7

Barranquilla, a Bookseller and a Bohemian Group

1950–1953

“MAN, I THINK he went to Barranquilla looking for fresh air, more freedom and better pay.”¹ Thus, more than forty years later, did Ramiro de la Espriella explain his friend’s decision to move from the historic city of Cartagena to the bustling seaport of Barranquilla, eighty miles to the east. When García Márquez left Cartagena towards the end of December 1949 the curfew was in place again and it was not easy to reach Barranquilla by the late afternoon before it came into effect. He had 200 pesos secretly smuggled to him by his mother Luisa in his pocket and an unspecified sum from one of his university professors, Mario Alario di Filippo. He was carrying the draft of “The House” in the leather briefcase he had looted in Bogotá and, as usual, was much more anxious about losing that than he was about the possibility of losing his money. And he was euphoric, despite the fact that he would be spending yet another Christmas holiday alone. After all, as even a Cartagena aficionado would later concede, “Arriving in Barranquilla, in those days, was like returning to the world, the place where things were really happening.”² And García Márquez had a promise from Alfonso Fuenmayor that he would move heaven and earth to get him a job on El Heraldo.

Barranquilla was a place with almost no history, with almost no distinguished buildings; but it was modern, entrepreneurial, dynamic and hospitable, and far from the Violencia which was ravaging the interior of the country. Its population was approaching half a million. “Barranquilla enabled me to be a writer,” García Márquez told me in 1993. “It had the highest immigrant population in Colombia—Arabs, Chinese and so on. It was like Córdoba in the Middle Ages. An open city, full of intelligent people who didn’t give a fuck about being intelligent.”³

The spiritual founder of what would later be known as the Barranquilla Group was the Catalan Ramón Vinyes, destined to become the wise old Catalan bookseller of One Hundred Years of Solitude.⁴ Born in the mountain village of Berga in 1882, he was brought up in Barcelona and established a minor reputation in Spain before migrating to Ciénaga in 1913. Rumours that he was homosexual persist in Barranquilla to this day and appear well founded. Thus it turns out that both García Márquez’s crucial mentors during his Caribbean period, Zabala and Vinyes, were probably homosexuals. When García Márquez got to know him—and it was only briefly—Vinyes was in his late sixties. He was slightly portly, had a shock of white hair and an uncontrollable quiff like that of a cockatoo. He managed to look both intimidating and benevolent. Though not himself a great drinker, he was a great conversationalist and had a delicate but acid humour; on occasion he could be brutally frank.⁵ He had huge prestige among the group. He knew he was not a great writer but he was widely read and had a view of literature which was both catholic and shrewd. He never had much money but was always relaxed about it. It was Vinyes who gave the group cohesion and the confidence to believe that even in an unknown, apparently uncultured city, with no history, no university and no cultivated ruling class, it was possible to be educated. And easy to be modern. One of his sayings that García Márquez never forgot was, “If Faulkner lived in Barranquilla he’d be sitting at this table.”⁶It was probably true. One of his key themes was that the world was becoming a “universal village,” many years before Marshall McLuhan came up with the idea.

Alfonso Fuenmayor, born in 1917, and son of the respected writer José Félix Fuenmayor, was the quietest and perhaps the most serious of the younger members, but he was also the most pivotal. First, because of his direct connection to the older generation. Second, because he was the one who had brought all the others together through his own prior relationships. Third, because it was he who had first suggested to García Márquez that he should move to El Heraldo, where Fuenmayor himself worked for twenty-six years. Widely read in Spanish, English and French, he was myopic in appearance, quiet and judicious, but a well-practised drinker like the rest of them, and a determined lubricator of the collective wheels. He had a serious stutter which rum or whisky tended to ameliorate. And he had a penchant for classical literature and for dictionaries, and was, without doubt, the most genuinely erudite and the most widely read of the group.

Germán Vargas was Fuenmayor’s close friend and associate, born in Barranquilla in 1919. Tall, with piercing green eyes, he was an insatiable reader, but slow and careful in everything he did, and with a hard edge to him. If Fuenmayor, despite his seriousness, was unavoidably bumbling, untidy, funny, Vargas was always neat, white-shirted, prudent—though occasionally savage—in his judgements,⁷ and reliable. (He was the one García Márquez would later send his manuscripts to for a first impression and he was the one García Márquez would write to for relief packages of books or for money.) He smoked heavily, the blacker the tobacco the better, and he and Fuenmayor, despite being the most sedentary, were the biggest drinkers among the gang, specializing in a potion whose main ingredients were “rum, lemons and rum.”⁸

Alvaro Cepeda Samudio was the energetic motor of the group, handsome, rakish, with the widest flashing smile in the world, irresistible to women—he had well-publicized affairs with some of the leading female artists in Colombia—yet a man’s man; and, because of his early death in 1972, he has become a Barranquilla legend.⁹ He was born in the city on 30 March 1926, though he always claimed to have been born in Ciénaga, where the banana massacre had taken place, because he wished his birth to be associated with that tragic historical event in which the abominable cachacos had murdered innocent costeños. His father, a Conservative politician, went insane and died when Alvaro was a child, leaving a whiff of tragedy about the boy, belied by his expansive and unforgettable adult personality. Cepeda was a mass of contradictions which he resolved with uproarious bluster. He looked like a vagabond but had come into money while away in America in 1949–50 and always had close links with local aristocrats, including Barranquilla businessman Julio Mario Santo Domingo, briefly a member of the group and later the wealthiest man in Colombia and one of the wealthiest in Latin America.

Even more suicidally turbulent was Alejandro Obregón. He too was away from Barranquilla when García Márquez arrived and indeed Obregón was in Europe most of the time García Márquez was in Barranquilla; nevertheless he made occasional visits and he was an essential member of the group both before and after García Márquez’s sojourn. Obregón was a painter, born in Barcelona in 1920. His family owned the Obregón textile factory in Barranquilla and the city’s luxury hotel, the Prado. Married and divorced several times, and as much of a magnet for women as Cepeda, Obregón was the archetype of the impassioned painter and by the mid-1940s his reputation was on the rise.¹⁰ In the second half of the century he became the best-known painter in Colombia, before the rise of Fernando Botero, and undoubtedly the most loved and admired. His usual dress was a pair of shorts and nothing else. His exploits are legendary in Barranquilla: taking on several U.S. marines single-handed after they had mistreated a prostitute; eating a fellow drinker’s large trained cricket in one mouthful; breaking open the door of his favourite bar with an elephant hired from a local circus; playing William Tell with his friends and using bottles instead of arrows; shooting his favourite dog in the head when it became paralysed after an accident; and dozens more.

These, then, were the central players in what would later be known as the Group of Barranquilla, organizers of the permanent fiesta to which García Márquez was invited in early 1950. There were many others, almost all of them colourful and individualistic. Germán Vargas, writing in 1956 and referring to the group’s heterogeneous enthusiasms, talked about his friends in terms that were “postmodern” avant la lettre: “They can consider with the same interest and without prejudice phenomena as different as Joyce’sUlysses, Cole Porter’s music, Alfredo di Stefano’s skill or Willie Mays’s technique, Enrique Grau’s painting, Miguel Hernández’s poetry, Réné Clair’s judgement, Rafael Escalona’s merengues, Gabriel Figueroa’s photography or the vitality of Black Adán or Black Eufemia.”¹¹ They considered friendship even more important than politics. As for the latter, they were almost all Liberals though Cepeda tended towards anarchist postures and García Márquez towards socialist ones. García Márquez would later say that between them his friends had every book you could wish for; they would quote one at him in the brothel late at night and then give it to him the next morning and he would read it while he was still drunk.¹²

The group seemed anti-bourgeois but really they were more anti-aristocratic; Cepeda and Obregón were linked to some of the most important political, economic and social interests in the city. Their most striking posture—extraordinarily rare in Latin America at this time—was their sympathy for many things North American; while Bogotá, and most of Latin America, was still in thrall to European culture, the Barranquilla Group identified Europe with the past and with tradition, and preferred the more straightforward and modern cultural example of the United States. Naturally this preference did not apply to political questions, nor was it uncritical; but, for good or ill, it placed the group a good twenty-five years ahead of almost every other significant literary or intellectual movement in Latin America.

Of course the posture also made them anti-cachaco, none more so than Cepeda, who was both a great believer in Caribbean—as against Andean—popular culture and a great modernizer. He would later advocate the creation of a Caribbean Republic. In a 1966 interview with the Bogotá journalist Daniel Samper he would assert that costeños “are not transcendentalists … don’t invent mysteries. We are not liars and hypocrites like the cachacos.”¹³ Samper, a cachaco, had no idea any of his fellow Colombians could be like that and was infatuated with such a larger-than-life personality. Cepeda was one of the first enthusiasts for cut-the-crap North American writers like Faulkner and Hemingway and the number one exponent of the Group’s favourite pastime, mamagallismo.

Their stamping ground was a few blocks in central Barranquilla. García Márquez would later say that “the world began in San Blas Street” or 35th Street as the more recent denomination has it.¹⁴ In fact, on just one block of San Blas, between Progreso (Carrera 41) and 20 de Julio (Carrera 43) was where the Librería Mundo stood, the Café Colombia, the Cine Colombia, the Café Japy and the Lunchería Americana; a block to the north stood América Billares and a block to the east was the Café Roma, on Paseo Simón Bolívar. And just beyond was the Colón Park, where Vinyes lived, by the open street market, with a view of San Nicolás church, known as the “cathedral of the poor,” a few steps away from the offices of El Heraldo.¹⁵

The Librería Mundo belonged to an ex-communist called Jorge Rondón Hederich and was seen as the spiritual successor of Vinyes’s own bookshop, which had been destroyed by fire in the distant 1920s.¹⁶ It was the place García Márquez headed for whenever he arrived in the city and the place where his mother would find him when she came to look for him a few weeks after his arrival.¹⁷ If the drinking went on to midnight or beyond, the group would usually adjourn to one of Barranquilla’s many brothels, often in the so-called Chinese Quarter, though the favourite destination was Black Eufemia’s place, then on the edge of the city more than thirty blocks away.¹⁸

García Márquez was the youngest of the entire group, the most naive and inexperienced—according to Ibarra Merlano, García Márquez not only did not swear in Cartagena but didn’t like others swearing either. He was never a great drinker and certainly no fighter, though there is evidence that he was a discreet but regular fornicator. Germán Vargas later remarked, “He was shy and quiet, like me and Alfonso; that was understandable because he was the most small-town of all of us … He was also the most disciplined.”¹⁹ He was still, as he would be for many years, the one without a house, the one without money, the one without a wife or even, for most of these years, a proper girlfriend. (His semi-fictional relationship with Mercedes saved him from the fate of having to find a real, steady girlfriend.) He was like some eternal student or bohemian artist. He would say later that although he was happy at the time, he never expected to survive it.²⁰

He could not afford to pay a proper rent. He ended up living for almost a year in a brothel which went under the name Residencias New York, in a building nicknamed “The Skyscraper” by Alfonso Fuenmayor, because it was four storeys high, unusual for Barranquilla at that time. Situated in the Calle Real, known popularly as “Crime Street,” it was almost opposite the El Heraldo office and very close to where Vinyes lived in the Plaza Colón. The ground floor of the building was given over to notaries and other offices. Up above were the prostitutes’ quarters, tightly administered by the madam, Catalina la Grande.²¹ García Márquez rented one of the rooms at the very top of the building, for one peso fifty a night. The room was three square metres, more like a cubicle. A prostitute called María Encarnación used to iron his two pairs of trousers and three shirts once a week. Sometimes he would not have the money to pay the rent, and then he would give the doorman, Dámaso Rodríguez, a copy of his latest manuscript as a deposit.²²

He lived in those conditions, between the uproar from the street and the diverse noises, business discussions and catfights of the brothel, for almost a year. He made friends of the prostitutes and even wrote their letters for them. They lent him their soap, shared their breakfast with him, and occasionally he would reciprocate by singing them the odd bolero or vallenato. He was especially grateful when, a few years later, his one-time idol William Faulkner declared that there is no better place for a writer than a brothel: “In the mornings there is peace and quiet, and in the evenings there are parties, liquor and interesting people to talk to.”²³ García Márquez heard many illuminating conversations on the other side of his insubstantial wall and would make much of them in literary episodes to come. Other times he would take aimless nocturnal rides with a taxi driver friend, “El Mono” Guerra. Thereafter he would always consider taxi drivers to be paragons of common sense.

He continued with the pseudonym “Séptimus” which he had assumed in Cartagena, and he entitled his daily column “The Giraffe” (“La Jirafa”), a secret tribute to his adolescent muse, Mercedes, noted for her long slim neck. From the very start these columns carried a new radiance, even if—there was still a censorship regime in place—they were often very low on content.

García Márquez nevertheless maintained his political perspective—and impertinence—as far as possible. At the very start of his career in El Heraldo, he showed that he was not susceptible to the Peronist populism which was tempting other Latin American leftists. Of Eva Perón’s visit to the old continent he wrote: “The second act was Eva’s foray into Europe. In an ostentatious act of international demagoguery, she squandered on the Italian proletariat—more as a spectacle than as an act of charity—almost an entire ministry of finance. In Spain the state comics welcomed her with the enthusiasm of magnanimous colleagues.”²⁴ On 16 March 1950 he got away with an article that noted the extraordinary opportunity open to the barber who shaved the President of the republic every day with an open razor;²⁵ on 29 July 1950 he would write nonchalantly, as if he were a personal acquaintance, about a visit to London by Ilya Ehrenburg, one of the Soviet Union’s most effective propagandists;²⁶ and on 9 February 1951 he would state baldly that “no political doctrine is more repugnant to me than falangism.”²⁷ (At the time Colombia was run by a regime, under Laureano Gómez, which was the first in Latin America to restore full relations with Franco’s Spain, despite United Nations warnings to the contrary, and which would clearly have liked to run a similar administration to Franco’s.)

If one of his main problems was censorship, one of his main topics was the search for a topic. And both concerns are humorously addressed in an article entitled “The Pilgrimage of the Giraffe” about his daily chore:

The giraffe is an animal vulnerable to the slightest editorial movement. From the moment the first word of this daily column is conceived—here, at the Underwood … until six in the morning the next day, the giraffe becomes a sad, defenceless animal who can break a joint as he turns any corner. In the first place, one has to bear in mind that this business of writing fourteen centimetres of foolishness every day is no joke however temperamentally foolish the writer may be. Then there’s the matter of the two censors. The first, who is right here, at my side, blushingly sitting by the fan, ready to stop the giraffe having any colour other than the one he is naturally and publicly allowed. Then there is the second censor, about which nothing can be said without danger of the giraffe’s long neck being reduced to the absolute minimum. Finally the defenceless mammal reaches the dark chamber of the linotypists where those much-maligned colleagues labour from sun to sun converting what was originally written on light and transitory leaves into lead.²⁸

In many of these articles we can feel not only the “joy of living” but the joy of writing. It was in these early weeks of 1950 that he first experienced this pleasure over a sustained period of time.

Just as García Márquez was getting used to his new life, he received an unexpected visit. At lunchtime on Saturday 18 February, on the eve of Carnival, his mother Luisa Santiaga, who had travelled down-river from Sucre, found him in the Mundo Bookshop. His friends had been discreet enough not to direct her towards the “Skyscraper.” This moment is the one that would be chosen by García Márquez to initiate his autobiographical narration in Living to Tell the Tale. The family were running short of money again and Luisa Santiaga was on her way to Aracataca to begin the process of selling her father’s old home. The journey the mother and her son were about to make was exactly the same journey Luisa had made alone more than fifteen years earlier when she went back to Aracataca to meet a small boy she had left several years before and who had forgotten her. Now she was back again, a couple of weeks before Gabito’s twenty-third birthday.²⁹

He finished his article for the following day’s paper and then he and Luisa travelled on the seven o’clock launch across the great swamp to Ciénaga, a journey recaptured unforgettably in the memoir. From Ciénaga they went on to Aracataca in the same yellow train that had run between the two towns all those years before. They arrived in Aracataca and walked through the empty streets trying to shelter in the shade of the walnut trees.³⁰ García Márquez considers this visit the single most important experience of his entire life, attributing to it the definitive confirmation of his literary vocation and the catalyst for what he regards as his first serious piece of writing, the novel Leaf Storm. That is why it is this episode that initiates Living to Tell the Tale, and not the moment of his birth; and it is, without a doubt, a narrative tour de force which gives life to the entire memoir.

The effect of this return to things past was stunning. Every street seemed to funnel him backwards in time towards the house where he was born. Was this the Aracataca of his childhood, these ramshackle houses, these dusty streets, this crumbling toy-sized church? The busy green avenues of his memory were deserted and looked as if they would never be animated again. Everyone and everything he saw seemed covered in dust and had aged to a degree he could not have imagined; the adults all looked sick, weary and defeated, his contemporaries aged beyond their years, their children listless and pot-bellied; stray dogs and vultures appeared to have taken over the town.³¹ It was as if everyone else was dead and only he and his mother were alive. Or as if, as in a fairy tale, he himself had been dead and only now had come back to life.

When the two travellers reached the corner diagonally across from the grandparents’ old house, on Monsignor Espejo’s Avenue, Luisa and Gabito stopped at the old dispensary of the Venezuelan doctor Alfredo Barbosa. Behind the counter, his wife Adriana Berdugo was working at her sewing machine and Luisa blurted out, “Comadre, how are you?” The woman looked round, stupefied, tried to reply but couldn’t; the two embraced without a word and wept for several minutes. García Márquez looked on, stunned by the confirmation that it was not only distance that had been separating him from Aracataca but time itself. He had once been frightened of the old pharmacist, now a pitiful sight, thin as a dry withered stick, sparse of hair and with most of his teeth missing. When they asked how he was, the old man stammered, almost accusingly, “You cannot imagine what this town has gone through.”³²

Years later García Márquez would say, “What really happened to me in that trip to Aracataca was that I realized that everything that had occurred in my childhood had a literary value that I was only now appreciating. From the moment I wrote Leaf Storm I realized I wanted to be a writer and that nobody could stop me and that the only thing left for me to do was to try to be the best writer in the world.”³³ Adding to the ironies involved in all returns, the visit itself was a complete failure: his mother was unable to reach agreement with the sitting tenants. Indeed, the entire journey had been made on the basis of a misunderstanding and anyway Luisa herself was in two minds about the sale. As for him, until he wrote his memoir, which describes his and Luisa’s tour around the old crumbling building in great detail, he had always insisted that he had been unable to enter the house on that occasion and had never entered it since: “If I do, I will stop being a writer. The key is inside,” he once said.³⁴ But in the memoir he goes in.

He says he immediately decided to give up “The House” and take a different direction. This is surprising at first sight: one might have thought that a return to the house would only encourage him to start working again on the novel already inspired by it—rather than, as was in fact the case, expanding his focus to include the whole town in which it was situated. But the truth is that the house evoked in “The House” was not in fact the real house but a fictional construct intended to screen it. Now, at last, he was preparing to openly confront the edifice which had been haunting him for so many years and to rebuild the old town, which he still retained in his imagination, around it. Thus was Macondo born.

It is impossible not to think of Proust. Except that García Márquez finds that although Aracataca itself is in many ways dead, he, after all, is alive. And he has, miraculously, got his mother back: he has no memories of ever having lived in the house with her but now at last they have visited it together; and this is the first time in his entire life that he has been on a journey alone with her.³⁵ Naturally he does not say it—he does not say any of this—but their meeting in the Mundo Bookshop the previous day re-enacted the story of the “first” meeting between them (the first one he remembered) when he was six or seven—because in that later scene too, like a character inspired by Oedipus Rex, the narrator, García Márquez himself, has her say, “I am your mother.”

The visit not only triggered his memory and changed his attitude towards his own past; it also showed him how to write the new novel. Now he viewed his home town through the lens given to him by Faulkner and the other 1920s modernists, Joyce, Proust and Virginia Woolf. “The House” had really been conceived as a nineteenth-century novel, inspired by the kind of books which the Cartagena set admired, books such as Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables; now he would write it as a narrative structured by an awareness of the multiple dimensions of time itself. He was no longer buried in that frozen house with his grandfather. He had escaped it.

It was obvious that something big was happening to his understanding of the relation between literature and life when, a few weeks later, he wrote an article entitled “Problems of the Novel?,” which casts scorn on most fiction being written in Colombia at the time and then states:

There has not yet been written in Colombia a novel evidently and fortunately influenced by Joyce, Faulkner or Virginia Woolf. And I say “fortunately” because I don’t think we Colombians can be an exception at this point to the play of influences. In her prologue to Orlando Virginia Woolf admits her influences. Faulkner himself could not deny those exerted upon him by Joyce. There is something—especially in the management of time—in common between Huxley and, again, Virginia Woolf. Franz Kafka and Proust are everywhere in the literature of the modern world. If we Colombians are to take the right path, we must position ourselves inevitably within this current. The lamentable truth is that it has not happened yet and there is not the slightest sign of it ever happening.³⁶

García Márquez was undoubtedly on his way to becoming a new man; he was no longer exiled from his own life; he had recovered his childhood. And he had discovered—or perhaps better, uncovered—a new identity. He had reinvented himself. And all by suddenly perceiving, as in a lightning flash, how the avant-garde writers of the 1920s had learned to view the world from within their own artistic consciousness.

Few of his friends, either in Cartagena or Barranquilla, knew much about his origins. Now the “boy from Sucre” became the “boy from Aracataca” and he would never change his origin again. If there is good reason to believe that at this stage “The House” was in part a Sucre novel, now it would evolve towards being an Aracataca novel, albeit under an alias: Macondo. Before long, indeed, the earlier book would give way completely to the new one and García Márquez would be writing something much more directly autobiographical. Now the jokes he told his friends and colleagues had a different twist: for example, that he had gone back “home” to get his birth certificate and the Mayor had not had an official stamp to hand so had called for a large banana; when it was brought he had cut it in half and stamped the document with it.³⁷ García Márquez assured his friends that the story was true, only he couldn’t prove it just now because he’d left the certificate in the “Skyscraper.” They all roared with laughter but they half-believed him. Whether or not there was a certificate to prove it, the story-teller from Aracataca was born; in his next incarnation he would become the magician from Macondo. At last he knew who he was and who he wanted to be.

Soon after his return to Aracataca with Luisa Santiaga in February 1950 he had written a “Giraffe” entitled “Abelito Villa, Escalona and Co.”³⁸ This piece, demonstrating that the journey with his mother reminded him of journeys he had already made and, equally significant, inspired journeys he intended to make in the future, briefly recalled the November 1949 expedition with Zapata Olivella, and celebrated the lives and adventures of the wandering troubadours of the Magdalena and Padilla regions. In particular it exalted the work of another young man who was to play a major role not only in his understanding of vallenato music but also in his direct participation in the culture of the Atlantic hinterland. The young man was Rafael Escalona, the vallenato composer, who, having already talked to Zapata Olivella about García Márquez, now, on reading the favourable review García Márquez had written of his music, set out to meet him.³⁹ Their first one-on-one encounter (they may actually have met the year before) was in Barranquilla’s Café Roma on 22 March 1950, less than two weeks after the publication of the article about the 1949 trip and less than a month after the life-changing journey with Luisa Santiaga. To make an impression on the young troubadour, García Márquez arrived to meet him at the Café Roma, singing his composition “Hunger at School” (“El hambre del liceo”). There is a rare photograph from those days in which we can see García Márquez singing one of Escalona’s songs to the man himself, while drumming on a counter, with a pursing of the lips that García Márquez has always used not only to sing but to smoke, and to pout—whether to women or to men with whom he is in one way or another infatuated.⁴⁰

On 15 April 1950 Vinyes left his disciples and returned whence he had come. Before his departure a farewell dinner was arranged for him, a veritable last supper. In the photograph taken that evening Vinyes, euphoric, has his arm around a disconsolate Alfonso Fuenmayor; next to them, the only man without either a jacket or tie and wearing a brightly coloured tropical shirt, is the youngest person present, Gabriel García Márquez, “thin as a fishbone,” as a waitress at the América Billiards Hall had recently said, eyes shining, delighted to be there, his expression both ingenuous and sardonic but above all bursting with energy and life.

Soon after this he was persuaded by Alfonso Fuenmayor to contribute to a new independent weekly magazine, produced tabloid-style at the El Heraldo workshop, called Crónica (Chronicle), which was unveiled on 29 April 1950 and survived until June 1951.⁴¹García Márquez became the jack-of-all-trades of Crónica, as well as its director; some of his contributions were drawn, somewhat desperately, from real life. His story “The Woman Who Came at Six O’Clock” originated in a challenge from Fuenmayor that he could not write a detective story. García Márquez recalled an anecdote about Obregón’s first efforts, in Catholic Barranquilla, to find a nude model. His friends set about the search for a willing prostitute and finally located a promising candidate; she asked Obregón to first write a letter for her to a sailor in Bristol, agreed to turn up at the School of Fine Arts the next day and then … disappeared.⁴² “The Woman Who Came at Six O’Clock” is about a prostitute who appears to have just murdered a client and comes into a bar to establish an alibi. A debt to another of his new enthusiasms, Hemingway (perhaps “The Killers”), is evident.⁴³ It is a rare example of a story by García Márquez which is set directly and recognizably in the Barranquilla of his time.

“The Night of the Curlews” was another even more successful story, admired by connoisseurs such as Mutis and Zalamea Borda up in Bogotá. It had originated in one of the visits to Black Eufemia’s brothel in Las Delicias, where the gang tended to turn up almost every night. Fuenmayor would later insist, as if the thought had never even occurred to him, that they certainly did not go there for the women, “those pathetic little girls who went to bed out of hunger,” but rather to buy a bottle of rum for thirteen pesos and watch the Yankee sailors stagger around the floor amid the resident curlews, as if they had lost their human partners and were looking to dance with the red-feathered waders. One night García Márquez was dozing there and Fuenmayor shook him awake and said: “Careful the curlews don’t peck out your eyes!” (It is believed in Colombia that the birds blind children because they see fish move in their eyes.) So García Márquez went straight back to the office to write the story of three friends in a brothel who are blinded by birds, just in order to fill a space in Crónica. The author himself would later say that it was the first literary piece he ever wrote which did not embarrass him half a century later.

He was hypnotized by the literary achievement of the European and American modernists of the 1920s and 1930s; but he was also fascinated by their fame and glory and the use some writers had made of this, notably Faulkner and, above all, Hemingway, in developing myths about themselves and their writing. The 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature had been left vacant because, although Faulkner had won an overwhelming majority vote of the Swedish Academy, he had not achieved unanimity. On 8 April García Márquez had already written an article, “Nobel Prize Again,” in which he predicted that Faulkner, whom he always called “el maestro Faulkner,” would never win the prize because he was “too good a writer.” When Faulkner was in fact awarded the 1949 prize retrospectively in November 1950, García Márquez declared that it was long overdue because Faulkner was “the greatest writer of the contemporary world and one of the greatest of all time,” one who now would have to accept “the uncomfortable privilege of becoming fashionable.”⁴⁴ Much later he would sort out the great dilemma—Faulkner or Hemingway?—by remarking that Faulkner had nourished his literary soul whilst Hemingway had taught him the writer’s trade.⁴⁵

After he became famous García Márquez found himself repeatedly lured into discussing how much he had been “influenced” by Faulkner. Beneath the question, invariably, was a more sinister question: whether he had “plagiarized” Faulkner; in short, whether he lacked true originality. Perhaps, given the extraordinary parallels between their backgrounds, the remarkable thing is that García Márquez was not more influenced by Faulkner, especially since Faulkner was unquestionably the favourite writer of the entire Barranquilla Group. The almost equally decisive influence of Virginia Woolf on García Márquez is much less frequently mentioned; James Joyce hardly at all. Since his points of reference were many, and his own originality unmistakable, it is little wonder that García Márquez grew weary of the attempts to reduce him to the status of a Colombian Faulkner, despite his passing enthusiasm for the Mississippian and the many things they had in common. We have almost no private documents written by García Márquez in this period; not even the manuscripts of his stories and novels have been preserved. But some time between the middle of 1950 and, say, October of that same year, García Márquez, possibly under some non-literary influence—alcohol perhaps—wrote a two-page letter to his friend Carlos Alemán in Bogotá. Miraculously, the letter has survived and here is an excerpt:

idonthavejuanbsaddressimsendingyoualetterforhim

aleman im writing in reply to the epistolary absurdity you sent me as im too busy i wont have time to put full stops or commas semi colons and all the other pieces of punctuation in this letter i hardly have time to put the letters pity telepathy doesnt exist to reply by telepathic post which must be the best as its not subject to censorship as you know we are doingcronicaweekly which leaves us no time for expeditions in search of stupefying grasses so for the moment youll have to be content with ordinary crocodile prick until cronica goes bust and we can go back to our stamping ground at son of the night aurelianobuendia sends greetings likewise his daughter remedios semi whore who went out in the end with the singer salesman the son tobias became a policeman and they were killed so the only one left is the girl without a name who won’t ever have one they all just called her the girl sitting all day in her rocking chair listening to the gramophone which like everything else in this world went wrong and now its a problem in the house because the only one in the town who knows about machinery is an italian shoemaker whos never in his life seen a cobbled gramophone he goes to the house and tries to hammermendrepair it in vain whilst all the water boys are talkingspillingwaterwhistling and pieces of the grammy end up in every house sayinggramophonecolonelaurelianodamaged that same afternoon people have to run togetdressedclosedoorsputtheirshoesoncombtheirhair to go to the colonel’s house he for his part was not expecting visitors since the townsfolk hadn’t been back to his house for fifteen years since when they refused to bury gregorios body for fear of the police and the colonel insulted prieststownfellowpartymembers withdrew from council and shut himself up in his house so that only fifteen years later when the gramophone wasdamagedbust-broke did people go back to the house and catch the colonel and his wife dona soledad completely unawares … the woman spends all night in a corner not talking to anyone and when dona soledad embarrassed gets to go over its dawn and the people leave its just stuff you know that as the son became a policeman when the police come with his funeral the colonels sitting at the door like always and when he sees the funeral coming he pulls the doors shut well stuff like that its as if it happened in mompos just so you can see how the great book is going that apart i can tell you that german alfonso figurita and i are passing our time talkingwritingthinkingdoingcronica and not like before drinkingwhoringsmokingcigarettesgrass cos life cant be like that if you dont like virginia you can go fuck yourself ramiro likes her and knows more about novels than you so go to fuck tell ramiro i owe him a letter but to write to me anyway in december ill ask for a vacation from cronica and to keep me a place in the apartment don ramon left and has written were all well tito brinqueit eduard puteit old fuenmayors turned out a great guy we all say hello and wish you merrychristmashappynewyear your affectionate friend gabito⁴⁶

This letter is a revelation. As well as the evident influence of the rarely mentioned Joyce—also Virginia Woolf—and the vivid sense it gives of García Márquez’s life in Barranquilla and his feelings of euphoria about it, it also shows us a young man still thinking like an impressionable teenager totally obsessed with his own creative process and immersed in his own stories but also, for those familiar with his development, a serious and committed writer riding the wave of a transition between one long-term project, “The House,” and another, Leaf Storm, as well as writing several stories which would later appear in anthologies and writing his daily column. Colonel Aureliano Buendía is of course the best-known character ever created by García Márquez, and here he is. Nevertheless he is soon to be sidelined, his name a mere legendary mention in one book after another until his moment eventually comes in the mid-1960s; not quite yet, though. Clearly García Márquez has not at this point renounced “The House,” despite what he would later assert in his memoir. He was still working on details which, elaborated and modified, would eventually form part of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

So perhaps the most interesting detail in the letter is the explanation of the Colonel’s problems with the townsfolk and why he has closed down his house: namely, that for some unstated reason they would not let him bury his slave Gregorio and so he buried the slave himself beneath the almond tree in the patio.⁴⁷ Here, unmistakably, is one of the first seeds not only of Leaf Storm, a novel in which a colonel finds himself under siege because he has a duty to arrange the burial of a man hated by the town in which he lives, but also of One Hundred Years of Solitude, in which one of the central characters is tied to a tree in the patio and another dies beneath it.

The careful reader can also divine another influence at this time. García Márquez had included stories by the brilliant Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges in several editions of Crónica. Precisely in August 1950, the month in which the reactionary President Laureano Gómez was invested, García Márquez’s reading of the great exponent of “fantastic literature” seems to have borne fruit. Borges was remarkable for taking his influences from anywhere and everywhere and he was already pursuing the line in essays that the concept of “influences” was misleading because “all writers create their own precursors.” Not only was this attitude highly liberating for a Latin American writer but Borges’s lack of respect for the sources he did use was also extremely refreshing. He has sometimes been called the “Latin American Kafka” but nowhere in Kafka do we find his good-humoured irony. It is doubly appropriate, then, that at the time that García Márquez takes up many of Borges’s ideas (though without acknowledging this new influence), he should choose to write a satirical story about a suicide which he entitles “Caricature of Kafka.”⁴⁸ It can safely be said that at this point García Márquez dispatches Kafka (and his “influence” upon him) to the past and henceforth views Kafka’s themes through the more whimsical lens of Borges. One might say that part of the trouble with “The House” was that it carried an excessive dose of Kafka; One Hundred Years of Solitude, when it came along, would be a distinctly Borgesian book.

Leaf Storm, the emerging novel, would be about different conceptions of honour, duty and shame. A colonel, one of the accepted aristocrats of the town of Macondo, has vowed to take responsibility for the burial of his friend the Belgian “doctor” (a character based, of course, on “Don Emilio” in the Aracataca of García Márquez’s childhood); he intends to carry out his pledge, against the wishes of his wife and daughter, even though the Doctor betrayed his hospitality by sleeping with his servant and even though the townsfolk would like to see the Doctor “rot” because many years earlier he had refused to attend to the town’s wounded following a political conflict. Now he has committed an even worse crime against the laws of God as Catholics interpret them—his suicide—and all the Colonel can hope to do is have the man buried in unconsecrated ground.

Despite this moralistic plot-line, a variation on the theme of Sophocles’s Antigone, Leaf Storm is also, in a purely factual sense, the most autobiographical of all García Márquez’s novels. The central characters are a holy trinity forming a three-way family romance based on Gabito, Luisa and Nicolás; but if the child, the mother and the grandfather were to be based upon these real people, such a choice required the suppression of other real people, notably Tranquilina (the grandmother in the novel has died and is replaced by a second wife), Gabito’s brothers and sisters (the child is an only son), and, above all, Gabito’s real father, Gabriel Eligio García. In his case the suppression is merely a displacement. There is indeed a character closely based on Gabriel Eligio and he is the child’s real father in the novel; but his name is Martín—Gabriel Eligio’s second surname, which would have been his first had he been legitimate, was Martínez—and his motives for the marriage are unscrupulous and self-serving. Moreover he abandons his wife after a brief time (her feelings about him were always apparently lukewarm), leaves Macondo, and the child never thinks about him in the entire novel. Obviously this allowed García Márquez to fantasize while he wrote that his mother never really loved Gabriel Eligio, and that it was Gabriel Eligio, the father, who became separated from her, not himself, Gabito, the son.⁴⁹

The novel has a dual, Faulknerian timescale. The three characters spend half an hour, between 2.30 and 3 p.m. on 12 September 1928, sitting in the room where the Doctor has died while they wait for him to be placed in his coffin and carried out; they are in a state of high tension because they fear that the townsfolk, who hate the Doctor, may prevent the funeral from taking place. But during that half-hour they also think back over the entire life of their family—the Colonel’s family, originally from the Guajira—in flashbacks viewed fragmentarily through the consciousness of each of them. It is a more complex version, though also a more static and mechanical one, of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying: the novel as a detective story, a labyrinth or a puzzle which the reader has to solve. Here is a classic example of a young writer dazzled by geniuses such as Faulkner, Woolf and, probably, Borges, and wanting to show it as much as conceal it.

What we have, then, is, simultaneously, a return and a distancing—clearly an extraordinarily powerful and defining experience with a fusion of the emotional and the intellectual, the past and the present. If the view of Colombian reality is not as yet a cruelly satirical one, that is because García Márquez does not wish to include his grandfather in the condemnation or to make his own past too bitter (or too deluded!) in retrospect; at this point, the Colonel is a contradictory but still mainly admirable figure, treated with only the lightest irony. Still, in making his return to his birthplace, García Márquez has realized that Macondo has already been devastated by a force which the inhabitants see as fate but which he, now, sees as history.

Many years later, in 1977, García Márquez would remark, “I have a great affection for Leaf Storm. And a great compassion for the guy who wrote it. I can see him clear as day: he’s a boy of twenty-two, twenty-three, who thinks he’s never going to write another thing in his life, this is his only chance, so he tries to put everything in, everything he remembers and everything he’s learned about technique and literary craft in all the authors that he’s read.”⁵⁰ Work on Leaf Storm would continue, on and off, for several more years but the book was well and truly launched. And although this young man would never be complacent, with luck and much more hard work his literary future would undoubtedly be assured. He was not, however, a man about whom one could write the usual cliché—that he would never look back.

OF COURSE García Márquez still had a living to earn and he continued to produce his “Giraffes” for El Heraldo on almost a daily basis and to act as the dynamo for Crónica. Almost everything he wrote at the time, however trivial and however rushed, was touched in some degree by the grace of discovery and creation. Biographically, however, the most interesting article during this period is one which appeared on 16 December 1950, called “La Amiga.” “Amiga” in Spanish can mean any female friend or it can mean “girlfriend.” It was, in brief, a public reaction to the excitement of having met up with Mercedes Barcha again, in an article whose cool tone can scarcely contain the pleasure of the event. This “friend” is described as Mercedes was then and is today, “oriental in looks,” with “slanting eyes,” “high cheekbones,” “dark skin” and a “cordially mocking” manner. Mercedes was in town because her family had fled their home some months before in the face of the Violencia, which had come to Sucre with a vengeance.

The courtship between Gabriel García Márquez and Mercedes Barcha is an enigma from start to finish.⁵¹ Both of them have always joked about his insistence that he decided he would marry her when she was nine, her insistence that she was almost unaware of him until shortly before he left for Europe in 1955. The December 1950 article, which cannot of course be taken literally, nonetheless says that it is three years since its protagonists last met up. In fact 1947 was the year when García Márquez graduated from Zipaquirá, went home for the summer and then left for university in Bogotá; after that he went home as little as possible and Mercedes was in any case away from Sucre studying at a convent school in Medellín and only returned home for the end-of-year holidays. There are persistent stories that Gabito used to hang around Mompox before 1947, when she was studying there, and Ramiro de la Espriella recalls that he used to talk about her in Cartagena in 1949; but there seems to have been very little contact or communication between them in the six years that passed between their first acquaintance and their meeting at the end of what must already be counted the most decisive year in García Márquez’s life.

Everything suggests that he had been anticipating her return from school to Barranquilla for Christmas for some time before they met. For one thing he finally left the “Skyscraper” and moved into a respectable boarding house run by the Avila sisters, whom he knew through connections with Sucre and who lived in the upper part of town just a few blocks from the Hotel Prado, near where his friend the poet Meira Delmar lived.⁵² It also happened to be very close to the new pharmacy which Demetrio Barcha had established on the corner of 65th Street and 20 July Avenue. García Márquez had also changed his image, with a shorter haircut, a more neatly clipped moustache, a suit and tie, and some decent shoes to replace his tropical sandals. The reaction from his friends was merciless, some of them predicting that he would be unable to write a word as soon as he left the “Skyscraper.” The move evidently coincided both with the realization that his new novel—a novel about him and his own life—was now a secure reality, and with the resolve to bump into Mercedes. He was, after all, in many ways a new man, with much more to offer a woman than in the past.

His timidity remained a problem however and the family still joke about it today. Ligia García Márquez recalls, “When Mercedes moved to Barranquilla Gabito spent hours talking to Demetrio Barcha in the pharmacy, which was right next door to their house. So people said to Mercedes again, ‘Gabito’s still got a crush on you,’ and she’d reply, ‘No, he’s got a crush on my dad, it’s him he talks to all the time. He doesn’t even say good evening to me.’”⁵³ García Márquez himself has admitted that he spent ten years as a “street-corner man,” hanging around waiting for a glimpse of the haughty and ironic Mercedes, suffering agonies of frustration and even the occasional humiliation from a girl who seems to have found it difficult, for a long time, to take him seriously and showed very little interest in him.⁵⁴ Barranquilla Group members later recalled driving round and round in Cepeda’s jeep and García Márquez asking Cepeda to crawl slowly past the pharmacy, where Mercedes sometimes helped out during the vacations and after she left school, just to get a glimpse of her—oblivious to the jeers of his macho friends who had quite another attitude to women. Mercedes herself, who has only ever given two newspaper interviews (one of them to her sister-in-law, with the teasing title, “Gabito Waited for Me to Grow Up”), told me in 1991, “I only ever went out with Gabo in a group. But I did have a Palestinian aunt who always used to cover for us and was always trying to get us together; she was always starting sentences with the phrase, ‘When you marry Gabito. …’”

That Christmas of 1950, somehow or other, Gabito finally persuaded Mercedes to give him a chance and took her dancing at the Prado several times. She was teasingly non-committal, without overtly rejecting the young man’s advances, and he chose to believe that they had some kind of tacit agreement and that he was in with a chance. This was an entirely new situation.

A person who knows at least something about these early dates is Aida García Márquez, who was banished to Barranquilla by her parents, to keep her away from her own beloved suitor Rafael Pérez. She told me: “Mercedes was not my best friend but I was hers. We used to go out dancing together at the Prado, and I would dance with her father so Gabito could be with Mercedes.”⁵⁵

Thus García Márquez began 1951 in the most optimistic mood imaginable, little knowing that his carefully arranged and hard-earned new life was about to be cruelly demolished. On 23 January he heard from Mercedes again. A brief note informed him that his friend Cayetano Gentile had been murdered in Sucre. The two families were very close—Cayetano’s mother Julieta was Nanchi’s godmother—and García Márquez would later discover that several of his own brothers and sisters had been witnesses to what had happened; the only absentees from Sucre at the time were Aida, Gabriel Eligio, who was in Cartagena at a Conservative Party conference, and Gabito himself.

Cayetano Gentile had been killed by the brothers of Margarita Chica, the girl who had roomed with Mercedes in Mompox. During her wedding night Margarita had revealed to her husband that she was not a virgin and he had returned her to her family as damaged goods. One of the rumours in Mompox is that she had been raped by a policeman during the Violencia and was unable to tell the truth for fear of reprisals. So she said that her virginity had been taken by Cayetano Gentile, who was, indeed, a former boyfriend.⁵⁶ The truth will never be known. Her brothers set out immediately to restore the family’s honour by killing the alleged offender in the main square of Sucre, in front of the whole town. This is the story that García Márquez would convert into his novelChronicle of a Death Foretold thirty years later, in 1981. It was a savage murder and an act that would haunt García Márquez and his whole family for decades.

A week later, before he had had time to learn much about this horrific event, he received a message that, instead of returning to Sucre after his conference, Gabriel Eligio had arrived in Barranquilla. Gabito took the bus down to the centre and met his panic-stricken father at the Café Roma: he too had heard the news. He and Luisa Santiaga had already feared for the future of the family because of the growing political violence and this barbaric killing was the last straw. (Truth to tell, Gabriel Eligio had recently been having a hard time financially in Sucre since the moment when a real doctor moved into his part of town.) He had been in Cartagena with Gustavo, henceforth his right-hand man, and had already made inquiries among his Conservative friends and relatives in the city and was arranging to move the family there. He wanted Gabito to help them get installed and then move back to Cartagena himself to help out with the finances in a situation that was bound to be difficult, if not desperate. A further advantage, Gabriel Eligio said, was that Gabito could return to his law studies.⁵⁷

Gabriel Eligio’s fears were at first sight surprising. Sucre was essentially Conservative territory and he himself had got involved in local politics and should have been able to count on protection; it was the Liberals, like Demetrio Barcha, whom one would expect to flee—as indeed he had—whereas the García Márquez family seemed to be sitting pretty. Besides, the murder of Cayetano was not politically motivated. But at that time slanderous posters (pasquines) began to appear which were a coded symptom of the disintegration of society and were devoted not only to political matters, notably corruption, but, above all, to sexual accusations designed to ruin people’s reputations. Vendettas proliferated. And of course Gabriel Eligio had sexual scandals of his own to worry about.

With a heavy heart Gabito reluctantly agreed to his father’s demands; and Gabriel Eligio went back to Sucre to organize the exodus. Luisa was heartbroken. Ligia recalls, “Just as my mother wept when she arrived in Sucre, so she wept when she left.”⁵⁸ The family had lived in Sucre for more than eleven years. Jaime, Hernando, Alfredo and Eligio Gabriel had all been born there; Tranquilina had died there. And Gabriel Eligio had, for once, for a time, achieved a certain prestige and authority in the small waterlocked town. He had even built his first house there. But the whole García Márquez family, like the Barchas shortly before them, like Gabito and Luis Enrique in 1948, had now become refugees from the Violencia.

For Gabito himself this was a disaster; we can only imagine the anguish with which he allowed himself to be dragged back into the bosom of a family with whom he had almost never lived for any significant period of time. He negotiated with the management ofEl Heraldo to continue to send his “Giraffes” from Cartagena. They generously agreed to advance him 600 pesos for six months of the column and seven—often politically compromising—editorials a week, making life a nightmare for him but easy for Fuenmayor.

The first year was absolutely chaotic. None of the children was ever again sent away to study and the younger ones didn’t even start their education. After all his previous failures Gabriel Eligio must have known he would not make it in Cartagena as a pharmacist, though he briefly tried again. He also made a half-hearted effort to carry on his work as a doctor but Cartagena was not a promising arena for a quack, and before a year had passed he was off on his travels once more, roaming the Sucre region as a peripatetic doctor just as he had done fourteen years before when they moved to Barranquilla. Gabriel Eligio would never again be fully able to support his wife and children. It would be ten years before the family would even begin to be able to say that it was back on its feet—and even then only because most of the children had left home and Margot was taking most of the strain.

It seems likely that Gabito went back to Cartagena hoping not to have to stay too long, but feeling the need to show willing in getting the family installed in this expensive and not necessarily welcoming new environment. He crawled back to El Universal with his tail between his legs and was surprised and gratified to be received with open arms by Zabala, López Escauriaza and all his old colleagues—even more so when they offered him a monthly salary larger than he had been receiving in Barranquilla.⁵⁹

What he did not do was return to his studies. Only when he went, reluctantly, to enrol did he realize that he had failed not two but three subjects at the end of 1949, which meant that instead of taking the fourth year he would have to repeat the whole of the third year.⁶⁰ He quickly dropped the idea but his father got wind of the decision and lost his temper with his evasive eldest son. Gustavo remembers Gabriel Eligio confronting Gabito about the matter, appropriately enough on the Promenade of the Martyrs just outside the old city. When he heard his son admit that he had decided to give up the law and concentrate on his writing, Gabriel Eligio uttered a phrase that has become legendary in the family: “You’ll end up eating paper!” he bellowed.⁶¹

The arrival of that large, unruly, impoverished family into his urban world must have been desperately embarrassing, not to say humiliating, for a young man used to hiding his own poverty and his own complexes beneath a clown’s uniform and a clown’s performance. On his first night in the new house García Márquez remembers bumping into a sack containing his grandmother’s bones which Luisa Santiaga had brought to re-bury in their new city of residence.⁶² Ramiro de la Espriella’s wry amusement at the family predicament was summed up in the name he coined to refer to Gabriel Eligio in those days: “the stud horse.”⁶³ Nor were Gabriel Eligio’s feelings about his son concealed from public gaze. On one occasion when Carlos Alemán met Gabriel Eligio and asked after Gabito, the father complained loudly that his son was never around when he was wanted: “Tell that peripatetic spermatozoa to come and see his mother,” he roared.⁶⁴ And when de la Espriella, trying to defend Gabito against some other criticism, said that he was now considered “one of the best story writers in the country,” his father exploded, “He’s a story-teller, all right, he’s been a liar since he was a small boy!”⁶⁵

At the beginning of July, his debt having been paid, García Márquez ceased sending “Giraffes” to El Heraldo and no more were published until February 1952. Meanwhile, he went on with his own writing, in the midst of the family chaos, as best he could. An incident recalled by Gustavo gives the measure of his ambition: “Gabito doesn’t remember but he … once said to me, ‘Listen, help me with this,’ and he fetched the original manuscript of Leaf Storm to go through it. We were halfway through reading it when he stood up and said: ‘This is OK but I’m going to write something that will be read more than the Quixote.’”⁶⁶ In March García Márquez had had another of his stories published in Bogotá, “Nabo: The Black Man Who Made the Angels Wait.”⁶⁷ This is the first story called something that sounds like a “García Márquez” title and has something of the manner of his later works.⁶⁸

Around then an exiled Peruvian politician and adventurer called Julio César Villegas, the representative in Bogotá of Buenos Aires’s influential Losada publishing house, which at that time could make the continental reputation of any Latin American writer, was travelling around the country, including the Costa, looking for promising material, and told García Márquez that if he completed his work in progress and submitted it to Losada it would be considered for publication in Buenos Aires as a representative of contemporary Colombian fiction. In a state of great excitement, García Márquez set about his manuscript with renewed vigour and enthusiasm. By mid-September the first version of Leaf Storm was more or less ready.

It was now that a young man arrived in Cartagena who was to become one of García Márquez’s lifelong friends: the poet, traveller and business executive Alvaro Mutis—perhaps the only Colombian writer of the past half century in a position to be something like García Márquez’s equal as an interlocutor.⁶⁹ García Márquez would later describe him as having “a heraldic nose and a Turk’s eyebrows, an enormous body and tiny shoes like Buffalo Bill.”⁷⁰ Partly brought up in Europe where his father died when he was nine, he was a relative of the famous Spanish-Colombian colonial botanist José Celestino Mutis. His first published poem “No. 204” (“El 204”) had appeared in El Espectador shortly before García Márquez’s first short story, and his second, “The Curses of Maqroll the Lookout” (“Las imprecaciones de Maqroll el Gaviero”) appeared a couple of weeks later. Just as García Márquez had already invented his Aureliano Buendía, so Mutis had already invented Maqroll, a character similarly destined for worldwide celebrity. By then Mutis had worked for a time at the Colombian Insurance Company, had spent four years at the Bavaria Brewing Company as Head of Publicity, and then almost two years as a radio presenter; now he was Head of Publicity for LANSA, the same airline in which Luis Enrique had previously been employed—hence Mutis’s fabled ability to fix flights at short notice. Mutis had just met García Márquez’s old student friend Gonzalo Mallarino in Bogotá and Mutis, in a characteristic gesture, swept his new friend off to encounter the sea the very day he discovered that Mallarino had never seen it.⁷¹

At the weekend they looked for Gabito in El Universal, then went off to Bocagrande to have a drink on the terrace of their small hotel. As they sat and drank, a tropical storm gathered force around them, rolling in from the grey-white Caribbean. At its height, as coconuts exploded all around them, in staggered García Márquez from the chaos, painfully thin, pale, wild-eyed as always, his pencil moustache now widening to fountain pen size, and the inevitable trademark tropical shirt.⁷² “What gives?” (“Qué es la vaina?”) he exclaimed, as he would whenever he met Alvaro Mutis over the next fifty years.⁷³ So the three friends spent several hours discussing la vaina: life, love and literature, among other things. Two characters more different than Mutis and García Márquez could hardly be imagined and yet their friendship has lasted half a century. Their only true enthusiasm in common is Joseph Conrad and they disagreed about William Faulkner from the moment they met. Mutis told me in 1992, “He tried to act the costeño but after five minutes I realized he was an intensely serious type of guy. He was an old man in a young man’s body.” The visit was particularly timely because Mutis, whose networking was always the astonishment of his friends, knew the Losada agent Julio César Villegas and urged García Márquez to get on with the job and send his manuscript off as soon as possible. García Márquez set to producing a fair copy of his chaotic typescript and a few weeks later Mutis returned to Cartagena, carried the finished version back with him to Bogotá and sent it airmail to Buenos Aires. This was a prophetic act; many years later the same Alvaro Mutis would personally carry a duplicate copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude to Buenos Aires for consideration by another great Argentine publishing house, Sudamericana.

In early December 1951 García Márquez turned up in the El Heraldo office in Barranquilla and in response to Alfonso Fuenmayor’s enquiry as to the cause of his reappearance, said, “Maestro, I’ve had it up to here.”⁷⁴ Now that the novel was completed he could no longer bear the strains of living with the family in Cartagena and relieving an ungrateful Gabriel Eligio of his responsibilities. Of course, the timing of his return probably had something to do with the fact that the end-of-year vacations had begun and Mercedes Barcha was back in Barranquilla after completing her fifth grade of high school in the tyrannical convent academy run by the Salesian nuns in Medellín, where the girls had to bathe in specially designed shifts (“so that none of us,” she told me, “would ever see any part of another girl’s body”). García Márquez went back to stay with the Avila sisters, despite the extra expense, and not to the “Skyscraper.”

In early February he received a letter from Losada via the El Heraldo office. It was perhaps the greatest disappointment of his life. García Márquez had understood that Leaf Storm’s publication was a near sure thing and was shattered to learn that the editorial committee in Buenos Aires had rejected the book and, in a manner of speaking, had rejected him. Because the committee in Buenos Aires had sent a devastating letter from its chairman, Guillermo de Torre, one of Spain’s leading literary critics in exile and, as it happened, brother-in-law to Jorge Luis Borges, whom García Márquez so much admired. The letter granted the novice writer some poetic talent but declared that he had no future as a novelist and suggested none too delicately that he look for some other profession. All García Márquez’s friends, almost equally disconcerted, rallied round and helped him pull himself together—which was as well because he was in danger of falling sick with the shock and dismay. Alvaro Cepeda snorted, “Everyone knows Spaniards are stupid,” and all of them backed their own judgement against De Torre’s.⁷⁵

For the rest of 1952 he continued to earn his living with El Heraldo and his “Giraffes” appeared throughout the year. They were never again quite so refreshingly novel and eager as in the first magical year.⁷⁶ Before long, though, Séptimus would be dead and García Márquez would write no more “Giraffes”—though neither he nor any member of the group has ever given an adequate explanation of how or why the relationship with El Heraldo came to an end. The truth is that, despite his bravado, the rejection of Leaf Storm had been a devastating, sickening blow. His confidence had been savagely dented and there seemed little point in continuing with the “Giraffes”; what had they done for him, where had all his hard work taken him? It was no doubt because he saw himself as a failure, publicly at least, that he had felt morally constrained to make one more gesture at studying to be a lawyer and saving the family. And once he saw, yet again, that it was not going to work, he was utterly lost.

IRONICALLY, IT WAS his erstwhile nemesis, the Losada agent Julio César Villegas, who offered him a desperate way out and he took it. Villegas had started his own bookselling business and turned up one day when García Márquez was in Barranquilla, took him to the Hotel Prado, plied him with whisky and sent him away with a promise of employment and a bookseller’s briefcase. Gabriel García Márquez, self-styled contender to write “the next Quixote,” was now a travelling salesman hawking encyclopedias and medical and scientific manuals around the small towns and villages of north-eastern Colombia. He must have reflected that he had turned into his father.

Fortunately García Márquez has always had a sense of humour and a Cervantine sense of irony. He could probably take it. Just about. The consolation, needless to say, was that he could now learn more about his family history by retracing the steps of his grandparents all those years before, as he travelled the dusty roads of the Valley of Upar, between the Sierra Nevada and the River Cesar. This was not the world of Guillermo de Torre; but it was his world. Appropriately enough, as he set off on his first trip he met up with his brother Luis Enrique in Santa Marta. Luis Enrique, who had married the previous October, was already finding marriage a straitjacket that he would do almost anything to loosen. He had been involved in a series of real and fictitious jobs, first in Ciénaga and then Santa Marta; now he jumped at the chance of a jaunt with his brother. The two went to Ciénaga together and Gabito began his new job there, in one of the towns where his grandparents had briefly lived before moving to Aracataca. Luis Enrique then accompanied him on his first arc through Guacamayal, Sevilla, Aracataca, Fundación and Copey to Valledupar, La Paz and Manaure, targeting particularly doctors, lawyers, judges, notaries and mayors.

After Luis Enrique’s departure back to Ciénaga, Gabito looked up Rafael Escalona, who accompanied him for a week through the towns of the Guajira—Urumita, Villanueva, El Molino, San Juan del Cesar, and possibly Fonseca. They picked up Zapata Olivella on the way and between them they organized a travelling parranda, a kind of vallenato jam session and contest involving several participants and huge quantities of liquor, a session which in this case included friends and relatives such as Luis Carmelo Correa from Aracataca and Poncho Cotes, a cousin of García Márquez and close friend of Rafael Escalona.⁷⁷ Forty-five years later Zapata told me, “We would go on celebratory outings. One night a car would arrive and you’d wake up the next morning with a hangover in the Guajira or the Sierra Nevada, that’s what life was like then; we’d go out to someone’s farm and eat a sancocho, or drive over the Sierra de Perijá to Manaure; but always we’d end up drinking with the best accordionists of the era, Emiliano Zuleta, Carlos Noriega, Lorenzo Morales.”⁷⁸ Thus Escalona took his citified friend to meet the cowboy troubadours and the legendary characters of the region.

The historic centre of vallenato activity is now conventionally considered to be Valledupar itself, the capital city of El Cesar, situated in the Valley of Upar (vallenato means “born in the valley”). Once heard, traditional vallenatos are instantly recognizable: they have a driving, swinging beat brought about by the unusual instrumental combination of the European accordion, the African drum and the Indian guacharaca (scraper), led by the strong, assertive and defiantly masculine voice of the singer, usually the accordionist himself.⁷⁹ A song by Alonso Fernández Oñate sums up the vallenato’s prevailing ideology very succinctly:

I’m true vallenato born
Pure of heart and stock
Indian blood in my veins
Some black and Spanish on top
I have my vallenato pleasures
Women, music, my accordion
And all these things I love
Come out in the voice of my song.⁸⁰

Not many Latin American writers have been in such close contact with what could be called a genuine popular culture as García Márquez was to be over the next fifty years. He would go so far as to say that his encounter with the vallenato genre and the musicians who created it really gave him the idea for the narrative form of One Hundred Years of Solitude.⁸¹ The comparison is interesting, given that more events are narrated on every single page of that novel than in any other narrative one can think of. But García Márquez takes it further, establishing a parallel between the concreteness of the vallenato and the direct relation between his own novels and his own life: “There’s not a line in any of my books which I can’t connect to a real experience. There is always a reference to a concrete reality.” This is why he has always asserted that far from being a “magical realist,” he is just a “poor notary” who copies down what is placed on his desk.⁸² Perhaps the only surprising aspect of all this is that García Márquez, usually admired for his sympathy with women, should have identified quite so fully with a movement that so assertively exalts maleness and masculine values.

It was with Escalona that García Márquez had another of the great mythic encounters of his life. They were drinking iced beer and rum in a cantina in La Paz when a young man strode in, dressed like a cowboy with a wide hat, leather chaps, and a gun at his waist. Escalona, who knew him well, said: “Let me introduce you to Gabriel García Márquez.” The man asked, as he shook his hand, “Would you have anything to do with Colonel Nicolás Márquez?” “I’m his grandson.” “Then your grandfather killed my grandfather.”⁸³ The young man’s name was Lisandro Pacheco—though in the memoir García Márquez would say he was called José Prudencio Aguilar, like the character based on him in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Escalona, who always carried a pistol himself, moved quickly to say that García Márquez knew nothing about the matter and suggested that he and Lisandro should try some sharp-shooting, the purpose being to empty the gun. The three men spent three days and nights drinking and travelling in Pacheco’s truck—used mainly for smuggling—around the region. Pacheco introduced García Márquez to several of the Colonel’s illegitimate children from the time of the war.

When his friends and travelling companions were otherwise engaged, the reluctant encyclopedia salesman would stay in small run-down hotels sizzling in the heat. One of the better ones was the Hotel Welcome in Valledupar. It was during this stay that he read Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, which appeared in the Spanish edition of Life magazine at the end of March, sent by his friends in Barranquilla. It was “like a stick of dynamite.”⁸⁴ García Márquez’s deprecating attitude to Hemingway the novelist was transformed.

As well as The Old Man and the Sea he vividly recalls having re-read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway in some other hotel-cum-brothel during this journey, amidst clouds of mosquitoes and asphyxiating heat—probably not the kind of place Virginia Woolf herself would have much enjoyed. Although he had taken his nom de plume from her novel, he had not previously been so struck by it, and especially by a passage about the King of England passing by in a limousine which would later have a major influence onThe Autumn of the Patriarch.⁸⁵

When he got back to Barranquilla after this brief excursion García Márquez had actually come to the end of a very long journey through his own popular regional culture and, indeed, through his own past and his own prehistory.⁸⁶ He was now ready to inhabit “Macondo”—at the very moment, ironically enough, when Hemingway’s example would shortly lure him away from the worlds of memory and myth. Nowadays the great writer “García Márquez” is associated intimately with that Latin American village which is also a state of mind: “Macondo.” But “Macondo,” as we know, is only half the García Márquez story, though it is the half which would give him his international identity and prestige. The real region around the literary town “Macondo” is the northern part of the old Department of Magdalena, from Santa Marta to the Guajira by way of Aracataca and Valledupar. It is the territory of his mother and his maternal grandparents, to which his father came as an unwanted interloper, one of the so-called “leaf-trash.” The other half of the story is that father’s own territory: the city of Cartagena and the towns of Sincé and Sucre, in the departments of Bolívar and Sucre, the territory of a man with vainglorious dreams of legitimacies past and future, and therefore a territory to be rejected both because of the region’s colonial, repressive splendour and the humiliations still undergone by its less illustrious sons; a territory which would become condensed into the anonymous pueblo, unworthy of a literary name but equally representative of Latin America—the “real,” historical Latin America, one is tempted to say.⁸⁷

Now that his long journey was over, García Márquez could return briefly to Barranquilla and survey this entire conquered space—conquered, at last, by him—from its very centre, located at the apex of the entire backward-looking territory but not itself of that territory. Not only was Barranquilla a gateway, it was also a twentieth-century, modern town, with neither colonial pretensions nor guilts, where one could escape from the weight of the past and its ghostly generations and make oneself anew. By now it had almost done its job.

The whole period of drift was about to end at a time when political change was again looming, menacingly, in the background. García Márquez was on a bus back to Barranquilla on 13 June 1953 when he learned that General Rojas Pinilla, Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, had taken over the government in a coup against the regime of Laureano Gómez. Gómez, sufficiently recovered from the illness that had forced him to hand over to his Vice-President even before the coup, was trying to return to power but the military had decided that his return was not in the national interest and that they would serve out the rest of his term, with Rojas Pinilla at their head. There was overwhelming national support for this coup; even the editors of some national newspapers serenaded the new leader. García Márquez remembers having a violent political argument with Ramiro de la Espriella in Villegas’s bookshop—Villegas would shortly be thrown in prison for alleged fraud—the day after Rojas Pinilla moved against Gómez. García Márquez had even allowed himself to provoke his friend by saying, “I do, I feel identified with the government of my General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla.”⁸⁸ His position was essentially that anything was better than Gómez’s falangist regime whereas de la Espriella wanted outright revolution, feared that a military dictatorship might prove worse than a reactionary dictatorship and argued that the military could not be trusted. Both men had a point; this was a significant disagreement and a prophetic one. García Márquez would several times in the future argue that a progressive dictatorship was better than a fascistic government doing mischief under the cover of a false democracy.

Despite his reluctance to return to El Heraldo, García Márquez only managed to keep out of that frying pan by tumbling into a different fire. Alvaro Cepeda Samudio, who had been working in car sales, had long nurtured the desire to compete with El Heraldoand build a better newspaper which would dominate the Costa. Around October he was given a chance to run El Nacional, hoping to turn it into the kind of modern paper he had learned about in the USA. He hired his newly unemployed friend as his assistant. García Márquez later remembered it as one of his worst times. The two young men spent entire days and nights at the newspaper office, yet very few editions actually came out, and hardly any of them on time. Unfortunately there are no collections extant so it is impossible to judge their efforts. All we really know is that Cepeda directed the morning edition, which he sent to the interior, and García Márquez directed the evening edition, which sold in Barranquilla. They concluded that at least part of the problem was the old-timers on the payroll trying to sabotage an innovatory newspaper.⁸⁹ Unfortunately the truth appears to be that Cepeda proved incapable at that time of the discipline and subtlety required to manage such an operation. García Márquez recalls discreetly that “Alvaro left with a slam of the door.”⁹⁰

García Márquez himself still had a contract and carried on for a time, trying desperately to survive by using old material, but he was also provoked into writing a new story, “One Day After Saturday,” another of the few early tales of his which he would later admit to actually liking. It is most interesting for the fact that, although still reminiscent of “The House,” it was set in a place called “Macondo.” Not only that: anyone who had been there could have worked out that “Macondo” was clearly based on Aracataca, with, somehow, a transparency of focus despite the air of mystery, and open skies instead of the grim darkness that seems to characterize both “The House” and “the town” (el pueblo), based on Sucre. Why, there was even a railway station! At the same time the story—really a short, highly condensed novella—was no longer confined within a house, like most of the earlier stories and published fragments, and was overtly political, focusing on the mayor and the local priest. Moreover Colonel Aureliano Buendía and José Arcadio Buendía were named, as was their relative Rebeca, “the embittered widow.” There was also a poor boy from outside the town, treated with a quite new sympathy that was clearly tinged with social and political critique. At the same time the story displayed a whole range of what would later be García Márquez’s favourite themes, beginning with the topic of plagues (in this case a plague of dead birds) and the concept of human solitude.⁹¹

Alvaro Mutis, who was now Head of Public Relations with Esso, returned to Barranquilla close to the end of the year and, seeing his friend’s predicament, tried again to persuade him to move to Bogotá. He told him that he was “rusting away in the provinces.”⁹²Mutis had good reason to believe that García Márquez could get a job with El Espectador. Nothing in the costeño wanted to go and he flatly refused. Mutis said, “Well, I’ll send you an open ticket and you can come when you’re ready.”⁹³ Finally García Márquez had second thoughts but realized that he couldn’t go to Bogotá even if he wanted to, because he had no clothes. He scraped his last pesos together and bought a business suit, a couple of shirts and a tie. Then he took the air ticket out of his drawer and looked at it. Then he put it in the pocket of his new suit. He had tried his very hardest but there was no way a poor boy without a degree could earn a decent living on the Costa. Maybe one day he would be able to marry Mercedes, to whom he had now committed himself, at least in his own mind. His friends said, “Fine, but don’t come back a cachaco.” Then they took him down to celebrate his departure in one of their favourite down-market bars, The Third Man. And that was that.