DESPITE HIS MEMORIES of solitude Gabito was not the only child in the house, though he was the only boy. His sister Margarita also lived there from the time Gabito was three and a half and his adolescent cousin Sara Emilia Márquez—the illegitimate child of Uncle Juan de Dios, rejected by his wife Dilia (some say Dilia argued that the girl was José María Valdeblánquez’s daughter, not her husband’s)—was also brought up there with the two of them. Neither was the house the mansion that García Márquez has sometimes claimed.5 In fact, in March 1927, rather than one house it was three separate buildings mainly of wood with some adobe plus a number of outhouses and a large area of land at the back. By the time Gabito was born these three main buildings had American-style brushed cement floors, steel windows with gauze screens against mosquitoes and red zinc gabled roofs, though some of the outhouses still retained the more traditional Colombian palm leaf roofs. There were almond trees outside the property, sheltering the entrance. By the time of García Márquez’s earliest memories, there were two buildings on the left-hand side as you entered the property, the first the Colonel’s office, with a small reception room adjoining, followed by a pretty patio and garden with a jasmine tree—this garden, a profusion of brilliant roses, jasmines, spikenards, heliotropes, geraniums and astromelias, was always full of yellow butterflies—and then a further suite of three rooms.
The first of these three private rooms was the grandparents’ bedroom, completed as late as 1925, where Gabito was born just two years later.6 Next to that room was the so-called “room of the saints,” where Gabito would actually sleep—in a hammock after he outgrew his cot—during his ten years with his grandparents, accompanied, variably but sometimes simultaneously, by his younger sister Margarita, his great-aunt Francisca Cimodosea and his cousin Sara Márquez, together with an unchanging pantheon of saints, all illuminated day and night with palm oil lamps and each charged with the protection of one particular member of the family: “to look after grandpa, to watch over the grandchildren, to protect the house, for no one to fall ill, and so on—a custom inherited from our great-great-grandmother.”7 Aunt Francisca spent many hours of her life praying there on her knees. The last room was the “room of the trunks,” a lumber room full of ancestral possessions and family souvenirs brought in the exodus from the Guajira.8
On the right-hand side of the property, across a walkway, was a suite of six rooms fronted by a verandah lined with large flower pots which the family called the “verandah of the begonias.” Going back to the entrance-way, the first three rooms of the building on the right constituted, together with the office and reception room opposite, what might be called the public side of the house. The first was the guest room where distinguished visitors stayed, including, for example, Monsignor Espejo himself. But family and war comrades from all over the Guajira, Padilla and Magdalena were lodged there, including Liberal war heroes Rafael Uribe Uribe and General Benjamín Herrera.9 Next to it was the Colonel’s silversmith’s workshop, where he would continue to practise his craft until shortly before he died, though his municipal duties obliged him to turn his prior profession into a hobby.10 Then came the large dining room, the effective centre of the house, and even more important to Nicolás than the workshop alongside; open to the fresh air, the dining room had space for ten people at the table and a few wicker rocking chairs for drinks before or after dinner when the occasion arose. Then came a third bedroom, known as “the blind woman’s room,” where the house’s most celebrated ghost, Aunt Petra Cotes, Tranquilina’s sister, had died some years before,11 as had Uncle Lázaro, and where now one or other of the aunts would sleep; then a pantry cum store room where the less distinguished guests could be placed, at a pinch; and finally Tranquilina’s great kitchen, with its large baker’s oven, open to all the elements like the dining room. There grandmother and aunts made bread, cakes and sweets of every kind both for their guests to enjoy and for the household Indians to sell in the street and thus supplement the family income.12
Beyond the rooms of the saints and the trunks was a further patio with a bathroom and a large water tank where Tranquilina bathed Gabito with part of the five barrels’ worth of water that haulier José Contreras delivered every day. On one unforgettable occasion little Gabito was up above climbing on the roof when down below he saw one of his aunts, naked, taking a shower. Instead of shrieking and covering herself up, as he expected, she simply waved to him. Or so the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude would recall. The patio by the bathroom looked out, on the right, to a yard where the mango tree stood, with a large shed over in the corner which served as a carpenter’s workshop, the base from which the Colonel carried out his strategic renovations of the household.
And then, at the very back of the property, beyond the bathroom and the mango tree, the new, fast-growing town of Aracataca, which this large household’s wealth and ambition ostentatiously represented, seemed to fuse back into the countryside in a large semi-wild space called La Roza (The Clearing).13 Here were the guava trees whose fruit Tranquilina would use to make sweets in a huge steel pail and whose fragrant aroma Gabito would forever associate with the Caribbean of his childhood. Here loomed the huge, now legendary chestnut tree to which José Arcadio Buendía would be tied in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Beneath this spreading chestnut tree Gabriel Eligio García had asked Luisa for her hand while the “guard dog,” Aunt Francisca, growled at him from the shadows. In these trees there were parrots, macaws and troupials, and even a sloth up in the boughs of the breadfruit tree. And by the back gate stood the stables where the Colonel kept his horse and mules, and where his visitors tied their own mounts when they arrived not just for lunch, when they would leave them out in the street, but for a longer stopover.
Adjacent to the house was a building which the children would always think of as a house of horrors. They called it the “Dead Man’s House” and the entire town told blood-curdling stories about it because a Venezuelan called Antonio Mora went on living there after hanging himself and could clearly be heard coughing and whistling inside.14
At the time when García Márquez’s earliest memories were fixed, Aracataca was still a dramatic, violent frontier town. Almost every man carried a machete and there were plenty of guns. One of the boy’s earliest memories was of playing in the outer patio when a woman walked past the house with her husband’s head in a cloth and the decapitated body carried behind. He remembers being disappointed that the body was covered in rags.15
Daytime, then, brought a vivid, varied, ever-changing world, sometimes violent, sometimes magical. Night-time was always the same, and it was terrifying. He recalled: “That house was full of mysteries. My grandmother was very nervous; many things appeared to her which she would tell me about at night. When she talked about the souls of the dead she would say ‘they are always whistling out there, I hear them all the time.’ In each corner there were dead people and memories and after six o’clock in the evening you just couldn’t move around in there. They would sit me in a corner and there I would stay, just like the boy in Leaf Storm.”16 Little wonder the child saw dead men in the bath and in the kitchen by the stove; once he even saw the devil at his window.17
Everyday life was dominated inevitably by Tranquilina, or “Mina,” as her husband and the other women called her, a small, nervy woman with grey, anxious eyes and silver hair parted down the middle which framed an unmistakably Hispanic face and ended in a bun on her pale neck.18 García Márquez recalled: “If you make an analysis of how things were, the real head of the household was my grandmother, and not only her but these fantastic forces with which she was in permanent communication and which determined what could and could not be done that day because she would interpret her dreams and organize the house according to what could and could not be eaten; it was like the Roman Empire, governed by birds, and thunderclaps and other atmospheric signals which explained any change of the weather, change of humour; really we were manipulated by invisible Gods, even though they were al
l supposedly very Catholic people.”19 Dressed always in mourning or semi-mourning, and always on the verge of hysteria, Tranquilina floated through the house from dawn to dusk, singing, always trying to exude a calm and unflustered air, yet always mindful of the need to protect her charges from the ever-present dangers: souls in torment (“hurry, put the children to bed”), black butterflies (“hide the children, someone is going to die”), funerals (“get the children up, or they’ll die too”). She would remind the children of those dangers last thing at night.
Rosa Fergusson, García Márquez’s first teacher, recalled that Tranquilina was very superstitious. Rosa and her sisters would arrive in the early evening and the old lady might say, “Do you know I heard a witch last night … it fell up there on the roof of the house.”20 She also had a habit of recounting her dreams, like many of the female characters in García Márquez’s novels. Once she told the assembled company that she dreamed that she felt a crowd of fleas, so she took her head off, put it between her legs, and began to kill the fleas one by one.21
Aunt Francisca Cimodosea Mejía, known as Aunt Mama, was the most imposing of the three aunts who were present in the house during Gabito’s childhood and, unlike Tranquilina, was reputed not to be afraid of anything either natural or supernatural. Half-sister of Eugenio Ríos, the Colonel’s partner in Barrancas, brought up with the Colonel, her cousin, in El Carmen de Bolívar, she moved from Barrancas to Aracataca with him after the killing of Medardo. She was dark in complexion, strong of physique, with black hair like that of a Guajiro Indian, combed in plaits which she tied in a bun to walk in the streets. She dressed all in black and wore tightly tied boots, smoked strong cigarettes, was permanently active, shouting questions, giving orders in her loud, deep voice, shaping and organizing the children’s days. She looked after everybody, the family members, all the waifs and strays; she cooked special sweets and fancies for guests; she bathed the children in the river (with carbolic soap when they had lice), took them to school and to church, put them to bed, and made them say their prayers, before abandoning them to Tranquilina’s nocturnal postscripts. She was trusted with the keys of the church and the cemetery and dressed the altars on holy days. She also made the wafers for the church—the priest was a frequent visitor to the household—and the children looked forward excitedly to eating the blessed left-overs. Aunt Mama lived and died a spinster. And when she thought she was going to die she began to sew her own shroud, like Amaranta in One Hundred Years of Solitude.
The aunt next in importance to the children was Aunt Pa, Elvira Carrillo, who was born in Barrancas at the end of the nineteenth century. She was one of the Colonel’s natural children, the twin sister of Esteban Carrillo. She moved to Aracataca when she was twenty. Despite the inevitable initial tensions, Tranquilina treated her as one of her own and she in turn cared for Tranquilina until her death in Sucre many years later. She was sweet-tempered, self-effacing and hardworking, always cleaning, sewing and making sweets for sale, though she herself preferred not to venture into the street.
Another aunt, Wenefrida, “Aunt Nana,” Nicolás’s only legitimate sister, was also a constant presence, though she lived in a house of her own. She had moved to Aracataca with her husband Rafael Quintero, and she would die there in Nicolás’s house—she spent her last days in his office—shortly before the Colonel himself.
There were also numerous female servants, mostly part-time workers who cleaned around the house, and washed the clothes and dishes. It was indeed a house full of women, a fact which destined Gabito on the one hand to an especially close and indeed decisive relationship with the only other male, his grandfather, and on the other to an ease with women, and a dependence on them, which would last the rest of his life. Men, for Gabito, were either to emulate, like his grandfather, or to fear, like his father. His early relationships with women were far more varied and complex. (There were several Indian servants in the house who were effectively slaves; the boy, Apolinar, hardly counted as a male because he did not count as a full human being.)
When García Márquez read fairy stories he must have been struck by the fact that many of them involved a boy and a girl and grandparents—always grandparents. Like him, Margot, Nicolás and Tranquilina. Psychologically it was a complex world, which he later explained to his friend Plinio Mendoza. “The strange thing 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.”22 Leonine and magnificent in the memory of his grandchildren, “Papa Lelo” imposed order and discipline upon a pride of females, a houseful of women whom he had brought to Aracataca through his search for security and renewed respectability. He was bluff and forthright, with decisive, straightforward opinions. Gabito evidently felt like his direct descendant and his heir. The Colonel took his young grandson everywhere, explained everything to him and when in doubt took him home, took down the family dictionary and underlined his own authority with the definition he found there.23 He was sixty-three when Gabito was born, quite European-looking, like his wife, stocky, of average height with a broad forehead, balding and with a thick moustache. He wore gold-rimmed glasses and by that time was blind in the right eye because of glaucoma.24 On most days he would wear a spotless white tropical suit, a panama hat and brightly coloured braces. He was a direct, good-hearted man of easy, confident authority leavened by a twinkle in the eye which showed that he understood this society he was living in and did his best in all the circumstances but that morally he was no prude.
Many years later, when García Márquez managed to reconstruct these two ways of interpreting and narrating reality, both of them involving a tone of absolute certainty—the worldly, rationalizing sententiousness of his grandfather and the other-wordly oracular declamations of his grandmother—leavened by his own inimitable sense of humour, he would be able to develop a world-view and a corresponding narrative technique which would be instantly recognizable to the readers of each new book.
ALTHOUGH DEFEATED in the War of a Thousand Days, Colonel Márquez had managed to prosper in the peace. After the end of hostilities the Conservative government had opened the republic to foreign investment and during and after the First World War the national economy expanded at an unprecedented rate. U.S. financiers invested intensively in petroleum exploration, mining and bananas, and the U.S. government eventually paid the Colombian government $25 million in compensation for the loss of Panama. This was invested in a range of public works designed to modernize the country. More borrowing followed, and all those dollars and pesos swirled around and around, creating a kind of financial hysteria that Colombian historians call the “dance of the millions.” These brief years of easy money would be remembered by many as a time of unparalleled prosperity and opportunity on the Caribbean coast.
The banana is a tropical fruit which takes seven to eight months to grow and can be harvested and shipped at almost any time of year. It carries its own packaging and, with modern methods of cultivation and transportation, would help transform the dietary and economic habits of the world’s great capitalist cities. Local landowners, belatedly opening up Colombia’s northern coastal region, were overtaken by events. In the mid-1890s American entrepreneur Minor C. Keith, who already owned huge tracts of land in Central America and Jamaica, had begun to buy land around Santa Marta. Then in 1899 he founded the United Fruit Company (UFC), with its offices in Boston and its main shipping port in New Orleans. At the same time as he bought land Keith also bought shares in the Santa Marta railway and eventually the fruit company not only ran the railway but owned 25,500 of its 60,000 shares.25
One critic has said that Minor C. Keith’s holdings in Colombia amounted to a “pirate’s charter.”26 By the mid-1920s the zone was the third largest exporter of bananas in the world. More than ten million bunches a year were leaving the UFC wharves in Santa Marta. Its railway ran sixty miles from Santa Marta to Fundación, with thirty-two stations along the way. It had a near mono
poly of land, irrigation systems, exports by sea, transport out of Santa Marta and across the Ciénaga Grande, the telegraph system, cement production, meat and other foodstuffs, telephones and ice.27 By owning the plantations and the railway the UFC effectively controlled the nine towns in the zone. It also indirectly controlled the local police, local politicians and press.28 One of the largest farm properties belonging to the UFC was called Macondo, 135 acres on the banks of the River Sevilla, in the corregimiento of Guacamayal.
The top echelons of the Santa Marta ruling class already had links to New York, London and Paris, and were culturally sophisticated, albeit politically conservative. But now the UFC’s Great White Fleet brought daily contact with the USA, Europe and the rest of the Caribbean for everyone. At the same time migrants both from other parts of Colombia, including the Guajira Peninsula and the old runaway slave regions of Bolívar, and from other parts of the world, came to work on the banana plantations or to set up small businesses serving the farms and the people who laboured in them. Artisans, merchants, boatmen, prostitutes, washerwomen, musicians, bartenders appeared. Gypsies came and went too, but in a real sense almost all the inhabitants of the Banana Zone were gypsies in those days. These growing communities became plugged in to the international market for goods, with cinemas which changed their movies two or three times a week, Montgomery Ward catalogues, Quaker Oats, Vicks Vaporub, Eno Fruit Salts, Colgate Dental Creme, indeed many of the things by then available in New York or London.
Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez Page 6