Gabriel García Márquez Read online

  He arrived after an eight-month-long pregnancy, and weighed 9.3 pounds at birth. Three years later, on July 27, 1930, García Márquez was baptized by Father Francisco C. Angarita at the Iglesia de San José of Aracataca. The baptism had been delayed because García Márquez’s parents, Gabriel Eligio García Martínez (Sincé, 1901–Cartagena, 1984) and Luisa Santiaga Márquez (Barrancas, 1905–Cartagena, 2002), were not based in Aracataca. Luisa had lived there but after the couple met, they were exiled from the town by her parents, Nicolás Ricardo Márquez Mejía (Riohacha, 1864–Santa Marta, 1937) and Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes (Riohacha, 1863–Sucre, 1947), who didn’t look favorably upon their liaison. Another reason for the delay may have been the family’s ambivalence toward institutionalized Catholicism, an ambivalence later embraced with enthusiasm by García Márquez and connected to his left-leaning political views. It is manifested in the presence of the hypocritical town priests that populate his fiction from the stories “La siesta del martes” (Tuesday Siesta) and “Un hombre muy viejo con unas alas enormes” (A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings) to the novella La mala hora (In Evil Hour) and, of course, One Hundred Years of Solitude.

  Known colloquially as Cataca, Aracataca, in the Magdalena Department, is an unremarkable town dotted with one-story houses. While most are made of masonry, a number sport the humble tin roofs characteristic of dwellings in this tropical Caribbean climate, where the temperature at mid-afternoon can rise above 110°F. The lush vegetation, with its stunning hues of emerald, grows chaotically everywhere. Humidity quickly integrates new buildings into the environment, staining them with pervasive mildew.

  Founded in 1885 and established as a municipality in 1912, the town is located approximately fifty miles south of the capital of the Department, Santa Marta. Aracataca is on the banks of the non-navigable Aracataca River that flows from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta range into the Ciénega Grande. To the north, it borders the municipalities of Zona Bananera, Santa Marta, and Ciénega, to the east is the César Department, to the south lies the municipality of Fundación, and to the west is El Retén and Pueblo Viejo.

  The Aracataca municipality has a population of approximately 50,000, living in about three dozen barrios mired in poverty. Between the two world wars, the drop in world prices for bananas and the establishment of plantations in other parts of the globe were just two developments that forced the main employer, the United Fruit Company, to downsize. Colombian plantations on the Caribbean coast were abandoned, settlers left, and unemployment skyrocketed, resulting in the financial collapse of the region.

  To understand García Márquez’s universe it is important to visualize Aracataca. The town, as in other Caribbean regions, has an agricultural economy that is based on banana, plantain, yucca, tomato, sugar cane, cotton, rice, oil palm, and livestock, including cattle, horses, mules, and pigs. The weather is marked by relentless humidity, the result of tropical rains that might be sudden or else prolong themselves for days on end. Gerald Martin describes it as the hottest and wettest place in the entire zone. He suggests that in 1900 Aracataca had a population of a few hundred. By 1913 it had risen to 3,000 and by the late 1920s it had perhaps 10,000.5

  Commerce is largely unstructured, and the principal means for transporting goods is by land. The town is bisected by Highway 45, which leads to the Colombian Andean region. It is crowded with buses, taxis, and minivans. The railway, which played a predominant role during the banana bonanza and is an important motif in One Hundred Years of Solitude, is no longer used as a means of public transportation but rather to transport coal from La Loma to the port of Santa Marta.

  The accident of birth defines one’s weltanschauung. The location of Aracataca in the northwestern region of South America as well as the lower edge of the Caribbean basin always made García Márquez feel like he was part of two worlds. He perceived himself as a citizen of a manglar at once belonging to a continent and a constellation of islands. “The Caribbean taught me to look at reality in a different way,” he pronounced, “to accept the supernatural as part of our everyday life.” He stated, “. . . the Caribbean is a distinctive world whose first work of magical literature was The Diary of Christopher Columbus, a book which tells of fabulous plants and mythological societies. The history of the Caribbean is full of magic—a magic brought by black slaves from Africa and by Swedish, Dutch and English pirates who thought nothing of setting up an Opera House in New Orleans or filling women’s teeth with diamonds. Nowhere in the world do you find the racial mixture and the contrasts that you find in the Caribbean.”

  García Márquez added: “I know all its islands: their honey-colored mulattas with green eyes and golden handkerchiefs round their heads; their half-caste Indo-Chinese who do laundry and sell amulets; their green-skinned Asians who leave their ivory stalls to shit in the middle of the street; on one hand their scorched, dusty towns with houses which collapse in cyclones and on the other skyscrapers of smoked glass and an ocean of seven colours. Well, if I start talking about the Caribbean there’s no stopping me. Not only is it the world which taught me to write, it’s the only place where I really feel at home.”6 This viewpoint serves as a map to understand his oeuvre. Early in his career García Márquez enjoyed being grouped with Latin American writers as much as he did with his Caribbean counterparts. In the article “Caribe mágico” (Magical Caribbean), García Márquez wrote of a common language beyond words that is spoken by everyone in the Caribbean, about a unifying aesthetic worldview. He wrote about immigrants from abroad who descended on the region, adapting to its customs. This group included Henri Charrière, author of Papillon, who prospered in Caracas as a restaurant promoter as well as in other less worthy enterprises.7

  García Márquez is the eldest of the eleven children of Gabriel Eligio García Martínez and Luisa Santiaga Márquez; he has one half-sibling born of one of his father’s extramarital escapades. Gabriel Eligio García Martínez was originally from a town in the Bolívar Department. In the early twenties he moved to Cartagena, where he enrolled at the university. But his stay in the classroom didn’t last long, because he needed to support himself. At the time, the nation’s Atlantic region was experiencing an enormous boom in banana plantations. The United Fruit Company, a major corporation that traded in tropical fruit, especially pineapple and banana, was incorporated in 1899 as a result of the merger between Minor C. Keith’s banana-trading concerns and Andrew W. Preston’s Boston Fruit Company. It penetrated the markets of Latin American countries, such as Colombia, Ecuador, and the West Indies, where it became a monopoly. Currently known as Chiquita Brands International, it continues to export products to Europe and the United States.

  Banana plantations in the Third World were a loci of contradictions. They became great magnets for agricultural laborers from different parts of the world—Spain, Italy, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine. García Márquez writes about this immigration in his early work, the novella La hojarasca, translated into English as Leaf Storm. It was the banana boom that brought to Aracataca electricity, its first orchestra, the avenue named Camellón 20 de Julio, a church, as well as a weekly lottery game. But the United Fruit Company’s exploitation of both natural and human resources resulted in accusations of neocolonialism. The term “banana republics,” coined by the short-story writer O. Henry, is intimately associated with the presence of the United Fruit Company in Latin America. The local, regional, and national governments in countries such as Colombia sided with their corporate patrons against the native population, resulting in clashes that left numerous victims.

  The sense of injustice from decades of exploitation by the United Fruit Company is still palpable in the area. Many years later, people in restaurants, on the street, and in elementary schools continue to talk about the excesses of the banana boom and the system of abuse established by the corporation, which has left deep scars. In One Hundred Years of Solitude García Márquez describes, in patient detail, the agricultural, social, political, and economic transformation tha
t took place and how mores were ruled by greed and the thirst for power. The United Fruit Company occupies an infamous and prominent place in Latin American literature. From the thirties onward, a slew of writers depicted the changes it brought in a sharply critical tone. Pablo Neruda, in a famous poem included in Canto General (1938–1949), in the section “The Sand Betrayed,” refers directly to the United Fruit Company.

  Other Latin American writers like Miguel Ángel Asturias of Guatemala, Carlos Luis Fallas of Costa Rica, Ramón Amaya Amador of Honduras, and Álvaro Cepeda Samudio of Colombia condemned the company in their work. In 1950 the prolific American novelist Gore Vidal wrote Dark Green, Bright Red, set in a fictional Central American country where the corporation supports a military coup. The infamous place the United Fruit Company has in literature is but a thermometer of the region’s popular hatred toward it.

  Spanish explorers led by Rodrigo de Bastidas first set foot in the Caribbean littoral of Colombia in 1499. (The country’s name comes from Christopher Columbus.) In the beginning of the sixteenth century, Vasco Nuñez de Balboa started colonizing the territories, which were populated by indigenous tribes, including the Muisca, Chibcha, Carib, Quimbaya, and Tairona. The process of colonization led to the creation of the Viceroyalty of New Granada, comprising modern-day Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Panama. The fever for independence that swept across Latin America in the nineteenth century reached New Granada in 1819. Internecine wars and secessions fractured the newly independent nation, as Venezuela and Ecuador broke away. What is now modern Colombia and Panama emerged as the Republic of New Granada. The new nation experimented with federalism as the Granadine Confederation of 1858 before the Republic of Colombia was finally founded in 1886.

  By the time the United Fruit Company arrived in the region, at the close of the nineteenth century, bipartisan divisions had resulted in civil clashes, the most famous of which was the Guerra de los Mil Días, the Thousand-Day War (1899– 1902). One of the most popular military figures of the war was General Rafael Uribe Uribe, on whom García Márquez is said to have based Colonel Aureliano Buendía, one of the central forces moving the plot of One Hundred Years of Solitude. His identical last names may have inspired García Márquez’s playfulness with names in a book that has more than a dozen Aurelianos.

  Born in Valparaíso, in the Antioquia Department, in 1859, General Uribe Uribe died in Bogotá in 1914, after being hacked to death by envoys sent by his foes. The general was a lawyer, journalist, and one of the most radical members of the Liberal Party. He played a major role in the civil war of 1895, in which he was defeated by General Rafael Reyes in the Battle of La Tribuna. Although he made his escape forging the Magdalena River, he was captured in Mampox and imprisoned in Cartagena’s Cárcel de San Diego. He was eventually pardoned and was elected to the House of Representatives. Uribe Uribe was an acerbic critic of the political process known as Regeneration, which advocated a strong central government and the restriction of civil liberties, advocated by two presidents: Rafael Núñez (1880–1888) and Miguel Antonio Caro (1892–1898).

  General Uribe Uribe was a federalist. He founded the newspaper El Autonomista. In 1898 he said: “Colombia is divided, so to speak, into two nations: Bogotanos and provincials, the latter being the victims of the former . . . For it is here [in Bogotá] that the politicians have always hatched the wars we provincials have had to fight for them to further their fortunes, while they stay here enjoying themselves, chatting delightfully among enemies.”8 In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Colonel Aureliano Buendía—a liberal military figure impatient with himself, involved in seditions, civil wars, and truces, active in politics, and ultimately essential in a peace agreement known in García Márquez’s novels as the Treaty of Neerlandia—is closely patterned after General Uribe Uribe, under whose command García Márquez’s maternal grandfather, Nicolás Márquez Iguarán, fought against the conservative forces.

  As a child, García Márquez heard about General Uribe Uribe’s adventurous life from his grandparents and even studied his military tactics in school. The general was a leader of the October 20, 1899 uprising that triggered the Thousand-Day War. He commanded the Liberal troops during the Santander military campaign between October 1899 and August 1900, and defeated the Conservatives at the Battle of Bucaramanga. He then went to the city of Cúcuta, where he joined forces with Liberal Benjamín Herrera. En route to Ocaña, his troops were ambushed and the confrontation resulted in the Battle of Peralonso. The battle ended the following day with the general’s triumph over the Conservatives. General Uribe Uribe then became an advocate of peace, although he continued his military enterprise. On June 12, 1902, the Colombian government ended the armed conflict by pardoning the Liberal rebels who began to demobilize. The general surrendered in the Hacienda Neerlandia in October of that year.

  General Uribe Uribe was not the only source of inspiration for García Márquez. The story of his parents served as the blueprint for his novel Love in the Time of Cholera. As a young man, Gabriel Eligio García Martínez benefited from the economic boom brought by the United Fruit Company and found a job as a telegraphist in Aracataca. It was there that in 1924 he met Luisa Santiaga Márquez Iguarán, the belle of the town. She belonged to a family who had lived in Aracataca since 1910. Her parents viewed the arrival of outsiders to the region with suspicious eyes even though they themselves had settled in Aracataca after a twenty-two-month exodus from Barrancas, in La Guajira, through Riohacha, Santa Marta, and Ciénega. They acquired a good property near the central plaza.

  Luisa Santiaga returned Gabriel Eligio’s love, but her parents, Colonel Márquez Iguarán and his wife, Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes, were adamantly against the relationship. The young man was part of la hojarasca, the immigration that came as a leaf storm, and he was an illegitimate child, which to them meant that he was a low-life. They forbade the couple from seeing each other. But Gabriel Eligio and Luisa Santiaga persevered in their courtship. In response, her parents sent her away to stay with various friends and acquaintances in the Bolívar Department.

  They soon discovered that Gabriel Eligio kept in touch with her via telegraph, sending messages to the various localities where she lived. Furious, her parents arranged to have him transferred to Riohacha. The young couple’s love only increased. Many not only supported them but urged her parents to reconsider and allow them to be together. Her parents finally agreed to a wedding, on the condition that they stay in Riohacha and not return to Aracataca. Gabriel Eligio and Luisa Santiaga were married in the Santa Marta cathedral on June 11, 1926. According to various sources, it was the news of Luisa Santiaga’s pregnancy that softened her parents. They invited the couple to return to Aracataca, so that Luisa Santiaga could give birth there.9 Until the end of his days, Gabriel Eligio never learned to like the place—he called it “un moridero de pobres,” the place where poor people die—but he agreed. García Márquez was born in the big house that belonged to his grandparents.

  Aracataca, Riohacha, La Ciénega, and other places in the area were infused with folklore and a history of colonialism. As García Márquez grew up, he absorbed all their details into his personal memory. He took in the history he learned from the textbooks he used at school, the stories he heard from his grandmother and others, and daily conversations. For instance, he discovered that the year after he was born, banana workers went on strike in La Ciénega, a town in the region where Aracataca is, north of Magdalena, twenty miles from Santa Marta in the Magdalena Department, and the second largest population center in the Department. Workers in the area’s plantations went on strike in December 1928. They demanded written contracts, eight-hour days, six-day weeks, and the elimination of food coupons. The strike became the beginning of a labor movement that turned into the largest of its kind in Colombia. It involved members of the Communist and Socialist parties, as well as radical members of the Liberal Party. An army regiment from Bogotá was deployed by the government in support of the United Fruit Company, whose capital
was deemed essential to the economy, to crush the strike. The strategy was to portray the strikers as subversive, law-breaking thugs.

  On a Sunday, right after Mass, soldiers with machine guns were positioned on the roofs of the low buildings at the corners of the main square and streets were blocked off. A crowd of some 3,000 workers and their families had gathered to hear the governor speak. After giving the crowd a five-minute warning along with the order to evacuate the plaza, the army opened fire on them. General Cortés Vargas, who issued the order to shoot, later said that he had given the order because he had information that U.S. warships were poised to land troops on Colombian coasts to defend American personnel and the interests of the United Fruit Company.

  The exact number of dead has never been established. General Vargas claimed there were only forty-seven, although the reports put the numbers higher. The episode was an integral component of García Márquez’s childhood. “I knew the event as if I had lived it,” he wrote in his memoir Living to Tell the Tale, “having heard it recounted and repeated a thousand times by my grandmother from the time I had a memory: the soldier reading the decree by which the striking laborers were declared a gang of lawbreakers; the three thousand men, women, and children motionless under the savage sun after the officer gave them five minutes to evacuate the square; the order of fire, the clattering machine guns spitting in white-hot bursts, the crowd trapped by panic as it was cut down, little by little, by the methodical scissors of the shrapnel.”10