It seems likely that Gabito went back to Cartagena hoping not to have to stay too long, but feeling the need to show willing in getting the family installed in this expensive and not necessarily welcoming new environment. He crawled back to El Universal with his tail between his legs and was surprised and gratified to be received with open arms by Zabala, López Escauriaza and all his old colleagues—even more so when they offered him a monthly salary larger than he had been receiving in Barranquilla.59
What he did not do was return to his studies. Only when he went, reluctantly, to enrol did he realize that he had failed not two but three subjects at the end of 1949, which meant that instead of taking the fourth year he would have to repeat the whole of the third year.60 He quickly dropped the idea but his father got wind of the decision and lost his temper with his evasive eldest son. Gustavo remembers Gabriel Eligio confronting Gabito about the matter, appropriately enough on the Promenade of the Martyrs just outside the old city. When he heard his son admit that he had decided to give up the law and concentrate on his writing, Gabriel Eligio uttered a phrase that has become legendary in the family: “You’ll end up eating paper!” he bellowed.61
The arrival of that large, unruly, impoverished family into his urban world must have been desperately embarrassing, not to say humiliating, for a young man used to hiding his own poverty and his own complexes beneath a clown’s uniform and a clown’s performance. On his first night in the new house García Márquez remembers bumping into a sack containing his grandmother’s bones which Luisa Santiaga had brought to re-bury in their new city of residence.62 Ramiro de la Espriella’s wry amusement at the family predicament was summed up in the name he coined to refer to Gabriel Eligio in those days: “the stud horse.”63 Nor were Gabriel Eligio’s feelings about his son concealed from public gaze. On one occasion when Carlos Alemán met Gabriel Eligio and asked after Gabito, the father complained loudly that his son was never around when he was wanted: “Tell that peripatetic spermatozoa to come and see his mother,” he roared.64 And when de la Espriella, trying to defend Gabito against some other criticism, said that he was now considered “one of the best story writers in the country,” his father exploded, “He’s a story-teller, all right, he’s been a liar since he was a small boy!”65
At the beginning of July, his debt having been paid, García Márquez ceased sending “Giraffes” to El Heraldo and no more were published until February 1952. Meanwhile, he went on with his own writing, in the midst of the family chaos, as best he could. An incident recalled by Gustavo gives the measure of his ambition: “Gabito doesn’t remember but he … once said to me, ‘Listen, help me with this,’ and he fetched the original manuscript of Leaf Storm to go through it. We were halfway through reading it when he stood up and said: ‘This is OK but I’m going to write something that will be read more than the Quixote.’”66 In March García Márquez had had another of his stories published in Bogotá, “Nabo: The Black Man Who Made the Angels Wait.”67 This is the first story called something that sounds like a “García Márquez” title and has something of the manner of his later works.68
Around then an exiled Peruvian politician and adventurer called Julio César Villegas, the representative in Bogotá of Buenos Aires’s influential Losada publishing house, which at that time could make the continental reputation of any Latin American writer, was travelling around the country, including the Costa, looking for promising material, and told García Márquez that if he completed his work in progress and submitted it to Losada it would be considered for publication in Buenos Aires as a representative of contemporary Colombian fiction. In a state of great excitement, García Márquez set about his manuscript with renewed vigour and enthusiasm. By mid-September the first version of Leaf Storm was more or less ready.
It was now that a young man arrived in Cartagena who was to become one of García Márquez’s lifelong friends: the poet, traveller and business executive Alvaro Mutis—perhaps the only Colombian writer of the past half century in a position to be something like García Márquez’s equal as an interlocutor.69 García Márquez would later describe him as having “a heraldic nose and a Turk’s eyebrows, an enormous body and tiny shoes like Buffalo Bill.”70 Partly brought up in Europe where his father died when he was nine, he was a relative of the famous Spanish-Colombian colonial botanist José Celestino Mutis. His first published poem “No. 204” (“El 204”) had appeared in El Espectador shortly before García Márquez’s first short story, and his second, “The Curses of Maqroll the Lookout” (“Las imprecaciones de Maqroll el Gaviero”) appeared a couple of weeks later. Just as García Márquez had already invented his Aureliano Buendía, so Mutis had already invented Maqroll, a character similarly destined for worldwide celebrity. By then Mutis had worked for a time at the Colombian Insurance Company, had spent four years at the Bavaria Brewing Company as Head of Publicity, and then almost two years as a radio presenter; now he was Head of Publicity for LANSA, the same airline in which Luis Enrique had previously been employed—hence Mutis’s fabled ability to fix flights at short notice. Mutis had just met García Márquez’s old student friend Gonzalo Mallarino in Bogotá and Mutis, in a characteristic gesture, swept his new friend off to encounter the sea the very day he discovered that Mallarino had never seen it.71
At the weekend they looked for Gabito in El Universal, then went off to Bocagrande to have a drink on the terrace of their small hotel. As they sat and drank, a tropical storm gathered force around them, rolling in from the grey-white Caribbean. At its height, as coconuts exploded all around them, in staggered García Márquez from the chaos, painfully thin, pale, wild-eyed as always, his pencil moustache now widening to fountain pen size, and the inevitable trademark tropical shirt.72 “What gives?” (“Qué es la vaina?”) he exclaimed, as he would whenever he met Alvaro Mutis over the next fifty years.73 So the three friends spent several hours discussing la vaina: life, love and literature, among other things. Two characters more different than Mutis and García Márquez could hardly be imagined and yet their friendship has lasted half a century. Their only true enthusiasm in common is Joseph Conrad and they disagreed about William Faulkner from the moment they met. Mutis told me in 1992, “He tried to act the costeño but after five minutes I realized he was an intensely serious type of guy. He was an old man in a young man’s body.” The visit was particularly timely because Mutis, whose networking was always the astonishment of his friends, knew the Losada agent Julio César Villegas and urged García Márquez to get on with the job and send his manuscript off as soon as possible. García Márquez set to producing a fair copy of his chaotic typescript and a few weeks later Mutis returned to Cartagena, carried the finished version back with him to Bogotá and sent it airmail to Buenos Aires. This was a prophetic act; many years later the same Alvaro Mutis would personally carry a duplicate copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude to Buenos Aires for consideration by another great Argentine publishing house, Sudamericana.
In early December 1951 García Márquez turned up in the El Heraldo office in Barranquilla and in response to Alfonso Fuenmayor’s enquiry as to the cause of his reappearance, said, “Maestro, I’ve had it up to here.”74 Now that the novel was completed he could no longer bear the strains of living with the family in Cartagena and relieving an ungrateful Gabriel Eligio of his responsibilities. Of course, the timing of his return probably had something to do with the fact that the end-of-year vacations had begun and Mercedes Barcha was back in Barranquilla after completing her fifth grade of high school in the tyrannical convent academy run by the Salesian nuns in Medellín, where the girls had to bathe in specially designed shifts (“so that none of us,” she told me, “would ever see any part of another girl’s body”). García Márquez went back to stay with the Avila sisters, despite the extra expense, and not to the “Skyscraper.”
In early February he received a letter from Losada via the El Heraldo office. It was perhaps the greatest disappointment of his life. García Márquez had understood that Leaf
Storm’s publication was a near sure thing and was shattered to learn that the editorial committee in Buenos Aires had rejected the book and, in a manner of speaking, had rejected him. Because the committee in Buenos Aires had sent a devastating letter from its chairman, Guillermo de Torre, one of Spain’s leading literary critics in exile and, as it happened, brother-in-law to Jorge Luis Borges, whom García Márquez so much admired. The letter granted the novice writer some poetic talent but declared that he had no future as a novelist and suggested none too delicately that he look for some other profession. All García Márquez’s friends, almost equally disconcerted, rallied round and helped him pull himself together—which was as well because he was in danger of falling sick with the shock and dismay. Alvaro Cepeda snorted, “Everyone knows Spaniards are stupid,” and all of them backed their own judgement against De Torre’s.75
For the rest of 1952 he continued to earn his living with El Heraldo and his “Giraffes” appeared throughout the year. They were never again quite so refreshingly novel and eager as in the first magical year.76 Before long, though, Séptimus would be dead and García Márquez would write no more “Giraffes”—though neither he nor any member of the group has ever given an adequate explanation of how or why the relationship with El Heraldo came to an end. The truth is that, despite his bravado, the rejection of Leaf Storm had been a devastating, sickening blow. His confidence had been savagely dented and there seemed little point in continuing with the “Giraffes”; what had they done for him, where had all his hard work taken him? It was no doubt because he saw himself as a failure, publicly at least, that he had felt morally constrained to make one more gesture at studying to be a lawyer and saving the family. And once he saw, yet again, that it was not going to work, he was utterly lost.
IRONICALLY, IT WAS his erstwhile nemesis, the Losada agent Julio César Villegas, who offered him a desperate way out and he took it. Villegas had started his own bookselling business and turned up one day when García Márquez was in Barranquilla, took him to the Hotel Prado, plied him with whisky and sent him away with a promise of employment and a bookseller’s briefcase. Gabriel García Márquez, self-styled contender to write “the next Quixote,” was now a travelling salesman hawking encyclopedias and medical and scientific manuals around the small towns and villages of north-eastern Colombia. He must have reflected that he had turned into his father.
Fortunately García Márquez has always had a sense of humour and a Cervantine sense of irony. He could probably take it. Just about. The consolation, needless to say, was that he could now learn more about his family history by retracing the steps of his grandparents all those years before, as he travelled the dusty roads of the Valley of Upar, between the Sierra Nevada and the River Cesar. This was not the world of Guillermo de Torre; but it was his world. Appropriately enough, as he set off on his first trip he met up with his brother Luis Enrique in Santa Marta. Luis Enrique, who had married the previous October, was already finding marriage a straitjacket that he would do almost anything to loosen. He had been involved in a series of real and fictitious jobs, first in Ciénaga and then Santa Marta; now he jumped at the chance of a jaunt with his brother. The two went to Ciénaga together and Gabito began his new job there, in one of the towns where his grandparents had briefly lived before moving to Aracataca. Luis Enrique then accompanied him on his first arc through Guacamayal, Sevilla, Aracataca, Fundación and Copey to Valledupar, La Paz and Manaure, targeting particularly doctors, lawyers, judges, notaries and mayors.
After Luis Enrique’s departure back to Ciénaga, Gabito looked up Rafael Escalona, who accompanied him for a week through the towns of the Guajira—Urumita, Villanueva, El Molino, San Juan del Cesar, and possibly Fonseca. They picked up Zapata Olivella on the way and between them they organized a travelling parranda, a kind of vallenato jam session and contest involving several participants and huge quantities of liquor, a session which in this case included friends and relatives such as Luis Carmelo Correa from Aracataca and Poncho Cotes, a cousin of García Márquez and close friend of Rafael Escalona.77 Forty-five years later Zapata told me, “We would go on celebratory outings. One night a car would arrive and you’d wake up the next morning with a hangover in the Guajira or the Sierra Nevada, that’s what life was like then; we’d go out to someone’s farm and eat a sancocho, or drive over the Sierra de Perijá to Manaure; but always we’d end up drinking with the best accordionists of the era, Emiliano Zuleta, Carlos Noriega, Lorenzo Morales.”78 Thus Escalona took his citified friend to meet the cowboy troubadours and the legendary characters of the region.
The historic centre of vallenato activity is now conventionally considered to be Valledupar itself, the capital city of El Cesar, situated in the Valley of Upar (vallenato means “born in the valley”). Once heard, traditional vallenatos are instantly recognizable: they have a driving, swinging beat brought about by the unusual instrumental combination of the European accordion, the African drum and the Indian guacharaca (scraper), led by the strong, assertive and defiantly masculine voice of the singer, usually the accordionist himself.79 A song by Alonso Fernández Oñate sums up the vallenato’s prevailing ideology very succinctly:
I’m true vallenato born
Pure of heart and stock
Indian blood in my veins
Some black and Spanish on top
I have my vallenato pleasures
Women, music, my accordion
And all these things I love
Come out in the voice of my song.80
Not many Latin American writers have been in such close contact with what could be called a genuine popular culture as García Márquez was to be over the next fifty years. He would go so far as to say that his encounter with the vallenato genre and the musicians who created it really gave him the idea for the narrative form of One Hundred Years of Solitude.81 The comparison is interesting, given that more events are narrated on every single page of that novel than in any other narrative one can think of. But García Márquez takes it further, establishing a parallel between the concreteness of the vallenato and the direct relation between his own novels and his own life: “There’s not a line in any of my books which I can’t connect to a real experience. There is always a reference to a concrete reality.” This is why he has always asserted that far from being a “magical realist,” he is just a “poor notary” who copies down what is placed on his desk.82 Perhaps the only surprising aspect of all this is that García Márquez, usually admired for his sympathy with women, should have identified quite so fully with a movement that so assertively exalts maleness and masculine values.
It was with Escalona that García Márquez had another of the great mythic encounters of his life. They were drinking iced beer and rum in a cantina in La Paz when a young man strode in, dressed like a cowboy with a wide hat, leather chaps, and a gun at his waist. Escalona, who knew him well, said: “Let me introduce you to Gabriel García Márquez.” The man asked, as he shook his hand, “Would you have anything to do with Colonel Nicolás Márquez?” “I’m his grandson.” “Then your grandfather killed my grandfather.”83 The young man’s name was Lisandro Pacheco—though in the memoir García Márquez would say he was called José Prudencio Aguilar, like the character based on him in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Escalona, who always carried a pistol himself, moved quickly to say that García Márquez knew nothing about the matter and suggested that he and Lisandro should try some sharp-shooting, the purpose being to empty the gun. The three men spent three days and nights drinking and travelling in Pacheco’s truck—used mainly for smuggling—around the region. Pacheco introduced García Márquez to several of the Colonel’s illegitimate children from the time of the war.
When his friends and travelling companions were otherwise engaged, the reluctant encyclopedia salesman would stay in small run-down hotels sizzling in the heat. One of the better ones was the Hotel Welcome in Valledupar. It was during this stay that he read Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, which appeared in the Spa
nish edition of Life magazine at the end of March, sent by his friends in Barranquilla. It was “like a stick of dynamite.”84 García Márquez’s deprecating attitude to Hemingway the novelist was transformed.
As well as The Old Man and the Sea he vividly recalls having re-read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway in some other hotel-cum-brothel during this journey, amidst clouds of mosquitoes and asphyxiating heat—probably not the kind of place Virginia Woolf herself would have much enjoyed. Although he had taken his nom de plume from her novel, he had not previously been so struck by it, and especially by a passage about the King of England passing by in a limousine which would later have a major influence on The Autumn of the Patriarch.85
When he got back to Barranquilla after this brief excursion García Márquez had actually come to the end of a very long journey through his own popular regional culture and, indeed, through his own past and his own prehistory.86 He was now ready to inhabit “Macondo”—at the very moment, ironically enough, when Hemingway’s example would shortly lure him away from the worlds of memory and myth. Nowadays the great writer “García Márquez” is associated intimately with that Latin American village which is also a state of mind: “Macondo.” But “Macondo,” as we know, is only half the García Márquez story, though it is the half which would give him his international identity and prestige. The real region around the literary town “Macondo” is the northern part of the old Department of Magdalena, from Santa Marta to the Guajira by way of Aracataca and Valledupar. It is the territory of his mother and his maternal grandparents, to which his father came as an unwanted interloper, one of the so-called “leaf-trash.” The other half of the story is that father’s own territory: the city of Cartagena and the towns of Sincé and Sucre, in the departments of Bolívar and Sucre, the territory of a man with vainglorious dreams of legitimacies past and future, and therefore a territory to be rejected both because of the region’s colonial, repressive splendour and the humiliations still undergone by its less illustrious sons; a territory which would become condensed into the anonymous pueblo, unworthy of a literary name but equally representative of Latin America—the “real,” historical Latin America, one is tempted to say.87
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