17. Of course it isn’t the way Kafka’s grandmother talked—that, precisely, was the difference!
18. See John Updike, “Dying for love: a new novel by GM,” in The New Yorker, 7 November 2005: “A velvety pleasure to read, though somewhat disagreeable to contemplate; it has the necrophiliac tendencies of the precocious short stories, obsessed with living death, that GM published in his early twenties.”
19. GGM, Todos los cuentos (1947–1972) (Barcelona, Plaza y Janés, 3rd edition, 1976), pp. 17–18. (My translation.)
20. Ibid., pp. 14–15.
21. Ibid., pp. 17–18.
22. GGM tells the whole story to Germán Castro Caycedo, “‘Gabo’ cuenta la novela de su vida. 3,” El Espectador, 23 March 1977.
23. GGM, Collected Stories (New York, Harper Perennial, 1991), p. 24.
24. “La Ciudad y el Mundo,” El Espectador, 28 October 1947.
25. Living to Tell the Tale, p. 271.
26. Gustavo Adolfo Ramírez Ariza is preparing a major revisionist work on García Márquez’s relationship with and experiences in Bogotá.
27. GGM, Collected Stories, p. 19.
28. Luis Enrique GM, in Galvis, Los GM, pp. 132–3.
29. The ending -azo in Spanish conveys the idea of a violent blow by or against something.
30. See Gonzalo Sánchez, “La Violencia in Colombia: New research, new questions,” Hispanic American Historical Review, 65:4 (1985), pp. 789–807.
31. Interview, Bogotá, 1998. In “Bogotá 1947,” El Espectador, 18 October 1981, GGM states categorically that his papers disappeared in the fire which destroyed his pensión (with specific reference to “El fauno en la tranvía”). Living to Tell the Tale, p. 288, tells a different story.
32. See Herbert Braun, Mataron a Gaitán: vida pública y violencia urbana en Colombia (Bogotá, Norma, 1998), p. 326.
33. Ironically, his first revolutionary act was to help a looter smash a typewriter; García Márquez would later assure Castro that the typewriter was his!
34. See Arturo Alape, El Bogotazo: memorias del olvido (Bogotá, Universidad Central, 1983).
35. Interview, Margarita Márquez Caballero, Bogotá, 1998.
36. Rita GM, in Galvis, Los GM, p. 237.
6 / Back to the Costa: An Apprentice Journalist
in Cartagena (1948–1949)
1. Living to Tell the Tale, p. 304. This chapter draws on interviews with the GM family, with Ramiro de la Espriella (Bogotá, 1991), Carlos Alemán (Bogotá, 1991), Manuel Zapata Olivella (Bogotá, 1991), Juan Zapata Olivella (Cartagena, 1991), Jacques Gilard (Toulouse, 1999, 2004), Héctor Rojas Herazo (Barranquilla, 1998) and Marta Yances (Cartagena, 2007), among many others.
2. There are two excellent books on García Márquez’s time in Cartagena: Gustavo Arango, Un ramo de nomeolvides: García Márquez en “ El Universal” (Cartagena, El Universal, 1995) and Jorge García Usta, Como aprendió a escribir García Márquez (Medellín, Lealon, 1995), which appeared in a revised edition and with a slightly less inflammatory title in 2007: García Márquez en Cartagena: sus inicios liter arios (Bogotá, Planeta, 2007). Both claim more for the impact of the city upon his development as a writer than the evidence can perhaps sustain, but they both write as correctives to the majority view that it was the subsequent period in Barranquilla (1950–53) which was decisive. They were reacting above all against the work of the French scholar Jacques Gilard, who, in the 1970s, gathered together all García Márquez’s journalism in El Universal (Cartagena), El Heraldo (Barranquilla), El Espectador (Bogotá) and elsewhere. Whatever view is taken of this ongoing polemic Gilard’s contribution to García Márquez studies is unsurpassed and his prologues to the volumes of GGM’s Obra periodística are indispensable. No more than a handful of GGM’s more than 1,000 articles, essays and brief literary pieces published in the press between 1948 and 2008 have ever appeared in English. Specifically on this period, see Jacques Gilard, ed., Gabriel García Márquez, Obra periodística vol. I: Textos costeños 1 (Bogotá, Oveja Negra, 1983).
3. Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 3 06–16, tells the story of these days and weeks in great detail.
4. See profile of Rojas Herazo by GGM, El Heraldo (Barranquilla), 14 March 1950.
5. Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 313–14 and pp. 320–21. In Living GGM calls him “José Dolores.”
6. See “Un domingo de delirio,” El Espectador, 8 March 1981, in which GGM, back in Cartagena, talks about its magic and reveals that his favourite place used to be the wharf of the Bahía de las Animas, where the market used to be. See also “Un payaso pintado detrás de una puerta,” El Espectador, 1 May 1982.
7. Although, in Cartagena, it is thought that García Márquez did not acknowledge Zabala precisely because he learned so much from him, in 1980 García Márquez said to a journalist, Donaldo Bossa Herazo, “Zabala is a gentleman to whom I owe much of what I am.” (Arango, Un ramo de nomeolvides, p. 136.)
8. The two articles, both untitled, appeared in El Universal under the “Punto y Aparte” byline on 21 and 22 May 1948, six weeks after the Bogotazo.
9. These and all his other articles from this period can be found in Gilard, ed., Textos costeños 1.
10. See Gilard, ed., Textos costeños 1, pp. 94–5.
11. Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 324–5.
12. Ligia GM, in Galvis, Los GM, p. 169.
13. Arango, Un ramo de nomeolvides, p. 178.
14. García Usta, Como aprendió a escribir García Márquez, p. 49.
15. The phrase in Spanish was “tan modosito” (Arango, Un ramo de nomeolvides, p. 67).
16. Ibid., p. 275.
17. Franco Múnera, quoted by Ibid., p. 178. The detail is significant: in the racist Colombia of the 1940s, above all in Bogotá, the drum was a coded sign for costeño culture in general and black culture in particular; García Márquez’s explicit attachment to that instrument was, equally, a sign of an attachment to his regional culture and a gesture of defiance to the cachaco view of the world.
18. El Universal, 27 June 1948.
19. See GGM’s article on Poe in El Universal, 7 October 1949. On his relation with Ibarra Merlano, see Cobo Borda, “Cuatro horas de comadreo literario con GGM,” op. cit.
20. El Universal, 4 July 1948; see Arango, Un ramo de nomeolvides, p. 149. The article was republished in El Heraldo (Barranquilla), 16 February 1950, with the addition of the name Albaniña.
21. El Universal, 10 July 1948; republished with slight differences in El Heraldo, 1 February 1950.
22. Arango, Un ramo de nomeolvides, pp. 208, 222.
23. Luis Enrique GM, interview, Barranquilla, 1998.
24. Luis Enrique GM, interview, Barranquilla, 1993.
25. Living to Tell the Tale, pp. 333–9.
26. See GGM, “El viaje de Ramiro de la Espriella,” El Universal, 26 July 1949, which mentions both writers.
27. See Virginia Woolf, Orlando (New York, Vintage, 2000), p. 176: “But love—as the male novelists define it—and who, after all, speak with greater authority?—has nothing whatever to do with kindness, fidelity, generosity, or poetry. Love is slipping off one’s petticoat and—But we all know what love is. Did Orlando do that?” (My emphasis.)
28. The phrase was “mucha vieja macha”: see Arango, Un ramo de nomeolvides, p. 220.
29. Rafael Betancourt Bustillo, quoted by García Usta, pp. 52–3.
30. Arango, Un ramo de nomeolvides, p. 231.
31. But this would have involved, again, inventing so-called “magical realism” all on his own, and writers more than twice his age such as Miguel Angel Asturias (Men of Maize, 1949) and Alejo Carpentier (The Kingdom of This World, 1949) were only just getting round to this idea as García Márquez began to wrestle with “The House,” in a country whose fiction was painfully backward even by the Latin American standards of the time.
32. Vivir para contarla, p. 411. (My translation.)
33. See GGM’s articles on La Sierpe in Gilard, ed., Gabriel García Márquez, Obra periodística vol.
II: Textos costeños 2 (Bogotá, Oveja Negra, 1983).
34. See Eligio García, La tercera muerte de Santiago Nasar (Bogotá, Oveja Negra, 1987), p. 61.
35. See GGM, “La cándida Eréndira y su abuela Irene Papas,” El Espectador, 3 November 1982.
36. Fiorillo, La Cueva, p. 95.
37. In Living to Tell the Tale, p. 350, he says he starts it now! On p. 363 he says it was never more than “fragments” anyway!
38. Arango, Un ramo de nomeolvides, p. 266.
39. Ibid., p. 243. Jaime Angulo Bossa recalls that in Cartagena in those days he and Garcí Márquez always shook one another’s left hand (Ibid., p. 302). Ironically enough, although critics have argued interminably as to whether García Márquez’s reading of modernist novels originated in Cartagena or Barranquilla, none of them seem to have noticed that his active political education undoubtedly began right there in Cartagena, due first to Zabala and then to Ramiro de la Espriella; politics was never the Barran-quilla Group’s principal concern.
40. See Juan Gossaín, “A Cayetano lo mató todo el pueblo,” El Espectador, 13 May 1981, in which Luis Enrique GM tells the extraordinary story of María Alejandrina Cervantes: her improvised brothel in Sucre was “a sort of office where we all met during the vacations … My mother never worried if it was late and Gabito hadn’t got home because she knew he was at María Alejandrina’s. I don’t know if people can understand the way things were thirty years ago without being scandalized …”
41. GGM, “Viernes,” El Universal, 24 June 1949. The book’s importance to him was such that, no doubt exaggerating, he would later attribute his entire understanding of the nature of time both in life and in fiction to having read Mrs. Dalloivay.
42. Gilard, ed., Textos costeños 1, pp. 7–10; Saldívar, GM, pp. 556–7.
43. GGM, “Abelito Villa, Escalona & Cía,” El Heraldo, 14 March 1950.
44. Arango, Un ramo de nomeolvides, p. 237.
45. Both Arango and García Usta take this line.
7 / Barranquilla, a Bookseller and a Bohemian Group (1950–1953)
1. Arango, Un ramo de nomeolvides, p. 222.
2. Ibid., p. 311. This chapter draws upon interviews with the GM brothers and sisters, Alfonso Fuenmayor (Barranquilla, 1991, 1993), Germán Vargas (Barranquilla, 1991), Alejandro Obregón (Cartagena, 1991), Tita Cepeda (Barranquilla, 1991), Susy Linares de Vargas (Barranquilla, 1991), Heliodoro García (Barranquilla, 1991), Guillermo Marín (Barranquilla, 1991), Quique Scopell (Barranquilla, 1993), Katya González (Barranquilla, 1991), Pacho Bottía (Barranquilla, 1991), Ben Woolford (London, 1991), Ramón Illán Bacca (Barranquilla, 1991, 2007), Antonio María Peñaloza Cervantes (Aracataca, 1991), Otto Garzón Patiño (Barranquilla, 1993), Alberto Assa (Barranquilla, 1993), Juan Roda and María Fornaguera de Roda (Bogotá, 1993), Jacques Gilard (Toulouse, 1999, 2004), Guillermo Henríquez (Barranquilla, 2007), Meira Delmar (Barranquilla, 2007), Jaime Abello (Barranquilla, 2007), and many others.
3. Conversation, Mexico City, 1993.
4. On the Barranquilla Group see especially Alfonso Fuenmayor, Crónicas sobre el grupo de Barranquilla (Bogotá, Instituto Colombiano de Cultura, 1978) and Fiorillo, La Cueva, which has outstanding illustrations. Fiorillo has produced several other invaluable works on cultural matters surrounding the group. On Vinyes, see Jacques Gilard, Entre los Andes y el Caribe: la obra amerkana de Ramón Vinyes (Medellín, Universidad de Antioquia, 1989) and Jordi Lladó, Ramon Vinyes: un home de lletres entre Catalunya i el Caribe (Barcelona, Generalitat de Catalunya, 2006).
5. “What, you are Subirats? Subirats, the mediocre translator of Joyce?” (Fuenmayor, Crónicas sobre el grupo, p. 43).
6. Fiorillo, La Cueva, pp. 46, 98.
7. See Alvaro Mutis, “Apuntes sobre un viaje que no era para contar,” in Mera, ed., Aracataca-Estocolmo, pp. 19–20, for examples.
8. See Fiorillo, La Cueva, p. 108.
9. Daniel Samper, Prologue, Antologta de Alvaro Cepeda Samudio (Bogotá, Biblioteca Colombiana de Cultura, 1977); also Plinio Mendoza, “Requiem,” La llama y el hielo.
10. See GM, “Obregón, o la vocación desaforada,” El Espectador, 20 October 1982.
11. “El grupo de Barranquilla,” Vanguardia Liberal, Bucaramanga, 22 January 1956, quoted by Gilard in GGM, Obra periodística vol. V: De Europa y América 1 (Bogotá, Oveja Negra, 1984), p. 15.
12. Fiorillo, La Cueva, p. 96.
13. Ibid., pp. 136–7.
14. Ibid., p. 58; in more recent times the singer Shakira’s father had a jeweller’s shop there.
15. The present writer was given an unforgettable tour of this zone by Alfonso Fuenmayor in 1993, not long before he died; Jaime Abello, director of GGM’s Foundation for New Ibero-American Journalism, gave me a splendid update in 2006.
16. It may have been Rondón who first introduced GGM to the world of communism. See “‘Estoy comprometido hasta el tuétano con el periodismo político: Alternativa entrevista a GGM,” Alternativa (Bogotá), 29, 31 March-13 April 1975, p. 3, where he mentions belonging to a communist cell “at the age of twenty-two.”
17. See the first paragraph of Living to Tell the Tale.
18. Fiorillo, La Cueva, p. 74. Eufemia’s brothel is another place given mythical status by references in García Márquez’s story “The Night of the Curlews” and One Hundred Years of Solitude. Many of the group’s escapades were later immortalized in both literature and local legend, such as the time when Alfonso Fuenmayor frightened a parrot down from a tree and it fell into the sancocho stew that is always boiling away in anecdotes about costeño brothels at this time; García Márquez, without thinking, picked up the saucepan’s great lid and the parrot met its destiny as a substitute for chicken in the fragrant bubbling stew. On prostitution and literature in Barranquilla see Adlai Stevenson Samper, Polvos en La Arenosa: cultura y burdeles en Barranquilla (Barranquilla, La Iguana Ciega, 2005).
19. Fiorillo, La Cueva, p. 93.
20. GGM told me this in Havana in 1997.
21. See Living to Tell the Tale, p. 363. In Memories of My Melancholy Whores her fictional re-creation will be called Castorina.
22. In Living to Tell the Tale he is called not Dámaso but Lácides.
23. Faulkner said this in his famous Paris Review interview, which made a big impression on GGM. For an early description of the Skyscraper and its inhabitants see Plinio Mendoza, “Entrevista con Gabriel García Márquez,” Libre (Paris), 3, March-May 1972, pp. 7–8.
24. “Una mujer con importancia,” El Heraldo, 11 January 1950.
25. “El barbero de la historia,” El Heraldo, 25 May 1951.
26. “Illya en Londres,” El Heraldo, 29 July 1950.
27. “Memorias de un aprendiz de antropófago,” El Heraldo, 9 February 1951.
28. “La peregrinación de la jirafa,” El Heraldo, 30 May 1950.
29. Saldívar, GM: el viaje a la semilla, refutes GGM’s story and asserts categorically that the visit to Aracataca with his mother was in 1952 and that GGM only said that it was in 1950 in order to make Barranquilla the place where Leaf Storm was first written and in order to make the journey with his mother its inspiration—whereas in fact, according to Saldívar, Leaf Storm was first written in Cartagena in 1948-9! Since at the time Saldívar asserted this GGM was planning to make the journey with his mother the point of departure for his entire memoir and the definitive confirmation of his literary vocation, Saldívar’s hypothesis is especially reckless—and, in my judgement, entirely mistaken.
30. Later he would use this memory to create his story “Tuesday Siesta” about the mother and sister of a dead thief who have to walk through the hostile streets of Macondo to visit his grave. Those who have read Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (1955), which had an enormous influence on GGM, starting with the first line of OHYS, will have noted that both the style and the content of this section of Living to Tell the Tale are reminiscent of Juan Preciado’s arrival in Comala at the start of Rulfo’s book. On Aracataca at this time, see Lázaro Diago Julio, Aracataca
… una historia para contar (Aracataca, 1989, unpublished), pp. 198–212.
31. Ironically enough, the local historian Diago Julio says that 1950 was Aracataca’s most prosperous year since the 1920s (Ibid., p. 215).
32. Living to Tell the Tale, p. 26.
33. GGM, interviewed by Peter Stone for the Paris Review in 1981. See Philip Gourevitch, ed., The “Paris Review” Interviews, Vol. II (London, Canongate, 2007), pp. 185–6.
34. Said to me in 1999; and see Anthony Day and Marjorie Miller, “Gabo talks: GGM on the misfortunes of Latin America, his friendship with Fidel Castro and his terror of the blank page,” Los Angeles Times Magazine, 2 September 1990, p. 33.
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