3

Holding His Grandfather’s Hand

1929–1937

ALTHOUGH THE SEEDS of Aracataca’s decline were sown, it took years before the full implications became clear, and life in the Colonel’s household went on much as before. Across the Great Swamp, in Barranquilla, Gabriel Eligio was working by day in a hardware store run by the Singer company, but had recently opened his first modest pharmacy, which he attended in the evenings and at weekends, assisted by Luisa. The young couple endured grinding poverty, and the pampered Luisa, used to the attentions of a mother, aunts and servants, must have found life desperately hard.

The Colonel and Tranquilina took Gabito to Barranquilla in November 1929, after the birth of Luisa’s third child, Margarita, on the 9th of that month. Just two and a half, the boy’s main memory was of seeing traffic lights for the first time. His grandparents took him back to Barranquilla again in December 1930 for the birth of Aida Rosa and he saw his first aeroplane in a city which pioneered air travel in Colombia.¹ He also heard the word “Bolívar” for the first time because Aida Rosa was born on 17 December, exactly a hundred years to the day after the great Liberator died and Barranquilla, like the whole of Latin America, was commemorating his death. Gabito would retain no firm memories of either his mother or his father but these visits must have been intensely troubling to a child trying to make sense of the world and his place in it.² It was on this last occasion that Tranquilina, seeing that little Margarita was a sickly, withdrawn child who needed urgent attention beyond her harassed young mother’s means, insisted on taking her back to Aracataca to be brought up with Gabito.³

The formative period in Gabito’s development thus stretched from the age of two, when his mother went away for the second time, to almost seven, when his parents and siblings returned to Aracataca. Those are the five years whose memories really form the basis of the mythological Macondo which readers the world over have come to know. And although it is not true that he had no contact with his birth parents, it is certainly true that he had no sustained contact with either them or his new brothers and sisters after 1928 and no reason therefore to have any enduring memories of them. His only parents were his grandparents and his only sibling was Margarita, now called Margot, who would not become a satisfying companion until she was three or four, by which time the rest of the family would be making their return to Aracataca towards the end of 1933. Nicolás and Tranquilina evidently decided that between incessantly having to explain that his parents had gone away (and why, and if and when they would ever return) and drawing a veil of silence over his origins, the latter would be less painful in the long run. Of course other children must have asked questions and García Márquez could not possibly have been as ignorant as he has always maintained. It is difficult to imagine that Luisa was never remembered at bedtime prayers, for example. But clearly the matter of his mother and father was a taboo area which he learned to approach as little as possible.

In Spain and Latin America women traditionally belonged in the house and men in the street. It was his grandfather, the Colonel, who gradually rescued him from that feminine world of superstition and premonitions, those stories that seemed to spring from the darkness of nature itself, and who installed him in the man’s world of politics and history; took him out, so to speak, into the daylight. (“I would say that the relationship with my grandfather was the umbilical cord that kept me in touch with reality until I was eight years old.”)⁴ In later life, with touching naivety, he would remember his grandfather as “the natural patriarch of the town.”⁵

The truth is that the men who were really powerful, like the large landowners, rarely occupied regional political positions like treasurer or tax collector, preferring to leave them to less important relatives or to middle-class political representatives usually ignorant of the law.⁶ Mayors were appointed by governors who were named by politicians in Bogotá in association with local interests, and Liberals like Nicolás Márquez had to transact, usually in quite humiliating ways, with the Conservative Party and other local forces such as the UFC. The whole political system was grossly corrupt, resting on personal relations and various forms of patronage. Significant local personalities like Márquez got UFC perks such as fresh meat and other desirable luxuries at the company store, and in return could be relied on to maintain the system. Many of the most vivid memories of both Gabito and Margot were of their grandfather’s expeditions to the store, which was just over the road from their house. It was like an Aladdin’s Cave from which the Colonel and Gabito would return triumphantly to surprise and enchant Margot with magical commodities manufactured in and imported from the USA.⁷

The municipal treasurer and tax collector would mainly be involved in extracting municipal—and in some cases personal—income from the only significant form of taxation in existence at the time, namely liquor consumption, meaning that the Colonel’s own income depended heavily on the financial well-being, physical intoxication and resultant sexual promiscuity of the much-despised “leaf-trash.” How conscientiously Nicolás himself carried out his duties we cannot know but the system was not one which left much freedom for personal probity.⁸ After 1930, with the Liberal Party coming to power for the first time in fifty years, things should have got better for Nicolás, who was actively involved in the campaign to elect Enrique Olaya Herrera, the Liberal candidate, but all the information we have suggests that they gradually got worse.

García Márquez has recalled: “He was the only person in the house that I was not afraid of. I always felt that he understood me and cared about my future vocation.”⁹ The Colonel adored his little grandson. He celebrated his little Napoleon’s birthday every month, and yielded to his every whim. But Gabito would not himself be a warrior nor even a sportsman, and he would be governed by terrors—ghosts, superstitions, the dark, violence, rejection—all his life.¹⁰ All of them originated in Aracataca, during his anguished, troubled childhood. Still, his intelligence and sensitivity, and even his frequent tantrums, confirmed his indulgent grandfather in the belief that this child was worthy of him and was, perhaps, destined for greatness.¹¹

The boy was certainly worth educating; it was he who would inherit the old man’s memories, his philosophy of life and political morality, his view of the world; the Colonel would live on through him. It was the Colonel who told him about the War of a Thousand Days, his own deeds and those of his friends, heroic Liberals all; and it was the Colonel who explained the presence of the banana plantations, the UFC and its company houses, stores, tennis courts and swimming pools, and the horrors of the 1928 strike. Battles, scars, gunfights. Violence and death. Even in the relative safety of Aracataca the old man always slept with a revolver beneath his pillow, though after the killing of Medardo he had stopped carrying it in the street.¹²

By the time Gabito was six or seven, then, he was already a fully fledged Colombian. He thought his grandfather was a hero, but even this hero was clearly subject to the whims of American managers and Conservative politicians. He had lost the war, not won it, and even the small boy must have divined, dimly, that perhaps the gunfight was not the unblemished act of heroism he had been led to believe. Years later one of the family’s favourite stories was about Gabito sitting listening to his grandfather, blinking incessantly and forgetting where he was.¹³ Margot recalls: “Gabito was always by my grandfather’s side, listening to all the stories. Once a friend came from Ciénaga, one of those old men who were in the War of a Thousand Days with Grandpa. Gabito, all ears as usual, stood beside the gentleman and it turned out the leg of the chair they’d given the old man trapped Gabito’s shoe. He just kept quiet and put up with it, staying quite still until the visit ended, because he thought, ‘If I say something they’ll notice me and throw me out.’”¹⁴

Late in her own life his mother would tell me that “Gabito was always old; when he was a child he knew so much he seemed like a little old man. That’s what we called him, the little old man.” Throughout his life most of his friends would be significantly older and more experienced than he was and despite his Liberal and eventually socialist politics, he would always be drawn, consciously or unconsciously, to combinations of wisdom, power and authority in his preferred associates. It is not fanciful to conclude that one of the strongest impulses in García Márquez’s later life was the desire to restore himself to his grandfather’s world.

Most lastingly and decisively of all, Colonel Márquez was involved in providing a number of symbolic adventures, memorable incidents which would remain fixed in his grandson’s imagination until, many years later, he would fuse them into a definitive shaping image in the very first line of his most celebrated novel. Once, when the child was still very small, the old man took him to the company store to see the fish frozen in ice. Many years later García Márquez would recall: “I touched it and felt as if it was burning me. I needed ice in the first sentence of [One Hundred Years of Solitude] because in the hottest town in the world, ice is magical. If it wasn’t hot the book wouldn’t work. That made it so hot it was no longer necessary to mention it again, it was in the atmosphere.”¹⁵Similarly: “The initial image of One Hundred Years of Solitude was already in ‘The House’ [his first attempt at a novel] and then in Leaf Storm. Every day was a discovery, both through visits to the banana company and visits to the railway station. The banana company brought the cinema, radio and so forth. The circus arrived with a dromedary and a camel; complete fairs arrived with wheels of fortune, roller-coasters, carousels. My grandfather always took me by the hand to see everything. He took me to the cinema and although I don’t remember films I do remember images. My grandfather had no notion of censorship so I saw every kind of image. But the most vivid of all of them and the one that is always repeated is that of an old man leading a child by the hand.”¹⁶ Eventually, in that first line of his most famous novel—“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice”—the author would turn the different images of his expeditions with his grandfather into a self-defining experience that a fictional son has with his father, thereby subliminally confirming that Nicolás was not only his grandfather but also the father he felt he never had.

Thus for almost a decade the child lived with the old man and on most days he would walk around the town with him. One of their favourite walks was on a Thursday to the post office to see if there was any news about the Colonel’s pension from the war twenty-five years earlier. There never was, a fact which made a big impression on the child.¹⁷ Another was to the station to collect the day’s letter from the Colonel’s son Juan de Dios, Uncle Juanito, because the two men wrote to one another every day—mainly about business matters and the movements of relatives and mutual acquaintances.¹⁸ From the station they would walk back down the short boulevard named for the country’s national day, Camellón 20 July, where the Montessori School was (Nicolás’s good friend General José Durán had donated the land);¹⁹ then down the Street of the Turks, past the Four Corners and the pharmacy of Alfredo Barbosa and back to the house on Carrera Six between Calles 6 and 7; or they might go on past the house and the Liberal Party headquarters to the parish church of Saint James of the Holy Trinity, which was still a work in progress, with three small naves, thirty-eight wooden seats, many plaster saints and a great cross with a skull and crossbones at its base. (Gabito was an altar boy there, always went to mass and was closely connected to church matters throughout his childhood.)²⁰ Then they would walk across Bolívar Square, where vultures sat on the surrounding buildings, to the telegraph office where Gabriel Eligio had worked—though whether this fact was ever mentioned we cannot know. Not far beyond here was the cemetery along an avenue of palm trees—buried there now are General Durán, local trader José Vidal Daconte and Aunt Wenefrida—and what had only recently been open countryside, once forests, then cattle pastures, now closed off by the interminable, perfectly geometrical banana plantations.

Gabito had actually been assisted into the world by a Venezuelan woman, Juana de Freites, the wife of exiled General Marcos Freites who had fallen foul of the dictator Juan Vicente Gómez. He became the UFC warehouse manager and his house was a part of the UFC office complex. Not only was Señora Freites an invaluable presence at Gabito’s birth but she later told him and his little friends a series of classic fairy stories—all set in Caracas!—which would contribute to his lifelong affection for Venezuela’s capital city.²¹Another Venezuelan who lived across the mud road from Gabito’s house was of course the pharmacist Alfredo Barbosa, also a victim of Gómez. He acted as the town doctor after his arrival just before the First World War and married a local woman, Adriana Berdugo. His was the town’s leading pharmacy during the banana boom but by the end of the 1920s he was subject to fits of depression and passed long idle days swinging in his hammock.²²

A cooler, more distant presence was that of the “gringos” who worked for the UFC and lived inside what García Márquez would later call the “electrified henhouse” of the company compound with their air-conditioned houses, swimming pools, tennis courts and manicured lawns. It was these other-worldly creatures who had diverted the course of the river and unleashed the 1928 strike and ensuing massacre. It was they who built the canal between two rivers which, during the rainstorms of October 1932, contributed to the devastating floods on which the five-year-old Gabito gazed, mesmerized, from the verandah of his grandfather’s house.²³

The Italian Antonio Daconte Fama had arrived after the First World War. He brought the silent movies through his cinema the Olympia, the gramophone, the radio and even bicycles which he hired out to the astonished population. Antonio Daconte lived alternately with two sisters, one of whom bore him only sons, the other only daughters.²⁴ Many Dacontes live in Aracataca to this day.

Some of Gabito’s most enduring memories were of “the Frenchman,” really a Belgian, known as Don Emilio, who also arrived after the First World War, on crutches, with a bullet in his leg. A talented jeweller and cabinet maker, Don Emilio would play chess or cards with the Colonel of an evening until the day he went to see All Quiet on the Western Front and went home and killed himself with a slug of cyanide.²⁵ The Colonel arranged the funeral and the whole episode ended up in Leaf Storm (where he is “the Doctor,” fused in part with the depressive Venezuelan pharmacist Alfredo Barbosa) and Love in the Time of Cholera (where he is Jeremiah de Saint-Amour). García Márquez recalls, “My grandfather was given news of his suicide one August Sunday as we came out of eight o’clock mass. He almost dragged me to the Belgian’s house where the mayor and two policemen were waiting. The first thing that struck me in the untidy bedroom was the strong smell of bitter almonds from the cyanide he had inhaled in order to kill himself. The body was lying on a camp bed covered with a blanket. By his side, on a wooden stool, was the tray in which he had vaporized the poison and a piece of paper with a message carefully written with a brush: ‘No one is to blame, I’m killing myself because I am no good.’ I can remember as if it were yesterday when my grandfather removed the blanket. The body was naked, stiff and twisted, the skin without colour, covered by a sort of yellow gauze and the watery eyes looked at me as if they were still alive. When she saw the look on my face as I returned to the house, my grandmother predicted: ‘This poor child will never again sleep in peace for the rest of his life.’”²⁶

There is reason to believe that the corpse of Don Emilio did indeed haunt the imagination of the susceptible boy throughout his childhood and fused with other corpses seen or only imagined; that it looms large in his very first published story, which is a meditation about his own status as a potential corpse (or possibly as an ex-corpse); and that even after Leaf Storm, where its much contested burial is the central drama of the novel, it would rise again and again from beneath the surface of his traumatized consciousness. Perhaps it is the screen concealing the corpse of the Colonel himself, which Gabito would never see.

Sometimes the Colonel would take Gabito out for a last “turn” before his bedtime: “My grandmother would always interrogate me when I got home after my evening walks with my grandfather; she would ask me where we’d been and what we’d done. I remember one night passing a house with other people and seeing my grandfather sitting in the parlour; I saw him from a distance, sitting there as if it was his own house. For some reason I never spoke about it to my grandmother, but I know now that it was the house of a lover, a woman who wanted to see him when he died and my grandmother wouldn’t let her in, saying that corpses were only for legitimate wives.”²⁷ The woman whom his grandmother would not let in to see Nicolás’s corpse was almost certainly Isabel Ruiz, who seems to have moved to Aracataca in the 1920s.²⁸ And there was even a girl in his class at school whom Tranquilina told him he should have nothing to do with: “You and she must never marry.” But the boy was unable to make sense of this warning until much later in life.²⁹

While Gabito and the Colonel were out on their walks, greeting the Colonel’s comrades and acquaintances, the women back at the house were permanently involved in arranging hospitality, some of it relating to the arrival of dignitaries, the Colonel’s old war comrades or his Liberal Party cronies; much of it involved them dealing with the human products of his past misdeeds, who would usually arrive on mules, tie them out back and sleep in hammocks out in “The Clearing.”³⁰ However most guests arrived by train: “The train arrived at eleven every morning and my grandmother would always say, ‘We have to prepare fish and meat because you never know if those who are coming would prefer meat or fish.’ So we were always excited to see who would be coming.”³¹

But by the early 1930s everything was beginning to change. The banana strike and massacre, combined with the great depression of 1929, had set everything in reverse and Aracataca’s brief period of prosperity gave way to the beginnings of a steep decline. Despite the massacre and the resentment felt by many at the general arrogance of the banana company, its stay in Aracataca was remembered with nostalgia for the next half century; many a conversation would speculate about the possibilities of it returning and with it the good old days of easy money and constant excitement.³² Nicolás’s income from liquor and other sources was catastrophically reduced and before long the steady stream had become a trickle. In the case of the Márquez Iguarán family, then, the permanent sense of loss which was the aftermath of the move from the Guajira was now supplemented by the sense that Aracataca’s best days were also behind it, and Nicolás and Tranquilina, pensionless, began to stare poverty in the face as they entered an uncertain and intimidating old age.

EARLY IN 1934 Luisa returned to Aracataca to see her eldest son and daughter and to talk to her parents. It cannot have been an easy encounter from any point of view. She had never been forgiven for disobeying and shaming her parents and for bringing an unacceptable son-in-law into the family. By early 1933 things were getting hopeless in Barranquilla and she had probably persuaded Gabriel Eligio to let her negotiate their return to Aracataca. She arrived late one morning on the train from Ciénaga. Margot was terrified of her unknown mother and feared she would take her away.³³ She hid in her grandmother’s skirts. Gabito, who would have been six, going on seven, was utterly perplexed by the arrival of this stranger and then embarrassed when he saw five or six women in the room and had no idea which one was his mother until she gestured that he should approach.³⁴

By the time he was reacquainted with Luisa, Gabito had started his education at the new school—named after Maria Montessori and loosely based on her methods—near the railway station on Boulevard 20 July. The Montessori system, limited to kindergarten activities, was felt to do little harm as long as a good Catholic education was then instilled at primary level. The method stresses the child’s creative potential, innate desire to grow and learn, and individuality; it teaches initiative and self-direction through the medium of the child’s own senses. García Márquez would later say that it was “like playing at being alive.”³⁵

As it happened, Gabito’s first teacher, Rosa Elena Fergusson, had been his father’s first love in Aracataca (or so Gabriel Eligio claimed) and perhaps it was as well that Gabito did not know this. Rosa Elena, who had been born in Riohacha, was said to be a descendant of the first British consul in that city and to be related to Colonel William Fergusson, an equerry of Bolívar. She studied at the teachers’ college in Santa Marta and followed her family to Aracataca. There her father and grandfather worked for the UFC, one of her relatives became Mayor,³⁶ and there the Montessori school opened in 1933. Gabito had to repeat the first grade because the school closed for operational reasons halfway through the year, and so he did not learn to read and write until he was eight years old, in 1935.

Rosa Elena, who was graceful, gentle and pretty, was twice crowned carnival queen of Aracataca. She was devoted to Spanish Golden Age poetry, which would be a lifelong enthusiasm of her precocious pupil.³⁷ She was his first infant love—he was simultaneously thrilled and embarrassed to be physically close to her—and she encouraged him to appreciate language and verse. Sixty years later Rosa Elena had a particularly vivid memory of her famous ex-pupil: “Gabito was like a doll, with his hair the colour of whipped brown sugar and his skin all pale and pink, an odd colour in Aracataca; and he was always carefully washed and combed.”³⁸ For his part, García Márquez said that Miss Fergusson “imbued in me the pleasure of going to school just to see her.”³⁹ When she put her arms around him to guide his hand in writing, he would get some inexplicable “funny feelings.”⁴⁰ Miss Fergusson recalled: “He was quiet, he hardly spoke, he was very, very shy. His class mates respected him for his application, tidiness, and intelligence, but he never liked sports. He took great pride in being the first to carry out an instruction.”⁴¹ She taught Gabito two key work habits, punctuality and producing pages with no errors, which would be lifelong obsessions.

Gabito had previously shown no precocity in reading and writing and failed to learn at home.⁴² But long before he started to read he had taught himself to draw and this remained his favourite activity until he was thirteen years of age. When he was very small the old man had even allowed him to draw on the walls of the house. Above all he loved to copy comic strips—little stories—from his grandfather’s newspapers.⁴³ He also retold the plots of the movies the Colonel took him to see: “He used to take me to every kind of picture, I particularly remember Dracula … The next day he would make me tell him the film to see if I had been paying attention. So I not only fixed the films very clearly in my mind, but was also concerned to know how to narrate them because I knew he would make me tell him the story step by step to see if I had understood.”⁴⁴ Thus the movies transported the young child; and he was, of course, a member of the first generation in history for whom the cinema, including talking films, was an experience prior to that of written literature. Later it was the Colonel who taught him respect for words and for the dictionary, which “knew everything” and was more infallible than the Pope in Rome.⁴⁵ The permanent sense of exploration and discovery encouraged by the Montessori system must have been the perfect complement to Nicolás’s more traditional sense of certainty based on authority and personal empowerment.

But now came a jarring change in the lives of Gabito and Margarita. Gabriel Eligio, always energetic but always an improviser, with no head for finance, was never much of a bet to be able to start from scratch in a big bustling city like Barranquilla, in its first flush of prosperity when he moved there. So things were even more likely to go downhill once the depression began to bite in Colombia. He had managed to acquire a pharmacist’s licence, leave his job in the hardware store and establish not one but two drugstores in the centre of the city, “Pasteur I” and “Pasteur 2.”⁴⁶ This venture failed and the family retreated to Aracataca in disarray. Luisa arrived first with Luis Enrique and Aida, and stayed at the Colonel’s house. Although she did in fact have a three-year break between pregnancies after giving birth to four children in less than four years by the time Aida Rosa was born in December 1930, Luisa was now pregnant again. Gabriel Eligio, who always had other “business” to attend to, was away for many more months and eventually returned on his birthday, 1 December 1934, long after the birth of the fifth child, Ligia, in August.⁴⁷

His arrival is one of the few dates from these early years that can be fixed precisely, because García Márquez vividly remembers the arrival of a stranger: a “slim, dark, garrulous, pleasant man in a white suit and straw hat, every inch a Caribbean of the 1930s.”⁴⁸The stranger was his father. The reason he is able to date it precisely is that someone wished Gabriel Eligio a happy birthday and asked how old he was and Gabriel Eligio, born on 1 December 1901, responded, “the same age as Christ.” A few days later the boy’s first expedition with this new father was to buy Christmas presents at the market for all the other children. Gabito might have chosen to feel privileged by this experience; but what he vividly remembered instead was his feeling of disillusionment at realizing that it was not Baby Jesus or even Santa Claus or Saint Nicholas who brought presents at Christmas but one’s own parents.⁴⁹ The father would regularly disappoint his son in the years—and decades—to come. Their relationship would never be either easy or close.

Now Gabriel Eligio set up his new pharmacy, “G.G.” (“Gabriel García”), early in 1935 and managed to persuade the departmental medical authorities to award him a limited licence to practise homeopathic medicine, which allowed him to diagnose and treat patients and also to prescribe and sell his own quack remedies as the only appropriate cure for the complaints he identified. He had been combing magazines and medical journals and carrying out his own, often hair-raising experiments. Soon he invented a “Menstrual Mixture” under the brand name “GG,” a wheeze worthy of José Arcadio Buendía in One HundredYears of Solitude, that incompetent dreamer who unmistakably bears numerous traces of García Márquez’s own idiosyncratic, impractical but irrepressible progenitor. Economic survival was never more than precarious, and continuing subsidies from Colonel Márquez, himself increasingly impoverished, were humiliating but necessary. Before Gabriel Eligio’s return Luisa had moved in temporarily with her parents in the absence of her eccentric and wayward husband.⁵⁰ Rosa Elena Fergusson even remembered that Nicolás began to expand the house to fit the new arrivals—perhaps hoping that his unloved son-in-law would not be returning.⁵¹ After Gabriel Eligio did return, he and Luisa rented a house a couple of blocks from the Colonel’s home, and it was there that a sixth child, Gustavo, was born on 27 September 1935.

In the household of their youthful, struggling parents, though truth to tell more in the yard and street than in the house, Luis Enrique and Aida both grew up as normal, healthy, unruly children, active, outgoing and without obvious complexes. Meanwhile, Gabito and Margot were being brought up by old people and had developed quite a different world-view, obsessive, superstitious, fatalistic and fearful but also diligent and efficient; both were perfectly behaved, rather timorous, spending more time in the house than in the street.⁵² Gabito and Margarita must have felt at once inexplicably abandoned by their parents—Why me? Why us?—yet privileged to be cared for in the house of the much-respected and much-loved grandparents. It was these two outsiders, Margot and Gabito, who, in later life, would keep the García Márquez family’s collective head above water.

Adjustment to the new situation was extremely difficult.⁵³ Aida remembers that Gabito was very jealous of the affection of his grandparents and watched everything and everybody when his siblings visited the house, trying to make sure they stayed as little as possible. No one was to come between him and his grandfather. Antonio Barbosa, the son of the pharmacist, who lived opposite, and was ten years older than Gabito but a good friend of the family, remembers him as a cissy or “petticoat-hugger” who played with tops and kites but never played football with the street children.⁵⁴

Perhaps because he was not encouraged to become personally adventurous Gabito developed an active imagination—through drawing, reading, visits to the cinema and his own interactions with grownups. He seems to have become something of a show-off, always trying to impress the visitors with his fancy ideas and amusing anecdotes, tales which had to become ever taller in order to achieve the desired effect. Tranquilina was convinced he was a clairvoyant. Inevitably some adults interpreted his love of story-telling and fantasy as a tendency to dishonesty, and for the rest of his life García Márquez would have trouble with other people’s questioning of his veracity.⁵⁵ Perhaps no modern writer’s work raises so compellingly, indeed mysteriously, the relation between truth, fiction, verisimilitude and sincerity as his.

The two eldest children remained the property of their grandparents, as an eloquent anecdote from Margot demonstrates: “Grandfather didn’t allow anyone to tell us off. Once, I remember, when we were older, they gave us permission to go to my mother’s house by ourselves. When we set off, at about ten in the morning, my grandmother was cutting up a cheese and we asked for a piece. We arrived at the house and it turned out Luis Enrique and Aida were fasting because they’d taken medicine against parasites and couldn’t eat for a few hours. Naturally they were starving and when they saw the cheese they asked for some. When my father found out he was furious and started to shout insults at us. Gabito said, ‘Run, Margot, he’s going to hit us,’ and he took my hand and we made a run for it. We arrived home all frightened, and me crying. When we told Grandpa what had happened he went to tell my father off: why had he shouted at us, why had he threatened us.”⁵⁶

In 1935, however, the old world really did start to come to an end. One day, at six o’clock in the morning, Nicolás, by now over seventy, climbed a ladder at the side of the house to retrieve the family parrot, which had become caught in the sacking placed over the huge water tanks on the roof to prevent the leaves from the mango trees dropping in. Somehow he missed his footing and fell to the ground, and was left scarcely able to breathe. Margot remembers everyone screaming, “He’s fallen, he’s fallen!”⁵⁷ From that moment the old man, who was still enjoying reasonably good health, went into a sharp physical decline. It was now that Gabito, spying on the occasion of a doctor’s visit, saw a bullet scar close to his grandfather’s groin, the undeniable mark of a warrior. But after his fall, the old warrior was never the same again. He began to walk with a stick and to suffer from a series of ailments that would lead, before long, to his death. After the accident the walks around the town came to an abrupt end and the magic of the child’s relationship with his grandfather—based above all on security—would begin to fade. The Colonel even had to ask Gabriel Eligio and Luisa to collect taxes and other payments on his behalf, which must have been a demoralizing blow to his pride.

In early 1936 Gabito moved to the public school in Aracataca.⁵⁸ He had suddenly become an obsessive reader. His grandfather and Miss Fergusson had already opened his eyes to learning, and the dictionary had begun to lay down the law; but the book which most stimulated his imagination was The Thousand and One Nights, found in one of his grandfather’s old trunks, which seems to have conditioned his interpretation of much of what he experienced in the Aracataca of those days, part Persian market, part Wild West. For a long time he was unaware of the book’s title because the cover was missing; when he did discover the title he must surely have made a connection between the exotic and mythological “Thousand and One Nights” and the more local, historical “War of a Thousand Days.”⁵⁹

Now that the Colonel was a virtual invalid, Gabriel Eligio felt able to reassert his rights to his two fostered children. Thus Gabito had no sooner learned to read and write, with all its wonders, than his own adventurous, restless father decided to take the family away to Sincé, where he himself had been born. And this time Gabito too would be included, taken away from his home, his grandparents and his sister Margot by this man he hardly knew, who had already decided that his son’s main character trait was that he was a born liar, a kid who would “go somewhere, see something and come home telling something completely different. He exaggerated everything.”⁶⁰ In December 1936 this frightening father, a born fabulator himself, took Gabito and Luis Enrique on an exploratory expedition to Sincé, to see if prospects there were better than the increasingly grim reality of Aracataca.⁶¹

Gabriel Eligio enrolled the boys to study with a local teacher, though the classes would not be recognized by the authorities and Gabito would lose yet another school year. Little wonder he eventually decided to adjust his age downwards to make up for all the school years he had lost! Now the two boys got to know their colourful paternal grandmother, Argemira García Paternina, still unmarried in her forties. She had given birth to Gabriel Eligio at the age of fourteen and thereafter had at least six children by at least three other men. “She was an extraordinary woman, I now realize,” said García Márquez sixty years later, “the freest spirit I’ve ever known. She had an extra bed ready at all times for whoever wanted to sleep with someone. She had her own moral code and she didn’t give a fuck what anyone else thought about it. Of course we thought it was quite normal at the time. Some of her sons, my uncles, were younger than I was, and I used to play with them, we’d go off and hunt birds and things like that; I never thought twice about it all, it was the social world we lived in. Of course the landowners would seduce or rape thirteen-year-old girls in those days and then just cast them aside. My father went back to see her when he was grown up with a family and she was in her forties and he was outraged to find her pregnant again. She just laughed and said, ‘What’s it to you, how do you think you came into the world?’”⁶²

Gabito’s recollections of this stay were fragmentary and no doubt painful, despite his jokes in later life. It is not difficult to imagine the anguish at leaving his sick grandfather and the culture shock at meeting the less respectable side of the family. Like Aracataca, Sincé was a small compact town with an even larger central square, the usual wedding-cake church, the usual statue of Bolívar, and a population of perhaps nine thousand inhabitants. Its economy was based principally on cattle, rice and maize and, like most cattle areas, its politics were essentially conservative. Grandmother Argemira, known as “Mama Gime,” lived in a little sloping square well away from the main plaza in a tiny two-room wooden house, painted white, with a palm thatch roof. It was there she had all her children.⁶³ The experience must have shown Gabito a different world. He was no longer the protected child of Colonel Márquez and must have had to adjust to the wilder ways of his illegitimate uncles and cousins, not to mention his own rebellious and increasingly reckless younger brother, Luis Enrique.

Meanwhile, back home in Aracataca life had been getting harder. The culmination came early in March 1937 when, two years after his accident, Colonel Márquez died in Santa Marta of bronchial pneumonia. He had never recovered from the effects of his fall from the ladder in 1935. The old man had already been emotionally devastated by the death of his sister Wenefrida in his own house on 21 January 1937 and we can only imagine what the departure of his beloved “little Napoleon” had done to the old soldier’s morale. His son Juan de Dios moved the Colonel to Santa Marta early in 1937 for a throat operation. In March he contracted pneumonia and died on the 4th of that month at the age of seventy-three, in the city where another warrior, Simón Bolívar, had died and in whose cathedral he had been laid to rest.

Colonel Márquez was buried that same day in the Santa Marta city cemetery and the newspaper EI Estado recorded his death in a brief obituary. Margot vividly recalls the funeral in Santa Marta. “I cried and cried the whole day. But Gabito was away with my father and Luis Enrique in Sincé on another of his adventures. Gabito didn’t get back for months, so I don’t remember his reaction. But it must have been one of deep sadness, because they adored one another, they were inseparable.”⁶⁴

Gabito, in Sincé, learned about the death indirectly through overhearing a conversation between his father and grandmother. Many years later, he would say that he was unable to cry at the news, and only realized the old man’s importance to him after he had grown up. He even made light of the moment: “I had other worries. I recall that at that time I had lice and it used to embarrass me terribly. They used to say that lice abandoned you when you died. I remember being very worried: ‘Shit, if I go and die now, everyone’ll know I have lice!’ So in those circumstances I can’t have been much affected by my grandfather’s death. My main worry was the lice. In fact I only started to miss my grandfather later when, grown up, I couldn’t find anyone to replace him, because my father was never a proper substitute.”⁶⁵ The quirky recollections and provocative hyperboles, the typically indirect communication of personal emotions and implicit denials, conceal a simpler, more brutal fact: the boy was never able to grieve for the being he loved most during a painful and often incomprehensible childhood, the one who was the fount of all wisdom and the foundation of all security. Surrounded now by the members of his own nuclear family, his real family, the family who had left him when he was a baby, little Gabito was bereft. In April 1971, in answer to a reporter’s question about his grandfather’s death, and in front of his own biological father, García Márquez stated, with characteristic and in this case cruel hyperbole: “I was eight when he died. Since then nothing important has happened to me. Everything has just been flat.”⁶⁶

Gabriel Eligio took the two boys back briefly to Aracataca to persuade Luisa to join them in Sincé. Luisa was decidedly unenthusiastic about the expedition. In 1993 she told me, “I didn’t want to go, just imagine, a young family and all our things. Train to Ciénaga, boat to Cartagena and road to Sincé. But I always did what he wanted, and he was a great traveller, an adventurer. We hired two trucks, with Luis Enrique and Gabito in the first one and their father behind in the second one, which overturned once on the way.”⁶⁷ Only their cousin Sara Márquez, recently married, stayed behind in the old house in Aracataca with Tranquilina and Aunt Francisca.

Margot’s response to all these changes in the family’s fortunes was a bitter one: “We lived in my grandmother’s house until the money started to run out and she had to live on what Uncle Juanito sent her; so then it was decided that Gabito and I should move to my father’s home in Sincé … It was terrible. To move from a quiet environment to live with those devils, my brothers and sisters, added to the character of our father, who was rough and noisy. He never let anything go. He used to give Aida some tremendous thrashings and she would take no notice. I thought, ‘If he ever touches me, I’ll throw myself in the river.’ Neither I nor Gabito ever stood up to him, we always did as we were told.”⁶⁸

But things went badly in Sincé. Gabriel Eligio had invested in livestock, notably a herd of goats, but the venture turned out disastrously and the family returned to Aracataca within a few months. Gabriel Eligio did not accompany his wife and children all the way but stopped off in Barranquilla where he began to find the means to set up yet another pharmacy. In Aracataca the rest of the family burned the Colonel’s clothes in the courtyard of the house and Gabito somehow saw the old man alive again among the flames. Gabito tried to come to terms with the loss of his grandfather, the collapse of his grandmother, who, already losing her eyesight, was inconsolable without her husband of over fifty years, and the simultaneous decline of the redoubtable Aunt Francisca, who had been with Nicolás even longer than his wife had. For Gabito, it was the end of an entire world. Immersed in this grief that he was unable even to recognize, and wholly in the hands, now, of the family that had abandoned him so many years before, he was reluctant to reintegrate into the life of the other children in Aracataca.

Luis Enrique, less reflective and with none of his brother’s painful psychological baggage to carry, threw himself back into the life of their Caribbean home town, the life which the hypersensitive Gabito would only be able to appreciate many years later, as he looked back with rueful nostalgia not only on the world he had lost but the fun he had missed. Both went back to the public school for boys. Luis Enrique recalls that the gypsies and the circus soon stopped passing through and, like the García Márquez family, lots of people were preparing to leave: “Even the prostitutes went away, the ones who practised their trade in ‘The Academy,’ as the house of pleasure was known … Naturally I never [went inside] but my friends told me all about it.”⁶⁹

For many, many years Gabito would see Aracataca far more darkly than his reckless and rumbustious younger brother, as his first literary portrait, Leaf Storm, would illustrate. Although, much later, he would talk somewhat warmly about the town, he would always be afraid to go back. Not until he was forty years of age would he achieve the distance to view it through the picaresque filter Luis Enrique had already developed as a boy.

The end had arrived for all of them and Gabito, now eleven, was about to leave “that hot dusty town where my parents assure me I was born and where I dream that I am—innocent, anonymous and happy—almost every night. In which case I would not perhaps be the same person I am now but maybe I would have been something better: just a character in one of the novels I would never have written.”⁷⁰