that was coming from beyond his, that had been sunken with him in the liquid night of the maternal womb and was climbing up with him through the branches of an ancient genealogy; that was with him in the blood of his four pairs of great-grandparents and that came from way back, from the beginning of the world, sustaining with its weight, with its mysterious presence, the whole universal balance … his other brother who had been born and shackled to his heel and who came tumbling along generation after generation, night after night, from kiss to kiss, from love to love, descending through arteries and testicles until he arrived, as on a night voyage, at the womb of his recent mother.27
This genealogical, dynastic obsession and the parallel exploration of the entire universe (time, space, matter, spirit, idea; life, death, burial, corruption, metamorphosis) is a structure of thought and feeling which, once explicitly explored and elaborated, will apparently disappear from García Márquez’s work but will in fact become implicit and its manifestations used sparingly, strategically, for maximum effect. This first García Márquez, qua literary persona, is anguished, hypersensitive, hypochondriac—Kafkaesque: far from his later, carefully constructed narrative identity, which will be closer to that of, say, Cervantes. Apparently with very little help from Colombian or other Latin American writers—the best-known of whom he appears hardly to have read—the early García Márquez attacks the essential Latin American questions of genealogy (estar, existence, history) and identity (ser, essence, myth). They make up, without doubt, the essential Latin American problematic of that era: genealogy is inevitably a crucial matter in a continent that has no satisfactory myth of origin, where everything is up for grabs. This García Márquez has not yet got on to the question of legitimacy (which is what is really tormenting him and is certainly implicit here). Nevertheless, this narrator is also, clearly, a problem unto himself.
The long vacation eventually came to an end and things finally looked up. At the start of the new university year in 1948 Luis Enrique arrived in Bogotá, in theory to continue his secondary education; in practice he took up a job with Colgate-Palmolive that Gabito had secured for him and then devoted himself to the usual hell-raising in his spare time. By now their Uncle Juanito (Juan de Dios), following the death of his mother, Tranquilina, had moved to Bogotá to work for the national bureaucracy. Luis Enrique brought with him a secret present which he was supposed to have saved for Gabito’s twenty-first birthday on 6 March, but when his brother and his friends told him at the airport that they had no money with which to celebrate, Luis Enrique slyly revealed that the surprise inside his package was a new typewriter: “The next step was a visit to the pawnshop in the centre of Bogotá, and the guy opening the case, turning the handle and pulling out a piece of paper. I remember he looked at it and said, ‘This must be for one of you.’ One of our friends took it and read it out loud: ‘Congratulations. We’re proud of you. The future is yours. Gabriel and Luisa, Sucre, 6 March 1948.’ Then the pawnshop assistant asked, ‘How much do you need?’ and the owner of the typewriter replied, ‘As much as you can give me.’”28
With Luis Enrique’s new income and some additional money that Gabito himself was earning by providing newspaper illustrations through a friend, the standard of living improved markedly in the following weeks—adventures involving wine, women and song ensued—and Luis Enrique renewed his vagabonds’ alliance with the madcap José Palencia. Meanwhile, Gabito, by now the most prestigious of the university’s many students with pretensions to literary status, was missing even more classes as he devoted himself ever more zealously to reading and writing literature, including reading another modernist masterwork, James Joyce’s Ulysses.
At that very moment political storm clouds were gathering rapidly over Colombia and heading directly for Bogotá. Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, an outstanding lawyer who had imbibed a potent political cocktail offered by the Mexican Revolution, Marxism and Mussolini, was the most charismatic politician in twentieth-century Colombian history and one of the most successful political leaders in Latin America in an era of populist politics. He was the hero of the rising proletarian classes and of many lower-middle-class inhabitants of the rapidly growing cities. García Márquez knew that he had first come to national attention in 1929 when he took up the case of the banana workers massacred in Ciénaga in December 1928. García Márquez did not know that among his key informants was Father Francisco Angarita, the man who had baptized him in Aracataca, and possibly also Colonel Nicolás Márquez. Gaitán had grown ever stronger despite the electoral setback caused by his own division of the Liberal Party, had soon captured the leadership and began to conduct a style of politics never before seen in one of the most conservative republics in Latin America. Some called him “The Tongue,” others “The Throat,” such was the power of his oratory and of the voice that delivered it. García Márquez has almost never spoken of Gaitán in public interviews until very recently, most likely because his own politics have always been well to the left of any Latin American populism since the early 1950s and also in part, no doubt, because in April 1948, although instinctively attached to the Liberals, his political consciousness was still largely undeveloped.
In April 1948 the ninth Pan-American Conference was taking place in the centre of Bogotá and the Organization of American States was in the process of being set up at the behest of the United States. On Friday the 9th, just after 1 p.m., Gabriel García Márquez was sitting down to lunch in his boarding house in Florián Street with Luis Enrique and some of his costeño friends. Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was at that moment leaving his law office to walk down Seventh Avenue to lunch with his Liberal Party colleague Plinio Mendoza Neira and other associates. As he reached number 14–55, between Avenida Jiménez and 14th Street, an unemployed worker called Juan Roa Sierra walked across from the Black Cat café and fired at him three or four times from point-blank range. Gaitán fell to the pavement, just a few yards from “the best street corner in the world.” It was five past one. Before they lifted him from the ground, sixteen-year-old Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, who had come to meet his father, bent over and gazed with horror into the dying leader’s face. Gaitán was rushed to the Central Clinic in a private car and pronounced dead soon after arrival, to the inconsolable dismay of the large crowd that gathered outside the clinic.
That was the murder. Now came the Bogotazo.29 A wave of fury and hysteria swept through the city immediately. Bogotá was in uproar. An afternoon of riots, lootings and killings ensued. The Liberal mob took it for granted that the Conservatives were behind the assassination: within minutes Roa had been murdered and his battered body was dragged naked through the streets towards the government palace. The centre of Bogotá, all of it the very symbol of Colombia’s reactionary political system, began to burn.30
García Márquez ran out immediately to the site of the murder but Gaitán’s dying body had already been rushed to the hospital—weeping men and women were soaking their handkerchiefs in the fallen leader’s blood—and Roa’s corpse had already been dragged away. Luis Villar Borda remembers meeting García Márquez between two and three o’clock in the afternoon just a few steps from where Gaitán had fallen: “I was very surprised to see him. ‘You’ve never been a fan of Gaitán,’ I said. ‘No,’ he said, ‘but they’ve burned down my pensión and I’ve lost all my stories.’”31 (This much-exaggerated tale would gain mythical status down the years.) During this same excursion García Márquez encountered an uncle, the law professor Carlos H. Pareja, in 12th Street as he hastened back to finish his lunch in the—still intact—pensión. Pareja stopped his young nephew in the street and urged him to hurry to the university and organize the students on behalf of the Liberal uprising. García Márquez reluctantly set off but changed his mind as soon as Pareja was out of sight and made his way back through the chaos—Bogotá was now a mortally dangerous place—to the pensión on Florián.
Luis Enrique and the other costeños were having a kind of apocalyptic celebration. Behind their din, on t
he radio, Uncle Carlos could already be heard, together with the writer Jorge Zalamea (destined to become, like his first cousin Eduardo Zalamea Borda, another significant figure in García Márquez’s life), both urging the Colombian people to rise against the dastardly Conservatives who had assassinated the country’s greatest political leader and only hope for its future. Pareja, whose own radical bookstore was a victim of the flames, thundered that “the Conservatives will pay for Gaitán’s life with many other lives.”32 Gabito, Luis Enrique and their friends heard his call to arms on the pensión radio but they did not answer the appeal.
Not far away another young Latin American aged twenty-one was also beside himself, but with joy and excitement. Fidel Castro was a Cuban student leader who had travelled to Bogotá as part of a delegation taking part in a student congress set up in opposition to the Pan-American Conference. Castro forgot all about the Congress of Latin American Students and took to the streets, attempting to impose some sort of revolutionary logic upon the violently erratic actions of the popular uprising. Only two days before, he had interviewed the now martyred leader in his office in Carrera 7 and had apparently impressed the Colombian politician. Incredibly, they had agreed to meet again at 2 p.m. on 9 April: the name Fidel Castro was found pencilled in Gaitán’s appointment book for that day. Little wonder the Colombian Conservative government and right-wing press were soon claiming that Castro was involved either in the plot to murder Gaitán or in the conspiracy to subvert the Pan-American Conference and provoke an uprising, or both. At times, Castro must have been no more than a couple of hundred yards from his future friend García Márquez.33 In retrospect the Bogotazo would be as crucial to Castro’s understanding of revolutionary politics as later events in Guatemala in 1954 would be to his future comrade Che Guevara.34
As Castro began to organize for a revolution that never came, García Márquez sat mourning the loss of his typewriter—the pawnshop had been looted—and rehearsing his explanation for his parents. However, when smoke began to waft through the walls of the boarding house from the burning Cundinamarca state building behind it, the García Márquez brothers organized their friends from Sucre and set off for their Uncle Juanito’s new house, which was only four blocks away. The band of friends and brothers joined in the generalized looting and Luis Enrique made off with a sky-blue suit which his father would wear for years to come on special occasions. Gabito found an elegant calfskin briefcase which became his proudest possession. But the most prized piece of plunder was a large fifteen-litre flagon into which Luis Enrique and Palencia poured as many varieties of liquor as they could find before bearing it off in triumph to Uncle Juanito’s.
Margarita Márquez Caballero, then twelve years old, today García Márquez’s personal secretary in Bogotá, vividly remembers the arrival of her favourite cousin, his brother and their friends. The house was full of refugees from the Costa and in the evening, drunk on their illicit liquor, the young men joined Uncle Juanito on the roof of the building and gazed with stupefaction at the burning city centre.35 Meanwhile, down in Sucre the family feared the worst, as Rita recalls: “The only time I ever saw my mother cry when I was a child was 9 April. Then I could tell that she was very upset because of Gabito and Luis Enrique being in Bogotá at the time Gaitán was assassinated. I remember that at about three in the afternoon the next day she got dressed all of a sudden and went out to the church. She was going to give thanks to God because they’d just told her that her sons were safe. I was struck by it because I wasn’t used to seeing her go out, she was always at home looking after all of us.”36
In Bogotá, the young costeños stayed indoors for three days. The government had imposed a state of siege and snipers were still sporadically picking off those who ventured out. The city centre continued to smoulder. The university was closed and much of old Bogotá was in ruins. But the Conservative government had survived and the leading Liberal politicians had reached an unsatisfactory agreement with the unexpectedly valiant President Ospina Pérez which put some of them back in the cabinet but would effectively leave them out of power again as a party for another decade. As soon as they felt it was safe to return to the streets the two brothers, whose parents had urged them to fly down to Sucre, began to hustle for tickets to travel back to the Costa. Luis Enrique had decided to try his luck in Barranquilla, where the latest love of his life was waiting for him, and Gabito had decided to pursue his law studies in the University of Cartagena; or at least, he had decided to pretend to do so. A little over a week after the disastrous events of 9 April, Gabriel García Márquez, his brother Luis Enrique and the young Cuban agitator Fidel Castro Ruz set off from Bogotá on different planes towards their different historical destinies.
As for Colombia, it has become a historical cliché, but nonetheless true, that the death of Gaitán and the ensuing Bogotazo divided the nation’s twentieth-century history in two. What Gaitán might or might not have achieved lies in the realm of speculation. No politician has since excited the masses as he did and Colombia has moved further away from solving its real political problems with every year that has passed since he died. It was the crisis following his death which gave rise to the guerrilla movements that continue to compromise political life in the country until this very day. If it can be said that the War of a Thousand Days showed the upper classes the need to unite against the peasantry, the Bogotazo similarly showed the danger represented by the urban proletarian masses. Yet it was in the rural areas that the reaction would be most brutal, beginning twenty-five years of one of the world’s most savage and costly civil wars: the Violencia.
As for García Márquez, it can fairly be said of him, unlike most other people caught up in the events, that the Bogotazo was one of the most fortunate things that ever happened. It interrupted his law studies in the most prestigious university in the country and gave a shot in the arm to a young man looking for some further excuse to abandon his education; and it gave him an irrefutable pretext for abandoning a place he hated and for returning to his beloved Costa, but not before he had acquired a familiarity with the capital city which would be crucial in giving him a wider national consciousness. Never again would he take the two ruling parties entirely seriously. Slow as he was to develop a mature political consciousness, there were significant lessons that García Márquez had now assimilated about the nature of his country; as he had lost or abandoned most of his material possessions, these new lessons were perhaps the most important things the young man took with him on the plane to Barranquilla and Cartagena.
6
Back to the Costa:
An Apprentice Journalist
in Cartagena
1948–1949
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ LANDED in Barranquilla in a Douglas DC-3 aircraft on 29 April 1948, two days after his brother Luis Enrique. Luis Enrique stayed on in Barranquilla and started looking for employment; he would soon land a job with the airline company LANSA and would work there for the next eighteen months. Meanwhile all the transport systems of the country remained in chaos in the aftermath of the Bogotazo and Gabito, with a heavy suitcase and a similarly heavy dark suit, found himself perched on top of a postal truck in the searing heat of the Caribbean coastlands, heading for Cartagena.1
Cartagena was the merest shadow of its former self. When the Spaniards arrived in 1533, it became a vital bastion of the colonial system linking Spain to the Caribbean and South America and, before long, one of the most important cities for the delivery and sale of slaves in the entire New World. Despite this grim antecedent it had also become (and has remained) one of the most gracious and picturesque cities anywhere in Latin America.2
But after independence in the nineteenth century Barranquilla expanded to become the large trading city that Colombia required and Cartagena stagnated, nursed its wounds and its grievances, and consoled itself with the knowledge of its glorious past and its ravaged beauty. This decadent city was García Márquez’s new home. He was back in the Caribbean, back in a world where the
human body was accepted for what it was, in its beauty, its ugliness and its fragility, back in the realm of the senses. He had never before visited the heroic city and was struck, simultaneously, by its magnificence and its desolation. It had not entirely escaped the effects of the Bogotazo but, like the Costa as a whole, it had quickly returned to a somewhat uneasy normality despite the state of siege, the curfew and the censorship. The young man went straight to the Hotel Suiza in the Calle de las Damas, which doubled as a student residence, only to find that his wealthy friend José Palencia had not arrived. The owner would not give him a room on credit and he was forced to wander the old walled city, hungry and thirsty, and eventually to lie on a bench in the main square and hope that Palencia would soon turn up. Palencia didn’t. García Márquez fell asleep on his bench and was arrested by two policemen for breaking the curfew, or possibly because he didn’t have a cigarette to give them. He spent the night on the floor in a police cell. This was his introduction to Cartagena and the auguries were not good. Palencia finally turned up the next day and the two young men were admitted to the residence.3
García Márquez went to the university, just a couple of blocks away and managed to persuade the authorities, who examined him in front of his prospective classmates, to take him on for the remainder of the second year of the law degree, including passing the subjects he had failed in year one. He was a student again. He and Palencia took up where they had left off in Bogotá, went drinking and partying despite the curfew and generally acted like the kind of upper-class student layabout that Palencia actually was and that García Márquez could hardly afford to be. This idyllic state of affairs was brought to an end after just a few weeks when the restless Palencia decided to move on and García Márquez moved up to the collective dormitory, which cost thirty pesos a month for full board and laundry.
Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez Page 15