Gabriel García Márquez

by Gerald Martin

  The second year at San José started like the first. García Márquez remained the literary star of the lower school and enjoyed a quiet popularity. He wrote an entertaining report on a school excursion to the seaside in March 1941 which is a pleasure to read, overflowing with good humour, youthful enthusiasm and sheer verve and nerve: “On the bus Father Zaldívar told us to sing a devotion to the Virgin and we did so despite the fact that some boys proposed instead a porro21 (an Afro-Colombian song) like ‘The Old Cow’ or ‘The Hairless Hen.’” The chronicle ends, “Whoever wants to know who wrote these ‘foolish fancies’ should send a letter to Gabito.” He was one of the swots, allergic to sports and fighting, and used to sit reading in the shade during break time while the others were playing football. But like many other studious and non-sporting students before and since, he learned to be funny and to defend himself with his tongue.

  Yet there was much more to this enigmatic adolescent than met the eye. Gabito’s blossoming education was interrupted in 1941 by a lengthy absence from San José when he missed the second half of the academic year through an emotional disorder which came to a head in May. The ever indiscreet Gabriel Eligio discussed it in an interview in 1969, soon after his son became famous: “He had something like a schizophrenia, with terrible temper tantrums and such like. Once he threw an inkwell at one of the priests, a well-known Jesuit. So they wrote to say they thought I should take him out of school, which I did.”22 It is rumoured in the family that Gabriel Eligio intended to trepan his son’s head “at the place where his consciousness and memory were situated” and that only Luisa’s threat to make the plan public restrained him.23 It is not hard to imagine what effect such a plan may have had on a boy who had no faith in this home doctor anyway and who must have been petrified at the thought of his father literally getting inside his head.

  When the wretched Gabito arrived in Sucre his half-brother Abelardo said bluntly that what he needed was to “get his leg over” and provided him with a stream of willing young women who gave him early sexual experiences while the other boys back at San José were busy praying to the Holy Virgin. These precocious adventures gave García Márquez, who until that time evidently felt less of a male than other males in a profoundly macho society, the sense of being a sexual insider, which never left him whatever his other complexes and sustained him in the face of numerous other anxieties and setbacks.24

  It was at this point that a mysterious character called José Palencia, son of a local landowner, appeared on the scene. Like Gabito’s brother Luis Enrique, Palencia was a talented musician and a great parrandero (drinker, singer, seducer) who would remain a good friend of Gabito’s through his time at Bogotá. He was also handsome, and an accomplished dancer, a skill which Gabito, an excellent singer, had not yet mastered. Palencia would be the protagonist of numerous picaresque and even melodramatic anecdotes down the years before an untimely but not unexpected demise. Acquiring such a friend was another shot in the arm for a growing adolescent.

  On his return to school in February 1942 the young García Márquez was warmly greeted by both pupils and teachers. Although he makes light of the experience in his memoirs, he must have felt embarrassed and humiliated by his absence and the explanations he had to invent. His father was given much credit for his “cure.” He no longer stayed with José María and Hortensia Valdeblánquez, who now had two children, but with his father’s uncle, Eliécer García Paternina, a bank clerk known for his probity and generosity whose great passion in life was the English language. Eliécer’s daughter Valentina was, like Gabito, a great reader and took him to meetings of the local “Arena y Cielo” (“Sand and Sky”) group of poets.25

  One day, while he was waiting in the house of one of the poets, a “white woman poured into a mulatta’s mould” came to visit. Her name was Martina Fonseca and she was married to a black river pilot well over six feet tall. Gabito was just fifteen and very small for his age. He talked to her for a couple of hours as they waited for the poet. Then he saw her again waiting for him—he says—on a park bench after they had both been to church on Ash Wednesday. She invited him home and they embarked on an intense sexual affair—“a secret love that burned like a wild fire”—which lasted the rest of the school year. The pilot was frequently away for twelve days at a time and on the corresponding Saturdays Gabito, who had to be back at Uncle Eliécer’s by eight o’clock, pretended to be at the Saturday afternoon performance at the Rex Cinema. But after a few months Martina said she thought it would be better if he went somewhere else to study because “then you will realize that our affair will never be more than it has already been.”26 He left in tears and as soon as he got back to Sucre he announced that he was not returning either to San José or to Barranquilla. His mother, according to this version, said, “Then you’ll have to go to Bogotá.” His father said there was no money for that and Gabito, suddenly realizing that he wanted to go on studying after all, blurted out, “There are scholarships.” A few days later came the pay-off: “Get yourself ready,” said Gabriel Eligio, “you’re going to Bogotá.”27

  GABITO SET OFF for the capital in January 1943 to try his luck. Even this was a risk for the family because the journey to Bogotá was an expensive investment for a boy who might easily fail the entrance examination. Bogotá was, in effect, another country, and the journey there was long and intimidating. His mother adjusted one of his father’s old black suits and the whole family saw him off at the boardwalk. Never one to miss the chance of a trip, Gabriel Eligio began the journey with Gabito in a small launch which took them along the rivers Mojana and San Jorge and then down the great Magdalena to the city of Magangué. There Gabito said goodbye to his father and took the river-boat David Arango south to the port of Puerto Salgar, a voyage which normally lasted a week but sometimes three if the river was low and the steamer was stranded on a sandbank. Although he wept during the first night, what had seemed daunting in prospect became a revelation.28 The boat was full of other young costeños, hopeful first-timers like him looking for grants, or more fortunate schoolboys and university students already enrolled and returning after the long vacations. He would come to remember these journeys as floating fiestas during which he, with the rest of the young men, sang boleros, vallenatos and cumbias to entertain themselves and to earn a few pesos, on that “wooden paddle-wheeler that went along leaving a wake of piano-player waltzes in the midst of the sweet fragrance of gardenias and rotting salamanders of the equatorial tributaries.”29

  A few days later, as Gabito was leaving the river-boat at journey’s end his more experienced companions, jeering at a tropical bundle his mother had forced upon him—a palm-leaf sleeping mat, a fibre hammock, a coarse woollen blanket and an emergency chamber pot—wrested it from him and threw it in the river to mark the accession to civilization of this corroncho—the deprecating Bogotá word for a costeño, which implies that all of them are coarse and ignorant and incapable of discriminating good behaviour from bad.30 It was as if nothing he knew or possessed would be of use to him in Bogotá, among the devious and supercilious cachacos.

  At Puerto Salgar, at the foot of the Eastern Andes, the passengers boarded the train which would take them up to Bogotá. As the locomotive climbed into the Andes the mood of the costeños changed. With each twist of the line the atmosphere grew colder and thinner, and breathing became more difficult.31 Most of them started to shiver and developed headaches. At 8,000 feet they reached the Meseta and the train began to accelerate towards the capital city across the Sabana de Bogotá, a plateau 300 miles long and 50 miles wide, a gloomy dark green beneath the year-round rains but a brilliant emerald colour when the high Andean sun shone down from its cobalt sky. The Sabana was dotted with small Indian villages of gray adobe huts with thatched roofs, willow trees and eucalyptuses, and flowers decorating even the humblest dwellings.

  The train arrived in the capital at four o’clock in the afternoon. García Márquez has often said it was the worst moment of his life. He was
from the world of sun, sea, tropical exuberance, relaxed social customs and a relative absence of clothing and prejudices. On the Sabana everyone was wrapped up tight in a ruana or Colombian poncho; and in rainy and grey Bogotá, backed up against the Andean mountains at a height of 8,660 feet, it seemed even colder than on the Sabana; and the streets were full of men in dark suits, waistcoats and overcoats, like Englishmen in the City of London; and there were no women anywhere to be seen. Reluctantly, with a heartfelt sigh, the boy put on the black trilby hat he had been told everyone wore in Bogotá, got down from the carriage and hauled his heavy metal trunk on to the platform.32

  No one was waiting for him. He realized that he could hardly breathe. Everywhere around him was the unfamiliar smell of soot. As the station and the street outside became deserted, Gabito wept for the world he had left behind. He was an orphan: he had no family, no sunshine, and no idea what to do. Finally a distant relative arrived and took him off in a taxi to a house near the town centre. If outside in the streets everyone wore black, inside they all wore ponchos and dressing gowns. When García Márquez got into bed that first night he jumped straight out again and shrieked that someone had soaked his bed. “No,” he was told, “that’s what Bogotá’s like, you’ll have to get used to it.” He lay awake all night weeping for the world he had lost.

  Four days later, early in the morning, he was standing in line outside the Ministry of Education on Jiménez de Quesada, the great avenue named after the Spanish conqueror of Colombia and founder of Bogotá.33 The line seemed interminable; it started on the third floor of the ministry building and stretched two blocks along Avenida Jiménez. García Márquez was near the end of it. His despair deepened as the morning wore on. And then some time after midday he felt a tap on his shoulder. On the steamboat from Magangué he had met a lawyer from the Costa, Adolfo Gómez Támara, who had been devouring books throughout the journey, including Dostoyevsky’s The Double and Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes. Gómez Támara had been impressed by García Márquez’s singing and had asked him to write out the words of one of the boleros so he could sing it to his sweetheart in Bogotá. In return he had presented him with his copy of The Double. The shivering youth blurted out his perhaps hopeless purpose: to win a scholarship. Incredibly, it turned out that the elegant lawyer was none other than the national director of educational grants, who at once led the stupefied applicant to the front of the line and into a large office. García Márquez’s application was registered and he was entered for the examination, which took place at the College of San Bartolomé, the academy in old Bogotá where upper-class Colombians had been educated since colonial days. He passed and was offered a place in a new school, the National College for Boys in nearby Zipaquirá thirty miles away. García Márquez would have preferred to be at the prestigious San Bartolomé in Bogotá but struggled to conceal his disappointment.

  He had neither the time nor the money to go home and celebrate with his proud and excited family. He had never heard of Zipaquirá but he headed straight there, arriving by train on 8 March 1943, two days after his sixteenth birthday. Zipaquirá was a small colonial city, typically Andean, with the same climate as Bogotá. It had been the economic heart of the Chibcha Indian empire, based on the salt mines which even today are the main attraction for tourists. The imposing main square was surrounded by huge colonial houses with blue balconies and heavy, overhanging red-tiled roofs, and was fronted by a great pallid cathedral with double towers which seemed too big for what in those days was really little more than a large village. Zipaquirá was full of small workshops with black chimneys processing salt by evaporation, after which the product would be sold back to the government. Particles drifted down all over the small community like ash. For a boy from the Costa the climate and environment were cold, dismal and oppressive.

  The school was newly established but housed in an old colonial building. Formerly the College of San Luis Gonzaga, it was an austere two-storeyed edifice which dated back to the seventeenth century and was organized around an inner courtyard lined with colonial arches.34 The premises comprised the rector’s study and private quarters, the secretariat, an excellent library, six classrooms and a laboratory, a storeroom, a kitchen and refectory, toilets and showers and a huge first-floor dormitory for the eighty or so boarders who slept at the school. Winning a grant for Zipaquirá, he would later say, was like “winning a tiger in a raffle.” The school was “a punishment” and “that frozen town was an injustice.”35

  Although he did not appreciate it at the time, García Márquez benefited from two circumstances unique in the history of Colombia. The Conservatives had abandoned state secondary education in 1927 and handed it to the private sector, essentially the Church, but when Alfonso López Pumarejo was elected President in 1934 he declared a “Revolution on the March.” For the only time in the nation’s entire history a government, inspired in part by the Mexican Revolution and by the precarious reforms of the socialists in Republican Spain, set out to unify and democratize the country and create a new type of citizen. One of the main instruments for this transformation was to be a truly nationalist education system and the first “national college” to be founded was, precisely, the National College of Zipaquirá. At this time there were only forty thousand secondary students in the whole of Colombia and that year barely six hundred of them graduated from high school (of whom only nineteen were women). Most Colombians had only a vague idea of the regional complexity of their country but in Zipaquirá boys from every region were thrown together.36

  The teachers at Zipaquirá were outstanding. Many of them had been rejected by other schools because of their progressive orientation. They tended to be hard-working idealists of a radical Liberal or even Marxist persuasion, and were sent to Zipaquirá to prevent them from polluting the minds of the upper-class boys in Bogotá. They were all specialists in their subjects, most of whom had passed through the Higher Normal School under one of Colombia’s great educators, the costeño psychiatrist José Francisco Socarrás, a relative of one of Colonel Márquez’s old war comrades and indeed of the Colonel’s wife Tranquilina.37 Socarrás believed that young Colombians should be exposed to all ideas, not excluding socialist currents. Many of the teachers were recent graduates and established relaxed and informal relationships with the pupils.

  The school day was demanding. The wake-up bell was at six and by half past six García Márquez had taken a cold shower, dressed, cleaned his shoes and fingernails and made his bed. There was no school uniform but most students wore blue blazers with grey trousers and black shoes. García Márquez had to do the best he could with hand-me-downs from his father and would be embarrassed for the next few years by badly frayed jackets with extra-long sleeves, which did at least help him keep warm in the unheated school. At nine o’clock at night, after the school day and homework were behind them, the boys went up to the dormitory, where a memorable school tradition was instituted soon after García Márquez’s arrival. There was a small cubicle for the teachers to sit dozing in the dormitory and from there before lights out a teacher would sit reading to the boys from his window as they fell asleep—usually some popular classic like The Man in the Iron Mask but sometimes an even weightier work like The Magic Mountain.38 According to García Márquez the first of the authors was Mark Twain, an appropriate recollection for a man destined to be—among other things—the Mark Twain of his own land: symbol of the country, definer of a national sense of humour and chronicler of the relation between the provincial realm and the centre. The dormitory had iron beds with planks and these planks were the item mainly stolen by one boy from another. García Márquez became famous for terrifying dreams in the middle of the night which made him wake the entire dormitory with his screams. He had inherited this tendency from his mother Luisa; his worst nightmares “did not occur in terrifying visions but in joyful episodes with ordinary persons or places that all at once revealed sinister information in an innocent glance.”39 His recent reading of Dostoyevsky’s
The Double can surely not have helped.

  On Saturdays there were classes until midday, after which the boys were free until six to wander the town, attend the cinema or organize dances—if they were lucky—at the houses of local girls. On Saturday they could play soccer, though the costeños preferred baseball. Sunday was totally free until six and, although the school did have religious instruction by a priest, there was no daily service and attendance at church was not mandatory even on Sunday—though García Márquez used to attend, perhaps so that he would not have to lie to his mother in his letters home. Such freedom was extraordinary for Colombia in the 1940s. And, as García Márquez would later reflect, with three square meals a day and more freedom—a sort of “supervised autonomy”—than in one’s own home, there was much to be said after all for life at Zipaquirá.

  He would always be grateful to the school for the grounding it gave him in Colombian and Latin American history, but literature, inevitably, was his favourite subject and he studied everything from the Greeks and Romans up to recent Spanish and Colombian texts. His spelling was, then as now, surprisingly erratic (though not as poor as his abject mathematical skills); he consoled himself with the thought that the great Simón Bolívar was also rumoured to have been a poor speller. He would later say that his best teacher of spelling was his mother Luisa; throughout his schooldays she would send his letters back to him with the spelling corrected.