Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez
Page 73
Days before the inauguration Julio Mario Santo Domingo, Colombia’s richest and most powerful businessman, now the owner of El Espectador, hosted a special party—a kind of belated birthday party—at which the guests of honour were Gabo and Mercedes. It was held on the top floor of another of Cartagena’s luxury hotels—in which the King and Queen of Spain would stay in the following week—and guests included Carlos Fuentes, Tomás Eloy Martínez, ex-President Pastrana, The New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson taking time out from the Iraq War, ex-Vice President of Nicaragua and novelist Sergio Ramírez, and many other luminaries and beautiful people from Bogotá, Cartagena and, especially, Barranquilla. Champagne, whisky and rum flowed in profusion to lubricate the sweetest of lives and the omnipresent rhythms of the vallenato throbbed deep into the night. In corridors and on balconies party-goers whispered the big question. Would Gabo be giving a speech at the ceremony to honour him on the first day of the congress? And if so …
The great day dawned: 26 March 2007. Several thousand people filed in to the Cartagena Convention Centre, on the site where García Márquez used to eat and drink late at night after working in El Universal in 1948 and 1949.6 Many of his friends were there and most of his family, though not his sons. Ex-Presidents Pastrana, Gaviria and—astonishingly—Samper were all present, as was ex-President Betancur, who would be on the podium with the other speakers, which would include the current President, Alvaro Uribe Vélez. The day was asphyxiatingly hot but most men were wearing dark suits, Bogotá-style. Carlos Fuentes, generous as ever, was due to give the special eulogy of his friend; Tomás Eloy Martínez, recovering from a brain tumour, was also due to speak. So were the Director of the Royal Academy, Víctor Garcia de la Concha, and the former Director of the Instituto Cervantes, Antonio Muñoz Molina. So were the President of Colombia and the King of Spain. So was García Márquez.
When García Márquez and Mercedes walked in the entire audience rose to its feet and applauded for several minutes. He looked happy and relaxed. The two groups on the podium, García Márquez and his entourage (Mercedes, Carlos Fuentes, the Colombian Minister of Culture, Elvira Cuerdo de Jaramillo) and the academy entourage on the other side of the stage, got themselves organized and seated. Members of the expectant audience could scarcely believe their luck to be there. On a huge screen behind the protagonists the television coverage showed the arrival of the King and Queen of Spain, Don Juan Carlos and Doña Sofía, and watched them mounting the stairways and striding along the corridors of the vast convention building until their arrival inside the auditorium was announced.
There were many speeches, including the King’s, most of them more interesting than such occasions usually produce. The stand-out speech was that of García de la Concha, whose task it was to present García Márquez with the first copy of the Royal Academy edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude.7 He told an indiscreet story, having previously asked King Juan Carlos’s permission to do so. It transpired that when the academy first thought up the idea of honouring García Márquez at this congress García de la Concha had asked the writer’s permission to go ahead with the organization of the event. García Márquez had said he was in agreement but “who I really want to see is the King.” The next time García Márquez saw Juan Carlos he passed on the message himself: “You, King, what you have to do is come to Cartagena.” (The “you” was conveyed in the Spanish familiar: “tú.”) This double- or treble-edged anecdote brought a huge collective howl of laughter made up of different ingredients—depending on each person’s interpretation and whether the listener was a Spaniard or a Latin American, a monarchist or a republican, a socialist or a conservative—followed by a protracted ovation. Did this Latin American not know his place? Worse, did he just not know how to speak to a king? Or, worst of all, did he feel superior to the King of Spain and had he thus talked down to him? Those close to the podium noticed that when García Márquez approached the monarch and shook his hand he did so with the Latin American student salute—one man’s thumb entwined around the other’s—which spoke rather of an encounter of equals. The Bourbons had lost Latin America in the early nineteenth century; now Juan Carlos was doing his best to make amends both diplomatically and economically.
The most dramatic moment for those who knew was the beginning of García Márquez’s own speech. He started hesitantly and stumbled over the first sentences but gradually got into his stride. More than a speech, it was a sentimental reminiscence of the time, in México, when he and Mercedes were living in poverty and hoping that one day he would hit the jackpot and publish a best-selling book. It was an authentic fairy story—“I’ve still not got over my surprise that all this has happened to me”—and also, the audience felt, a message of thanks and recognition to the companion who had seen him through those hard times and all the other times, good and bad, over the last half century. Mercedes looked on anxiously and sombrely and prayed that this man who had got through so many challenges would get through this one too. He did: he finished with the story of the two of them mailing half the manuscript from México City to Buenos Aires in 1966 because they were too poor to mail the whole thing.8 The ovation that greeted the speech’s conclusion lasted many minutes.
Earlier, in the midst of the proceedings, another announcement had electrified the auditorium. “Ladies and gentlemen, Señor William Clinton, ex-President of the United States, has arrived in the building.” The crowd rose as the most famous man on earth made his way down to the front of the hall. The King of Spain, five Presidents of Colombia and now the most popular ex-President of the most powerful country in the world—some observers reflected that the only superstars missing were Fidel Castro, ailing in Cuba, and the Pope in Rome. Once again it had been demonstrated that if García Márquez was obsessed with—fascinated by—power, power was repeatedly, irresistibly, drawn to him. Literature and politics have been the two most effective ways of achieving immortality in the transient world that Western civilization has created for the planet; few would hold that political glory is more enduring than the glory that comes from writing famous books.
WE WERE ABLE to have only the briefest of conversations before I left Cartagena. It was the end of many things.
“Gabo, what a wonderful event,” I said.
“Wasn’t it,” he said.
“You know, many people around me were weeping.”
“I was weeping too,” he said, “only inside.”
“Well,” I said, “I know that I will never forget it.”
“Well, what a good thing you were there,” he said, “so you can tell people we didn’t make up the story.”
The García Márquez (GM)
and Barcha Pardo (BP) Families
The García Martínez Family
The Márquez Iguarán Family
The Buendía Family in One Hundred Years of Solitude
Notes
ABBREVIATIONS
GM García Márquez
GGM Gabriel García Márquez
OHYS One Hundred Years of Solitude
Prologue: From Origins Obscure (1800–1899)
1. This section, despite its somewhat literary style, is based directly upon conversations with Luisa Santiaga Márquez in Cartagena in 1991 and in Barranquilla in 1993; and on Gabriel García Márquez’s (henceforth GGM’s) and his sister Margarita’s (henceforth Margot’s) own recollections.
2. This prologue and the next three chapters are based upon conversations with all the members of the García Márquez (henceforth GM) family and many members of the extended family over the period 1991–2008, as well as many journeys around the Colombian Costa from Sucre to Riohacha and beyond, some of them with GGM’s brothers. The most authoritative informants were Ligia GM, a Mormon, who considers it her duty to research her family’s history (it is to Ligia above all that I owe the family trees); Margot Valdeblánquez de Díaz-Granados, who spent long periods in her grandfather Colonel Márquez’s house in the 1920s and 1930s; Ricardo Márquez Iguarán, who in 1993 and 2008 gave m
e invaluable information on the family ramifications in the Guajira; and Rafael Osorio Martínez, who in 2007 gave detailed insight into Gabriel Eligio García’s family background in Sincé. GGM himself never had more than a general and rather vague knowledge of the details of this family history but his understanding of the underlying structure and dynamic of the genealogy is extraordinary and the stories of specific relatives blessed or cursed with colourful or dramatic lives form the foundation of his fictional oeuvre. In general a biographer of GGM also depends heavily on random snippets of information which appear from time to time in the Colombian press. The only previous biographical works are Oscar Collazos, García Márquez: la soledad y la gloria (Barcelona, Plaza y Janés, 1983), helpful but brief, and, most substantially, Dasso Saldívar, García Márquez: el viaje a la semilla. La biografía (Madrid, Alfaguara, 1997), on GGM’s life to 1967: its most useful contribution is the information it provides on the genealogical background to the two sides of the GM family and on his childhood and schooldays. Historically the first biographical study was Mario Vargas Llosa, García Márquez: historia de un deicidio (Barcelona, Barral, 1971), which is also a work of literary criticism: although factually unreliable, it is especially illuminating because most of Vargas Llosa’s information came direct from GGM in the late 1960s. Equally important is the book by GGM’s brother Eligio García, Tras las claves de Melquíades: historia de “Cien años de soledad” (Bogotá, Norma, 2001). GGM’s own most considered autobiographical reflections before his brilliant but not always accurate 2002 memoir Living to Tell the Tale (London, Jonathan Cape, 1993) (its epigraph, “Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it,” must be taken as a warning) were those in Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, The Fragrance of Guava (London, Faber, 1988), though, taken as a whole, GGM’s weekly columns published in El Espectador (Bogotá) and El País (Madrid) between 1980 and 1984 were even more informative and illuminating but are unavailable in English. Juan Luis Cebrían, Retrato de GGM (Barcelona, Círculo de Lectores, 1989), is a biographical essay with excellent illustrations. Mendoza, The Fragrance of Guava and GGM, Living to Tell the Tale are the only key works on GGM’s biography available in English but Stephen Minta, Gabriel García Márquez: Writer of Colombia (London, Jonathan Cape, 1987) and Gene Bell-Villada, García Márquez: The Man and His Work (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1990) are also helpful. Literary-critical analyses (see esp. Bell, Wood) can be found in the bibliography.
3. On “natural children” see GGM, “Telepatía sin hilos,” El Espectador (Bogotá), 23 November 1980. See the family trees in the appendix for the way in which OHYS replicates the García Martínez and Márquez Iguarán family histories in their oscillation between legitimate and illegitimate unions.
4. See Guillermo Henríquez Torres, El misterio de los Buendía: el verdadero trasfondo histórico de “Cien años de soledad” (Bogotá, Nueva América, 2003; 2nd revised edition, 2006). Henríquez, a native of Ciénaga, believes that the Buendía family of OHYS is based on his own family, the Henríquezes, descended in part from Jews who migrated from Amsterdam to the Caribbean. While few readers will swallow Henríquez’s thesis whole, his book provides invaluable background and atmospherics to a reading of OHYS.
5. See GGM, Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 66–7, for a revised version of this episode. None of Nicolás Márquez’s “natural” children inherited his name: they all carried their mother’s surname.
6. Interview, Barrancas, 1993.
7. José Luis Díaz-Granados explained his relation to Gabriel García Márquez as follows when I first met him in Bogotá in 1991: “Colonel Márquez, when he was eighteen, had had a son by Altagracia Valdeblánquez; he was called José María and carried the maternal surname, Valdeblánquez: he was my mother’s father. Later Colonel Márquez married Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes, the aunt of my father, Manuel José Díaz-Granados Cotes, and had three more children, among them Luisa Santiaga Márquez Iguarán, mother of Gabriel García Márquez. In other words, I am the double cousin of Gabriel García Márquez.” This personal story was typical of the entanglements I came across, not only in the admittedly “exotic” Guajira but everywhere else I travelled in Colombia in the 1990s. Indeed JLD-G married a cousin in 1972!
8. Ligia García Márquez, interview, Bogotá, 1991.
9. There is reason to believe Argemira was one of the prototypes for Pilar Ternera, a central character of OHYS.
10. I owe my information on Gabriel Martínez Garrido, who should have been called Gabriel Garrido Martínez, to his grandson Rafael Osorio Martínez. His evidence made me realise that GGM could easily have been called Gabriel Garrido Márquez (or, indeed, Gabriel Garrido Cotes); and this made me further realise just how far-reaching was GGM’s decision to identify with his Liberal grandparents from the Guajira rather than his Conservative, landowning grandparents from Sincé (then in Bolívar department).
11. When Gabriel junior was married in 1958 and needed his birth certificate, the family would persuade the priest in Aracataca to change the names of his paternal grandparents so that they appeared as Gabriel García and Argemira Martínez.
1 / Of Colonels and Lost Causes (1899–1927)
1. See Ernesto González Bermejo, “GGM, la imaginación al poder en Macondo,” Crisis (Buenos Aires), 1972 (reprinted in Alfonso Rentería Mantilla, ed., GM habla de GM en 33 grandes reportajes (Bogotá, Rentería Editores, 1979) pp. 111–17), where GGM says he wants Latin American revolutions to cease to be “martyrologies”: he wants the continent and its people to start winning. His own life is a monument to this ambition.
2. See David Bushnell, The Making of Modern Colombia. A Nation in Spite of Itself (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1993), Eduardo Posada-Carbó, The Colombian Caribbean: A Regional History, 1870–1950 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996), and Frank Safford and Marco Palacios, Colombia: Fragmented Land, Divided Society (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001).
3. “Aunt Margarita was sixteen years older than my mother and there were various other children in the years between, all of them dead at birth: one baby girl, then two twin girls, and others … Uncle Juanito was seventeen years older than my mother and she called him ‘godfather,’ not brother.” Ligia quoted in Silvia Galvis, Los García Márquez (Bogotá, Arango, 1996), p. 152.
4. The Márquez Iguarán family’s closest relationship of all was with Eugenio Ríos, Nicolás’s nephew and business partner. His daughter Ana Ríos was only two when Luisa passed through but remembers everything her mother Arsenia Carrillo told her about those now legendary days. When her sister Francisca Luisa Ríos Carrillo was born on 25 August 1925 she was “baptized” by Luisa two weeks after her birth, and thus became her goddaughter.
5. I am grateful to Gustavo Adolfo Ramírez Ariza for a copy of the Gaceta Departmental of Magdalena for November 1908 which shows that Nicolás was imprisoned for “homicide” at Santa Marta on 7 November 1908 but had not yet been tried.
6. Saldívar, GM: el viaje a la semilla, p. 44.
7. See Mario Vargas Llosa and GGM, La novela en América Latina: diálogo (Lima, Milla Batres, 1968), p. 14. In OHYS the Nicolás role is played by José Arcadio Buendiá and Medardo becomes Prudencio Aguilar.
8. GGM in conversation, México City, 1999.
9. See Living to Tell the Tale, p. 40, for GGM’s version of this episode.
10. In Leaf Storm, pp. 51–4, GGM himself gives a romantic, Faulknerian version of what we could call the GM family founding myth, which blames the exodus on “the war” (and is indeed much less candid and “historical” than the still romanticized version he would give later in OHYS).
11. Henríquez, El misterio, contradicts Saldívar’s version of events, which follows the GM family line.
12. Aracataca is forty metres above sea level, eighty-eight kilometres from Santa Marta, and its average temperature is twenty-eight degrees (which is why this is GGM’s preferred working room temperature).
13.
See Lázaro Diago Julio, Aracataca … una historia para contar (Aracataca, 1989, unpublished), an invaluable work of local history despite a tendency to consider GGM’s literary works as historiographical evidence in their own right.
14. These two words are much disputed in Colombia and it is reckless for a foreigner to get involved. It is generally agreed that costeños are the inhabitants of the tropical lowlands in the Caribbean or Atlantic north of the country. The original cachacos were the upper-class inhabitants of Bogotá, but many costeños have come to consider all inhabitants of “the interior” (mainly Andean) of the country as cachacos, sometimes including even the paisas or inhabitants of Antioquia. See GGM, Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 41–2.
15. Judith White, Historia de una ignominia: la UFC en Colombia (Bogotá, Editorial Presencia, 1978), pp. 19–20. Nevertheless Colonel Márquez was undoubtedly one of the town’s leading Liberals. (He had been President of the Liberal Club in Riohacha when still a young man.)
16. See Saldívar, GM: el viaje a la semilla, p. 50; White, Historia; and Catherine C. LeGrand, Frontier Expansion and Peasant Protest in Colombia, 1850-1936 (Albuquerque, New México University Press, 1986), p. 73.
17. See Living to Tell the Tale, p. 15, where GGM asserts—erroneously—that his grandfather was twice Mayor of Aracataca.
18. See ibid., p. 42, for GGM’s narration of this event.