Gabriel García Márquez

by Gerald Martin

The new student had found a boarding house in the former Florián Street, now Carrera 8, near the corner of Avenue Jiménez de Quesada; a house where numerous costeño students lived. Florián Street was one of the oldest and best-known in the city, running parallel to the best-known of all: “Séptima,” Seventh Avenue. García Márquez’s pensión was perhaps three hundred yards from the intersection of Seventh and Jiménez de Quesada, generally considered the strategic centre of the city and even exalted by some local patriots as the “best street corner in the world.”

  Up on the second floor of his boarding house García Márquez shared a room with a number of costeño students, including the irrepressible José Palencia. The rooms were comfortable though not luxurious but despite the economical cost of bed and board García Márquez found it hard to get by. He would always be short of money: “I always had the feeling I was short of the last five centavos.” He has never made too much of the more painful aspects of this theme but despite Gabriel Eligio’s exertions, which meant that his family were always above the peasants and proletarians, poverty and its humiliations were a constant feature of Gabito’s childhood and youth. And beyond.

  His anguished recollections about this time remind one of Kafka’s comment that studying law was “like living, in an intellectual sense, on sawdust, sawdust which had moreover already been chewed for me in thousands of other people’s mouths.”3 The teachers included an ex-president’s son, Alfonso López Michelsen, himself a future president. In that first year García Márquez would fail statistics and demography and scrape through constitutional law, which he took with López Michelsen, who said to me forty-five years later, “No, he wasn’t a good student. But because of my costeño family background all the students from Padilla and Magdalena would take my course; they knew I was sure to pass them.”4

  A classmate, Luis Villar Borda, recalls, “I met Gabo in the very first days. There were maybe a hundred new students in law—only three of them women—organized in two alphabetical groups. Gabo was in the first and I was in the second. I was very interested in the subject but Gabo never was. He started to miss a lot of classes quite early on. We used to talk about literature: Dos Passos, Hemingway, Faulkner, Hesse, Mann and the Russians. Colombian literature hardly at all, just a few poets like Barba Jacob, De Greiff, Luis Carlos López. At midday we would move back to the city centre and sit in the cafés, which is where we all studied. If you lived in a pensión there was nowhere to work. The café owners would let the students take over a corner just like the regular customers.”5

  Sometimes García Márquez and his costeño friends would organize impromptu Saturday night dances. Then on Sunday mornings at nine o’clock the young costeños would walk up to Seventh Avenue and 14th Street to the radio station that broadcast “The Costeño Hour” and they would dance outside in the street. By now García Márquez was a proud representative of his culture and compensated for his poverty by dressing in an even more garish manner than he had started to do at the Colegio San José. It was the first great era of “Latin” music and García Márquez lived it from the inside.6

  He also made friends among the uptight cachacos, some of whom would play an important role in his future. One of them was Gonzalo Mallarino, whose mother would develop a soft spot for this sad little costeño Chaplin figure.7 Others were Villar Borda, Camilo Torres, who would later achieve continental fame as a martyred guerrilla priest,8 and one of the great buddies of his life, Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, son of a leading politician from Boyacá, Plinio Mendoza Neira—by then perhaps Gaitán’s closest political ally—and a few years younger than García Márquez.

  Some of García Márquez’s contemporaries contemplated him, it seems, with a mild dose of pity. Plinio Mendoza says many viewed him with contempt, as a “lost cause.” He recalls the day Villar Borda introduced him in the Café Asturias to a young costeño, who “made his way between the crowded tables and black hats, stunning us with the lightning flash of his cream-coloured tropical suit.” But he was also shocked by the newcomer’s general demeanour and behaviour. When the waitress approached the table the costeño gazed at her, all of her, and whispered suggestively: “Tonight?,” after which he placed his hand on her posterior. She pushed him away and flounced off in theatrical disgust.9

  Behind the colourful costumes, the costeño mamagallismo (piss-taking),10 and the adolescent pride (“Problems, me?” “Lonely, me?”), García Márquez was a deeply solitary young man with very contradictory feelings about his self-worth. His life now, despite the friendships, was one of loneliness, alienation, disorientation, and a lack of vocation. But also defiance: it was to protect himself that he played the effervescent costeño. Fleeing his solitude on Sundays, he would take endless tram rides through the grey, monotonous city, reading and reflecting.11 Sometimes he would take up an invitation from Gonzalo Mallarino, also a friend of both Camilo Torres and Villar Borda. Mallarino had been born only four days after García Márquez, of illustrious parentage. He told me: “The Bogotá weekends could be very long for a stranger. Gabo often used to visit me at home on a Sunday. We would always have chocolate and arepas [corn-cakes]. My mother, who was widowed when I was nine, felt sorry for him; he always seemed lonely to her, and she was always kind to him. She was from the provinces, like he was, and they instinctively knew how to talk to one another.”12

  From the very start of his university studies, as both Mallarino and Villar Borda perceived, García Márquez, behind his protective costeño persona, was developing his literary vocation, even if he was reluctant to admit to such ambition in case he failed. Certainly between the attractions of the law and literature it was no contest. He was a fish out of water with his long anarchic hair, his tatty coloured trousers and his bizarre checked shirts, rebelling self-consciously with every awkward move he made.

  Villar Borda and Camilo Torres edited a literary page called “University Life” (“La Vida Universitaria”), a Tuesday supplement of the newspaper La Razón, which published two of García Márquez’s “Stone and Sky”–style poems.13 “Poem from a Seashell” (“Poema desde un caracol”) appeared on 22 June, only a few weeks before Torres took the fateful decision to abandon the university and become a priest.14 Two of its stanzas read:

  VIII

  For my sea was the sea eternal,

  sea of childhood, unforgettable,

  suspended from our dream

  like a dove in the air …

  XII

  It was the sea of our first love

  in those autumnal eyes …

  One day I wished to see that sea

  —that sea of childhood—I was too late.15

  It was a poem by a boy profoundly aware not only that he has lost his childhood but also that he has lost his other homeland, the Caribbean coast, the land of sea and sun.

  Something like Kafka was what García Márquez was looking for in that ghostly highland city and Kafka is what he eventually found. One afternoon a costeño friend lent him a copy of The Metamorphosis, translated by an Argentine writer called Jorge Luis Borges.16 García Márquez went back to the boarding house, up to his room, took off his shoes and lay on his bed. He read the first line: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” Mesmerized, García Márquez recalls saying to himself: “Shit, that’s just the way my grandmother talked!”17

  Kafka undoubtedly opened wide his imagination (including his ability to imagine himself as a writer) and showed him for the long term that even the most fantastic episodes can be narrated in a matter-of-fact way. But what García Márquez first took from Kafka seems to have been something rather different from what he has said in retrospect. First, evidently, Kafka addressed the alienation of urban existence; but beneath the surface, suffusing everything he wrote, was his terror of another authority, his father: his simultaneous loathing and veneration of his tyrannical progenitor.

  García Márquez had read Dostoyevsky’s The Double, set in an even m
ore repressive St. Petersburg, four years before, on his arrival in Bogotá. Kafka’s vision is a direct descendant of that novel and its impact on the young writer is not in doubt. García Márquez had discovered European modernism; more, he had discovered that far from being merely complex and pretentious, the innovations of modernism had emerged from the spirit of the age, from the structure of reality as currently perceived, and could be directly relevant to him—even in his remote capital city in Latin America.

  The protagonists of both The Double and The Metamorphosis are victims of a split personality, characters who are hypersensitive and terrified of authority, and who, by internalizing the distortions of the outside world, conclude that it is they themselves, finally, who are sick, deformed, perverted and out of place. Many young people are beset by conflicting impulses and defensive–aggressive perceptions of their abilities and their relations with others; but the gap between García Márquez’s self-confidence, bordering on unusual and sometimes startling arrogance (he was the Colonel’s grandson and clever with it), and his simultaneous sense of insecurity and inferiority (he was the quack doctor’s son and had been abandoned by him but maybe took after him), is undoubtedly unusual and it created a dynamic that allowed him to develop a hidden ambition which would burn within him like a fierce, sustained flame.

  The very next day after reading The Metamorphosis García Márquez sat down to write a story, which he would entitle “The Third Resignation.” It was his first work as a person prepared to think of himself as an author with something serious to offer. It already sounds something like “García Márquez” and is strikingly ambitious, profoundly subjective, suffused with absurdity, solitude and death. It initiates what will be a constant in García Márquez: building a story around the initial motif of an unburied corpse.18 Eventually his readers would discover that García Márquez has lived with three interconnected but also impossibly contradictory primordial terrors: the terror of dying and being buried oneself (or, worse, being buried alive); the terror of having to bury others; and the terror of any person remaining unburied. “A dead person can live happily with his irremediable situation,” declares the narrator of this first story, a person who is unsure whether he is living, or dead, or both at the same time or successively. “But a living person cannot resign himself to being buried alive. Yet his limbs would not respond to his call. He could not express himself, and that was what terrified him; it was the greatest terror of his life and of his death. That they would bury him alive.”19

  By way of compensation García Márquez’s story appears to propose some new American telluric—historical genealogy founded on the conception of a family tree:

  He had been felled like some twenty-five-year-old tree … Perhaps later he would feel a slight nostalgia; the nostalgia of not being a formal, anatomical corpse, but an imaginary, abstract corpse, living only in the hazy memory of his relatives … Then he would know that he would rise up through the blood vessels of an apple and find himself being eaten by the hunger of a child some autumn morning. He would know then—and this thought really did make him sad—that he had lost his unity.20

  Evidently the horror of being trapped in a house, between life and death, as in a coffin (as in memory, perhaps), is here mitigated by the idea of one’s lost individuality fusing into a tree as symbol both of nature and history (the generational family tree). The poignancy of such a genealogical impulse in a young man separated soon after birth from his natural mother and father and the brothers and sisters who would follow him requires no elaboration. And there is no need to have a qualification in psychoanalysis to question whether this young writer did not unconsciously feel, as he looked back on his early life, that his parents had buried him alive in the house at Aracataca; and that his real self was buried inside a second self, the new identity that he had had to build, Hamlet-like, to protect himself from his true feelings about his mother and his perhaps murderous feelings about the usurper, Gabriel Eligio, who belatedly claimed to be his father—when he, Gabito, knew perfectly well that his real father was Colonel Nicolás Márquez, the man who, admired and respected by all who knew him, had presided benignly over his early years. And then disappeared. There follows what may either be a piece of literary bluster (a form of wish-fulfilment) or a genuine sense that the writer has achieved wisdom (and “resignation”?): “All that terrible reality did not give him any anxiety. Quite the opposite, he was happy there, alone in his solitude.”

  Clumsy though the story is, it has a curiously hypnotic effect and is narrated with an unmistakable confidence that is more than just literary, and a resolution surprising in a novice writer. The ending is pure García Márquez:

  Resigned, he will hear the last prayers, the last phrases mumbled in Latin and clumsily responded by the altar boys. The cold of the cemetery’s earth and bones will penetrate to his own bones and may dissipate somewhat that “smell.” Perhaps—who knows!—the imminence of that moment will force him out of that lethargy. When he feels himself swimming in his own sweat, in a thick, viscous liquid, as he swam before he was born in his mother’s womb. Perhaps at that moment he will be alive.

  But by then he will be so resigned to dying that he may die of resignation.21

  Readers of One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Autumn of the Patriarch and The General in His Labyrinth, written twenty, twenty-five and forty years later, will recognize the tone, the themes and the literary devices. It is, palpably, and contradictorily (given the morbid nature of the narrative voice), a bid for authority.

  On 22 August, a week or two after he had written this story, he read in Eduardo Zalamea Borda’s daily column, “The City and the World,” in El Espectador, that Zalamea Borda was “anxious to hear from new poets and storytellers, who are unknown or ignored due to the lack of an adequate and just publication of their works.”22 Zalamea Borda, a leftist sympathizer, was one of the most respected of newspaper columnists. García Márquez sent his story in. Two weeks later, to his joy and stupefaction, he was sitting in the Molino café when he saw the title of his piece covering a whole page of the “Weekend” supplement. Flushed with excitement, he rushed out to buy a copy—to discover as usual that he was “short of the last five centavos.” So he went back to the boarding house, appealed to a friend, and out they went to buy the paper—El Espectador, Saturday 13 September 1947. There on page twelve was “The Third Resignation” by Gabriel García Márquez, with an illustration by the artist Hernán Merino.

  He was euphoric, inspired. Six weeks later, on 25 October, El Espectador published another of his stories, “Eva Is Inside Her Cat” (“Eva está dentro de su gato”), again on the theme of death and subsequent reincarnations, about a woman, Eva, who, obsessed with the desire to eat not an apple but an orange, decides to transmigrate through the body of her pet cat, only to find herself, three thousand years later, trapped—buried—in a new and confusing world. She is a beautiful woman, desperate to escape the attentions of men, a woman whose physical allure has begun to pain her like a cancer tumour. She has become aware that her arteries are teeming with tiny insects:

  She knew that they came from back there, that all who bore her surname had to bear them, had to suffer them as she did when insomnia held unconquerable sway until dawn. It was those very insects who painted that bitter expression, that unconsolable sadness on the faces of her forebears. She had seen them looking out of their extinguished existence, out of their ancient portraits, victims of that same anguish …23

  Both the genealogically obsessive One Hundred Years of Solitude and its primitive version, “The House” (“La casa”), soon to be conceived (perhaps already conceived), can be divined in this remarkable passage.

  Only three days after the publication of this second story his unexpected literary patron announced in his daily column the arrival of a new literary talent upon the national scene, one who was in his first year as a student and not yet twenty-one. Zalamea declared unequivocally: “In Gabriel García Márquez we are seeing th
e birth of a remarkable writer.”24 One side effect of the confidence being placed in him was that García Márquez felt ever more justified in the neglect of his studies and in his obsessive love of reading and writing. More than half a century later the world-famous writer would comment that his first stories were “inconsequential and abstract, some absurd, and none based on real feelings.”25 Once again a reverse interpretation suggests itself: that he hated his poems and early stories precisely because they were “based on real feelings” and that later he learned to cover up—but not entirely suppress—the callow romanticism and emotionalism which left him exposed in all his vulnerability and might later give him away. It may also be the case that he is unwilling to give Bogotá the credit for his having become a writer.26

  García Márquez stayed in Bogotá for the Christmas 1947 vacation. It was expensive to remain in the pensión but it was more expensive to find the fare to return to Sucre. Mercedes remained oblivious to his overtures. Besides, his grandmother was dead and his mother was just about to have yet another baby. Above all, though, despite having scraped through the examinations, failing only statistics and demography, he knew by now that he was not going to dedicate himself to the law and he was reluctant to confront Gabriel Eligio on this matter. The success of his first two stories suggested that there might be another path through life for him and he preferred to make the most of his perhaps temporary independence.

  It was probably during this vacation that he began his next story, “The Other Side of Death” (“La otra costilla de la muerte”). If the first story was a meditation on one’s own death, this was more a reflection on the death of others (or perhaps on the death of one’s own other, one’s double, in this case a brother). Appropriately, therefore, the narrative voice alternates modernist-style between a “he” and an “I.” Again we are implicitly in a city but now the themes of the twin, the double, identity, the mirror (including that internal mirror, the consciousness) predominate. This brother, who had died of cancer, and of whom the narrator has a mortal terror, is now metamorphosed into another body