Around this time Zabala received a message from Zalamea Borda in Bogotá asking what was happening to his young protégé’s literary activities. García Márquez had actually given up on his stories at this time but could never say no to Zalamea and quickly revised another, “The Other Side of Death” (“La otra costilla de la muerte”), which was published in El Espectador on 25 July 1948. It must have been flattering and profoundly comforting to know that an important and influential personage was still thinking about him and furthering his interests up in Bogotá.
On 16 September 1948 García Márquez travelled to Barranquilla on newspaper business and instead of taking the bus straight back to Cartagena he decided to look up some fellow journalists recommended by his friends in Cartagena. It was another historic decision. He headed for the offices of El Nacional, where Germán Vargas and Alvaro Cepeda were then employed. They were part of a loose bohemian fraternity which would eventually be known as the “Barranquilla Group.”25 García Márquez’s passionate yet judicious contribution to the literary discussions that first evening impressed the third member of the group, Alfonso Fuenmayor, who was the assistant editor of the Liberal newspaper El Heraldo and asked García Márquez to look him up before returning to Cartagena.
García Márquez was delighted to discover that these apparently hard-bitten journalists knew him by his reputation and he was embraced like a long-lost brother, introduced to the local literary guru, the Catalan writer Ramón Vinyes, and then taken off on a bar and brothel crawl which ended up in a legendary establishment called “Black Euphemia’s,” which would later be immortalized in One Hundred Years of Solitude. There García Márquez sealed his own personal triumph and his bond with the group by singing mambos and boleros for more than an hour. He stayed overnight at the home of Alvaro Cepeda, who, unlike the others, was the same age as he was and had similar tastes in flowered shirts and artist’s smocks, had even longer hair and wore sandals, like a pioneer hippy. Cepeda was loud, bombastic and dogmatic. He showed García Márquez a wall of books, mainly North American and English, and roared: “These are the best books going, the only ones worth reading by the only people who know how to write. You can borrow all of them if you want.”
The next morning, according to the memoir, García Márquez was sent off with a novel called Orlando by a writer he had never heard of, Virginia Woolf, whom Cepeda seemed to know personally since he always called her “old Woolf,” just as the entire group evidently also had an intimate relationship with their favourite writer, William Faulkner, whom they usually called “the Old Man.”26 After all these years the enthusiasm displayed by these tough guys for the work of the demure Mrs. Woolf remains astonishing. Friends recall that García Márquez was particularly struck at the time by an apparently unladylike line he claimed to have read in one of her novels: that “love is taking your knickers off,” a somewhat “loose” translation of “love is slipping off one’s petticoat” from Orlando.27 This quotation may have had more impact on his view of the world than may appear to be the case at first sight. At any rate, he told everyone that “Virginia” was “a tough old broad.”28
The time for the second-year examinations approached and García Márquez was desperate. His attendance had been more than erratic—fifteen absences officially noted down—and he had absorbed little of what he had heard. A classmate from that era recalls that García Márquez “worked until three in the morning at the newspaper, then slept on rolls of newsprint until seven o’clock when our classes began. He always said he would have to bathe later because he had no time to wash before arriving at the university.”29 He passed the year overall but a failure in Roman law would come back to haunt him several years later and may even have been decisive in ensuring that he would never qualify as a lawyer.
Meanwhile his contact with the Barranquilla Group had inspired him—and given him the confidence—to begin work on his first novel, which he entitled “The House” (“La casa”). It was a novel about his own past—possibly, indeed, a novel which he had been nurturing for a long time. He worked on this novel initially in the second half of 1948 and then more intensively in early 1949. His friend, Ramiro de la Espriella, and his brother Oscar lived in their parents’ large nineteenth-century house in the Segunda Calle de Badillo in the old walled city. García Márquez was a frequent visitor, often eating there and even sleeping there on occasion. The house had a large collection of books and García Márquez would often be found reading Colombian history in the library. Oscar, the older of the two brothers, remembers: “My father called him ‘Civic Valour’ because he said it took a lot of nerve to dress the way he did … My mother loved him like a son … He would turn up with his great roll of papers tied up with a necktie, it was what he was writing, and so he’d unwrap his stuff and sit down and read it to us.”30
From the extracts that survived and were later published in El Heraldo of Barranquilla we can see that the novel was set in a house something like the house of García Márquez’s grandparents and was faintly reminiscent of Faulkner in theme though not in manner; it was interesting and had potential but it was rather flat and none of the extant extracts from it suggest the influence of Faulkner or Joyce or indeed Virginia Woolf. It involved characters something like his grandfather and grandmother and their ancestors, a place something like Aracataca, a war like the War of a Thousand Days, but at this time he never managed to go beyond a rather episodic, one-dimensional and somewhat lifeless narrative. It seems García Márquez could not escape from the house. Or to put it another way, he could not separate “The House” from the house, the novel from its inspiration. Still, it is impossible to doubt that here, to an astonishing degree, are the germs of One Hundred Years of Solitude, with the themes of solitude, destiny nostalgia, patriarchy and violence all waiting for the distinctive tone and perspective that were still more than a decade away from discovery. The truth in part is that García Márquez could not yet fully ironize his own culture; it was inconceivable in those days that anything connected to Nicolás Márquez could be ludicrous or even funny. Ironically enough, then, it had not yet occurred to him to connect the fantastic world of Kafka with the real world of his memories.31
In March 1949, suddenly, he fell seriously ill. According to his own testimony, it was a political confrontation with Zabala which triggered the crisis. One night towards the end of March García Márquez was sitting in “The Cave” with Zabala as the editor ate his late-night supper. García Márquez had been behaving increasingly badly since his trips to Barranquilla, working erratically at El Universal and showing signs of an unfocused adolescent rebellion brought on by his contact with Alvaro Cepeda. Zabala stopped eating his soup, looked over his glasses and said acidly, “Tell me something, Gabriel, in the midst of all your stupid antics, have you noticed that this country is going down the pan?”32 Stung, García Márquez went on drinking and ended up fast asleep on a bench in the Paseo de los Mártires. He woke up next morning at the end of a tropical downpour with his clothes sodden and his lungs shot. He was diagnosed with pneumonia and so he went back to Sucre for however long it might take to convalesce at his parents’ house—not necessarily the ideal destination for a bronchial invalid because the waters around Sucre had risen higher than ever and the town was flooded as it would so often be in In Evil Hour or Chronicle of a Death Foretold.
This would turn out to be an important return home. García Márquez has said that he half expected the stay to last six months, though in the event it was not much more than six weeks. But not only was it the longest time he had spent with the family for some years but it was also a visit where he knew in advance that he would be housebound for a long time. He didn’t realize it at the time but a quiet unconscious revolution would begin to work inside him now that several of his brothers and sisters were growing up, a revolution too slow to take immediate effect but crucial in the longer term to his literary and historical imagination and perspective. One might say that he would begin to add living people to
the dead people who already haunted his imagination.
Now that he was a journalist García Márquez also began to notice Sucre. One of the most interesting local legends in the region was that of the Marquesita de La Sierpe, a blonde Spanish woman who was supposed to have lived in the remote settlement of La Sierpe (a sierpe is a serpent) and never married or engaged in sexual congress with any male. She had magical powers, a hacienda as big as several municipalities and lived for more than two hundred years. Each year she would tour the region curing the sick and dispensing favours to those she protected. Before she died she had her cattle parade past the house, which took nine days until so much trampling in wet earth eventually formed the Swamp (Ciénaga) of La Sierpe, south-west of Sucre, between the San Jorge and Cauca rivers. She then buried the rest of her most precious possessions and treasures in the Swamp together with the secret of eternal life, and distributed her remaining wealth among the six families who had served her.33
This legend, told to García Márquez by his friend Angel Casij Palencia, José Palencia’s cousin, together with others he would collect himself, helped not only to form the basis of a series of brilliant articles he would write three or four years later but also to inspire his own fabulous literary creation “Big Mama” (la Mamá Grande), which would be the first unmistakable sign of the mature García Márquez style, in the late 1950s. Another ingredient was a wealthy resident of Sucre, who lived next door to the family’s friends the Gentile Chimento family. She was called María Amalia Sampayo de Alvarez, a woman who sneered at education and culture and bragged endlessly about her wealth. When she died in 1957 she was given a grotesquely extravagant funeral.34 Another equally extraordinary story was that of an eleven-year-old girl who was forced into prostitution by her grandmother; many years later she would become several fictional characters, notably the famous “Eréndira.”35
In fact, the matter of his development as a narrator was now called into question in the most dramatic fashion. García Márquez had hinted in a letter to his friends in Barranquilla that a shipment of books would be welcome to counteract the wilderness of Sucre and the uncouthness of his parents’ home.36 The books duly arrived. They included Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, The Hamlet, As I Lay Dying and The Wild Palms, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath, Nathan’s Portrait of Jenny and Huxley’s Point Counter Point. Unfortunately the result of reading these scintillating works of modernist literature was that work on “The House” slowed almost to a halt.37 Moreover as he began to recover his health he also began to return to leisure activities. He never made it to La Sierpe but he got back into his relationship with the voluptuous Nigromanta (who by then had lost her husband), much to Luisa Santiaga’s disgust. He also made some new friends. One, Carlos Alemán, from Mompox, who had already been elected to the departmental assembly, remembers arriving at Sucre in May 1949: “In the midst of the crowd greeting our arrival from the huts there stood out a man in exotic garb: he had peasant sandals, black trousers and a yellow shirt. I said to Ramiro, ‘Who’s that parakeet?’ and he replied, ‘That’s Gabito’ … He stood right out in those clothes of his, with everyone else there dressed in khaki.”38
So García Márquez, still supposedly convalescent, joined the group with his friend Jacobo Casij, another Liberal militant, and they sailed on around the entire Mojana region in three launches, each with Liberal flags, barrels of rum and a brass band. Liberal supporters cheered from the river banks and local bosses, usually Liberal landowners, would organize fiestas and meetings wherever they landed. Oscar de la Espriella later reflected, “Really we were all Marxists in those days, all waiting for the revolution, but Carlos Lleras would never give the order.”39
By the middle of May García Márquez felt well enough to return to his activities in Cartagena. As a newly elected member of the departmental assembly, his friend Carlos Alemán was not noticeably more aware of his self-importance than before but used his new status and budget to organize frequent binges which usually gave his poorer friend enough to eat to last him a week and invariably ended up in a brothel.40
When García Márquez got back from Sucre and wrote his next signed article—by then an extremely rare phenomenon—about the elections for student beauty queen, he signed it not Gabriel García Márquez but “Séptimus,” inspired by the character of that name in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.41 This first Séptimus article, “Friday,” is notable for its confident, almost arrogant tone, and includes the following defiant statement: “We are the students and we have discovered the formula for the perfect state: concord between the different social classes, fair salaries, the equal distribution of surplus value, the dissolution of salaried parliaments and total and collective abstention from elections.”
García Márquez had seriously neglected his legal studies before he fell ill and neglected them even more determinedly afterwards. He was well known for proclaiming his loathing of the law and for organizing impromptu football games in the university’s august corridors. The danger was that if he qualified as a lawyer he might be tempted—or forced, either by his family or his conscience—to practise it. Law studies in Cartagena were even more tedious than in Bogotá. In the end he failed both medical law (one in the eye for Gabriel Eligio?) and the seminar in civil law, scraped through civil law itself and passed five other subjects. Even this was a miracle in view of his numerous absences. But he did not retrieve Roman law and thus carried three failures into the fourth year.42
On 9 November in Bogotá, sensing the divisions and weaknesses within the Liberal leadership, the existing Conservative government reimposed the state of siege and closed the Congress—the so-called “institutional coup.” An eight o’clock curfew was decreed a few days later. The Liberal failure to react encouraged the Conservatives to cast off all restraint and the Violencia—redoubled—filled the entire country with corpses, above all in rural areas, though as usual less in the northern coastlands than elsewhere.
Internationally, this period—1948–9—was also an extraordinary time, one of the most intense and decisive moments of the entire twentieth century. García Márquez had been in Bogotá while the new inter-American system was being created there—largely in the interests of the United States, which had only recently dominated discussions in Europe about the establishment of the United Nations and had arranged, symbolically enough, to move the new organization’s meetings from London to New York. President Truman, who had taken the decision not long before to drop two atomic bombs on Japan, had now declared a worldwide crusade against communism—the CIA had been set up in 1947 as part of the anti-communist struggle—and the Pope had tacitly supported the American line; Truman had got himself re-elected on the strength of this position. The state of Israel had been founded with the full support of the Western nations and NATO had been established; the USSR had imposed a blockade on Berlin and the USA had responded with an airlift; the USSR had then tested its own atom bomb and on 1 October 1949 the People’s Republic of China had been founded. By the time García Márquez finally made the decision to take hold of his own life and move on from Cartagena, the new international system which would run the world throughout the recently declared Cold War and beyond was firmly in place. This was the context of his adult life and time.
It was at this moment that Manuel Zapata Olivella, the black vagabond, writer, revolutionary and doctor, crossed García Márquez’s path again—as he would on further occasions in the future. Now he took him off for his first encounter with the old province of Padilla, the stamping ground of Colonel Márquez during the Thousand Day War. Zapata Olivella had just graduated from the National University in Bogotá; although a native of Cartagena, he was travelling to practise his new profession in the small town of La Paz, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, about twelve miles from Valledupar. Zapata invited García Márquez to go with him to his new place of residence and the young man leaped at the chance. Th
ere, for the first time, in La Paz and Valledupar, he met the singers of vallenatos and merengues in their natural habitat—in particular the influential Afro-Colombian accordionist Abelito Antonio Villa, the first man to record vallenato music.43
By the time he got back to Cartagena he had finally made up his mind: it was time to leave. Barranquilla would be a much more convenient place from which to look back upon his cultural heritage. His last public appearance in Cartagena was at a party on 22 December to celebrate the publication of his seventeen-year-old friend Jorge Lee Biswell Cotes’s novel, Blue Mist (Neblina azul), which he damned with faint praise in a patronizing and deprecating review in El Universal.
Oscar de la Espriella recalls García Márquez singing what he announced as “the first vallenato I ever learned,” whose first line went, “I’ll give you a bunch of forget-me-nots, so you’ll do as their name tells you.”44 The line has been used implicitly by writers from Cartagena to insinuate that García Márquez has unfairly “forgotten”—indeed, repudiated—not only the city, with its admittedly snobbish and reactionary upper-class values, but the friends who helped him, the colleagues who inspired him and, above all, the editor who loved and instructed him: Clemente Manuel Zabala, whom García Márquez almost never mentioned publicly until the prologue of Of Love and Other Demons in 1994.45
The young man would indeed be ostensibly ungrateful to specific individuals in later life and he has consistently played down the contribution of the Cartagena period to his development; but it is also clear that Cartagena writers now claim too much for the impact of the city and its intellectuals on the budding novelist and underestimate how much he suffered through his treatment there. García Márquez was a poor boy during his seven years at school, dependent on grants and the benevolence of others. In Bogotá he was always short of money and in Cartagena—and later Barranquilla—he would be close to indigent. Somehow he managed to smile and nearly always be positive during these years; friendly and unfriendly witnesses alike confirm that he virtually never expressed pity for himself or asked for favours. How he maintained his equanimity, how he held on to his confidence, how he built his resolve and managed to fashion and fortify a vocation in these arduous circumstances, with a family of ten other children beneath him also living in relative poverty, is something that can only be explained by words like courage, character and unshakable determination.
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