PART I
1
FIVE HUNDRED YEARS after Europeans stumbled across it, Latin America often seems a disappointment to its inhabitants. It is as if its destiny had been fixed by Columbus, “the great captain,” who discovered the new continent by mistake, misnamed it—“the Indies”—and then died embittered and disillusioned in the early sixteenth century; or by the “great liberator” Simón Bolívar, who put an end to Spanish colonial rule in the early nineteenth century but died dismayed at the newly emancipated region’s disunity and at the bitter thought that “he who makes a revolution ploughs the sea.” More recently the fate of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the twentieth century’s most romantic revolutionary icon, who died a martyr’s death in Bolivia in 1967, only confirmed the idea that Latin America, still the unknown continent, still the land of the future, is home to grandiose dreams and calamitous failures.1
Long before the name of Guevara circled the planet, in a small Colombian town which history only briefly illuminated during the years when the Boston-based United Fruit Company chose to plant bananas there in the early twentieth century, a small boy would listen while his grandfather told tales of a war that lasted a thousand days, at the end of which he too had experienced the bitter solitude of the vanquished, tales of glorious deeds in days gone by, of ghostly heroes and villains, stories which taught the child that justice is not naturally built in to the fabric of life, that right does not always triumph in the kingdom of this world, and that ideals which fill the hearts and minds of many men and women may be defeated and even disappear from the face of the earth. Unless they endure in the memory of those who survive and live to tell the tale.
AT THE END of the nineteenth century, seventy years after achieving independence from Spain, the republic of Colombia had been a country of less than five million controlled by an elite of perhaps three thousand owners of large haciendas, most of whom were politicians and businessmen, and many also lawyers, writers or grammarians—which is why the capital, Bogotá, became known as the “Athens of South America.” The War of a Thousand Days was the last and most devastating of more than twenty national and local civil wars which had ravaged Colombia during the nineteenth century, fought between Liberals and Conservatives, centralists and federalists, bourgeoisie and landowners, the capital and the regions. In most other countries the nineteenth century gradually saw the Liberals or their equivalents winning the historical battle, whereas in Colombia the Conservatives were dominant until 1930 and, after a Liberal interlude from 1930 to 1946, took charge again until the mid-1950s and remain a powerful force to the present day. Certainly Colombia is the only country where, at the end of the twentieth century, the general elections were still being fought out between a traditional Liberal Party and a traditional Conservative Party, with no other parties gaining a lasting foothold.2 This has changed in the last ten years.
Although named the “War of a Thousand Days,” the conflict was really over almost before it began. The Conservative government had vastly superior resources and the Liberals were at the mercy of the eccentricities of their inspirational but incompetent leader Rafael Uribe Uribe. Nevertheless the war dragged on for almost three years, increasingly cruel, increasingly bitter and increasingly futile. From October 1900 neither side took prisoners: a “war to the death” was announced whose sombre implications Colombia is living with still. When it all ended in November 1902 the country was devastated and impoverished, the province of Panama about to be lost for ever and perhaps a hundred thousand Colombians had been slaughtered. Feuds and vendettas resulting from the way the conflict had been fought were to continue for many decades. This has made Colombia a curious country in which the two major parties have ostensibly been bitter enemies for almost two centuries yet have tacitly united to ensure that the people never receive genuine representation. No Latin American nation had fewer coups or dictatorships in the twentieth century than Colombia but the Colombian people have paid a staggeringly high price for this appearance of institutional stability.
The War of a Thousand Days was fought over the length and breadth of the country but the centre of gravity gradually shifted north to the Atlantic coastal regions. On the one hand the seat of government, Bogotá, was never seriously threatened by the Liberal rebels; and on the other hand, the Liberals inevitably retreated towards the coastal escape routes which their leaders frequently took in order to seek refuge in sympathetic neighbouring countries or the United States, where they would try to raise funds and buy weapons for the next round of hostilities. At this time the northern third of the country, known as la Costa (“the Coast”), whose inhabitants are called costeños (coast-dwellers), comprised two major departments: Bolívar to the west, whose capital was the port of Cartagena; and Magdalena to the east, whose capital was the port of Santa Marta, nestling beneath the mighty Sierra Nevada. The two major cities either side of the Sierra Nevada—Santa Marta to the west and Riohacha to the east—and all the towns in between as you rode around the sierra—Ciénaga, Aracataca, Valledupar, Villanueva, San Juan, Fonseca and Barrancas—changed hands many times during the war and provided the scenario for the exploits of Nicolás Márquez and his two eldest, illegitimate children, José María Valdeblánquez and Carlos Alberto Valdeblánquez.
Some time in the early 1890s Nicolás Márquez and Tranquilina Iguarán had moved with their two children Juan de Dios and Margarita to the small town of Barrancas in the Colombian Guajira and rented a house in the Calle del Totumo, a few paces from the square. The house still stands today. Señor Márquez set up as a jeweller, making and selling his own pieces—necklaces, rings, bracelets, chains and his speciality, little gold fish—and establishing, it seems, a profitable business which turned him into a respected member of the community. His apprentice and eventual partner was a younger man called Eugenio Ríos, almost an adopted son, with whom he had worked in Riohacha, having brought him from El Carmen de Bolívar. Ríos was the half-brother of Nicolás’s cousin Francisca Cimodosea Mejía, with whom Nicolás had grown up in El Carmen and whom he would later take with him to Aracataca. When the War of a Thousand Days began, after many years of Liberal frustration and bitterness, Nicolás Márquez was, at thirty-five, getting a bit old for adventure. Besides, he had established a comfortable, productive and agreeable life in Barrancas and was looking to build on his growing prosperity. Still, he joined the army of Uribe Uribe, fought in the Guajira, Padilla and Magdalena provinces and there is evidence that he fought harder and longer than many others. Certainly he was involved from the very start when, as a comandante, he was part of a Liberal army which occupied his native city of Riohacha, and he was still involved at the conclusion of the conflict in October 1902.
By the end of August 1902 the recently reinforced Liberal army, now under the command of Uribe Uribe, who had recently made one of his frequent unscheduled reappearances, had marched its way westward around the sierra from Riohacha to the small village of Aracataca, already known as a Liberal stronghold, arriving on 5 September. There Uribe Uribe held two days of talks with Generals Clodomiro Castillo and José Rosario Durán and other officers, including Nicolás Márquez. And it was there, in Aracataca, that they made the fateful decision to fight one more time which would lead to their disastrous defeat at the Battle of Ciénaga.
Uribe advanced on Ciénaga in the early morning of 14 October 1902. The battle went badly for the Liberals from the moment that a government warship began to shell their positions from the sea. Uribe Uribe was shot from his mule and several bullets that pierced his jacket miraculously missed his person (not for the first time). He exclaimed, as García Márquez’s Colonel Aureliano Buendía might have done: “How many changes of uniform do these damned Goths think I have!” (“Goths” was the Liberal name for the Conservatives.) Nicolás Márquez’s teenage son Carlos Alberto died a hero’s death; his elder brother José María, fourth in command of the Conservative army’s “Carazúa Division,” survived.
Two days later, shattered by the death of Carlos Alberto, José María rode out of Ciénaga towards the encampment of the defeated Liberals, where his father, among others, was nursing his wounds. José María was carrying a peace offer from the Conservatives. As his mule approached the tents of the defeated Liberals an advance party intercepted him and he rode in blindfolded to present the Conservative terms to Uribe Uribe. What took place between the nineteen-year-old illegitimate son and his rebel father on an historic occasion overshadowed for both of them by the death of the younger son, we shall never know. Uribe Uribe discussed the Conservative proposal with his senior officers. They decided to accept. The young messenger rode back to Ciénaga and arrived late at night at the railway station, where he was greeted by a delirious crowd and carried aloft to deliver the joyful news. Ten days later, on 24 October 1902, Conservative leaders and Uribe Uribe met with their respective chiefs of staff at a banana plantation called Neerlandia not far from Ciénaga, to sign the peace treaty. It was little more than a fig leaf concealing the bitter truth: that the Liberals had suffered a disastrous defeat.
LATE IN 1902, Nicolás Márquez went back to Barrancas and his wife Tranquilina and picked up the threads of his life. In 1905 their third child, Luisa Santiaga, was born and things appeared to have returned to normal.3 But in 1908 Nicolás was involved in a violent encounter which would change his family’s destiny for ever and he was forced to leave Barrancas. Everyone still knew the story when I passed through Barrancas eighty-five years later in 1993. Unfortunately everyone told a different version. Still, no one denies the following facts. Around five o’clock on the rainy afternoon of Monday 19 October 1908, the final day of the week-long Festival of the Virgin of Pilar, whilst the procession carrying her image was proceeding to the church just a few streets away, Colonel Nicolás Márquez, a respectable local politician, landowner, silversmith and family man, then in his forties, shot and killed a younger man called Medardo, the nephew of his friend and comrade in arms General Francisco Romero. Something else that no one denies is that Nicolás was a “ladies’ man” or, more bluntly, a philanderer. To readers from some other parts of the world this quality might seem to conflict with his image as a man of dignity and good standing among his neighbours. But there are at least two sorts of renown which a man prizes in such a society: one is his “good reputation” as such, the conventional respect, always mingled with fear, which he should know how to impose; and the other is his reputation as a “Don Juan” or a “macho,” which others will happily circulate for him, usually with his complaisance. The trick is to ensure that these reputations mutually reinforce one another.
The first version I heard was as convincing as any that followed. Filemón Estrada had been born in the very year the events took place. He was now completely sightless, and that long-ago story had retained for him a vividness which other testimonies had lost. Filemón said that Nicolás, who already had several illegitimate children, seduced Medarda Romero, the sister of his old friend General Romero, and then bragged about it over drinks in the square. There was a lot of gossip, most of it at Medarda’s expense but some of it involving Tranquilina. Medarda said to her son, “This slander must be washed clean with blood, my son, there’s no other way. And if you won’t see to him I’ll have to put on your trousers and you can put on my skirts!” Medardo, a skilled marksman who had ridden with Nicolás in the war, and now lived in nearby Papayal, repeatedly and publicly challenged and insulted his former commander, who took the warnings seriously and some time later lay in wait for the younger man. Medardo rode in to town on the day of the fiesta, dressed up in a white gabardine raincoat, and took a short cut down an alleyway that no longer exists. As he got down from his horse with a bunch of grass in one hand and a lighted pilgrim’s candle in the other, Nicolás said, “Are you armed, Medardo?” Medardo said “No.” “Well, you remember what I told you”—and Nicolás fired one, some say two shots. An old woman who lived down that alleyway came out and said, “So you finally killed him.” “The bullet of right has prevailed over might,” said Nicolás. “After that,” said blind Filemón, “old Nicolás Márquez charged off down the street, leaping over puddles, with his gun in one hand and his umbrella in the other, and looked for Lorenzo Solano Gómez, his compadre, who went with him to give himself up. He was jailed but later his son José María Valdeblánquez, who was very smart, and almost a lawyer, got him out of jail. Medardo being illegitimate, it wasn’t certain whether his surname was Pacheco or Romero, so Valdeblánquez said it wasn’t clear who exactly had been killed; it was a technicality, see, and that’s how Valdeblánquez got him off.”
None other than Ana Ríos, the daughter of Nicolás’s partner Eugenio, who surely had better reason to know than most, told me that Tranquilina was closely involved in the entire tragedy.4 She recalled that Tranquilina was intensely jealous, and with good reason because Nicolás was always deceiving her. Medarda was a widow and there is always talk about widows in small towns. It was widely rumoured that she was Nicolás’s regular mistress. Tranquilina became obsessed with this possibility, perhaps because Medarda was from a higher class, and therefore more dangerous, than his other conquests. It was said that Tranquilina consulted witches, brought water from the river to clean her threshold and sprinkled lemon juice around the house. Then one day—it is said—she went out into the street and shouted, “There’s a fire at widow Medarda’s place, fire, fire!,” whereupon a boy she had paid to wait in the tower of the the church of San José began to ring the alarm bells, and shortly thereafter Nicolás was seen sneaking out of Medarda’s house in broad daylight (presumably while his friend the General was away).
When he gave his statement to the authorities Nicolás Márquez was asked whether he admitted killing Medardo Romero Pacheco, and he said: “Yes, and if he comes back to life I’ll kill him again.” The Mayor, a Conservative, resolved to protect Nicolás. Deputies were despatched to collect Medardo’s body. He was placed face down in the rain and his hands were tied together behind his back before they carried him away. Most people accept that Medardo sought the confrontation and “asked for” what happened; this may be, although the bare facts seem to demonstrate that it was Nicolás who chose the time, the place and the manner of the final showdown. There is not enough information to appreciate how justified or reprehensible his action may have been; what is crystal clear is that there was nothing remotely heroic about it. Nicolás was not some sedentary farmer but a seasoned war veteran; and the man he killed by stealth was both his military inferior and his junior.
Many in Barrancas saw it as fate. The Spanish word for such an event is a desgracia, closer to bad luck than to disgrace, and it is said that many of Medardo’s family sympathized with the Colonel in his misfortune. Still, there was talk of a lynching and fear of a riot so as soon as it was safe to extricate him, they sent Nicolás under armed guard to Riohacha, his home town. Even there he was not considered secure and was moved to another prison in Santa Marta, on the other side of the Sierra Nevada.5 It seems an influential relative of Tranquilina’s got the sentence reduced to just a year in jail in Santa Marta with “the city as his prison” for the second year. Tranquilina, the children and other family members followed him there some months later. Some say he managed to buy his release with the proceeds of his craft; that he worked at his jewellery inside the jail and made fish, butterflies and chalices for sale and then bribed his way out. No one has yet found any documents relating to the case.
The García Márquez family never faced up to the full implications of this event and a sanitized version of the story was adopted. According to this version at some point a rumour emerged that Medarda, who was no spring chicken, was once more “doing some local man a favour.” One of Nicolás’s friends commented on this piece of gossip while they were drinking in the main square and Nicolás said, “I wonder if it’s true?” Medarda heard the story in a form which suggested that Nicolás himself had been peddling the rumour, and asked her son to defend her honour. In later years Luisa would often recall that in alluding to the almost unmentionable episode Tranquilina would say, “And all over a simple question.” In this version the gunfight is a “duel,” the dead man gets what he deserves and the killer becomes “the real victim” of the murder.6
In 1967, in the immediate aftermath of the success of One Hundred Years of Solitude (in which García Márquez gives a less idealized version of the murder than the rest of his family), Mario Vargas Llosa asked its author who the key person was in his childhood. García Márquez replied: “It was my grandfather. And note that he was a gentleman that I found afterwards in my books. He had to kill a man when he was very young. He lived in a town and it seems there was someone who was always bothering him and challenging him, but he took no notice until the situation became so difficult that he simply put a bullet in him. It seems that the town was so much in agreement with what he did that one of the dead man’s brothers slept that night in front of the door to the house, in front of my grandfather’s room, so that the dead man’s family would not come to avenge him. So my grandfather, who could no longer bear the threat that existed against him in that town, went elsewhere; that is to say, he didn’t just go to another town; he went far away with his family and founded a new town. Yes, he went and founded a town; yet what I most remember about my grandfather is him always saying to me, ‘You don’t know how much a dead man weighs.’”7 Many years after that García Márquez would say to me: “I don’t know why my grandfather had to be caught up in all that and why it all had to happen but they were tough times after the war. I still believe he just had to do it.”8
It may just be a coincidence but October would always be the gloomiest month, the time of evil augury, in Gabriel García Márquez’s novels.
MYSTERY SURROUNDS Nicolás Márquez’s movements after his ignominious departure from Barrancas.9 García Márquez’s mother Luisa gave different versions to different interlocutors.10 She told me that she and Tranquilina sailed from Riohacha to Santa Marta a few months after Nicolás was transferred to the prison there (Luisa was only four), that he was released after a year and the family then moved to nearby Ciénaga for a further year, arriving in Aracataca in 1910. This had become the official story. But people in Ciénaga insist that Nicolás and family spent three years there after his release from prison, from 1910 to 1913, and only moved to Aracataca in 1913.11 It may be that Nicolás used Ciénaga as a base from which to scout the region for new opportunities; if so, he might have begun to develop political and commercial interests in Aracataca, a mainly Liberal town, before moving his family there. It also seems likely however that one reason for staying in Ciénaga, whether for one year or three, was the fact that Ciénaga was now the home of Isabel Ruiz, whom Nicolás had met in Panama in 1885, around the time of his marriage to Tranquilina, and who had given birth to his daughter María Gregoria Ruiz in 1886.
Ciénaga, unlike colonial Santa Marta, was modern, commercial, raucous and unrestrained; it was also a hub for regional transportation. It too is on the shores of the Caribbean; it was the connection with the Ciénaga Grande, or Great Swamp, across which steamboats travelled to make contact with road traffic heading either for the Magdalena River and Bogotá or for the rapidly growing commercial city of Barranquilla; and the first railway in the region ran from Santa Marta to Ciénaga after 1887 and then was extended between 1906 and 1908 to run down the spine of the Banana Zone to Aracataca and Fundación.
The Banana Zone is situated south of Santa Marta, between the Ciénaga Grande and the Magdalena River to the west, the Caribbean or Atlantic Ocean to the north, and the great swamp and the Sierra Nevada, whose highest peaks are called Columbus and Bolívar, to the east.12 In the broad plain between the western side of the mountains and the great swamp lay the small settlement called Aracataca, the birthplace of Gabriel García Márquez. Up above it rose the Sierra Nevada, home of the reclusive, peace-loving Kogi Indians. The first founders of Aracataca were quite different people, the warlike Chimilas, an Arawak Indian group. The tribe and its chief were called Cataca, “clear water.” Thus they renamed the river Cataca, and so their village was called Aracataca (“ara” being river in Chimila), the place of diaphanous waters.13
In 1887 planters from Santa Marta introduced banana cultivation into the region. In 1905 the Boston-based United Fruit Company moved in. Workers migrated from all over the Caribbean, including cachacos (the derisive costeño name for their compatriots from the interior of the country, especially Bogotá),14 and others from Venezuela, Europe, and even the Middle and Far East: the so-called “leaf-trash” vilified by the protagonists of García Márquez’s first novel Leaf Storm. Within a few years Aracataca was transformed from a small settlement to a thriving township, a “Wild West boom town,” in García Márquez’s phrase. It became a municipality, a fully functioning part of Colombia’s national political system, in 1915.
The real leader of the town was not Colonel Márquez, as his grandson would frequently claim, but General José Rosario Durán.15 Durán had several large plantations around Aracataca; he had led the Liberal forces in regional wars for two decades and was the effective leader of the Aracataca Liberals for almost half a century. Nicolás Márquez had been one of his close military subordinates, and became perhaps his most trusted political ally in Aracataca, during the 1910–13 period. It was Durán, then, who had helped Márquez to get installed in the town, to buy land out at Ariguaní and other properties in the town itself, and to acquire the posts of departmental tax collector and later municipal treasurer.16 These responsibilities, added to his military reputation, made Colonel Márquez undoubtedly one of the most respected and powerful members of the local community, though he was always dependent on Durán’s goodwill and subject to pressures from the Conservative government’s political appointees and the managers of the United Fruit Company.
García Márquez’s mother Luisa told me that Nicolás was named “departmental tax collector” of Aracataca early in the century,17 possibly in 1909, but did not take his family there immediately because of the poor sanitary conditions in the newly developing tropical boom town, at that time a village of fewer than two thousand people. Still, let us imagine them all arriving—Colonel Márquez, Doña Tranquilina, their three legitimate children, Juan de Dios, Margarita and Luisa, his illegitimate daughter Elvira Ríos, his sister Wenefrida Márquez, his cousin Francisca Cimodosea Mejía, and his three Indian servants, Alirio, Apolinar and Meme, bought for 100 pesos each in the Guajira—on the banana company’s yellow-painted train, full of optimism, on an exploratory visit, in August 1910. Unfortunately the zone around Aracataca was still unhealthy and plagued by disease, and tragedy struck the new arrivals almost immediately when twenty-one-year-old Margarita died of typhoid. Always pale, with her fair hair in two plaits, she was the Colonel’s pride and joy and he and his superstitious family may have interpreted her death as some kind of further punishment for his sins in Barrancas. Now she would never make the kind of marriage her parents were no doubt envisaging, and all their hopes would rest on little Luisa. Family tradition tells that shortly before she died, Margarita sat up in bed, looking at her father, and said: “The eyes of your house are going out.”18 Her pale presence would live on in the collective memory, especially, paradoxically, in a picture taken when she was ten years old; and the anniversary of the day she died, 31 December, would never again be celebrated in the large, comfortable house which the Colonel began to build near the Plaza Bolívar.
Nicolás Márquez, though never wealthy, and always hoping in vain for the pension promised to all veterans of the civil war, became one of the makeshift community’s local notables, a big fish in a small pool, the eventual owner of a large wooden residence with cement floors which in Aracataca would be considered—not least by his grandson Gabriel—a veritable mansion by comparison with the shacks and hovels that housed most of their fellow townsfolk.
THE COLONEL’S DAUGHTER Luisa was almost nineteen and her father had already turned sixty when in July of 1924 a new telegraphist named Gabriel Eligio García arrived in town from his native Sincé.19 By that time Aracataca had been enjoying the jai lai or “high life” for several years. Luisa had been sent to the Colegio de la Presentación, the most respected convent school in stuffy Santa Marta, though she had left at seventeen due to her delicate health. “She never went back because our grandparents said she looked very thin and worn and they were afraid she would die like her sister Margarita,” her daughter Ligia recalls.20 Luisa could sew and play the piano. She had been educated to embody the improvement in station that Nicolás and Tranquilina were looking for as consolation when they moved from the Guajira to the Banana Zone. So the Colonel was thunderstruck at the idea that his carefully groomed daughter might be falling in love with a dark-skinned no-account telegraphist from elsewhere, a man with no father and few prospects.
Nicolás Márquez and his daughter’s suitor, Gabriel Eligio García, had very little in common when they met except, ironically enough, a matter which is a recurrent theme of Gabriel García Márquez’s work: a collection of illegitimate children. Although Nicolás had been born in wedlock and Gabriel Eligio out of wedlock, each had engendered more than one illegitimate child by the time they married in their early twenties.
Gabriel Eligio had spent his childhood and youth in poverty, though little is known in detail of his early life—indeed, little detail seems to have been asked of him even by his children: it was always the Márquez side which counted, and the Guajira connection.21We do know that he had half-brothers and half-sisters named Luis Enrique, Benita, Julio, Ena Marquesita, Adán Reinaldo and Eliécer. We also know that, with the help of relatives, he completed his secondary education—a notable achievement anywhere in the world in those days—and we hear that in the early 1920s he managed to begin some courses in the medical school of the University of Cartagena, but was soon forced to abandon them. He would later tell his children that his father, a teacher, had undertaken to fund his training but ran into financial problems and had to renege on his promise. Without the means to sustain his studies, he left home and looked for work in the Caribbean provinces of Córdoba and Bolívar, working mainly as a small-town telegraphist but also as a homeopathic physician, and travelling the entire frontier region of rivers, swamps and forests. He became possibly the first telegraphist of Magangué, then worked in Tolú, Sincelejo and other towns. At that time the position of telegraphist was undoubtedly reputable among the lower classes, depending as it did on modern technology in the machinery and literacy in the operator. It was also hard, demanding work. In Achí, a small town on the River Cauca, south of Sucre, the first of his four illegitimate children, Abelardo, was born, when Gabriel Eligio was just nineteen, and in 1924 he ran into more trouble in Ayapel, on the border of Córdoba province and what is now Sucre province, on the edge of a vast swamp. There, in August 1924, he asked his first true sweetheart, Carmelina Hermosillo, to marry him after she gave birth to another child, Carmen Rosa. During a trip to Barranquilla to make the arrangements, he was apparently dissuaded by his relative Carlos Henrique Pareja from such a naive decision,22 and fled to the plantation town of Aracataca, where he again found work as a telegraphist. By then he was a practised seducer, hungry for sexual conquest wrapped up in poetry and love songs. Or, as his famous son would later put it, “a typical Caribbean guy of the era.” Meaning, among other things: talkative, extrovert, hyperbolic and dark or very dark of skin.
He arrived in Colonel Nicolás Márquez’s house in Aracataca with a letter of recommendation from a priest in Cartagena who had known Colonel Márquez in earlier days. For this reason, according to Gabriel Eligio’s own version, the Colonel, famous for his hospitality, greeted him warmly, invited him to eat, and the next day took him to Santa Marta, where his wife Tranquilina and their only daughter Luisa were spending the summer by the seaside. At the station in Santa Marta, the Colonel bought a lark in a cage and gave it to Gabriel Eligio for him to give it in turn to Luisa as a present. This—which sounds frankly implausible—would have been the Colonel’s first mistake, even though, again according to Gabriel Eligio, he did not fall for Luisa at first sight. “To be honest,” he would recall, “I was not at all impressed by Luisa, even though she was very pretty.”23
Luisa was no more impressed by Gabriel Eligio than he was by her. She always insisted that they met first not in Santa Marta but in Aracataca at the wake of a local child and that as she and the other young women sang to send the child on its way to a better place a male voice joined the choir, and when they all turned to see who it was they saw a handsome young man in a dark jacket with its four buttons done up. The other girls chorused, “We’re going to marry him,” but Luisa said that to her he seemed like “just another stranger.”24 Luisa, who was no pushover despite her lack of experience, was on her guard and for a long time she would rebuff each and every one of his advances.
The telegraph office was opposite the church, behind the main square in Aracataca, close to the cemetery and just a couple of blocks from the Colonel’s house.25 The new arrival had a second letter of recommendation, this one to the parish priest. Whether the good Father noticed that the new arrival received frequent female visitors at advanced hours of the night we do not know but it is said that Gabriel Eligio had not only a hammock for himself but also a well-oiled bed for his lovers in the back room of the telegraph office. He was a talented amateur violinist whose party piece was “After the Ball,” the bittersweet waltz from America’s Gilded Age that exhorted young lovers not to miss their opportunities, and the priest invited him to play his violin with the choir of the so-called Daughters of the Virgin. This was like setting the fox to play with the chickens. One of his courtships involved a newly qualified local primary school teacher, Rosa Elena Fergusson, with whom a marriage was rumoured, so much so that at a party in Luisa’s house he joked with the Colonel’s daughter that she would be his principal matron or godmother. This joke, no doubt calculated to make Luisa jealous if she were in any way attracted to Gabriel Eligio, allowed them to call one another “godmother” and “godson” and to cloak their growing intimacy under the guise of a fictitious formal relationship which neither took seriously.
Gabriel Eligio was a man who had a way with women and was good-looking to boot. Though far from cynical, he was shameless, and far more confident than anyone with his background, qualifications and talents had any right to be. People from his part of the country, the savannahs of Bolívar, were known as outgoing and rumbustious, in stark contrast to the apprehension, introspection and downright suspiciousness of those who hailed, like Nicolás Márquez and Tranquilina, from the frontier lands of the Guajira, still considered Indian territory in the early twentieth century. The Colonel’s affability in public belied a deep-rooted Guajiro clannishness, an attachment to old ways and places, and a wariness of outsiders. Besides, the last thing he needed was an unqualified son-in-law who would be an extra burden when he was surely looking for a successful union with a family much better heeled and at least as respectable as his own.
Luisa was somewhat delicate and a little spoilt, the joy of her father’s life. Legend depicts her, perhaps exaggeratedly, as “the belle of Aracataca.”26 In fact she was not conventionally pretty but she was attractive, vivacious and refined, though perhaps a little eccentric and certainly rather dreamy. She was imprisoned in her house and social class by a father and mother whom she loved and respected but whose concern for her sexual and social security was neurotically reinforced by her own father’s wayward history.27Moreover, as Gabito himself would note, the family was already nurturing a long, paradoxically “incestuous” tradition of rejecting all outside suitors, which turned the men into “furtive street hunters” and condemned the women, frequently, to spinsterhood. At any rate, Luisa was infinitely less experienced than the man who, eight months after his arrival in Aracataca, would fix his attention firmly upon her and set out to make her his wife.
They started exchanging ardent looks at Sunday mass and in March 1925 Gabriel Eligio looked for a way to convey his feelings and ask her to marry him. He would pause beneath the almond trees in front of the house, where Luisa and her aunt Francisca Cimodosea Mejía would sit and sew at siesta time or in the early evening; occasionally he would get a chance to chat beneath the great chestnut tree inside the garden, with Aunt Francisca, scourge of Luisa’s several suitors, hovering close in chaperone mode, like the unfortunate Aunt Escolástica in Love in the Time of Cholera.28 Eventually, beneath that monumental tree, he made one of the least gallant proposals recorded in romantic folklore: “Listen, Señorita Márquez, I was awake all night thinking that I have a pressing need to marry. And the woman in my heart is you. I love no other. Tell me if you have any spiritual feelings towards me; but don’t feel you have to agree because I am certainly not dying of love for you. I will give you twenty-four hours to think it over.”29 He was interrupted by the redoubtable Aunt Francisca. But within twenty-four hours Luisa sent a note with one of the Indian servants proposing a secret meeting. She said she doubted his seriousness, he seemed so flirtatious; he said he would not wait, there were other fish in the pond. She asked for reassurance and he swore that if she accepted he would never love another. They agreed: they would be married to one another and to no other. “Only death” would stop them.
The Colonel soon saw worrying signs of mutual infatuation and decided to nip the relationship in the bud, not realizing that by now it was fully in bloom. He closed his house to the telegraphist and refused to speak to him again. García’s courtship of their daughter was a bitter pill that Nicolás and Tranquilina were not prepared to swallow. On one occasion, when the Colonel was hosting a social event from which Gabriel Eligio could not be excluded, he was the only person in the room not invited to sit down. So intimidated was the young man that he even bought himself a gun. But he had no intention of leaving town. Luisa’s parents told her that she was too young, though she was twenty by then and Gabriel Eligio was twenty-four. No doubt they also pointed out that he was swarthy, illegitimate, a public employee attached to the odious Conservative regime against which the Colonel had fought in the war, and a member of the “leaf-trash,” the windblown human garbage from out of town. Still, the courtship continued clandestinely: outside the church after mass, on the way to the cinema, or at the window of the Colonel’s house when the coast was clear.
Aunt Francisca told her cousin the Colonel about these new manoeuvres and he now took radical measures. He sent Luisa, escorted by Tranquilina and a servant, on a long journey to the Guajira, staying with friends and relatives along the way. Even today this remains an uncomfortable and arduous trek by road, because no modern highway has been completed. In those days much of it involved narrow pathways overlooking the precipices of the lower slopes of the Sierra Nevada, and Luisa had never previously ridden a mule.
The Colonel’s plan failed completely. Luisa outwitted Tranquilina as easily as he himself had always done. The veteran of numerous battles had not counted on Gabriel Eligio working out his own “campaign strategy” and should not have underestimated the resources of a telegraphist. Love in the Time of Cholera recounts the entire story of the coded messages passed on by sympathetic telegraphists in every town the mother and daughter passed through. Ana Ríos recalled hearing that the telegraph communication was so effective that when Luisa was invited to a dance in Manaure she asked her prospective husband for permission to go; the reply, in the affirmative, came back the same day and she danced until seven in the morning.30 It was thanks to the solidarity of his fellow telegraphists that, when mother and daughter arrived on the shore in Santa Marta early in 1926, Gabriel Eligio was waiting to greet his beloved as she stepped off the boat in a “romantic” pink dress.
Luisa evidently refused to go back to Aracataca and stayed in Santa Marta with her brother Juan de Dios and his wife Dilia in the Calle del Pozo. What this defiance cost in terms of family dramas may well be imagined. Dilia herself had already been through the horrors of the Márquez Iguarán family’s clan-like hostility to outsiders and was only too happy to help out her sister-in-law, though Juan de Dios kept a watchful eye on both women on his father’s behalf. Gabriel Eligio would visit Luisa at weekends, under conditions of relative freedom, until in due course he was transferred to Riohacha, which was too far away for weekend visits. Luisa spoke to the parish priest of Santa Marta, Monsignor Pedro Espejo, formerly of Aracataca, who was a good friend of Colonel Márquez. The priest wrote to the Colonel on 14 May 1926 to persuade him that the two were hopelessly in love and that a marriage would avoid what he darkly termed “worse misfortunes.”31 The Colonel relented—he must have been aware that Luisa was only a few weeks away from her twenty-first birthday—and the young couple were married in the Cathedral of Santa Marta, at seven in the morning on 11 June 1926. It was the day of the Blessed Heart, emblem of the city.
Gabriel Eligio would say he had refused to invite his new parents-in-law to the wedding because of a dream. It seems more likely that they had refused to attend. Mario Vargas Llosa, who received most of his information directly from García Márquez around 1969–70, says that the Colonel himself insisted that the couple should live “far from Aracataca.”32 When reminded of this, Gabriel Eligio always retorted that he had been more than happy to oblige. He confessed to his bride as they sailed, both seasick, to Riohacha, that he had seduced five virgins in his first years as a country Casanova and that he had two illegitimate children. Whether he told her anything about his mother’s record in the sexual arena we must doubt but this admission from her new husband about his own misdeeds must have come as a deeply unpleasant surprise. Nevertheless Luisa would for the rest of her days remember the months she spent with Gabriel Eligio in the house they rented in Riohacha as one of the happiest times of her life.33
Luisa may have become pregnant on the second night after the wedding—if not before the wedding—and family legend has it that the news of her condition promised to thaw the icy relationship between Gabriel Eligio and the Colonel. It is said that presents were sent via José María Valdeblánquez. Still, Gabriel Eligio would not relent until one day Juan de Dios arrived from Santa Marta to say that Tranquilina was pining for her pregnant daughter and Gabriel Eligio allowed her to travel back to Aracataca for the confinement.34
TWENTY-ONE-YEAR-OLD LUISA arrived back in her home town of Aracataca one February morning, without her husband, after almost eighteen months away. She was eight months pregnant and seasick, after another turbulent voyage to Santa Marta by boat from Riohacha. A few weeks later, on Sunday 6 March 1927, at 9 a.m., in the midst of an unseasonal rainstorm, a baby boy, Gabriel José García Márquez, was born. Luisa told me that her father had left early on his way to mass when things were going “very badly” but when he got back to the house the whole thing was over.
The child was born with the umbilical cord around his neck—he would later attribute his tendency to claustrophobia to this early misfortune—and weighed in, so it was said, at a substantial nine pounds and five ounces. His great-aunt, Francisca Cimodosea Mejía, proposed that he be rubbed with rum and blessed with baptismal water in case of further mishap. In fact, the child would not be officially baptized for almost three and a half years, together with his sister Margot, who by then had also been sequestered with the grandparents. (Gabito would remember the baptism clearly. It was officiated by Father Francisco Angarita in the church of San José at Aracataca on 27 July 1930 and the godparents were the two witnesses at his parents’ wedding, his uncle, Juan de Dios, and his great-aunt, Francisca Cimodosea.)
Colonel Márquez celebrated the birth. His beloved daughter had become another lost cause but he determined to consider even that setback to have been just a battle and resolved to win the war. Life would go on and he would now invest all his still considerable energies in her first child, his latest grandson, “my little Napoleon.”