Gabriel García Márquez (5 page)

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.
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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.”
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One Hundred Years of Solitude
includes a scene memorializing the event: The strikers test the government forces. Soldiers begin shooting without warning, and then the bodies are taken away in a train. The following day, nobody is able to remember anything. García Márquez said that the massacre in the square, as he depicted it, was “completely true, but while I wrote it on the basis of testimony and documents, it was never known exactly how many people were killed. I used the figure three thousand, which is probably an exaggeration. But one of my childhood memories was watching a very, very long train leave the plantation supposedly full of bananas. There could have been three thousand dead on it, eventually to be dropped in the sea. What is really surprising is that now they speak very naturally in Congress and the newspapers about the ‘three thousand dead.' In
The Autumn of the Patriarch,
the dictator says that it doesn't matter if it's not true now, because sometime in the future it will be true. Sooner or later people believe writers rather than the government.”
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The strike is the topic of another Colombian novel by García Márquez's close childhood friend, Álvaro Cepeda Samudio:
La casa grande
(The Big House), originally published in 1954 (thirteen years before
One Hundred Years of Solitude
). It is unclear if Cepeda Samudio, who was born in 1926, witnessed the massacre. García Márquez includes a scene in the novel in which a child on his father's shoulders watches the shooting. Some literary historians see this as an homage to Cepeda Samudio. In a foreword in the English translation of
La casa grande,
García Márquez writes: “This manner of writing history, arbitrary as it might seem to the historian, is a splendid lesson in poetic transformation. Without distorting reality or playing loose with the serious political and human aspects of the social drama, Cepeda Samudio has subjected it to a kind of purifying
alchemy and has given us only its mythical essence, which will remain forever, far longer than any man's morality, justice, and ephemeral memory. The super dialogues, the straight-forward and virile richness of the language, the genuine compassion aroused by the character's fate, the fragmentary and somewhat loose structure which so closely resembles the pattern of memories—everything in this book is a magnificent example of how a writer can honestly filter out the immense quantity of rhetorical and demagogic garbage that stands in the way of indignation and nostalgia.”
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The siblings who followed García Márquez were born in different places, depending on where their parents were stationed. They include Luis Enrique (Aracataca, September 8, 1928), Margarita, aka Margot (Barranquilla, November 9, 1929), Aída Rosa (Barranquilla, December 17, 1933), Ligia (Aracataca, August 8, 1934), Gustavo (Aracataca, September 27, 1935), Rita del Carmen (Barranquilla, July 10, 1938), Jaime (Sucre, May 22, 1940), Hernando (Sucre, March 26, 1943), Alfredo Ricardo (Cartagena, February 25, 1946), and Eligio Gabriel (Bogotá, November 14, 1947). The family is close knit and shies away from publicity, although through the years they have agreed to speak with researchers. Silvia Galvis spent several years interviewing the siblings for a volume entitled
Los García Márquez,
which is composed of ten stand-alone personal essays based on extended conversations in which each sibling gives his or her version of what it was like to grow up together. His siblings include an engineer, a journalist, a businessman, a consul, a fireman, and a nun, the latter an ironic career choice given the anti-clericalism that defines García Márquez's
weltanschauung.

Jaime, the second child, was an engineer who, at García Márquez's request, became director of the Fundación Nuevo Periodismo in Cartagena. The story of Eligio, the youngest, born in Sucre in 1947, is moving. His full name was Eligio
Gabriel, and he grew up in his famous brother's shadow. He once remarked, “there are different versions surrounding my name. The one I've heard most frequently is that when I was born my father held me in the air and said: ‘He is exactly like me; this one is a García and needs to have my name.' Until that moment none of his children was called exactly like him: Gabriel Eligio. But when I was about to be baptized, my mother wondered how they could call me Gabriel if there was already a Gabito. Then my father, who disliked complications, responded: ‘Alright, then let's call him Eligio Gabriel.' It's that simple and I believe it is true because my father was that way, never allowing to get too entangled in things.” He added, “Gabito has his own version, obviously, and it is that when I was born he had already left the house, that's why my mother said: ‘We called him Gabriel and he left, but we need to have a Gabriel at home.'”
¹³

In 1966, Eligio enrolled at the Universidad Nacional to study theoretical physics, but he decided that he preferred to write. He struggled; each time he published something, everyone asked him if he was related to the famous author of
One Hundred Years of Solitude.
He opted to use a shortened version of his name, Eligio García, as his pen name. Toward the end of his life he made peace with this and reverted to using his full name: Eligio García Márquez. He achieved peace in other ways. Beginning in 1974 he lived in Paris and London, where he worked as a correspondent for several Colombian periodicals, such as
El Espectador.
He was the editorial advisor of the magazine
Cromos,
and served as the general editor of his brother's magazine,
Cambio.
In 1978, Eligio published the novel
Para matar el tiempo
(To Kill Time), and in 1982, a collection of interviews with Latin American writers and a companion volume to the movie adaptation of
Chronicle of a Death Foretold,
directed by Francesco Rosi. Shortly before his death on June 29, 2001, he released a book he had been working on
for years,
Tras las claves de Melquíades,
an impressionistic study of how
One Hundred Years of Solitude
came to be.

García Márquez spent the first eight years of his life in his maternal grandparents' house in Aracataca. His relationships with them were decisive. He called his grandfather Papalelo. “My grandfather was stocky, with a florid complexion, and the most voracious eater I can remember. He was the most outrageous fornicator, as I learned much later on.”
¹⁴
It was his grandfather, who died in 1937, when the author was around ten years old, who took young García Márquez to the town of Ciénega to visit the Goleta that could go to Barranquilla.

In contrast, he had an intimate connection with his grandmother, from whom he learned the art of storytelling. The manner in which she related an outrageous anecdote in all seriousness, without a hint of surprise, was something he was accustomed to as a child but didn't understand until much later—when he decided that telling stories was what he enjoyed most in life and what he wanted to do for a living. “What was most important,” García Márquez reminisced about Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes, “was the expression she had on her face. She did not change her expression at all when telling her stories, and everyone was surprised. In previous attempts to write
One Hundred Years of Solitude,
I tried to tell the story without believing in it. I discovered that what I had to do was believe in them myself and write them with the same expression with which my grandmother told them: with a brick face.”
¹⁵
His grandmother, who was the inspiration for Úrsula Iguarán, arguably the most important female character in his magnum opus and the novel's center of gravity, was prone to exaggeration, a device he later used with great skill as a narrator: “For example, if you say that there are three elephants flying in the sky, people are not going to believe you. But if you say that there are four hundred and twenty-five elephants flying in the sky, people will probably believe you.”
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