Gabriel García Márquez

by Gerald Martin

  He arrived in Colonel Nicolás Márquez’s house in Aracataca with a letter of recommendation from a priest in Cartagena who had known Colonel Márquez in earlier days. For this reason, according to Gabriel Eligio’s own version, the Colonel, famous for his hospitality, greeted him warmly, invited him to eat, and the next day took him to Santa Marta, where his wife Tranquilina and their only daughter Luisa were spending the summer by the seaside. At the station in Santa Marta, the Colonel bought a lark in a cage and gave it to Gabriel Eligio for him to give it in turn to Luisa as a present. This—which sounds frankly implausible—would have been the Colonel’s first mistake, even though, again according to Gabriel Eligio, he did not fall for Luisa at first sight. “To be honest,” he would recall, “I was not at all impressed by Luisa, even though she was very pretty.”23

  Luisa was no more impressed by Gabriel Eligio than he was by her. She always insisted that they met first not in Santa Marta but in Aracataca at the wake of a local child and that as she and the other young women sang to send the child on its way to a better place a male voice joined the choir, and when they all turned to see who it was they saw a handsome young man in a dark jacket with its four buttons done up. The other girls chorused, “We’re going to marry him,” but Luisa said that to her he seemed like “just another stranger.”24 Luisa, who was no pushover despite her lack of experience, was on her guard and for a long time she would rebuff each and every one of his advances.

  The telegraph office was opposite the church, behind the main square in Aracataca, close to the cemetery and just a couple of blocks from the Colonel’s house.25 The new arrival had a second letter of recommendation, this one to the parish priest. Whether the good Father noticed that the new arrival received frequent female visitors at advanced hours of the night we do not know but it is said that Gabriel Eligio had not only a hammock for himself but also a well-oiled bed for his lovers in the back room of the telegraph office. He was a talented amateur violinist whose party piece was “After the Ball,” the bittersweet waltz from America’s Gilded Age that exhorted young lovers not to miss their opportunities, and the priest invited him to play his violin with the choir of the so-called Daughters of the Virgin. This was like setting the fox to play with the chickens. One of his courtships involved a newly qualified local primary school teacher, Rosa Elena Fergusson, with whom a marriage was rumoured, so much so that at a party in Luisa’s house he joked with the Colonel’s daughter that she would be his principal matron or godmother. This joke, no doubt calculated to make Luisa jealous if she were in any way attracted to Gabriel Eligio, allowed them to call one another “godmother” and “godson” and to cloak their growing intimacy under the guise of a fictitious formal relationship which neither took seriously.

  Gabriel Eligio was a man who had a way with women and was good-looking to boot. Though far from cynical, he was shameless, and far more confident than anyone with his background, qualifications and talents had any right to be. People from his part of the country, the savannahs of Bolívar, were known as outgoing and rumbustious, in stark contrast to the apprehension, introspection and downright suspiciousness of those who hailed, like Nicolás Márquez and Tranquilina, from the frontier lands of the Guajira, still considered Indian territory in the early twentieth century. The Colonel’s affability in public belied a deep-rooted Guajiro clannishness, an attachment to old ways and places, and a wariness of outsiders. Besides, the last thing he needed was an unqualified son-in-law who would be an extra burden when he was surely looking for a successful union with a family much better heeled and at least as respectable as his own.

  Luisa was somewhat delicate and a little spoilt, the joy of her father’s life. Legend depicts her, perhaps exaggeratedly, as “the belle of Aracataca.”26 In fact she was not conventionally pretty but she was attractive, vivacious and refined, though perhaps a little eccentric and certainly rather dreamy. She was imprisoned in her house and social class by a father and mother whom she loved and respected but whose concern for her sexual and social security was neurotically reinforced by her own father’s wayward history.27 Moreover, as Gabito himself would note, the family was already nurturing a long, paradoxically “incestuous” tradition of rejecting all outside suitors, which turned the men into “furtive street hunters” and condemned the women, frequently, to spinsterhood. At any rate, Luisa was infinitely less experienced than the man who, eight months after his arrival in Aracataca, would fix his attention firmly upon her and set out to make her his wife.

  They started exchanging ardent looks at Sunday mass and in March 1925 Gabriel Eligio looked for a way to convey his feelings and ask her to marry him. He would pause beneath the almond trees in front of the house, where Luisa and her aunt Francisca Cimodosea Mejía would sit and sew at siesta time or in the early evening; occasionally he would get a chance to chat beneath the great chestnut tree inside the garden, with Aunt Francisca, scourge of Luisa’s several suitors, hovering close in chaperone mode, like the unfortunate Aunt Escolástica in Love in the Time of Cholera.28 Eventually, beneath that monumental tree, he made one of the least gallant proposals recorded in romantic folklore: “Listen, Señorita Márquez, I was awake all night thinking that I have a pressing need to marry. And the woman in my heart is you. I love no other. Tell me if you have any spiritual feelings towards me; but don’t feel you have to agree because I am certainly not dying of love for you. I will give you twenty-four hours to think it over.”29 He was interrupted by the redoubtable Aunt Francisca. But within twenty-four hours Luisa sent a note with one of the Indian servants proposing a secret meeting. She said she doubted his seriousness, he seemed so flirtatious; he said he would not wait, there were other fish in the pond. She asked for reassurance and he swore that if she accepted he would never love another. They agreed: they would be married to one another and to no other. “Only death” would stop them.

  The Colonel soon saw worrying signs of mutual infatuation and decided to nip the relationship in the bud, not realizing that by now it was fully in bloom. He closed his house to the telegraphist and refused to speak to him again. García’s courtship of their daughter was a bitter pill that Nicolás and Tranquilina were not prepared to swallow. On one occasion, when the Colonel was hosting a social event from which Gabriel Eligio could not be excluded, he was the only person in the room not invited to sit down. So intimidated was the young man that he even bought himself a gun. But he had no intention of leaving town. Luisa’s parents told her that she was too young, though she was twenty by then and Gabriel Eligio was twenty-four. No doubt they also pointed out that he was swarthy, illegitimate, a public employee attached to the odious Conservative regime against which the Colonel had fought in the war, and a member of the “leaf-trash,” the windblown human garbage from out of town. Still, the courtship continued clandestinely: outside the church after mass, on the way to the cinema, or at the window of the Colonel’s house when the coast was clear.

  Aunt Francisca told her cousin the Colonel about these new manoeuvres and he now took radical measures. He sent Luisa, escorted by Tranquilina and a servant, on a long journey to the Guajira, staying with friends and relatives along the way. Even today this remains an uncomfortable and arduous trek by road, because no modern highway has been completed. In those days much of it involved narrow pathways overlooking the precipices of the lower slopes of the Sierra Nevada, and Luisa had never previously ridden a mule.

  The Colonel’s plan failed completely. Luisa outwitted Tranquilina as easily as he himself had always done. The veteran of numerous battles had not counted on Gabriel Eligio working out his own “campaign strategy” and should not have underestimated the resources of a telegraphist. Love in the Time of Cholera recounts the entire story of the coded messages passed on by sympathetic telegraphists in every town the mother and daughter passed through. Ana Ríos recalled hearing that the telegraph communication was so effective that when Luisa was invited to a dance in Manaure she asked her prospective husband for permission to go
; the reply, in the affirmative, came back the same day and she danced until seven in the morning.30 It was thanks to the solidarity of his fellow telegraphists that, when mother and daughter arrived on the shore in Santa Marta early in 1926, Gabriel Eligio was waiting to greet his beloved as she stepped off the boat in a “romantic” pink dress.

  Luisa evidently refused to go back to Aracataca and stayed in Santa Marta with her brother Juan de Dios and his wife Dilia in the Calle del Pozo. What this defiance cost in terms of family dramas may well be imagined. Dilia herself had already been through the horrors of the Márquez Iguarán family’s clan-like hostility to outsiders and was only too happy to help out her sister-in-law, though Juan de Dios kept a watchful eye on both women on his father’s behalf. Gabriel Eligio would visit Luisa at weekends, under conditions of relative freedom, until in due course he was transferred to Riohacha, which was too far away for weekend visits. Luisa spoke to the parish priest of Santa Marta, Monsignor Pedro Espejo, formerly of Aracataca, who was a good friend of Colonel Márquez. The priest wrote to the Colonel on 14 May 1926 to persuade him that the two were hopelessly in love and that a marriage would avoid what he darkly termed “worse misfortunes.”31 The Colonel relented—he must have been aware that Luisa was only a few weeks away from her twenty-first birthday—and the young couple were married in the Cathedral of Santa Marta, at seven in the morning on 11 June 1926. It was the day of the Blessed Heart, emblem of the city.

  Gabriel Eligio would say he had refused to invite his new parents-in-law to the wedding because of a dream. It seems more likely that they had refused to attend. Mario Vargas Llosa, who received most of his information directly from García Márquez around 1969–70, says that the Colonel himself insisted that the couple should live “far from Aracataca.”32 When reminded of this, Gabriel Eligio always retorted that he had been more than happy to oblige. He confessed to his bride as they sailed, both seasick, to Riohacha, that he had seduced five virgins in his first years as a country Casanova and that he had two illegitimate children. Whether he told her anything about his mother’s record in the sexual arena we must doubt but this admission from her new husband about his own misdeeds must have come as a deeply unpleasant surprise. Nevertheless Luisa would for the rest of her days remember the months she spent with Gabriel Eligio in the house they rented in Riohacha as one of the happiest times of her life.33

  Luisa may have become pregnant on the second night after the wedding—if not before the wedding—and family legend has it that the news of her condition promised to thaw the icy relationship between Gabriel Eligio and the Colonel. It is said that presents were sent via José María Valdeblánquez. Still, Gabriel Eligio would not relent until one day Juan de Dios arrived from Santa Marta to say that Tranquilina was pining for her pregnant daughter and Gabriel Eligio allowed her to travel back to Aracataca for the confinement.34

  TWENTY-ONE-YEAR-OLD LUISA arrived back in her home town of Aracataca one February morning, without her husband, after almost eighteen months away. She was eight months pregnant and seasick, after another turbulent voyage to Santa Marta by boat from Riohacha. A few weeks later, on Sunday 6 March 1927, at 9 a.m., in the midst of an unseasonal rainstorm, a baby boy, Gabriel José García Márquez, was born. Luisa told me that her father had left early on his way to mass when things were going “very badly” but when he got back to the house the whole thing was over.

  The child was born with the umbilical cord around his neck—he would later attribute his tendency to claustrophobia to this early misfortune—and weighed in, so it was said, at a substantial nine pounds and five ounces. His great-aunt, Francisca Cimodosea Mejía, proposed that he be rubbed with rum and blessed with baptismal water in case of further mishap. In fact, the child would not be officially baptized for almost three and a half years, together with his sister Margot, who by then had also been sequestered with the grandparents. (Gabito would remember the baptism clearly. It was officiated by Father Francisco Angarita in the church of San José at Aracataca on 27 July 1930 and the godparents were the two witnesses at his parents’ wedding, his uncle, Juan de Dios, and his great-aunt, Francisca Cimodosea.)

  Colonel Márquez celebrated the birth. His beloved daughter had become another lost cause but he determined to consider even that setback to have been just a battle and resolved to win the war. Life would go on and he would now invest all his still considerable energies in her first child, his latest grandson, “my little Napoleon.”

  2

  The House at Aracataca

  1927–1928

  “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. It’s a recurring dream which persists even now. What’s more, every single day of my life I wake up with the feeling, real or imaginary, that I’ve dreamed 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. Even now in my dreams that sense of night-time foreboding which dominated my whole childhood still persists. It was an uncontrollable sensation which began early every evening and gnawed away at me in my sleep until I saw dawn breaking through the cracks in the door.”1

  Thus, half a century later, talking to his old friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza in Paris, would Gabriel García Márquez recall the dominant image of his “prodigious” childhood in the small Colombian town of Aracataca. Gabito spent the first ten years of his life not with his mother and father and the many brothers and sisters who regularly followed him into the world, but in the big house of his maternal grandparents, Colonel Nicolás Márquez Mejía and Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes.

  It was a house full of people—grandparents, aunts, transient guests, servants, Indians—but also full of ghosts (above all perhaps, that of his absent mother).2 Years later it would continue to obsess him when he was far away in time and space, and the attempt to recover it, re-create it and master his memories of it was a large part of what would make him a writer. It was a book he carried inside him from childhood: friends recall that when Gabito was barely twenty years of age he was already writing an interminable novel he called “The House.” That old lost house in Aracataca remained in the family until the late 1950s, though it would be rented to other households after Gabriel Eligio took his wife and children away from Aracataca again in 1937. It eventually reappeared, intact yet somehow hallucinatory, in García Márquez’s first novel, Leaf Storm, written in 1950, but only later, in One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), did the obsession fully realize and exhaust itself, and in such a way that Gabito’s vivid but anguished and often terrifying childhood could become materialized for all eternity as the magical world of Macondo, at which point the view from Colonel Márquez’s house would encompass not only the little town of Aracataca but also the rest of his native Colombia and indeed the whole of Latin America and beyond.

  After Gabito’s birth, Gabriel Eligio, still working in Riohacha, and still sulking, waited several months to make his first journey back to Aracataca. He resigned from his job in Riohacha, gave up telegraphy for ever and hoped to earn his living from homeopathic medicine in Aracataca. But since he had no qualifications and equally little money, and since, despite family legend to the contrary, it appears he was not made welcome in the Colonel’s house, he eventually decided to take Luisa off to Barranquilla and, through some obscure negotiation, it was agreed that Gabito would remain with his grandparents.3

  Of course such arrangements as the two couples agreed were so common as to be almost normal in traditional societies with large extended families; but it is still hard to understand Luisa leaving her first child behind at an age when she could have continued to suckle him for many more months. What seems certain is that her commitment to her husband was more than tenacious. For all the criticisms of her parents, for all Gabriel Eligio’s flaws and eccentricities, she must have really loved her man and she gave herself, apparently without hesitation, into his keeping. Above all, she pu
t him before her first-born son.

  We will never know what Luisa and Gabriel Eligio were thinking or what they said to one another as they took the train out of Aracataca heading for Barranquilla, having left their first baby behind. We do know that the young couple’s first foray was a financial failure yet within months Luisa was pregnant again and returned to Aracataca to have her second child, Luis Enrique, on 8 September 1928. This means that she and the second baby were in Aracataca during the period leading up to the massacre of the banana workers in Ciénaga in December of that year and the many killings in and around Aracataca itself that followed. One of Gabito’s own first memories was of soldiers marching past the Colonel’s house. Curiously, when Gabriel Eligio came to take the mother and her new son back to Barranquilla in January 1929, the baby was hurriedly baptized before the departure, whereas Gabito was not baptized until July 1930.4

  Let us look at the face of the small child, just one year old, reproduced on the cover of García Márquez’s memoir Living to Tell the Tale. His mother had left him with his grandparents several months before the picture was taken and now, several months after it was taken, she had returned, only to be trapped by the drama of the strike and subsequent massacre. This massacre was not only a hugely, even crucially, important event which would change Colombian history by leading directly to the return of a Liberal government in August 1930 after half a century of civil war and exclusion, thereby uniting the small boy with his nation’s history; it also coincided with the moment when the boy’s mother could have taken him back to Barranquilla with her. Instead she took another child, her new baby, Luis Enrique, newly baptized, and left Gabito behind in the big house with his grandparents, thereby ensuring that he would have to assimilate this abandonment, live with this absence, explain this unexplainable sequence of events to himself and, through the elaboration of such a story, somehow forge an identity which, like all identities, would connect his own personal circumstances, with all their joys and all their cruelties, to the joys and cruelties of the wider world.