The first version I heard was as convincing as any that followed. Filemón Estrada had been born in the very year the events took place. He was now completely sightless, and that long-ago story had retained for him a vividness which other testimonies had lost. Filemón said that Nicolás, who already had several illegitimate children, seduced Medarda Romero, the sister of his old friend General Romero, and then bragged about it over drinks in the square. There was a lot of gossip, most of it at Medarda’s expense but some of it involving Tranquilina. Medarda said to her son, “This slander must be washed clean with blood, my son, there’s no other way. And if you won’t see to him I’ll have to put on your trousers and you can put on my skirts!” Medardo, a skilled marksman who had ridden with Nicolás in the war, and now lived in nearby Papayal, repeatedly and publicly challenged and insulted his former commander, who took the warnings seriously and some time later lay in wait for the younger man. Medardo rode in to town on the day of the fiesta, dressed up in a white gabardine raincoat, and took a short cut down an alleyway that no longer exists. As he got down from his horse with a bunch of grass in one hand and a lighted pilgrim’s candle in the other, Nicolás said, “Are you armed, Medardo?” Medardo said “No.” “Well, you remember what I told you”—and Nicolás fired one, some say two shots. An old woman who lived down that alleyway came out and said, “So you finally killed him.” “The bullet of right has prevailed over might,” said Nicolás. “After that,” said blind Filemón, “old Nicolás Márquez charged off down the street, leaping over puddles, with his gun in one hand and his umbrella in the other, and looked for Lorenzo Solano Gómez, his compadre, who went with him to give himself up. He was jailed but later his son José María Valdeblánquez, who was very smart, and almost a lawyer, got him out of jail. Medardo being illegitimate, it wasn’t certain whether his surname was Pacheco or Romero, so Valdeblánquez said it wasn’t clear who exactly had been killed; it was a technicality, see, and that’s how Valdeblánquez got him off.”
None other than Ana Ríos, the daughter of Nicolás’s partner Eugenio, who surely had better reason to know than most, told me that Tranquilina was closely involved in the entire tragedy.4 She recalled that Tranquilina was intensely jealous, and with good reason because Nicolás was always deceiving her. Medarda was a widow and there is always talk about widows in small towns. It was widely rumoured that she was Nicolás’s regular mistress. Tranquilina became obsessed with this possibility, perhaps because Medarda was from a higher class, and therefore more dangerous, than his other conquests. It was said that Tranquilina consulted witches, brought water from the river to clean her threshold and sprinkled lemon juice around the house. Then one day—it is said—she went out into the street and shouted, “There’s a fire at widow Medarda’s place, fire, fire!,” whereupon a boy she had paid to wait in the tower of the the church of San José began to ring the alarm bells, and shortly thereafter Nicolás was seen sneaking out of Medarda’s house in broad daylight (presumably while his friend the General was away).
When he gave his statement to the authorities Nicolás Márquez was asked whether he admitted killing Medardo Romero Pacheco, and he said: “Yes, and if he comes back to life I’ll kill him again.” The Mayor, a Conservative, resolved to protect Nicolás. Deputies were despatched to collect Medardo’s body. He was placed face down in the rain and his hands were tied together behind his back before they carried him away. Most people accept that Medardo sought the confrontation and “asked for” what happened; this may be, although the bare facts seem to demonstrate that it was Nicolás who chose the time, the place and the manner of the final showdown. There is not enough information to appreciate how justified or reprehensible his action may have been; what is crystal clear is that there was nothing remotely heroic about it. Nicolás was not some sedentary farmer but a seasoned war veteran; and the man he killed by stealth was both his military inferior and his junior.
Many in Barrancas saw it as fate. The Spanish word for such an event is a desgracia, closer to bad luck than to disgrace, and it is said that many of Medardo’s family sympathized with the Colonel in his misfortune. Still, there was talk of a lynching and fear of a riot so as soon as it was safe to extricate him, they sent Nicolás under armed guard to Riohacha, his home town. Even there he was not considered secure and was moved to another prison in Santa Marta, on the other side of the Sierra Nevada.5 It seems an influential relative of Tranquilina’s got the sentence reduced to just a year in jail in Santa Marta with “the city as his prison” for the second year. Tranquilina, the children and other family members followed him there some months later. Some say he managed to buy his release with the proceeds of his craft; that he worked at his jewellery inside the jail and made fish, butterflies and chalices for sale and then bribed his way out. No one has yet found any documents relating to the case.
The García Márquez family never faced up to the full implications of this event and a sanitized version of the story was adopted. According to this version at some point a rumour emerged that Medarda, who was no spring chicken, was once more “doing some local man a favour.” One of Nicolás’s friends commented on this piece of gossip while they were drinking in the main square and Nicolás said, “I wonder if it’s true?” Medarda heard the story in a form which suggested that Nicolás himself had been peddling the rumour, and asked her son to defend her honour. In later years Luisa would often recall that in alluding to the almost unmentionable episode Tranquilina would say, “And all over a simple question.” In this version the gunfight is a “duel,” the dead man gets what he deserves and the killer becomes “the real victim” of the murder.6
In 1967, in the immediate aftermath of the success of One Hundred Years of Solitude (in which García Márquez gives a less idealized version of the murder than the rest of his family), Mario Vargas Llosa asked its author who the key person was in his childhood. García Márquez replied: “It was my grandfather. And note that he was a gentleman that I found afterwards in my books. He had to kill a man when he was very young. He lived in a town and it seems there was someone who was always bothering him and challenging him, but he took no notice until the situation became so difficult that he simply put a bullet in him. It seems that the town was so much in agreement with what he did that one of the dead man’s brothers slept that night in front of the door to the house, in front of my grandfather’s room, so that the dead man’s family would not come to avenge him. So my grandfather, who could no longer bear the threat that existed against him in that town, went elsewhere; that is to say, he didn’t just go to another town; he went far away with his family and founded a new town. Yes, he went and founded a town; yet what I most remember about my grandfather is him always saying to me, ‘You don’t know how much a dead man weighs.’”7 Many years after that García Márquez would say to me: “I don’t know why my grandfather had to be caught up in all that and why it all had to happen but they were tough times after the war. I still believe he just had to do it.”8
It may just be a coincidence but October would always be the gloomiest month, the time of evil augury, in Gabriel García Márquez’s novels.
MYSTERY SURROUNDS Nicolás Márquez’s movements after his ignominious departure from Barrancas.9 García Márquez’s mother Luisa gave different versions to different interlocutors.10 She told me that she and Tranquilina sailed from Riohacha to Santa Marta a few months after Nicolás was transferred to the prison there (Luisa was only four), that he was released after a year and the family then moved to nearby Ciénaga for a further year, arriving in Aracataca in 1910. This had become the official story. But people in Ciénaga insist that Nicolás and family spent three years there after his release from prison, from 1910 to 1913, and only moved to Aracataca in 1913.11 It may be that Nicolás used Ciénaga as a base from which to scout the region for new opportunities; if so, he might have begun to develop political and commercial interests in Aracataca, a mainly Liberal town, before moving his family there. It also seems likely however
that one reason for staying in Ciénaga, whether for one year or three, was the fact that Ciénaga was now the home of Isabel Ruiz, whom Nicolás had met in Panama in 1885, around the time of his marriage to Tranquilina, and who had given birth to his daughter María Gregoria Ruiz in 1886.
Ciénaga, unlike colonial Santa Marta, was modern, commercial, raucous and unrestrained; it was also a hub for regional transportation. It too is on the shores of the Caribbean; it was the connection with the Ciénaga Grande, or Great Swamp, across which steamboats travelled to make contact with road traffic heading either for the Magdalena River and Bogotá or for the rapidly growing commercial city of Barranquilla; and the first railway in the region ran from Santa Marta to Ciénaga after 1887 and then was extended between 1906 and 1908 to run down the spine of the Banana Zone to Aracataca and Fundación.
The Banana Zone is situated south of Santa Marta, between the Ciénaga Grande and the Magdalena River to the west, the Caribbean or Atlantic Ocean to the north, and the great swamp and the Sierra Nevada, whose highest peaks are called Columbus and Bolívar, to the east.12 In the broad plain between the western side of the mountains and the great swamp lay the small settlement called Aracataca, the birthplace of Gabriel García Márquez. Up above it rose the Sierra Nevada, home of the reclusive, peace-loving Kogi Indians. The first founders of Aracataca were quite different people, the warlike Chimilas, an Arawak Indian group. The tribe and its chief were called Cataca, “clear water.” Thus they renamed the river Cataca, and so their village was called Aracataca (“ara” being river in Chimila), the place of diaphanous waters.13
In 1887 planters from Santa Marta introduced banana cultivation into the region. In 1905 the Boston-based United Fruit Company moved in. Workers migrated from all over the Caribbean, including cachacos (the derisive costeño name for their compatriots from the interior of the country, especially Bogotá),14 and others from Venezuela, Europe, and even the Middle and Far East: the so-called “leaf-trash” vilified by the protagonists of García Márquez’s first novel Leaf Storm. Within a few years Aracataca was transformed from a small settlement to a thriving township, a “Wild West boom town,” in García Márquez’s phrase. It became a municipality, a fully functioning part of Colombia’s national political system, in 1915.
The real leader of the town was not Colonel Márquez, as his grandson would frequently claim, but General José Rosario Durán.15 Durán had several large plantations around Aracataca; he had led the Liberal forces in regional wars for two decades and was the effective leader of the Aracataca Liberals for almost half a century. Nicolás Márquez had been one of his close military subordinates, and became perhaps his most trusted political ally in Aracataca, during the 1910–13 period. It was Durán, then, who had helped Márquez to get installed in the town, to buy land out at Ariguaní and other properties in the town itself, and to acquire the posts of departmental tax collector and later municipal treasurer.16 These responsibilities, added to his military reputation, made Colonel Márquez undoubtedly one of the most respected and powerful members of the local community, though he was always dependent on Durán’s goodwill and subject to pressures from the Conservative government’s political appointees and the managers of the United Fruit Company.
García Márquez’s mother Luisa told me that Nicolás was named “departmental tax collector” of Aracataca early in the century,17 possibly in 1909, but did not take his family there immediately because of the poor sanitary conditions in the newly developing tropical boom town, at that time a village of fewer than two thousand people. Still, let us imagine them all arriving—Colonel Márquez, Doña Tranquilina, their three legitimate children, Juan de Dios, Margarita and Luisa, his illegitimate daughter Elvira Ríos, his sister Wenefrida Márquez, his cousin Francisca Cimodosea Mejía, and his three Indian servants, Alirio, Apolinar and Meme, bought for 100 pesos each in the Guajira—on the banana company’s yellow-painted train, full of optimism, on an exploratory visit, in August 1910. Unfortunately the zone around Aracataca was still unhealthy and plagued by disease, and tragedy struck the new arrivals almost immediately when twenty-one-year-old Margarita died of typhoid. Always pale, with her fair hair in two plaits, she was the Colonel’s pride and joy and he and his superstitious family may have interpreted her death as some kind of further punishment for his sins in Barrancas. Now she would never make the kind of marriage her parents were no doubt envisaging, and all their hopes would rest on little Luisa. Family tradition tells that shortly before she died, Margarita sat up in bed, looking at her father, and said: “The eyes of your house are going out.”18 Her pale presence would live on in the collective memory, especially, paradoxically, in a picture taken when she was ten years old; and the anniversary of the day she died, 31 December, would never again be celebrated in the large, comfortable house which the Colonel began to build near the Plaza Bolívar.
Nicolás Márquez, though never wealthy, and always hoping in vain for the pension promised to all veterans of the civil war, became one of the makeshift community’s local notables, a big fish in a small pool, the eventual owner of a large wooden residence with cement floors which in Aracataca would be considered—not least by his grandson Gabriel—a veritable mansion by comparison with the shacks and hovels that housed most of their fellow townsfolk.
THE COLONEL’S DAUGHTER Luisa was almost nineteen and her father had already turned sixty when in July of 1924 a new telegraphist named Gabriel Eligio García arrived in town from his native Sincé.19 By that time Aracataca had been enjoying the jai lai or “high life” for several years. Luisa had been sent to the Colegio de la Presentación, the most respected convent school in stuffy Santa Marta, though she had left at seventeen due to her delicate health. “She never went back because our grandparents said she looked very thin and worn and they were afraid she would die like her sister Margarita,” her daughter Ligia recalls.20 Luisa could sew and play the piano. She had been educated to embody the improvement in station that Nicolás and Tranquilina were looking for as consolation when they moved from the Guajira to the Banana Zone. So the Colonel was thunderstruck at the idea that his carefully groomed daughter might be falling in love with a dark-skinned no-account telegraphist from elsewhere, a man with no father and few prospects.
Nicolás Márquez and his daughter’s suitor, Gabriel Eligio García, had very little in common when they met except, ironically enough, a matter which is a recurrent theme of Gabriel García Márquez’s work: a collection of illegitimate children. Although Nicolás had been born in wedlock and Gabriel Eligio out of wedlock, each had engendered more than one illegitimate child by the time they married in their early twenties.
Gabriel Eligio had spent his childhood and youth in poverty, though little is known in detail of his early life—indeed, little detail seems to have been asked of him even by his children: it was always the Márquez side which counted, and the Guajira connection.21 We do know that he had half-brothers and half-sisters named Luis Enrique, Benita, Julio, Ena Marquesita, Adán Reinaldo and Eliécer. We also know that, with the help of relatives, he completed his secondary education—a notable achievement anywhere in the world in those days—and we hear that in the early 1920s he managed to begin some courses in the medical school of the University of Cartagena, but was soon forced to abandon them. He would later tell his children that his father, a teacher, had undertaken to fund his training but ran into financial problems and had to renege on his promise. Without the means to sustain his studies, he left home and looked for work in the Caribbean provinces of Córdoba and Bolívar, working mainly as a small-town telegraphist but also as a homeopathic physician, and travelling the entire frontier region of rivers, swamps and forests. He became possibly the first telegraphist of Magangué, then worked in Tolú, Sincelejo and other towns. At that time the position of telegraphist was undoubtedly reputable among the lower classes, depending as it did on modern technology in the machinery and literacy in the operator. It was also hard, demanding work. In Achí, a small town on the R
iver Cauca, south of Sucre, the first of his four illegitimate children, Abelardo, was born, when Gabriel Eligio was just nineteen, and in 1924 he ran into more trouble in Ayapel, on the border of Córdoba province and what is now Sucre province, on the edge of a vast swamp. There, in August 1924, he asked his first true sweetheart, Carmelina Hermosillo, to marry him after she gave birth to another child, Carmen Rosa. During a trip to Barranquilla to make the arrangements, he was apparently dissuaded by his relative Carlos Henrique Pareja from such a naive decision,22 and fled to the plantation town of Aracataca, where he again found work as a telegraphist. By then he was a practised seducer, hungry for sexual conquest wrapped up in poetry and love songs. Or, as his famous son would later put it, “a typical Caribbean guy of the era.” Meaning, among other things: talkative, extrovert, hyperbolic and dark or very dark of skin.
Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez Page 4