Gabriel García Márquez (9 page)

Juan Carlos Onetti, whose readings of Faulkner defined him, once described how he discovered the Nobel laureate's oeuvre.

The recollection speaks not only for Onetti but for an entire generation of starstruck Latin American readers.

One afternoon, after I left the office where I worked, I stopped by a bookstore and bought the last issue of
Sur,
a magazine founded and supported by Victoria Ocampo . . . Looking back, when I remember that I opened the issue on the street, for the first time in my life I encountered the name of William Faulkner. An unknown writer had written the introduction, which was followed by a story poorly translated into Spanish. I started reading while continuing to walk, beyond the world of passers-by and automobiles, until I decided to enter a café to finish the story, happily forgetting that someone was waiting for me somewhere. I reread it again and the bewitchment increased. It increased and every critic agrees that it is enduring.
²³

On September 13, 1947, at the age of twenty, García Márquez published his first short story,
“La tercera resignación”
(The Third
Resignation), in the evening newspaper
El Espectador,
one of Bogotá's most important dailies. It appeared on page eight, in the section
Fin de semana
(Weekend) edited by Eduardo Zalamea Borda. It would be the first of eighteen short stories he would write before publishing his first book,
Leaf Storm.
A little over a month later, his second and third stories,
“Eva está dentro de su gato”
(Eve Is Inside Her Cat) and
“Tubal Caín forja una estrella”
(Tubal Caín Shapes a Star), were published in the
Fin de semana
supplement.

García Márquez wrote for long hours, secluded from everyone else, on a typewriter. In an article entitled
“El amargo encanto de la máquina de escribir,”
he discussed the difference between writing in longhand and typing. He suggested that the former had an aura of mystery but that the latter was the inevitable outcome of modern life. “Truth is that everyone writes in whatever way possible, because the hardest thing of this arduous business isn't how one handles tools, but the way one succeeds in putting one word after another.”
²⁴

Although it is essential to recognize the value of translation in García Márquez's literary education, it would be wrong to suggest that all the influences on his oeuvre were foreign. All artists are shaped by their provenance, and García Márquez was no different. Equally important, if only for its aesthetic consistency, was the work of Colombian authors. García Márquez responded to nineteenth-century romantic and naturalistic novels, but he sought ways to create something fresh and different, to be a new voice that would allow Colombian literature to be viewed beyond its regional confines and to be embraced by the international literary community.

The Colombian novel is defined by its geography. The coastal narrative of
One Hundred Years of Solitude
belongs to a tradition shared by other Caribbean nations. Not surprisingly, García Márquez is often compared to baroque authors such as Alejo Carpentier and José Lezama Lima. That
coastal tradition is represented by Juan José Nieto's novel
Ingermina
(1844). As Raymond Leslie Williams, a scholar of the Colombian novel, has mapped it out, other national traditions include the narrative based in the interior highlands, such as Eugenio Díaz's
Manuela
(1858) and Eduardo Caballero Calderón's
El buen salvaje
(1963); the Antioquian tradition, evident in Tomás Carrasquilla's
Frutos de mi tierra
(1896) and Manuel Mejía Vallejo's
El día señalado
(1964); and the Cauca tradition, encompassing works that range from Jorge Isaac's
María
(1867) to Gustavo Alvarez Gardeazábal's
El bazar de los idiotas
(1974).
²⁵

While studying law at the Universidad Nacional in Bogotá, a crucial moment took place that served as a catalyst in García Márquez's apprenticeship as a writer. In 1948 the populist Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, a charismatic, immensely popular leader of the Liberal Party and a presidential candidate, was assassinated during a riot in Bogotá; he was fifty years old. García Márquez remembers that day as a watershed moment in his life.

Trained in the law at the Universidad Nacional, Gaitán had been mayor of Bogotá and minister of education. Gaitán was killed during a period known as
La Violencia,
in which violent clashes between liberals and conservatives resulted in the death of several hundred thousand people. In a speech he gave the year he died, Gaitán said, “If I am killed, avenge me!”

The events took place on April 9. The nation's capital was hosting the Pan-American Conference, which was devoted to trade issues, although politics occupied center stage. President Mariano Ospina Pérez was at a meeting with the secretary of state of the United States, General George Marshall.

Gaitán and a few colleagues left his office at around 1:05 P.M. Witnesses heard three gunshots, then a fourth. Gaitán was hit in the back; the bullet tore though his lungs. Another lodged in the back of his head. He lay on the ground for at least ten minutes before being taken in a black taxi to the
Clínica Central, five blocks away. He reached the clinic at around 1:30 P.M. A historian described the scene: “There was an inexorable finality about what had happened. The leader was gone for all who witnessed the shooting. It mattered little that he had been rushed to a clinic, where doctors would try to save his life. The assassination had been on everyone's mind. It was too predictable. His death was inevitable. He was too dangerous and too feared by the leaders of both parties.”
²⁶

The assassination was a pivotal event in modern Colombian history. In Bogotá the news quickly spread. People screamed,
“¡Mataron a Gaitán! ¡Mataron a Gaitán!”
and took to the streets in anger. Radio broadcasters cautioned Bogotanos to stay home. The minister of the interior went on the air to deny that Gaitán had been shot. But to no avail. People marched to the
palacio
on Calle Real. Revolution was in the air, but no one was at the helm. A crowd of workers and middle-class folks carried off the body of Gaitán's alleged assassin. There is still confusion regarding the true identity of the perpetrator.

The role of the media was critical. Radio station
Últimas noticias,
managed by Gaitán supporters, made the following broadcast minutes after the assassination: “
Últimas Noticias con ustedes. Los conservadores y el gobierno de Ospina Pérez acaban de asesinar al doctor Gaitán, quien cayó frente a la puerta de su oficina abaleado por un policía. Pueblo ¡a las armas! ¡A la carga!, a la calle con palos, piedras, escopetas, cuanto haya a la mano. Asalten las ferreterías y tomen la dinamita, la pólvora, las herramientas, los machetes . . .
” An English translation:
Últimas Noticias
is broadcasting to you. The conservatives and Ospina Peréz's government have just assassinated Doctor Gaitán, who collapsed in front of his office after being gunned down by a policeman. People, take arms! Be ready to battle! Go on the street with sticks, stones, muskets, anything at hand. Assault the hardware stores and take away the dynamite, the gun powder, the tools and machetes.

The broadcast instructed people to make Molotov cocktails. The crowd on Calle Real was organized, but in other parts of the city it was amorphous, massive, and dangerous. People shouted, “Down with the Conservative government!” On the Plaza de Bolívar, busses were set on fire. President Mariano Ospina Pérez believed “the republic would fall into the hands of rioters whose prime objective was control of the nation's government.”
²⁷

Gaitán's assassination was known as
El Bogotazo,
the period preceding the event as
la convivencia,
in which people with opposing ideological views—liberal and conservative—tried to coexist.
El Bogotazo
led to a long spell of violence. “Gaitán had taken his followers from a life in which they were excluded from the decisions that affected them to another in which they felt they participated in those decisions,” a historian recounted. “His death thrust them instinctively back to the sacrosanct old hierarchies and to their lowly, deferential, and reviled place in society. As the crowd lost contact with the
convivialistas,
the old anonymous world with distant and sporadic leaders materialized again. The actions of the crowd in Bogotá on the afternoon of April 9 were a sign of the people's refusal to return to the past, to retrace the distance already traveled. But the crowd could not undertake the rest of the journey without Gaitán. How was it suddenly to take power? The idea was never even there. Unwilling to move back and unable to move forward, the anger and frustration of the rioters had only one outlet: the destruction of a society in which they could no longer live. From the feeling of loss that enveloped Gaitán's followers at the moment of his death, from the sense of pride and cohesion that he had offered them, and from the hatred he had shown for the
convivialistas,
the crowd delivered the courage, and the need, to destroy.”
²⁸

The riots during
El Bogotazo
lasted ten hours. They started in Bogotá and quickly spread to the rest of the country. Stores were looted; goods were stolen and fenced at cheap prices.
The death toll reached 200,000, and approximately one million were injured.
La Violencia
raged for a decade, until 1958. In the article “Bogotá 1947,” about the book
Mafia: Historias de caleños y bogotanos
by Gonzalo Mallarino, García Márquez described the day he first set foot in Bogotá at the age of thirteen: “. . . it was a somber January afternoon, the saddest of my life.” He added that the greatest heroism of his life, and of his generation's, was having been young in Bogotá at the time. He would jump on the trolleys on Sunday and go from Plaza Bolívar to Avenida de Chile. Sometimes he would meet a random person, usually a man, and they would have coffee together and chat until midnight.
²⁹

During the riots, García Márquez's boarding house burned down and the Universidad Nacional closed. A penciled statement in his transcript reveals that he transferred to the Universidad de Cartagena. “I realized that literature had a relationship with life that my short stories didn't,” García Márquez said later. “And then an event took place that was very important with respect to this attitude. It was
El Bogotazo,
on April 9, 1948, when a political leader, Gaitán, was shot and the people of Bogotá went raving mad in the streets. I was in my
pensión
ready to have lunch when I heard the news. I ran toward the place, but Gaitán had just been put into a taxi and was being taken to a hospital. On my way back to the pension, the people had already taken to the streets and they were demonstrating, looting stores, and burning buildings. I joined them. That afternoon and evening, I became aware of the kind of country I was living in, and how little my short stories had to do with any of that.”
³⁰

García Márquez's entry into journalism took place shortly afterward. He decided to leave Bogotá after witnessing the riots. While he understood the causes that had led to the mobilization of the masses, he was shocked and frightened by the anarchy. He needed to leave the nation's capital, to gain
perspective by looking at things from afar. He decided to go to Barranquilla first, but the university there was closed. After some time he made his way to Cartagena, a thriving coastal city with deep colonial roots where Afro-Colombian culture thrived. It was a bold move. These two cities, Bogotá and Cartagena, dramatically different in their metabolism and in the way García Márquez approached them, would allow him to come to terms with his own literary talents.

“When I was later forced to go back to Barranquilla on the Caribbean, where I had spent my childhood,” García Márquez later recalled, “I realized that that was the type of life I had lived, known, and wanted to write about.”
¹
Being a participant of
El Bogotazo
convinced him that the responsibility of a writer was to bear witness, to use words to describe the dramatic transformations taking place in a journalistic fashion.

Once in Barranquilla, García Márquez started writing a daily column and some editorials for the newspaper
El Heraldo.
Its offices were located on a street known for its underworld bar, which people referred to as
Calle del Crimen
(Crime Street). He lived in “one of those hotels for casual customers which are really brothels.”
²
The newspaper paid him three pesos per column and another three per editorial. At the time, according to his friend Germán Vargas Cantillo, whom he had just met, García Márquez worked intensely, “after midnight, on an insurmountable novel,
La casa
[The House], which he never finished nor did he publish with that title, but it's unquestionable that in that novel, which we called
el mamotreto,
the huge thing, there were probably, in essence, a few of the stories and some of the novels for
which he would later be known among readers and critics.”
³
But progress was slow. He wasn't quite sure what the plot was about, how to approach it, and what narrative perspective to take. He struggled with it, often feeling disappointed. Did he have to accept that the project needed to be aborted? The material was germinating within him but, although he refused to acknowledge it, the novel wasn't quite ready to acquire its final shape.