4
GABRIEL ELIGIO took Gabito alone with him to Barranquilla to set up the pharmacy and their new life. It took them two months. Eleven-year-old Gabito found his father treated him better when there was no one else to show off to. But he was also left alone a lot of the time and Gabriel Eligio often neglected to feed him. One time the boy even found himself sleepwalking along an avenue in the centre of the city, suggesting a serious emotional disturbance.1
Barranquilla stood on the Magdalena River at the point where it begins to open out to the Caribbean Sea. In half a century it had been transformed from a mere hamlet lying between the historic colonial harbours of Cartagena and Santa Marta to become perhaps the most dynamic city in the nation. It was the hope of Colombia’s shipping industry and the home of its aviation. It was the only conurbation with significant immigration from abroad, which made it in a way like a capital city with a strong sense of its own somewhat makeshift modernity compared to Bogotá’s gloomy Andean traditionalism and the conservatism of its more aristocratic neighbour Cartagena. It was full of foreign and national import-export businesses, factories and workshops—a German airline, Dutch manufacturers, Italian food producers, Arab stores, American developers—and a plethora of small banks, commercial institutes and schools. Many of the firms were founded by Jews who had migrated from the Dutch Antilles. Barranquilla was the point of entry for travellers from abroad and the point of departure for travellers to Bogotá, whether by river or by air. Its carnival was the most famous in the country and many barranquilleros still live the whole year in impatient expectation of that week in February when their already vibrant community will once again explode.
In Sincé and during the brief return to Aracataca relationships had been diluted to some extent by the presence of numerous members of the respective extended families. But when they arrived in Barranquilla late in 1938, leaving Tranquilina and the aunts behind in Aracataca, the members of the García Márquez nuclear family found themselves alone together for the very first time. Gabito and Margot, silently mourning their grandfather and the absence of their now ailing grandmother, found the adjustment almost too difficult to bear. But bear it they had to. Each knew that the other was suffering but they never spoke about it. Besides, their mother was suffering similar grief and had moved back to Barranquilla with great reluctance and visible resentment. The new pharmacy was down in the town centre and the new house was in the Barrio Abajo or Lower Quarter, perhaps the best-known popular district of Barranquilla. The house was small but surprisingly pretentious; Gabriel Eligio had realized that Luisa, expecting another baby, was in no mood for stoicism. Although it only had two bedrooms, the main living room had four Doric columns and on the roof was a small mock turret painted red and cream. Locals called it “the castle.”
It became clear almost at once that the new pharmacy was to be another disastrous failure. Overwhelmed by his misfortunes, Gabriel Eligio set off once more for greener grasses, leaving his pregnant wife with no way of supporting herself and the children. Now came the family’s worst days. Gabriel Eligio travelled up and down and around the northern reaches of the Magdalena River, treating patients ad hoc, taking on temporary jobs and looking for new ideas. Luisa must often have wondered if he would ever be coming back. Her seventh child, Rita, would be born in July 1939; Aunt Pa travelled to Barranquilla to assist Luisa in the absence of Gabriel Eligio, and García Márquez notes in his memoir that the child was named Rita in honour of St. Rita of Cascia whose claim to moral fame was “the patience with which she bore the bad character of her wayward husband.”2 Luisa Santiaga would have four more children, all of them boys.
She was forced to rely on the generosity of her brother Juan de Dios, an accountant in Santa Marta, who was already supporting Tranquilina and the aunts in Aracataca.3 It turned out that Luisa had resources of resilience, practicality and common sense which Gabriel Eligio never managed to develop. She was a quiet, gentle woman who could seem passive and even childlike, yet she found a way to bring up and protect eleven children without ever having enough money to feed, clothe and educate them in comfort. Where Gabriel Eligio’s sense of humour was somewhat broad and always eccentric, Luisa had an incisive sense of irony—which again she kept under tight rein—and a sense of humour that ranged from the wry to the openly festive and which has been immortalized in a number of her son’s female characters, most notably the unforgettable Ursula Iguarán in One Hundred Years of Solitude. The period in Barranquilla, during which Gabito and his mother fought together against real poverty, established a new link between them which would never be broken: García Márquez, stressing its importance to him but concealing his hurt, would say that his relationship with her was “a serious relationship … probably the most serious relationship I’ve ever had.”4
Despite the hardships Luisa decided to enrol Gabito in school so that he could complete his primary education. He was the eldest and academically the brightest and as such he represented the family’s best hope for the future. The headmaster of the Cartagena de Indias school, Juan Ventura Casalins, took a protective attitude to his new pupil and the encouragement of a sympathetic adult male must have been providential. Even so, García Márquez’s reminiscences of his schooldays are of loneliness and of overcoming great trials and tribulations. He immersed himself in books such as Treasure Island and The Count of Monte Cristo.
He also had to look for real work and earned a few pesos painting signs for a store named El Toquío which stood—and still stands—next to the old house. The boy would paint messages from the shopkeeper such as “If you don’t see it, just ask,” or, “The man who gives the credit is out looking for his money.” On one memorable occasion he was paid twenty-five pesos for painting the sign on the local bus. (Colombia’s buses are the gaudiest in Latin America.) On another he entered a radio talent contest in which he remembers singing “The Swan,” a well-known waltz, but unfortunately he came second and he also remembers that his mother, who had alerted all her friends and relatives and was not unnaturally hoping for the five-peso prize, found it hard to conceal her disappointment. He also got a job with a local printer which included hawking samples around the streets. He abandoned the job after meeting the mother of one of his friends from Aracataca, who shouted after him: “Tell Luisa Márquez she should think what her parents would say if they saw their favourite grandson handing out leaflets to consumptives in the market.”5
Gabito himself was a sickly child at this age, pale, underfed and physically underdeveloped. Luisa tried to protect him from tuberculosis by giving him Scott’s Emulsion, the famous brand of cod liver oil, while her husband was away and Gabriel Eligio would say that when he got home from his travels Gabito “stank of fish.” One of the boy’s most chilling childhood memories was of a dairywoman who often called at the house saying crassly one day to Luisa Santiaga in front of the child himself, “I hate to say it, ma’am, but I don’t think this boy of yours is going to make it to grown-up.”6
During one of the family’s occasional telephone calls to the long-lost head of the family, Luisa said she didn’t like the tone of his voice and during the next call she exhorted him to come home. The Second World War had just broken out and perhaps she was feeling especially insecure. Gabriel Eligio sent a telegram which simply said, “Indecisive.” Smelling a rat, she gave him a blunt alternative: either he came home at once or she would take all the children to wherever he was. Gabriel Eligio caved in and was back in Barranquilla within the week. In no time at all he began dreaming about new ventures. He recalled nostalgically a small river town called Sucre, which he had visited as a very young man. No doubt there was a woman somewhere in his mind’s eye. Once again he acquired a loan from a pharmaceutical wholesaler whose drugs he undertook to purvey and within a couple of months the family was on its way from the most modern city in Colombia to a small rural backwater.
As usual Gabriel Eligio went on in advance to the new destination and left Luisa, pregnant once more, to move or sell the family effects—this time she sold most of them—and bring the seven children. Gabito, who had already been given tasks beyond his years when he went on ahead to Barranquilla with his father a year and a half before, now found himself in an enhanced role as man of the family. He made almost all the arrangements, including the packing, booking the removal truck and buying the steamer tickets to take the family up-river towards Sucre. Unfortunately the ticket clerk changed the rules in mid-transaction and Luisa found herself without enough money because the company said that all the children had to pay full fare. Desperate, she carried out a one-woman sit-in and won the day. Years later, Luisa herself, chatting to me in Barranquilla when she was eighty-eight, remembered that odyssey: “At the age of twelve Gabito had to organize the journey, being the eldest. I can still see him standing on the deck of the river steamer counting the children and suddenly panicking. ‘There’s one missing!’ he said. And it was him. He hadn’t counted himself!”7
The river-boat took them south to Magangué, the largest town on the northern Magdalena. From there they had to switch to a launch which would take them up the smaller San Jorge River and then along the much narrower Mojana, with swamps and jungle on either side, a great adventure which opened wide the children’s imagination. Gustavo, the youngest son, was only four years old and the arrival in Sucre in November 1939 is one of his most vivid early memories: “We went to Sucre by launch and stepped down from the boat along a plank. The scene is imprinted on my mind: my mother walking down the plank, dressed all in black, with pearl buttons on the sleeves of her dress. She must have been about thirty-four. I remembered that episode many years later, when I was thirty myself; it was as if I was looking at a portrait and I realized she had a look of resignation on her face. It’s easy enough to understand because my mother had been educated in a convent school and had been the favourite child of one of the most important families in the town; an indulged little girl who had painting and piano lessons and who, all of a sudden, had to live in a town where the snakes came into the houses and there was no electric light; a town where the floods were so bad in winter that the land disappeared beneath the water and clouds of mosquitoes appeared.”8
Sucre was a small town of about three thousand inhabitants with no road or rail access to anywhere. It was like a floating island lost in a lattice-work of rivers and streams amidst what had once been dense tropical jungle, now thinned out by constant human endeavour but still covered by trees and undergrowth with large clearings for cattle, rice, sugar cane and maize. Other crops included bananas, cacao, yucca, sweet potato and cotton. The landscape was constantly changing and shifting between scrub forest and savannah, depending on the season and the height of the rivers. Immigrants had come from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Italy and Germany between 1900 and the mid-1920s. The more prosperous inhabitants lived around the large plaza, which was not a conventional square but an area more than a hundred and fifty yards long and perhaps thirty yards wide, with the river at one end, the church at the other and a row of brightly painted two-storey houses on either side. This was where Gabriel Eligio had rented his new house, with the pharmacy set up on the ground floor.
Soon after their arrival Luisa insisted on raising the question of Gabito’s secondary education and persuaded her reluctant husband that he should be sent to the San José College back in Barranquilla, about which she had made enquiries before her departure. “They make governors there,” she said.9 Gabito himself may have felt that he was being rejected again but decided to put a brave face on things: “I thought of school as a dungeon, I was appalled at the very idea of living subject to a bell, but it was also my only hope of enjoying a free life from the age of thirteen, on good terms with my family but away from their control.”10
A friend has described his appearance in those days: “He had a large broad head, and wiry unkempt hair. He had a rather coarse nose, long as a shark’s fin. He had a mole starting to grow to the right of his nose. He looked half Indian and half gypsy. He was a thin, taciturn boy who went to school because he had to.”11 He was almost thirteen and his education was well behind schedule. During his first fifteen months back in the big coastal city he stayed with José María, one of his Valdeblánquez cousins, his wife Hortensia and their baby daughter. He slept in the lounge on a sofa.
Despite his own self-doubts and the competition from other talented boys, Gabito’s performance in school was consistently excellent across the board. He became celebrated for his literary exercises entitled “My Foolish Fancies,” humorous satirical poems about his schoolmates and about severe or silly school rules, which, when they came to the attention of his teachers, he was regularly asked to recite.12 He also published a number of other short pieces and poems in the school magazine Juventud (Youth) and was given a series of positions of trust and responsibility during his three years at the school. For example, the boy with the best grades of the week would raise the national flag before classes in the morning and this was a task Gabito had to himself for long periods of the school year. There is a picture of him in the school magazine with his medals; he is looking slightly sideways at the camera and somewhat shamefaced, as if he has reason to doubt the justice of his success. This was a feeling which would pursue him down the years.
At the end of the first year the adolescent García Márquez returned home for the annual two-month vacation in December and January. Inevitably another child had been born, and prematurely at seven months: his baby brother Jaime, destined to be sickly for seven years; Gabito became his family godfather and much later in life Jaime would become Gabito’s closest sibling. By now the family was established in the new environment and Gabito, as always, had a lot of catching up to do. His brothers and sisters came to view him as a sort of occasional brother, who turned up every so often, quiet, shy and somewhat solitary—the oldest and the most distant. These regular absences, at the very outset of adolescence, deepened the gulf between the boy and his father, who never understood him and seemed not to try. But he never forgot about his sister Margot, who was equally afraid of their father, while their mother could never find time for her. She missed him terribly. (“We were almost like twins.”) Aware of her solitude, Gabito wrote to Margot religiously every week he was away.13
He dreaded going home. If in order to learn about Sucre we had to rely upon statements made by García Márquez between 1967 and his 2002 autobiography we would have known next to nothing apart from the indirect evidence of novels such as In Evil Hourand No One Writes to the Colonel, written in the 1950s, and Chronicle of a Death Foretold, written at the beginning of the 1980s. Such grudging statements as he did make merely confirmed the grim and sombre impression left by those novels. Sucre was the anonymous pueblo (small town), the dark and evil twin of Macondo; he would not even refer to it by name, just as he rarely mentioned his father, with whom it was so closely identified in his mind. (The original title for In Evil Hour was This Shit-Heap of a Town.) Yet for the younger children, particularly for Rita and the four who were born there, it was a tropical paradise of river, jungle, exotic animals and freedom.
This was also Gabriel Eligio’s most successful period as a pharmacist and homeopathic practitioner and he not only worked on his own account but was connected to the local clinic. For such perks it was helpful to be a Conservative, for Sucre, unlike Aracataca, was a largely Conservative town. At the same time, violence was never too far below the surface. On the day Jaime was christened a local trumpeter had his throat slit at the very moment he was straining to blow the highest, wildest note. Some said the blood soared three metres. Luis Enrique heard about the incident immediately and raced off to see but by the time he arrived the unfortunate man was almost out of blood, though the body was still palpitating.14 Nothing quite so dramatic would happen again in public until a family friend, Cayetano Gentile, their next door neighbour, was murdered in front of the whole town in January 1951 and all their lives were irremediably changed.
For Gabito there had been a jarring alteration in the family arrangements brought about by his errant father. As he walked up from the launch on his return to Sucre at the end of 1940 he was embraced by a vivacious young woman who announced herself as his sister Carmen Rosa; the same evening he would discover that his other half-sibling Abelardo was also in town, working as a tailor. The presence of Abelardo must have come as a particular shock. Gabito’s only consolation for being with this almost unknown family had been that he was the eldest and this consolation had now been taken away from him: he was not his father’s eldest son, only his mother’s.
Gabriel Eligio’s career frustrations and professional inferiority complex account for part of the problem between him and Gabito, who was always looking at him with an outsider’s eye. Most of Gabriel Eligio’s children took his stories about his medical expertise and achievements at face value.15 Gabito, who had already seen far more of the world, was undoubtedly more sceptical than his brothers and sisters. Gabriel Eligio evidently read a lot and knew a lot; he also had a lot of brass neck and the fortitude to follow his own intuitions while his patients took the risks. He had qualified as a homeopathic doctor in Barranquilla and while he worked as a pharmacist there he struggled part-time to earn a qualification through the University of Cartagena to secure full recognition as a doctor; eventually, after prolonged negotiations, he was granted the title “Doctor of Natural Sciences,” but he called himself “doctor” long before that.16 It seems doubtful Gabito ever took his father’s assumed title very seriously; besides, “Colonel” was a title he undoubtedly much preferred. Gabriel Eligio himself often boasted that his techniques were far from orthodox: “When I used to go and see a sick person the beating of his heart would tell me what was wrong with him. I used to listen with great care. ‘This is a liver problem,’ the heart would … say to me, ‘This man’s going to die talking,’ so I’d say to his relatives, ‘This man is going to die talking’ and the man would die talking. But afterwards I lost the knack.”17
Not surprisingly, teguas (tegua is a pejorative word meaning anything between a Western quack doctor and an Indian herbalist), indeed all homeopathic doctors, had a reputation for sexual profligacy in Colombia in those days. After all, they were travelling experts, with no ties to most of the places they passed through, with unrivalled access to members of the opposite sex and a ready explanation for any disconcerting behaviour. A woman in a nearby settlement hired a lawyer who accused Gabriel Eligio of raping her while under anaesthetic and although he denied the more serious charge of rape he admitted that he was indeed the father of her child.18 This too—having sexual relations with a patient—was a criminal offence, but he managed to extricate himself from what was perhaps the most perilous moment of his career, when he could have lost everything. Later another woman came forward to say that her granddaughter too had been made pregnant by Doctor García and that she could not look after her. Luisa, after the inevitable quarrels and recriminations, did the same as her mother before her and accepted that her husband’s offspring were also hers. As García Márquez himself said, “She was angry, yet she took the children in and I actually heard her say that phrase: ‘I don’t want the family blood going wandering around the world.’”19
During the first annual vacation Gabito not only had to assimilate the appearance of Abelardo and Carmen Rosa, and the darkly whispered news about yet another illegitimate half-brother; another traumatic experience awaited him. He took a message from his father to what turned out to be the local brothel, “La Hora” (“The Hour”). The woman who opened the door looked him up and down and said, “Oh, sure, come this way.” She led him to a darkened room, undressed him and, as he put it the first time he ever mentioned it in public, “raped” him. He would later recall: “It was the most awful thing that ever happened to me, because I didn’t know what was going on. I was absolutely certain I was going to die.”20 To add insult to injury, the prostitute rather brutally told Gabito he should ask his younger brother, evidently already a regular, for lessons. He must have blamed his father for this sordid, frightening and humiliating experience. Indeed, it is more than likely that, in time-honoured Latin American tradition—what the Brazilians used to call “sending a boy to buy candy”—Gabriel Eligio actually set it up.
The second year at San José started like the first. García Márquez remained the literary star of the lower school and enjoyed a quiet popularity. He wrote an entertaining report on a school excursion to the seaside in March 1941 which is a pleasure to read, overflowing with good humour, youthful enthusiasm and sheer verve and nerve: “On the bus Father Zaldívar told us to sing a devotion to the Virgin and we did so despite the fact that some boys proposed instead a porro21 (an Afro-Colombian song) like ‘The Old Cow’ or ‘The Hairless Hen.’” The chronicle ends, “Whoever wants to know who wrote these ‘foolish fancies’ should send a letter to Gabito.” He was one of the swots, allergic to sports and fighting, and used to sit reading in the shade during break time while the others were playing football. But like many other studious and non-sporting students before and since, he learned to be funny and to defend himself with his tongue.
Yet there was much more to this enigmatic adolescent than met the eye. Gabito’s blossoming education was interrupted in 1941 by a lengthy absence from San José when he missed the second half of the academic year through an emotional disorder which came to a head in May. The ever indiscreet Gabriel Eligio discussed it in an interview in 1969, soon after his son became famous: “He had something like a schizophrenia, with terrible temper tantrums and such like. Once he threw an inkwell at one of the priests, a well-known Jesuit. So they wrote to say they thought I should take him out of school, which I did.”22 It is rumoured in the family that Gabriel Eligio intended to trepan his son’s head “at the place where his consciousness and memory were situated” and that only Luisa’s threat to make the plan public restrained him.23 It is not hard to imagine what effect such a plan may have had on a boy who had no faith in this home doctor anyway and who must have been petrified at the thought of his father literally getting inside his head.
When the wretched Gabito arrived in Sucre his half-brother Abelardo said bluntly that what he needed was to “get his leg over” and provided him with a stream of willing young women who gave him early sexual experiences while the other boys back at San José were busy praying to the Holy Virgin. These precocious adventures gave García Márquez, who until that time evidently felt less of a male than other males in a profoundly macho society, the sense of being a sexual insider, which never left him whatever his other complexes and sustained him in the face of numerous other anxieties and setbacks.24
It was at this point that a mysterious character called José Palencia, son of a local landowner, appeared on the scene. Like Gabito’s brother Luis Enrique, Palencia was a talented musician and a great parrandero (drinker, singer, seducer) who would remain a good friend of Gabito’s through his time at Bogotá. He was also handsome, and an accomplished dancer, a skill which Gabito, an excellent singer, had not yet mastered. Palencia would be the protagonist of numerous picaresque and even melodramatic anecdotes down the years before an untimely but not unexpected demise. Acquiring such a friend was another shot in the arm for a growing adolescent.
On his return to school in February 1942 the young García Márquez was warmly greeted by both pupils and teachers. Although he makes light of the experience in his memoirs, he must have felt embarrassed and humiliated by his absence and the explanations he had to invent. His father was given much credit for his “cure.” He no longer stayed with José María and Hortensia Valdeblánquez, who now had two children, but with his father’s uncle, Eliécer García Paternina, a bank clerk known for his probity and generosity whose great passion in life was the English language. Eliécer’s daughter Valentina was, like Gabito, a great reader and took him to meetings of the local “Arena y Cielo” (“Sand and Sky”) group of poets.25
One day, while he was waiting in the house of one of the poets, a “white woman poured into a mulatta’s mould” came to visit. Her name was Martina Fonseca and she was married to a black river pilot well over six feet tall. Gabito was just fifteen and very small for his age. He talked to her for a couple of hours as they waited for the poet. Then he saw her again waiting for him—he says—on a park bench after they had both been to church on Ash Wednesday. She invited him home and they embarked on an intense sexual affair—“a secret love that burned like a wild fire”—which lasted the rest of the school year. The pilot was frequently away for twelve days at a time and on the corresponding Saturdays Gabito, who had to be back at Uncle Eliécer’s by eight o’clock, pretended to be at the Saturday afternoon performance at the Rex Cinema. But after a few months Martina said she thought it would be better if he went somewhere else to study because “then you will realize that our affair will never be more than it has already been.”26 He left in tears and as soon as he got back to Sucre he announced that he was not returning either to San José or to Barranquilla. His mother, according to this version, said, “Then you’ll have to go to Bogotá.” His father said there was no money for that and Gabito, suddenly realizing that he wanted to go on studying after all, blurted out, “There are scholarships.” A few days later came the pay-off: “Get yourself ready,” said Gabriel Eligio, “you’re going to Bogotá.”27
GABITO SET OFF for the capital in January 1943 to try his luck. Even this was a risk for the family because the journey to Bogotá was an expensive investment for a boy who might easily fail the entrance examination. Bogotá was, in effect, another country, and the journey there was long and intimidating. His mother adjusted one of his father’s old black suits and the whole family saw him off at the boardwalk. Never one to miss the chance of a trip, Gabriel Eligio began the journey with Gabito in a small launch which took them along the rivers Mojana and San Jorge and then down the great Magdalena to the city of Magangué. There Gabito said goodbye to his father and took the river-boat David Arango south to the port of Puerto Salgar, a voyage which normally lasted a week but sometimes three if the river was low and the steamer was stranded on a sandbank. Although he wept during the first night, what had seemed daunting in prospect became a revelation.28 The boat was full of other young costeños, hopeful first-timers like him looking for grants, or more fortunate schoolboys and university students already enrolled and returning after the long vacations. He would come to remember these journeys as floating fiestas during which he, with the rest of the young men, sang boleros,vallenatos andcumbias to entertain themselves and to earn a few pesos, on that “wooden paddle-wheeler that went along leaving a wake of piano-player waltzes in the midst of the sweet fragrance of gardenias and rotting salamanders of the equatorial tributaries.”29
A few days later, as Gabito was leaving the river-boat at journey’s end his more experienced companions, jeering at a tropical bundle his mother had forced upon him—a palm-leaf sleeping mat, a fibre hammock, a coarse woollen blanket and an emergency chamber pot—wrested it from him and threw it in the river to mark the accession to civilization of this corroncho—the deprecating Bogotá word for a costeño, which implies that all of them are coarse and ignorant and incapable of discriminating good behaviour from bad.30 It was as if nothing he knew or possessed would be of use to him in Bogotá, among the devious and supercilious cachacos.
At Puerto Salgar, at the foot of the Eastern Andes, the passengers boarded the train which would take them up to Bogotá. As the locomotive climbed into the Andes the mood of the costeños changed. With each twist of the line the atmosphere grew colder and thinner, and breathing became more difficult.31 Most of them started to shiver and developed headaches. At 8,000 feet they reached the Meseta and the train began to accelerate towards the capital city across the Sabana de Bogotá, a plateau 300 miles long and 50 miles wide, a gloomy dark green beneath the year-round rains but a brilliant emerald colour when the high Andean sun shone down from its cobalt sky. The Sabana was dotted with small Indian villages of gray adobe huts with thatched roofs, willow trees and eucalyptuses, and flowers decorating even the humblest dwellings.
The train arrived in the capital at four o’clock in the afternoon. García Márquez has often said it was the worst moment of his life. He was from the world of sun, sea, tropical exuberance, relaxed social customs and a relative absence of clothing and prejudices. On the Sabana everyone was wrapped up tight in a ruana or Colombian poncho; and in rainy and grey Bogotá, backed up against the Andean mountains at a height of 8,660 feet, it seemed even colder than on the Sabana; and the streets were full of men in dark suits, waistcoats and overcoats, like Englishmen in the City of London; and there were no women anywhere to be seen. Reluctantly, with a heartfelt sigh, the boy put on the black trilby hat he had been told everyone wore in Bogotá, got down from the carriage and hauled his heavy metal trunk on to the platform.32
No one was waiting for him. He realized that he could hardly breathe. Everywhere around him was the unfamiliar smell of soot. As the station and the street outside became deserted, Gabito wept for the world he had left behind. He was an orphan: he had no family, no sunshine, and no idea what to do. Finally a distant relative arrived and took him off in a taxi to a house near the town centre. If outside in the streets everyone wore black, inside they all wore ponchos and dressing gowns. When García Márquez got into bed that first night he jumped straight out again and shrieked that someone had soaked his bed. “No,” he was told, “that’s what Bogotá’s like, you’ll have to get used to it.” He lay awake all night weeping for the world he had lost.
Four days later, early in the morning, he was standing in line outside the Ministry of Education on Jiménez de Quesada, the great avenue named after the Spanish conqueror of Colombia and founder of Bogotá.33 The line seemed interminable; it started on the third floor of the ministry building and stretched two blocks along Avenida Jiménez. García Márquez was near the end of it. His despair deepened as the morning wore on. And then some time after midday he felt a tap on his shoulder. On the steamboat from Magangué he had met a lawyer from the Costa, Adolfo Gómez Támara, who had been devouring books throughout the journey, including Dostoyevsky’s The Double and Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes. Gómez Támara had been impressed by García Márquez’s singing and had asked him to write out the words of one of the boleros so he could sing it to his sweetheart in Bogotá. In return he had presented him with his copy of The Double. The shivering youth blurted out his perhaps hopeless purpose: to win a scholarship. Incredibly, it turned out that the elegant lawyer was none other than the national director of educational grants, who at once led the stupefied applicant to the front of the line and into a large office. García Márquez’s application was registered and he was entered for the examination, which took place at the College of San Bartolomé, the academy in old Bogotá where upper-class Colombians had been educated since colonial days. He passed and was offered a place in a new school, the National College for Boys in nearby Zipaquirá thirty miles away. García Márquez would have preferred to be at the prestigious San Bartolomé in Bogotá but struggled to conceal his disappointment.
He had neither the time nor the money to go home and celebrate with his proud and excited family. He had never heard of Zipaquirá but he headed straight there, arriving by train on 8 March 1943, two days after his sixteenth birthday. Zipaquirá was a small colonial city, typically Andean, with the same climate as Bogotá. It had been the economic heart of the Chibcha Indian empire, based on the salt mines which even today are the main attraction for tourists. The imposing main square was surrounded by huge colonial houses with blue balconies and heavy, overhanging red-tiled roofs, and was fronted by a great pallid cathedral with double towers which seemed too big for what in those days was really little more than a large village. Zipaquirá was full of small workshops with black chimneys processing salt by evaporation, after which the product would be sold back to the government. Particles drifted down all over the small community like ash. For a boy from the Costa the climate and environment were cold, dismal and oppressive.
The school was newly established but housed in an old colonial building. Formerly the College of San Luis Gonzaga, it was an austere two-storeyed edifice which dated back to the seventeenth century and was organized around an inner courtyard lined with colonial arches.34 The premises comprised the rector’s study and private quarters, the secretariat, an excellent library, six classrooms and a laboratory, a storeroom, a kitchen and refectory, toilets and showers and a huge first-floor dormitory for the eighty or so boarders who slept at the school. Winning a grant for Zipaquirá, he would later say, was like “winning a tiger in a raffle.” The school was “a punishment” and “that frozen town was an injustice.”35
Although he did not appreciate it at the time, García Márquez benefited from two circumstances unique in the history of Colombia. The Conservatives had abandoned state secondary education in 1927 and handed it to the private sector, essentially the Church, but when Alfonso López Pumarejo was elected President in 1934 he declared a “Revolution on the March.” For the only time in the nation’s entire history a government, inspired in part by the Mexican Revolution and by the precarious reforms of the socialists in Republican Spain, set out to unify and democratize the country and create a new type of citizen. One of the main instruments for this transformation was to be a truly nationalist education system and the first “national college” to be founded was, precisely, the National College of Zipaquirá. At this time there were only forty thousand secondary students in the whole of Colombia and that year barely six hundred of them graduated from high school (of whom only nineteen were women). Most Colombians had only a vague idea of the regional complexity of their country but in Zipaquirá boys from every region were thrown together.36
The teachers at Zipaquirá were outstanding. Many of them had been rejected by other schools because of their progressive orientation. They tended to be hard-working idealists of a radical Liberal or even Marxist persuasion, and were sent to Zipaquirá to prevent them from polluting the minds of the upper-class boys in Bogotá. They were all specialists in their subjects, most of whom had passed through the Higher Normal School under one of Colombia’s great educators, the costeño psychiatrist José Francisco Socarrás, a relative of one of Colonel Márquez’s old war comrades and indeed of the Colonel’s wife Tranquilina.37 Socarrás believed that young Colombians should be exposed to all ideas, not excluding socialist currents. Many of the teachers were recent graduates and established relaxed and informal relationships with the pupils.
The school day was demanding. The wake-up bell was at six and by half past six García Márquez had taken a cold shower, dressed, cleaned his shoes and fingernails and made his bed. There was no school uniform but most students wore blue blazers with grey trousers and black shoes. García Márquez had to do the best he could with hand-me-downs from his father and would be embarrassed for the next few years by badly frayed jackets with extra-long sleeves, which did at least help him keep warm in the unheated school. At nine o’clock at night, after the school day and homework were behind them, the boys went up to the dormitory, where a memorable school tradition was instituted soon after García Márquez’s arrival. There was a small cubicle for the teachers to sit dozing in the dormitory and from there before lights out a teacher would sit reading to the boys from his window as they fell asleep—usually some popular classic like The Man in the Iron Mask but sometimes an even weightier work like The Magic Mountain.38Accordingto García Márquez the first of the authors was Mark Twain, an appropriate recollection for a man destined to be—among other things—the Mark Twain of his own land: symbol of the country, definer of a national sense of humour and chronicler of the relation between the provincial realm and the centre. The dormitory had iron beds with planks and these planks were the item mainly stolen by one boy from another. García Márquez became famous for terrifying dreams in the middle of the night which made him wake the entire dormitory with his screams. He had inherited this tendency from his mother Luisa; his worst nightmares “did not occur in terrifying visions but in joyful episodes with ordinary persons or places that all at once revealed sinister information in an innocent glance.”39 His recent reading of Dostoyevsky’s The Double can surely not have helped.
On Saturdays there were classes until midday, after which the boys were free until six to wander the town, attend the cinema or organize dances—if they were lucky—at the houses of local girls. On Saturday they could play soccer, though the costeños preferred baseball. Sunday was totally free until six and, although the school did have religious instruction by a priest, there was no daily service and attendance at church was not mandatory even on Sunday—though García Márquez used to attend, perhaps so that he would not have to lie to his mother in his letters home. Such freedom was extraordinary for Colombia in the 1940s. And, as García Márquez would later reflect, with three square meals a day and more freedom—a sort of “supervised autonomy”—than in one’s own home, there was much to be said after all for life at Zipaquirá.
He would always be grateful to the school for the grounding it gave him in Colombian and Latin American history, but literature, inevitably, was his favourite subject and he studied everything from the Greeks and Romans up to recent Spanish and Colombian texts. His spelling was, then as now, surprisingly erratic (though not as poor as his abject mathematical skills); he consoled himself with the thought that the great Simón Bolívar was also rumoured to have been a poor speller. He would later say that his best teacher of spelling was his mother Luisa; throughout his schooldays she would send his letters back to him with the spelling corrected.
At weekends he would play games, a bit of football with his friends in the grounds of the school, go to the cinema or walk the streets and highland meadows of Zipaquirá beneath the eucalyptus trees. Sometimes on a Sunday he would take the train to Bogotá, thirty miles away, to visit costeño relatives; on one such occasion he was introduced by a friend in the street to a distant cousin, Gonzalo González, who worked for the newspaper El Espectador. González, who had also been born in Aracataca, left a rare snapshot of the young man that García Márquez then was: “He must have been about seventeen and weighed no more than fifty kilos. He did not approach me. He said nothing before I spoke and I at once suspected that this boy was a methodical fellow, thoughtful and disciplined. He didn’t move from where he was, with one old but clean shoe on the sidewalk and the other down on the asphalt of Seventh Avenue at Sixteenth Street in Bogotá. Maybe he was a timid person who did not show his fear. Circumspect, almost a bit sad, and in any case lonely and unknown. Once his initial reserve was overcome, he began to communicate and to put on the sort of controlled effusiveness that I later heard him call his ‘nice guy show.’ Within a minute or two he was talking about books …”40
Reading was this evasive young man’s principal activity in Zipaquirá. In Barranquilla he had read every cheap Jules Verne and Emilio Salgari novel he could find as well as enough lowbrow poetry for a lifetime, together with the classics of the Spanish Golden Age. He knew many of these poems by heart. Now the lonely adolescent set to reading every book he could lay his hands on. He went through the whole library of literature, then turned to books of history, psychology, Marxism—mainly Engels—and even the works of Freud and the prophecies of Nostradamus. At the same time he was bored by the demands and rigours of his formal education and spent his time daydreaming, so much so that he was in real danger of losing his grant. Yet with just a week or two of study he astonished both his classmates and his teachers by getting straight fives and becoming “top boy.”
In late 1943 Gabito returned again to Sucre. He would travel back to this remote river town from school in Barranquilla and Zipaquirá, from university in Bogotá, and from his jobs in Cartagena and Barranquilla until the family moved to Cartagena in 1951. Here, or in other nearby towns, he would meet the models for many of his best-known characters, including “innocent Eréndira” from the book of that name and the prostitute he would call María Alejandrina Cervantes in Chronicle of a Death Foretold. While he had been away this first year in Zipaquirá the ninth child, Hernando (“Nanchi”), had been born at the end of March, and while his wife was pregnant Gabriel Eligio’s philandering ways had got him into hot water once more, with the birth of yet another illegitimate child. This time both Luisa and her eldest daughter Margot had been filled with womanly outrage, and for quite a while even Gabriel Eligio thought he might have gone too far; but as usual he talked them round.41
During this vacation García Márquez had another torrid sexual experience, this time with a voluptuous young black woman he calls “Nigromanta” (the name he would give a similarly sensuous black woman in the penultimate chapter of One Hundred Years of Solitude), whose husband was a policeman. Luis Enrique has told part of the story: “One day at midnight Gabito met a policeman on the Alvarez bridge in Sucre. The policeman was going to his wife’s house and Gabito was coming from the policeman’s wife’s house. They greeted one another, the policeman asked after Gabito’s family and Gabito asked after the policeman’s wife. And if that’s a story my mother tells you can imagine the ones she knows and doesn’t tell. And she doesn’t tell that one complete either because the end of the story is that the policeman asked Gabito for a light and as he drew near the policeman made a face and said, ‘Shit, Gabito, you must have been in “La Hora” because there’s a smell of whore on you even a billy-goat wouldn’t jump across.’”42 Weeks later—according to García Márquez’s own version—the policeman caught him in bed with his wife (he had unfortunately fallen asleep) and threatened him with a round of Russian roulette with him, Gabito, as the only player. The lawman relented not only because he had the same political proclivities as García Márquez’s father but also because he recalled with gratitude a recent occasion when Gabriel Eligio had cured him of a bout of gonorrhoea which no other doctor had been able to shift.43
Gabito was growing older, finally beginning to look his age. Contemporaries at Zipaquirá remember him at this time as thin, wild-eyed, always shivering and complaining about the cold; his previously combed and parted hair gradually turned to wire wool, never to be fully controlled again.44 He stopped trying to look like the cachacos—sombre, tidy clothes; hair greased and combed at all times—and began to make a virtue of who and what he was. A wispy costeño moustache appeared on his adolescent lip and was left to wander where it would. The previous rector had been replaced by a young poet, Carlos Martín, only thirty years of age and as handsome as a matinée idol. He was a member of the fashionable “Stone and Sky” movement in poetry which was all the rage in Bogotá. These poets, who had taken their name from the work of the Spaniard Juan Ramón Jiménez, would not have been thought revolutionary in most other Latin American republics at the time. But Colombia, always a home of poetry rather than prose—except for speeches, another national speciality—was also a home of literary conservatism. Its poetic tradition is very rich, one of the strongest in a continent of great poets, but operates within an unusually narrow, subjectivist vein, and the nation’s social and historical reality was almost completely absent from its literature in those days. New Colombian poets such as Eduardo Carranza, Arturo Camacho Ramírez, Jorge Rojas and Carlos Martín mirrored the works of Jiménez and the later Spanish 1927 Generation, together with Latin American avant-garde poets such as Pablo Neruda, who had visited Bogotá and made contact with the group in September 1943.
For the next six months the poet Martín replaced the self-effacing teacher Carlos Julio Calderón Hermida as García Márquez’s Spanish literature professor. García Márquez was already writing poetry under the pseudonym “Javier Garcés.” Martín concentrated especially on the works of Rubén Darío, the great Nicaraguan who had almost single-handedly revolutionized the poetic language of both Spain and Latin America between 1888, when his Blue (Azul) appeared, and 1916, when he died. Darío, whose childhood had been eerily similar to García Márquez’s, would become one of the principal gods of the young Colombian’s poetic Olympus.45 He began to compose poems “after the manner of …,” technical pastiches of the great Spaniards such as Garcilaso de la Vega, Quevedo and Lorca, and Latin Americans such as Darío and Neruda. He wrote sonnets on request for boys to take to their girlfriends and once he even had one of them recited back to him by the unwary recipient.46 He also wrote love poems on his own account, inspired by his relationships with local girls. The older García Márquez has always been curiously embarrassed by these early efforts to the point of denying authorship of many of them.
The costeño students organized dances in the town whenever they could. By this means, and others, he met numbers of young women. One of them, Berenice Martínez, was his partner in a brief but evidently impassioned romance towards the end of his stay in Zipaquirá. She was born in the same month as García Márquez and she recalled in 2002, by which time she was a widow with six children and living in the United States, that she and García Márquez fell in love “at first sight” and that their principal shared enthusiasm was the boleros then in vogue, snatches of which they would sing to one another during their romance.47 Also unforgettable was Cecilia González Pizano, “who was no one’s love but the muse of all the poetry addicts. She had a swift intelligence, personal charm and a free spirit in an old Conservative family, plus a supernatural memory for poetry.”48 Cecilia was called “the little One-Arm” (“La Manquita”), in that rather brutal Hispanic way, because she only had one hand and covered up its absence with a long sleeve. She was a pretty and vivacious blonde girl with whom Gabito constantly talked about poetry. Most boys assumed she was his girlfriend.
And there were other adventures, nocturnal escapades to the theatre, boys lowering others by knotted sheets to make their getaway in the dark for some illicit rendezvous. The school porter never seemed to catch anyone absconding and the boys concluded that he was their tacit accomplice. García Márquez struck up a relationship with an older woman, the wife of a physician, and during her husband’s absences made nocturnal visits to her bedroom at the end of a labyrinth of rooms and corridors in one of Zipaquirá’s old colonial houses. This experience, worthy of a story by Boccaccio, is recalled in the unforgettable scene early in One Hundred Years of Solitude in which the young José Arcadio has his first sexual experience, after feeling his way in the dark through a house full of sleeping bodies in hammocks.49
Carlos Martín knew all the leading poets of his generation and, a few months after his arrival, he invited the two most influential among them, Eduardo Carranza and Jorge Rojas, to speak at Zipaquirá. García Márquez and a friend had the honour of interviewing them in the great lounge of the colonial house Martín had rented in the main square of the town. This was his first contact with living literature at the highest level and he was at once delighted and embarrassed when Martín introduced him to the two celebrity visitors as “a great poet.”50 Unfortunately a magazine the boys founded, La Gaceta Literaria, became an improbable victim of national political developments and also García Márquez’s first experience of the violence threatening the new Colombia that President López Pumarejo was trying to fashion. On 10 July 1944 López Pumarejo, two years into his second term, was kidnapped in the town of Pasto in a coup attempt supported by the arch-Conservative politician Laureano Gómez, known to Liberals as “the Monster.” López Pumarejo, under increasing stress, would resign on 31 July 1945 and another Liberal, Alberto Lleras Camargo, would serve the last year of his term in a climate of increasing tension. Carlos Martín as headmaster had sent a telegram of support to the government palace some days after the attempted coup. Shortly afterwards, the Conservative Mayor of Zipaquirá arrived at the school with a police detachment and confiscated the entire first issue of the Gaceta Literaria, which had been specially printed at a workshop in Bogotá. A few days later the new rector was telephoned by the Minister of Education, summoned to his office, and asked to resign.
García Márquez returned to the classes of Señor Calderón Hermida and went on with his own reading. He has remarked that he found Freud’s works as speculative and imaginative as those of Jules Verne,51 and they inspired him to present a composition entitled “Obsessive Psychosis” (“Sicosis obsesiva”), written, ironically enough, in detention.52 It was about a girl who turned into a butterfly, flew far away and underwent a series of extraordinary adventures. When García Márquez’s classmates jeered at such pretentiousness the teacher hastened to support and encourage him and gave practical advice about the organization of his prose and the rhetorical instruments he might use. The story was passed around the school until it reached the school secretary who said, prophetically, that it reminded him of Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.”
This is a striking detail because García Márquez has always said that he first heard of Kafka in Bogotá in 1947 and that the impact led directly to his first published stories.53 Yet it seems he may have read Kafka at school. Interestingly, The Double, given him by Gómez Támara, is not only one of Dostoyevsky’s strangest books, as the donor himself observed at the time, but also one of the least known. Someone who had read it, however, was Franz Kafka. The idea that we all have more than one personality, more than one identity, must have been extremely consoling and in every way therapeutic for a young man like García Márquez, who was much more troubled than he seemed, who had already been through quite serious emotional problems at his previous school and was now confronted not only with a much greater challenge to his confidence and sense of self in general but also with a need to respond to the dusty conventions of Bogotá as regards authority, taste and civilization. Señor Calderón later claimed that he told his talented pupil, who was thought by most observers at the time to be an even better graphic artist than writer, that he could become “the best novelist in Colombia.”54 Such moral support was surely priceless.
Despite his extra-curricular antics and only intermittent attention to his academic obligations, García Márquez’s prestige in the school continued to grow. On the last day of 1944, at the end of his second year there, El Tiempo, Colombia’s most important newspaper, would publish one of his poems in its literary supplement, under his pseudonym, Javier Garcés. This has been a source of profound embarrassment to its author for almost sixty years but at the time it must surely have seemed a wonderful piece of recognition for a seventeen-year-old who was still two years away from completing secondary school.55 The poem, “Song,” was dedicated to a friend, Lolita Porras, who had died tragically not long before. It had an epigraph from a poem by Eduardo Carranza, the leader of the Stone and Sky group, and began as follows:
SONG
“It is raining in this poem”
E.C.
It is raining. The afternoon
is a blade of cloud. Raining.
The afternoon is soaked
in your sadness.
At times the wind comes
with its song. At times …
I feel my soul pressed
against your absent voice.
Raining. And I’m thinking
of you. And dreaming.
No one will come this afternoon
to my grief, shut tight.
No one. Only your absence
that pains me hour by hour.
Tomorrow your presence
will return with the rose.
I think—the rain falls—
of your tender gaze.
Girl like fresh fruit,
joyful as a fiesta,
today your name is twilighting
here in my poem.56
García Márquez would judge of the verses he wrote during his schooldays, “They were mere technical exercises without inspiration or aspiration, to which I assigned no poetic value because they had not come out of my soul.”57 In fact a first reading of the poem—not to mention its subject—would surely suggest that the emotional charge is rather strong. The technical aspect, though promising, is admittedly derivative—it is a pastiche, and not a bad one, of 1920s Neruda—but surely secondary. The truth seems to be that García Márquez is embarrassed not only, in the most “poetic” of Latin American republics, by the wholly understandable technical shortcomings of his early poetic beginnings but also, and much more strongly, by the otherwise unexpressed emotions he felt when he was an adolescent.
His growing literary prestige, a continuation of his juvenile prowess in Barranquilla, must explain why García Márquez gave the ceremonial graduation speech on 17 November 1944 in which he bade farewell to the boys in the class two years above him. The chosen theme of the speech was friendship, one of the leitmotifs of his future life.
IN 1944 THE JOURNEY home took him only as far as Magangué. The García Márquez family had been happy and—so they thought—settled in Sucre but happiness was always a transient experience for Gabriel Eligio, who suddenly decided to move his reluctant dependants downriver to Magangué, a hot, sprawling, flat city, surrounded by marshes, on a promontory above the Magdalena, the most important river town between Barranquilla and Barrancabermeja and the principal road link between the Magdalena and the west of the country. There is reason to believe that Gabriel Eligio was fleeing the site of his own sexual misdemeanours and embarrassments, but this had not stopped him taking a punitive view of the misdeeds of his second son, Luis Enrique, who had been sent away to a reform school in Medellín for eighteen months.
It was in Magangué that Gabito’s sisters remember meeting his future wife Mercedes Barcha. García Márquez himself has always claimed that she was nine when he met her, which would place their first meeting somewhere between November 1941 and November 1942—even before he left for Zipaquirá—and that he knew even then (at the age of fourteen) that he would marry her.58 Mercedes herself, who claims to remember “almost nothing about the past,” has confirmed that she first met her future husband when she was “just a little girl.”59 Now, in early 1945, he wrote a poem entitled “Morning Sonnet to an Incorporeal Schoolgirl” and there is good reason to assume that the schoolgirl in question was none other than Mercedes Barcha. She was just finishing her last year of primary school. The poem circulated both in Zipaquirá and Magangué and is another enthusiastic pastiche of the poetry of Neruda. The extant version is entitled simply “Girl” and is signed by “Javier Garcés”:
GIRL
She greets me as she passes and the air
breathed from her early morning voice
blurs not the four-sided light of my window
’gainst its glass but my own breath, my very soul.
She is early like the morning,
as unbelievable as any story,
and as she cuts her way through the moment
the morning sheds drops of pure white blood.
If dressed in blue she goes to school,
none can tell whether she walks or flies,
so light she treads, so like the breeze
that in the morning blue no one can say
which of the three that pass may be the breeze,
which the girl and which the morning.60
If the sonnet is indeed for Mercedes it is one of the very few things García Márquez has ever said about her in public without a humorous or ironic edge to it.
He must have returned to school with mixed emotions in February 1945. He had taken to smoking up to forty or fifty cigarettes a day, a habit he would maintain for the next three decades.61 During classes he would find frequent cause to take refuge in the lavatories and break time was anxiously awaited. He acted in part like a rebel let down by the system, and in part like a kind of poète maudit whom no system would ever satisfy. He began to affect boredom in all his classes except literature and found it almost intolerable to have to work at subjects that did not interest him. He has always expressed astonishment at his academic success and speculated that his teachers graded him for the presumed intelligence of his personality and not his actual achievements.
Despite his sense of alienation, his behaviour and record were such that he was one of three boys chosen to accompany the rector when he travelled to the National Palace in Bogotá to request funding from President Lleras Camargo, López Pumarejo’s emergency replacement, for a study visit to the Costa. Lleras not only agreed but attended the school’s graduation ceremony at the end of the year. García Márquez would get to know this consummate Liberal politician quite well in years to come and establish with him one of his curiously ambivalent relationships with the great and powerful of Bogotá. Certainly eighteen was a precocious age at which to have one’s first audience with a president and one’s first access to the seat of government. It was during this year that García Márquez made his most successful speech of all—and the only one he ever improvised. When the Second World War ended there was euphoria at the school and he was asked to say a few words. He declared that Franklin D. Roosevelt had been able, like the great Spanish hero the Cid, to “win victories even after his death.” The phrase was celebrated not only in the school but throughout the city and García Márquez’s oratorical reputation was further enhanced.62
In late 1945 he returned to Sucre. His father had closed the pharmacy in Magangué and returned for several months to his wandering ways, leaving Luisa, pregnant yet again (when she was not pregnant she was hardly let out of the house), to cope with her large family in a large rambling house. On his return he moved the family back to Sucre, to a different house a few blocks from the square, renounced pharmacy and devoted himself full-time to homeopathy. The tenth child, Alfredo (“Cuqui”), had been born in February and was effectively being brought up by Margot.
Gabito now allowed himself to be thoroughly led astray by his good-natured but incorrigible younger brother. He immediately joined Luis Enrique’s musical group, stayed out all night, frequented the local brothels and spent his share of the money the band earned drinking riotously for the first time in his life. Over Christmas, instead of making his usual contribution to the rival floats during the end-of-year festivities, he disappeared to the nearby town of Majagual for ten days and lived it up in a whorehouse: “It was all the fault of María Alejandrina Cervantes, an extraordinary woman whom I met the first night and over whom I lost my head in the longest and wildest binge of my life.”63
After many sighs and silences, Luisa finally asked her eldest son what was going on and he replied: “I’ve had it up to here, that’s what’s going on.” “What, with us?” “With everything.” He said he was sick of his life, sick of school, sick of the expectations placed upon him. This was not an answer his mother could pass on to Gabriel Eligio so she processed it for a while and finally suggested that the solution was for Gabito, like almost all other ambitious young men in Latin America in those days, to study law. “After all,” she said shrewdly, “it’s a good training for writing, and people have said that you could be a good writer.” According to his memoir, Gabito’s first response to his mother on the subject was negative: “If you’re going to be a writer it has to be one of the greats and they don’t make them any more.” The reader is confronted by the astonishing realization that, although the young man had not yet read Joyce or Faulkner, he was not interested in being the kind of writer these poor twentieth-century also-rans might represent: in his immature heart of hearts he wanted to be Dante or Cervantes! Luisa was not deterred by his demurral and over the next few days she achieved a brilliant negotiation without father and son even discussing the issue face to face: Gabriel Eligio accepted, albeit tragic of demeanour, that his son would not follow him into medicine; and Gabito accepted that he would not only finish off the baccalaureate but would also go on to study law at the National University. Thus were a major teenage rebellion and a disastrous family crisis averted.64
García Márquez, now something of a sexual reprobate, must have been astonished, as Christmas approached, to find that the incorporeal schoolgirl from Magangué had moved to Sucre. Her full name was Mercedes Raquel Barcha Pardo, the child, like him, of a pharmacist, one whom Gabriel Eligio had known for many years since he was a young man travelling the rivers and jungles of the Magdalena basin in the early 1920s. She had been born on 6 November 1932. Like Gabito she was also the eldest child, mysteriously pretty, with high cheekbones and dark oblique eyes, a long slim neck and an elegant bearing. She lived in the main square, opposite Gabito’s good friend Cayetano Gentile, who in turn lived next to the house the García Márquezes had lived in before their move to Magangué.
Mercedes’s mother Raquel Pardo López was from a cattle ranching family, as indeed was her father; but he, Demetrio Barcha Velilla, was of partly Middle Eastern stock, though he had been born in Corozal and was a Catholic. Demetrio’s father, Elías Barcha Facure, hailed from Alexandria, probably out of Lebanon: hence, presumably, Mercedes’s “stealthy beauty, that of a serpent of the Nile.”65 Elías had acquired Colombian nationality on 23 May 1932, six months before Mercedes was born. He lived to be almost one hundred and read people’s stars in coffee grains. “My grandfather was a pure Egyptian,” she told me. “He used to bounce me on his knee and sing to me in Arabic. He always dressed in white linen, with a black tie, a gold watch and a straw hat like Maurice Chevalier. He died when I was about seven.”66
Mercedes Raquel, named after her mother and grandmother, was the eldest of the six children of Demetrio and Raquel. The family moved to Majagual after she was born, then back to Magangué and finally to nearby Sucre. Demetrio had various businesses, including general provisions, but like Gabriel Eligio García, he specialized in pharmacy. Mercedes had just spent her first year at the Franciscan convent school of the Sacred Heart in Mompox, across the river from Magangué. It was only one block from the famous octagonal tower of the church of Santa Barbara in the main square of what is perhaps Colombia’s most perfectly preserved small colonial city.67
In Magangué a childhood friend told me, “Mercedes always attracted a lot of attention, she had a good figure, tall and slim. Though to be fair, her sister María Rosa was even prettier. But Mercedes always got more compliments.”68 She would help in the family pharmacy in those days and the García Márquez children would see her often when they were running errands for their father. They were all aware, then and later, that Mercedes had a strong sense of herself and a quiet authority. Gabito, who rarely went about anything directly, would often hang around talking to Mercedes’s father, Demetrio Barcha: he always preferred older men and Demetrio had the great virtue of being a Liberal, despite his friendship with Gabriel Eligio. Mercedes herself has always insisted that she was blissfully unaware of her lovesick admirer’s intentions. Usually she would not even acknowledge Gabito’s presence and her father would look over his glasses as she stalked past and gently reprove her: “Say hello.” She told Gabito that her father always said that “the prince who will marry me has not yet been born.” She told me that for many years she thought that Gabito was in love with her father!
Over the course of that Christmas vacation, 1945–6, he had an opportunity to get closer to this cool, distant girl when they coincided at parties. In Chronicle of a Death Foretold the narrator recalls, “Many people knew that in the heat of one party I asked Mercedes Barcha to marry me, when she had scarcely finished primary school, as she herself reminded me when we did marry fourteen years later.”69 Days after the party he saw her in the street walking two small children and she laughed, “Yes, they’re mine.” He took this grown-up joke, from such an enigmatic young person, as a secret sign that they were on the same wavelength. It would keep him going for years.
García Márquez’s return to Zipaquirá for the final year began on a glamorous note. He had undertaken to somehow get his madcap friend José Palencia enrolled at the National College, Palencia having failed the final grade at his school in Cartagena. In return Palencia bought him an air ticket and they flew to Bogotá in an unpressurized DC-3, a journey which took four hours instead of eighteen days.70 Palencia rented a large room in the best house in the square, with a view of the cathedral from his window. This would provide García Márquez with a useful bolthole in which to enjoy his senior status as a twelfth grader. Palencia bought him a dark suit to express his gratitude. García Márquez’s embarrassment at his dishevelled, hand-me-down clothes, which had dogged him throughout his schooldays, was at an end.
Early in this last year at school García Márquez reached the age of nineteen. He was a published poet, with considerable prestige among his classmates, whom he would regularly amuse with comical or satirical verses, with the poems written especially for their girlfriends, or with the caricatures he drew of his classmates and teachers. Even at this age he was still prey to nightmares which terrified his dorm mates and teachers almost as much as himself and for this final year he was moved to a smaller dormitory where fewer people would be disturbed by his shrieks.
The whole of Colombia was now on edge. The Conservatives had predictably defeated the divided Liberal Party in the national elections and by the time García Márquez graduated in November 1946 they were already taking sinister revenge on their political enemies and their supporters, particularly in the rural areas where the peasants had been given some reason to hope that land reform might be on the political agenda. That was never going to happen. The Conservative rollback was given an added tinge of hysteria by the growing popularity of the ever more strident Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, now the undisputed leader of the Liberals and already their proclaimed candidate for the 1950 elections. The Violencia, the horrific wave of violence that would kill a quarter of a million Colombians from the late 1940s to the 1960s, is usually dated from April 1948 but it was well under way during García Márquez’s last years in Zipaquirá.
Nervous about his examinations and desperate to carry out his promise to his mother, García Márquez eventually achieved the excellent result in the final examination that his talent evidently merited. But he was fortunate. During the revision period before the exam he and Palencia stayed out all night and got rolling drunk. They were in serious danger of expulsion and were suspended from taking the examinations, which meant that they would not be able to graduate as “bachelors” for another year. However, the principal, realizing that it would be embarrassing and anyway regrettable if his best student were to end his career in this way, reversed the decision and personally escorted the two delinquents to take the examinations belatedly in Bogotá.71 Later García Márquez would acknowledge, “Everything I ever learned was thanks to the baccalaureate I took in Zipaquirá.”72
So home went the hero, still convinced that his achievements were one large confidence trick, and therefore somehow lacking in confidence for that very reason; yet also dimly aware that to hoodwink everyone as he felt he had done probably meant that he was even more talented than they all thought he was; determined, finally, despite all his feelings of guilt, to go on deceiving the family, to pay lip-service to the project of getting a law degree whilst in reality following his own chosen path through life.
Quite soon after the return to Sucre from Magangué Gabriel Eligio, while renting yet another house some distance from the town square, had set about building a house of his own, an ambitious one-storey utopia among the mango trees, some fifty yards from the Mojana, on its northern bank. Could it be he had finally resolved to put down roots? The family would come to call their new home “La Casa Quinta,” the country house, but Gabito, for whom there was only one house in the whole wide world, would call it “the hospital,” because his father had his consultancy and laboratory there and because it was painted white; and because he begrudged the man even the smallest of achievements.
Yet the new house was surprisingly large by Sucre standards, though it hardly compared with the relatively majestic residences in the town square. Jaime García Márquez remembers a fine house, though with no electricity, which there had been in Aracataca; and no running water or proper sanitation (there had been a fully functioning septic tank in Aracataca). The family used oil lamps, which were always swarming with tropical insects. Snakes were often found coiled on the window sills at night. A neighbour, Miss Juana, used to cook and clean, play with the children and tell them terrifying stories, inspired by local legends.
There had been another big change in the family circumstances, as Ligia recalls: “Grandma Tranquilina and Aunt Pa, my mother’s half-sister, came to live at the new house with us. Aunt Pa could predict the droughts and rains, because she knew all the secrets of nature, learned from the Guajiro Indians. We all loved her because she helped bring us up. She’s the one who told me all the stories about the family ancestors … When our grandmother died, our mother made a beautiful garden and planted roses and daisies to take to her tomb.”73 García Márquez recalls that Tranquilina was blind and demented and would not undress while the radio was on because she imagined that the people attached to the voices she heard might be watching her.74
There is, undoubtedly, a poignant story relating to the new house. Gabito was especially embarrassed by the celebrations surrounding his return to Sucre late in 1946. Here was his father, with whom he had a difficult relationship, and whom he was intending to deceive and disappoint in the immediate future and for the long term, at a moment of great mutual triumph: Gabito was a “bachelor,” a rare achievement in those days even among the middle classes; and Gabriel Eligio had built a fine new house and was determined to remind everyone of that achievement at the same time as he celebrated his son’s academic success. Aida Rosa recalls, “I’ll never forget the party Dad put on in Sucre when Gabito graduated from high school. Don Gabriel Eligio really went to town. He invited the whole of Sucre, had a pig killed, there were drinks for everyone and we danced all night.”75
García Márquez spent as much time away from the family as possible during this transitional vacation and ended it as soon as he could. He had completed his secondary schooling and had accumulated, although he could not have guessed it, as much formal education as he was going to need in life. He was still not sure what he was going to do but what lay ahead was a return to the lugubrious Andean city of Bogotá and years of study for a university degree and a profession from which he felt profoundly alienated in advance and which he hoped never to have to practise.