Gabriel García Márquez (20 page)

*
For instance, in
El Universal
in Cartagena, García Márquez wrote mostly about Hollywood and European cinema in September 1948. In his column “
La Jirafa
” in
El Heraldo
in Barranquilla, which he wrote under the pseudonym Septimus, he discussed an adaptation of William Faulkner's
Intruder in the Dust
, among other notes on film. In
El Espectador
in Bogotá he had a regular weekly section on film, including reviews of Mervy LeRoy's
Quo Vadis
?, Edward Dmytryk‘s
The Caine Mutiny
, Billy Wilder's
Sabrina
, and Francois Truffaut's
The 400 Blows
.

In the
Dictionary of Imaginary Places,
first published in 1980, Alberto Manguel and Giovanni Guadalupi catalog the nonexistent geographies invented by literati, such as Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky Wood, Daniel Defoe's Crusoe Island, Jonathan Swift's Brobdingnag, J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth, and Jules Verne's Saknussemm's Corridor. Each of these places is surveyed in a succinct, provocative entry. The following describes Macondo in
One Hundred Years of Solitude:

Macondo
, a Colombian village founded in ancient times by José Arcadio Buendía, whose boundless imagination always stretched farther than the inventiveness of nature. The founder had placed the houses in such a way that the inhabitant of each could reach the river and then fetch water with exactly the same degree of effort as his neighbor; and the streets had been planned in such a manner that all houses received the same amount of sunshine throughout the day. For the benefit of the population he built small traps to catch canaries, robins, and nightingales and in very little time the village was so full of their singing that the gypsy tribe
which every year visited Macondo to show the inhabitants the newest eighth marvel of the world would let themselves be guided by the music.

Toward the east Macondo is protected by a high and forbidding range of hills; toward the south by marshes covered with a kind of vegetable soup. The marshes rise toward the west and become a large body of water in which cetaceans of delicate skin, with the face and torso of a woman, lure sailors with their firm and tempting breasts. To the north, many days' march away through a dangerous jungle, lies the sea.

From a small village of some twenty mud and bamboo huts, Macondo became a town with shops and a marketplace. The prosperity made José Arcadio Buendía free all the birds he had carefully trapped and replace them with musical clocks which he had obtained from merchants in exchange for parrots. These clocks were so synchronized that every half-hour the town would shake with a sound of ringing bells and every midday a musical explosion of cuckoos and waltzes would glorify the beginning of the siesta. Buendía also replaced the acacias lining the streets with almond trees and found a system of giving them eternal life. Many years later, when Macondo became a city of wooden houses and zinc roofs, ancient almond trees still bloomed in the older streets, though there was no one in the town who could remember having witnessed their planting.

Among the most notable events which form the history of Macondo is the unusual insomnia epidemic that struck the town. The most terrible thing about it was not the impossibility of sleep—because the body would not tire itself either—but the gradual loss of memory. When the sick person became accustomed
to staying awake, memories of his childhood would start to vanish, followed by the names and concepts of things; finally he would lose his own identity and consciousness of his own being, sinking into a calm lunacy without a past. Bells were set up around the village and whoever passed them would give them a tug to prove that he was still sane. Visitors would be advised not to eat or drink in Macondo, because the illness was supposed to be contagious. The inhabitants soon became accustomed to this state of affairs and dispensed with the useless activity of sleep. In order not to forget what the different objects around them were, they labeled each thing with its proper name: “pail,” “table,” “cow,” “flower.” However, the inhabitants realized that even though the names of things could be remembered in this fashion, their utility could nevertheless be forgotten and a more extensive explanation was added on the labels. For instance, a large placard on the cow informed the onlooker: “This is a cow; it is necessary to milk her every morning to produce milk and the milk must be boiled and then added to coffee to produce coffee with milk.” At the entrance to the village the inhabitants erected a sign that said “Macondo” and, a little farther on, another saying “God exists.”

The inhabitants of Macondo also invented an ingenious system to counteract the effects of their strange illness and learned to read the past in the cards, as before the gypsies used to read the future. Buendía also created a memory machine into which every morning he would record the past events of his life. In this way, at any point, he would make the machine work and recall his whole past day by day. The epidemic reached an end when the gypsy Melquíades—who had been
dead but had returned because he could not stand the loneliness of death—brought to Macondo an insomnia antidote in the form of a sweet liquid in little bottles. The inhabitants drank the potion and immediately were able to sleep.

Another important event in the history of Macondo was the proposed building of a huge temple organized by Father Nicanor Reyna, who was traveling throughout the world with the intention of establishing a sanctuary in the center of impiety and envisioned a temple full of life-sized saints and stained-glass windows. However, the people of Macondo, who had lived for so many years without a priest, had established a personal contact with God and were free of the stain of the original sin. They could levitate some twelve centimeters off the ground after drinking a full cup of chocolate. Seeing that Macondo was not the center of impiety he was searching for, Father Reyna continued on his travels.

In more recent years Macondo saw the creation of an American banana plantation on its land, and the town was linked to the rest of the world by a railway. But due to a strike, heavy rains and then drought, the plantation was abandoned and it is said that Macondo's prosperity was wiped off the surface of the earth by a violent cyclone.

Its inclusion in the
Dictionary of Imaginary Places
affirms that Macondo is not quite a parallel reality that imitates our own world in appearance and sophistication but is an extension of that world, with its own flora and fauna, its continents and nations, its record of social, political, and economic upheaval—in other words, its own metabolism. In their foreword, Manguel and Guadalupi described how they came upon the idea of
putting together their encyclopedic volume: “We agreed that our approach would have to be carefully balanced between the practical and the fantastic. We would take for granted that fiction was fact, and treat the chosen texts as seriously as one treats the reports of an explorer or chronicler.” They were interested in places that, while imaginary, actually exist, “that they can indeed be visited and are mapped in the real world, that the authors looked upon real landscapes and installed on these landscapes their visions.”
¹

García Márquez's Macondo possesses that immediacy. After reading the novel, one feels that the town isn't an escapist's dream but is within reach. And its metabolism, in my view, carries in it the DNA of Latin America.
²
Or, as critic Edna Van der Walde put it, its imprint on the region's psyche has turned “el macondismo como latinoamericanismo.”
³
Mario Vargas Llosa, in his doctoral dissertation
García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio,
defended at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and published in 1971, called
One Hundred Years of Solitude
a “total” novel. “The process of edification of the fictitious reality achieved is a culmination: this novel integrates in a superior synthesis the previous fictions [created by the author], builds a world of extraordinary richness, exhausts that world and is exhausted by it.”
⁴

In the mid-sixties, García Márquez reached the conclusion that an author and a book are matched at birth. Work for the cinema helped him support his family, but it wasn't altogether rewarding. He felt empty, in debt to his own talent. For years, he had been dreaming of writing a novel that could sum up not only his childhood experiences but his overall vision of the world. The more he let his imagination free, the faster he realized that no matter how many short and long stories he produced, they were all part of a single book, what Mallarmé had visualized as an all-encompassing volume that mirrored, even competed, with reality in all its complexity.

He told Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza that in general, he thought “a writer writes only one book, although the same book may appear in several volumes under different titles.” García Márquez considered Balzac, Conrad, Melville, Kafka, and Faulkner as models of the one-book author. One of their books often stands out above the rest, giving the impression that the author is connected to a primordial work. He asked: “Who remembers Cervantes's short stories? Who remembers
The Graduate Who Thought He Was Made of Glass,
for instance? But that can still be read with as much pleasure as any of his major works. In Latin America, the Venezuelan writer Rómulo Gallegos is famous for
Doña Barbara
which is not his best work, and the Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias is known for
El Señor Presidente,
a terrible novel, not nearly as good as
Legends of Guatemala.
”
⁵

In his mind, his magnum opus wasn't a summing up. He perceived himself as “a slave to a perfectionist's exactitude,” as he put it, decades later, in
Living to Tell the Tale.
He polished every sentence, ensured the arc of a plotline in any given piece was well-rounded, looked at each character as if he or she were an autonomous entity, and reduced dialogue to the bare essentials; these were all representative of what he conceived to be his supercilious dedication as a writer. His book of books needed to be at once sumptuous, abundant, baroque, but straightforward, distilled, and self-sufficient.

There is much debate about exactly when García Márquez started writing
One Hundred Years of Solitude.
It's unquestionable that its essence had been with him for a long time. In June 1950, he had published “
La casa de los Buendía: Apuntes para una novela
” (The Buendía House: Notes for a Novel) in
Crónica.
⁶
But no copies of the magazine exist, so until one manifests itself, what the piece contained is the subject of mere speculation. This is the period when García Márquez got sick in Barranquilla; he was writing his newspaper column, “La Jirafa,” for
El Heraldo.
He asked to take a leave of several weeks to return to Sucre, where he convalesced with his family. His illness was described as pneumonia. But his friends knew he used the time to work on a novel.

“It was supposed to be a drama about the Thousand-Day War in the Colombian Caribbean,” García Márquez said later, “about which I had talked to Manuel Zapata Olivella on an earlier visit to Cartagena. On that occasion, and with no relation at all to my project, he gave me a pamphlet written by his father about a veteran of the war whose portrait was printed on the cover, and who, with his
liquiliqui
shirt and his mustache singed by gunpowder, reminded me somehow of my grandfather. I have forgotten his name, but his surname would stay with me forever after: Buendía. That was why I thought I would write a novel with the title
La casa,
the epic tale of a family that could have in it a good deal of our own history during the sterile wars of Colonel Nicolás Márquez.”
⁷

Judging by the description of its content, if not by its prophetic title, it is clear that, seventeen years before
One Hundred Years of Solitude
was published, García Márquez was already defining its parameters.
La casa
was his working title, which he used any time he referred to the project. It is important to note that the house is a ubiquitous symbol in Latin American fiction, appearing in a number of novels by or related to
El Boom,
such as Vargas Llosa's
The Green House,
Isabel Allende's
The House of the Spirits,
and Álvaro Cepeda Samudio's
La casa grande.
⁸
Yet for years García Márquez has said that the true beginning was a trip he took with his mother on a yellow train back to Aracataca in 1950 or 1951; this journey serves as the opening of his memoir
Living to Tell the Tale.
It was then, he says, looking at the place where he had grown up, invaded by the ghosts of the past, that the idea of writing a book about the house, the family, and the town came to him. In an interview, he stated: “When I got there it was at first quite shocking
because I was now twenty-two and hadn't been there since the age of eight. Nothing had really changed, but I felt that I wasn't really looking at the village, but I was
experiencing
it as if I were reading it. It was as if everything I saw had already been written, and all I had to do was to sit down and copy what was already there and what I was just reading. For all practical purposes everything had evolved into literature: the house, the people, and the memories.”
⁹