Gabriel García Márquez

by Gerald Martin

  Late in her own life his mother would tell me that “Gabito was always old; when he was a child he knew so much he seemed like a little old man. That’s what we called him, the little old man.” Throughout his life most of his friends would be significantly older and more experienced than he was and despite his Liberal and eventually socialist politics, he would always be drawn, consciously or unconsciously, to combinations of wisdom, power and authority in his preferred associates. It is not fanciful to conclude that one of the strongest impulses in García Márquez’s later life was the desire to restore himself to his grandfather’s world.

  Most lastingly and decisively of all, Colonel Márquez was involved in providing a number of symbolic adventures, memorable incidents which would remain fixed in his grandson’s imagination until, many years later, he would fuse them into a definitive shaping image in the very first line of his most celebrated novel. Once, when the child was still very small, the old man took him to the company store to see the fish frozen in ice. Many years later García Márquez would recall: “I touched it and felt as if it was burning me. I needed ice in the first sentence of [One Hundred Years of Solitude] because in the hottest town in the world, ice is magical. If it wasn’t hot the book wouldn’t work. That made it so hot it was no longer necessary to mention it again, it was in the atmosphere.”15 Similarly: “The initial image of One Hundred Years of Solitude was already in ‘The House’ [his first attempt at a novel] and then in Leaf Storm. Every day was a discovery, both through visits to the banana company and visits to the railway station. The banana company brought the cinema, radio and so forth. The circus arrived with a dromedary and a camel; complete fairs arrived with wheels of fortune, roller-coasters, carousels. My grandfather always took me by the hand to see everything. He took me to the cinema and although I don’t remember films I do remember images. My grandfather had no notion of censorship so I saw every kind of image. But the most vivid of all of them and the one that is always repeated is that of an old man leading a child by the hand.”16 Eventually, in that first line of his most famous novel—“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice”—the author would turn the different images of his expeditions with his grandfather into a self-defining experience that a fictional son has with his father, thereby subliminally confirming that Nicolás was not only his grandfather but also the father he felt he never had.

  Thus for almost a decade the child lived with the old man and on most days he would walk around the town with him. One of their favourite walks was on a Thursday to the post office to see if there was any news about the Colonel’s pension from the war twenty-five years earlier. There never was, a fact which made a big impression on the child.17 Another was to the station to collect the day’s letter from the Colonel’s son Juan de Dios, Uncle Juanito, because the two men wrote to one another every day—mainly about business matters and the movements of relatives and mutual acquaintances.18 From the station they would walk back down the short boulevard named for the country’s national day, Camellón 20 July, where the Montessori School was (Nicolás’s good friend General José Durán had donated the land);19 then down the Street of the Turks, past the Four Corners and the pharmacy of Alfredo Barbosa and back to the house on Carrera Six between Calles 6 and 7; or they might go on past the house and the Liberal Party headquarters to the parish church of Saint James of the Holy Trinity, which was still a work in progress, with three small naves, thirty-eight wooden seats, many plaster saints and a great cross with a skull and crossbones at its base. (Gabito was an altar boy there, always went to mass and was closely connected to church matters throughout his childhood.)20 Then they would walk across Bolívar Square, where vultures sat on the surrounding buildings, to the telegraph office where Gabriel Eligio had worked—though whether this fact was ever mentioned we cannot know. Not far beyond here was the cemetery along an avenue of palm trees—buried there now are General Durán, local trader José Vidal Daconte and Aunt Wenefrida—and what had only recently been open countryside, once forests, then cattle pastures, now closed off by the interminable, perfectly geometrical banana plantations.

  Gabito had actually been assisted into the world by a Venezuelan woman, Juana de Freites, the wife of exiled General Marcos Freites who had fallen foul of the dictator Juan Vicente Gómez. He became the UFC warehouse manager and his house was a part of the UFC office complex. Not only was Señora Freites an invaluable presence at Gabito’s birth but she later told him and his little friends a series of classic fairy stories—all set in Caracas!—which would contribute to his lifelong affection for Venezuela’s capital city.21 Another Venezuelan who lived across the mud road from Gabito’s house was of course the pharmacist Alfredo Barbosa, also a victim of Gómez. He acted as the town doctor after his arrival just before the First World War and married a local woman, Adriana Berdugo. His was the town’s leading pharmacy during the banana boom but by the end of the 1920s he was subject to fits of depression and passed long idle days swinging in his hammock.22

  A cooler, more distant presence was that of the “gringos” who worked for the UFC and lived inside what García Márquez would later call the “electrified henhouse” of the company compound with their air-conditioned houses, swimming pools, tennis courts and manicured lawns. It was these other-worldly creatures who had diverted the course of the river and unleashed the 1928 strike and ensuing massacre. It was they who built the canal between two rivers which, during the rainstorms of October 1932, contributed to the devastating floods on which the five-year-old Gabito gazed, mesmerized, from the verandah of his grandfather’s house.23

  The Italian Antonio Daconte Fama had arrived after the First World War. He brought the silent movies through his cinema the Olympia, the gramophone, the radio and even bicycles which he hired out to the astonished population. Antonio Daconte lived alternately with two sisters, one of whom bore him only sons, the other only daughters.24 Many Dacontes live in Aracataca to this day.

  Some of Gabito’s most enduring memories were of “the Frenchman,” really a Belgian, known as Don Emilio, who also arrived after the First World War, on crutches, with a bullet in his leg. A talented jeweller and cabinet maker, Don Emilio would play chess or cards with the Colonel of an evening until the day he went to see All Quiet on the Western Front and went home and killed himself with a slug of cyanide.25 The Colonel arranged the funeral and the whole episode ended up in Leaf Storm (where he is “the Doctor,” fused in part with the depressive Venezuelan pharmacist Alfredo Barbosa) and Love in the Time of Cholera (where he is Jeremiah de Saint-Amour). García Márquez recalls, “My grandfather was given news of his suicide one August Sunday as we came out of eight o’clock mass. He almost dragged me to the Belgian’s house where the mayor and two policemen were waiting. The first thing that struck me in the untidy bedroom was the strong smell of bitter almonds from the cyanide he had inhaled in order to kill himself. The body was lying on a camp bed covered with a blanket. By his side, on a wooden stool, was the tray in which he had vaporized the poison and a piece of paper with a message carefully written with a brush: ‘No one is to blame, I’m killing myself because I am no good.’ I can remember as if it were yesterday when my grandfather removed the blanket. The body was naked, stiff and twisted, the skin without colour, covered by a sort of yellow gauze and the watery eyes looked at me as if they were still alive. When she saw the look on my face as I returned to the house, my grandmother predicted: ‘This poor child will never again sleep in peace for the rest of his life.’”26

  There is reason to believe that the corpse of Don Emilio did indeed haunt the imagination of the susceptible boy throughout his childhood and fused with other corpses seen or only imagined; that it looms large in his very first published story, which is a meditation about his own status as a potential corpse (or possibly as an ex-corpse); and that even after Leaf Storm, where its much contested burial is the central dram
a of the novel, it would rise again and again from beneath the surface of his traumatized consciousness. Perhaps it is the screen concealing the corpse of the Colonel himself, which Gabito would never see.

  Sometimes the Colonel would take Gabito out for a last “turn” before his bedtime: “My grandmother would always interrogate me when I got home after my evening walks with my grandfather; she would ask me where we’d been and what we’d done. I remember one night passing a house with other people and seeing my grandfather sitting in the parlour; I saw him from a distance, sitting there as if it was his own house. For some reason I never spoke about it to my grandmother, but I know now that it was the house of a lover, a woman who wanted to see him when he died and my grandmother wouldn’t let her in, saying that corpses were only for legitimate wives.”27 The woman whom his grandmother would not let in to see Nicolás’s corpse was almost certainly Isabel Ruiz, who seems to have moved to Aracataca in the 1920s.28 And there was even a girl in his class at school whom Tranquilina told him he should have nothing to do with: “You and she must never marry.” But the boy was unable to make sense of this warning until much later in life.29

  While Gabito and the Colonel were out on their walks, greeting the Colonel’s comrades and acquaintances, the women back at the house were permanently involved in arranging hospitality, some of it relating to the arrival of dignitaries, the Colonel’s old war comrades or his Liberal Party cronies; much of it involved them dealing with the human products of his past misdeeds, who would usually arrive on mules, tie them out back and sleep in hammocks out in “The Clearing.”30 However most guests arrived by train: “The train arrived at eleven every morning and my grandmother would always say, ‘We have to prepare fish and meat because you never know if those who are coming would prefer meat or fish.’ So we were always excited to see who would be coming.”31

  But by the early 1930s everything was beginning to change. The banana strike and massacre, combined with the great depression of 1929, had set everything in reverse and Aracataca’s brief period of prosperity gave way to the beginnings of a steep decline. Despite the massacre and the resentment felt by many at the general arrogance of the banana company, its stay in Aracataca was remembered with nostalgia for the next half century; many a conversation would speculate about the possibilities of it returning and with it the good old days of easy money and constant excitement.32 Nicolás’s income from liquor and other sources was catastrophically reduced and before long the steady stream had become a trickle. In the case of the Márquez Iguarán family, then, the permanent sense of loss which was the aftermath of the move from the Guajira was now supplemented by the sense that Aracataca’s best days were also behind it, and Nicolás and Tranquilina, pensionless, began to stare poverty in the face as they entered an uncertain and intimidating old age.

  EARLY IN 1934 Luisa returned to Aracataca to see her eldest son and daughter and to talk to her parents. It cannot have been an easy encounter from any point of view. She had never been forgiven for disobeying and shaming her parents and for bringing an unacceptable son-in-law into the family. By early 1933 things were getting hopeless in Barranquilla and she had probably persuaded Gabriel Eligio to let her negotiate their return to Aracataca. She arrived late one morning on the train from Ciénaga. Margot was terrified of her unknown mother and feared she would take her away.33 She hid in her grandmother’s skirts. Gabito, who would have been six, going on seven, was utterly perplexed by the arrival of this stranger and then embarrassed when he saw five or six women in the room and had no idea which one was his mother until she gestured that he should approach.34

  By the time he was reacquainted with Luisa, Gabito had started his education at the new school—named after Maria Montessori and loosely based on her methods—near the railway station on Boulevard 20 July. The Montessori system, limited to kindergarten activities, was felt to do little harm as long as a good Catholic education was then instilled at primary level. The method stresses the child’s creative potential, innate desire to grow and learn, and individuality; it teaches initiative and self-direction through the medium of the child’s own senses. García Márquez would later say that it was “like playing at being alive.”35

  As it happened, Gabito’s first teacher, Rosa Elena Fergusson, had been his father’s first love in Aracataca (or so Gabriel Eligio claimed) and perhaps it was as well that Gabito did not know this. Rosa Elena, who had been born in Riohacha, was said to be a descendant of the first British consul in that city and to be related to Colonel William Fergusson, an equerry of Bolívar. She studied at the teachers’ college in Santa Marta and followed her family to Aracataca. There her father and grandfather worked for the UFC, one of her relatives became Mayor,36 and there the Montessori school opened in 1933. Gabito had to repeat the first grade because the school closed for operational reasons halfway through the year, and so he did not learn to read and write until he was eight years old, in 1935.

  Rosa Elena, who was graceful, gentle and pretty, was twice crowned carnival queen of Aracataca. She was devoted to Spanish Golden Age poetry, which would be a lifelong enthusiasm of her precocious pupil.37 She was his first infant love—he was simultaneously thrilled and embarrassed to be physically close to her—and she encouraged him to appreciate language and verse. Sixty years later Rosa Elena had a particularly vivid memory of her famous ex-pupil: “Gabito was like a doll, with his hair the colour of whipped brown sugar and his skin all pale and pink, an odd colour in Aracataca; and he was always carefully washed and combed.”38 For his part, García Márquez said that Miss Fergusson “imbued in me the pleasure of going to school just to see her.”39 When she put her arms around him to guide his hand in writing, he would get some inexplicable “funny feelings.”40 Miss Fergusson recalled: “He was quiet, he hardly spoke, he was very, very shy. His class mates respected him for his application, tidiness, and intelligence, but he never liked sports. He took great pride in being the first to carry out an instruction.”41 She taught Gabito two key work habits, punctuality and producing pages with no errors, which would be lifelong obsessions.

  Gabito had previously shown no precocity in reading and writing and failed to learn at home.42 But long before he started to read he had taught himself to draw and this remained his favourite activity until he was thirteen years of age. When he was very small the old man had even allowed him to draw on the walls of the house. Above all he loved to copy comic strips—little stories—from his grandfather’s newspapers.43 He also retold the plots of the movies the Colonel took him to see: “He used to take me to every kind of picture, I particularly remember Dracula … The next day he would make me tell him the film to see if I had been paying attention. So I not only fixed the films very clearly in my mind, but was also concerned to know how to narrate them because I knew he would make me tell him the story step by step to see if I had understood.”44 Thus the movies transported the young child; and he was, of course, a member of the first generation in history for whom the cinema, including talking films, was an experience prior to that of written literature. Later it was the Colonel who taught him respect for words and for the dictionary, which “knew everything” and was more infallible than the Pope in Rome.45 The permanent sense of exploration and discovery encouraged by the Montessori system must have been the perfect complement to Nicolás’s more traditional sense of certainty based on authority and personal empowerment.

  But now came a jarring change in the lives of Gabito and Margarita. Gabriel Eligio, always energetic but always an improviser, with no head for finance, was never much of a bet to be able to start from scratch in a big bustling city like Barranquilla, in its first flush of prosperity when he moved there. So things were even more likely to go downhill once the depression began to bite in Colombia. He had managed to acquire a pharmacist’s licence, leave his job in the hardware store and establish not one but two drugstores in the centre of the city, “Pasteur I” and “Pasteur 2.”46 This venture failed and the family retreated to Aracataca
in disarray. Luisa arrived first with Luis Enrique and Aida, and stayed at the Colonel’s house. Although she did in fact have a three-year break between pregnancies after giving birth to four children in less than four years by the time Aida Rosa was born in December 1930, Luisa was now pregnant again. Gabriel Eligio, who always had other “business” to attend to, was away for many more months and eventually returned on his birthday, 1 December 1934, long after the birth of the fifth child, Ligia, in August.47

  His arrival is one of the few dates from these early years that can be fixed precisely, because García Márquez vividly remembers the arrival of a stranger: a “slim, dark, garrulous, pleasant man in a white suit and straw hat, every inch a Caribbean of the 1930s.”48 The stranger was his father. The reason he is able to date it precisely is that someone wished Gabriel Eligio a happy birthday and asked how old he was and Gabriel Eligio, born on 1 December 1901, responded, “the same age as Christ.” A few days later the boy’s first expedition with this new father was to buy Christmas presents at the market for all the other children. Gabito might have chosen to feel privileged by this experience; but what he vividly remembered instead was his feeling of disillusionment at realizing that it was not Baby Jesus or even Santa Claus or Saint Nicholas who brought presents at Christmas but one’s own parents.49 The father would regularly disappoint his son in the years—and decades—to come. Their relationship would never be either easy or close.