Now Gabriel Eligio set up his new pharmacy, “G.G.” (“Gabriel García”), early in 1935 and managed to persuade the departmental medical authorities to award him a limited licence to practise homeopathic medicine, which allowed him to diagnose and treat patients and also to prescribe and sell his own quack remedies as the only appropriate cure for the complaints he identified. He had been combing magazines and medical journals and carrying out his own, often hair-raising experiments. Soon he invented a “Menstrual Mixture” under the brand name “GG,” a wheeze worthy of José Arcadio Buendía in One HundredYears of Solitude, that incompetent dreamer who unmistakably bears numerous traces of García Márquez’s own idiosyncratic, impractical but irrepressible progenitor. Economic survival was never more than precarious, and continuing subsidies from Colonel Márquez, himself increasingly impoverished, were humiliating but necessary. Before Gabriel Eligio’s return Luisa had moved in temporarily with her parents in the absence of her eccentric and wayward husband.50 Rosa Elena Fergusson even remembered that Nicolás began to expand the house to fit the new arrivals—perhaps hoping that his unloved son-in-law would not be returning.51 After Gabriel Eligio did return, he and Luisa rented a house a couple of blocks from the Colonel’s home, and it was there that a sixth child, Gustavo, was born on 27 September 1935.
In the household of their youthful, struggling parents, though truth to tell more in the yard and street than in the house, Luis Enrique and Aida both grew up as normal, healthy, unruly children, active, outgoing and without obvious complexes. Meanwhile, Gabito and Margot were being brought up by old people and had developed quite a different world-view, obsessive, superstitious, fatalistic and fearful but also diligent and efficient; both were perfectly behaved, rather timorous, spending more time in the house than in the street.52 Gabito and Margarita must have felt at once inexplicably abandoned by their parents—Why me? Why us?—yet privileged to be cared for in the house of the much-respected and much-loved grandparents. It was these two outsiders, Margot and Gabito, who, in later life, would keep the García Márquez family’s collective head above water.
Adjustment to the new situation was extremely difficult.53 Aida remembers that Gabito was very jealous of the affection of his grandparents and watched everything and everybody when his siblings visited the house, trying to make sure they stayed as little as possible. No one was to come between him and his grandfather. Antonio Barbosa, the son of the pharmacist, who lived opposite, and was ten years older than Gabito but a good friend of the family, remembers him as a cissy or “petticoat-hugger” who played with tops and kites but never played football with the street children.54
Perhaps because he was not encouraged to become personally adventurous Gabito developed an active imagination—through drawing, reading, visits to the cinema and his own interactions with grownups. He seems to have become something of a show-off, always trying to impress the visitors with his fancy ideas and amusing anecdotes, tales which had to become ever taller in order to achieve the desired effect. Tranquilina was convinced he was a clairvoyant. Inevitably some adults interpreted his love of story-telling and fantasy as a tendency to dishonesty, and for the rest of his life García Márquez would have trouble with other people’s questioning of his veracity.55 Perhaps no modern writer’s work raises so compellingly, indeed mysteriously, the relation between truth, fiction, verisimilitude and sincerity as his.
The two eldest children remained the property of their grandparents, as an eloquent anecdote from Margot demonstrates: “Grandfather didn’t allow anyone to tell us off. Once, I remember, when we were older, they gave us permission to go to my mother’s house by ourselves. When we set off, at about ten in the morning, my grandmother was cutting up a cheese and we asked for a piece. We arrived at the house and it turned out Luis Enrique and Aida were fasting because they’d taken medicine against parasites and couldn’t eat for a few hours. Naturally they were starving and when they saw the cheese they asked for some. When my father found out he was furious and started to shout insults at us. Gabito said, ‘Run, Margot, he’s going to hit us,’ and he took my hand and we made a run for it. We arrived home all frightened, and me crying. When we told Grandpa what had happened he went to tell my father off: why had he shouted at us, why had he threatened us.”56
In 1935, however, the old world really did start to come to an end. One day, at six o’clock in the morning, Nicolás, by now over seventy, climbed a ladder at the side of the house to retrieve the family parrot, which had become caught in the sacking placed over the huge water tanks on the roof to prevent the leaves from the mango trees dropping in. Somehow he missed his footing and fell to the ground, and was left scarcely able to breathe. Margot remembers everyone screaming, “He’s fallen, he’s fallen!”57 From that moment the old man, who was still enjoying reasonably good health, went into a sharp physical decline. It was now that Gabito, spying on the occasion of a doctor’s visit, saw a bullet scar close to his grandfather’s groin, the undeniable mark of a warrior. But after his fall, the old warrior was never the same again. He began to walk with a stick and to suffer from a series of ailments that would lead, before long, to his death. After the accident the walks around the town came to an abrupt end and the magic of the child’s relationship with his grandfather—based above all on security—would begin to fade. The Colonel even had to ask Gabriel Eligio and Luisa to collect taxes and other payments on his behalf, which must have been a demoralizing blow to his pride.
In early 1936 Gabito moved to the public school in Aracataca.58 He had suddenly become an obsessive reader. His grandfather and Miss Fergusson had already opened his eyes to learning, and the dictionary had begun to lay down the law; but the book which most stimulated his imagination was The Thousand and One Nights, found in one of his grandfather’s old trunks, which seems to have conditioned his interpretation of much of what he experienced in the Aracataca of those days, part Persian market, part Wild West. For a long time he was unaware of the book’s title because the cover was missing; when he did discover the title he must surely have made a connection between the exotic and mythological “Thousand and One Nights” and the more local, historical “War of a Thousand Days.”59
Now that the Colonel was a virtual invalid, Gabriel Eligio felt able to reassert his rights to his two fostered children. Thus Gabito had no sooner learned to read and write, with all its wonders, than his own adventurous, restless father decided to take the family away to Sincé, where he himself had been born. And this time Gabito too would be included, taken away from his home, his grandparents and his sister Margot by this man he hardly knew, who had already decided that his son’s main character trait was that he was a born liar, a kid who would “go somewhere, see something and come home telling something completely different. He exaggerated everything.”60 In December 1936 this frightening father, a born fabulator himself, took Gabito and Luis Enrique on an exploratory expedition to Sincé, to see if prospects there were better than the increasingly grim reality of Aracataca.61
Gabriel Eligio enrolled the boys to study with a local teacher, though the classes would not be recognized by the authorities and Gabito would lose yet another school year. Little wonder he eventually decided to adjust his age downwards to make up for all the school years he had lost! Now the two boys got to know their colourful paternal grandmother, Argemira García Paternina, still unmarried in her forties. She had given birth to Gabriel Eligio at the age of fourteen and thereafter had at least six children by at least three other men. “She was an extraordinary woman, I now realize,” said García Márquez sixty years later, “the freest spirit I’ve ever known. She had an extra bed ready at all times for whoever wanted to sleep with someone. She had her own moral code and she didn’t give a fuck what anyone else thought about it. Of course we thought it was quite normal at the time. Some of her sons, my uncles, were younger than I was, and I used to play with them, we’d go off and hunt birds and things like that; I never thought twice about it all, it was the
social world we lived in. Of course the landowners would seduce or rape thirteen-year-old girls in those days and then just cast them aside. My father went back to see her when he was grown up with a family and she was in her forties and he was outraged to find her pregnant again. She just laughed and said, ‘What’s it to you, how do you think you came into the world?’”62
Gabito’s recollections of this stay were fragmentary and no doubt painful, despite his jokes in later life. It is not difficult to imagine the anguish at leaving his sick grandfather and the culture shock at meeting the less respectable side of the family. Like Aracataca, Sincé was a small compact town with an even larger central square, the usual wedding-cake church, the usual statue of Bolívar, and a population of perhaps nine thousand inhabitants. Its economy was based principally on cattle, rice and maize and, like most cattle areas, its politics were essentially conservative. Grandmother Argemira, known as “Mama Gime,” lived in a little sloping square well away from the main plaza in a tiny two-room wooden house, painted white, with a palm thatch roof. It was there she had all her children.63 The experience must have shown Gabito a different world. He was no longer the protected child of Colonel Márquez and must have had to adjust to the wilder ways of his illegitimate uncles and cousins, not to mention his own rebellious and increasingly reckless younger brother, Luis Enrique.
Meanwhile, back home in Aracataca life had been getting harder. The culmination came early in March 1937 when, two years after his accident, Colonel Márquez died in Santa Marta of bronchial pneumonia. He had never recovered from the effects of his fall from the ladder in 1935. The old man had already been emotionally devastated by the death of his sister Wenefrida in his own house on 21 January 1937 and we can only imagine what the departure of his beloved “little Napoleon” had done to the old soldier’s morale. His son Juan de Dios moved the Colonel to Santa Marta early in 1937 for a throat operation. In March he contracted pneumonia and died on the 4th of that month at the age of seventy-three, in the city where another warrior, Simón Bolívar, had died and in whose cathedral he had been laid to rest.
Colonel Márquez was buried that same day in the Santa Marta city cemetery and the newspaper EI Estado recorded his death in a brief obituary. Margot vividly recalls the funeral in Santa Marta. “I cried and cried the whole day. But Gabito was away with my father and Luis Enrique in Sincé on another of his adventures. Gabito didn’t get back for months, so I don’t remember his reaction. But it must have been one of deep sadness, because they adored one another, they were inseparable.”64
Gabito, in Sincé, learned about the death indirectly through overhearing a conversation between his father and grandmother. Many years later, he would say that he was unable to cry at the news, and only realized the old man’s importance to him after he had grown up. He even made light of the moment: “I had other worries. I recall that at that time I had lice and it used to embarrass me terribly. They used to say that lice abandoned you when you died. I remember being very worried: ‘Shit, if I go and die now, everyone’ll know I have lice!’ So in those circumstances I can’t have been much affected by my grandfather’s death. My main worry was the lice. In fact I only started to miss my grandfather later when, grown up, I couldn’t find anyone to replace him, because my father was never a proper substitute.”65 The quirky recollections and provocative hyperboles, the typically indirect communication of personal emotions and implicit denials, conceal a simpler, more brutal fact: the boy was never able to grieve for the being he loved most during a painful and often incomprehensible childhood, the one who was the fount of all wisdom and the foundation of all security. Surrounded now by the members of his own nuclear family, his real family, the family who had left him when he was a baby, little Gabito was bereft. In April 1971, in answer to a reporter’s question about his grandfather’s death, and in front of his own biological father, García Márquez stated, with characteristic and in this case cruel hyperbole: “I was eight when he died. Since then nothing important has happened to me. Everything has just been flat.”66
Gabriel Eligio took the two boys back briefly to Aracataca to persuade Luisa to join them in Sincé. Luisa was decidedly unenthusiastic about the expedition. In 1993 she told me, “I didn’t want to go, just imagine, a young family and all our things. Train to Ciénaga, boat to Cartagena and road to Sincé. But I always did what he wanted, and he was a great traveller, an adventurer. We hired two trucks, with Luis Enrique and Gabito in the first one and their father behind in the second one, which overturned once on the way.”67 Only their cousin Sara Márquez, recently married, stayed behind in the old house in Aracataca with Tranquilina and Aunt Francisca.
Margot’s response to all these changes in the family’s fortunes was a bitter one: “We lived in my grandmother’s house until the money started to run out and she had to live on what Uncle Juanito sent her; so then it was decided that Gabito and I should move to my father’s home in Sincé … It was terrible. To move from a quiet environment to live with those devils, my brothers and sisters, added to the character of our father, who was rough and noisy. He never let anything go. He used to give Aida some tremendous thrashings and she would take no notice. I thought, ‘If he ever touches me, I’ll throw myself in the river.’ Neither I nor Gabito ever stood up to him, we always did as we were told.”68
But things went badly in Sincé. Gabriel Eligio had invested in livestock, notably a herd of goats, but the venture turned out disastrously and the family returned to Aracataca within a few months. Gabriel Eligio did not accompany his wife and children all the way but stopped off in Barranquilla where he began to find the means to set up yet another pharmacy. In Aracataca the rest of the family burned the Colonel’s clothes in the courtyard of the house and Gabito somehow saw the old man alive again among the flames. Gabito tried to come to terms with the loss of his grandfather, the collapse of his grandmother, who, already losing her eyesight, was inconsolable without her husband of over fifty years, and the simultaneous decline of the redoubtable Aunt Francisca, who had been with Nicolás even longer than his wife had. For Gabito, it was the end of an entire world. Immersed in this grief that he was unable even to recognize, and wholly in the hands, now, of the family that had abandoned him so many years before, he was reluctant to reintegrate into the life of the other children in Aracataca.
Luis Enrique, less reflective and with none of his brother’s painful psychological baggage to carry, threw himself back into the life of their Caribbean home town, the life which the hypersensitive Gabito would only be able to appreciate many years later, as he looked back with rueful nostalgia not only on the world he had lost but the fun he had missed. Both went back to the public school for boys. Luis Enrique recalls that the gypsies and the circus soon stopped passing through and, like the García Márquez family, lots of people were preparing to leave: “Even the prostitutes went away, the ones who practised their trade in ‘The Academy,’ as the house of pleasure was known … Naturally I never [went inside] but my friends told me all about it.”69
For many, many years Gabito would see Aracataca far more darkly than his reckless and rumbustious younger brother, as his first literary portrait, Leaf Storm, would illustrate. Although, much later, he would talk somewhat warmly about the town, he would always be afraid to go back. Not until he was forty years of age would he achieve the distance to view it through the picaresque filter Luis Enrique had already developed as a boy.
The end had arrived for all of them and Gabito, now eleven, was about to leave “that hot dusty town where my parents assure me I was born and where I dream that I am—innocent, anonymous and happy—almost every night. In which case I would not perhaps be the same person I am now but maybe I would have been something better: just a character in one of the novels I would never have written.”70
4
Schooldays:
Barranquilla, Sucre, Zipaquirá
1938–1946
GABRIEL ELIGIO took Gabito alone with him to Barranquilla to se
t up the pharmacy and their new life. It took them two months. Eleven-year-old Gabito found his father treated him better when there was no one else to show off to. But he was also left alone a lot of the time and Gabriel Eligio often neglected to feed him. One time the boy even found himself sleepwalking along an avenue in the centre of the city, suggesting a serious emotional disturbance.1
Barranquilla stood on the Magdalena River at the point where it begins to open out to the Caribbean Sea. In half a century it had been transformed from a mere hamlet lying between the historic colonial harbours of Cartagena and Santa Marta to become perhaps the most dynamic city in the nation. It was the hope of Colombia’s shipping industry and the home of its aviation. It was the only conurbation with significant immigration from abroad, which made it in a way like a capital city with a strong sense of its own somewhat makeshift modernity compared to Bogotá’s gloomy Andean traditionalism and the conservatism of its more aristocratic neighbour Cartagena. It was full of foreign and national import-export businesses, factories and workshops—a German airline, Dutch manufacturers, Italian food producers, Arab stores, American developers—and a plethora of small banks, commercial institutes and schools. Many of the firms were founded by Jews who had migrated from the Dutch Antilles. Barranquilla was the point of entry for travellers from abroad and the point of departure for travellers to Bogotá, whether by river or by air. Its carnival was the most famous in the country and many barranquilleros still live the whole year in impatient expectation of that week in February when their already vibrant community will once again explode.
Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez Page 9