indian dark, not black dark. A very imaginative man. Gabito’s imagination was due to his father’s imagination. He was a very interesting man. Imaginative.
RAFAEL ULLOA: His father was also half a doctor. In the family there were always not only pharmacists but herbalists and some witches. There was a man in our family, on the Paternina side, that they say prepared certain pomades and then . . . “What a powerful pomade, it works against every poison.” He would spread the pomade on his hand and let a snake bite him. Of course, the snake had no poison, but he performed his pantomime in the crowded square. He lived around Sincé. Gabito uses that guy in his stories.
CARMELO MARTÍNEZ: Besides, his father was a Conservative like me.
RAFAEL ULLOA: Very few people know that his father almost wasn’t really García but Martínez. They should be Martínez, not García. He should be Gabriel Martínez Márquez not Gabriel García Márquez. You know that in the past, in the small towns, there was a problem. Many children were born out of wedlock and Gabo’s father was born out of wedlock, and so he took his mother’s name, García. Argemira García was the daughter of a Señor García who had arrived in Sincé with Lozana Paternina. This Lozana Paternina was the sister of my grandfather, my mother’s father. And so I knew Gabito. When they gave him the Nobel Prize, the story came out. But they killed it because . . . don’t fuck around, he’s a huge writer. How do you say he’s an illegitimate child now out there?
JAIME GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: Besides being a telegraph operator, an occupation that was so ephemeral that sometimes it seems to me it wasn’t even real and that it’s an invention of Gabito’s, my father was a versatile man who recited verses and played the violin.
MARGARITA DE LA VEGA: When I met his father he was one of those men who sat—they do it much less now, in Cartagena, what with all the tourism—in the Plaza de Bolívar, that is, the square that’s outside the Palace of the Inquisition and the city hall. The one where they have a folklore dancer now every afternoon. The locals would sit there and talk, especially at dusk and things like that. My father never sat there because he didn’t have the time, he would converse at other times, because he was a doctor, and his office was nearby. And an uncle, for example, who was the wastrel of the family and didn’t do anything, passed his time sitting there.
Luis Carlos López, “One-Eyed López,” the great poet, would sit there and tell stories. Back then it was a kind of bohemian thing, the people who would sit there and sometimes drink rum too. García Márquez’s father loved to tell stories and he sat there too.
He lived in a lot of places and failed a lot of times. He had many professions. He was a telegraph operator. In other words, he’s the character in Love in the Time of Cholera. The one who comes to town and is the telegraph operator and falls in love with Gabo’s mother, who at that moment is the daughter of the man with the best reputation in town. We’re talking now about Aracataca, not Cartagena. And one who has distinguished family names. Colonel Márquez. The Márquez Iguarán is a family with a certain tradition in the town. The Iguarán comes from the Guajira region. The Márquez comes from Santa Marta and from Fundación, and then she’s the prettiest girl in town. And she was very pretty. I met her when she was an old woman and you still could see how pretty she had been. He was homelier. Even as an old man you could see he was homelier. He took some long-distance courses in pharmacy and he was a pharmacist. Then he became a homeopathic practitioner.
CARMELO MARTÍNEZ: He died here in Cartagena, buying paychecks. They never pay the teachers. Other people buy their paychecks at a discount. And that’s how they live.
JOSÉ ANTONIO PATERNOSTRO: If the person was going to earn a hundred, the buyer would say: “Fine, I’ll give you eighty. Here it is, and you tell the company to pay me a hundred and I’ll earn the difference.” That’s the deal. It’s called buying paychecks. The buyer of the paycheck anticipates the person’s salary.
That’s how they used to do it. In the park. In the square of the town. Men would need the money, so they’d find someone who tells them: “I’ll give it to you but let’s go here.” In Cartagena it was the Plaza de Bolívar, outside the city hall and the Palace of the Inquisition. Then they’d buy the paycheck, they’d go to the government paymaster’s office and say: “Don’t you pay them. He’s signed this over to me and you pay me.” It was perfectly legal. I’ll give you an example: Marco Fidel Suárez, who was president of Colombia. Marco Fidel Suárez was a poor man, son of a washerwoman, and, they say, of General Obando. Marco Fidel Suárez was elected president and his mother fell gravely ill. They hadn’t paid him his president’s salary, and he negotiated the salary for two or three months with a moneylender who was in Bogotá back then, and who lent him the money. He instructed the paymaster of the Presidency of the Republic at that time not to pay him but to pay so-and-so.
They threw Suárez out of the presidency because the politicians of the day considered it undignified for the president to sell his paycheck.
CARMELO MARTÍNEZ: Since the world began that’s existed. Of course it has, honey.
RAMÓN ILLÁN BACCA: I’ll dare to say that everything about Brussels and García Márquez is based on hearsay because his family wasn’t one of those that went to Brussels. He didn’t have money or land. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, one of the Buendías goes to Brussels at the end, right? It was the fashion to go to study in Brussels. But that was information he had heard, it didn’t come from his family. My aunts had lived ten years in Brussels, and before Brussels, they were sent to Antwerp.
Tranquilina would sometimes spend the night in my aunts’ house, one of those ancestral houses where there was food for everyone who came by. Huge tables. Prepared for when a compadre from Aracataca or Guacamaya would arrive because they had a farm, or were related to the overseer, or something like that. Since the people had to come on the morning train to spend the afternoon doing their wor
k and then could catch the train the next day to go back to Aracataca. They couldn’t do everything in the same day. Then they would have to spend the night in Santa Marta. Then that was their connection to my aunts’ house. When García Márquez brought out One Hundred Years of Solitude, my aunts’ response was this: “Ay, who would have thought that Tranquilina’s grandson would be so intelligent?” That was the response.
* On December 5 and 6, 1928, in the town of Ciénaga, near Santa Marta (also close to Aracataca where García Márquez was born), the Colombian army shot at a group of workers of the United Fruit Company protesting poor working conditions. It is known as the Banana Massacre. The event looms so large in García Márquez’s own history that he changed the year of his birth to coincide with the year of the incident. He writes about the massacre in One Hundred Years of Solitude, claiming that the army killed three thousand workers. In a twist that feels appropriate for “magical realism,” it is this account that entered the annals of Colombian history.
** The War of a Thousand Days is the name given to a civil armed conflict that lasted about one thousand days, from 1989 to 1902. Colombia was a country of two political parties: the Conservative Party, close to the feudal ways of traditional landowners and the clergy, and the Liberal Party of the rising mercantile class, which believed in liberal ideas and the separation of state and religion. The conflict began when the Liberals accused the ruling Conservative Party of fraudulent elections. Up until very recently, the division between the Liberals and the Conservatives was such that people didn’t marry outside party lines. Everyone knew if a family was Liberal or Conservative. García Márquez grew up in a Liberal household. His grandfather Nicolás García fought in the war. García Márquez has said that all the Liberal characters including Aureliano Buendía, the founder of Macondo, take after his beloved grandfather.
Solitude & Company Page 2