Gabriel García Márquez (4 page)

Finally, in his mordant self-portrait García Márquez wonders if instead of having become a writer, it would have been more useful for him and for humankind had he been a terrorist. That is the writer's ultimate dream:
si en vez de escritor fuera terrorista,
to be a saboteur, to be remembered for reformulating the rules of the game. The word choice is ominous, but he isn't being literal. He isn't referring to the use of violence with the intention of coercing society. Instead, he embraces metaphor as a form of persuasion: in subtle, tangential, enchanting ways he is ready, through literature, to unsettle the establishment.

Gabriel García Márquez was born in the small town of Aracataca, on Colombia's Caribbean coast, on a hot and humid Sunday, March 6, 1927, at 9 A.M., as a rainstorm was descending on the coast. Rumors circulated for some time that the actual place of his birth had been Riohacha—the capital of the province La Guajira, where his mother had spent most of her pregnancy—but those proved untrue. For years his birth date was mistakenly given as March 6, 1928. The Library of Congress in Washington still quotes that date, as do scores of reference volumes.
²
The confusion stems from various factors. There were no official papers like a birth certificate issued and his was a large family. Furthermore, the author himself seems to have nurtured this misunderstanding.

His immediate younger sibling, Luis Enrique, once said that for years he “believed he had been born on September 8, 1928, after his mother's nine-month pregnancy. But it happened that in the year of 1955, Gabito wrote
The Story of a Shipwrecked
Sailor
in
El Espectador
and had complications with the government of [General Gustavo] Rojas Pinilla. So he had to leave the country, for which he needed a certain document, and I don't know why but Gabito ended up as having been born on March 7, 1928, that is, the same year I was born, something that leaves me in a difficult situation: either I am the only six-month old that weighed four kilos of whom there had been any notice, or I am almost his twin. He never rectified that date.”
³
Eventually, the truth was uncovered as myriad biographers from the nineties onward, among them Dasso Saldívar and Gerald Martin, corroborated the information.
⁴
In March 2007, celebrations took place worldwide to commemorate his eightieth birthday and the fortieth anniversary of the publication, in June 1967, of his magnum opus,
Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude).

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 that 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).