2
“MY MOST CONSTANT and vivid memory is not so much of the people but of the actual house in Aracataca where I lived with my grandparents. It’s a recurring dream which persists even now. What’s more, every single day of my life I wake up with the feeling, real or imaginary, that I’ve dreamed I’m in that huge old house. Not that I’ve gone back there but that I am there, at no particular age, for no particular reason—as if I’d never left it. Even now in my dreams that sense of night-time foreboding which dominated my whole childhood still persists. It was an uncontrollable sensation which began early every evening and gnawed away at me in my sleep until I saw dawn breaking through the cracks in the door.”1
Thus, half a century later, talking to his old friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza in Paris, would Gabriel García Márquez recall the dominant image of his “prodigious” childhood in the small Colombian town of Aracataca. Gabito spent the first ten years of his life not with his mother and father and the many brothers and sisters who regularly followed him into the world, but in the big house of his maternal grandparents, Colonel Nicolás Márquez Mejía and Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes.
It was a house full of people—grandparents, aunts, transient guests, servants, Indians—but also full of ghosts (above all perhaps, that of his absent mother).2 Years later it would continue to obsess him when he was far away in time and space, and the attempt to recover it, re-create it and master his memories of it was a large part of what would make him a writer. It was a book he carried inside him from childhood: friends recall that when Gabito was barely twenty years of age he was already writing an interminable novel he called “The House.” That old lost house in Aracataca remained in the family until the late 1950s, though it would be rented to other households after Gabriel Eligio took his wife and children away from Aracataca again in 1937. It eventually reappeared, intact yet somehow hallucinatory, in García Márquez’s first novel, Leaf Storm, written in 1950, but only later, in One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), did the obsession fully realize and exhaust itself, and in such a way that Gabito’s vivid but anguished and often terrifying childhood could become materialized for all eternity as the magical world of Macondo, at which point the view from Colonel Márquez’s house would encompass not only the little town of Aracataca but also the rest of his native Colombia and indeed the whole of Latin America and beyond.
After Gabito’s birth, Gabriel Eligio, still working in Riohacha, and still sulking, waited several months to make his first journey back to Aracataca. He resigned from his job in Riohacha, gave up telegraphy for ever and hoped to earn his living from homeopathic medicine in Aracataca. But since he had no qualifications and equally little money, and since, despite family legend to the contrary, it appears he was not made welcome in the Colonel’s house, he eventually decided to take Luisa off to Barranquilla and, through some obscure negotiation, it was agreed that Gabito would remain with his grandparents.3
Of course such arrangements as the two couples agreed were so common as to be almost normal in traditional societies with large extended families; but it is still hard to understand Luisa leaving her first child behind at an age when she could have continued to suckle him for many more months. What seems certain is that her commitment to her husband was more than tenacious. For all the criticisms of her parents, for all Gabriel Eligio’s flaws and eccentricities, she must have really loved her man and she gave herself, apparently without hesitation, into his keeping. Above all, she put him before her first-born son.
We will never know what Luisa and Gabriel Eligio were thinking or what they said to one another as they took the train out of Aracataca heading for Barranquilla, having left their first baby behind. We do know that the young couple’s first foray was a financial failure yet within months Luisa was pregnant again and returned to Aracataca to have her second child, Luis Enrique, on 8 September 1928. This means that she and the second baby were in Aracataca during the period leading up to the massacre of the banana workers in Ciénaga in December of that year and the many killings in and around Aracataca itself that followed. One of Gabito’s own first memories was of soldiers marching past the Colonel’s house. Curiously, when Gabriel Eligio came to take the mother and her new son back to Barranquilla in January 1929, the baby was hurriedly baptized before the departure, whereas Gabito was not baptized until July 1930.4
Let us look at the face of the small child, just one year old, reproduced on the cover of García Márquez’s memoir Living to Tell the Tale. His mother had left him with his grandparents several months before the picture was taken and now, several months after it was taken, she had returned, only to be trapped by the drama of the strike and subsequent massacre. This massacre was not only a hugely, even crucially, important event which would change Colombian history by leading directly to the return of a Liberal government in August 1930 after half a century of civil war and exclusion, thereby uniting the small boy with his nation’s history; it also coincided with the moment when the boy’s mother could have taken him back to Barranquilla with her. Instead she took another child, her new baby, Luis Enrique, newly baptized, and left Gabito behind in the big house with his grandparents, thereby ensuring that he would have to assimilate this abandonment, live with this absence, explain this unexplainable sequence of events to himself and, through the elaboration of such a story, somehow forge an identity which, like all identities, would connect his own personal circumstances, with all their joys and all their cruelties, to the joys and cruelties of the wider world.
DESPITE HIS MEMORIES of solitude Gabito was not the only child in the house, though he was the only boy. His sister Margarita also lived there from the time Gabito was three and a half and his adolescent cousin Sara Emilia Márquez—the illegitimate child of Uncle Juan de Dios, rejected by his wife Dilia (some say Dilia argued that the girl was José María Valdeblánquez’s daughter, not her husband’s)—was also brought up there with the two of them. Neither was the house the mansion that García Márquez has sometimes claimed.5In fact, in March 1927, rather than one house it was three separate buildings mainly of wood with some adobe plus a number of outhouses and a large area of land at the back. By the time Gabito was born these three main buildings had American-style brushed cement floors, steel windows with gauze screens against mosquitoes and red zinc gabled roofs, though some of the outhouses still retained the more traditional Colombian palm leaf roofs. There were almond trees outside the property, sheltering the entrance. By the time of García Márquez’s earliest memories, there were two buildings on the left-hand side as you entered the property, the first the Colonel’s office, with a small reception room adjoining, followed by a pretty patio and garden with a jasmine tree—this garden, a profusion of brilliant roses, jasmines, spikenards, heliotropes, geraniums and astromelias, was always full of yellow butterflies—and then a further suite of three rooms.
The first of these three private rooms was the grandparents’ bedroom, completed as late as 1925, where Gabito was born just two years later.6 Next to that room was the so-called “room of the saints,” where Gabito would actually sleep—in a hammock after he outgrew his cot—during his ten years with his grandparents, accompanied, variably but sometimes simultaneously, by his younger sister Margarita, his great-aunt Francisca Cimodosea and his cousin Sara Márquez, together with an unchanging pantheon of saints, all illuminated day and night with palm oil lamps and each charged with the protection of one particular member of the family: “to look after grandpa, to watch over the grandchildren, to protect the house, for no one to fall ill, and so on—a custom inherited from our great-great-grandmother.”7 Aunt Francisca spent many hours of her life praying there on her knees. The last room was the “room of the trunks,” a lumber room full of ancestral possessions and family souvenirs brought in the exodus from the Guajira.8
On the right-hand side of the property, across a walkway, was a suite of six rooms fronted by a verandah lined with large flower pots which the family called the “verandah of the begonias.” Going back to the entrance-way, the first three rooms of the building on the right constituted, together with the office and reception room opposite, what might be called the public side of the house. The first was the guest room where distinguished visitors stayed, including, for example, Monsignor Espejo himself. But family and war comrades from all over the Guajira, Padilla and Magdalena were lodged there, including Liberal war heroes Rafael Uribe Uribe and General Benjamín Herrera.9 Next to it was the Colonel’s silversmith’s workshop, where he would continue to practise his craft until shortly before he died, though his municipal duties obliged him to turn his prior profession into a hobby.10 Then came the large dining room, the effective centre of the house, and even more important to Nicolás than the workshop alongside; open to the fresh air, the dining room had space for ten people at the table and a few wicker rocking chairs for drinks before or after dinner when the occasion arose. Then came a third bedroom, known as “the blind woman’s room,” where the house’s most celebrated ghost, Aunt Petra Cotes, Tranquilina’s sister, had died some years before,11 as had Uncle Lázaro, and where now one or other of the aunts would sleep; then a pantry cum store room where the less distinguished guests could be placed, at a pinch; and finally Tranquilina’s great kitchen, with its large baker’s oven, open to all the elements like the dining room. There grandmother and aunts made bread, cakes and sweets of every kind both for their guests to enjoy and for the household Indians to sell in the street and thus supplement the family income.12
Beyond the rooms of the saints and the trunks was a further patio with a bathroom and a large water tank where Tranquilina bathed Gabito with part of the five barrels’ worth of water that haulier José Contreras delivered every day. On one unforgettable occasion little Gabito was up above climbing on the roof when down below he saw one of his aunts, naked, taking a shower. Instead of shrieking and covering herself up, as he expected, she simply waved to him. Or so the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude would recall. The patio by the bathroom looked out, on the right, to a yard where the mango tree stood, with a large shed over in the corner which served as a carpenter’s workshop, the base from which the Colonel carried out his strategic renovations of the household.
And then, at the very back of the property, beyond the bathroom and the mango tree, the new, fast-growing town of Aracataca, which this large household’s wealth and ambition ostentatiously represented, seemed to fuse back into the countryside in a large semi-wild space called La Roza (The Clearing).13 Here were the guava trees whose fruit Tranquilina would use to make sweets in a huge steel pail and whose fragrant aroma Gabito would forever associate with the Caribbean of his childhood. Here loomed the huge, now legendary chestnut tree to which José Arcadio Buendía would be tied in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Beneath this spreading chestnut tree Gabriel Eligio García had asked Luisa for her hand while the “guard dog,” Aunt Francisca, growled at him from the shadows. In these trees there were parrots, macaws and troupials, and even a sloth up in the boughs of the breadfruit tree. And by the back gate stood the stables where the Colonel kept his horse and mules, and where his visitors tied their own mounts when they arrived not just for lunch, when they would leave them out in the street, but for a longer stopover.
Adjacent to the house was a building which the children would always think of as a house of horrors. They called it the “Dead Man’s House” and the entire town told blood-curdling stories about it because a Venezuelan called Antonio Mora went on living there after hanging himself and could clearly be heard coughing and whistling inside.14
At the time when García Márquez’s earliest memories were fixed, Aracataca was still a dramatic, violent frontier town. Almost every man carried a machete and there were plenty of guns. One of the boy’s earliest memories was of playing in the outer patio when a woman walked past the house with her husband’s head in a cloth and the decapitated body carried behind. He remembers being disappointed that the body was covered in rags.15
Daytime, then, brought a vivid, varied, ever-changing world, sometimes violent, sometimes magical. Night-time was always the same, and it was terrifying. He recalled: “That house was full of mysteries. My grandmother was very nervous; many things appeared to her which she would tell me about at night. When she talked about the souls of the dead she would say ‘they are always whistling out there, I hear them all the time.’ In each corner there were dead people and memories and after six o’clock in the evening you just couldn’t move around in there. They would sit me in a corner and there I would stay, just like the boy in Leaf Storm.”16 Little wonder the child saw dead men in the bath and in the kitchen by the stove; once he even saw the devil at his window.17
Everyday life was dominated inevitably by Tranquilina, or “Mina,” as her husband and the other women called her, a small, nervy woman with grey, anxious eyes and silver hair parted down the middle which framed an unmistakably Hispanic face and ended in a bun on her pale neck.18 García Márquez recalled: “If you make an analysis of how things were, the real head of the household was my grandmother, and not only her but these fantastic forces with which she was in permanent communication and which determined what could and could not be done that day because she would interpret her dreams and organize the house according to what could and could not be eaten; it was like the Roman Empire, governed by birds, and thunderclaps and other atmospheric signals which explained any change of the weather, change of humour; really we were manipulated by invisible Gods, even though they were all supposedly very Catholic people.”19 Dressed always in mourning or semi-mourning, and always on the verge of hysteria, Tranquilina floated through the house from dawn to dusk, singing, always trying to exude a calm and unflustered air, yet always mindful of the need to protect her charges from the ever-present dangers: souls in torment (“hurry, put the children to bed”), black butterflies (“hide the children, someone is going to die”), funerals (“get the children up, or they’ll die too”). She would remind the children of those dangers last thing at night.
Rosa Fergusson, García Márquez’s first teacher, recalled that Tranquilina was very superstitious. Rosa and her sisters would arrive in the early evening and the old lady might say, “Do you know I heard a witch last night … it fell up there on the roof of the house.”20 She also had a habit of recounting her dreams, like many of the female characters in García Márquez’s novels. Once she told the assembled company that she dreamed that she felt a crowd of fleas, so she took her head off, put it between her legs, and began to kill the fleas one by one.21
Aunt Francisca Cimodosea Mejía, known as Aunt Mama, was the most imposing of the three aunts who were present in the house during Gabito’s childhood and, unlike Tranquilina, was reputed not to be afraid of anything either natural or supernatural. Half-sister of Eugenio Ríos, the Colonel’s partner in Barrancas, brought up with the Colonel, her cousin, in El Carmen de Bolívar, she moved from Barrancas to Aracataca with him after the killing of Medardo. She was dark in complexion, strong of physique, with black hair like that of a Guajiro Indian, combed in plaits which she tied in a bun to walk in the streets. She dressed all in black and wore tightly tied boots, smoked strong cigarettes, was permanently active, shouting questions, giving orders in her loud, deep voice, shaping and organizing the children’s days. She looked after everybody, the family members, all the waifs and strays; she cooked special sweets and fancies for guests; she bathed the children in the river (with carbolic soap when they had lice), took them to school and to church, put them to bed, and made them say their prayers, before abandoning them to Tranquilina’s nocturnal postscripts. She was trusted with the keys of the church and the cemetery and dressed the altars on holy days. She also made the wafers for the church—the priest was a frequent visitor to the household—and the children looked forward excitedly to eating the blessed left-overs. Aunt Mama lived and died a spinster. And when she thought she was going to die she began to sew her own shroud, like Amaranta in One Hundred Years of Solitude.
The aunt next in importance to the children was Aunt Pa, Elvira Carrillo, who was born in Barrancas at the end of the nineteenth century. She was one of the Colonel’s natural children, the twin sister of Esteban Carrillo. She moved to Aracataca when she was twenty. Despite the inevitable initial tensions, Tranquilina treated her as one of her own and she in turn cared for Tranquilina until her death in Sucre many years later. She was sweet-tempered, self-effacing and hardworking, always cleaning, sewing and making sweets for sale, though she herself preferred not to venture into the street.
Another aunt, Wenefrida, “Aunt Nana,” Nicolás’s only legitimate sister, was also a constant presence, though she lived in a house of her own. She had moved to Aracataca with her husband Rafael Quintero, and she would die there in Nicolás’s house—she spent her last days in his office—shortly before the Colonel himself.
There were also numerous female servants, mostly part-time workers who cleaned around the house, and washed the clothes and dishes. It was indeed a house full of women, a fact which destined Gabito on the one hand to an especially close and indeed decisive relationship with the only other male, his grandfather, and on the other to an ease with women, and a dependence on them, which would last the rest of his life. Men, for Gabito, were either to emulate, like his grandfather, or to fear, like his father. His early relationships with women were far more varied and complex. (There were several Indian servants in the house who were effectively slaves; the boy, Apolinar, hardly counted as a male because he did not count as a full human being.)
When García Márquez read fairy stories he must have been struck by the fact that many of them involved a boy and a girl and grandparents—always grandparents. Like him, Margot, Nicolás and Tranquilina. Psychologically it was a complex world, which he later explained to his friend Plinio Mendoza. “The strange thing was that I wanted to be like my grandfather—realistic, brave, safe—but I could not resist the constant temptation to peep into my grandmother’s territory.”22 Leonine and magnificent in the memory of his grandchildren, “Papa Lelo” imposed order and discipline upon a pride of females, a houseful of women whom he had brought to Aracataca through his search for security and renewed respectability. He was bluff and forthright, with decisive, straightforward opinions. Gabito evidently felt like his direct descendant and his heir. The Colonel took his young grandson everywhere, explained everything to him and when in doubt took him home, took down the family dictionary and underlined his own authority with the definition he found there.23 He was sixty-three when Gabito was born, quite European-looking, like his wife, stocky, of average height with a broad forehead, balding and with a thick moustache. He wore gold-rimmed glasses and by that time was blind in the right eye because of glaucoma.24 On most days he would wear a spotless white tropical suit, a panama hat and brightly coloured braces. He was a direct, good-hearted man of easy, confident authority leavened by a twinkle in the eye which showed that he understood this society he was living in and did his best in all the circumstances but that morally he was no prude.
Many years later, when García Márquez managed to reconstruct these two ways of interpreting and narrating reality, both of them involving a tone of absolute certainty—the worldly, rationalizing sententiousness of his grandfather and the other-wordly oracular declamations of his grandmother—leavened by his own inimitable sense of humour, he would be able to develop a world-view and a corresponding narrative technique which would be instantly recognizable to the readers of each new book.
ALTHOUGH DEFEATED in the War of a Thousand Days, Colonel Márquez had managed to prosper in the peace. After the end of hostilities the Conservative government had opened the republic to foreign investment and during and after the First World War the national economy expanded at an unprecedented rate. U.S. financiers invested intensively in petroleum exploration, mining and bananas, and the U.S. government eventually paid the Colombian government $25 million in compensation for the loss of Panama. This was invested in a range of public works designed to modernize the country. More borrowing followed, and all those dollars and pesos swirled around and around, creating a kind of financial hysteria that Colombian historians call the “dance of the millions.” These brief years of easy money would be remembered by many as a time of unparalleled prosperity and opportunity on the Caribbean coast.
The banana is a tropical fruit which takes seven to eight months to grow and can be harvested and shipped at almost any time of year. It carries its own packaging and, with modern methods of cultivation and transportation, would help transform the dietary and economic habits of the world’s great capitalist cities. Local landowners, belatedly opening up Colombia’s northern coastal region, were overtaken by events. In the mid-1890s American entrepreneur Minor C. Keith, who already owned huge tracts of land in Central America and Jamaica, had begun to buy land around Santa Marta. Then in 1899 he founded the United Fruit Company (UFC), with its offices in Boston and its main shipping port in New Orleans. At the same time as he bought land Keith also bought shares in the Santa Marta railway and eventually the fruit company not only ran the railway but owned 25,500 of its 60,000 shares.25
One critic has said that Minor C. Keith’s holdings in Colombia amounted to a “pirate’s charter.”26 By the mid-1920s the zone was the third largest exporter of bananas in the world. More than ten million bunches a year were leaving the UFC wharves in Santa Marta. Its railway ran sixty miles from Santa Marta to Fundación, with thirty-two stations along the way. It had a near monopoly of land, irrigation systems, exports by sea, transport out of Santa Marta and across the Ciénaga Grande, the telegraph system, cement production, meat and other foodstuffs, telephones and ice.27 By owning the plantations and the railway the UFC effectively controlled the nine towns in the zone. It also indirectly controlled the local police, local politicians and press.28 One of the largest farm properties belonging to the UFC was called Macondo, 135 acres on the banks of the River Sevilla, in the corregimiento of Guacamayal.
The top echelons of the Santa Marta ruling class already had links to New York, London and Paris, and were culturally sophisticated, albeit politically conservative. But now the UFC’s Great White Fleet brought daily contact with the USA, Europe and the rest of the Caribbean for everyone. At the same time migrants both from other parts of Colombia, including the Guajira Peninsula and the old runaway slave regions of Bolívar, and from other parts of the world, came to work on the banana plantations or to set up small businesses serving the farms and the people who laboured in them. Artisans, merchants, boatmen, prostitutes, washerwomen, musicians, bartenders appeared. Gypsies came and went too, but in a real sense almost all the inhabitants of the Banana Zone were gypsies in those days. These growing communities became plugged in to the international market for goods, with cinemas which changed their movies two or three times a week, Montgomery Ward catalogues, Quaker Oats, Vicks Vaporub, Eno Fruit Salts, Colgate Dental Creme, indeed many of the things by then available in New York or London.
Aracataca’s population had been a few hundred in 1900, dispersed around the countryside and concentrated on the river banks; by 1913 it had risen to three thousand and it soared thereafter to perhaps ten thousand in the late 1920s. As the hottest and wettest place in the entire zone, it also produced the biggest bananas; their production required a daily epic struggle by the workers, since for most mortals even sitting or lying down in the Aracataca heat is arduous. By 1910, when the Colonel had begun to move his family there, the railway track already ran all the way down from Santa Marta through Ciénaga and Aracataca to Fundación, the last town in the zone. Banana plantations grew up on either side of the tracks for a distance of almost sixty miles.
Aracataca was a boom town with boom-town excitements. A lottery was held on Sundays as a band played in the main square. The Aracataca carnival, first held in 1915, was a particular draw, with the square occupied annually by improvised cantinas, stalls, dance floors, traders, healers, herbalists, women dressed in exotic costumes and masks, and the local men swaggering by in khaki trousers and blue shirts, all in a cloud of cigar smoke, rum and sweat blown about by the salt breeze sweeping in from the Ciénaga Grande. It was said that in those golden years almost everything was for sale: not only consumer goods from all over the world but dance partners, political votes, pacts with the devil.29
Even at its height the town was only ten blocks in either direction. Were it not for the searing heat, any moderately fit person could walk it end to end in less than twenty minutes. There was only a handful of cars. The UFC company offices were directly opposite the house of Colonel Nicolás Márquez, close to the pharmacy of his Venezuelan friend Doctor Alfredo Barbosa. On the other side of the railtrack was another community, the American company administrators’ camp, alongside a country club with recreational lawns, tennis courts and a swimming pool, where you could see “beautiful languid women in muslin dresses and wide gauze hats cutting the flowers in their gardens with golden scissors.”30
During the banana era Aracataca was a territory with only limited respect for God or law. In response to a request from the local citizens the diocese of Santa Marta had sent Aracataca’s first priest, Pedro Espejo, from Riohacha, on a part-time basis. It was he who initiated the building of the parish church, which took more than twenty years.31 It was he too who famously levitated one day during mass. He became a close friend of the Márquez Iguarán family and stayed with them whenever he was in Aracataca. Now, many years later, the street in which that old house stood is called “The Street of Monsignor Espejo.”
LATE IN 1928 Aracataca’s golden age came to a violent end. The UFC needed labour to build railways and irrigation canals; to clear land, plant trees and harvest the fruit; and to load the trains and ships to carry the bananas away. At first it had managed to divide and rule the workers with ease but gradually they organized into unions over the course of the 1920s and in November 1928 they put in a wide-ranging demand for more pay, a shorter working day and better conditions. The management rejected these demands and a strike of the thirty thousand workers in the Banana Zone was declared on 12 November 1928. The infant García Márquez was twenty months old.
Strikers moved in to occupy plantations that same day. The government of Conservative President Miguel Abadía Méndez responded by sending General Carlos Cortés Vargas to the zone as Civil and Military Leader the following day, accompanied by 1,800 troops from the highlands. When Cortés Vargas arrived in Santa Marta he and his officers were feted by the UFC management and the soldiers were housed in UFC barracks and warehouses all over the zone. It was said that UFC officials gave the officers riotous parties at which local ladies were abused and insulted and that prostitutes rode naked on military horses and bathed naked in the company’s irrigation ditches.32
At dawn on 5 December 1928 three thousand workers arrived in Ciénaga to occupy the square and, by controlling Ciénaga, to control railway communications throughout the region. Together with Ciénaga, Aracataca was one of the zones of strongest support for the strike; like the merchants of Ciénaga, local storekeepers and landowners gave significant material assistance to the strikers right up to the day of the showdown.33 General José Rosario Durán had a reputation as a decent employer who tried to have good relations with the union; indeed, many Conservatives felt he was overly friendly to “socialists.”34 At midday on 5 December General Durán, described in military communiqués at the time as “the Liberal leader of the entire region,”35 sent a telegram to Santa Marta requesting a train to take him and his associates to Santa Marta where he hoped to mediate between the workers and the company with the help of Governor Núñez Roca. Cortés Vargas agreed, no doubt reluctantly, and the train was duly sent.36 Durán and his delegation, including Colonel Nicolás Márquez, eventually arrived in Ciénaga at nine that evening. The workers greeted them with enthusiasm and they continued to Santa Marta to negotiate a settlement, only to find themselves arrested on arrival. The Conservative administration, the UFC and the Colombian army all seem to have been intent on a salutary piece of bloodletting which would teach the workers a lesson.
Back in Ciénaga the crowd confronting the army was of more than three thousand people.37 Each of the soldiers had a rifle and bayonet, and three machine guns were set up in front of the station. A cornet sounded and an officer, Captain Garavito, stepped forward and read out “Decree no. I”: a state of siege was in force, a curfew was declared with immediate effect, no groups of four or more would be permitted and if the crowd did not disperse in five minutes it would be fired upon. The crowd, which had at first cheered the army and chanted patriotic slogans, now burst into boos and insults. After some time Cortés Vargas himself stepped forward and appealed to the crowd to move or be shot. He gave them one further minute. At that point a voice from the crowd shouted out the immortal rejoinder, recorded for ever in One Hundred Years of Solitude: “You can have the other minute on us!” “Fire!” shouted Cortés Vargas, and two of the three machine guns (the third one jammed) and two or three hundred rifles resounded around the square. Many people fell to the ground and those who could run, ran.38 Cortés Vargas later said the fusillade lasted a few seconds. Salvador Durán, the General’s son, who was in his house adjoining the square, reported that it lasted five full minutes; after it everything was so quiet he could hear the mosquitoes buzzing in his room.39 It was said that the army finished off the wounded with bayonets.40 It was also said that Cortés Vargas had threatened all the soldiers with summary execution if they did not obey orders that night.41 Only at six in the morning did the authorities begin to dispose of the bodies, stating officially that there were nine dead and three wounded.
How many died? Forty years later, in One Hundred Years of Solitude, García Márquez would invent a figure of three thousand, a total which many of his readers would take at face value. On 19 May 1929 El Espectador of Bogotá said there were “more than a thousand” dead. Likewise the U.S. representative in Bogotá, Jefferson Caffery, said in a letter dated 15 January 1929, but not released until many years later, that, according to Thomas Bradshaw, Managing Director of the UFC, there were “more than a thousand dead.” (In 1955 the then Vice-President of the UFC would tell a researcher that 410 were killed in the massacre and more than a thousand in the following weeks.)42 The statistics are still discussed and bitterly disputed to this day.
Gabriel Eligio García was away working in Barranquilla unable to communicate with his family, though the telegraphist of Aracataca wired him that everyone was safe and well. Luisa had recently given birth to Luis Enrique and Gabriel Eligio was making plans to move them back to Barranquilla. He always sided with government estimates, and even apologized for Cortés Vargas, arguing that the husband of a great-aunt of Gabito’s in Ciénaga told him there could not have been more than a few casualties since “no one was missed.”
Prisoners were summarily executed in the days after the massacre. One army detachment guided by UFC officials went through Aracataca “firing everywhere and against everyone.”43 In one night 120 workers disappeared in Aracataca and parish priest Father Angarita was woken up by soldiers who took his set of keys to the cemetery.44 Father Angarita stayed up the whole of the next night to ensure that another seventy-nine prisoners would not be executed.45 During the three months after the massacre, the authorities and leading residents of Aracataca, including treasurer Nicolás R. Márquez and his friends Alfredo Barbosa the pharmacist and exiled Venezuelan General Marco Freites, as well as the entire municipal council, were persuaded to send letters declaring that the military had behaved impeccably during the state of siege and had worked for the good of the community.46 This must have involved painful moral somersaults and an almost unbearable sense of humiliation. The ensuing state of siege lasted three months.
The strike and its bitter aftermath scarred the region and it remains one of the most controversial events in Colombian history. In 1929 Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the politician whose assassination would spark the brief but devastating civil insurrection known as theBogotazo, became a national leader, at the age of twenty-six, through the passionate parliamentary campaign he initiated against the government, the military and the UFC. After visiting the site of the massacre and talking to dozens of people, he made a report to the House of Representatives back in Bogotá, talking for four days in September 1929. His most dramatic pieces of evidence were the fragment of a child’s skull and an accusatory letter from Father Angarita, the man who would baptize Gabriel García Márquez just a few months later.47 As a result of Gaitán’s sensational testimony, the prison sentences handed down to workers in Ciénaga were quashed. The Liberals, although still weak and disorganized nationally, were galvanized into action, began to gain the upper hand politically and started their rise to power, coming into government in 1930. The end of that period would be marked by Gaitán’s assassination in April 1948, the most important and far-reaching event in Colombia’s twentieth-century history.
The deterioration in the relations between the UFC and its workers and the impact the massacre had on the Banana Zone would be overtaken by the Great Depression, which was about to engulf the region and the entire global trading system. The devastating slump caused the company to severely contract its operations. Executives and administrators left and Aracataca began its long and unstoppable decline, a period whose beginning would coincide precisely with García Márquez’s childhood and the last years of his grandfather’s life.