Solitude & Company

by Silvana Paternostro

  In No One Writes to the Colonel, the colonel is a retired veteran who awaits his government pension and was present at the signing of the Treaty of Neerlandia, the peace treaty that ended the war.

  2

  Raised by Grandparents

  In which his first eight years living with his grandparents are explained, and what happens to him when his grandfather, the colonel, dies

  MARGOT GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: In Aracataca we lived with my grandfather, my grandmother, Gabito, and our aunt Mama, whose real name was Francisca Mejía, the first cousin of our grandfather Nicolás Ricardo Márquez Mejía. She never married and was a person of strong character. For example, she was the one who kept the keys to the church and the keys to the cemetery. One day they came to ask for the keys to the cemetery because they had to bury a dead person. Aunt Mama went to look for the keys, but she began to do something else and forgot about them. About two hours later she remembered, but the dead person had to wait until she appeared with the blessed keys. Nobody dared to say anything to her there. Aunt Mama was also the one who baked the hosts for the church, which she did in my grandfather’s house. I remember that Gabito and I were happy to eat the trimmings from the hosts.

  EDUARDO MÁRCELES DACONTE: Until he was eight years old, García Márquez lived in Aracataca. Well, let me tell you that the relationship between García Márquez and my family is a longstanding one. García Márquez’s grandfather was a good friend of my grandfather, Antonio Daconte. The colonel would go to my grandfather’s store, in what was called the Four Corners, the important part of Aracataca. They would sit in a little room my grandfather had to the side of his store. He wasn’t the one doing the selling in the store. That grandfather was the colonel waiting for his pension that never arrived. He was the colonel who took part in the Thousand-Day War. This was at the beginning of the century and so he had been promoted to colonel. He often visited my grandfather and drank black coffee, and they exchanged ideas there and talked about the things that were happening in the world, in the country. My grandfather had a regular get-together. Three or four thermoses, filled with black coffee, some cups and sugar and everything, and people came and visited him and sat in the chairs he had there. So one of these people was García Márquez’s grandfather. Sometimes García Márquez’s grandfather brought his grandson to my grandfather’s.

  MARGOT GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: Ah! Our grandfather was happy with us. They say he laughed a lot over this story about Gabito, which they told me afterward. When he was very little he was sitting in the doorway of the house to watch the soldiers march past on their way to the banana plantations. Once he came running in, very excited, and he said to our grandfather: “Papa Lelo! Papa Lelo! The bolgers went by” (he meant soldiers, but he still didn’t speak very well). “Well, well, my boy, and what did they say to you?” Grandfather asked him. ‘Hiya, cute little Gabi.” A liar since he was born.

  IMPERIA DACONTE: He was adorable. Little, good-looking. We were more or less the same age. He was the only boy who lived with the colonel. Our courtyard was very big. Since the house is so big, the part of the yard in the next street was García Márquez’s courtyard. We would go to his house very often for guavas; he had an immense yard of fruit trees. His grandmother, old Tranquilina, would give us lots of fruit, guavas and everything.

  MARGOT GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: Until Gabito was born, Grandfather Nicolás passed for a very serious, very reserved man, and so my mother treated him with a great deal of respect and even with some distance. But as soon as his grandson was born he melted, he changed. His seriousness went to the devil. He became loving, affectionate, he played with us, sat us on his knee, got down on all fours so we could ride him, as if he were a donkey. His friends protested: “How can you do something like that, Nicolás Márquez: look how you’ve ended up!” Grandfather loved Gabito so much that he decided to celebrate his birthday every month. A party every month to celebrate him. He invited his friends to toast Gabito’s “birthmonth.” He brought us animals as presents; we had parrots, macaws, troupials, there was even a sloth in the courtyard, which was planted with fruit trees. The sloth lived hanging from the jackfruit tree, which was as tall as a palm, and the animal climbed to the top and began to throw down fruits, which were like custard apples. Grandmother parboiled them and everybody came by to eat. They tasted like potatoes.

  EDUARDO MÁRCELES DACONTE: Don’t forget that his parents had twelve children.

  MARGOT GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: Every day Grandfather took us to visit my mother. This is what we did: in the afternoon, Aunt Mama changed our clothes, our shoes, and made us look good. I remember that Grandmother would say: “Now, Nicolasito, take them so their mother can see them.” And our grandfather took Gabito and me, each of us holding one of his hands, for a little turn (as our grandfather said), and when we passed my mother’s house, he would stop for a while, caressing Luis Enrique and Aida, picking up Ligia and Gustavo (the family kept growing), talked about something or other with my father, and then continued the little turn.

  I remember that Gabito and I always arrived nice and clean, recently combed (we always wore shoes and socks, they never allowed us to go barefooted in case worms crawled in, in case animals bit us, in case something stuck to us), and we found those crazy siblings, especially Luis Enrique and Aida, as mischievous, disobedient, quarrelsome as they were, out roaming the streets all day.

  IMPERIA DACONTE: The colonel went every night to visit my father. Since he had a shop and all, there was a lot of activity in that house. They’d put out a tray with lots of little cups of black coffee. And all Father’s friends would go there at night to drink coffee. I don’t know what they talked about because I was very little. García Márquez was there, very small, and so were we.

  EDUARDO MÁRCELES DACONTE: My grandfather, Antonio Daconte, when he came to Aracataca from Italy, must have been very good-looking. He had five wives, just imagine, he even married two sisters. That is, first one, then he divorced and married the other one. That’s why I’m explaining these things to you, so you can see where they come from, often even things Gabo forgot about because this would have been interesting. My grandfather came and married María Calle first and with her he had five sons. Then he divorced María Calle and married Manuela, who’s my grandmother and was younger. The two sisters never talked to each other again. If one saw the other coming down the street, she crossed to the other side. But never again, until they died, they never spoke again . . . With María he had five sons. Galileo, Amadeo, Antonio, Pedro, Rafael. And with my grandmother Manuela he had five daughters.

  His daughters were Elena, Yolanda, María, Imperia. Imperia is my mother . . . Elena is Nena Daconte, the name of the character in the story “The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow.” She’s my mother’s sister. She liked the idea that he used her name, but she also didn’t make a big deal about it.

  MARGOT GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: Well . . . but I’ll go on with the story of the little turn, which continued from my mother’s house down to the Turks’ corner, which was the place where the politicians met, and Grandfather spent some more time talking there. Gabito didn’t leave him, he was always listening to what they were talking about; in the meantime, I began to look in the windows of the Turks’ grocery stores. There were four corners and I went from one to the other looking in windows. Since then I have the habit of looking in store windows. Even today it fascinates me to walk and look in store windows.

  EDUARDO MÁRCELES DACONTE: Back then my grandfather, as I was telling you, had a very big, very pretty house on the corner, and it was like the meeting place for people in Aracataca. My grandfather also imported billiards and what they called buchácara, or pool. The wooden house is still there. I hope they never knock it down. In the courtyard, which was where they showed movies, they now have costume parties, bring in an orchestra, and rent it out for carnival dances. One of the columns that Gabo wrote in El Espectador he dedicated to my grandfather. There he talks about how he went to visit my grandfather and went over to
the large water jar and tried to see, to take out the water and see where the elves were. The jars are made of clay and are used to keep water cool and often they have something like a filter over them. They keep them anywhere. They have glasses and the dipper to take out the water and the water jar on a wooden base. The stand. Aha. They came and poured in the water. I remember that back then there was no aqueduct in Aracataca, what we had were water sellers, they were the ones who brought in water on burros, they got it in the ditch (there was no pollution back then) and took the water coming directly from the river. There was no danger at all. By then there was an aqueduct, but for a long time I remember that you bought two cans, three cans of water. “Give me four cans of water.” The cans were those cans of lard where they attached a wooden crosspiece in the middle with nails. The story is that he remembered that when he was little they had told him that little people lived at the bottom of all the water jars. So he would go and try to get them out. He would go put his glass deep in the jug trying to find the elves. It has a name that escapes me for the moment, but he wrote a very good column about this subject. And I remember that my grandfather’s water jar was really immense, and all the cousins would go running there to get water. A delicious, cool water. A water that tasted of I don’t know what, I’ve never had that taste of water again, it was mossy, it tasted of moss, of dampness, I don’t know. Because there’s water that’s metallic in a way . . .

  MARGOT GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: The little turn ended at bedtime and we went home to go to bed. Then, yes, my grandmother, who had been busy all day with household matters, put me in the bed, taught me to pray, sang to me, and told me stories until I fell asleep.

  EDUARDO MÁRCELES DACONTE: There was no electricity in Aracataca. I was very small and I remember that people used candles and kerosene lamps that have a little thing on top. They’re beautiful. People used those lamps a lot. I remember that I walked down the street holding a lamp. In that darkness people get together and there’s no television. There’s always someone who tells the little kids mystery stories, horror stories, scary stories. I remember then that I was panicked when it was time to go to sleep in my bed after the stories that an uncle would tell sometimes, and sometimes my father, my mother, somebody, an older cousin. Or sometimes you’d go to the farms and the overseer always had his stories and he’d tell you those stories, those scary stories. All that. A lot of that. That’s why I say that Gabo’s memory is important because he remembered many of the things he had been told. Things many people don’t remember. He has the memory of an elephant.

  IMPERIA DACONTE: They sent him to the Fergusson’s Montessori, they lived close by.

  EDUARDO MÁRCELES DACONTE: There was a teacher he had who was terrific. They’ve done a lot of interviews in that town because Gabo said he had learned a great deal with her. I also believe that Gabito saw his first film thanks to my grandfather. The only one who had a movie theater was my grandfather. He had his own electricity generator, an old thing, out back, so you wouldn’t hear the noise. Later they set one up for the whole town.

  IMPERIA DACONTE: The colonel was godfather to María, my sister. And María would say: “Papi, my godfather’s house has been sad since he died.” “That’s how it will stay,” my father would say. I was very little when he died. The colonel died first. His wife stayed because she had a lot of family.

  EDUARDO MÁRCELES DACONTE: Gabito lived in Aracataca until he was eight. When his grandfather dies, he goes to Sucre because his father had been transferred there.

  MARGOT GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: I remember the funeral very well because I cried the whole blessed day, nothing could console me. Gabito wasn’t with us because he had gone with my father and Luis Enrique to Sincé on another of the adventures that my father would undertake. Gabito returned to Aracataca several months after the death of Papá Lelo and perhaps for that reason I don’t recall his reaction; it surely had to be deep sadness because they loved each other very much, they were inseparable. The two of us continued living a little while longer with my grandmother, Aunt Mama and Aunt Pa, whose name was Elvira Carrillo and who was the illegitimate daughter of my grandfather Nicolás, that is, my mother’s half sister. Aunt Pa was a very good woman, she took care of my grandmother until she died with total dedication, as if she had been her own daughter.

  We lived in my grandmother’s house until the money began to run out and she had to live on what my uncle Juanito sent her; then they decided that Gabito and I would stay in our father’s house, in Sucre. The family had moved there.

  MARGARITA DE LA VEGA: For the first time he lives with his parents, who by now are in a better financial situation. By now his sister had been born, the one who later became a nun.

  CARMELO MARTÍNEZ: Sucre was a very important town, but by the 1940s floods had caused a great deal of damage. It was a town with seven or eight thousand inhabitants. To get to Sucre you have to go to Magangué. In Magangué you take a boat with an outboard motor and go to Sucre. It depends, in a boat with two outboard motors of 100 or 150 horsepower each you get there in forty-five minutes.

  Gabito lived in Sucre until he went to Barranquilla. Well, he was studying at the San José Academy, in Barranquilla, with the Jesuits. I met him in Sucre around 1940 (we were both thirteen) because his house, where his father, Dr. García, lived, was across from mine.

  JUANCHO JINETE: As a boy he studied here in Barranquilla, at the Colegio San José.

  MARGOT GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: That’s why when they sent Gabito to study for his diploma at the San José, in Barranquilla, I felt abandoned. I had always been very close to him, he was so loving, we seemed like twins. He finished primary school in Sucre, and when he was eleven or twelve, barely three months after we went to live in my parents’ house, he went to Barranquilla and I was left all alone. The shock was tremendous. The calm and order I was used to disappeared, but what I missed most was my affection for my grandparents; I couldn’t get close to my mother because she had no time, bringing up so many kids, and my father, even less so. He always seemed distant to me, so much so that all my brothers and sisters called him “tú” except for me; I called him “usted.”

  CARMELO MARTÍNEZ: He always had a writer’s calling because at the Colegio San José, in Barranquilla, he put out a little paper. I mean he basically was a writer, a journalist. He didn’t talk about novels. That came later.

  MARGOT GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: He was a great student, he won prizes, medals for excellence, the best at the academy. Back then, the prizes they gave to the best students were little books about the Mass because, of course, it was a Jesuit academy; well, Gabito sent me the book they had given him, with a dedication to me; he sent me illustrated cards, medals, rosaries, everything they gave him he would send to me. I also wrote to him in Barranquilla, to the house of Uncle Eliécer García, the brother of our grandmother Argemira (my father’s mother), where he was living. Ay! How happy I was when Gabito came home for vacation. Again the two of us were very close, I tried to get the best for him, I fixed him his little slices of fried plantains that he liked so much.

  García Márquez at thirteen years old.

  QUIQUE SCOPELL: I met him with Ricardo González Ripoll, my cousin, because they left here to study in Zipaquirá. We went up the Magdalena River in boats back when you had to go to Bogotá by boat and all that.

  The three of us traveled by boat. I began to study in Bogotá, but I was in love and love was stronger than my studies, and since then I’ve been a drunkard all my life, that was when I began to drink rum. And then as a punishment they sent me to study in the United States.

  FERNANDO RESTREPO: Gabo says that the National Academy of Zipaquirá was where he discovered his passion for literature and the novel, stimulated by a teacher who started him reading. I once asked him: “Hey, and how did you ever end up in Zipaquirá?” Then he tells me that his scholarship was for an academy in Bogotá but there was no more room and that finally they found him a place in the academy in Zipaquirá, and so he went there. I didn�
��t know the school except that when he came to spend a weekend at my finca there, we passed by the school, and he looked at it and pointed out where he had been. It’s an official academy that had a lot of boarders.

  Only males. That is, it wasn’t an important school. It wasn’t known outside of local boundaries.

  CARMELO MARTÍNEZ: He went to Zipaquirá to finish his baccalaureate, and then he went to law school.

  MARGARITA DE LA VEGA: When they gave him the Nobel, his father gave an interview to the Diario de la Costa and mentioned all the towns where he had lived, saying that Gabo hadn’t invented anything. That the story of Remedios, of course, was Señora So-and-so, whose daughter or granddaughter had run away with some guy . . . She said that in fact the sheets had carried her away when she was hanging out the clothes, and she had disappeared. Divine. I kept that interview for a long time. Back then, remember, it was all newspaper clippings. In that interview, he said that the priests at San José had said that Gabo was schizophrenic and that he had cured him with some homeopathic drops. I imagine Gabo had an unusual imagination and had matured very quickly because he had grown up only with old people. And that happens when children grow up alone with old people or are very close to old people. He was like that back then.

  JAIME ABELLO BANFI: Gabo was a clairvoyant. Or is a clairvoyant, excuse me. I mean, at that time he was clairvoyant in terms of his own culture. That is, a man very much of the Colombian Caribbean, who in one of his earliest articles is already talking about the problems of Colombian literature. He’s a kid of twenty and he’s already passing judgment on the Colombian novel. Incredible.