Gabriel García Márquez

by Gerald Martin

  In Sincé and during the brief return to Aracataca relationships had been diluted to some extent by the presence of numerous members of the respective extended families. But when they arrived in Barranquilla late in 1938, leaving Tranquilina and the aunts behind in Aracataca, the members of the García Márquez nuclear family found themselves alone together for the very first time. Gabito and Margot, silently mourning their grandfather and the absence of their now ailing grandmother, found the adjustment almost too difficult to bear. But bear it they had to. Each knew that the other was suffering but they never spoke about it. Besides, their mother was suffering similar grief and had moved back to Barranquilla with great reluctance and visible resentment. The new pharmacy was down in the town centre and the new house was in the Barrio Abajo or Lower Quarter, perhaps the best-known popular district of Barranquilla. The house was small but surprisingly pretentious; Gabriel Eligio had realized that Luisa, expecting another baby, was in no mood for stoicism. Although it only had two bedrooms, the main living room had four Doric columns and on the roof was a small mock turret painted red and cream. Locals called it “the castle.”

  It became clear almost at once that the new pharmacy was to be another disastrous failure. Overwhelmed by his misfortunes, Gabriel Eligio set off once more for greener grasses, leaving his pregnant wife with no way of supporting herself and the children. Now came the family’s worst days. Gabriel Eligio travelled up and down and around the northern reaches of the Magdalena River, treating patients ad hoc, taking on temporary jobs and looking for new ideas. Luisa must often have wondered if he would ever be coming back. Her seventh child, Rita, would be born in July 1939; Aunt Pa travelled to Barranquilla to assist Luisa in the absence of Gabriel Eligio, and García Márquez notes in his memoir that the child was named Rita in honour of St. Rita of Cascia whose claim to moral fame was “the patience with which she bore the bad character of her wayward husband.”2 Luisa Santiaga would have four more children, all of them boys.

  She was forced to rely on the generosity of her brother Juan de Dios, an accountant in Santa Marta, who was already supporting Tranquilina and the aunts in Aracataca.3 It turned out that Luisa had resources of resilience, practicality and common sense which Gabriel Eligio never managed to develop. She was a quiet, gentle woman who could seem passive and even childlike, yet she found a way to bring up and protect eleven children without ever having enough money to feed, clothe and educate them in comfort. Where Gabriel Eligio’s sense of humour was somewhat broad and always eccentric, Luisa had an incisive sense of irony—which again she kept under tight rein—and a sense of humour that ranged from the wry to the openly festive and which has been immortalized in a number of her son’s female characters, most notably the unforgettable Ursula Iguarán in One Hundred Years of Solitude. The period in Barranquilla, during which Gabito and his mother fought together against real poverty, established a new link between them which would never be broken: García Márquez, stressing its importance to him but concealing his hurt, would say that his relationship with her was “a serious relationship … probably the most serious relationship I’ve ever had.”4

  Despite the hardships Luisa decided to enrol Gabito in school so that he could complete his primary education. He was the eldest and academically the brightest and as such he represented the family’s best hope for the future. The headmaster of the Cartagena de Indias school, Juan Ventura Casalins, took a protective attitude to his new pupil and the encouragement of a sympathetic adult male must have been providential. Even so, García Márquez’s reminiscences of his schooldays are of loneliness and of overcoming great trials and tribulations. He immersed himself in books such as Treasure Island and The Count of Monte Cristo.

  He also had to look for real work and earned a few pesos painting signs for a store named El Toquío which stood—and still stands—next to the old house. The boy would paint messages from the shopkeeper such as “If you don’t see it, just ask,” or, “The man who gives the credit is out looking for his money.” On one memorable occasion he was paid twenty-five pesos for painting the sign on the local bus. (Colombia’s buses are the gaudiest in Latin America.) On another he entered a radio talent contest in which he remembers singing “The Swan,” a well-known waltz, but unfortunately he came second and he also remembers that his mother, who had alerted all her friends and relatives and was not unnaturally hoping for the five-peso prize, found it hard to conceal her disappointment. He also got a job with a local printer which included hawking samples around the streets. He abandoned the job after meeting the mother of one of his friends from Aracataca, who shouted after him: “Tell Luisa Márquez she should think what her parents would say if they saw their favourite grandson handing out leaflets to consumptives in the market.”5

  Gabito himself was a sickly child at this age, pale, underfed and physically underdeveloped. Luisa tried to protect him from tuberculosis by giving him Scott’s Emulsion, the famous brand of cod liver oil, while her husband was away and Gabriel Eligio would say that when he got home from his travels Gabito “stank of fish.” One of the boy’s most chilling childhood memories was of a dairywoman who often called at the house saying crassly one day to Luisa Santiaga in front of the child himself, “I hate to say it, ma’am, but I don’t think this boy of yours is going to make it to grown-up.”6

  During one of the family’s occasional telephone calls to the long-lost head of the family, Luisa said she didn’t like the tone of his voice and during the next call she exhorted him to come home. The Second World War had just broken out and perhaps she was feeling especially insecure. Gabriel Eligio sent a telegram which simply said, “Indecisive.” Smelling a rat, she gave him a blunt alternative: either he came home at once or she would take all the children to wherever he was. Gabriel Eligio caved in and was back in Barranquilla within the week. In no time at all he began dreaming about new ventures. He recalled nostalgically a small river town called Sucre, which he had visited as a very young man. No doubt there was a woman somewhere in his mind’s eye. Once again he acquired a loan from a pharmaceutical wholesaler whose drugs he undertook to purvey and within a couple of months the family was on its way from the most modern city in Colombia to a small rural backwater.

  As usual Gabriel Eligio went on in advance to the new destination and left Luisa, pregnant once more, to move or sell the family effects—this time she sold most of them—and bring the seven children. Gabito, who had already been given tasks beyond his years when he went on ahead to Barranquilla with his father a year and a half before, now found himself in an enhanced role as man of the family. He made almost all the arrangements, including the packing, booking the removal truck and buying the steamer tickets to take the family up-river towards Sucre. Unfortunately the ticket clerk changed the rules in mid-transaction and Luisa found herself without enough money because the company said that all the children had to pay full fare. Desperate, she carried out a one-woman sit-in and won the day. Years later, Luisa herself, chatting to me in Barranquilla when she was eighty-eight, remembered that odyssey: “At the age of twelve Gabito had to organize the journey, being the eldest. I can still see him standing on the deck of the river steamer counting the children and suddenly panicking. ‘There’s one missing!’ he said. And it was him. He hadn’t counted himself!”7

  The river-boat took them south to Magangué, the largest town on the northern Magdalena. From there they had to switch to a launch which would take them up the smaller San Jorge River and then along the much narrower Mojana, with swamps and jungle on either side, a great adventure which opened wide the children’s imagination. Gustavo, the youngest son, was only four years old and the arrival in Sucre in November 1939 is one of his most vivid early memories: “We went to Sucre by launch and stepped down from the boat along a plank. The scene is imprinted on my mind: my mother walking down the plank, dressed all in black, with pearl buttons on the sleeves of her dress. She must have been about thirty-four. I remembered that episode many years later, when I wa
s thirty myself; it was as if I was looking at a portrait and I realized she had a look of resignation on her face. It’s easy enough to understand because my mother had been educated in a convent school and had been the favourite child of one of the most important families in the town; an indulged little girl who had painting and piano lessons and who, all of a sudden, had to live in a town where the snakes came into the houses and there was no electric light; a town where the floods were so bad in winter that the land disappeared beneath the water and clouds of mosquitoes appeared.”8

  Sucre was a small town of about three thousand inhabitants with no road or rail access to anywhere. It was like a floating island lost in a lattice-work of rivers and streams amidst what had once been dense tropical jungle, now thinned out by constant human endeavour but still covered by trees and undergrowth with large clearings for cattle, rice, sugar cane and maize. Other crops included bananas, cacao, yucca, sweet potato and cotton. The landscape was constantly changing and shifting between scrub forest and savannah, depending on the season and the height of the rivers. Immigrants had come from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Italy and Germany between 1900 and the mid-1920s. The more prosperous inhabitants lived around the large plaza, which was not a conventional square but an area more than a hundred and fifty yards long and perhaps thirty yards wide, with the river at one end, the church at the other and a row of brightly painted two-storey houses on either side. This was where Gabriel Eligio had rented his new house, with the pharmacy set up on the ground floor.

  Soon after their arrival Luisa insisted on raising the question of Gabito’s secondary education and persuaded her reluctant husband that he should be sent to the San José College back in Barranquilla, about which she had made enquiries before her departure. “They make governors there,” she said.9 Gabito himself may have felt that he was being rejected again but decided to put a brave face on things: “I thought of school as a dungeon, I was appalled at the very idea of living subject to a bell, but it was also my only hope of enjoying a free life from the age of thirteen, on good terms with my family but away from their control.”10

  A friend has described his appearance in those days: “He had a large broad head, and wiry unkempt hair. He had a rather coarse nose, long as a shark’s fin. He had a mole starting to grow to the right of his nose. He looked half Indian and half gypsy. He was a thin, taciturn boy who went to school because he had to.”11 He was almost thirteen and his education was well behind schedule. During his first fifteen months back in the big coastal city he stayed with José María, one of his Valdeblánquez cousins, his wife Hortensia and their baby daughter. He slept in the lounge on a sofa.

  Despite his own self-doubts and the competition from other talented boys, Gabito’s performance in school was consistently excellent across the board. He became celebrated for his literary exercises entitled “My Foolish Fancies,” humorous satirical poems about his schoolmates and about severe or silly school rules, which, when they came to the attention of his teachers, he was regularly asked to recite.12 He also published a number of other short pieces and poems in the school magazine Juventud (Youth) and was given a series of positions of trust and responsibility during his three years at the school. For example, the boy with the best grades of the week would raise the national flag before classes in the morning and this was a task Gabito had to himself for long periods of the school year. There is a picture of him in the school magazine with his medals; he is looking slightly sideways at the camera and somewhat shamefaced, as if he has reason to doubt the justice of his success. This was a feeling which would pursue him down the years.

  At the end of the first year the adolescent García Márquez returned home for the annual two-month vacation in December and January. Inevitably another child had been born, and prematurely at seven months: his baby brother Jaime, destined to be sickly for seven years; Gabito became his family godfather and much later in life Jaime would become Gabito’s closest sibling. By now the family was established in the new environment and Gabito, as always, had a lot of catching up to do. His brothers and sisters came to view him as a sort of occasional brother, who turned up every so often, quiet, shy and somewhat solitary—the oldest and the most distant. These regular absences, at the very outset of adolescence, deepened the gulf between the boy and his father, who never understood him and seemed not to try. But he never forgot about his sister Margot, who was equally afraid of their father, while their mother could never find time for her. She missed him terribly. (“We were almost like twins.”) Aware of her solitude, Gabito wrote to Margot religiously every week he was away.13

  He dreaded going home. If in order to learn about Sucre we had to rely upon statements made by García Márquez between 1967 and his 2002 autobiography we would have known next to nothing apart from the indirect evidence of novels such as In Evil Hour and No One Writes to the Colonel, written in the 1950s, and Chronicle of a Death Foretold, written at the beginning of the 1980s. Such grudging statements as he did make merely confirmed the grim and sombre impression left by those novels. Sucre was the anonymous pueblo (small town), the dark and evil twin of Macondo; he would not even refer to it by name, just as he rarely mentioned his father, with whom it was so closely identified in his mind. (The original title for In Evil Hour was This Shit-Heap of a Town.) Yet for the younger children, particularly for Rita and the four who were born there, it was a tropical paradise of river, jungle, exotic animals and freedom.

  This was also Gabriel Eligio’s most successful period as a pharmacist and homeopathic practitioner and he not only worked on his own account but was connected to the local clinic. For such perks it was helpful to be a Conservative, for Sucre, unlike Aracataca, was a largely Conservative town. At the same time, violence was never too far below the surface. On the day Jaime was christened a local trumpeter had his throat slit at the very moment he was straining to blow the highest, wildest note. Some said the blood soared three metres. Luis Enrique heard about the incident immediately and raced off to see but by the time he arrived the unfortunate man was almost out of blood, though the body was still palpitating.14 Nothing quite so dramatic would happen again in public until a family friend, Cayetano Gentile, their next door neighbour, was murdered in front of the whole town in January 1951 and all their lives were irremediably changed.

  For Gabito there had been a jarring alteration in the family arrangements brought about by his errant father. As he walked up from the launch on his return to Sucre at the end of 1940 he was embraced by a vivacious young woman who announced herself as his sister Carmen Rosa; the same evening he would discover that his other half-sibling Abelardo was also in town, working as a tailor. The presence of Abelardo must have come as a particular shock. Gabito’s only consolation for being with this almost unknown family had been that he was the eldest and this consolation had now been taken away from him: he was not his father’s eldest son, only his mother’s.

  Gabriel Eligio’s career frustrations and professional inferiority complex account for part of the problem between him and Gabito, who was always looking at him with an outsider’s eye. Most of Gabriel Eligio’s children took his stories about his medical expertise and achievements at face value.15 Gabito, who had already seen far more of the world, was undoubtedly more sceptical than his brothers and sisters. Gabriel Eligio evidently read a lot and knew a lot; he also had a lot of brass neck and the fortitude to follow his own intuitions while his patients took the risks. He had qualified as a homeopathic doctor in Barranquilla and while he worked as a pharmacist there he struggled part-time to earn a qualification through the University of Cartagena to secure full recognition as a doctor; eventually, after prolonged negotiations, he was granted the title “Doctor of Natural Sciences,” but he called himself “doctor” long before that.16 It seems doubtful Gabito ever took his father’s assumed title very seriously; besides, “Colonel” was a title he undoubtedly much preferred. Gabriel Eligio himself often boasted that his techniques were far from orthodox: “When I used to
go and see a sick person the beating of his heart would tell me what was wrong with him. I used to listen with great care. ‘This is a liver problem,’ the heart would … say to me, ‘This man’s going to die talking,’ so I’d say to his relatives, ‘This man is going to die talking’ and the man would die talking. But afterwards I lost the knack.”17

  Not surprisingly, teguas (tegua is a pejorative word meaning anything between a Western quack doctor and an Indian herbalist), indeed all homeopathic doctors, had a reputation for sexual profligacy in Colombia in those days. After all, they were travelling experts, with no ties to most of the places they passed through, with unrivalled access to members of the opposite sex and a ready explanation for any disconcerting behaviour. A woman in a nearby settlement hired a lawyer who accused Gabriel Eligio of raping her while under anaesthetic and although he denied the more serious charge of rape he admitted that he was indeed the father of her child.18 This too—having sexual relations with a patient—was a criminal offence, but he managed to extricate himself from what was perhaps the most perilous moment of his career, when he could have lost everything. Later another woman came forward to say that her granddaughter too had been made pregnant by Doctor García and that she could not look after her. Luisa, after the inevitable quarrels and recriminations, did the same as her mother before her and accepted that her husband’s offspring were also hers. As García Márquez himself said, “She was angry, yet she took the children in and I actually heard her say that phrase: ‘I don’t want the family blood going wandering around the world.’”19

  During the first annual vacation Gabito not only had to assimilate the appearance of Abelardo and Carmen Rosa, and the darkly whispered news about yet another illegitimate half-brother; another traumatic experience awaited him. He took a message from his father to what turned out to be the local brothel, “La Hora” (“The Hour”). The woman who opened the door looked him up and down and said, “Oh, sure, come this way.” She led him to a darkened room, undressed him and, as he put it the first time he ever mentioned it in public, “raped” him. He would later recall: “It was the most awful thing that ever happened to me, because I didn’t know what was going on. I was absolutely certain I was going to die.”20 To add insult to injury, the prostitute rather brutally told Gabito he should ask his younger brother, evidently already a regular, for lessons. He must have blamed his father for this sordid, frightening and humiliating experience. Indeed, it is more than likely that, in time-honoured Latin American tradition—what the Brazilians used to call “sending a boy to buy candy”—Gabriel Eligio actually set it up.