Gabriel García Márquez

by Gerald Martin

  Then fate took a hand. As he wandered down the Street of Bad Behaviour (Mala Crianza) in the old slave quarter of Getsemaní, adjacent to the walled city, he came across Manuel Zapata Olivella, a black doctor he had known in Bogotá the year before. The next day Zapata, a well-known philanthropist to his many friends and later one of Colombia’s leading writers and journalists, took the young man to the offices of the newspaper El Universal in San Juan de Dios Street, just round the corner from his student pensión, and introduced him to the managing editor, Clemente Manuel Zabala. As luck would have it, Zabala, who was a friend of Eduardo Zalamea Borda, had read García Márquez’s short stories in El Espectador and was already an admirer. Despite the young man’s timidity he took him on as a columnist and, without discussing terms or conditions, said he looked forward to seeing him the next day and to printing his first article the day after that.

  At the time García Márquez seems to have conceived journalism only as a means to an end and as an inferior form of writing. Nevertheless, he had now been taken on as a journalist precisely because of his pre-existing literary prestige, just past his twenty-first birthday. He contacted his parents immediately to tell them that he would now be able to support himself through his studies. Given his intention to give up those studies as soon as he could, and certainly never to practise law even if he qualified, the message significantly eased his conscience.

  El Universal itself was a new paper. It had been founded only ten weeks before by Dr. Domingo López Escauriaza, a patrician Liberal politician who had been state governor and a diplomat and now, in the light of growing Conservative violence, had decided to open a new front in the propaganda war on the Costa. This had been a month before the Bogotazo. There was no other Liberal newspaper in that very conservative city.

  Everyone agrees that Zabala was the newspaper’s trump card. Such was the managing editor’s dedication and lucidity that El Universal emerged, despite its unprepossessing offices, as a model of political coherence and, by the standards of the time, good writing. The good writing would be providential for the new recruit. Zabala was a slight, nervous man in his mid-fifties, born in San Jacinto, with “Indian” features and hair. Dark in complexion, with a slight paunch, he always wore glasses and was rarely seen without a cigarette in his hand. He was also, it was rumoured, a discreet homosexual, who dyed his hair black to defy the advancing years and lived alone in a small hotel room. He had been a political associate of Gaitán. It was said he had been private secretary to General Benjamín Herrera in his youth and he had worked on the General’s newspaper El Diario Nacional. In the 1940s he had worked in the ministry of education and later he had collaborated closely with Plinio Mendoza Neira’s magazine Acción Liberal.

  Zabala introduced García Márquez to another recent recruit, Héctor Rojas Herazo, a young poet and painter of twenty-seven from the Caribbean port of Tolú. He did not recognize García Márquez but he had briefly been his art teacher eight years before at the Colegio San José in Barranquilla. It was another of the extraordinary conjunctions which were already punctuating García Márquez’s life; Rojas Herazo was himself destined to be one of the country’s leading poets and novelists as well as a widely admired painter.4 Craggy and leonine, he was louder and larger, more dogmatic and apparently more passionate than his new friend, expansive and prickly at one and the same time.

  Well after midnight, when Zabala had checked and corrected every article on every one of the newspaper’s eight pages, he invited his two young protégés out to eat. Journalists were exempt from the curfew and García Márquez now embarked on a new life, which was to last many years, in which he worked through much of the night and slept, when he slept at all, during much of the day. This would not be easy in Cartagena where law classes began at seven in the morning and García Márquez arrived home at six. The only place open so late at night was a restaurant and bar nicknamed “The Cave” on the waterfront behind the public market, run by an exquisitely beautiful young black homosexual called José de las Nieves, “Joe of the Snows.”5 There the journalists and other night owls would eat beefsteak, tripe, and rice with shrimp or crab.

  After Zabala had returned to his solitary room, García Márquez and Rojas Herazo began to wander the port area, beginning at the Paseo de los Mártires, where nine busts commemorate the deaths in 1816 of some of the first rebels against the Spanish empire.6 Then García Márquez went home to work. After an anxious few hours, but infatuated with his own rhetoric, he trotted off to show his first column to the boss. Zabala read it and said it was well enough written but wouldn’t do. Firstly, it was too personal, and far too literary; and secondly, “Haven’t you noticed that we are working under a regime of censorship?” On Zabala’s desk was a red pencil. He picked it up. Almost immediately the combination of García Márquez’s own inborn talent and Zabala’s professional zeal produced articles which were readable, absorbing and patently original from the very start.7 All García Márquez’s signed columns in El Universal appeared under the byline “New Paragraph” (“Punto y Aparte”). The first, the one that received most attention from the editor, was a political piece about the curfew and state of siege, cunningly disguised as a general meditation on the city. The young writer asked prophetically how, in an era of political violence and dehumanization, could his generation be expected to turn out as “men of good will.” Evidently the novice journalist had been abruptly radicalized by the events of 9 April. The second article was equally remarkable.8 If the first was implicitly political in the traditional sense, the second was almost a manifesto about cultural politics: it was a defence of the humble accordion, a vagabond among musical instruments but an essential element in the vallenato, a musical form developed in the Costa by usually anonymous musicians and, for García Márquez, a symbol of the people of the region and their culture, not to mention of his own desire to challenge ruling-class preconceptions. The accordion, he insisted, is not only a vagabond but a proletarian. The first article had been a rejection of the kind of politics coming from Bogotá; the second embraced the writer’s newly recovered cultural roots.9

  For the first time the future of Gabriel García Márquez was moderately assured. He was doing a job, and one that other people recognized he was good at. He was a newspaperman. He would continue to study the law sporadically and unenthusiastically, but he had found his way out of the legal profession and into the world of journalism and literature. He would never look back.

  In the next twenty months he would write forty-three signed pieces and many times that number of unsigned contributions for El Universal. Mostly this was still a noticeably old-fashioned journalism of commentary and literary creation, more for entertainment than political information, closer indeed to the genre of daily or weekly “chronicles” which would not have been out of date in a Latin American newspaper of the 1920s. On the other hand, one of García Márquez’s tasks was to sift through the cables coming off the teletype machine in order to select news items and propose topics for the commentary pieces and literary extrapolations that were so important in the journalism of those times. This daily practice must have given him an experience of the way in which the events of everyday life are transmuted into “news,” into “stories,” that immediately demystified ordinary reality and provided a powerful antidote to his recent excursions into the works of Kafka. Journalists almost everywhere at this time were obliged to adopt the hands-on, sleeves-rolled-up approach of U.S. journalistic practices and from the beginning García Márquez took to this like a duck to water. It would make him a very different sort of writer from the majority of his Latin American contemporaries, for whom France and French ways of doing things were still the models to follow in an age when France itself was beginning to lose its grip on modernity.

  Much though he had to learn, the new columnist’s originality was obvious from the start and must have been a joy to the editor who hired him. Just three months later, in his article on the Cartagena Afro-Colombian writer Jorge Art
el, he was implicitly calling for a literature at once local and continental which would represent “our race”—an astonishing perspective for Colonel Márquez’s grandson to adopt at the age of twenty-one—and to give the Atlantic Coast “an identity of its own.”10

  In mid-July of that first year Conservative police massacred Liberal families in El Carmen de Bolívar, the town where García Márquez’s grandfather had been brought up with Aunt Francisca. El Carmen had a long and glorious Liberal political tradition. It also happened to be the nearest large town to Zabala’s place of birth, San Jacinto, so both men took a special interest in events there and between them carried out a campaign based on the slogan, “What happened in Carmen de Bolívar?” Zabala’s grim joke, whenever he renewed the campaign, in the face of government denials and inertia, was to end with the words, “No doubt about it, in Carmen de Bolívar absolutely nothing happened.”11 This is almost exactly the phrase García Márquez would later use about his invented town of Macondo in a celebrated section of One Hundred Years of Solitude after the pivotal episode of the banana-workers massacre.

  In one sense there could have been no worse time to become a journalist in Colombia. Censorship was imposed immediately after the events of April 1948, though less brutally on the coast than in the interior of the country. García Márquez began to practise journalism because of the Violencia but the Violencia severely limited what a journalist could do. For the next seven years, under Ospina Pérez, Laureano Gómez, Urdaneta Arbeláez and Rojas Pinilla, albeit with variable intensity, government censorship would be continuously active. All the more significant, then, that the first article of García Márquez’s career, dated 21 May 1948, had implied a clear left-of-centre political position. He would never diverge from this broad perspective; yet it would never, in the last instance (as the Marxists used to say), constrain or distort his fiction.

  Only two weeks after starting with El Universal García Márquez asked for a week’s holiday and travelled across to Barranquilla, up to Magangué and then on to Sucre to see his family. Whether he stopped off at Mompox to get a glimpse of Mercedes we do not know. By the time he set off he must have realized that his new salary was not what he had given his parents to believe but he evidently did not have the heart to disabuse them. This was not only his first visit since the Bogotazo but the first time he had been home since he travelled to Bogotá at the start of his university studies in February 1947, more than a year before. It was therefore the first time he had seen his mother since her own mother had died and the first time he had seen the last of his brothers and sisters, Eligio Gabriel, named, like himself only more completely, after their father. In later life García Márquez, who was twenty years older than Eligio Gabriel, would often jokingly tell the story that the new child was so named because “my mother had lost me but she wanted to be sure there was always a Gabriel in the house.” In fact when he personally delivered Eligio Gabriel, whom the family would call Yiyo, in November 1947, Gabriel Eligio declared: “This baby looks like me; Gabito is not at all like me so we’ll call this one after me, only the other way round—Eligio Gabriel!”12

  Back Gabito went to Cartagena. It was only now, on 17 June, that he formally registered at the university, though he had passed the interview weeks before. Professionally things were going well but economically disaster stared the young writer in the face. Despite being, effectively, a staff journalist, García Márquez was paid by the piece. Although he himself was never much of a mathematician and was relatively indifferent to budgetary questions, a friend, Ramiro de la Espriella, later calculated that he was paid thirty-two centavos, a third of a peso, for each article, signed or unsigned, that he wrote, and virtually nothing for his other duties. This was below any imaginable minimum wage. By the end of June he had been thrown out of the pensión and had taken to sleeping on park benches again, in the rooms of other students or, famously, on the rolls of newsprint in the office of El Universal, one place that never closed. One evening, as he walked with colleagues in the Centenary Park, where they would sit on the steps of the Noli Me Tangere monument and drink, smoke and talk, another journalist, Jorge Franco Múnera, asked how his lodgings were turning out and García Márquez confessed the truth. That same night Franco Múnera took him to his family home in Estanco del Aguardiente Street on the corner of Cuartel del Fijo, near the Heredia Theatre in the old city. The family embraced the hungry, homeless student, especially Jorge’s mother Carmen Múnera Herrán.13 Other people’s mothers always took to him. He would board with her on and off, trying to appease his conscience by eating as little as possible, for the rest of his stay in Cartagena.

  So at this time García Márquez was living a life even more desperate than his time in Bogotá and he now habituated himself to a virtual disregard for his own bodily needs. Even here on the Costa he was famous for his ghastly multi-coloured shirts—usually he owned only one at a time—and checked jackets, worn over black woollen trousers from some old suit, canary yellow socks which hung around his ankles and dusty moccasins which he never cleaned. He had a tentative wispy moustache and curly, untidy black hair which rarely saw a comb. Even after getting the Franco Múnera room he slept wherever fatigue and the approaching dawn caught him. He was thin as a rake and friends, touched by the fact that he remained eternally cheerful and never ever seemed sorry for himself or appealed for help, repeatedly clubbed together to buy him meals by day and include him in their night-time excursions.

  The opinions of friends and acquaintances varied. Many people, especially social conservatives, thought him eccentric to the point of lunacy or, not infrequently, homosexual.14 Even friends like Rojas Herazo say in retrospect that he was something of a cissy (“such a good boy”).15 Both Rojas and another friend, Carlos Alemán, remember García Márquez’s boyishness, his bouncy gait—which he has never lost—and his tendency to dance with glee when someone gave him a new idea or he was excited about one of his own ideas for a story.16 Acquaintances remember him always drumming his fingers on the table as he waited for his lunch, or on anything else to hand, singing quietly or noisily, music always somehow wafting through him.17

  García Márquez learned everything his new friends and colleagues had to teach him. He also developed some key ideas about his vocation at an astonishingly early age. For example, he picked up George Bernard Shaw’s declaration that he was going to devote himself henceforth to advertising slogans and making money; García Márquez commented that this was food for thought for those, like himself, who were “resolved not to write for commercial reasons and yet find ourselves doing it out of vanity instead.”18

  Life settled into a routine in Cartagena. He missed most of his classes but not all professors took an attendance list and the Liberal teachers sympathized with the young man’s journalistic skirmishes with the censors and with the authorities in general, who more than once sent military detachments to the newspaper offices to intimidate the staff. Among his most important relationships was that with Gustavo Ibarra Merlano, a student of the classics who had graduated from the Bogotá Normal School and now taught in a local college a few yards from the El Universal office. Ibarra Merlano was already a good friend of Rojas Herazo’s. To amble about with these two cost García Márquez no money—nor involved him in receiving any charity—because they did no drinking or partying and mainly discussed lofty matters related to poetry or religious philosophy.19

  García Márquez also had other friends whose inclinations were less austere. Principal among them were the De la Espriella brothers, Ramiro and Oscar, whom he met occasionally in 1948 and more frequently in 1949, whose interests were not only much more political—in the arena of radical Liberalism and even Marxism—but also far more worldly. With them and others García Márquez would spend time drinking and going to brothels. Three surprisingly provocative articles printed in July 1948 suggest that at the time García Márquez may have been enamoured of some young woman of the night and may, right then, have been evolving the attitudes towar
ds sex and love which would characterize his later work. The first has him quite explicitly inventorying the body of a young female while musing, “And to think that all this one day will be inhabited by death,” then ending the first paragraph, “To think that this pain of being inside you and far from my own substance will one day find its definitive remedy.”20 It is as well that the reactionary Catholic matrons of Cartagena would no more have opened the pages of El Universal than walk naked through the Plaza Bolívar.

  By the time of the third article the young writer has discovered one of his key ideas, later given classic form in the novel Love in the Time of Cholera: that love can last for ever but is much more likely to flower and die in the briefest of times, like a sickness.21 Few male visitors will quickly forget their first sight of the voluptuous, under-dressed women of Caribbean harbour towns like Cartagena or Havana, and García Márquez lived on the Costa as a young man in the heyday of the Caribbean prostitute. But as for serious, respectable girlfriends, Ramiro de la Espriella remembers him mentioning only one, Mercedes, by then a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl. “Though what she saw in him I can’t imagine: he was just a kid, insignificant, pimply, malarial, he looked puny, without any physical presence … If you saw him in the street you’d have taken him for a messenger boy.”22

  Mercedes’s family and most of García Márquez’s were still down in Sucre. But Luis Enrique was living in Barranquilla and would often travel across to Cartagena at weekends and over holiday periods: “Gabito was in Cartagena doing the same as in Bogotá, pretending to study law but really writing.”23 It was the era of the great Latin American bolero singing trios such as Los Panchos and Luis Enrique’s dream was to set up his own trio—“my father would have been even more horrified by that than he was by Gabito’s writing.”24