Gabriel García Márquez

by Gerald Martin

  The book he had always wanted to write was a family saga set in Aracataca but renamed Macondo. And this book he was now writing was indeed a family saga set in Aracataca, renamed Macondo. But the family was no longer only Colonel Nicolás Márquez’s family, still suffused with nostalgia and longings for epic validation as in Leaf Storm, though now also treated with lofty irony; but also Gabriel Eligio García’s family, treated parodically and satirically, with a comic turn which oscillated between the affectionate and the cruel. And the book was written not by the twenty-year-old man who had started “The House” but, in a curious way, by the small boy whose experience that twenty-year-old had recalled with such nostalgia, and that small boy was walking hand in hand not with Colonel Márquez but with the family man of nearly forty that García Márquez himself now was, a writer who had read all the world’s literature and had lived through the most decisive of the ages of man.

  What had happened to Gabriel García Márquez? Why was he now able, after so long, to write this book? He had realized, in a lightning flash of inspiration, that instead of a book about his childhood he should write a book about his memories of his childhood. Instead of a book about reality, it should be a book about the representation of reality. Instead of a book about Aracataca and its people, it should be a book narrated through the world-view of those people. Instead of trying yet again to resurrect Aracataca he should say farewell to Aracataca by narrating it not only through the world-view of its people but by putting into the novel everything that had happened to him, everything he knew about the world, everything that he was and that he embodied as a late-twentieth-century Latin American; in other words, instead of isolating the house and Aracataca from the world he should take the entire world to Aracataca. And above all, emotionally, instead of trying to raise the ghost of Nicolás Márquez he himself should somehow become Nicolás Márquez.

  What he felt was relief coursing through him on multiple levels from a hundred different directions, all the efforts and all the anguish and all the failures and frustrations of his life relieved; liberation and self-recognition and self-affirmation all embodied in this extraordinary creation which he knew—he knew—could be a unique, possibly immortal work even as he started to write and then, as he worked on it with growing excitement, began to take on the grandiosity of a myth in its own right. So of course it felt magical, miraculous, euphoric, even to him, as he wrote it; and then, later, to his readers. It was, indeed, an experience of the magic of literary creation raised to the highest degree of intensity. Moreover, the writing was also radically therapeutic: instead of obsessively, neurotically, diligently trying to re-create the events of his life exactly as he remembered them he now rearranged all that he had been told or personally experienced in the way he wanted to, so that the book took on the shape its author needed. And so the book really was magical, miraculous, euphoric: it was curing him of many ills.

  Now a man who usually wrote one paragraph a day was writing several pages every day. A man who turned his books inside out and upside down looking first for the sequence and then for the structure was now writing the chapters one after another like God himself ordaining the shape and rotation of the Earth. A man who had always suffered every twist and turn, every small technical and psychological decision in each of his books, was playing with his life: fusing his grandfather with his father with himself, Tranquilina with Luisa Santiaga with Mercedes, weaving Luis Enrique and Margot in and out of several characters, turning his paternal grandmother into Pilar Ternera, smuggling Tachia in through the character of Amaranta Ursula, and fusing the history of his entire family with the history of Latin America, uniting his Latin American literary ingredients—Borges, Asturias, Carpentier, Rulfo—with the Bible, Rabelais, the chronicles of the Spanish conquest and the European novels of chivalry, Defoe, Woolf, Faulkner, Hemingway. No wonder he felt like an alchemist; no wonder he fused Nostradamus and Borges—and himself, García Márquez—into the figure of the great Writer-Creator Melquíades, another genius who locked himself away in a small room to encapsulate the entire cosmos in that enchanted space, at once transhistorical and intemporal, known as literature. What he now did, in short, was not only to mix everything in but above all (and this is why he succeeded, according to many, in writing something like the Latin American equivalent of Don Quixote) to confront and combine the two principal, contradictory characteristics of that little-known but extraordinary and life-enhancing continent: over the dark story of conquest and violence, tragedy and failure, he laid the other side of the continent, the carnival spirit, the music and the art of the Latin American people, that ability to honour life even in its darkest corners and to find pleasure in ordinary things, a pleasure which for so many Latin Americans is not just a consolation for oppression and failure but a premonition of that better world which to them is always so close and which they celebrate not only through their revolutions but also through the festive victories of daily life. Later, of course, García Márquez would deny all such transcendent intentions: “I was never conscious of any of it,” he would tell Elena Poniatowska in 1973, “I am a man who tells stories, anecdotes.”3

  By the end of the first week in September he had made huge strides. He soon discovered that he needed total commitment and a complete suspension of his other activities. Trying to write the book and work on in the advertising agency gave him excruciating headaches. He decided to give up both paid employment and his regular social life. This was an extraordinary gamble for a family man.

  The book was set in Aracataca, in Macondo, but Macondo was now a metaphor for the whole of Latin America. He knew Latin America all right; but he had also visited the Old World and he had personally witnessed the difference between the old liberal democracies of the capitalist world and the new socialist countries including the USSR. And he had also lived for a time in the iconic city of the USSR’s historic rival, the country that was defining the future of the planet and had already, for more than half a century, circumscribed and controlled Latin America’s own destiny: the United States. This man knew a lot about the world. All this he knew before we even start to recall what he had learned about literature.

  So Macondo, the living image of a small town anywhere in Colombia or Latin America (or, indeed, as readers in Africa and Asia would later attest, anywhere in the Third World), would become a symbol of any small community at the mercy of historical forces not only beyond its control but even beyond its ken.

  The story, as it now emerged, was the saga of a family which migrated from the Guajira to a place very like Aracataca some time in the nineteenth century. The father figure, José Arcadio Buendía, had killed his best friend out of honour and machismo, and was forced to leave because he was haunted by his friend’s ghost. José Arcadio founded a new village named Macondo where he and his resilient wife Ursula built a house and became the unofficial leaders of the new community. They had three children, Arcadio, Aureliano and Amaranta, and over time took in a number of others. One of the household servants, Pilar Ternera, had relationships with several male members of the family down the years, contributing to the family’s terror that eventually there would be an incestuous coupling which would produce a child with a pig’s tail and bring about the end of the family line. Gypsies visited frequently, including an especially shrewd and talented fellow named Melquíades, who eventually stayed in Macondo and moved into the family house. But there was also a negative arrival: the central government in Bogotá (unnamed in the novel), which sent political and military representatives to control the innocent little community; this original sin led to a series of civil wars in which Aureliano, once grown up, became an enthusiastic and indeed fanatical participant on the side of the Liberal Party until eventually he became known throughout the country as the legendary warrior Colonel Aureliano Buendía. Later, even more sinister outsiders would appear: the North Americans who would arrive with their Fruit Company to transform the town’s economy and culture until the locals rebelled by going on
strike, at which point the gringos prodded the central government into action and three thousand striking workers and members of their families were massacred beside the railway station in Macondo. After this dark episode Macondo went into decline, a decline signalled by Ursula herself—the heart and soul of the novel—finally dying, whereupon the less vigorous younger generation, who live more as victims of history than as creators of myth, find themselves returning to some sort of primordial darkness and sinfulness. Eventually the last member of the family, as was predicted, engendered a child with a pig’s tail after a wild affair with his youthful aunt, and both he and the whole of Macondo were swept away, as was also predicted (by Melquíades), in an apocalyptic hurricane wind.

  The novel would also be modernist in the sense that García Márquez would write a book which would condense all books, macrocosm contained within a microcosm: it begins and ends in biblical style and contains some of the universal myths of anthropology, the characteristic mythemes of Western culture and the peculiar negative thrust of Latin America’s own specific experience of grandiose aspiration and humiliating failure, right down to the multifarious continental theories of the best-known Latin American thinkers. Yet almost everything in the book would be the result of García Márquez’s own lived experience. Anyone familiar with the outlines of his life can find half a dozen or more items on every page which correspond directly to García Márquez’s biography—the writer himself has claimed that every single incident and every single detail corresponds to a lived experience. (“I am just a mediocre notary.”)

  Most wondrous of all was the form, which somehow managed to contain all these multifarious elements, a remarkable combination of high art with the ways of oral communication. Yet while it is true that the novel has assimilated large quantities of Colombia’s own popular experience it is not entirely easy to agree with those who see the book as a storehouse of folk wisdom. What García Márquez has achieved, and the achievement is no less extraordinary, is the magical appearance of a world of folk wisdom—because, after all, what characterizes the inhabitants of this novel is how little wisdom they actually possess and how ill equipped they are to confront the world it is their destiny and misfortune to inhabit. Theirs is a world where folk wisdom is no longer relevant or valid. The form could not be further from the form of those typical modernist works which are, nevertheless, the point of reference of this novel—written as if it were a “timeless classic” yet informed by every discovery made by the novel in the first sixty years of the twentieth century. It is as if James Joyce set out to write a novel using the story-telling tone and narrative techniques of García Márquez’s Aunt Francisca.4

  There it is, then. A man who writes about village, nation and the world using the discoveries of the great Western myths (Greece, Rome, the Bible, the imported Arabian Nights), the great Western classics (Rabelais, Cervantes, Joyce) and the greatest precursors from his own continent (Borges, Asturias, Carpentier, Rulfo) to produce a work—a mirror—in which his own continent at last recognizes itself, and thus founds a tradition. If it was Borges who designed the viewfinder (like a belated brother Lumière), it is García Márquez who provides the first truly great collective portrait. So Latin Americans would not only recognize themselves but would now be recognized everywhere, universally. This was the meaning of the book Luisa Santiaga Márquez Iguarán de García’s son was writing in his tiny smoke-filled room at his crude, diminutive writing desk in the midst of a vast and chaotic Third World city. His excitement was more than justified and its nervous, euphoric intensity is embedded in the pages of the book.

  García Márquez’s run of luck was by no means over; indeed, in a sense it would never end. After Luis Harss left Mexico at the end of June he had travelled on through various Latin American capitals and eventually arrived in Buenos Aires, where his book of interviews was to be edited by the prestigious publishing house Sudamericana. Harss’s contact at Sudamericana was Francisco “Paco” Porrúa, who would later confess, “I had never heard of García Márquez until Harss mentioned him to me. And there he was, alongside Borges, Rulfo … and other greats. So the first thing that came into my head was, ‘Who is he?’” He wrote to García Márquez enquiring about his books. Months later a deal would be struck.5

  Early in September García Márquez had taken time off from his writing one afternoon to attend a talk by Carlos Fuentes about his new novel A Change of Skin (Cambio de piel) at the Instituto de Bellas Artes. At the end Fuentes had mentioned several of his friends, among them the Colombian, “to whom I am linked as much by our Sunday rituals as by my admiration for the ancient wisdom of this bard from Aracataca.” Perhaps symbolically Fuentes asserted on this occasion that earning fame and fortune was a legitimate part of a writer’s aspirations: “I do not think it is a writer’s obligation to swell the ranks of the needy.”6 Afterwards Alvaro Mutis and his wife Carmen had invited Fuentes and Rita Macedo, Jomí García Ascot and María Luisa Elío, Fernando del Paso, Fernando Benítez and Elena Garro, as well as García Márquez and Mercedes, among others, to a paella in the Mutises’ apartment in Río Amoy.7 García Márquez had begun to relate anecdotes from his new novel on the way out from the talk, in the street, in the car and had continued in Mutis’s apartment. Everyone had heard more than enough already and only María Luisa Elío continued to pay attention. In the tiny crowded apartment María Luisa made him go on all evening telling her stories, most notably the one about the priest who takes chocolate in order to levitate. There and then—for listening with such rapt attention—he promised to dedicate the new novel to her. He had the skills of Scheherezade, she the beauty.

  Latin American critics and journalists have been obsessed with this period ever since the publication of the novel in 1967. García Márquez’s own brother Eligio devoted an entire book to the genesis and creation of the novel thirty years after it was published. Every single detail has been given cabbalistic, not to say fetishistic, significance. Yet the room where the writer worked could not have been less magical, though many people, years later, would want to call it “Melquíades’s Room.” The “Cave of the Mafia,” as García Márquez himself dubbed it, was ten feet by eight feet with its own small bathroom adjoining and a door and a window on to a yard. There was a couch, an electric heater, some shelves and a very small, absolutely rudimentary table with an Olivetti typewriter on it. It was now that García Márquez took to wearing blue worker’s overalls in order to write—he who had been getting quite conventional lately (even wearing ties). He had already made the revolutionary decision to move from night-time to day-time work. Now, instead of writing at the ad agency after a day’s work or at the offices of the film studios, he worked in the mornings until the boys came home from school. Instead of the family demands crippling his creative faculties and cramping his style, they had now forced the change which would transform García Márquez’s whole approach to work and self-discipline. Mercedes, previously a wife, mother and housekeeper, now became receptionist, secretary and business manager as well.8 Little did she know it would be for ever. The new novel would benefit directly and dramatically from these changes.

  García Márquez would drive his sons off to school in the morning, sit at his desk by 8.30 a.m. and work through until 2.30 p.m. when the boys got home. They would remember their father as a man who spent most of his time incarcerated in a small room, lost in blue cigarette smoke, a man who hardly noticed them, appeared only at meal times and answered their questions in a vague and distracted manner. They little suspected that he was inscribing this too into his all-consuming novel—José Arcadio Buendía’s belated discovery of his own children, after his experimental obsessions, in chapter 1.

  García Márquez would later recall, “From the first moment, long before it was published, the book exerted a magic power on everyone who in some way came into contact with it: friends, secretaries, etc., even people like the butcher or our landlord, who were waiting for me to finish so I would pay them.”9 He told Elena Poniat
owska, “We owed the landlord eight months’ rent. When we only owed three months, Mercedes called the owner and said, ‘Look, we’re not going to pay you these three months, nor the next six.’ First she’d asked me, ‘When do you think you’ll finish?’ and I said in about five more months. So to be sure she added an extra month and then the owner said to her, ‘If you give me your word, all right, I’ll wait until September.’ And in September we went and paid him …”10

  One of the many people waiting for García Márquez to finish was the long-suffering “Pera” (Esperanza) Araiza, a typist who worked for Barbachano and who also typed Fuentes’s novels. Every few days García Márquez would take Pera another chunk of the novel, typed by him but heavily corrected by hand, and she would produce a clean fair copy. Since his own spelling was never better than shaky, he relied on Pera to clean up his literary act; but he nearly lost her and the start of the novel on the very first day when she was almost run over by a bus and the papers flew all over the wet streets of an autumnal Mexico City. Only much later did she confess that she invited her friends round each weekend to read the latest chapter.

  Everything we know about this time suggests that García Márquez was indeed touched by magic. He was, at last, the magician he had always wanted to be. He was pumped up, high on literary narcotics. He was Aureliano Babilonia. He was Melquíades. Glory awaited him. The book was a grand mythological enterprise punctuated by rituals. Every evening, after his session with his notes, friends would come round. It was nearly always Alvaro Mutis and Carmen, Jomí García Ascot and María Luisa, supportive friends who for a whole year would turn into privileged witnesses and would watch the construction of one of the great edifices of Western literature. As the novel went on and he realized its scale, so his confidence and self-importance grew. By day he would sit in his smoky dungeon making it all up and in the afternoon he would consult the reference books and see how much of it could be true. Jomí and María Luisa could hardly wait for successive episodes. María Luisa particularly had grasped that she was witness to something of transcendental importance and was his most intimate confidante. He would later say that although she was admittedly entranced by his book, he in return was repeatedly stunned by her own insight into the worlds of magic and esoteric wisdom and that many of her perceptions eventually ended up in the book. He would call her at any time of the day to read the latest episode.11