Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez
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48. Mendoza, The Fragrance of Guava, p. 21. (My translation.)
49. See GGM, “La túnica fosforescente,” El Tiempo, December 1992; also “Estas Navidades siniestras,” El Espectador, December 1980, in which he says he was five when all this happened. In Living to Tell the Tale, p. 70, he says that he was ten on this occasion, not seven, as chronological laws would suggest.
50. In Leaf Storm, pp. 50–54, Martín, the character based partly on Gabriel Eligio, is both sinister (he uses Guajiro witchcraft, including sticking pins in dolls’ eyes) and bland; evidently he never loved Isabel (the character based partly on Luisa) but only wanted contact with the Colonel’s influence and money; and he left before his child (the character partly based on GGM) could have any memories of him-which of course is true of GGM’s own experience, except in that case Gabriel Eligio also took Luisa away; whereas in Leaf Storm GGM, in wish-fulfilment, has the mother to himself and sends the father away for ever.
51. “Recuerdos de la maestra de GM,” El Espectador, 31 October 1982.
52. Margot GM, in Galvis, Los GM, p. 61.
53. See Living to Tell the Tale, p. 85.
54. See Leonel Giraldo, “Siete Días en Aracataca, el pueblo de ‘Gabo’ GM,” Siete Días (Buenos Aires), 808, 8–14 December 1982.
55. GGM addresses this question in Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 82–4.
56. Margot GM, in Galvis, Los GM, p. 62. See Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 84–5, for GGM’s reflections on the return of his parents; note in particular that although refusing overtly to criticize his father he immediately starts talking about beatings, thereby showing that he associates his father with violence (for which, he says, Gabriel Eligio later apologized). Of course most parents physically chastised their children in those days.
57. See Margot’s recollections in Galvis, Los GM, p. 68.
58. GGM, Los cuentos de mi abuelo el coronel, ed. Juan Gustavo Cobo Borda (Smurfit Cartón de Colombia, 1988).
59. See Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 95–6.
60. Ramiro de la Espriella, “De ‘La casa’ fue saliendo todo,” Imagen (Caracas), 1972.
61. See Luis Enrique’s hilarious recollections of the journey to Sincé in Galvis, Los GM, pp. 124–5; also GGM, Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 96–7.
62. Interview with GGM, Mexico City, 1999.
63. I visited Sincé with GGM’s brother-in-law Alfonso Torres (married to GGM’s sister Rita, who had lived there) in 1998.
64. Margot GM, in Galvis, Los GM, p. 68.
65. Saldívar, “GM: ‘La novela que estoy escribiendo está localizada en Cartagena de Indias, durante el siglo XVIII,’” Diario 16, 1 April 1989. These are clearly very important statements. GGM’s stories and novels are obsessed with corpses but GGM himself seems never to have seen the corpses of people who were important to him until his father died in 1984. In his first story, “La tercera resignación” (1947), the narrator himself dies but his corpse does not decompose or get buried.
66. Guillermo Ochoa, “Los seres que inspiraron a Gabito,” Excelsior (México City), 13 April 1971. Of course he was not eight but ten when his grandfather died (in “El personaje equívoco,” Cambio, 19-26 June 2000, he says it happened “when I was not much more than five”); but he was indeed eight when his grandfather had his fateful accident and it was then that the life he had led until that moment, already threatened by the return of his parents and siblings, effectively came to an end.
67. Luisa Márquez, interview, Barranquilla, 1993.
68. Margot GM, in Galvis, Los GM, p. 69.
69. Luis Enrique, in Galvis, Los GM, p. 130. Did the always mischievous Luis Enrique know more about the “academy” and its antecedents than he lets on?
70. GGM, “Regreso a la guayaba,” El Espectador, 10 April 1983. On his relation to Aracataca, see also GGM, “Vuelta a la semilla,” El Espectador, 18 December 1983.
4 / Schooldays: Barranquilla, Sucre, Zipaquirá (1938–1946)
1. GGM, Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 128-29.
2. Ibid., p. 132.
3. Ibid., pp. 142–3.
4. Mendoza, The Fragrance of Guava, p. 19.
5. GGM, Vivir para contarla (Mexico City, Diana, 2002), p. 173. (My translation.)
6. Vivir para contarla, p. 163. (My translation.) The fact that he did survive was always attributed by Luisa Santiaga to the fact that she gave him cod-liver oil every day: see Guillermo Ochoa, “El microcosmos de GM,” Excelsior (Mexico City), April 12 1971: “‘The kid smelled of fish all day,’ his father says.”
7. The following sections on Sucre draw on my interviews with Señora Luisa Márquez de García in Cartagena and Barranquilla, 1991 and 1993, on a conversation with GGM himself in Mexico City in 1999, and on many conversations with all his brothers and sisters down the years—as well as on the published sources recorded in these notes.
8. Gustavo GM, in Galvis, Los GM, p. 185.
9. Living to Tell the Tale, p. 155.
10. Vivir para contarla, p. 188. (My translation.)
11. Juan Gossaín, quoted by Heriberto Fiorillo, La Cueva: crónica del grupo de Barranquilla (Bogotá, Planeta, 2002), pp. 87-8.
12. Saldívar, GM: el viaje a la semilla, is the best source on GGM’s time in the Colegio San Juan. But see also José A. Núñez Segura, “Gabriel García Márquez (Gabo-Gabito),” Revista Javeriana (Bogotá), 352, March 1969, pp. 31-6, in which one of the Jesuit teachers at the school retrieves some of GGM’s juvenile compositions.
13. Galvis, Los GM, p. 70.
14. GGM mentions this murder in Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 227-8.
15. The youngest, Yiyo, did not entirely agree: he once told me that all the younger children, the ones born in Sucre, were “hopeless,” including him, precisely because they were the only ones his father had delivered!
16. See Harley D. Oberhelman, “Gabriel Eligio García habla de Gabito,” in Peter G. Earle, ed., Gabriel García Marquez (Madrid, Taurus, 1981), pp. 281-3. Oberhelman interviewed Gabriel Eligio about his medical training and experience.
17. Guillermo Ochoa, “El microcosmos de GM,” Excelsior, 12 April 1971.
18. Living to Tell the Tale, p. 224.
19. GGM in conversation, Mexico City, 1999.
20. Rosario Agudelo, “Conversaciones con García Márquez,” Pueblo, suplemento, “Sábado Literario” (Madrid), 2 May 1981. In other versions GGM laughs this traumatic experience off; Living to Tell the Tale gives a kind of intermediate version; and Memories of My Melancholy Whores gives a fictionalized account.
21. Popular Caribbean musical genre whose style evolved out of the cumbia, Colombia’s traditional national dance rhythm.
22. Roberto Ruiz, “Eligio García en Cartagena. El abuelo de Macondo,” El Siglo, 31 October 1969.
23. Quoted by Gossaín in Fiorillo, La Cueva, p. 88. Gabriel Eligio later denied the intention to trepan.
24. See GGM, “El cuento del cuento. (Conclusión),” El Espectador, 2 September 1981, in which he recalls his adolescent days in Sucre (un-named) and states that they were “the freest years of my life.” On his attitude to prostitutes, see Claudia Dreifus, “Gabriel García Márquez,” Playboy 30:2, February 1983.
25. Living to Tell the Tale, p. 166.
26. My translation. See Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 168-71.
27. ibid., p. 174.
28. See GGM, “Bogotá 1947,” El Espectador, 21 October 1981 and “El río de nuestra vida,” El Espectador, 22 March 1981. The writer Christopher Isherwood visited Colombia in the 1940s and travelled on the David Arango. See his evocation of the journey in The Condor and the Cows (London, Methuen, 1949).
29. GGM, The Autumn of the Patriarch (London, Picador, 1978), p. 16.
30. Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 179-80.
31. The best evocation of this entire journey and the arrival in Bogotá is in Germán Castro Caycedo, “‘Gabo’ cuenta la novela de su vida. 1 and 2,” El Espectador, 23 March 1977.
32. GGM, “Bogotá 1947,” El Espectacdor, 18 October
1981.
33. GGM, Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 184-5.
34. The best source on the school at Zipaquirá is Saldívar, GM: el viaje a la semilla. Much of my information is based on an interview with a schoolmate of GM, José Espinosa, Bogotá, 1998.
35. Rosario Agudelo, “Conversaciones con García Márquez,” Pueblo, suplemento, “Sábado Literario” (Madrid), 2 May 1981.
36. See Aline Helg, La educacíon en Colombia 1918–1957: una historia social, economíca y politica (Bogotá, CEREC, 1987).
37. GGM, “‘Estoy comprometido hasta el tuétano con el periodismo político.’ Alternativa entrevista a GGM,” Alternativa (Bogotá), 29, 31 March-13 April 1975, p. 3.
38. See Juan Gustavo Cobo Borda, “Cuatro horas de comadreo literario con GGM” (interview 23 March 1981), in his Silva, Arciniegas, Mutis y García Márquez (Bogotá, Presidencia de la República, 1997), pp. 469-82 (p. 475).
39. Living to Tell the Tale, p. 196.
40. Quoted by Carlos Rincón, “GGM entra en los 65 años. Tres o cuatro cosas que querría saber de él,” El Espectador, 1 March 1992.
41. Margot García Márquez told me in 1993: “When Mamá was pregnant with Nanchi, it happened again. This time even Mamá got upset. She was in bed in the two-storey house in Sucre square and she wouldn’t get up. That time she even screamed at him. And Mamá was always incredibly sick, vomiting, with each of her pregnancies, she always lost weight, it was amazing but true. And I got really upset for her and wanted to do something about it, but she wouldn’t let me.”
42. Luis Enrique GM, Galvis, Los GM, p. 146.
43. Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 217-18.
44. Saldívar, GM: el viaje a la semilla, p. 156.
45. Darío too came from a small Caribbean town, he too was brought up away from his own mother, and he too had listened to an old colonel telling tales of war. Thirty years later García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch would be, among other things, a loving tribute to Darío’s poetic language.
46. Living to Tell the Tale, p. 205.
47. “La ex-novia del Nobel Colombiano,” El País (Madrid), 7 October 2002.
48. Vivir para contarla, p. 242. (My translation.)
49. See GGM, One Hundred Years of Solitude (London, Picador, 1978), pp. 29–30.
50. Living to Tell the Tale, p. 204.
51. Ibid., p. 193.
52. Ibid., p. 193.
53. See Saldívar, GM: el viaje a la semilla, p. 166; also GGM, Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 193-4.
54. See Germán Santamaría, “Carlos Julio Calderón Hermida, el profesor de GM,” Gaceta (Bogotá, Colcultura), 39, 1983, pp. 4-5.
55. In interviews after he became famous he frequently denied ever having written poetry: see, for example, his conversation with María Esther Gilio, “Escribir bien es un deber revolucionario,” Triunfo (Madrid), 1977, included in Rentería, ed., GM habla de GM en 33 grandes reportajes.
56. See La Casa Grande (Mexico City/Bogotá), 1:3, February-April 1997, p. 45, where the poem is published “thanks to Dasso Saldívar and Luis Villar Borda.”
57. Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 205-6.
58. Ligia GM, in Galvis, Los GM, p. 165: “When Gabito fell in love with Mercedes she was a girl of eight in a pinafore dress with little ducks on.”
59. See Beatriz López de Barcha, “‘Gabito esperó a que yo creciera,’” Carrusel, Revista de El Tiempo (Bogotá), 10 December 1982.
60. This was republished by Héctor Abad Gómez, “GM poeta?,” El Tiempo, Lecturas Dominicales, 12 December 1982. See also Donald McGrady, “Dos sonetos atribuidos a GGM,” Hispanic Review, 51 (1983), pp. 429–34. The most popular cumbia in Colombia, composed years later, is called “Colegiala” (“Schoolgirl”).
61. See GGM, “Memorias de un fumador retirado,” El Espectador, 13 February 1983.
62. Living to Tell the Tale, p. 200.
63. Vivir para contarla, p. 281. (My translation.) See also GGM, “El cuento del cuento. (Conclusión),” El Espectador, 2 September 1981, where he recalls how he discovered that María Alejandrina Cervantes’s brothel had become a convent school when he returned fifteen years later.
64. See Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 236–9.
65. OHYS, p. 301.
66. Interview, Cartagena, 1991.
67. In Mompox Mercedes had a close school friend called Margarita Chica Salas, who also lived in Sucre: she would shortly be involved in the drama surrounding the murder of Cayetano Gentile, a close friend of GM and his family.
68. Gertrudis Prasca de Amín, interview, Magangué, 1991.
69. GGM, Crónica de una muerte anunciada (Bogotá, Oveja Negra, 1981), p. 40. (My translation.)
70. GGM, “El río de nuestra vida,” El Espectador, 22 March 1981, mentions the “irrecoverable José Palencia.” See Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 239–43.
71. Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 243-4.
72. Saldívar, “GM: La novela que estoy escribiendo está localizada en Cartagena de Indias, durante el siglo XVIII,” Diario 16, 1 April 1989.
73. Ligia GM, in Galvis, Los GM, p. 158.
74. See GGM, “Telepatía sin hilos,” El Espectador, 16 November 1980, in which he states that Tranquilina died “almost one hundred years old.”
75. Aida Rosa GM, in Galvis, Los GM, p. 99.
5 / The University Student and the Bogotazo (1947–1948)
1. This chapter draws on a wide range of sources and conversations but especially on interviews with Gonzalo Mallarino (Bogotá, 1991), Luis Villar Borda (Bogotá, 1998), Margarita Márquez Caballero (Bogotá, 1998), Jacques Gilard (Toulouse, 1999, 2004) and Gustavo Adolfo Ramírez Ariza (Bogotá, 2007).
2. In M. Fernández-Braso, GGM: una conversación infinita (Madrid, Azur, 1969), p. 102, GGM remarks that the Colombian Academy considers even the Spanish Royal Academy “progressive” and talks of “protecting” the language (even against Spain!).
3. Kafka, “Letter to his Father” (November 1919). Kafka’s father never read this letter.
4. Interview, Bogotá, 1993. ALM was in fact a distant relation through a shared Cotes great-grandfather, as would later be discovered when they became friends.
5. Luis Villar Borda, interview, 1998. On this period see also GGM, “Bogotá 1947,” El Espectador, 18 October 1981.
6. See Juan B. Fernández, “Cuando García Márquez era Gabito,” El Tiempo, Lecturas Dominicales, October 1982. One of his key companions at this time was to be Afro-Colombian medical student Manuel Zapata Olivella, who would later intervene in his destiny in a decisive fashion on more than one occasion. Other important costeño students were Jorge Alvaro Espinosa, who introduced GGM to Joyce’s Ulysses, and Domingo Manuel Vega, who lent him Kafka’s Metamorphosis.
7. Alvaro Mutis, “Apuntes sobre un viaje que no era para contar,” in Aura Lucía Mera, ed., Aracataca/Estocolmo (Bogotá, Instituto Colombiano de Cultura, 1983), pp. 19–20, describes Mallarino on the 1982 Nobel trip as “our dean,” GGM’s oldest cachaco friend from the Bogotá period.
8. For important details about Camilo Torres and his decision to be a priest and subsequent departure, see Germán Castro Caycedo, “‘Gabo’ cuenta la novela de su vida. 2,” El Espectador, 23 March 1977.
9. Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, La llama y el hielo (Bogotá, Gamma, 3rd edition, 1989), pp. 9–10.
10. The direct translation would be “cock-sucking” because the image is of the owner of a fighting cock gazing ironically and provocatively at his adversary over the cock’s comb, while soothing it lovingly with his lips.
11. See GGM, “Bogotá, 1947,” El Espectador, 18 October 1981; and “El frenesí del viernes,” El Espectador, 13 November 1983, which recalls his desolate Sundays in Bogotá.
12. Gonzalo Mallarino, interview, Bogotá, 1991.
13. The second, “Celestial Geography,” was published on 1 July 1947.
14. See Germán Castro Caycedo, “‘Gabo’ cuenta la novela de su vida. 2,” El Espectador, 23 March 1977, on GGM’s farewell to Camilo Torres.
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15. La Vida Universitaria, Tuesday supplement of La Razón, Bogotá, 22 June 1947. See La Casa Grande (Mexico City/Bogotá), 1:3, February-April 1997, p. 45, where this poem is republished “thanks to Dasso Saldívar and Luis Villar Borda.”
16. See Juan Gustavo Cobo Borda, “Cuatro horas de comadreo literario con GGM,” in his Silva, Arciniegas, Mutis y GM (Bogotá, Presidencia de la República, 1997), pp. 469–82, for one of the many versions of this story. Borges would later say that “The Metamorphosis” was the only story from this collection that he did not in fact translate.