Gabriel García Márquez (8 page)

Love is the quintessential ingredient in García Márquez's oeuvre and it might well have been at that point, in his late teens, when he first recognized its depth and scope. “I believe one thing,” he told a reporter decades later in Havana, “all my life I have been a romantic. But in our society, once youth is gone, you are supposed to believe that romantic feeling is something reactionary and out of style. As time passes and I grew older, I came to realize how primordial these sentiments are, these feelings.”
⁷

Mercedes was from the Bolívar Department, where the Roman Catholic Diocese has a see. It was one of the places where García Márquez's father had been a telegraphist. Her Mediterranean beauty hypnotized him. He couldn't stop dreaming about her. She reminded him of an Egyptian goddess, an image that long remained with him. In the eighteenth chapter of
One Hundred Years of Solitude
he pays tangential tribute to Mercedes. The last Aureliano, after a long seclusion, leaves the house twice. On his second outing, “he had to go only a few blocks to reach a small pharmacy with dusty windows and ceramic bottles with labels in Latin where a girl with the stealthy beauty of a serpent of the Nile gave him the medicine
the name of which José Arcadio had written down on a piece of paper.”
⁸

According to transcripts dated February 25, 1947, García Márquez enrolled in the Universidad Nacional in Bogotá to study law. He did it mainly to please his parents. Coming as he did from a town of barely 20,000 people, the metropolis seemed colossal to him. But size wasn't necessarily a synonym of depth. He perceived it as “a distant, gloomy city where an unrelenting drizzle had been falling since the beginning of the sixteenth century.” He told his friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza that “the first thing I noticed about the somber capital was that there were too many men in too much of a hurry, that they all wore the same black suits and hats as I did, and that there wasn't a woman to be seen. I noticed enormous Percherons drawing beer wagons in the rain, trams which gave off sparks like fireworks as they rounded the corners in the rain, and endless traffic jams for interminable funerals. These were the most lugubrious funerals in the world with grandiose ornate hearses and black horses decked out in velvet and black plumed nosebands, and corpses from important families who thought they had invented death.”
⁹
In the seventh section of
One Hundred Years of Solitude,
García Márquez describes an army of lawyers all dressed in black suits who do little else but cater to the status quo.

Was García Márquez ready to become a lawyer? It is difficult to ascertain the extent of his commitment. His studies bored him to death. In
Living to Tell the Tale,
he quotes George Bernard Shaw: “Since very little I had to interrupt my education in order to go to school.” Judging from the recollections of his siblings, the exact sciences weren't his forte.
¹⁰

According to the same transcripts, during his first year he did well in all his courses, except statistics and demographics. Boredom appears to have taken the upper hand; García Márquez's transcript for the second year reveals him to have
been frequently absent, which resulted in the failure of various courses.
¹¹
Years later he would say that instead of attending classes, he read novels. In other words, it was the educational system that disappointed him; his interest in knowledge—especially in literature—remained strong.

His passion for literature (which he called the “
sarampión literario,
” the literary chickenpox) dates to this time. He read the European classics. “My literary education began [then],” he told a journalist. “I would read bad poetry on the one hand, and Marxist texts lent to me secretly by my history teacher, on the other. I would spend Sundays in the school library to stave off boredom. So, I began with bad poetry before discovering the good. Rimbaud, Valéry . . .”
¹²
García Márquez enjoyed “popular poetry, the kind printed on calendars and sold as broadsheets. I found I liked the poetry as much as I loathed the grammar in the Castilian text which I did for my secondary school certificate. I loved the Spanish Romantics—Núñez de Arce, Espronceda.”
¹³

Although poetry was an essential component in his literary apprenticeship, it seldom makes an appearance in his oeuvre. On occasion—in
Love in the Time of Cholera, Of Love and Other Demons,
and his autobiography—García Márquez includes quotes from favorite masters he had read in his youth. Decades later, after he had achieved international renown, García Márquez, in collaboration with Surrealist painter Roberto Matta, published in Cuba a calendar that included riddles he'd written about fruits. There's hardly any more evidence. Still, his discovery of poetry was auspicious. “My most salacious form of entertainment (at the time) was to sit, Sunday after Sunday, on those blue-paned trams that took you back and forth from the Plaza Bolívar to the Avenida de Chile for five cents—desolate afternoons which seemed to promise nothing but an interminable string of other empty Sundays to come. I'd spent that entire journey of vicious circles reading books of poems, poems and poems, getting
through about one slim volume for each city block, until the first street lamps would light up in the never-ending rain. Then I'd roam the silent cafés of the old town searching for someone who'd take pity on me and discuss the poems, poems, poems I'd just read.”
¹⁴
Those volumes of poetry were by writers who, as Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza put it, were politically committed and sought to produce a literature that was clear and accessible to “the simple people.” Among them were Rubén Darío, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and Pablo Neruda.

To a large extent, García Márquez's understanding of literature was shaped by his discovery of Franz Kafka's writings. “I must have been around nineteen (on other occasions, he said he was seventeen) when I read
The Metamorphosis,
” García Márquez recalled in 1982. The transformation of Gregor Samsa astonished him. He remembered the first line with astonishing precision: “‘As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.' ‘Bloody hell!' I thought. ‘My grandmother used to talk like that.' I said to myself, ‘I didn't know you could do this, but if you can, I'm certainly interested in writing.'” He decided to read the most important novels ever written.
¹⁵

Kafka had a significant impact on García Márquez's generation, but it took some time for the Czech Jewish author, who died of tuberculosis in 1924, to gain a presence in Latin America. The translation of
Die Verwandlung
that García Márquez read has been at the heart of a heated debate for years. For some time, it was believed to have been done by the Argentine man of letters Jorge Luis Borges, who had been infatuated with Kafka since 1938. He translated the parable “Before the Law” for the journal
El Hogar,
and, as critic Efraín Kristal notes in his book
Invisible Work: Borges and Translation,
the Argentine also included a number of his renditions of Kafka in the famous
Anthology of Fantastic Literature,
which he edited with his friends Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo.
¹⁶
However, Borges himself cast doubt on having translated
The Metamorphosis.
The novel was first translated into Spanish in 1925, a year after Kafka's death, and published in
Revista de Occidente,
the intellectual magazine based in Madrid and edited by the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset. The translator was probably Galo Sáez, although others attributed it to Margarita Nelken. In 1945 that translation was published in book form by the Editorial Revista de Occidente, in a series called
Novelas extrañas
(Strange Novels). Borges purportedly translated
The Metamorphosis
in 1938 for Editorial Losada in Buenos Aires, in a series entitled “
La pajarita de papel,
” the paper bird.
¹⁷

Which translation did García Márquez read? It is impossible to know. What is unquestionable is that it was a trigger. Years later, he said that he wouldn't have been able to write his early story, “
La tercera resignación”
(The Third Resignation)—dated September 13, 1947, when he was twenty—had he not read Kafka's novel. The story, which first appeared in English in the
New Yorker,
is García Márquez at his most self-conscious. It chronicles the impressions of a nameless narrator, much like Gregor Samsa, as he lies in his coffin, a man “ready to be buried, and yet he knew that he wasn't dead. That if he tried to get up, he could do it so easily.”
¹⁸
The middle-class angst and the bizarre condition in which the protagonist finds himself seem to be an homage to Kafka's narrative.

García Márquez claimed that “Kafka, in German, told stories in the exact same way my grandmother did.”
¹⁹
While Kafka's absurdism resonated with many in Europe, especially after World War II, his initial reception in the Spanish-speaking world was mixed—in spite of the enthusiasm of Borges, García Márquez, and a few others. There are ardent followers of Kafka in the Americas (Calvert Casey, for instance), but they aren't numerous. And then there are writers, such as the Uruguayan Felisberto Hernández (1902–1964) who are
Kafkaesque without necessarily being Kafkian, i.e., they might not be aware of the debt they owe to the author of
The Castle,
yet it is obvious.
²⁰

Equally significant, although for the opposite reasons, was García Márquez's relationship with Borges himself. Born in 1899 in Buenos Aires of British and Argentine stock, the author of “The Circular Ruins,” “The Garden of Forking Paths,” “Funes the Memorious,” and other fictions was a Europeanized poet and essayist known, until the late fifties, only among a small cadre of intellectual devotees. A voracious reader, Borges's cosmopolitanism and his disdain for politics often put him at odds with the Latin American left. Borges was of a diametrically different ideological mindset. While he opposed, even ridiculed Argentine dictator Juan Domingo Perón, he was an intellectual dandy in the tradition of Oscar Wilde. He had little interest in the indigent. His view of the world was based on philosophical disquisitions and metaphysical constructions.

Emir Rodríguez Monegal, a Uruguayan critic and Yale professor who befriended both Borges and Neruda and wrote biographies of each (rather mediocre ones, filled with psychoanalytic interpretations), once asked Borges, sometime in the seventies, if he had heard of
One Hundred Years of Solitude,
a book that everyone was talking about. Borges, with acumen, said he had never heard of it. Except that with Borges it is always difficult to know if he was being honest. Had its author not been a left-leaning intellectual, had it been written elsewhere on the globe, maybe even in the nineteenth century, the Macondo saga would probably have hypnotized the Argentine man of letters. But the model of the writer as an artist engaged with the world that García Márquez represented was antithetical to Borges.

The English novelist Graham Greene—author of
The Power and the Glory, Our Man in Havana,
and other books—was another strong influence on García Márquez. Ironically, it was through Greene that García Márquez learned to appreciate his own
environment. “Greene taught me how to decipher the tropics, no less. To separate out the essential elements of a poetic synthesis from an environment that you know all too well is extremely difficult. It's all so familiar you don't know where to start and yet you have so much to say that you end by understanding nothing. That was my problem with the tropics. I'd read Christopher Columbus, Antonio Pigafetta and the other chroniclers of the Indies with great interest. I'd also read Emilio Salgari and Joseph Conrad and the early twentieth century ‘tropicalists' who saw everything through Modernist spectacles, and many others, but always found an enormous dichotomy between their visions and the real thing. Some of them fell into the trap of listing things and, paradoxically, the longer the list the more limited the vision seemed. Others, as we know, have succumbed to rhetorical excess. Graham Greene solved this literary problem in a very precise way—with a few disparate elements connected by an inner coherence both subtle and real. Using this method you can reduce the whole enigma of the tropics to the fragrance of a rotten guava.”
²¹

But the most significant literary influences on García Márquez, at least according to critics, were three writers from the United States: John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner. He admired the three for dramatically different reasons. Dos Passos studied the infrastructure of capitalism in all its excesses. Hemingway had a succinct, almost telegraphic style. His language was simple yet polished. But it was Faulkner who left the deepest, most defining mark on him. The novels
Sartoris, As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury,
and
Absalom! Absalom!
showed García Márquez the capacity of literature as a tool for revisiting history, and, through history, society as a whole. Macondo as an autonomous reality, with its geographical boundaries, its vegetation, and its genealogical lines, was inspired by Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, which was modeled after Lafayette County, Mississippi.

Unquestionably, there are similarities between Faulkner's native state of Mississippi in particular and the Deep South in general, and Macondo and Colombia. The loss the South experienced during the American Civil War and the depth and breadth of the trauma left by numerous victims is comparable to the aftermath of Colombia's Thousand-Day War and successive civil wars. Faulkner received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949, a year after the assassination of Liberal Party leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in Bogotá. Spanish translations of Faulkner's stories had appeared in literary magazines and cultural supplements, and Spanish translations of books were published in the late thirties. (Borges translated
The Palm Trees.
)
²²
Throughout the forties, he was read with reverence in intellectual circles.