Gabriel García Márquez

by Gerald Martin

  Aracataca’s population had been a few hundred in 1900, dispersed around the countryside and concentrated on the river banks; by 1913 it had risen to three thousand and it soared thereafter to perhaps ten thousand in the late 1920s. As the hottest and wettest place in the entire zone, it also produced the biggest bananas; their production required a daily epic struggle by the workers, since for most mortals even sitting or lying down in the Aracataca heat is arduous. By 1910, when the Colonel had begun to move his family there, the railway track already ran all the way down from Santa Marta through Ciénaga and Aracataca to Fundación, the last town in the zone. Banana plantations grew up on either side of the tracks for a distance of almost sixty miles.

  Aracataca was a boom town with boom-town excitements. A lottery was held on Sundays as a band played in the main square. The Aracataca carnival, first held in 1915, was a particular draw, with the square occupied annually by improvised cantinas, stalls, dance floors, traders, healers, herbalists, women dressed in exotic costumes and masks, and the local men swaggering by in khaki trousers and blue shirts, all in a cloud of cigar smoke, rum and sweat blown about by the salt breeze sweeping in from the Ciénaga Grande. It was said that in those golden years almost everything was for sale: not only consumer goods from all over the world but dance partners, political votes, pacts with the devil.29

  Even at its height the town was only ten blocks in either direction. Were it not for the searing heat, any moderately fit person could walk it end to end in less than twenty minutes. There was only a handful of cars. The UFC company offices were directly opposite the house of Colonel Nicolás Márquez, close to the pharmacy of his Venezuelan friend Doctor Alfredo Barbosa. On the other side of the railtrack was another community, the American company administrators’ camp, alongside a country club with recreational lawns, tennis courts and a swimming pool, where you could see “beautiful languid women in muslin dresses and wide gauze hats cutting the flowers in their gardens with golden scissors.”30

  During the banana era Aracataca was a territory with only limited respect for God or law. In response to a request from the local citizens the diocese of Santa Marta had sent Aracataca’s first priest, Pedro Espejo, from Riohacha, on a part-time basis. It was he who initiated the building of the parish church, which took more than twenty years.31 It was he too who famously levitated one day during mass. He became a close friend of the Márquez Iguarán family and stayed with them whenever he was in Aracataca. Now, many years later, the street in which that old house stood is called “The Street of Monsignor Espejo.”

  LATE IN 1928 Aracataca’s golden age came to a violent end. The UFC needed labour to build railways and irrigation canals; to clear land, plant trees and harvest the fruit; and to load the trains and ships to carry the bananas away. At first it had managed to divide and rule the workers with ease but gradually they organized into unions over the course of the 1920s and in November 1928 they put in a wide-ranging demand for more pay, a shorter working day and better conditions. The management rejected these demands and a strike of the thirty thousand workers in the Banana Zone was declared on 12 November 1928. The infant García Márquez was twenty months old.

  Strikers moved in to occupy plantations that same day. The government of Conservative President Miguel Abadía Méndez responded by sending General Carlos Cortés Vargas to the zone as Civil and Military Leader the following day, accompanied by 1,800 troops from the highlands. When Cortés Vargas arrived in Santa Marta he and his officers were feted by the UFC management and the soldiers were housed in UFC barracks and warehouses all over the zone. It was said that UFC officials gave the officers riotous parties at which local ladies were abused and insulted and that prostitutes rode naked on military horses and bathed naked in the company’s irrigation ditches.32

  At dawn on 5 December 1928 three thousand workers arrived in Ciénaga to occupy the square and, by controlling Ciénaga, to control railway communications throughout the region. Together with Ciénaga, Aracataca was one of the zones of strongest support for the strike; like the merchants of Ciénaga, local storekeepers and landowners gave significant material assistance to the strikers right up to the day of the showdown.33 General José Rosario Durán had a reputation as a decent employer who tried to have good relations with the union; indeed, many Conservatives felt he was overly friendly to “socialists.”34 At midday on 5 December General Durán, described in military communiqués at the time as “the Liberal leader of the entire region,”35 sent a telegram to Santa Marta requesting a train to take him and his associates to Santa Marta where he hoped to mediate between the workers and the company with the help of Governor Núñez Roca. Cortés Vargas agreed, no doubt reluctantly, and the train was duly sent.36 Durán and his delegation, including Colonel Nicolás Márquez, eventually arrived in Ciénaga at nine that evening. The workers greeted them with enthusiasm and they continued to Santa Marta to negotiate a settlement, only to find themselves arrested on arrival. The Conservative administration, the UFC and the Colombian army all seem to have been intent on a salutary piece of bloodletting which would teach the workers a lesson.

  Back in Ciénaga the crowd confronting the army was of more than three thousand people.37 Each of the soldiers had a rifle and bayonet, and three machine guns were set up in front of the station. A cornet sounded and an officer, Captain Garavito, stepped forward and read out “Decree no. I”: a state of siege was in force, a curfew was declared with immediate effect, no groups of four or more would be permitted and if the crowd did not disperse in five minutes it would be fired upon. The crowd, which had at first cheered the army and chanted patriotic slogans, now burst into boos and insults. After some time Cortés Vargas himself stepped forward and appealed to the crowd to move or be shot. He gave them one further minute. At that point a voice from the crowd shouted out the immortal rejoinder, recorded for ever in One Hundred Years of Solitude: “You can have the other minute on us!” “Fire!” shouted Cortés Vargas, and two of the three machine guns (the third one jammed) and two or three hundred rifles resounded around the square. Many people fell to the ground and those who could run, ran.38 Cortés Vargas later said the fusillade lasted a few seconds. Salvador Durán, the General’s son, who was in his house adjoining the square, reported that it lasted five full minutes; after it everything was so quiet he could hear the mosquitoes buzzing in his room.39 It was said that the army finished off the wounded with bayonets.40 It was also said that Cortés Vargas had threatened all the soldiers with summary execution if they did not obey orders that night.41 Only at six in the morning did the authorities begin to dispose of the bodies, stating officially that there were nine dead and three wounded.

  How many died? Forty years later, in One Hundred Years of Solitude, García Márquez would invent a figure of three thousand, a total which many of his readers would take at face value. On 19 May 1929 El Espectador of Bogotá said there were “more than a thousand” dead. Likewise the U.S. representative in Bogotá, Jefferson Caffery, said in a letter dated 15 January 1929, but not released until many years later, that, according to Thomas Bradshaw, Managing Director of the UFC, there were “more than a thousand dead.” (In 1955 the then Vice-President of the UFC would tell a researcher that 410 were killed in the massacre and more than a thousand in the following weeks.)42 The statistics are still discussed and bitterly disputed to this day.

  Gabriel Eligio García was away working in Barranquilla unable to communicate with his family, though the telegraphist of Aracataca wired him that everyone was safe and well. Luisa had recently given birth to Luis Enrique and Gabriel Eligio was making plans to move them back to Barranquilla. He always sided with government estimates, and even apologized for Cortés Vargas, arguing that the husband of a great-aunt of Gabito’s in Ciénaga told him there could not have been more than a few casualties since “no one was missed.”

  Prisoners were summarily executed in the days after the massacre. One army detachment guided by UFC officials went through Aracataca “firi
ng everywhere and against everyone.”43 In one night 120 workers disappeared in Aracataca and parish priest Father Angarita was woken up by soldiers who took his set of keys to the cemetery.44 Father Angarita stayed up the whole of the next night to ensure that another seventy-nine prisoners would not be executed.45 During the three months after the massacre, the authorities and leading residents of Aracataca, including treasurer Nicolás R. Márquez and his friends Alfredo Barbosa the pharmacist and exiled Venezuelan General Marco Freites, as well as the entire municipal council, were persuaded to send letters declaring that the military had behaved impeccably during the state of siege and had worked for the good of the community.46 This must have involved painful moral somersaults and an almost unbearable sense of humiliation. The ensuing state of siege lasted three months.

  The strike and its bitter aftermath scarred the region and it remains one of the most controversial events in Colombian history. In 1929 Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the politician whose assassination would spark the brief but devastating civil insurrection known as the Bogotazo, became a national leader, at the age of twenty-six, through the passionate parliamentary campaign he initiated against the government, the military and the UFC. After visiting the site of the massacre and talking to dozens of people, he made a report to the House of Representatives back in Bogotá, talking for four days in September 1929. His most dramatic pieces of evidence were the fragment of a child’s skull and an accusatory letter from Father Angarita, the man who would baptize Gabriel García Márquez just a few months later.47 As a result of Gaitán’s sensational testimony, the prison sentences handed down to workers in Ciénaga were quashed. The Liberals, although still weak and disorganized nationally, were galvanized into action, began to gain the upper hand politically and started their rise to power, coming into government in 1930. The end of that period would be marked by Gaitán’s assassination in April 1948, the most important and far-reaching event in Colombia’s twentieth-century history.

  The deterioration in the relations between the UFC and its workers and the impact the massacre had on the Banana Zone would be overtaken by the Great Depression, which was about to engulf the region and the entire global trading system. The devastating slump caused the company to severely contract its operations. Executives and administrators left and Aracataca began its long and unstoppable decline, a period whose beginning would coincide precisely with García Márquez’s childhood and the last years of his grandfather’s life.

  3

  Holding His Grandfather’s Hand

  1929–1937

  ALTHOUGH THE SEEDS of Aracataca’s decline were sown, it took years before the full implications became clear, and life in the Colonel’s household went on much as before. Across the Great Swamp, in Barranquilla, Gabriel Eligio was working by day in a hardware store run by the Singer company, but had recently opened his first modest pharmacy, which he attended in the evenings and at weekends, assisted by Luisa. The young couple endured grinding poverty, and the pampered Luisa, used to the attentions of a mother, aunts and servants, must have found life desperately hard.

  The Colonel and Tranquilina took Gabito to Barranquilla in November 1929, after the birth of Luisa’s third child, Margarita, on the 9th of that month. Just two and a half, the boy’s main memory was of seeing traffic lights for the first time. His grandparents took him back to Barranquilla again in December 1930 for the birth of Aida Rosa and he saw his first aeroplane in a city which pioneered air travel in Colombia.1 He also heard the word “Bolívar” for the first time because Aida Rosa was born on 17 December, exactly a hundred years to the day after the great Liberator died and Barranquilla, like the whole of Latin America, was commemorating his death. Gabito would retain no firm memories of either his mother or his father but these visits must have been intensely troubling to a child trying to make sense of the world and his place in it.2 It was on this last occasion that Tranquilina, seeing that little Margarita was a sickly, withdrawn child who needed urgent attention beyond her harassed young mother’s means, insisted on taking her back to Aracataca to be brought up with Gabito.3

  The formative period in Gabito’s development thus stretched from the age of two, when his mother went away for the second time, to almost seven, when his parents and siblings returned to Aracataca. Those are the five years whose memories really form the basis of the mythological Macondo which readers the world over have come to know. And although it is not true that he had no contact with his birth parents, it is certainly true that he had no sustained contact with either them or his new brothers and sisters after 1928 and no reason therefore to have any enduring memories of them. His only parents were his grandparents and his only sibling was Margarita, now called Margot, who would not become a satisfying companion until she was three or four, by which time the rest of the family would be making their return to Aracataca towards the end of 1933. Nicolás and Tranquilina evidently decided that between incessantly having to explain that his parents had gone away (and why, and if and when they would ever return) and drawing a veil of silence over his origins, the latter would be less painful in the long run. Of course other children must have asked questions and García Márquez could not possibly have been as ignorant as he has always maintained. It is difficult to imagine that Luisa was never remembered at bedtime prayers, for example. But clearly the matter of his mother and father was a taboo area which he learned to approach as little as possible.

  In Spain and Latin America women traditionally belonged in the house and men in the street. It was his grandfather, the Colonel, who gradually rescued him from that feminine world of superstition and premonitions, those stories that seemed to spring from the darkness of nature itself, and who installed him in the man’s world of politics and history; took him out, so to speak, into the daylight. (“I would say that the relationship with my grandfather was the umbilical cord that kept me in touch with reality until I was eight years old.”)4 In later life, with touching naivety, he would remember his grandfather as “the natural patriarch of the town.”5

  The truth is that the men who were really powerful, like the large landowners, rarely occupied regional political positions like treasurer or tax collector, preferring to leave them to less important relatives or to middle-class political representatives usually ignorant of the law.6 Mayors were appointed by governors who were named by politicians in Bogotá in association with local interests, and Liberals like Nicolás Márquez had to transact, usually in quite humiliating ways, with the Conservative Party and other local forces such as the UFC. The whole political system was grossly corrupt, resting on personal relations and various forms of patronage. Significant local personalities like Márquez got UFC perks such as fresh meat and other desirable luxuries at the company store, and in return could be relied on to maintain the system. Many of the most vivid memories of both Gabito and Margot were of their grandfather’s expeditions to the store, which was just over the road from their house. It was like an Aladdin’s Cave from which the Colonel and Gabito would return triumphantly to surprise and enchant Margot with magical commodities manufactured in and imported from the USA.7

  The municipal treasurer and tax collector would mainly be involved in extracting municipal—and in some cases personal—income from the only significant form of taxation in existence at the time, namely liquor consumption, meaning that the Colonel’s own income depended heavily on the financial well-being, physical intoxication and resultant sexual promiscuity of the much-despised “leaf-trash.” How conscientiously Nicolás himself carried out his duties we cannot know but the system was not one which left much freedom for personal probity.8 After 1930, with the Liberal Party coming to power for the first time in fifty years, things should have got better for Nicolás, who was actively involved in the campaign to elect Enrique Olaya Herrera, the Liberal candidate, but all the information we have suggests that they gradually got worse.

  García Márquez has recalled: “He was the only person in the house that I was not afraid of. I al
ways felt that he understood me and cared about my future vocation.”9 The Colonel adored his little grandson. He celebrated his little Napoleon’s birthday every month, and yielded to his every whim. But Gabito would not himself be a warrior nor even a sportsman, and he would be governed by terrors—ghosts, superstitions, the dark, violence, rejection—all his life.10 All of them originated in Aracataca, during his anguished, troubled childhood. Still, his intelligence and sensitivity, and even his frequent tantrums, confirmed his indulgent grandfather in the belief that this child was worthy of him and was, perhaps, destined for greatness.11

  The boy was certainly worth educating; it was he who would inherit the old man’s memories, his philosophy of life and political morality, his view of the world; the Colonel would live on through him. It was the Colonel who told him about the War of a Thousand Days, his own deeds and those of his friends, heroic Liberals all; and it was the Colonel who explained the presence of the banana plantations, the UFC and its company houses, stores, tennis courts and swimming pools, and the horrors of the 1928 strike. Battles, scars, gunfights. Violence and death. Even in the relative safety of Aracataca the old man always slept with a revolver beneath his pillow, though after the killing of Medardo he had stopped carrying it in the street.12

  By the time Gabito was six or seven, then, he was already a fully fledged Colombian. He thought his grandfather was a hero, but even this hero was clearly subject to the whims of American managers and Conservative politicians. He had lost the war, not won it, and even the small boy must have divined, dimly, that perhaps the gunfight was not the unblemished act of heroism he had been led to believe. Years later one of the family’s favourite stories was about Gabito sitting listening to his grandfather, blinking incessantly and forgetting where he was.13 Margot recalls: “Gabito was always by my grandfather’s side, listening to all the stories. Once a friend came from Ciénaga, one of those old men who were in the War of a Thousand Days with Grandpa. Gabito, all ears as usual, stood beside the gentleman and it turned out the leg of the chair they’d given the old man trapped Gabito’s shoe. He just kept quiet and put up with it, staying quite still until the visit ended, because he thought, ‘If I say something they’ll notice me and throw me out.’”14