Tachia was a woman who was brave, lucky, determined, adventurous, foolish or intelligent enough to lead a completely independent life long before this became a woman’s “right.” Although her story is that of subordinating her needs to García Márquez, it is difficult to imagine it was not her choice. With one important relationship behind her—one in which she had also found herself “sacrificed” to a literary vocation—it is hard to think she would have put up with anything ultimately unacceptable to her. Probably their relationship was a strong attachment that began to sour and to demand too much once she was pregnant—she had either to marry or put an end to it. And this was not her first serious relationship—though it was the first time either of the couple had ever lived with anyone.
García Márquez was probably unhappy about the abortion attempts; children are not considered a problem on the Costa and he was from a family where the women—Tranquilina, his grandmother; Luisa, his own mother—took in numerous children directly related to them; and so he was probably very troubled by the child’s death. It would have been hard on Mercedes if he had had a baby by another woman but Latin Americans are more accustomed to such things and less judgemental than Europeans. As for him returning to marry Mercedes soon after, he may have thought: so what? She was really only a child before. What would anyone have expected of a twenty-eight-year-old Latin American man but that he would have an affair in Paris? His friends would have been disappointed with anything less. If Tachia had had the baby he might still have left her. In Mercedes he seems very deliberately to have chosen a woman from his own milieu, someone who would understand exactly where he was from and what made him tick.
Tachia had left. But he had his novel. That novel, uniquely for García Márquez, is set during the very time he wrote it, the later months of 1956, framed by the Suez crisis in Europe. The details of the plot had been established long before Tachia left for Madrid. It is October: a colonel, whose name the reader will never know, and who used to live in Macondo, is a man of seventy-five rotting away in a small, asphyxiating river town lost in the forests of Colombia. The Colonel has been waiting fifty-six years for his pension from the War of a Thousand Days and has no other means of support. It is fifteen years since he received even a letter from the state pension department but still he goes to the post office every day in hope of information. Thus he spends his life waiting for news that never comes. He and his wife had a son, Agustín, a tailor, who was murdered by the authorities at the beginning of the year for distributing clandestine political propaganda.19 When Agustín, who used to look after the old couple, was killed, he left behind his champion fighting cock, which is worth a significant sum of money. The Colonel endures innumerable humiliations in order not to have to sell the bird, which for him and his son’s friends (named Alfonso, Alvaro and Germán) becomes a symbol of dignity and resistance, as well as a reminder of Agustín himself. The Colonel’s wife, who is more practical, and also ailing and in need of medical treatment, disagrees with him and repeatedly urges him to sell the rooster. At the end of the novel the Colonel is still obdurately resisting.
García Márquez has said that the novel had a multiple inspiration: firstly—given that he always has a visual image as a point of departure for his works—there was the memory of a man he saw in the Barranquilla fish market years before, waiting for a boat “with a kind of silent anxiety.”20 Secondly, more personally, there was the memory of his grandfather waiting for his own Thousand Day War pension although, physically, the model was Rafael Escalona’s father, also a colonel but a slimmer man, as befits the starving protagonist García Márquez imagined for the book.21 Thirdly, obviously, there was the political situation in Colombia during the Violencia. Fourthly, in terms of artistic inspiration, there was De Sica’s Umberto D., scripted by Zavattini, about another man, with another cherished creature (his dog), who lives out a silent via crucis in post-war Rome, amidst the general indifference of his contemporaries. But what García Márquez has never acknowledged is that No One Writes to the Colonel was based—fifthly and most directly of all—on the drama that he and Tachia were living through at the time, with the Suez crisis as a political backdrop both in their lives and in the novel.22
In both cases the woman puts up with what she interprets as the selfishness or weakness of the man she lives with, a man who has convinced himself that he has a historical mission, one which is more important than she is. In each case she babies him (in the novel the old couple have already lost their son; in the real world Tachia would eventually grow tired of babying Gabriel when she lost her own baby…) and she carries out all the indispensable material and maternal functions of the household. She does all the practical work while he keeps labouring away vainly on a hopeless utopian enterprise, horribly constipated, with the fighting cock as the symbol of his courage, independence and eventual triumph. She is convinced everything will turn out badly; he is indomitably optimistic. Nine months have passed between the death of the Colonel’s son and the events of the novel proper; when the wife says to the Colonel, “We are the orphans of our son,” it could be the epitaph to the affair between García Márquez and Tachia. The cock (the novel, the writer’s personal dignity) is a symbol of an individual’s identification with collective values. And guilt, and grief—the miscarriage, the death of the son—can only be assuaged by going on, almost as a memorial. García Márquez’s personal motto might always have been: “the only way out is through.”
No One Writes to the Colonel is one of those prose works which, in spite of its undeniable “realism,” functions like a poem. It is impossible to separate its central themes of waiting and hoping, weather phenomena and bodily functions (not least excreting or, in the unfortunate Colonel’s case, not excreting), politics and poverty, life and death, solitude and solidarity, fate and destiny. Although García Márquez has always said that dialogue is not his forte, the world-weary humour communicated by his characters, modulated in a fractionally different way to distinguish each of them from the others, is one of the defining features of his mature works. That unmistakable humour, as characteristic as that of Cervantes, reaches its definitive expression in this wonderful little novel, just as the Colonel himself, however briefly depicted, becomes one of the unforgettable personages of twentieth-century fiction. The last paragraph, one of the most perfect in all literature, seems to concentrate and then release virtually all of the themes and images marshalled by the work as a whole. The exhausted old man has managed to fall asleep but his exasperated wife, almost beside herself, shakes him violently and wakes him up. She wants to know what they will live on now that he has finally decided not to sell the fighting cock but to prepare it instead for combat:
“What will we eat?”
The Colonel had taken seventy-five years—the seventy-five years of his life, minute by minute—to arrive at that instant. He felt pure, explicit, invincible, at the moment he replied: “Shit.”23
The reader too feels a sense of release; and finds no little aesthetic pleasure in the implicit contrast between the perfectly synthesized ending and a sense of liberation and relief: a raising of consciousness, resistance, rebellion. Dignity, always so important to García Márquez, has been restored.
Years later, No One Writes to the Colonel became a universally acknowledged masterpiece of short fiction, like Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, almost perfect in its self-contained intensity, its carefully punctuated plot and its brilliantly prepared conclusion. The writer himself would say that No One Writes to the Colonel had the “conciseness, terseness and directness I learned from journalism.”24
Yet the end of the novel was not the end of the story. There is always another way of telling a tale. Twenty years later, García Márquez would write a strange and disturbing short narrative, “The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow.” It might be called No One Writes to the Colonel revised and corrected. If the first work would turn out to be his version of the affair at the time, an unmistakable self-justification, the
later work is equally clearly a self-criticism and a belated vindication of Tachia. Had he changed his mind or was he trying to mollify his ex-lover many years down the line? In the later story a young Colombian couple travel to Madrid on their honeymoon and then drive to Paris. As they leave the Spanish capital the young woman, Nena Daconte, receives a bunch of red roses and pricks her finger, which then bleeds all the way to Paris. At one point she says, “Imagine, a trail of blood in the snow all the way from Madrid to Paris. Wouldn’t that make a good song.” The author must have remembered, naturally, that after losing so much of her own blood, Tachia had travelled in the opposite direction, all the way from Paris back to Madrid, in the middle of winter. Is all this an exorcism? In the story, when the young couple arrive in Paris, Nena, who knows France well, and is two months pregnant, checks herself into the very hospital—a “huge, gloomy hospital” just off Avenue Denfert-Rochereau—where Tachia’s haemorrhage was treated in 1956, where she too might have died, and where her unborn child did indeed die. Nena’s untutored husband, Billy Sánchez de Avila, who has never left Colombia before this trip to Europe, and who dances in the Parisian snow just as García Márquez himself had done the first time he saw it, proves completely incapable of coping with the crisis, in a cold, hostile Paris, and Nena dies in the hospital without him ever seeing her again.25
Tachia was gone. At Christmas García Márquez was back in the Hôtel de Flandre full time, at the end of what he would later call “that sad autumn of 1956,”26 blamed by most of his friends for Tachia’s problems and her dramatic departure. But he was in the final stages of his novel, he had found a way to justify what had happened, at least to himself (he considered it a point of honour not to talk with other men about his personal relationships) and nothing would stand in his way. The survival of the cock at the end of the novel is also the survival of the novel itself despite a nagging woman; and, in the end, its completion took place just a few weeks after Tachia departed for Madrid. He would date it “January 1957.” No baby was born but the novel was. Tachia said he was “lucky” to finish it under the circumstances of those months. It is difficult to agree that luck had anything to do with it.
Now there was no Tachia to buy food, haggle over prices and cook cheap meals. García Márquez was scraping the barrel just like the old Colonel scrapes his coffee pot on the first page of the novel. He would tell his friend José Font Castro that he once spent a week in his frozen attic hiding from the hotel administrators without eating, and drinking only from the tap in the washbasin. His brother Gustavo recalls, “I remember a confidence Gabito passed to me when we were drinking in Barranquilla: ‘Everyone’s my friend since One Hundred Years of Solitude but no one knows what it cost me to get there. No one knows how I was reduced to eating garbage in Paris,’ he told me. ‘Once I was at a party in the house of some friends who helped me out a bit. After the party the lady of the house asked me to put the garbage out in the street for her. I was so hungry that I salvaged what I could from the garbage and ate it there and then.’”27
In other respects he was at a loose end too. Some friends were alienated by what they took to be his abandonment of Tachia and treated him less benevolently and less generously as a result. He got a job singing in L’Escale, the Latin American nightclub where he had spent evenings with Tachia and where she herself had found occasional work before. Mostly he was not doing vallenatos but Mexican rancheras in duet with the Venezuelan painter and sculptor Jesús Rafael Soto, one of the pioneers of kinetic art. He earned a dollar a night (equivalent to about eight dollars in 2008). He mooched around. He tried to get back to In Evil Hour but it had lost its hold on him after the months he had spent in the company of the old Colonel. The Barranquilla friends at “The Cave” had formed a “Society of Friends to Help Gabito” (“Sociedad de Amigos para Ayudar a Gabito,” or SAAG); together they bought a 100-dollar note, and met in the Rondón Bookshop to work out how best to send it to their friend. Jorge Rondón, using his Communist Party experience, explained how he had learned to send clandestine messages inside postcards. This the friends did and simultaneously sent a letter explaining the trick. Of course, the card arrived before the letter, and the indignant García Márquez, who was hoping for more than best wishes, snorted: “Bastards!” and threw the card in the waste paper bin. That same afternoon the explanatory letter arrived and he was fortunate to be able to retrieve the postcard after rummaging through the hotel’s dustbin.28
Then he had no way of changing the money. The photographer Guillermo Angulo—in Rome at the time, looking for García Márquez!—recalls: “Someone told him about a friend called ‘La Puppa’ who had just got in from Rome after getting paid her salary and should have a lot of money on her. So he went to see her—he was bundled up as usual, since it was wintertime—and ‘La Puppa’ opened the door and a current of warm air from a well-heated room greeted him. ‘La Puppa’ was naked. She was not pretty, but she had a great body and she would take her clothes off without any provocation. So ‘La Puppa’ sat down—according to Gabo, what bothered him most was that she carried on as if she were fully dressed—and crossed her legs and started to talk about Colombia and the Colombians she knew. He started to tell her his problem, and she nodded and went across the room to where she had a little money chest. He realized that what she wanted was to have sex, but what he wanted was to eat. So he went off to eat and pigged out so much that he was sick for a week with indigestion.”29 No doubt this second-hand anecdote has gained a good deal in the telling. It was “La Puppa” who would take a copy of No One Writes to the Colonel back to Rome for Angulo to read. Despite Angulo’s uncharacteristic discretion, it seems that she and García Márquez had a brief fling after Tachia returned to Madrid. Good for the battered ego, no doubt.
The fact remains, though, that García Márquez lived in Paris for eighteen months with only a cashed-in air ticket, sporadic charity from friends and some scant savings of his own to survive on; and no means of getting back to Colombia. By now however he spoke French, knew Paris well and had an assortment of friends and acquaintances, including one or two French people, Latin Americans from several different countries and a number of Arabs. Indeed García Márquez himself was frequently mistaken for an Arab—it was the era not only of Suez but of the Algerian conflict—and more than once he was taken in by the police as part of their regular security sweeps:
One night, as I was leaving a cinema, a police patrol set about me in the street, spat in my face and punched me as they bundled me into an armoured wagon. It was full of silent Algerians, also picked up and beaten and spat on in local cafés. They too, like the police who arrested me, thought I was Algerian. So we spent the night together, crammed like sardines in a cell in the nearest police station, whilst the police, in shirt sleeves, talked about their kids and ate wedges of bread dipped in wine. To piss them off the Algerians and I stayed awake all night singing songs by Brassens against the abuses and stupidity of the forces of law and order.30
He made a new friend inside overnight, Ahmed Tebbal, a doctor who gave him an Algerian viewpoint on the conflict and even involved him in a few subversive activities on behalf of the Algerian cause.31 Economically, however, things just got worse and worse. One grim night he saw a man crossing the Pont Saint-Michel:
I didn’t have a full appreciation of my situation until one night when I found myself by the Luxembourg Garden without having eaten a chestnut all day and without a place to sleep … As I crossed the Saint-Michel bridge I felt I was not alone in the mist, because I could clearly hear the steps of someone approaching in the opposite direction. I saw his outline appear in the mist, on the same sidewalk and moving at the same speed as me, and I clearly saw his tartan jacket with its red and black squares, and in the instant we passed one another halfway across the bridge I saw his untidy hair, his Turk’s moustache, that sad expression that told of daily hungers and sleepless nights, and I saw his eyes were filled with tears. My blood froze because that man looked like me, on m
y way back.32
Later, talking of those days, he would declare: “I too know what it is to wait for the mail and be hungry and beg: that’s how I finished No One Writes to the Colonel in Paris. He is a bit me, the same.”33
It was around this time that Hernán Vieco, whose financial status was quite different, and who had taken Tachia in after the miscarriage, resolved most of García Márquez’s problems by lending him the 120,000 francs he needed to pay Madame Lacroix at the Hôtel de Flandre. On the way back from a party one night, drunk but by no means incapable, Vieco told García Márquez they needed a heart to heart. He asked him how much his hotel account had now risen to. García Márquez refused to discuss the matter. One of the reasons people often helped him in his youth was because they could always see that no matter how bad his circumstances he never felt especially sorry for himself and he never asked for help. Eventually, after a scene of inebriated theatricality, Vieco flourished a fountain pen, wrote out a cheque on the roof of a parked car and stuffed it in his friend’s coat pocket. It was for the equivalent of 300 dollars, a substantial sum at the time. García Márquez was overwhelmed both with gratitude and with humiliation.34 When he took the money to Madame Lacroix her response was to stammer, red with embarrassment in her turn—this was, after all, Paris, home of bohemianism and of struggling artists—“No, no, monsieur, that’s too much, why don’t you pay me part now and part later.”
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