Gabriel García Márquez

by Gerald Martin

which the girl and which the morning.60

  If the sonnet is indeed for Mercedes it is one of the very few things García Márquez has ever said about her in public without a humorous or ironic edge to it.

  He must have returned to school with mixed emotions in February 1945. He had taken to smoking up to forty or fifty cigarettes a day, a habit he would maintain for the next three decades.61 During classes he would find frequent cause to take refuge in the lavatories and break time was anxiously awaited. He acted in part like a rebel let down by the system, and in part like a kind of poète maudit whom no system would ever satisfy. He began to affect boredom in all his classes except literature and found it almost intolerable to have to work at subjects that did not interest him. He has always expressed astonishment at his academic success and speculated that his teachers graded him for the presumed intelligence of his personality and not his actual achievements.

  Despite his sense of alienation, his behaviour and record were such that he was one of three boys chosen to accompany the rector when he travelled to the National Palace in Bogotá to request funding from President Lleras Camargo, López Pumarejo’s emergency replacement, for a study visit to the Costa. Lleras not only agreed but attended the school’s graduation ceremony at the end of the year. García Márquez would get to know this consummate Liberal politician quite well in years to come and establish with him one of his curiously ambivalent relationships with the great and powerful of Bogotá. Certainly eighteen was a precocious age at which to have one’s first audience with a president and one’s first access to the seat of government. It was during this year that García Márquez made his most successful speech of all—and the only one he ever improvised. When the Second World War ended there was euphoria at the school and he was asked to say a few words. He declared that Franklin D. Roosevelt had been able, like the great Spanish hero the Cid, to “win victories even after his death.” The phrase was celebrated not only in the school but throughout the city and García Márquez’s oratorical reputation was further enhanced.62

  In late 1945 he returned to Sucre. His father had closed the pharmacy in Magangué and returned for several months to his wandering ways, leaving Luisa, pregnant yet again (when she was not pregnant she was hardly let out of the house), to cope with her large family in a large rambling house. On his return he moved the family back to Sucre, to a different house a few blocks from the square, renounced pharmacy and devoted himself full-time to homeopathy. The tenth child, Alfredo (“Cuqui”), had been born in February and was effectively being brought up by Margot.

  Gabito now allowed himself to be thoroughly led astray by his good-natured but incorrigible younger brother. He immediately joined Luis Enrique’s musical group, stayed out all night, frequented the local brothels and spent his share of the money the band earned drinking riotously for the first time in his life. Over Christmas, instead of making his usual contribution to the rival floats during the end-of-year festivities, he disappeared to the nearby town of Majagual for ten days and lived it up in a whorehouse: “It was all the fault of María Alejandrina Cervantes, an extraordinary woman whom I met the first night and over whom I lost my head in the longest and wildest binge of my life.”63

  After many sighs and silences, Luisa finally asked her eldest son what was going on and he replied: “I’ve had it up to here, that’s what’s going on.” “What, with us?” “With everything.” He said he was sick of his life, sick of school, sick of the expectations placed upon him. This was not an answer his mother could pass on to Gabriel Eligio so she processed it for a while and finally suggested that the solution was for Gabito, like almost all other ambitious young men in Latin America in those days, to study law. “After all,” she said shrewdly, “it’s a good training for writing, and people have said that you could be a good writer.” According to his memoir, Gabito’s first response to his mother on the subject was negative: “If you’re going to be a writer it has to be one of the greats and they don’t make them any more.” The reader is confronted by the astonishing realization that, although the young man had not yet read Joyce or Faulkner, he was not interested in being the kind of writer these poor twentieth-century also-rans might represent: in his immature heart of hearts he wanted to be Dante or Cervantes! Luisa was not deterred by his demurral and over the next few days she achieved a brilliant negotiation without father and son even discussing the issue face to face: Gabriel Eligio accepted, albeit tragic of demeanour, that his son would not follow him into medicine; and Gabito accepted that he would not only finish off the baccalaureate but would also go on to study law at the National University. Thus were a major teenage rebellion and a disastrous family crisis averted.64

  García Márquez, now something of a sexual reprobate, must have been astonished, as Christmas approached, to find that the incorporeal schoolgirl from Magangué had moved to Sucre. Her full name was Mercedes Raquel Barcha Pardo, the child, like him, of a pharmacist, one whom Gabriel Eligio had known for many years since he was a young man travelling the rivers and jungles of the Magdalena basin in the early 1920s. She had been born on 6 November 1932. Like Gabito she was also the eldest child, mysteriously pretty, with high cheekbones and dark oblique eyes, a long slim neck and an elegant bearing. She lived in the main square, opposite Gabito’s good friend Cayetano Gentile, who in turn lived next to the house the García Márquezes had lived in before their move to Magangué.

  Mercedes’s mother Raquel Pardo López was from a cattle ranching family, as indeed was her father; but he, Demetrio Barcha Velilla, was of partly Middle Eastern stock, though he had been born in Corozal and was a Catholic. Demetrio’s father, Elías Barcha Facure, hailed from Alexandria, probably out of Lebanon: hence, presumably, Mercedes’s “stealthy beauty, that of a serpent of the Nile.”65 Elías had acquired Colombian nationality on 23 May 1932, six months before Mercedes was born. He lived to be almost one hundred and read people’s stars in coffee grains. “My grandfather was a pure Egyptian,” she told me. “He used to bounce me on his knee and sing to me in Arabic. He always dressed in white linen, with a black tie, a gold watch and a straw hat like Maurice Chevalier. He died when I was about seven.”66

  Mercedes Raquel, named after her mother and grandmother, was the eldest of the six children of Demetrio and Raquel. The family moved to Majagual after she was born, then back to Magangué and finally to nearby Sucre. Demetrio had various businesses, including general provisions, but like Gabriel Eligio García, he specialized in pharmacy. Mercedes had just spent her first year at the Franciscan convent school of the Sacred Heart in Mompox, across the river from Magangué. It was only one block from the famous octagonal tower of the church of Santa Barbara in the main square of what is perhaps Colombia’s most perfectly preserved small colonial city.67

  In Magangué a childhood friend told me, “Mercedes always attracted a lot of attention, she had a good figure, tall and slim. Though to be fair, her sister María Rosa was even prettier. But Mercedes always got more compliments.”68 She would help in the family pharmacy in those days and the García Márquez children would see her often when they were running errands for their father. They were all aware, then and later, that Mercedes had a strong sense of herself and a quiet authority. Gabito, who rarely went about anything directly, would often hang around talking to Mercedes’s father, Demetrio Barcha: he always preferred older men and Demetrio had the great virtue of being a Liberal, despite his friendship with Gabriel Eligio. Mercedes herself has always insisted that she was blissfully unaware of her lovesick admirer’s intentions. Usually she would not even acknowledge Gabito’s presence and her father would look over his glasses as she stalked past and gently reprove her: “Say hello.” She told Gabito that her father always said that “the prince who will marry me has not yet been born.” She told me that for many years she thought that Gabito was in love with her father!

  Over the course of that Christmas vacation, 1945–6, he had an opportunity to get closer to this cool, distant girl when they coincid
ed at parties. In Chronicle of a Death Foretold the narrator recalls, “Many people knew that in the heat of one party I asked Mercedes Barcha to marry me, when she had scarcely finished primary school, as she herself reminded me when we did marry fourteen years later.”69 Days after the party he saw her in the street walking two small children and she laughed, “Yes, they’re mine.” He took this grown-up joke, from such an enigmatic young person, as a secret sign that they were on the same wavelength. It would keep him going for years.

  García Márquez’s return to Zipaquirá for the final year began on a glamorous note. He had undertaken to somehow get his madcap friend José Palencia enrolled at the National College, Palencia having failed the final grade at his school in Cartagena. In return Palencia bought him an air ticket and they flew to Bogotá in an unpressurized DC-3, a journey which took four hours instead of eighteen days.70 Palencia rented a large room in the best house in the square, with a view of the cathedral from his window. This would provide García Márquez with a useful bolthole in which to enjoy his senior status as a twelfth grader. Palencia bought him a dark suit to express his gratitude. García Márquez’s embarrassment at his dishevelled, hand-me-down clothes, which had dogged him throughout his schooldays, was at an end.

  Early in this last year at school García Márquez reached the age of nineteen. He was a published poet, with considerable prestige among his classmates, whom he would regularly amuse with comical or satirical verses, with the poems written especially for their girlfriends, or with the caricatures he drew of his classmates and teachers. Even at this age he was still prey to nightmares which terrified his dorm mates and teachers almost as much as himself and for this final year he was moved to a smaller dormitory where fewer people would be disturbed by his shrieks.

  The whole of Colombia was now on edge. The Conservatives had predictably defeated the divided Liberal Party in the national elections and by the time García Márquez graduated in November 1946 they were already taking sinister revenge on their political enemies and their supporters, particularly in the rural areas where the peasants had been given some reason to hope that land reform might be on the political agenda. That was never going to happen. The Conservative rollback was given an added tinge of hysteria by the growing popularity of the ever more strident Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, now the undisputed leader of the Liberals and already their proclaimed candidate for the 1950 elections. The Violencia, the horrific wave of violence that would kill a quarter of a million Colombians from the late 1940s to the 1960s, is usually dated from April 1948 but it was well under way during García Márquez’s last years in Zipaquirá.

  Nervous about his examinations and desperate to carry out his promise to his mother, García Márquez eventually achieved the excellent result in the final examination that his talent evidently merited. But he was fortunate. During the revision period before the exam he and Palencia stayed out all night and got rolling drunk. They were in serious danger of expulsion and were suspended from taking the examinations, which meant that they would not be able to graduate as “bachelors” for another year. However, the principal, realizing that it would be embarrassing and anyway regrettable if his best student were to end his career in this way, reversed the decision and personally escorted the two delinquents to take the examinations belatedly in Bogotá.71 Later García Márquez would acknowledge, “Everything I ever learned was thanks to the baccalaureate I took in Zipaquirá.”72

  So home went the hero, still convinced that his achievements were one large confidence trick, and therefore somehow lacking in confidence for that very reason; yet also dimly aware that to hoodwink everyone as he felt he had done probably meant that he was even more talented than they all thought he was; determined, finally, despite all his feelings of guilt, to go on deceiving the family, to pay lip-service to the project of getting a law degree whilst in reality following his own chosen path through life.

  Quite soon after the return to Sucre from Magangué Gabriel Eligio, while renting yet another house some distance from the town square, had set about building a house of his own, an ambitious one-storey utopia among the mango trees, some fifty yards from the Mojana, on its northern bank. Could it be he had finally resolved to put down roots? The family would come to call their new home “La Casa Quinta,” the country house, but Gabito, for whom there was only one house in the whole wide world, would call it “the hospital,” because his father had his consultancy and laboratory there and because it was painted white; and because he begrudged the man even the smallest of achievements.

  Yet the new house was surprisingly large by Sucre standards, though it hardly compared with the relatively majestic residences in the town square. Jaime García Márquez remembers a fine house, though with no electricity, which there had been in Aracataca; and no running water or proper sanitation (there had been a fully functioning septic tank in Aracataca). The family used oil lamps, which were always swarming with tropical insects. Snakes were often found coiled on the window sills at night. A neighbour, Miss Juana, used to cook and clean, play with the children and tell them terrifying stories, inspired by local legends.

  There had been another big change in the family circumstances, as Ligia recalls: “Grandma Tranquilina and Aunt Pa, my mother’s half-sister, came to live at the new house with us. Aunt Pa could predict the droughts and rains, because she knew all the secrets of nature, learned from the Guajiro Indians. We all loved her because she helped bring us up. She’s the one who told me all the stories about the family ancestors … When our grandmother died, our mother made a beautiful garden and planted roses and daisies to take to her tomb.”73 García Márquez recalls that Tranquilina was blind and demented and would not undress while the radio was on because she imagined that the people attached to the voices she heard might be watching her.74

  There is, undoubtedly, a poignant story relating to the new house. Gabito was especially embarrassed by the celebrations surrounding his return to Sucre late in 1946. Here was his father, with whom he had a difficult relationship, and whom he was intending to deceive and disappoint in the immediate future and for the long term, at a moment of great mutual triumph: Gabito was a “bachelor,” a rare achievement in those days even among the middle classes; and Gabriel Eligio had built a fine new house and was determined to remind everyone of that achievement at the same time as he celebrated his son’s academic success. Aida Rosa recalls, “I’ll never forget the party Dad put on in Sucre when Gabito graduated from high school. Don Gabriel Eligio really went to town. He invited the whole of Sucre, had a pig killed, there were drinks for everyone and we danced all night.”75

  García Márquez spent as much time away from the family as possible during this transitional vacation and ended it as soon as he could. He had completed his secondary schooling and had accumulated, although he could not have guessed it, as much formal education as he was going to need in life. He was still not sure what he was going to do but what lay ahead was a return to the lugubrious Andean city of Bogotá and years of study for a university degree and a profession from which he felt profoundly alienated in advance and which he hoped never to have to practise.

  5

  The University Student

  and the Bogotazo

  1947-1948

  GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ enrolled at the National University of Colombia on 25 February 1947. This meant four or five years in Bogotá, which must have seemed a depressing prospect indeed for a young man who already knew that he hated the place. The epic journey from Sucre to the highland capital by river steamer and railway was not the fiesta filled with anticipation which he had experienced on previous occasions. Colombia itself was in a state of grim apprehension, with a minority Conservative government newly elected and determined to hold on to power, and the Liberal majority in a paroxysm of frustration at its party’s miscalculation in allowing two candidates, Turbay and Gaitán, to go forward against the Conservative Ospina Pérez.

  Gabriel Eligio had wanted his son to be a docto
r; and if not a doctor, a priest or a lawyer. He had sent him to study in the capital city for social distinction, and for financial gain. With the Conservatives in power there would surely be fortunes to be made. Literature was just a risky sideshow. Gabito had managed to avoid a showdown for the time being; but the much-debated law degree was now a pretext and Gabito would be forced at last to become the liar his father had always said he was.

  Set in a mountain paradise of salt, gold and emeralds, the mythical home of El Dorado, Bogotá was founded on 6 August 1538 by the Andalusian explorer Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada. He named the city Santa Fe. It was known first as Santa Fe de Bacatá, then Santa Fe de Bogotá. For many decades the Santa Fe was dropped but was briefly restored late in the twentieth century, as if the religious title might somehow redeem the city and raise it once more above the savage country over which it presides from its emerald green throne. Historically Bogotá has always been right, the rest of the nation always wrong; yet at 8,000 feet above sea level, this often cold and usually rainy city makes a strange capital for such a varied, essentially tropical country. In 1947 it had a population of 700,000 inhabitants: the cachacos (which could be translated as fops or dandies).1

  Bogotá has traditionally considered itself the home of the “purest” Spanish spoken anywhere in the world, not excluding Spain itself.2 In the 1940s almost all the politicians of Colombia were lawyers and many of them, particularly the Liberal lawyers, taught in the National University. The new university city, a landmark in Art Deco architecture, opened in 1940 and more or less complete by 1946, stood on the very outskirts of Bogotá, with the great savannah beyond. In García Márquez’s time there were more than four thousand students, half of whom were from the provinces. The political right considered the university a hotbed of communism.