Gabriel García Márquez

by Gerald Martin

  Despite his best efforts the novel stubbornly refused to take off and he began to lose his grip on it. Sunk in Colombia at its most depressing, indeed flailing about somewhat aimlessly in that disenchanted world he was re-creating, García Márquez was seeing less and less of Paris as winter turned to spring; but occasionally he would go out into the world. France too, in the dog-days of the Fourth Republic, was in a depressed condition. Pierre Mendès-France, the utopian President of the Council of State who had famously tried to get the French to drink milk instead of wine, had recently been forced from power; Edgar Faure had replaced him, but not for much longer. France had been defeated in Vietnam and was struggling in Algeria. Yet, though no one was aware of it at the time, Paris was in one of its most evocative moments, the last before European Community modernity began inexorably to change it in the 1960s from smoky blue to space age silver. García Márquez would mainly eat in cheap student restaurants such as the Capoulade and the Acropole; and whereas most other Latin Americans would feel the need to wander into the Sorbonne or the Louvre for the occasional piece of intellectual elevation, and to view other people like themselves in those gilded Parisian mirrors, he as usual would spend his days in the university of the streets.

  Then, out of the blue, or the grey, came a sudden change in his life. On an evening in March he met a young woman by the purest chance when he was out with a Portuguese journalist who was also covering the French spy trial for a Brazilian newspaper. She was a twenty-six-year-old actress from Spain known as Tachia. She was about to give a poetry recital. Almost forty years later, she would recall that Gabriel, as she would always call him, refused to go to the recital: “‘A poetry recital,’ he sneered, ‘what a bore!’ I assumed he hated poetry. He waited in the Café Le Mabillon down on the Boulevard Saint-Germain-des-Prés, near the church, and we joined him there after the recital.16 He was as thin as a finger, he looked just like an Algerian, curly hair and a moustache, and I’ve never liked men with moustaches. I don’t like crude macho men either; and I’d always had the Spanish racial and cultural prejudice that Latin American men were inferior.”17

  Tachia had been born María Concepción Quintana in January 1929 in Eibar, Guipúzcoa, in the Spanish Basque country. She was one of three daughters born to a Catholic family who supported the Franco regime after the civil war. Her father, a lover of poetry, had read to her constantly when she was a child, little knowing how this would determine her future. In 1952 she met the already famous Spanish poet Blas de Otero in Bilbao, where she was working as a nanny, one of the few opportunities for women to work independently in Franco’s Spain. Otero, thirteen years her senior, renamed her by loosely reorganizing the name Conchita: “Tachia.” He also seduced her. Soon after that she ran away to Madrid—although in those days you had to be twenty-five to leave home without parental permission—to study theatre and become an actress, and there she began a passionate but ill-starred affair with this man who was a great poet but profoundly unstable and an inveterate womanizer. The name Tachia appears in some of his best-known poems. Otero put her through hell with his manic unpredictability. To get away from him—though it would be many years before she got away from him entirely—she fled from Spain: “I went to Paris late in 1952 as a sort of au pair for six months; the city just dazzled me. Then on 1 August 1953 I went back there for good. I had none of the necessary skills, I attended theatre courses to try and find an entrée.”

  Tachia was adventurous, magnetic, curious, open to every experience. She was the kind of woman considered especially attractive in the post-war existentialist period and—though her own great love was the theatre—in the New Wave movies about to be made in late 1950s Paris: a slim, dark left-banker, usually dressed in black, with a close-cropped gamin haircut of the kind Jean Seberg would shortly make famous, and with energy to burn. Sentimentally, though, at just that moment she was at a loose end. As a foreigner her chances of making it in the French theatre had to be considered little more than zéro but she had no intention of returning to Spain. Nor of seeking long-term emotional attachments. She had been through an amour fou in her own country and nothing since had captured her emotions or her imagination in the same way. Now here she was telling her life story to this unprepossessing Colombian.

  “I’d say I disliked Gabriel on sight: he seemed despotic, arrogant, yet also timid: a really unattractive combination. I liked the James Mason types—Blas looked quite like him—the British gentleman types, not the pretty boy Latin lover types like Tyrone Power. Also I’d always preferred older men and Gabriel was more or less my own age. He immediately started boasting about his job, he seemed to consider himself a journalist, not a writer. The friend left the bar at ten and we stayed on, talking, and then started to walk around the streets of Paris. Gabriel said terrible things about the French … Though the French got their own back on him later because they proved too rational for his magical realism.”

  Tachia discovered that when you started to talk to this sarcastic Colombian, there was another side to him. Something in the voice, the confidential smile, the way he told a story. García Márquez and the forthright young Spanish woman began a relationship that very quickly became intimate. And perhaps archetypal. The most famous Latin American novel early in the following decade would be Argentinian Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch (Rayuela), published in 1963. It would be about a Latin American expatriate wandering about Paris in the 1950s, surrounded by a group of bohemian friends, artists and intellectuals, mainly focused on the Quartier Latin. The feckless protagonist, Oliveira, no longer young, would have no job, nor any interest in finding one; he would be finding himself and finding the world; and his inspiration, his melancholy muse, would be a beautiful young woman, a sort of hippy avant la lettre known as “La Maga,” “the Sorceress.” Cortázar never really lived this romance; but García Márquez did. Walking and talking, one thing led to another: “Gradually I came to like Gabriel, despite my initial reservations, and the relationship developed. We started to go steady after a few weeks, April some time, I suppose. At the beginning Gabriel had enough money to buy a girl a drink or a cup of chocolate or pay for the cinema. Then his newspaper was closed and he was left with nothing.”

  Yes. Three weeks after García Márquez met Tachia El Independiente was closed in Bogotá: this time, although he could not know it, for almost a year. It was a disastrous background to a new relationship. Instead of making up his back pay, the management eventually sent him a one-way ticket to Colombia. When the ticket arrived García Márquez gulped, took a deep breath, and cashed it in. Was this a desire to know Europe better; a desire to complete his new novel; or was he in love? He had already been working for three months on In Evil Hour and he intended to go on with it. So for many reasons he was nowhere near ready to leave Paris. In Bogotá he had found little time for his own writing and now he had the bit between his teeth again. It was his own decision. But it would be hard. And then there was Tachia.

  I myself first met Tachia Quintana in Paris in March 1993. We walked around the same city streets that she and García Márquez had walked in the mid-1950s. Six months later, in García Márquez’s house in Mexico City, I took a deep breath and asked him, “What about Tachia?” At that time her name was known to only a few people, and the outlines of their story to even fewer; I guess he must have been hoping it would pass me by. He breathed in equally deeply, like someone watching a coffin slowly open, and said, “Well, it happened.” I said, “Can we talk about it?” He said, “No.” It was on that occasion that he would first tell me, with the expression on his face of an undertaker determinedly closing a coffin lid back down, that “everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life and a secret life.” Naturally the public life was there for all to see, I just had to do the work; I would be given occasional access and insight into the private life and was evidently expected to work out the rest; as for the secret life, “No, never.” If it was anywhere, he intimated, it was in his books. I could start with them.
“And anyway, don’t worry. I will be whatever you say I am.” On the matter of Tachia Quintana, then, as she was perceived from the standpoint of García Márquez, both in 1956 and after, we will have to examine the books. Tachia herself, though, was happy enough to tell her side of the story.

  When I met Gabriel I was just about to move to a tiny room in the Rue d’Assas. I can’t remember where I was before, you’d never believe how many hotels and apartments I lived in in Paris. I even shared a room with Violeta Parra. The new place was near Montparnasse, between Les Invalides and Saint-Germain-des-Prés close to the brasseries of La Coupole, La Closerie des Lilas, Le Dôme and Le Select, and only yards from the Luxembourg Garden and the theatres, cinemas and jazz-bars of Montparnasse. We went to his room in the Hôtel de Flandre sometimes but mainly we slept in the Rue d’Assas. It was a former hôtel particulier which had been converted. I was in the old kitchen, it was minute, like a maid’s room, a chambre de bonne, with a little patio garden right outside. It was just a bed and orange boxes; imagine, twelve people used to sit on that bed. The owner was a strict Catholic but she mainly closed her eyes and basically let us get on with it. The best thing was the little garden out in the open air. How often he used to wait for me, sitting out there! Often with his head in his hands. He drove me crazy but I was very fond of him.

  Soon after he met Tachia, the Colombian found that the book he had begun and on which he had made significant though always painful progress was slowly slipping away from him. Many years later he would become one of the most technically assured “professional” writers in the world, a man who always knew exactly what he wanted to write and then invariably accomplished it. But at this time in his life each work seemed to break off into another one; composition was an agonizing experience; and conception never seemed to lead to the expected process of development. So it was now. One of the secondary characters began to grow, to become autonomous and, eventually, to demand his own separate literary environment. In this case it was an old colonel, at once diffident and obdurate, a refugee from Macondo and from the smell of overripe bananas, a man waiting, fifty years after the event, for the pension due him because of his service in the War of a Thousand Days. The original novel, now set aside, was a cool, cruel work requiring nerve and detachment, but its author was finding himself quite unexpectedly in a moment both of passion and great privation, living out his own version of La bohème.

  Just as nostalgia brought about by the journey with his mother was the instrument which had given birth to Leaf Storm, a not dissimilar emotion, poignancy (nostalgia about the impossibility of living in the present), was the lever which separated what would become No One Writes to the Colonel (El coronel no tiene quien le escriba: literally, “The Colonel has no one to write to him”) from what would eventually become In Evil Hour, the novel endlessly delayed and postponed. And once again a woman was the inspiration: in a desperate, haunting way the novel about the colonel would be a projection of the drama García Márquez was starting to live out, right there and then, with Tachia. They were involved in a surprising, exciting, passionate, totally unexpected affair; but quite soon they ran short of money. From the very beginning the relationship was conditioned by poverty and then, soon enough, threatened by tragedy. So the first novel, still a work in progress, was tied up, not for the last time, with an old striped necktie, and pushed to the back of the rickety wardrobe in the Hôtel de Flandre; and the intense, obsessive, desperate story of a starving colonel and his hapless, long-suffering wife took hold some time in May or early June of 1956.

  García Márquez’s debts at the hotel mounted alarmingly, yet, tellingly perhaps, he held on to the room even though he couldn’t pay for it. Or said he couldn’t. After a few weeks he and Tachia were finding it difficult even to eat. Of course he had been through this before, in Bogotá, in Cartagena, in Barranquilla. It was almost as if he had to go hungry in order to justify clinging to his vocation. His family could not complain that he was not pursuing his law degree, because he was starving; Tachia should not complain that he was not working to support her, because there were no lengths of suffering to which he himself was not prepared to go while he was writing his book. Granted, his French was still rudimentary and jobs were not easy to come by; but the truth is that he was not really looking. When the air fare was gone, he collected empty bottles and old newspapers and received centimes in return at local stores. At times, he says, he “borrowed” a bone from a butcher so that Tachia could use it to make a stew.18 One day he had to beg a fare in the metro—missing the last five centimes again—and was humiliated by the reaction of the Frenchman who gave him the money. He sent messages to his friends in Colombia appealing for financial help, then found himself waiting hopefully for good news, week after week, like his grandfather waiting for his pension all those years before, and like the colonel in his new novel. Perhaps the irony sustained him.

  In a way the relationship with Tachia never really had a chance. He had lost his job just three weeks after they met. And a couple of months later another disaster struck: “I realized I was pregnant one evening when we were walking along the Champs Elysées. I was feeling strange and I just knew it. After I got pregnant I was still out looking after children and cleaning floors, vomiting as I did so, and when I got back he’d have done nothing and then I’d have to start cooking. He said I was very bossy, he called me ‘the General.’ Meanwhile he was writing his articles and The Colonel—it was about us of course: our situation, our relationship. I read the novel as it was written, loved it. But we fought all the time for nine months, all the time. It was hard, exhausting, we were destroying one another. Were we just sparring? No, really fighting.”

  “But,” remembers Tachia, “he was also very affectionate; he was tenderness itself. We told each other everything. Men are very innocent and so I taught him things, things about women, I gave him a lot of material for his novels. I have the impression that Gabriel had had very few women; certainly at that time he had never lived with one. Although we fought a lot we also had good times. We used to talk about the baby and what he would be like, and come up with names for him. And Gabriel told me endless stories, fascinating ones about his childhood, his family, Barranquilla, Cepeda, and so on. It was wonderful, I loved that. Gabriel also used to sing a lot, especially vallenatos by Escalona—like the ‘House in the Sky’ [‘La casa en el aire’]. He sang cumbias too, like ‘My Pretty Girl’ [‘Mi chiquita linda’]; he had a beautiful voice. And of course, although we fought all day every day we never had any problem understanding one another at night.

  “Gabriel would often sing at the endless parties at Hernán Vieco’s place at Rue Guénégaud. Vieco was very seductive, blue eyes, large eyebrows, very attractive. He was the only one with a house, money and a car—the MG sports car he so adored. Gabriel used to sing there and play the guitar; he danced divinely too. We also had French friends who lived in the Rue Chérubini, over the river. It was there we got to know all Brassens’s songs. It was Gabriel who took me to the Communist Party’s Fête de l’Humanité for the first time, him and Luis Villar Borda, I think. In that way I was still a very traditional woman: I just sat there without saying anything while the men talked about politics. I had no political knowledge or ideas at all in those days, though my instincts were progressive. Whereas Gabriel seemed to me an admirably focused and principled person, at least politically. I formed the impression that as far as political morality was concerned, he was a man of integrity, serious, honourable. I thought of him as something hardly any different from a communist. I remember once saying, as if I knew what I was talking about, ‘I suppose there are good and bad communists.’ Gabriel gave me a look and replied, rather severely, ‘No, ma’am, there are communists and non-communists.’

  “I must admit that over the pregnancy he was totally fair. It’s one thing that could be said for him. We had an open discussion and he asked me what I wanted. I think he would have been happy enough to have the baby. Il s’assouvit, as th
ey say here: he put up with whatever I wanted. I was the one who didn’t want it. He knew how serious I was about children and so he knew I would expect him to marry me. He was both good about it and weak. He simply let me do whatever I decided. I don’t think he was as horrified as I was. Probably from his Latin American standpoint it wasn’t so unusual or shocking; he may even have been proud, for all I know.

  “It was absolutely my decision, not his. Of course by then, despite or perhaps because of my family background, I had broken with God. By the time we’d been through all this I was four and a half months pregnant; and desperate. It was a terrible, terrible time. Then I had the haemorrhage. He was absolutely horrified, he nearly fainted—Gabriel, when he sees blood, well, you know … I spent eight days in the Maternité Port Royal, very close to where I lived. Gabriel was always the first of the fathers to arrive in the hospital at visiting time in the evening.

  “After the miscarriage we both knew it was over. I kept threatening to leave. And finally I did, I just left, first to Vieco’s house, to convalesce, and then to Madrid. I was very upset, worn out. I was always on top in the relationship but the pregnancy undermined me. I left Paris from Gare d’Austerlitz in December 1956. Gabriel organized a whole group of friends to take me to the station. I had recovered from the operation but I was very fragile inside. We were late, of course, the luggage had to be thrown on to the train, I had to rush aboard and there wasn’t even time to say goodbye to everyone. I had eight suitcases. Gabriel always says it was sixteen. I was distraught as the train pulled out, weeping into my hands against the window. Then as the train started to move I stared out at Gabriel, and Gabriel with that soulful look on his face, started walking to keep up and then fell away. Really he let me down in 1956. He just couldn’t cope. Of course I could never have married him. I never had the slightest regret about it. He was too unreliable. And I couldn’t bring children into the world with such a father. Because nothing is more important, is it? Yet in a way I was completely wrong because he turned out to be an excellent father.”