Gabriel García Márquez

by Gerald Martin

  He finished his article for the following day’s paper and then he and Luisa travelled on the seven o’clock launch across the great swamp to Ciénaga, a journey recaptured unforgettably in the memoir. From Ciénaga they went on to Aracataca in the same yellow train that had run between the two towns all those years before. They arrived in Aracataca and walked through the empty streets trying to shelter in the shade of the walnut trees.30 García Márquez considers this visit the single most important experience of his entire life, attributing to it the definitive confirmation of his literary vocation and the catalyst for what he regards as his first serious piece of writing, the novel Leaf Storm. That is why it is this episode that initiates Living to Tell the Tale, and not the moment of his birth; and it is, without a doubt, a narrative tour de force which gives life to the entire memoir.

  The effect of this return to things past was stunning. Every street seemed to funnel him backwards in time towards the house where he was born. Was this the Aracataca of his childhood, these ramshackle houses, these dusty streets, this crumbling toy-sized church? The busy green avenues of his memory were deserted and looked as if they would never be animated again. Everyone and everything he saw seemed covered in dust and had aged to a degree he could not have imagined; the adults all looked sick, weary and defeated, his contemporaries aged beyond their years, their children listless and pot-bellied; stray dogs and vultures appeared to have taken over the town.31 It was as if everyone else was dead and only he and his mother were alive. Or as if, as in a fairy tale, he himself had been dead and only now had come back to life.

  When the two travellers reached the corner diagonally across from the grandparents’ old house, on Monsignor Espejo’s Avenue, Luisa and Gabito stopped at the old dispensary of the Venezuelan doctor Alfredo Barbosa. Behind the counter, his wife Adriana Berdugo was working at her sewing machine and Luisa blurted out, “Comadre, how are you?” The woman looked round, stupefied, tried to reply but couldn’t; the two embraced without a word and wept for several minutes. García Márquez looked on, stunned by the confirmation that it was not only distance that had been separating him from Aracataca but time itself. He had once been frightened of the old pharmacist, now a pitiful sight, thin as a dry withered stick, sparse of hair and with most of his teeth missing. When they asked how he was, the old man stammered, almost accusingly, “You cannot imagine what this town has gone through.”32

  Years later García Márquez would say, “What really happened to me in that trip to Aracataca was that I realized that everything that had occurred in my childhood had a literary value that I was only now appreciating. From the moment I wrote Leaf Storm I realized I wanted to be a writer and that nobody could stop me and that the only thing left for me to do was to try to be the best writer in the world.”33 Adding to the ironies involved in all returns, the visit itself was a complete failure: his mother was unable to reach agreement with the sitting tenants. Indeed, the entire journey had been made on the basis of a misunderstanding and anyway Luisa herself was in two minds about the sale. As for him, until he wrote his memoir, which describes his and Luisa’s tour around the old crumbling building in great detail, he had always insisted that he had been unable to enter the house on that occasion and had never entered it since: “If I do, I will stop being a writer. The key is inside,” he once said.34 But in the memoir he goes in.

  He says he immediately decided to give up “The House” and take a different direction. This is surprising at first sight: one might have thought that a return to the house would only encourage him to start working again on the novel already inspired by it—rather than, as was in fact the case, expanding his focus to include the whole town in which it was situated. But the truth is that the house evoked in “The House” was not in fact the real house but a fictional construct intended to screen it. Now, at last, he was preparing to openly confront the edifice which had been haunting him for so many years and to rebuild the old town, which he still retained in his imagination, around it. Thus was Macondo born.

  It is impossible not to think of Proust. Except that García Márquez finds that although Aracataca itself is in many ways dead, he, after all, is alive. And he has, miraculously, got his mother back: he has no memories of ever having lived in the house with her but now at last they have visited it together; and this is the first time in his entire life that he has been on a journey alone with her.35 Naturally he does not say it—he does not say any of this—but their meeting in the Mundo Bookshop the previous day re-enacted the story of the “first” meeting between them (the first one he remembered) when he was six or seven—because in that later scene too, like a character inspired by Oedipus Rex, the narrator, García Márquez himself, has her say, “I am your mother.”

  The visit not only triggered his memory and changed his attitude towards his own past; it also showed him how to write the new novel. Now he viewed his home town through the lens given to him by Faulkner and the other 1920s modernists, Joyce, Proust and Virginia Woolf. “The House” had really been conceived as a nineteenth-century novel, inspired by the kind of books which the Cartagena set admired, books such as Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables; now he would write it as a narrative structured by an awareness of the multiple dimensions of time itself. He was no longer buried in that frozen house with his grandfather. He had escaped it.

  It was obvious that something big was happening to his understanding of the relation between literature and life when, a few weeks later, he wrote an article entitled “Problems of the Novel?,” which casts scorn on most fiction being written in Colombia at the time and then states:

  There has not yet been written in Colombia a novel evidently and fortunately influenced by Joyce, Faulkner or Virginia Woolf. And I say “fortunately” because I don’t think we Colombians can be an exception at this point to the play of influences. In her prologue to Orlando Virginia Woolf admits her influences. Faulkner himself could not deny those exerted upon him by Joyce. There is something—especially in the management of time—in common between Huxley and, again, Virginia Woolf. Franz Kafka and Proust are everywhere in the literature of the modern world. If we Colombians are to take the right path, we must position ourselves inevitably within this current. The lamentable truth is that it has not happened yet and there is not the slightest sign of it ever happening.36

  García Márquez was undoubtedly on his way to becoming a new man; he was no longer exiled from his own life; he had recovered his childhood. And he had discovered—or perhaps better, uncovered—a new identity. He had reinvented himself. And all by suddenly perceiving, as in a lightning flash, how the avant-garde writers of the 1920s had learned to view the world from within their own artistic consciousness.

  Few of his friends, either in Cartagena or Barranquilla, knew much about his origins. Now the “boy from Sucre” became the “boy from Aracataca” and he would never change his origin again. If there is good reason to believe that at this stage “The House” was in part a Sucre novel, now it would evolve towards being an Aracataca novel, albeit under an alias: Macondo. Before long, indeed, the earlier book would give way completely to the new one and García Márquez would be writing something much more directly autobiographical. Now the jokes he told his friends and colleagues had a different twist: for example, that he had gone back “home” to get his birth certificate and the Mayor had not had an official stamp to hand so had called for a large banana; when it was brought he had cut it in half and stamped the document with it.37 García Márquez assured his friends that the story was true, only he couldn’t prove it just now because he’d left the certificate in the “Skyscraper.” They all roared with laughter but they half-believed him. Whether or not there was a certificate to prove it, the story-teller from Aracataca was born; in his next incarnation he would become the magician from Macondo. At last he knew who he was and who he wanted to be.

  Soon after his return to Aracataca with Luisa Santiaga in February 1950 he had written a “Giraffe” entitled “Abelit
o Villa, Escalona and Co.”38 This piece, demonstrating that the journey with his mother reminded him of journeys he had already made and, equally significant, inspired journeys he intended to make in the future, briefly recalled the November 1949 expedition with Zapata Olivella, and celebrated the lives and adventures of the wandering troubadours of the Magdalena and Padilla regions. In particular it exalted the work of another young man who was to play a major role not only in his understanding of vallenato music but also in his direct participation in the culture of the Atlantic hinterland. The young man was Rafael Escalona, the vallenato composer, who, having already talked to Zapata Olivella about García Márquez, now, on reading the favourable review García Márquez had written of his music, set out to meet him.39 Their first one-on-one encounter (they may actually have met the year before) was in Barranquilla’s Café Roma on 22 March 1950, less than two weeks after the publication of the article about the 1949 trip and less than a month after the life-changing journey with Luisa Santiaga. To make an impression on the young troubadour, García Márquez arrived to meet him at the Café Roma, singing his composition “Hunger at School” (“El hambre del liceo”). There is a rare photograph from those days in which we can see García Márquez singing one of Escalona’s songs to the man himself, while drumming on a counter, with a pursing of the lips that García Márquez has always used not only to sing but to smoke, and to pout—whether to women or to men with whom he is in one way or another infatuated.40

  On 15 April 1950 Vinyes left his disciples and returned whence he had come. Before his departure a farewell dinner was arranged for him, a veritable last supper. In the photograph taken that evening Vinyes, euphoric, has his arm around a disconsolate Alfonso Fuenmayor; next to them, the only man without either a jacket or tie and wearing a brightly coloured tropical shirt, is the youngest person present, Gabriel García Márquez, “thin as a fishbone,” as a waitress at the América Billiards Hall had recently said, eyes shining, delighted to be there, his expression both ingenuous and sardonic but above all bursting with energy and life.

  Soon after this he was persuaded by Alfonso Fuenmayor to contribute to a new independent weekly magazine, produced tabloid-style at the El Heraldo workshop, called Crónica (Chronicle), which was unveiled on 29 April 1950 and survived until June 1951.41 García Márquez became the jack-of-all-trades of Crónica, as well as its director; some of his contributions were drawn, somewhat desperately, from real life. His story “The Woman Who Came at Six O’Clock” originated in a challenge from Fuenmayor that he could not write a detective story. García Márquez recalled an anecdote about Obregón’s first efforts, in Catholic Barranquilla, to find a nude model. His friends set about the search for a willing prostitute and finally located a promising candidate; she asked Obregón to first write a letter for her to a sailor in Bristol, agreed to turn up at the School of Fine Arts the next day and then … disappeared.42 “The Woman Who Came at Six O’Clock” is about a prostitute who appears to have just murdered a client and comes into a bar to establish an alibi. A debt to another of his new enthusiasms, Hemingway (perhaps “The Killers”), is evident.43 It is a rare example of a story by García Márquez which is set directly and recognizably in the Barranquilla of his time.

  “The Night of the Curlews” was another even more successful story, admired by connoisseurs such as Mutis and Zalamea Borda up in Bogotá. It had originated in one of the visits to Black Eufemia’s brothel in Las Delicias, where the gang tended to turn up almost every night. Fuenmayor would later insist, as if the thought had never even occurred to him, that they certainly did not go there for the women, “those pathetic little girls who went to bed out of hunger,” but rather to buy a bottle of rum for thirteen pesos and watch the Yankee sailors stagger around the floor amid the resident curlews, as if they had lost their human partners and were looking to dance with the red-feathered waders. One night García Márquez was dozing there and Fuenmayor shook him awake and said: “Careful the curlews don’t peck out your eyes!” (It is believed in Colombia that the birds blind children because they see fish move in their eyes.) So García Márquez went straight back to the office to write the story of three friends in a brothel who are blinded by birds, just in order to fill a space in Crónica. The author himself would later say that it was the first literary piece he ever wrote which did not embarrass him half a century later.

  He was hypnotized by the literary achievement of the European and American modernists of the 1920s and 1930s; but he was also fascinated by their fame and glory and the use some writers had made of this, notably Faulkner and, above all, Hemingway, in developing myths about themselves and their writing. The 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature had been left vacant because, although Faulkner had won an overwhelming majority vote of the Swedish Academy, he had not achieved unanimity. On 8 April García Márquez had already written an article, “Nobel Prize Again,” in which he predicted that Faulkner, whom he always called “el maestro Faulkner,” would never win the prize because he was “too good a writer.” When Faulkner was in fact awarded the 1949 prize retrospectively in November 1950, García Márquez declared that it was long overdue because Faulkner was “the greatest writer of the contemporary world and one of the greatest of all time,” one who now would have to accept “the uncomfortable privilege of becoming fashionable.”44 Much later he would sort out the great dilemma—Faulkner or Hemingway?—by remarking that Faulkner had nourished his literary soul whilst Hemingway had taught him the writer’s trade.45

  After he became famous García Márquez found himself repeatedly lured into discussing how much he had been “influenced” by Faulkner. Beneath the question, invariably, was a more sinister question: whether he had “plagiarized” Faulkner; in short, whether he lacked true originality. Perhaps, given the extraordinary parallels between their backgrounds, the remarkable thing is that García Márquez was not more influenced by Faulkner, especially since Faulkner was unquestionably the favourite writer of the entire Barranquilla Group. The almost equally decisive influence of Virginia Woolf on García Márquez is much less frequently mentioned; James Joyce hardly at all. Since his points of reference were many, and his own originality unmistakable, it is little wonder that García Márquez grew weary of the attempts to reduce him to the status of a Colombian Faulkner, despite his passing enthusiasm for the Mississippian and the many things they had in common. We have almost no private documents written by García Márquez in this period; not even the manuscripts of his stories and novels have been preserved. But some time between the middle of 1950 and, say, October of that same year, García Márquez, possibly under some non-literary influence—alcohol perhaps—wrote a two-page letter to his friend Carlos Alemán in Bogotá. Miraculously, the letter has survived and here is an excerpt:

  idonthavejuanbsaddressimsendingyoualetterforhim

  aleman im writing in reply to the epistolary absurdity you sent me as im too busy i wont have time to put full stops or commas semi colons and all the other pieces of punctuation in this letter i hardly have time to put the letters pity telepathy doesnt exist to reply by telepathic post which must be the best as its not subject to censorship as you know we are doingcronicaweekly which leaves us no time for expeditions in search of stupefying grasses so for the moment youll have to be content with ordinary crocodile prick until cronica goes bust and we can go back to our stamping ground at son of the night aurelianobuendia sends greetings likewise his daughter remedios semi whore who went out in the end with the singer salesman the son tobias became a policeman and they were killed so the only one left is the girl without a name who won’t ever have one they all just called her the girl sitting all day in her rocking chair listening to the gramophone which like everything else in this world went wrong and now its a problem in the house because the only one in the town who knows about machinery is an italian shoemaker whos never in his life seen a cobbled gramophone he goes to the house and tries to hammermendrepair it in vain whilst all the water boys are talkingspillingwaterwhistlin
g and pieces of the grammy end up in every house sayinggramophonecolonelaurelianodamaged that same afternoon people have to run togetdressedclosedoorsputtheirshoesoncombtheirhair to go to the colonel’s house he for his part was not expecting visitors since the townsfolk hadn’t been back to his house for fifteen years since when they refused to bury gregorios body for fear of the police and the colonel insulted prieststownfellowpartymembers withdrew from council and shut himself up in his house so that only fifteen years later when the gramophone wasdamagedbust-broke did people go back to the house and catch the colonel and his wife dona soledad completely unawares … the woman spends all night in a corner not talking to anyone and when dona soledad embarrassed gets to go over its dawn and the people leave its just stuff you know that as the son became a policeman when the police come with his funeral the colonels sitting at the door like always and when he sees the funeral coming he pulls the doors shut well stuff like that its as if it happened in mompos just so you can see how the great book is going that apart i can tell you that german alfonso figurita and i are passing our time talkingwritingthinkingdoingcronica and not like before drinkingwhoringsmokingcigarettesgrass cos life cant be like that if you dont like virginia you can go fuck yourself ramiro likes her and knows more about novels than you so go to fuck tell ramiro i owe him a letter but to write to me anyway in december ill ask for a vacation from cronica and to keep me a place in the apartment don ramon left and has written were all well tito brinqueit eduard puteit old fuenmayors turned out a great guy we all say hello and wish you merrychristmashappynewyear your affectionate friend gabito46