Gabriel García Márquez (6 page)

“The strange thing,” García Márquez later told his friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, “was that I wanted to be like my grandfather—realistic, brave, safe—but I could not resist the constant temptation to peep into my grandmother's territory.”
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García Márquez's relationship with women was crucial in his upbringing. In
Living to Tell the Tale,
he writes: “I believe that the essence of my nature and way of thinking I owe in reality to the women in the family and to the many in our service who ministered to my childhood. They had strong characters and tender hearts, and they treated me with the naturalness of the Earthly Paradise.”
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A wide constellation of females, from relatives to servants, surrounded him. There were his five aunts: Tía Elvira Carrillo, his grandfather's illegitimate child and his mother's half-sister; Tía Francisca Cimodosea Mejía, known as La Cancerbera; Tía Mama, a beloved cousin who had grown up with his grandfather and who raised García Márquez in Aracataca; Tía Wenefrida Márquez, his grandfather's older sister; and Tía Petra Cotes, who died at the age of one hundred in the Aracataca home while sitting on a rocking chair in a hallway filled with begonias.

There were other women, too, such as Tía Margarita Márquez Iguarán, his grandmother's sister, who died of typhus at the age of twenty-one and is arguably the model for Remedios the Beautiful, although the actual name may come from yet another aunt, Remedios Núñez Márquez, his grandfather's eighth natural child. Such abundance of female models in his childhood marked him forever. In
One Hundred Years of Solitude
it was the Buendía women who grounded the family and safeguarded the collective memory. They were at the helm, raising the next generation, while the men explored the world, fought wars, and built their reputations. Women defined the home: what was morally acceptable and what wasn't, what everyone's diet was, who was a welcome visitor, and so on.

These home-bound women stood in sharp contrast to another type of woman: the intrusive mistress who often stole a family man away through concupiscence. Just as in
One Hundred Years of Solitude,
in García Márquez's family husbands were constantly bringing home their out-of-wedlock offspring. Aside from his three children with Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes, Nicolás Ricardo had a total of nine illegitimate children. And García Márquez's own father, Gabriel Eligio, had four: Abelardo García Ujueta, Carmen Rosa García Hermosillo, Antonio García Navarro, and Germaine (Emy) García Mendoza.
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And there were the maids, with some of whom García Márquez was physically intimate. One was Trinidad, the daughter of one of the workers in the family home. In his autobiography, García Márquez describes how she took away his innocence, as he put it. Trinidad was only thirteen. Suddenly music started to play from a nearby house. She held him so tightly that “she took my breath away.” He explains, “my intimacy with the maids could be the origin of a thread of secret communications that I believe I have with women and that throughout my life has allowed me to feel more comfortable and sure with them than with men.”
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García Márquez's relationship with his own mother, however, was more distant.
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Her seriousness defined her in his eyes. He once said, “perhaps it comes from having gone to live with her and my father when I was already old enough to think for myself—after my grandfather died.” As a result of his parent's itinerant life, which meant moving the family from one place to another, he didn't live with his parents “under the same roof for very long because a few years later when I was twelve, I went off to school, first to Barranquilla and then to Zipaquirá. Since then we've really only seen each other for brief visits, first during school holidays and after that whenever I go to Cartagena—which is never more than once a year
and never for more than a couple of weeks at a time. This has inevitably made our relationship distant.”
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Luisa Santiaga, while a somewhat peripheral female figure in García Márquez's family constellation, was the family anchor. In March 1952, at the age of twenty-five—after having lived in the big cities of Barranquilla, Cartagena, and Bogotá—García Márquez returned to Aracataca with his mother to sell his childhood home for $7,000 to a couple of old peasants, or
campesinos
, who had recently won the lottery. That sentimental journey served as the opening episode in
Living to Tell the Tale
and was an invaluable narrative viewpoint from which to relate his foundational past. Luisa Santiaga was nothing if not practical. The character based on her in
Love in the Time of Cholera
is romantic but down to earth. And García Márquez has suggested that Úrsula Iguarán has some of his mother's features.
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In spite of its seriousness, this relationship was more grounded than the one García Márquez had with his father. Gabriel Eligio didn't come from Riohacha to Aracataca to visit García Márquez until several months after he was born, in large part because his in-laws had made it so difficult for him to be with Luisa Santiaga. The families made peace and he eventually came back, but after a period working as a telegraphist, he left town again to become a homeopathic doctor. This and his future departures, all apparently related to work, turned Gabriel Eligio into a ghostlike figure in García Márquez's childhood.

In an article entitled “
Vuelta a la semilla,
” published on December 21, 1983, García Márquez wrote, “Contrary to what many writers good and bad have done across history, I have never idealized the town where I was born and where I spent the first eight years of my life. My memories of that time—as I have repeated so often—are the most clear and real I have, to the point that I'm able to evoke as if it was
yesterday not only the appearance of each of the houses that are still preserved, but even to spot a crack that didn't exist during my childhood.” García Márquez argued that trees always live longer than people and he believed that the trees in Aracataca were able to remember us, perhaps even better than we remember them. Yet, in spite of the similarities between Aracataca and Macondo, García Márquez remarked that every time he returned to his birth town he had the impression that it resembled less and less the fictitious one, with the exception of a few external elements, such as the unrelenting heat at two in the afternoon, its white and burning powder, and the almond trees that line its streets. On June 25, 2006, due to the international attention García Márquez had brought, there was a referendum to rename the town “Aracataca-Macondo,” although it failed due to a low turnout.

It's been almost a century since García Márquez was born, and Aracataca has hardly changed. He is its only famous child and claim to glory. One dramatic transformation in recent years, not only in Aracataca but in the entire region, is the rise of a tourist trade that attracts hordes of people who love his books. García Márquez isn't directly involved in these efforts. Local agencies, government-run as well as private, in Aracataca, Riohacha, Barranquilla, and, primarily, Cartagena, decided to capitalize on the attention the writer had brought to the region. In order to understand the phenomenon (literature as a magnet for tourism), I took a tour. I boarded a bus in Barranquilla that took me to Aracataca. The poverty I saw was moving. I spoke with local merchants, students, politicians, waitresses, journalists, policemen, and librarians, among others. They talked about the lack of financial support from the federal government, which remembers the town only when there is a García Márquez anniversary—an event that always brings an influx of tourists.

Aracataca, as I discovered, now parades tourists to some of the sites where García Márquez spent his childhood. Some of them are now even makeshift museums. There is, for instance, the
Casa del telegrafista,
behind the town church, where his father worked as a telegraphist. The visitor is able to see some of the early twentieth-century tools he used. The place is decorated with yellowed news clippings about the future Nobel laureate, his parents' romantic liaison, and the publication of major works such as
One Hundred Years of Solitude
and
Love in the Time of Cholera
among some sculptures and drawings by local talent. Given the site's extraordinarily limited resources, most of the items on display are exposed to the elements—humidity being foremost among them—and are in a slow state of decay.

There is Doctor Antonio Barbosa's pharmacy, where Gabriel Eligio would leave messages for his beloved Luisa Santiaga. Pharmacists play a curious role in García Márquez's oeuvre. In the primal landscape of the Caribbean, à la Gustave Flaubert, they are the promoters of scientific knowledge in society. And there is the Iglesia de San José, where García Márquez was baptized, the Calle de los Camellones, where he played on his way to and from school, and the train station, where a yellow train arrived at 11 A.M. every day, a scene that is depicted in
One Hundred Years of Solitude.
García Márquez attended preschool and the first grade at a local Montessori school. The school was established by María Elena Fergusson, a teacher from Riohacha who taught him how to read and who first ignited his incipient interest in poetry. Years later, he confessed that as a child one of his favorite characters was Sleeping Beauty.

According to García Márquez, the most famous house in Aracataca belonged to the parochial priest Francisco C. Angarita, who baptized him and his entire generation. Father Angarita was famous for his irascible mood and his moralizing sermons. As a child, García Márquez didn't know that Father
Angarita had taken a very concrete and consequential position in support of the strike of the banana workers in 1928, and the priest was also an informant for Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the lawyer and later left-wing political figure martyred during
El Bogotazo,
who represented the case of the workers after the massacre.
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But for purposes of this biography, unquestionably the most important site in Aracataca is García Márquez's family home.

“My most constant and vivid memory is not so much of the people but of the actual house in Aracataca where I lived with my grandparents,” he once said. “Every single day of my life I wake up with the feeling, real or imaginary, that I've dreamt I'm in that huge old house. Not that I've gone back there, but that I
am
there, at no particular age, for no particular reason—as if I'd never left it.”
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The family home, now known as the Casa Museo Gabriel García Márquez, has been reconstructed to satisfy tourists' needs. The
campesino
couple who bought the house from García Márquez sold it to another family, who in turn sold it to the municipality, which planned to turn it into a museum. While changing hands, a large portion of the house was demolished to make room for a more modern structure. When the municipality finally bought it, a group of researchers studied the architecture of the town in the early decades of the twentieth century and analyzed the foundation of the house. Thanks to this endeavor, García Márquez's family home is now restored to its original condition.

A plan of
la casa,
recreated by architects Gustavo Castellón, Gilver Caraballo, and Jaime Santos, is in the town's Casa Museo García Márquez. Looking at it, the structure of the Buendía home in
One Hundred Years of Solitude
becomes more concrete. It is located on Carrera 5, also known as Avenida del Monseñor Espejo, a street graced and perfumed by acacia
and almond trees. Built on a rectangular piece of land, the house consists of three independent structures. To the left is García Márquez's grandfather's office. As one enters the building, there's a patio that lies adjacent to a visitors' room. Behind the grandfather's office is a garden with a fragrant jasmine tree. Beyond the garden is the grandparents' bedroom. There is also a pantry, the kitchen, and another patio. Then come a few surprises: a room containing statues of saints, a room for suitcases, a silversmithing workshop, a hallway flanked by two chestnut trees and filled with begonias, and a carpentry shop. I found the latrine at the back of the property.

One of the most stunning scenes in
One Hundred Years of Solitude
takes place in chapter seven, when José Arcadio Buendía's son, the eldest child and the sibling of Colonel José Arcadio Buendía and Amaranta, dies mysteriously. This remains one of the only—
the
only?—unsolved mysteries in
One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Expelled from the family home, José Arcadio Buendía moves into another house with Rebeca.
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One September afternoon, he comes home, greets Rebeca, who is taking a bath, goes to his room, and soon after a gunshot is heard. But when his mother, Úrsula, enters the room, she doesn't find a weapon, nor does she find a wound on her son's body. Immediately after the gunshot, a trickle of blood spills out from the victim onto the street. García Márquez's description is superb:

A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a straight angle at the Buendía house, went in under the closed door, crossed the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to
the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta's chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano José, and went through a pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Úrsula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread.
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