5
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ enrolled at the National University of Colombia on 25 February 1947. This meant four or five years in Bogotá, which must have seemed a depressing prospect indeed for a young man who already knew that he hated the place. The epic journey from Sucre to the highland capital by river steamer and railway was not the fiesta filled with anticipation which he had experienced on previous occasions. Colombia itself was in a state of grim apprehension, with a minority Conservative government newly elected and determined to hold on to power, and the Liberal majority in a paroxysm of frustration at its party’s miscalculation in allowing two candidates, Turbay and Gaitán, to go forward against the Conservative Ospina Pérez.
Gabriel Eligio had wanted his son to be a doctor; and if not a doctor, a priest or a lawyer. He had sent him to study in the capital city for social distinction, and for financial gain. With the Conservatives in power there would surely be fortunes to be made. Literature was just a risky sideshow. Gabito had managed to avoid a showdown for the time being; but the much-debated law degree was now a pretext and Gabito would be forced at last to become the liar his father had always said he was.
Set in a mountain paradise of salt, gold and emeralds, the mythical home of El Dorado, Bogotá was founded on 6 August 1538 by the Andalusian explorer Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada. He named the city Santa Fe. It was known first as Santa Fe de Bacatá, then Santa Fe de Bogotá. For many decades the Santa Fe was dropped but was briefly restored late in the twentieth century, as if the religious title might somehow redeem the city and raise it once more above the savage country over which it presides from its emerald green throne. Historically Bogotá has always been right, the rest of the nation always wrong; yet at 8,000 feet above sea level, this often cold and usually rainy city makes a strange capital for such a varied, essentially tropical country. In 1947 it had a population of 700,000 inhabitants: the cachacos (which could be translated as fops or dandies).1
Bogotá has traditionally considered itself the home of the “purest” Spanish spoken anywhere in the world, not excluding Spain itself.2 In the 1940s almost all the politicians of Colombia were lawyers and many of them, particularly the Liberal lawyers, taught in the National University. The new university city, a landmark in Art Deco architecture, opened in 1940 and more or less complete by 1946, stood on the very outskirts of Bogotá, with the great savannah beyond. In García Márquez’s time there were more than four thousand students, half of whom were from the provinces. The political right considered the university a hotbed of communism.
The new student had found a boarding house in the former Florián Street, now Carrera 8, near the corner of Avenue Jiménez de Quesada; a house where numerous costeño students lived. Florián Street was one of the oldest and best-known in the city, running parallel to the best-known of all: “Séptima,” Seventh Avenue. García Márquez’s pensión was perhaps three hundred yards from the intersection of Seventh and Jiménez de Quesada, generally considered the strategic centre of the city and even exalted by some local patriots as the “best street corner in the world.”
Up on the second floor of his boarding house García Márquez shared a room with a number of costeño students, including the irrepressible José Palencia. The rooms were comfortable though not luxurious but despite the economical cost of bed and board García Márquez found it hard to get by. He would always be short of money: “I always had the feeling I was short of the last five centavos.” He has never made too much of the more painful aspects of this theme but despite Gabriel Eligio’s exertions, which meant that his family were always above the peasants and proletarians, poverty and its humiliations were a constant feature of Gabito’s childhood and youth. And beyond.
His anguished recollections about this time remind one of Kafka’s comment that studying law was “like living, in an intellectual sense, on sawdust, sawdust which had moreover already been chewed for me in thousands of other people’s mouths.”3 The teachers included an ex-president’s son, Alfonso López Michelsen, himself a future president. In that first year García Márquez would fail statistics and demography and scrape through constitutional law, which he took with López Michelsen, who said to me forty-five years later, “No, he wasn’t a good student. But because of my costeño family background all the students from Padilla and Magdalena would take my course; they knew I was sure to pass them.”4
A classmate, Luis Villar Borda, recalls, “I met Gabo in the very first days. There were maybe a hundred new students in law—only three of them women—organized in two alphabetical groups. Gabo was in the first and I was in the second. I was very interested in the subject but Gabo never was. He started to miss a lot of classes quite early on. We used to talk about literature: Dos Passos, Hemingway, Faulkner, Hesse, Mann and the Russians. Colombian literature hardly at all, just a few poets like Barba Jacob, De Greiff, Luis Carlos López. At midday we would move back to the city centre and sit in the cafés, which is where we all studied. If you lived in a pensión there was nowhere to work. The café owners would let the students take over a corner just like the regular customers.”5
Sometimes García Márquez and his costeño friends would organize impromptu Saturday night dances. Then on Sunday mornings at nine o’clock the young costeños would walk up to Seventh Avenue and 14th Street to the radio station that broadcast “TheCosteño Hour” and they would dance outside in the street. By now García Márquez was a proud representative of his culture and compensated for his poverty by dressing in an even more garish manner than he had started to do at the Colegio San José. It was the first great era of “Latin” music and García Márquez lived it from the inside.6
He also made friends among the uptight cachacos, some of whom would play an important role in his future. One of them was Gonzalo Mallarino, whose mother would develop a soft spot for this sad little costeño Chaplin figure.7 Others were Villar Borda, Camilo Torres, who would later achieve continental fame as a martyred guerrilla priest,8 and one of the great buddies of his life, Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, son of a leading politician from Boyacá, Plinio Mendoza Neira—by then perhaps Gaitán’s closest political ally—and a few years younger than García Márquez.
Some of García Márquez’s contemporaries contemplated him, it seems, with a mild dose of pity. Plinio Mendoza says many viewed him with contempt, as a “lost cause.” He recalls the day Villar Borda introduced him in the Café Asturias to a young costeño, who “made his way between the crowded tables and black hats, stunning us with the lightning flash of his cream-coloured tropical suit.” But he was also shocked by the newcomer’s general demeanour and behaviour. When the waitress approached the table thecosteñogazed at her, all of her, and whispered suggestively: “Tonight?,” after which he placed his hand on her posterior. She pushed him away and flounced off in theatrical disgust.9
Behind the colourful costumes, the costeño mamagallismo (piss-taking),10 and the adolescent pride (“Problems, me?” “Lonely, me?”), García Márquez was a deeply solitary young man with very contradictory feelings about his self-worth. His life now, despite the friendships, was one of loneliness, alienation, disorientation, and a lack of vocation. But also defiance: it was to protect himself that he played the effervescent costeño. Fleeing his solitude on Sundays, he would take endless tram rides through the grey, monotonous city, reading and reflecting.11 Sometimes he would take up an invitation from Gonzalo Mallarino, also a friend of both Camilo Torres and Villar Borda. Mallarino had been born only four days after García Márquez, of illustrious parentage. He told me: “The Bogotá weekends could be very long for a stranger. Gabo often used to visit me at home on a Sunday. We would always have chocolate and arepas [corn-cakes]. My mother, who was widowed when I was nine, felt sorry for him; he always seemed lonely to her, and she was always kind to him. She was from the provinces, like he was, and they instinctively knew how to talk to one another.”12
From the very start of his university studies, as both Mallarino and Villar Borda perceived, García Márquez, behind his protective costeño persona, was developing his literary vocation, even if he was reluctant to admit to such ambition in case he failed. Certainly between the attractions of the law and literature it was no contest. He was a fish out of water with his long anarchic hair, his tatty coloured trousers and his bizarre checked shirts, rebelling self-consciously with every awkward move he made.
Villar Borda and Camilo Torres edited a literary page called “University Life” (“La Vida Universitaria”), a Tuesday supplement of the newspaper La Razón, which published two of García Márquez’s “Stone and Sky”–style poems.13 “Poem from a Seashell” (“Poema desde un caracol”) appeared on 22 June, only a few weeks before Torres took the fateful decision to abandon the university and become a priest.14 Two of its stanzas read:
VIII
For my sea was the sea eternal,
sea of childhood, unforgettable,
suspended from our dream
like a dove in the air …
XII
It was the sea of our first love
in those autumnal eyes …
One day I wished to see that sea
—that sea of childhood—I was too late.15
It was a poem by a boy profoundly aware not only that he has lost his childhood but also that he has lost his other homeland, the Caribbean coast, the land of sea and sun.
Something like Kafka was what García Márquez was looking for in that ghostly highland city and Kafka is what he eventually found. One afternoon a costeño friend lent him a copy of The Metamorphosis, translated by an Argentine writer called Jorge Luis Borges.16 García Márquez went back to the boarding house, up to his room, took off his shoes and lay on his bed. He read the first line: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” Mesmerized, García Márquez recalls saying to himself: “Shit, that’s just the way my grandmother talked!”17
Kafka undoubtedly opened wide his imagination (including his ability to imagine himself as a writer) and showed him for the long term that even the most fantastic episodes can be narrated in a matter-of-fact way. But what García Márquez first took from Kafka seems to have been something rather different from what he has said in retrospect. First, evidently, Kafka addressed the alienation of urban existence; but beneath the surface, suffusing everything he wrote, was his terror of another authority, his father: his simultaneous loathing and veneration of his tyrannical progenitor.
García Márquez had read Dostoyevsky’s The Double, set in an even more repressive St. Petersburg, four years before, on his arrival in Bogotá. Kafka’s vision is a direct descendant of that novel and its impact on the young writer is not in doubt. García Márquez had discovered European modernism; more, he had discovered that far from being merely complex and pretentious, the innovations of modernism had emerged from the spirit of the age, from the structure of reality as currently perceived, and could be directly relevant to him—even in his remote capital city in Latin America.
The protagonists of both The Double and The Metamorphosis are victims of a split personality, characters who are hypersensitive and terrified of authority, and who, by internalizing the distortions of the outside world, conclude that it is they themselves, finally, who are sick, deformed, perverted and out of place. Many young people are beset by conflicting impulses and defensive–aggressive perceptions of their abilities and their relations with others; but the gap between García Márquez’s self-confidence, bordering on unusual and sometimes startling arrogance (he was the Colonel’s grandson and clever with it), and his simultaneous sense of insecurity and inferiority (he was the quack doctor’s son and had been abandoned by him but maybe took after him), is undoubtedly unusual and it created a dynamic that allowed him to develop a hidden ambition which would burn within him like a fierce, sustained flame.
The very next day after reading The Metamorphosis García Márquez sat down to write a story, which he would entitle “The Third Resignation.” It was his first work as a person prepared to think of himself as an author with something serious to offer. It already sounds something like “García Márquez” and is strikingly ambitious, profoundly subjective, suffused with absurdity, solitude and death. It initiates what will be a constant in García Márquez: building a story around the initial motif of an unburied corpse.18Eventually his readers would discover that García Márquez has lived with three interconnected but also impossibly contradictory primordial terrors: the terror of dying and being buried oneself (or, worse, being buried alive); the terror of having to bury others; and the terror of any person remaining unburied. “A dead person can live happily with his irremediable situation,” declares the narrator of this first story, a person who is unsure whether he is living, or dead, or both at the same time or successively. “But a living person cannot resign himself to being buried alive. Yet his limbs would not respond to his call. He could not express himself, and that was what terrified him; it was the greatest terror of his life and of his death. That they would bury him alive.”19
By way of compensation García Márquez’s story appears to propose some new American telluric—historical genealogy founded on the conception of a family tree:
He had been felled like some twenty-five-year-old tree … Perhaps later he would feel a slight nostalgia; the nostalgia of not being a formal, anatomical corpse, but an imaginary, abstract corpse, living only in the hazy memory of his relatives … Then he would know that he would rise up through the blood vessels of an apple and find himself being eaten by the hunger of a child some autumn morning. He would know then—and this thought really did make him sad—that he had lost his unity.20
Evidently the horror of being trapped in a house, between life and death, as in a coffin (as in memory, perhaps), is here mitigated by the idea of one’s lost individuality fusing into a tree as symbol both of nature and history (the generational family tree). The poignancy of such a genealogical impulse in a young man separated soon after birth from his natural mother and father and the brothers and sisters who would follow him requires no elaboration. And there is no need to have a qualification in psychoanalysis to question whether this young writer did not unconsciously feel, as he looked back on his early life, that his parents had buried him alive in the house at Aracataca; and that his real self was buried inside a second self, the new identity that he had had to build, Hamlet-like, to protect himself from his true feelings about his mother and his perhaps murderous feelings about the usurper, Gabriel Eligio, who belatedly claimed to be his father—when he, Gabito, knew perfectly well that his real father was Colonel Nicolás Márquez, the man who, admired and respected by all who knew him, had presided benignly over his early years. And then disappeared. There follows what may either be a piece of literary bluster (a form of wish-fulfilment) or a genuine sense that the writer has achieved wisdom (and “resignation”?): “All that terrible reality did not give him any anxiety. Quite the opposite, he was happy there, alone in his solitude.”
Clumsy though the story is, it has a curiously hypnotic effect and is narrated with an unmistakable confidence that is more than just literary, and a resolution surprising in a novice writer. The ending is pure García Márquez:
Resigned, he will hear the last prayers, the last phrases mumbled in Latin and clumsily responded by the altar boys. The cold of the cemetery’s earth and bones will penetrate to his own bones and may dissipate somewhat that “smell.” Perhaps—who knows!—the imminence of that moment will force him out of that lethargy. When he feels himself swimming in his own sweat, in a thick, viscous liquid, as he swam before he was born in his mother’s womb. Perhaps at that moment he will be alive.
But by then he will be so resigned to dying that he may die of resignation.21
Readers of One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Autumn of the Patriarch and The General in His Labyrinth, written twenty, twenty-five and forty years later, will recognize the tone, the themes and the literary devices. It is, palpably, and contradictorily (given the morbid nature of the narrative voice), a bid for authority.
On 22 August, a week or two after he had written this story, he read in Eduardo Zalamea Borda’s daily column, “The City and the World,” in El Espectador, that Zalamea Borda was “anxious to hear from new poets and storytellers, who are unknown or ignored due to the lack of an adequate and just publication of their works.”22 Zalamea Borda, a leftist sympathizer, was one of the most respected of newspaper columnists. García Márquez sent his story in. Two weeks later, to his joy and stupefaction, he was sitting in the Molino café when he saw the title of his piece covering a whole page of the “Weekend” supplement. Flushed with excitement, he rushed out to buy a copy—to discover as usual that he was “short of the last five centavos.” So he went back to the boarding house, appealed to a friend, and out they went to buy the paper—El Espectador, Saturday 13 September 1947. There on page twelve was “The Third Resignation” by Gabriel García Márquez, with an illustration by the artist Hernán Merino.
He was euphoric, inspired. Six weeks later, on 25 October, El Espectador published another of his stories, “Eva Is Inside Her Cat” (“Eva está dentro de su gato”), again on the theme of death and subsequent reincarnations, about a woman, Eva, who, obsessed with the desire to eat not an apple but an orange, decides to transmigrate through the body of her pet cat, only to find herself, three thousand years later, trapped—buried—in a new and confusing world. She is a beautiful woman, desperate to escape the attentions of men, a woman whose physical allure has begun to pain her like a cancer tumour. She has become aware that her arteries are teeming with tiny insects:
She knew that they came from back there, that all who bore her surname had to bear them, had to suffer them as she did when insomnia held unconquerable sway until dawn. It was those very insects who painted that bitter expression, that unconsolable sadness on the faces of her forebears. She had seen them looking out of their extinguished existence, out of their ancient portraits, victims of that same anguish …23
Both the genealogically obsessive One Hundred Years of Solitude and its primitive version, “The House” (“La casa”), soon to be conceived (perhaps already conceived), can be divined in this remarkable passage.
Only three days after the publication of this second story his unexpected literary patron announced in his daily column the arrival of a new literary talent upon the national scene, one who was in his first year as a student and not yet twenty-one. Zalamea declared unequivocally: “In Gabriel García Márquez we are seeing the birth of a remarkable writer.”24 One side effect of the confidence being placed in him was that García Márquez felt ever more justified in the neglect of his studies and in his obsessive love of reading and writing. More than half a century later the world-famous writer would comment that his first stories were “inconsequential and abstract, some absurd, and none based on real feelings.”25 Once again a reverse interpretation suggests itself: that he hated his poems and early stories precisely because they were “based on real feelings” and that later he learned to cover up—but not entirely suppress—the callow romanticism and emotionalism which left him exposed in all his vulnerability and might later give him away. It may also be the case that he is unwilling to give Bogotá the credit for his having become a writer.26
García Márquez stayed in Bogotá for the Christmas 1947 vacation. It was expensive to remain in the pensión but it was more expensive to find the fare to return to Sucre. Mercedes remained oblivious to his overtures. Besides, his grandmother was dead and his mother was just about to have yet another baby. Above all, though, despite having scraped through the examinations, failing only statistics and demography, he knew by now that he was not going to dedicate himself to the law and he was reluctant to confront Gabriel Eligio on this matter. The success of his first two stories suggested that there might be another path through life for him and he preferred to make the most of his perhaps temporary independence.
It was probably during this vacation that he began his next story, “The Other Side of Death” (“La otra costilla de la muerte”). If the first story was a meditation on one’s own death, this was more a reflection on the death of others (or perhaps on the death of one’s own other, one’s double, in this case a brother). Appropriately, therefore, the narrative voice alternates modernist-style between a “he” and an “I.” Again we are implicitly in a city but now the themes of the twin, the double, identity, the mirror (including that internal mirror, the consciousness) predominate. This brother, who had died of cancer, and of whom the narrator has a mortal terror, is now metamorphosed into another body
that was coming from beyond his, that had been sunken with him in the liquid night of the maternal womb and was climbing up with him through the branches of an ancient genealogy; that was with him in the blood of his four pairs of great-grandparents and that came from way back, from the beginning of the world, sustaining with its weight, with its mysterious presence, the whole universal balance … his other brother who had been born and shackled to his heel and who came tumbling along generation after generation, night after night, from kiss to kiss, from love to love, descending through arteries and testicles until he arrived, as on a night voyage, at the womb of his recent mother.27
This genealogical, dynastic obsession and the parallel exploration of the entire universe (time, space, matter, spirit, idea; life, death, burial, corruption, metamorphosis) is a structure of thought and feeling which, once explicitly explored and elaborated, will apparently disappear from García Márquez’s work but will in fact become implicit and its manifestations used sparingly, strategically, for maximum effect. This first García Márquez, qua literary persona, is anguished, hypersensitive, hypochondriac—Kafkaesque: far from his later, carefully constructed narrative identity, which will be closer to that of, say, Cervantes. Apparently with very little help from Colombian or other Latin American writers—the best-known of whom he appears hardly to have read—the early García Márquez attacks the essential Latin American questions of genealogy (estar, existence, history) and identity (ser, essence, myth). They make up, without doubt, the essential Latin American problematic of that era: genealogy is inevitably a crucial matter in a continent that has no satisfactory myth of origin, where everything is up for grabs. This García Márquez has not yet got on to the question of legitimacy (which is what is really tormenting him and is certainly implicit here). Nevertheless, this narrator is also, clearly, a problem unto himself.
The long vacation eventually came to an end and things finally looked up. At the start of the new university year in 1948 Luis Enrique arrived in Bogotá, in theory to continue his secondary education; in practice he took up a job with Colgate-Palmolive that Gabito had secured for him and then devoted himself to the usual hell-raising in his spare time. By now their Uncle Juanito (Juan de Dios), following the death of his mother, Tranquilina, had moved to Bogotá to work for the national bureaucracy. Luis Enrique brought with him a secret present which he was supposed to have saved for Gabito’s twenty-first birthday on 6 March, but when his brother and his friends told him at the airport that they had no money with which to celebrate, Luis Enrique slyly revealed that the surprise inside his package was a new typewriter: “The next step was a visit to the pawnshop in the centre of Bogotá, and the guy opening the case, turning the handle and pulling out a piece of paper. I remember he looked at it and said, ‘This must be for one of you.’ One of our friends took it and read it out loud: ‘Congratulations. We’re proud of you. The future is yours. Gabriel and Luisa, Sucre, 6 March 1948.’ Then the pawnshop assistant asked, ‘How much do you need?’ and the owner of the typewriter replied, ‘As much as you can give me.’”28
With Luis Enrique’s new income and some additional money that Gabito himself was earning by providing newspaper illustrations through a friend, the standard of living improved markedly in the following weeks—adventures involving wine, women and song ensued—and Luis Enrique renewed his vagabonds’ alliance with the madcap José Palencia. Meanwhile, Gabito, by now the most prestigious of the university’s many students with pretensions to literary status, was missing even more classes as he devoted himself ever more zealously to reading and writing literature, including reading another modernist masterwork, James Joyce’s Ulysses.
At that very moment political storm clouds were gathering rapidly over Colombia and heading directly for Bogotá. Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, an outstanding lawyer who had imbibed a potent political cocktail offered by the Mexican Revolution, Marxism and Mussolini, was the most charismatic politician in twentieth-century Colombian history and one of the most successful political leaders in Latin America in an era of populist politics. He was the hero of the rising proletarian classes and of many lower-middle-class inhabitants of the rapidly growing cities. García Márquez knew that he had first come to national attention in 1929 when he took up the case of the banana workers massacred in Ciénaga in December 1928. García Márquez did not know that among his key informants was Father Francisco Angarita, the man who had baptized him in Aracataca, and possibly also Colonel Nicolás Márquez. Gaitán had grown ever stronger despite the electoral setback caused by his own division of the Liberal Party, had soon captured the leadership and began to conduct a style of politics never before seen in one of the most conservative republics in Latin America. Some called him “The Tongue,” others “The Throat,” such was the power of his oratory and of the voice that delivered it. García Márquez has almost never spoken of Gaitán in public interviews until very recently, most likely because his own politics have always been well to the left of any Latin American populism since the early 1950s and also in part, no doubt, because in April 1948, although instinctively attached to the Liberals, his political consciousness was still largely undeveloped.
In April 1948 the ninth Pan-American Conference was taking place in the centre of Bogotá and the Organization of American States was in the process of being set up at the behest of the United States. On Friday the 9th, just after 1 p.m., Gabriel García Márquez was sitting down to lunch in his boarding house in Florián Street with Luis Enrique and some of his costeño friends. Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was at that moment leaving his law office to walk down Seventh Avenue to lunch with his Liberal Party colleague Plinio Mendoza Neira and other associates. As he reached number 14–55, between Avenida Jiménez and 14th Street, an unemployed worker called Juan Roa Sierra walked across from the Black Cat café and fired at him three or four times from point-blank range. Gaitán fell to the pavement, just a few yards from “the best street corner in the world.” It was five past one. Before they lifted him from the ground, sixteen-year-old Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, who had come to meet his father, bent over and gazed with horror into the dying leader’s face. Gaitán was rushed to the Central Clinic in a private car and pronounced dead soon after arrival, to the inconsolable dismay of the large crowd that gathered outside the clinic.
That was the murder. Now came the Bogotazo.29 A wave of fury and hysteria swept through the city immediately. Bogotá was in uproar. An afternoon of riots, lootings and killings ensued. The Liberal mob took it for granted that the Conservatives were behind the assassination: within minutes Roa had been murdered and his battered body was dragged naked through the streets towards the government palace. The centre of Bogotá, all of it the very symbol of Colombia’s reactionary political system, began to burn.30
García Márquez ran out immediately to the site of the murder but Gaitán’s dying body had already been rushed to the hospital—weeping men and women were soaking their handkerchiefs in the fallen leader’s blood—and Roa’s corpse had already been dragged away. Luis Villar Borda remembers meeting García Márquez between two and three o’clock in the afternoon just a few steps from where Gaitán had fallen: “I was very surprised to see him. ‘You’ve never been a fan of Gaitán,’ I said. ‘No,’ he said, ‘but they’ve burned down my pensión and I’ve lost all my stories.’”31 (This much-exaggerated tale would gain mythical status down the years.) During this same excursion García Márquez encountered an uncle, the law professor Carlos H. Pareja, in 12th Street as he hastened back to finish his lunch in the—still intact—pensión. Pareja stopped his young nephew in the street and urged him to hurry to the university and organize the students on behalf of the Liberal uprising. García Márquez reluctantly set off but changed his mind as soon as Pareja was out of sight and made his way back through the chaos—Bogotá was now a mortally dangerous place—to the pensión on Florián.
Luis Enrique and the other costeños were having a kind of apocalyptic celebration. Behind their din, on the radio, Uncle Carlos could already be heard, together with the writer Jorge Zalamea (destined to become, like his first cousin Eduardo Zalamea Borda, another significant figure in García Márquez’s life), both urging the Colombian people to rise against the dastardly Conservatives who had assassinated the country’s greatest political leader and only hope for its future. Pareja, whose own radical bookstore was a victim of the flames, thundered that “the Conservatives will pay for Gaitán’s life with many other lives.”32 Gabito, Luis Enrique and their friends heard his call to arms on the pensión radio but they did not answer the appeal.
Not far away another young Latin American aged twenty-one was also beside himself, but with joy and excitement. Fidel Castro was a Cuban student leader who had travelled to Bogotá as part of a delegation taking part in a student congress set up in opposition to the Pan-American Conference. Castro forgot all about the Congress of Latin American Students and took to the streets, attempting to impose some sort of revolutionary logic upon the violently erratic actions of the popular uprising. Only two days before, he had interviewed the now martyred leader in his office in Carrera 7 and had apparently impressed the Colombian politician. Incredibly, they had agreed to meet again at 2 p.m. on 9 April: the name Fidel Castro was found pencilled in Gaitán’s appointment book for that day. Little wonder the Colombian Conservative government and right-wing press were soon claiming that Castro was involved either in the plot to murder Gaitán or in the conspiracy to subvert the Pan-American Conference and provoke an uprising, or both. At times, Castro must have been no more than a couple of hundred yards from his future friend García Márquez.33 In retrospect the Bogotazo would be as crucial to Castro’s understanding of revolutionary politics as later events in Guatemala in 1954 would be to his future comrade Che Guevara.34
As Castro began to organize for a revolution that never came, García Márquez sat mourning the loss of his typewriter—the pawnshop had been looted—and rehearsing his explanation for his parents. However, when smoke began to waft through the walls of the boarding house from the burning Cundinamarca state building behind it, the García Márquez brothers organized their friends from Sucre and set off for their Uncle Juanito’s new house, which was only four blocks away. The band of friends and brothers joined in the generalized looting and Luis Enrique made off with a sky-blue suit which his father would wear for years to come on special occasions. Gabito found an elegant calfskin briefcase which became his proudest possession. But the most prized piece of plunder was a large fifteen-litre flagon into which Luis Enrique and Palencia poured as many varieties of liquor as they could find before bearing it off in triumph to Uncle Juanito’s.
Margarita Márquez Caballero, then twelve years old, today García Márquez’s personal secretary in Bogotá, vividly remembers the arrival of her favourite cousin, his brother and their friends. The house was full of refugees from the Costa and in the evening, drunk on their illicit liquor, the young men joined Uncle Juanito on the roof of the building and gazed with stupefaction at the burning city centre.35 Meanwhile, down in Sucre the family feared the worst, as Rita recalls: “The only time I ever saw my mother cry when I was a child was 9 April. Then I could tell that she was very upset because of Gabito and Luis Enrique being in Bogotá at the time Gaitán was assassinated. I remember that at about three in the afternoon the next day she got dressed all of a sudden and went out to the church. She was going to give thanks to God because they’d just told her that her sons were safe. I was struck by it because I wasn’t used to seeing her go out, she was always at home looking after all of us.”36
In Bogotá, the young costeños stayed indoors for three days. The government had imposed a state of siege and snipers were still sporadically picking off those who ventured out. The city centre continued to smoulder. The university was closed and much of old Bogotá was in ruins. But the Conservative government had survived and the leading Liberal politicians had reached an unsatisfactory agreement with the unexpectedly valiant President Ospina Pérez which put some of them back in the cabinet but would effectively leave them out of power again as a party for another decade. As soon as they felt it was safe to return to the streets the two brothers, whose parents had urged them to fly down to Sucre, began to hustle for tickets to travel back to the Costa. Luis Enrique had decided to try his luck in Barranquilla, where the latest love of his life was waiting for him, and Gabito had decided to pursue his law studies in the University of Cartagena; or at least, he had decided to pretend to do so. A little over a week after the disastrous events of 9 April, Gabriel García Márquez, his brother Luis Enrique and the young Cuban agitator Fidel Castro Ruz set off from Bogotá on different planes towards their different historical destinies.
As for Colombia, it has become a historical cliché, but nonetheless true, that the death of Gaitán and the ensuing Bogotazo divided the nation’s twentieth-century history in two. What Gaitán might or might not have achieved lies in the realm of speculation. No politician has since excited the masses as he did and Colombia has moved further away from solving its real political problems with every year that has passed since he died. It was the crisis following his death which gave rise to the guerrilla movements that continue to compromise political life in the country until this very day. If it can be said that the War of a Thousand Days showed the upper classes the need to unite against the peasantry, the Bogotazo similarly showed the danger represented by the urban proletarian masses. Yet it was in the rural areas that the reaction would be most brutal, beginning twenty-five years of one of the world’s most savage and costly civil wars: the Violencia.
As for García Márquez, it can fairly be said of him, unlike most other people caught up in the events, that the Bogotazo was one of the most fortunate things that ever happened. It interrupted his law studies in the most prestigious university in the country and gave a shot in the arm to a young man looking for some further excuse to abandon his education; and it gave him an irrefutable pretext for abandoning a place he hated and for returning to his beloved Costa, but not before he had acquired a familiarity with the capital city which would be crucial in giving him a wider national consciousness. Never again would he take the two ruling parties entirely seriously. Slow as he was to develop a mature political consciousness, there were significant lessons that García Márquez had now assimilated about the nature of his country; as he had lost or abandoned most of his material possessions, these new lessons were perhaps the most important things the young man took with him on the plane to Barranquilla and Cartagena.