6
GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ LANDED in Barranquilla in a Douglas DC-3 aircraft on 29 April 1948, two days after his brother Luis Enrique. Luis Enrique stayed on in Barranquilla and started looking for employment; he would soon land a job with the airline company LANSA and would work there for the next eighteen months. Meanwhile all the transport systems of the country remained in chaos in the aftermath of the Bogotazo and Gabito, with a heavy suitcase and a similarly heavy dark suit, found himself perched on top of a postal truck in the searing heat of the Caribbean coastlands, heading for Cartagena.1
Cartagena was the merest shadow of its former self. When the Spaniards arrived in 1533, it became a vital bastion of the colonial system linking Spain to the Caribbean and South America and, before long, one of the most important cities for the delivery and sale of slaves in the entire New World. Despite this grim antecedent it had also become (and has remained) one of the most gracious and picturesque cities anywhere in Latin America.2
But after independence in the nineteenth century Barranquilla expanded to become the large trading city that Colombia required and Cartagena stagnated, nursed its wounds and its grievances, and consoled itself with the knowledge of its glorious past and its ravaged beauty. This decadent city was García Márquez’s new home. He was back in the Caribbean, back in a world where the human body was accepted for what it was, in its beauty, its ugliness and its fragility, back in the realm of the senses. He had never before visited the heroic city and was struck, simultaneously, by its magnificence and its desolation. It had not entirely escaped the effects of the Bogotazo but, like the Costa as a whole, it had quickly returned to a somewhat uneasy normality despite the state of siege, the curfew and the censorship. The young man went straight to the Hotel Suiza in the Calle de las Damas, which doubled as a student residence, only to find that his wealthy friend José Palencia had not arrived. The owner would not give him a room on credit and he was forced to wander the old walled city, hungry and thirsty, and eventually to lie on a bench in the main square and hope that Palencia would soon turn up. Palencia didn’t. García Márquez fell asleep on his bench and was arrested by two policemen for breaking the curfew, or possibly because he didn’t have a cigarette to give them. He spent the night on the floor in a police cell. This was his introduction to Cartagena and the auguries were not good. Palencia finally turned up the next day and the two young men were admitted to the residence.3
García Márquez went to the university, just a couple of blocks away and managed to persuade the authorities, who examined him in front of his prospective classmates, to take him on for the remainder of the second year of the law degree, including passing the subjects he had failed in year one. He was a student again. He and Palencia took up where they had left off in Bogotá, went drinking and partying despite the curfew and generally acted like the kind of upper-class student layabout that Palencia actually was and that García Márquez could hardly afford to be. This idyllic state of affairs was brought to an end after just a few weeks when the restless Palencia decided to move on and García Márquez moved up to the collective dormitory, which cost thirty pesos a month for full board and laundry.
Then fate took a hand. As he wandered down the Street of Bad Behaviour (Mala Crianza) in the old slave quarter of Getsemaní, adjacent to the walled city, he came across Manuel Zapata Olivella, a black doctor he had known in Bogotá the year before. The next day Zapata, a well-known philanthropist to his many friends and later one of Colombia’s leading writers and journalists, took the young man to the offices of the newspaper El Universal in San Juan de Dios Street, just round the corner from his student pensión, and introduced him to the managing editor, Clemente Manuel Zabala. As luck would have it, Zabala, who was a friend of Eduardo Zalamea Borda, had read García Márquez’s short stories in El Espectador and was already an admirer. Despite the young man’s timidity he took him on as a columnist and, without discussing terms or conditions, said he looked forward to seeing him the next day and to printing his first article the day after that.
At the time García Márquez seems to have conceived journalism only as a means to an end and as an inferior form of writing. Nevertheless, he had now been taken on as a journalist precisely because of his pre-existing literary prestige, just past his twenty-first birthday. He contacted his parents immediately to tell them that he would now be able to support himself through his studies. Given his intention to give up those studies as soon as he could, and certainly never to practise law even if he qualified, the message significantly eased his conscience.
El Universal itself was a new paper. It had been founded only ten weeks before by Dr. Domingo López Escauriaza, a patrician Liberal politician who had been state governor and a diplomat and now, in the light of growing Conservative violence, had decided to open a new front in the propaganda war on the Costa. This had been a month before the Bogotazo. There was no other Liberal newspaper in that very conservative city.
Everyone agrees that Zabala was the newspaper’s trump card. Such was the managing editor’s dedication and lucidity that El Universal emerged, despite its unprepossessing offices, as a model of political coherence and, by the standards of the time, good writing. The good writing would be providential for the new recruit. Zabala was a slight, nervous man in his mid-fifties, born in San Jacinto, with “Indian” features and hair. Dark in complexion, with a slight paunch, he always wore glasses and was rarely seen without a cigarette in his hand. He was also, it was rumoured, a discreet homosexual, who dyed his hair black to defy the advancing years and lived alone in a small hotel room. He had been a political associate of Gaitán. It was said he had been private secretary to General Benjamín Herrera in his youth and he had worked on the General’s newspaper El Diario Nacional. In the 1940s he had worked in the ministry of education and later he had collaborated closely with Plinio Mendoza Neira’s magazine Acción Liberal.
Zabala introduced García Márquez to another recent recruit, Héctor Rojas Herazo, a young poet and painter of twenty-seven from the Caribbean port of Tolú. He did not recognize García Márquez but he had briefly been his art teacher eight years before at the Colegio San José in Barranquilla. It was another of the extraordinary conjunctions which were already punctuating García Márquez’s life; Rojas Herazo was himself destined to be one of the country’s leading poets and novelists as well as a widely admired painter.4Craggy and leonine, he was louder and larger, more dogmatic and apparently more passionate than his new friend, expansive and prickly at one and the same time.
Well after midnight, when Zabala had checked and corrected every article on every one of the newspaper’s eight pages, he invited his two young protégés out to eat. Journalists were exempt from the curfew and García Márquez now embarked on a new life, which was to last many years, in which he worked through much of the night and slept, when he slept at all, during much of the day. This would not be easy in Cartagena where law classes began at seven in the morning and García Márquez arrived home at six. The only place open so late at night was a restaurant and bar nicknamed “The Cave” on the waterfront behind the public market, run by an exquisitely beautiful young black homosexual called José de las Nieves, “Joe of the Snows.”5 There the journalists and other night owls would eat beefsteak, tripe, and rice with shrimp or crab.
After Zabala had returned to his solitary room, García Márquez and Rojas Herazo began to wander the port area, beginning at the Paseo de los Mártires, where nine busts commemorate the deaths in 1816 of some of the first rebels against the Spanish empire.6Then García Márquez went home to work. After an anxious few hours, but infatuated with his own rhetoric, he trotted off to show his first column to the boss. Zabala read it and said it was well enough written but wouldn’t do. Firstly, it was too personal, and far too literary; and secondly, “Haven’t you noticed that we are working under a regime of censorship?” On Zabala’s desk was a red pencil. He picked it up. Almost immediately the combination of García Márquez’s own inborn talent and Zabala’s professional zeal produced articles which were readable, absorbing and patently original from the very start.7 All García Márquez’s signed columns in El Universal appeared under the byline “New Paragraph” (“Punto y Aparte”). The first, the one that received most attention from the editor, was a political piece about the curfew and state of siege, cunningly disguised as a general meditation on the city. The young writer asked prophetically how, in an era of political violence and dehumanization, could his generation be expected to turn out as “men of good will.” Evidently the novice journalist had been abruptly radicalized by the events of 9 April. The second article was equally remarkable.8 If the first was implicitly political in the traditional sense, the second was almost a manifesto about cultural politics: it was a defence of the humble accordion, a vagabond among musical instruments but an essential element in the vallenato, a musical form developed in the Costa by usually anonymous musicians and, for García Márquez, a symbol of the people of the region and their culture, not to mention of his own desire to challenge ruling-class preconceptions. The accordion, he insisted, is not only a vagabond but a proletarian. The first article had been a rejection of the kind of politics coming from Bogotá; the second embraced the writer’s newly recovered cultural roots.9
For the first time the future of Gabriel García Márquez was moderately assured. He was doing a job, and one that other people recognized he was good at. He was a newspaperman. He would continue to study the law sporadically and unenthusiastically, but he had found his way out of the legal profession and into the world of journalism and literature. He would never look back.
In the next twenty months he would write forty-three signed pieces and many times that number of unsigned contributions for El Universal. Mostly this was still a noticeably old-fashioned journalism of commentary and literary creation, more for entertainment than political information, closer indeed to the genre of daily or weekly “chronicles” which would not have been out of date in a Latin American newspaper of the 1920s. On the other hand, one of García Márquez’s tasks was to sift through the cables coming off the teletype machine in order to select news items and propose topics for the commentary pieces and literary extrapolations that were so important in the journalism of those times. This daily practice must have given him an experience of the way in which the events of everyday life are transmuted into “news,” into “stories,” that immediately demystified ordinary reality and provided a powerful antidote to his recent excursions into the works of Kafka. Journalists almost everywhere at this time were obliged to adopt the hands-on, sleeves-rolled-up approach of U.S. journalistic practices and from the beginning García Márquez took to this like a duck to water. It would make him a very different sort of writer from the majority of his Latin American contemporaries, for whom France and French ways of doing things were still the models to follow in an age when France itself was beginning to lose its grip on modernity.
Much though he had to learn, the new columnist’s originality was obvious from the start and must have been a joy to the editor who hired him. Just three months later, in his article on the Cartagena Afro-Colombian writer Jorge Artel, he was implicitly calling for a literature at once local and continental which would represent “our race”—an astonishing perspective for Colonel Márquez’s grandson to adopt at the age of twenty-one—and to give the Atlantic Coast “an identity of its own.”10
In mid-July of that first year Conservative police massacred Liberal families in El Carmen de Bolívar, the town where García Márquez’s grandfather had been brought up with Aunt Francisca. El Carmen had a long and glorious Liberal political tradition. It also happened to be the nearest large town to Zabala’s place of birth, San Jacinto, so both men took a special interest in events there and between them carried out a campaign based on the slogan, “What happened in Carmen de Bolívar?” Zabala’s grim joke, whenever he renewed the campaign, in the face of government denials and inertia, was to end with the words, “No doubt about it, in Carmen de Bolívar absolutely nothing happened.”11 This is almost exactly the phrase García Márquez would later use about his invented town of Macondo in a celebrated section of One Hundred Years of Solitude after the pivotal episode of the banana-workers massacre.
In one sense there could have been no worse time to become a journalist in Colombia. Censorship was imposed immediately after the events of April 1948, though less brutally on the coast than in the interior of the country. García Márquez began to practise journalism because of the Violencia but the Violencia severely limited what a journalist could do. For the next seven years, under Ospina Pérez, Laureano Gómez, Urdaneta Arbeláez and Rojas Pinilla, albeit with variable intensity, government censorship would be continuously active. All the more significant, then, that the first article of García Márquez’s career, dated 21 May 1948, had implied a clear left-of-centre political position. He would never diverge from this broad perspective; yet it would never, in the last instance (as the Marxists used to say), constrain or distort his fiction.
Only two weeks after starting with El Universal García Márquez asked for a week’s holiday and travelled across to Barranquilla, up to Magangué and then on to Sucre to see his family. Whether he stopped off at Mompox to get a glimpse of Mercedes we do not know. By the time he set off he must have realized that his new salary was not what he had given his parents to believe but he evidently did not have the heart to disabuse them. This was not only his first visit since the Bogotazo but the first time he had been home since he travelled to Bogotá at the start of his university studies in February 1947, more than a year before. It was therefore the first time he had seen his mother since her own mother had died and the first time he had seen the last of his brothers and sisters, Eligio Gabriel, named, like himself only more completely, after their father. In later life García Márquez, who was twenty years older than Eligio Gabriel, would often jokingly tell the story that the new child was so named because “my mother had lost me but she wanted to be sure there was always a Gabriel in the house.” In fact when he personally delivered Eligio Gabriel, whom the family would call Yiyo, in November 1947, Gabriel Eligio declared: “This baby looks like me; Gabito is not at all like me so we’ll call this one after me, only the other way round—Eligio Gabriel!”12
Back Gabito went to Cartagena. It was only now, on 17 June, that he formally registered at the university, though he had passed the interview weeks before. Professionally things were going well but economically disaster stared the young writer in the face. Despite being, effectively, a staff journalist, García Márquez was paid by the piece. Although he himself was never much of a mathematician and was relatively indifferent to budgetary questions, a friend, Ramiro de la Espriella, later calculated that he was paid thirty-two centavos, a third of a peso, for each article, signed or unsigned, that he wrote, and virtually nothing for his other duties. This was below any imaginable minimum wage. By the end of June he had been thrown out of the pensión and had taken to sleeping on park benches again, in the rooms of other students or, famously, on the rolls of newsprint in the office of El Universal, one place that never closed. One evening, as he walked with colleagues in the Centenary Park, where they would sit on the steps of the Noli Me Tangere monument and drink, smoke and talk, another journalist, Jorge Franco Múnera, asked how his lodgings were turning out and García Márquez confessed the truth. That same night Franco Múnera took him to his family home in Estanco del Aguardiente Street on the corner of Cuartel del Fijo, near the Heredia Theatre in the old city. The family embraced the hungry, homeless student, especially Jorge’s mother Carmen Múnera Herrán.13 Other people’s mothers always took to him. He would board with her on and off, trying to appease his conscience by eating as little as possible, for the rest of his stay in Cartagena.
So at this time García Márquez was living a life even more desperate than his time in Bogotá and he now habituated himself to a virtual disregard for his own bodily needs. Even here on the Costa he was famous for his ghastly multi-coloured shirts—usually he owned only one at a time—and checked jackets, worn over black woollen trousers from some old suit, canary yellow socks which hung around his ankles and dusty moccasins which he never cleaned. He had a tentative wispy moustache and curly, untidy black hair which rarely saw a comb. Even after getting the Franco Múnera room he slept wherever fatigue and the approaching dawn caught him. He was thin as a rake and friends, touched by the fact that he remained eternally cheerful and never ever seemed sorry for himself or appealed for help, repeatedly clubbed together to buy him meals by day and include him in their night-time excursions.
The opinions of friends and acquaintances varied. Many people, especially social conservatives, thought him eccentric to the point of lunacy or, not infrequently, homosexual.14 Even friends like Rojas Herazo say in retrospect that he was something of a cissy (“such a good boy”).15 Both Rojas and another friend, Carlos Alemán, remember García Márquez’s boyishness, his bouncy gait—which he has never lost—and his tendency to dance with glee when someone gave him a new idea or he was excited about one of his own ideas for a story.16 Acquaintances remember him always drumming his fingers on the table as he waited for his lunch, or on anything else to hand, singing quietly or noisily, music always somehow wafting through him.17
García Márquez learned everything his new friends and colleagues had to teach him. He also developed some key ideas about his vocation at an astonishingly early age. For example, he picked up George Bernard Shaw’s declaration that he was going to devote himself henceforth to advertising slogans and making money; García Márquez commented that this was food for thought for those, like himself, who were “resolved not to write for commercial reasons and yet find ourselves doing it out of vanity instead.”18
Life settled into a routine in Cartagena. He missed most of his classes but not all professors took an attendance list and the Liberal teachers sympathized with the young man’s journalistic skirmishes with the censors and with the authorities in general, who more than once sent military detachments to the newspaper offices to intimidate the staff. Among his most important relationships was that with Gustavo Ibarra Merlano, a student of the classics who had graduated from the Bogotá Normal School and now taught in a local college a few yards from the El Universal office. Ibarra Merlano was already a good friend of Rojas Herazo’s. To amble about with these two cost García Márquez no money—nor involved him in receiving any charity—because they did no drinking or partying and mainly discussed lofty matters related to poetry or religious philosophy.19
García Márquez also had other friends whose inclinations were less austere. Principal among them were the De la Espriella brothers, Ramiro and Oscar, whom he met occasionally in 1948 and more frequently in 1949, whose interests were not only much more political—in the arena of radical Liberalism and even Marxism—but also far more worldly. With them and others García Márquez would spend time drinking and going to brothels. Three surprisingly provocative articles printed in July 1948 suggest that at the time García Márquez may have been enamoured of some young woman of the night and may, right then, have been evolving the attitudes towards sex and love which would characterize his later work. The first has him quite explicitly inventorying the body of a young female while musing, “And to think that all this one day will be inhabited by death,” then ending the first paragraph, “To think that this pain of being inside you and far from my own substance will one day find its definitive remedy.”20 It is as well that the reactionary Catholic matrons of Cartagena would no more have opened the pages of El Universal than walk naked through the Plaza Bolívar.
By the time of the third article the young writer has discovered one of his key ideas, later given classic form in the novel Love in the Time of Cholera: that love can last for ever but is much more likely to flower and die in the briefest of times, like a sickness.21Few male visitors will quickly forget their first sight of the voluptuous, under-dressed women of Caribbean harbour towns like Cartagena or Havana, and García Márquez lived on the Costa as a young man in the heyday of the Caribbean prostitute. But as for serious, respectable girlfriends, Ramiro de la Espriella remembers him mentioning only one, Mercedes, by then a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl. “Though what she saw in him I can’t imagine: he was just a kid, insignificant, pimply, malarial, he looked puny, without any physical presence … If you saw him in the street you’d have taken him for a messenger boy.”22
Mercedes’s family and most of García Márquez’s were still down in Sucre. But Luis Enrique was living in Barranquilla and would often travel across to Cartagena at weekends and over holiday periods: “Gabito was in Cartagena doing the same as in Bogotá, pretending to study law but really writing.”23 It was the era of the great Latin American bolero singing trios such as Los Panchos and Luis Enrique’s dream was to set up his own trio—“my father would have been even more horrified by that than he was by Gabito’s writing.”24
Around this time Zabala received a message from Zalamea Borda in Bogotá asking what was happening to his young protégé’s literary activities. García Márquez had actually given up on his stories at this time but could never say no to Zalamea and quickly revised another, “The Other Side of Death” (“La otra costilla de la muerte”), which was published in El Espectador on 25 July 1948. It must have been flattering and profoundly comforting to know that an important and influential personage was still thinking about him and furthering his interests up in Bogotá.
On 16 September 1948 García Márquez travelled to Barranquilla on newspaper business and instead of taking the bus straight back to Cartagena he decided to look up some fellow journalists recommended by his friends in Cartagena. It was another historic decision. He headed for the offices of El Nacional, where Germán Vargas and Alvaro Cepeda were then employed. They were part of a loose bohemian fraternity which would eventually be known as the “Barranquilla Group.”25 García Márquez’s passionate yet judicious contribution to the literary discussions that first evening impressed the third member of the group, Alfonso Fuenmayor, who was the assistant editor of the Liberal newspaper El Heraldo and asked García Márquez to look him up before returning to Cartagena.
García Márquez was delighted to discover that these apparently hard-bitten journalists knew him by his reputation and he was embraced like a long-lost brother, introduced to the local literary guru, the Catalan writer Ramón Vinyes, and then taken off on a bar and brothel crawl which ended up in a legendary establishment called “Black Euphemia’s,” which would later be immortalized in One Hundred Years of Solitude. There García Márquez sealed his own personal triumph and his bond with the group by singingmambosand boleros for more than an hour. He stayed overnight at the home of Alvaro Cepeda, who, unlike the others, was the same age as he was and had similar tastes in flowered shirts and artist’s smocks, had even longer hair and wore sandals, like a pioneer hippy. Cepeda was loud, bombastic and dogmatic. He showed García Márquez a wall of books, mainly North American and English, and roared: “These are the best books going, the only ones worth reading by the only people who know how to write. You can borrow all of them if you want.”
The next morning, according to the memoir, García Márquez was sent off with a novel called Orlando by a writer he had never heard of, Virginia Woolf, whom Cepeda seemed to know personally since he always called her “old Woolf,” just as the entire group evidently also had an intimate relationship with their favourite writer, William Faulkner, whom they usually called “the Old Man.”26 After all these years the enthusiasm displayed by these tough guys for the work of the demure Mrs. Woolf remains astonishing. Friends recall that García Márquez was particularly struck at the time by an apparently unladylike line he claimed to have read in one of her novels: that “love is taking your knickers off,” a somewhat “loose” translation of “love is slipping off one’s petticoat” fromOrlando.27 This quotation may have had more impact on his view of the world than may appear to be the case at first sight. At any rate, he told everyone that “Virginia” was “a tough old broad.”28
The time for the second-year examinations approached and García Márquez was desperate. His attendance had been more than erratic—fifteen absences officially noted down—and he had absorbed little of what he had heard. A classmate from that era recalls that García Márquez “worked until three in the morning at the newspaper, then slept on rolls of newsprint until seven o’clock when our classes began. He always said he would have to bathe later because he had no time to wash before arriving at the university.”29 He passed the year overall but a failure in Roman law would come back to haunt him several years later and may even have been decisive in ensuring that he would never qualify as a lawyer.
Meanwhile his contact with the Barranquilla Group had inspired him—and given him the confidence—to begin work on his first novel, which he entitled “The House” (“La casa”). It was a novel about his own past—possibly, indeed, a novel which he had been nurturing for a long time. He worked on this novel initially in the second half of 1948 and then more intensively in early 1949. His friend, Ramiro de la Espriella, and his brother Oscar lived in their parents’ large nineteenth-century house in the Segunda Calle de Badillo in the old walled city. García Márquez was a frequent visitor, often eating there and even sleeping there on occasion. The house had a large collection of books and García Márquez would often be found reading Colombian history in the library. Oscar, the older of the two brothers, remembers: “My father called him ‘Civic Valour’ because he said it took a lot of nerve to dress the way he did … My mother loved him like a son … He would turn up with his great roll of papers tied up with a necktie, it was what he was writing, and so he’d unwrap his stuff and sit down and read it to us.”30
From the extracts that survived and were later published in El Heraldo of Barranquilla we can see that the novel was set in a house something like the house of García Márquez’s grandparents and was faintly reminiscent of Faulkner in theme though not in manner; it was interesting and had potential but it was rather flat and none of the extant extracts from it suggest the influence of Faulkner or Joyce or indeed Virginia Woolf. It involved characters something like his grandfather and grandmother and their ancestors, a place something like Aracataca, a war like the War of a Thousand Days, but at this time he never managed to go beyond a rather episodic, one-dimensional and somewhat lifeless narrative. It seems García Márquez could not escape from the house. Or to put it another way, he could not separate “The House” from the house, the novel from its inspiration. Still, it is impossible to doubt that here, to an astonishing degree, are the germs of One Hundred Years of Solitude, with the themes of solitude, destiny nostalgia, patriarchy and violence all waiting for the distinctive tone and perspective that were still more than a decade away from discovery. The truth in part is that García Márquez could not yet fully ironize his own culture; it was inconceivable in those days that anything connected to Nicolás Márquez could be ludicrous or even funny. Ironically enough, then, it had not yet occurred to him to connect the fantastic world of Kafka with the real world of his memories.31
In March 1949, suddenly, he fell seriously ill. According to his own testimony, it was a political confrontation with Zabala which triggered the crisis. One night towards the end of March García Márquez was sitting in “The Cave” with Zabala as the editor ate his late-night supper. García Márquez had been behaving increasingly badly since his trips to Barranquilla, working erratically at El Universal and showing signs of an unfocused adolescent rebellion brought on by his contact with Alvaro Cepeda. Zabala stopped eating his soup, looked over his glasses and said acidly, “Tell me something, Gabriel, in the midst of all your stupid antics, have you noticed that this country is going down the pan?”32 Stung, García Márquez went on drinking and ended up fast asleep on a bench in the Paseo de los Mártires. He woke up next morning at the end of a tropical downpour with his clothes sodden and his lungs shot. He was diagnosed with pneumonia and so he went back to Sucre for however long it might take to convalesce at his parents’ house—not necessarily the ideal destination for a bronchial invalid because the waters around Sucre had risen higher than ever and the town was flooded as it would so often be in In Evil Hour or Chronicle of a Death Foretold.
This would turn out to be an important return home. García Márquez has said that he half expected the stay to last six months, though in the event it was not much more than six weeks. But not only was it the longest time he had spent with the family for some years but it was also a visit where he knew in advance that he would be housebound for a long time. He didn’t realize it at the time but a quiet unconscious revolution would begin to work inside him now that several of his brothers and sisters were growing up, a revolution too slow to take immediate effect but crucial in the longer term to his literary and historical imagination and perspective. One might say that he would begin to add living people to the dead people who already haunted his imagination.
Now that he was a journalist García Márquez also began to notice Sucre. One of the most interesting local legends in the region was that of the Marquesita de La Sierpe, a blonde Spanish woman who was supposed to have lived in the remote settlement of La Sierpe (a sierpe is a serpent) and never married or engaged in sexual congress with any male. She had magical powers, a hacienda as big as several municipalities and lived for more than two hundred years. Each year she would tour the region curing the sick and dispensing favours to those she protected. Before she died she had her cattle parade past the house, which took nine days until so much trampling in wet earth eventually formed the Swamp (Ciénaga) of La Sierpe, south-west of Sucre, between the San Jorge and Cauca rivers. She then buried the rest of her most precious possessions and treasures in the Swamp together with the secret of eternal life, and distributed her remaining wealth among the six families who had served her.33
This legend, told to García Márquez by his friend Angel Casij Palencia, José Palencia’s cousin, together with others he would collect himself, helped not only to form the basis of a series of brilliant articles he would write three or four years later but also to inspire his own fabulous literary creation “Big Mama” (la Mamá Grande), which would be the first unmistakable sign of the mature García Márquez style, in the late 1950s. Another ingredient was a wealthy resident of Sucre, who lived next door to the family’s friends the Gentile Chimento family. She was called María Amalia Sampayo de Alvarez, a woman who sneered at education and culture and bragged endlessly about her wealth. When she died in 1957 she was given a grotesquely extravagant funeral.34 Another equally extraordinary story was that of an eleven-year-old girl who was forced into prostitution by her grandmother; many years later she would become several fictional characters, notably the famous “Eréndira.”35
In fact, the matter of his development as a narrator was now called into question in the most dramatic fashion. García Márquez had hinted in a letter to his friends in Barranquilla that a shipment of books would be welcome to counteract the wilderness of Sucre and the uncouthness of his parents’ home.36 The books duly arrived. They included Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, The Hamlet, As I Lay Dying and The Wild Palms, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath, Nathan’s Portrait of Jenny and Huxley’s Point Counter Point. Unfortunately the result of reading these scintillating works of modernist literature was that work on “The House” slowed almost to a halt.37 Moreover as he began to recover his health he also began to return to leisure activities. He never made it to La Sierpe but he got back into his relationship with the voluptuous Nigromanta (who by then had lost her husband), much to Luisa Santiaga’s disgust. He also made some new friends. One, Carlos Alemán, from Mompox, who had already been elected to the departmental assembly, remembers arriving at Sucre in May 1949: “In the midst of the crowd greeting our arrival from the huts there stood out a man in exotic garb: he had peasant sandals, black trousers and a yellow shirt. I said to Ramiro, ‘Who’s that parakeet?’ and he replied, ‘That’s Gabito’ … He stood right out in those clothes of his, with everyone else there dressed in khaki.”38
So García Márquez, still supposedly convalescent, joined the group with his friend Jacobo Casij, another Liberal militant, and they sailed on around the entire Mojana region in three launches, each with Liberal flags, barrels of rum and a brass band. Liberal supporters cheered from the river banks and local bosses, usually Liberal landowners, would organize fiestas and meetings wherever they landed. Oscar de la Espriella later reflected, “Really we were all Marxists in those days, all waiting for the revolution, but Carlos Lleras would never give the order.”39
By the middle of May García Márquez felt well enough to return to his activities in Cartagena. As a newly elected member of the departmental assembly, his friend Carlos Alemán was not noticeably more aware of his self-importance than before but used his new status and budget to organize frequent binges which usually gave his poorer friend enough to eat to last him a week and invariably ended up in a brothel.40
When García Márquez got back from Sucre and wrote his next signed article—by then an extremely rare phenomenon—about the elections for student beauty queen, he signed it not Gabriel García Márquez but “Séptimus,” inspired by the character of that name in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.41 This first Séptimus article, “Friday,” is notable for its confident, almost arrogant tone, and includes the following defiant statement: “We are the students and we have discovered the formula for the perfect state: concord between the different social classes, fair salaries, the equal distribution of surplus value, the dissolution of salaried parliaments and total and collective abstention from elections.”
García Márquez had seriously neglected his legal studies before he fell ill and neglected them even more determinedly afterwards. He was well known for proclaiming his loathing of the law and for organizing impromptu football games in the university’s august corridors. The danger was that if he qualified as a lawyer he might be tempted—or forced, either by his family or his conscience—to practise it. Law studies in Cartagena were even more tedious than in Bogotá. In the end he failed both medical law (one in the eye for Gabriel Eligio?) and the seminar in civil law, scraped through civil law itself and passed five other subjects. Even this was a miracle in view of his numerous absences. But he did not retrieve Roman law and thus carried three failures into the fourth year.42
On 9 November in Bogotá, sensing the divisions and weaknesses within the Liberal leadership, the existing Conservative government reimposed the state of siege and closed the Congress—the so-called “institutional coup.” An eight o’clock curfew was decreed a few days later. The Liberal failure to react encouraged the Conservatives to cast off all restraint and the Violencia—redoubled—filled the entire country with corpses, above all in rural areas, though as usual less in the northern coastlands than elsewhere.
Internationally, this period—1948–9—was also an extraordinary time, one of the most intense and decisive moments of the entire twentieth century. García Márquez had been in Bogotá while the new inter-American system was being created there—largely in the interests of the United States, which had only recently dominated discussions in Europe about the establishment of the United Nations and had arranged, symbolically enough, to move the new organization’s meetings from London to New York. President Truman, who had taken the decision not long before to drop two atomic bombs on Japan, had now declared a worldwide crusade against communism—the CIA had been set up in 1947 as part of the anti-communist struggle—and the Pope had tacitly supported the American line; Truman had got himself re-elected on the strength of this position. The state of Israel had been founded with the full support of the Western nations and NATO had been established; the USSR had imposed a blockade on Berlin and the USA had responded with an airlift; the USSR had then tested its own atom bomb and on 1 October 1949 the People’s Republic of China had been founded. By the time García Márquez finally made the decision to take hold of his own life and move on from Cartagena, the new international system which would run the world throughout the recently declared Cold War and beyond was firmly in place. This was the context of his adult life and time.
It was at this moment that Manuel Zapata Olivella, the black vagabond, writer, revolutionary and doctor, crossed García Márquez’s path again—as he would on further occasions in the future. Now he took him off for his first encounter with the old province of Padilla, the stamping ground of Colonel Márquez during the Thousand Day War. Zapata Olivella had just graduated from the National University in Bogotá; although a native of Cartagena, he was travelling to practise his new profession in the small town of La Paz, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, about twelve miles from Valledupar. Zapata invited García Márquez to go with him to his new place of residence and the young man leaped at the chance. There, for the first time, in La Paz and Valledupar, he met the singers ofvallenatos and merengues in their natural habitat—in particular the influential Afro-Colombian accordionist Abelito Antonio Villa, the first man to record vallenato music.43
By the time he got back to Cartagena he had finally made up his mind: it was time to leave. Barranquilla would be a much more convenient place from which to look back upon his cultural heritage. His last public appearance in Cartagena was at a party on 22 December to celebrate the publication of his seventeen-year-old friend Jorge Lee Biswell Cotes’s novel, Blue Mist (Neblina azul), which he damned with faint praise in a patronizing and deprecating review in El Universal.
Oscar de la Espriella recalls García Márquez singing what he announced as “the first vallenato I ever learned,” whose first line went, “I’ll give you a bunch of forget-me-nots, so you’ll do as their name tells you.”44 The line has been used implicitly by writers from Cartagena to insinuate that García Márquez has unfairly “forgotten”—indeed, repudiated—not only the city, with its admittedly snobbish and reactionary upper-class values, but the friends who helped him, the colleagues who inspired him and, above all, the editor who loved and instructed him: Clemente Manuel Zabala, whom García Márquez almost never mentioned publicly until the prologue of Of Love and Other Demons in 1994.45
The young man would indeed be ostensibly ungrateful to specific individuals in later life and he has consistently played down the contribution of the Cartagena period to his development; but it is also clear that Cartagena writers now claim too much for the impact of the city and its intellectuals on the budding novelist and underestimate how much he suffered through his treatment there. García Márquez was a poor boy during his seven years at school, dependent on grants and the benevolence of others. In Bogotá he was always short of money and in Cartagena—and later Barranquilla—he would be close to indigent. Somehow he managed to smile and nearly always be positive during these years; friendly and unfriendly witnesses alike confirm that he virtually never expressed pity for himself or asked for favours. How he maintained his equanimity, how he held on to his confidence, how he built his resolve and managed to fashion and fortify a vocation in these arduous circumstances, with a family of ten other children beneath him also living in relative poverty, is something that can only be explained by words like courage, character and unshakable determination.