At weekends he would play games, a bit of football with his friends in the grounds of the school, go to the cinema or walk the streets and highland meadows of Zipaquirá beneath the eucalyptus trees. Sometimes on a Sunday he would take the train to Bogotá, thirty miles away, to visit costeño relatives; on one such occasion he was introduced by a friend in the street to a distant cousin, Gonzalo González, who worked for the newspaper El Espectador. González, who had also been born in Aracataca, left a rare snapshot of the young man that García Márquez then was: “He must have been about seventeen and weighed no more than fifty kilos. He did not approach me. He said nothing before I spoke and I at once suspected that this boy was a methodical fellow, thoughtful and disciplined. He didn’t move from where he was, with one old but clean shoe on the sidewalk and the other down on the asphalt of Seventh Avenue at Sixteenth Street in Bogotá. Maybe he was a timid person who did not show his fear. Circumspect, almost a bit sad, and in any case lonely and unknown. Once his initial reserve was overcome, he began to communicate and to put on the sort of controlled effusiveness that I later heard him call his ‘nice guy show.’ Within a minute or two he was talking about books …”40
Reading was this evasive young man’s principal activity in Zipaquirá. In Barranquilla he had read every cheap Jules Verne and Emilio Salgari novel he could find as well as enough lowbrow poetry for a lifetime, together with the classics of the Spanish Golden Age. He knew many of these poems by heart. Now the lonely adolescent set to reading every book he could lay his hands on. He went through the whole library of literature, then turned to books of history, psychology, Marxism—mainly Engels—and even the works of Freud and the prophecies of Nostradamus. At the same time he was bored by the demands and rigours of his formal education and spent his time daydreaming, so much so that he was in real danger of losing his grant. Yet with just a week or two of study he astonished both his classmates and his teachers by getting straight fives and becoming “top boy.”
In late 1943 Gabito returned again to Sucre. He would travel back to this remote river town from school in Barranquilla and Zipaquirá, from university in Bogotá, and from his jobs in Cartagena and Barranquilla until the family moved to Cartagena in 1951. Here, or in other nearby towns, he would meet the models for many of his best-known characters, including “innocent Eréndira” from the book of that name and the prostitute he would call María Alejandrina Cervantes in Chronicle of a Death Foretold. While he had been away this first year in Zipaquirá the ninth child, Hernando (“Nanchi”), had been born at the end of March, and while his wife was pregnant Gabriel Eligio’s philandering ways had got him into hot water once more, with the birth of yet another illegitimate child. This time both Luisa and her eldest daughter Margot had been filled with womanly outrage, and for quite a while even Gabriel Eligio thought he might have gone too far; but as usual he talked them round.41
During this vacation García Márquez had another torrid sexual experience, this time with a voluptuous young black woman he calls “Nigromanta” (the name he would give a similarly sensuous black woman in the penultimate chapter of One Hundred Years of Solitude), whose husband was a policeman. Luis Enrique has told part of the story: “One day at midnight Gabito met a policeman on the Alvarez bridge in Sucre. The policeman was going to his wife’s house and Gabito was coming from the policeman’s wife’s house. They greeted one another, the policeman asked after Gabito’s family and Gabito asked after the policeman’s wife. And if that’s a story my mother tells you can imagine the ones she knows and doesn’t tell. And she doesn’t tell that one complete either because the end of the story is that the policeman asked Gabito for a light and as he drew near the policeman made a face and said, ‘Shit, Gabito, you must have been in “La Hora” because there’s a smell of whore on you even a billy-goat wouldn’t jump across.’”42 Weeks later—according to García Márquez’s own version—the policeman caught him in bed with his wife (he had unfortunately fallen asleep) and threatened him with a round of Russian roulette with him, Gabito, as the only player. The lawman relented not only because he had the same political proclivities as García Márquez’s father but also because he recalled with gratitude a recent occasion when Gabriel Eligio had cured him of a bout of gonorrhoea which no other doctor had been able to shift.43
Gabito was growing older, finally beginning to look his age. Contemporaries at Zipaquirá remember him at this time as thin, wild-eyed, always shivering and complaining about the cold; his previously combed and parted hair gradually turned to wire wool, never to be fully controlled again.44 He stopped trying to look like the cachacos—sombre, tidy clothes; hair greased and combed at all times—and began to make a virtue of who and what he was. A wispy costeño moustache appeared on his adolescent lip and was left to wander where it would. The previous rector had been replaced by a young poet, Carlos Martín, only thirty years of age and as handsome as a matinée idol. He was a member of the fashionable “Stone and Sky” movement in poetry which was all the rage in Bogotá. These poets, who had taken their name from the work of the Spaniard Juan Ramón Jiménez, would not have been thought revolutionary in most other Latin American republics at the time. But Colombia, always a home of poetry rather than prose—except for speeches, another national speciality—was also a home of literary conservatism. Its poetic tradition is very rich, one of the strongest in a continent of great poets, but operates within an unusually narrow, subjectivist vein, and the nation’s social and historical reality was almost completely absent from its literature in those days. New Colombian poets such as Eduardo Carranza, Arturo Camacho Ramírez, Jorge Rojas and Carlos Martín mirrored the works of Jiménez and the later Spanish 1927 Generation, together with Latin American avant-garde poets such as Pablo Neruda, who had visited Bogotá and made contact with the group in September 1943.
For the next six months the poet Martín replaced the self-effacing teacher Carlos Julio Calderón Hermida as García Márquez’s Spanish literature professor. García Márquez was already writing poetry under the pseudonym “Javier Garcés.” Martín concentrated especially on the works of Rubén Darío, the great Nicaraguan who had almost single-handedly revolutionized the poetic language of both Spain and Latin America between 1888, when his Blue (Azul) appeared, and 1916, when he died. Darío, whose childhood had been eerily similar to García Márquez’s, would become one of the principal gods of the young Colombian’s poetic Olympus.45 He began to compose poems “after the manner of …,” technical pastiches of the great Spaniards such as Garcilaso de la Vega, Quevedo and Lorca, and Latin Americans such as Darío and Neruda. He wrote sonnets on request for boys to take to their girlfriends and once he even had one of them recited back to him by the unwary recipient.46 He also wrote love poems on his own account, inspired by his relationships with local girls. The older García Márquez has always been curiously embarrassed by these early efforts to the point of denying authorship of many of them.
The costeño students organized dances in the town whenever they could. By this means, and others, he met numbers of young women. One of them, Berenice Martínez, was his partner in a brief but evidently impassioned romance towards the end of his stay in Zipaquirá. She was born in the same month as García Márquez and she recalled in 2002, by which time she was a widow with six children and living in the United States, that she and García Márquez fell in love “at first sight” and that their principal shared enthusiasm was the boleros then in vogue, snatches of which they would sing to one another during their romance.47 Also unforgettable was Cecilia González Pizano, “who was no one’s love but the muse of all the poetry addicts. She had a swift intelligence, personal charm and a free spirit in an old Conservative family, plus a supernatural memory for poetry.”48 Cecilia was called “the little One-Arm” (“La Manquita”), in that rather brutal Hispanic way, because she only had one hand and covered up its absence with a long sleeve. She was a pretty and vivacious blonde girl with whom Gabito constantly talked about poetry. Most boys assumed
she was his girlfriend.
And there were other adventures, nocturnal escapades to the theatre, boys lowering others by knotted sheets to make their getaway in the dark for some illicit rendezvous. The school porter never seemed to catch anyone absconding and the boys concluded that he was their tacit accomplice. García Márquez struck up a relationship with an older woman, the wife of a physician, and during her husband’s absences made nocturnal visits to her bedroom at the end of a labyrinth of rooms and corridors in one of Zipaquirá’s old colonial houses. This experience, worthy of a story by Boccaccio, is recalled in the unforgettable scene early in One Hundred Years of Solitude in which the young José Arcadio has his first sexual experience, after feeling his way in the dark through a house full of sleeping bodies in hammocks.49
Carlos Martín knew all the leading poets of his generation and, a few months after his arrival, he invited the two most influential among them, Eduardo Carranza and Jorge Rojas, to speak at Zipaquirá. García Márquez and a friend had the honour of interviewing them in the great lounge of the colonial house Martín had rented in the main square of the town. This was his first contact with living literature at the highest level and he was at once delighted and embarrassed when Martín introduced him to the two celebrity visitors as “a great poet.”50 Unfortunately a magazine the boys founded, La Gaceta Literaria, became an improbable victim of national political developments and also García Márquez’s first experience of the violence threatening the new Colombia that President López Pumarejo was trying to fashion. On 10 July 1944 López Pumarejo, two years into his second term, was kidnapped in the town of Pasto in a coup attempt supported by the arch-Conservative politician Laureano Gómez, known to Liberals as “the Monster.” López Pumarejo, under increasing stress, would resign on 31 July 1945 and another Liberal, Alberto Lleras Camargo, would serve the last year of his term in a climate of increasing tension. Carlos Martín as headmaster had sent a telegram of support to the government palace some days after the attempted coup. Shortly afterwards, the Conservative Mayor of Zipaquirá arrived at the school with a police detachment and confiscated the entire first issue of the Gaceta Literaria, which had been specially printed at a workshop in Bogotá. A few days later the new rector was telephoned by the Minister of Education, summoned to his office, and asked to resign.
García Márquez returned to the classes of Señor Calderón Hermida and went on with his own reading. He has remarked that he found Freud’s works as speculative and imaginative as those of Jules Verne,51 and they inspired him to present a composition entitled “Obsessive Psychosis” (“Sicosis obsesiva”), written, ironically enough, in detention.52 It was about a girl who turned into a butterfly, flew far away and underwent a series of extraordinary adventures. When García Márquez’s classmates jeered at such pretentiousness the teacher hastened to support and encourage him and gave practical advice about the organization of his prose and the rhetorical instruments he might use. The story was passed around the school until it reached the school secretary who said, prophetically, that it reminded him of Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.”
This is a striking detail because García Márquez has always said that he first heard of Kafka in Bogotá in 1947 and that the impact led directly to his first published stories.53 Yet it seems he may have read Kafka at school. Interestingly, The Double, given him by Gómez Támara, is not only one of Dostoyevsky’s strangest books, as the donor himself observed at the time, but also one of the least known. Someone who had read it, however, was Franz Kafka. The idea that we all have more than one personality, more than one identity, must have been extremely consoling and in every way therapeutic for a young man like García Márquez, who was much more troubled than he seemed, who had already been through quite serious emotional problems at his previous school and was now confronted not only with a much greater challenge to his confidence and sense of self in general but also with a need to respond to the dusty conventions of Bogotá as regards authority, taste and civilization. Señor Calderón later claimed that he told his talented pupil, who was thought by most observers at the time to be an even better graphic artist than writer, that he could become “the best novelist in Colombia.”54 Such moral support was surely priceless.
Despite his extra-curricular antics and only intermittent attention to his academic obligations, García Márquez’s prestige in the school continued to grow. On the last day of 1944, at the end of his second year there, El Tiempo, Colombia’s most important newspaper, would publish one of his poems in its literary supplement, under his pseudonym, Javier Garcés. This has been a source of profound embarrassment to its author for almost sixty years but at the time it must surely have seemed a wonderful piece of recognition for a seventeen-year-old who was still two years away from completing secondary school.55 The poem, “Song,” was dedicated to a friend, Lolita Porras, who had died tragically not long before. It had an epigraph from a poem by Eduardo Carranza, the leader of the Stone and Sky group, and began as follows:
SONG
“It is raining in this poem”
E.C.
It is raining. The afternoon
is a blade of cloud. Raining.
The afternoon is soaked
in your sadness.
At times the wind comes
with its song. At times …
I feel my soul pressed
against your absent voice.
Raining. And I’m thinking
of you. And dreaming.
No one will come this afternoon
to my grief, shut tight.
No one. Only your absence
that pains me hour by hour.
Tomorrow your presence
will return with the rose.
I think—the rain falls—
of your tender gaze.
Girl like fresh fruit,
joyful as a fiesta,
today your name is twilighting
here in my poem.56
García Márquez would judge of the verses he wrote during his schooldays, “They were mere technical exercises without inspiration or aspiration, to which I assigned no poetic value because they had not come out of my soul.”57 In fact a first reading of the poem—not to mention its subject—would surely suggest that the emotional charge is rather strong. The technical aspect, though promising, is admittedly derivative—it is a pastiche, and not a bad one, of 1920s Neruda—but surely secondary. The truth seems to be that García Márquez is embarrassed not only, in the most “poetic” of Latin American republics, by the wholly understandable technical shortcomings of his early poetic beginnings but also, and much more strongly, by the otherwise unexpressed emotions he felt when he was an adolescent.
His growing literary prestige, a continuation of his juvenile prowess in Barranquilla, must explain why García Márquez gave the ceremonial graduation speech on 17 November 1944 in which he bade farewell to the boys in the class two years above him. The chosen theme of the speech was friendship, one of the leitmotifs of his future life.
IN 1944 THE JOURNEY home took him only as far as Magangué. The García Márquez family had been happy and—so they thought—settled in Sucre but happiness was always a transient experience for Gabriel Eligio, who suddenly decided to move his reluctant dependants downriver to Magangué, a hot, sprawling, flat city, surrounded by marshes, on a promontory above the Magdalena, the most important river town between Barranquilla and Barrancabermeja and the principal road link between the Magdalena and the west of the country. There is reason to believe that Gabriel Eligio was fleeing the site of his own sexual misdemeanours and embarrassments, but this had not stopped him taking a punitive view of the misdeeds of his second son, Luis Enrique, who had been sent away to a reform school in Medellín for eighteen months.
It was in Magangué that Gabito’s sisters remember meeting his future wife Mercedes Barcha. García Márquez himself has always claimed that she was nine when he met her, which would place their first meeting somewhere between November 1941 and Nove
mber 1942—even before he left for Zipaquirá—and that he knew even then (at the age of fourteen) that he would marry her.58 Mercedes herself, who claims to remember “almost nothing about the past,” has confirmed that she first met her future husband when she was “just a little girl.”59 Now, in early 1945, he wrote a poem entitled “Morning Sonnet to an Incorporeal Schoolgirl” and there is good reason to assume that the schoolgirl in question was none other than Mercedes Barcha. She was just finishing her last year of primary school. The poem circulated both in Zipaquirá and Magangué and is another enthusiastic pastiche of the poetry of Neruda. The extant version is entitled simply “Girl” and is signed by “Javier Garcés”:
GIRL
She greets me as she passes and the air
breathed from her early morning voice
blurs not the four-sided light of my window
’gainst its glass but my own breath, my very soul.
She is early like the morning,
as unbelievable as any story,
and as she cuts her way through the moment
the morning sheds drops of pure white blood.
If dressed in blue she goes to school,
none can tell whether she walks or flies,
so light she treads, so like the breeze
that in the morning blue no one can say
which of the three that pass may be the breeze,
Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez Page 12