Gabriel García Márquez

by Gerald Martin

  This letter is a revelation. As well as the evident influence of the rarely mentioned Joyce—also Virginia Woolf—and the vivid sense it gives of García Márquez’s life in Barranquilla and his feelings of euphoria about it, it also shows us a young man still thinking like an impressionable teenager totally obsessed with his own creative process and immersed in his own stories but also, for those familiar with his development, a serious and committed writer riding the wave of a transition between one long-term project, “The House,” and another, Leaf Storm, as well as writing several stories which would later appear in anthologies and writing his daily column. Colonel Aureliano Buendía is of course the best-known character ever created by García Márquez, and here he is. Nevertheless he is soon to be sidelined, his name a mere legendary mention in one book after another until his moment eventually comes in the mid-1960s; not quite yet, though. Clearly García Márquez has not at this point renounced “The House,” despite what he would later assert in his memoir. He was still working on details which, elaborated and modified, would eventually form part of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

  So perhaps the most interesting detail in the letter is the explanation of the Colonel’s problems with the townsfolk and why he has closed down his house: namely, that for some unstated reason they would not let him bury his slave Gregorio and so he buried the slave himself beneath the almond tree in the patio.47 Here, unmistakably, is one of the first seeds not only of Leaf Storm, a novel in which a colonel finds himself under siege because he has a duty to arrange the burial of a man hated by the town in which he lives, but also of One Hundred Years of Solitude, in which one of the central characters is tied to a tree in the patio and another dies beneath it.

  The careful reader can also divine another influence at this time. García Márquez had included stories by the brilliant Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges in several editions of Crónica. Precisely in August 1950, the month in which the reactionary President Laureano Gómez was invested, García Márquez’s reading of the great exponent of “fantastic literature” seems to have borne fruit. Borges was remarkable for taking his influences from anywhere and everywhere and he was already pursuing the line in essays that the concept of “influences” was misleading because “all writers create their own precursors.” Not only was this attitude highly liberating for a Latin American writer but Borges’s lack of respect for the sources he did use was also extremely refreshing. He has sometimes been called the “Latin American Kafka” but nowhere in Kafka do we find his good-humoured irony. It is doubly appropriate, then, that at the time that García Márquez takes up many of Borges’s ideas (though without acknowledging this new influence), he should choose to write a satirical story about a suicide which he entitles “Caricature of Kafka.”48 It can safely be said that at this point García Márquez dispatches Kafka (and his “influence” upon him) to the past and henceforth views Kafka’s themes through the more whimsical lens of Borges. One might say that part of the trouble with “The House” was that it carried an excessive dose of Kafka; One Hundred Years of Solitude, when it came along, would be a distinctly Borgesian book.

  Leaf Storm, the emerging novel, would be about different conceptions of honour, duty and shame. A colonel, one of the accepted aristocrats of the town of Macondo, has vowed to take responsibility for the burial of his friend the Belgian “doctor” (a character based, of course, on “Don Emilio” in the Aracataca of García Márquez’s childhood); he intends to carry out his pledge, against the wishes of his wife and daughter, even though the Doctor betrayed his hospitality by sleeping with his servant and even though the townsfolk would like to see the Doctor “rot” because many years earlier he had refused to attend to the town’s wounded following a political conflict. Now he has committed an even worse crime against the laws of God as Catholics interpret them—his suicide—and all the Colonel can hope to do is have the man buried in unconsecrated ground.

  Despite this moralistic plot-line, a variation on the theme of Sophocles’s Antigone, Leaf Storm is also, in a purely factual sense, the most autobiographical of all García Márquez’s novels. The central characters are a holy trinity forming a three-way family romance based on Gabito, Luisa and Nicolás; but if the child, the mother and the grandfather were to be based upon these real people, such a choice required the suppression of other real people, notably Tranquilina (the grandmother in the novel has died and is replaced by a second wife), Gabito’s brothers and sisters (the child is an only son), and, above all, Gabito’s real father, Gabriel Eligio García. In his case the suppression is merely a displacement. There is indeed a character closely based on Gabriel Eligio and he is the child’s real father in the novel; but his name is Martín—Gabriel Eligio’s second surname, which would have been his first had he been legitimate, was Martínez—and his motives for the marriage are unscrupulous and self-serving. Moreover he abandons his wife after a brief time (her feelings about him were always apparently lukewarm), leaves Macondo, and the child never thinks about him in the entire novel. Obviously this allowed García Márquez to fantasize while he wrote that his mother never really loved Gabriel Eligio, and that it was Gabriel Eligio, the father, who became separated from her, not himself, Gabito, the son.49

  The novel has a dual, Faulknerian timescale. The three characters spend half an hour, between 2.30 and 3 p.m. on 12 September 1928, sitting in the room where the Doctor has died while they wait for him to be placed in his coffin and carried out; they are in a state of high tension because they fear that the townsfolk, who hate the Doctor, may prevent the funeral from taking place. But during that half-hour they also think back over the entire life of their family—the Colonel’s family, originally from the Guajira—in flashbacks viewed fragmentarily through the consciousness of each of them. It is a more complex version, though also a more static and mechanical one, of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying: the novel as a detective story, a labyrinth or a puzzle which the reader has to solve. Here is a classic example of a young writer dazzled by geniuses such as Faulkner, Woolf and, probably, Borges, and wanting to show it as much as conceal it.

  What we have, then, is, simultaneously, a return and a distancing—clearly an extraordinarily powerful and defining experience with a fusion of the emotional and the intellectual, the past and the present. If the view of Colombian reality is not as yet a cruelly satirical one, that is because García Márquez does not wish to include his grandfather in the condemnation or to make his own past too bitter (or too deluded!) in retrospect; at this point, the Colonel is a contradictory but still mainly admirable figure, treated with only the lightest irony. Still, in making his return to his birthplace, García Márquez has realized that Macondo has already been devastated by a force which the inhabitants see as fate but which he, now, sees as history.

  Many years later, in 1977, García Márquez would remark, “I have a great affection for Leaf Storm. And a great compassion for the guy who wrote it. I can see him clear as day: he’s a boy of twenty-two, twenty-three, who thinks he’s never going to write another thing in his life, this is his only chance, so he tries to put everything in, everything he remembers and everything he’s learned about technique and literary craft in all the authors that he’s read.”50 Work on Leaf Storm would continue, on and off, for several more years but the book was well and truly launched. And although this young man would never be complacent, with luck and much more hard work his literary future would undoubtedly be assured. He was not, however, a man about whom one could write the usual cliché—that he would never look back.

  OF COURSE García Márquez still had a living to earn and he continued to produce his “Giraffes” for El Heraldo on almost a daily basis and to act as the dynamo for Crónica. Almost everything he wrote at the time, however trivial and however rushed, was touched in some degree by the grace of discovery and creation. Biographically, however, the most interesting article during this period is one which appeared on 16 December 1950, called “La Amiga.” “Amiga” in Spanish can me
an any female friend or it can mean “girlfriend.” It was, in brief, a public reaction to the excitement of having met up with Mercedes Barcha again, in an article whose cool tone can scarcely contain the pleasure of the event. This “friend” is described as Mercedes was then and is today, “oriental in looks,” with “slanting eyes,” “high cheekbones,” “dark skin” and a “cordially mocking” manner. Mercedes was in town because her family had fled their home some months before in the face of the Violencia, which had come to Sucre with a vengeance.

  The courtship between Gabriel García Márquez and Mercedes Barcha is an enigma from start to finish.51 Both of them have always joked about his insistence that he decided he would marry her when she was nine, her insistence that she was almost unaware of him until shortly before he left for Europe in 1955. The December 1950 article, which cannot of course be taken literally, nonetheless says that it is three years since its protagonists last met up. In fact 1947 was the year when García Márquez graduated from Zipaquirá, went home for the summer and then left for university in Bogotá; after that he went home as little as possible and Mercedes was in any case away from Sucre studying at a convent school in Medellín and only returned home for the end-of-year holidays. There are persistent stories that Gabito used to hang around Mompox before 1947, when she was studying there, and Ramiro de la Espriella recalls that he used to talk about her in Cartagena in 1949; but there seems to have been very little contact or communication between them in the six years that passed between their first acquaintance and their meeting at the end of what must already be counted the most decisive year in García Márquez’s life.

  Everything suggests that he had been anticipating her return from school to Barranquilla for Christmas for some time before they met. For one thing he finally left the “Skyscraper” and moved into a respectable boarding house run by the Avila sisters, whom he knew through connections with Sucre and who lived in the upper part of town just a few blocks from the Hotel Prado, near where his friend the poet Meira Delmar lived.52 It also happened to be very close to the new pharmacy which Demetrio Barcha had established on the corner of 65th Street and 20 July Avenue. García Márquez had also changed his image, with a shorter haircut, a more neatly clipped moustache, a suit and tie, and some decent shoes to replace his tropical sandals. The reaction from his friends was merciless, some of them predicting that he would be unable to write a word as soon as he left the “Skyscraper.” The move evidently coincided both with the realization that his new novel—a novel about him and his own life—was now a secure reality, and with the resolve to bump into Mercedes. He was, after all, in many ways a new man, with much more to offer a woman than in the past.

  His timidity remained a problem however and the family still joke about it today. Ligia García Márquez recalls, “When Mercedes moved to Barranquilla Gabito spent hours talking to Demetrio Barcha in the pharmacy, which was right next door to their house. So people said to Mercedes again, ‘Gabito’s still got a crush on you,’ and she’d reply, ‘No, he’s got a crush on my dad, it’s him he talks to all the time. He doesn’t even say good evening to me.’”53 García Márquez himself has admitted that he spent ten years as a “street-corner man,” hanging around waiting for a glimpse of the haughty and ironic Mercedes, suffering agonies of frustration and even the occasional humiliation from a girl who seems to have found it difficult, for a long time, to take him seriously and showed very little interest in him.54 Barranquilla Group members later recalled driving round and round in Cepeda’s jeep and García Márquez asking Cepeda to crawl slowly past the pharmacy, where Mercedes sometimes helped out during the vacations and after she left school, just to get a glimpse of her—oblivious to the jeers of his macho friends who had quite another attitude to women. Mercedes herself, who has only ever given two newspaper interviews (one of them to her sister-in-law, with the teasing title, “Gabito Waited for Me to Grow Up”), told me in 1991, “I only ever went out with Gabo in a group. But I did have a Palestinian aunt who always used to cover for us and was always trying to get us together; she was always starting sentences with the phrase, ‘When you marry Gabito. …’”

  That Christmas of 1950, somehow or other, Gabito finally persuaded Mercedes to give him a chance and took her dancing at the Prado several times. She was teasingly non-committal, without overtly rejecting the young man’s advances, and he chose to believe that they had some kind of tacit agreement and that he was in with a chance. This was an entirely new situation.

  A person who knows at least something about these early dates is Aida García Márquez, who was banished to Barranquilla by her parents, to keep her away from her own beloved suitor Rafael Pérez. She told me: “Mercedes was not my best friend but I was hers. We used to go out dancing together at the Prado, and I would dance with her father so Gabito could be with Mercedes.”55

  Thus García Márquez began 1951 in the most optimistic mood imaginable, little knowing that his carefully arranged and hard-earned new life was about to be cruelly demolished. On 23 January he heard from Mercedes again. A brief note informed him that his friend Cayetano Gentile had been murdered in Sucre. The two families were very close—Cayetano’s mother Julieta was Nanchi’s godmother—and García Márquez would later discover that several of his own brothers and sisters had been witnesses to what had happened; the only absentees from Sucre at the time were Aida, Gabriel Eligio, who was in Cartagena at a Conservative Party conference, and Gabito himself.

  Cayetano Gentile had been killed by the brothers of Margarita Chica, the girl who had roomed with Mercedes in Mompox. During her wedding night Margarita had revealed to her husband that she was not a virgin and he had returned her to her family as damaged goods. One of the rumours in Mompox is that she had been raped by a policeman during the Violencia and was unable to tell the truth for fear of reprisals. So she said that her virginity had been taken by Cayetano Gentile, who was, indeed, a former boyfriend.56 The truth will never be known. Her brothers set out immediately to restore the family’s honour by killing the alleged offender in the main square of Sucre, in front of the whole town. This is the story that García Márquez would convert into his novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold thirty years later, in 1981. It was a savage murder and an act that would haunt García Márquez and his whole family for decades.

  A week later, before he had had time to learn much about this horrific event, he received a message that, instead of returning to Sucre after his conference, Gabriel Eligio had arrived in Barranquilla. Gabito took the bus down to the centre and met his panic-stricken father at the Café Roma: he too had heard the news. He and Luisa Santiaga had already feared for the future of the family because of the growing political violence and this barbaric killing was the last straw. (Truth to tell, Gabriel Eligio had recently been having a hard time financially in Sucre since the moment when a real doctor moved into his part of town.) He had been in Cartagena with Gustavo, henceforth his right-hand man, and had already made inquiries among his Conservative friends and relatives in the city and was arranging to move the family there. He wanted Gabito to help them get installed and then move back to Cartagena himself to help out with the finances in a situation that was bound to be difficult, if not desperate. A further advantage, Gabriel Eligio said, was that Gabito could return to his law studies.57

  Gabriel Eligio’s fears were at first sight surprising. Sucre was essentially Conservative territory and he himself had got involved in local politics and should have been able to count on protection; it was the Liberals, like Demetrio Barcha, whom one would expect to flee—as indeed he had—whereas the García Márquez family seemed to be sitting pretty. Besides, the murder of Cayetano was not politically motivated. But at that time slanderous posters (pasquines) began to appear which were a coded symptom of the disintegration of society and were devoted not only to political matters, notably corruption, but, above all, to sexual accusations designed to ruin people’s reputations. Vendettas proliferated. And of course Gabriel Eligio had sexual
scandals of his own to worry about.

  With a heavy heart Gabito reluctantly agreed to his father’s demands; and Gabriel Eligio went back to Sucre to organize the exodus. Luisa was heartbroken. Ligia recalls, “Just as my mother wept when she arrived in Sucre, so she wept when she left.”58 The family had lived in Sucre for more than eleven years. Jaime, Hernando, Alfredo and Eligio Gabriel had all been born there; Tranquilina had died there. And Gabriel Eligio had, for once, for a time, achieved a certain prestige and authority in the small waterlocked town. He had even built his first house there. But the whole García Márquez family, like the Barchas shortly before them, like Gabito and Luis Enrique in 1948, had now become refugees from the Violencia.

  For Gabito himself this was a disaster; we can only imagine the anguish with which he allowed himself to be dragged back into the bosom of a family with whom he had almost never lived for any significant period of time. He negotiated with the management of El Heraldo to continue to send his “Giraffes” from Cartagena. They generously agreed to advance him 600 pesos for six months of the column and seven—often politically compromising—editorials a week, making life a nightmare for him but easy for Fuenmayor.

  The first year was absolutely chaotic. None of the children was ever again sent away to study and the younger ones didn’t even start their education. After all his previous failures Gabriel Eligio must have known he would not make it in Cartagena as a pharmacist, though he briefly tried again. He also made a half-hearted effort to carry on his work as a doctor but Cartagena was not a promising arena for a quack, and before a year had passed he was off on his travels once more, roaming the Sucre region as a peripatetic doctor just as he had done fourteen years before when they moved to Barranquilla. Gabriel Eligio would never again be fully able to support his wife and children. It would be ten years before the family would even begin to be able to say that it was back on its feet—and even then only because most of the children had left home and Margot was taking most of the strain.