Redeemers (46 page)

One important point is that the main driving force behind the company was none other than General Uribe Uribe, who was a former agent of the New York Life Insurance Company and a professor of economics who devoutly believed in the market economy and in agriculture for export. The legendary soldier also owned one of the biggest coffee plantations in Antioquia. Martin does not mention these facts, but notes that Uribe Uribe's comrade Colonel Márquez, the writer's grandfather, was in fact one of the first beneficiaries of this foreign investment. His comfortable house in Aracataca may not have had a pool or a tennis court, but it had cement floors, and it was one of the largest houses in town. Since he was the municipal tax collector, “the Colonel's own income depended heavily on the financial well-being, physical intoxication and resultant sexual promiscuity of the much despised ‘leaf-trash.' How conscientiously Nicolás carried out his duties we cannot know but the system was not one which left much freedom for personal probity.” The colonel oversaw establishments called
academias
, “where both liquor and sex were freely available” and through which must have passed the “unlikely whores” who would serve as inspiration for his grandson's stories and novels all the way through to his last novel,
Memories of My Melancholy Whores
.

Swept up by the force of the “remembered” version in
One Hundred Years of Solitude
, Martin overlooks the family's ambiguous relationship with the United Fruit Company—a love-hate relationship, typical of Caribbean attitudes toward the Yankees. The company was condemned for its abandonment of the towns people, but not for its existence. In his memoirs García Márquez notes that his mother, Luisa Santiaga (the real-life version of Ursula in the famous novel), “yearned for the golden age of the banana company”—that is, for her days as a “rich girl,” her clavichord classes, dance classes, English classes. And he himself confessed that he missed his pretty teacher at the Montessori school and his shopping trips with his grandfather. The truth is that the banana company brought with it much more than leaf-trash. As the historian Catherine C. LeGrand explains, the enclave was a melting pot of cosmopolitanism and localism, of “green gold” and witchcraft, of Parker pens, Vicks VapoRub, Quaker Oats, Colgate toothpaste, of Chevrolets and Fords, of magic potions and homeopathic medicine (like that practiced by Eligio, Gabito's erratic, impecunious, and absent father), of Rosicrucian books and Catholic missals, of Masons and Theosophists, of demonic tales and modern inventions, of craftsmen and professionals, of residents with centuries-long roots on the coast and immigrants from Italy, Spain, Syria, and Lebanon. García Márquez's mother would have liked that “false splendor” to last forever. Which is why, in the memoirs, when she sees the square where a massacre took place, she says to her son: “That's where the world ended.” The world she meant was
her
world. Paradise did not predate the company. Paradise, for that family, was the world created with the arrival of the company—a tropical alchemy that García Márquez would re-create in his first novels, and, most admirably, in
One Hundred Years of Solitude
.

And after the memory of apartheid came that of apocalypse. One that was very real. In 1928, at the request of the United Fruit Company, federal troops opened fire on a gathering of workers on strike at the railroad station in Ciénaga, very near Aracataca, where Gabriel García Márquez, who was born the previous year, lived with his grandparents. Hundreds were killed. The slaughter—re-created with expressionistic hyperbole in
One Hundred Years of Solitude—
sullied the reputation of the Conservative regime and paved the way after 1930 for a series of Liberal governments. Their important social reforms would meet with opposition from Conservatives, who adopted ever more reactionary positions. For the elections of 1946, the dominant Liberal Party split into two factions, one moderate, in support of Gabriel Turbay, and the other radical, behind their charismatic leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. In his popular anti-imperialist harangues, Gaitán constantly referred to the massacre of 1928, which he had investigated and denounced as a member of Parliament. Then, against the backdrop of the ninth Pan-American Conference held in Bogotá on April 9, 1948, Gaitán was assassinated and massive riots broke out in the streets of the capital.

The episode, known as El Bogotazo, was the starting point for a decade of ferocious social and political violence to which the Colombians refer with the highly understated term,
La violencia
. The young law student Gabriel García Márquez lived the tragedy up close. It was his political turning point—as it was for Fidel Castro, who was also in Bogotá at the time. It fueled his hatred of American imperialism and awakened his sympathy for communism. In addition to the glorification of the colonel and the demonization of the banana company, the young writer began to develop a mistrust of representative democracy and republican values. Martin succinctly supports this viewpoint in an assertion like: “Colombia is a curious country in which the two major parties have ostensibly been bitter enemies for almost two centuries yet have tacitly united to ensure that the people never receive genuine representation.” But this idea of Colombia as a sham republic does not fully correspond to reality. According to the historian Malcolm Deas, from the earliest decades of the nineteenth century, people in the remotest places in Colombia have been exercised by national politics, taking part in mostly clean and competitive elections, with a real separation of powers, and enjoying—at least in the twentieth century—significant liberties. Except for the fleeting episode of General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla in the 1950s, Colombians have not countenanced coups or dictatorships. It is probably not an exaggeration to say that no other country in the region in the second half of the twentieth century has experimented more tenaciously with democracy (not even Chile, until the military coup of 1973, or Uruguay, until the brutal repression of the 1970s against the militant Montonero revolutionaries, or Costa Rica, or Venezuela from 1959 until the arrival of Chávez).

And yet violence seems second nature in Colombia. The main reason for this violence was the discord between liberals and conservatives—a quarrel of political, economic, social, and religious values dating back to the nineteenth century in Latin America. Despite its democratic and republican tendencies, Colombia failed to find a formula for stability and dragged its internecine political and cultural conflict out to the point of exhaustion. In Colombia, the legalist and formal traditions of the reigning grammarians were overturned time and again by the call to arms. “In Colombia,” declared President Rafael Núñez at the end of the nineteenth century, “we have institutionalized anarchy.” This incapacity for peace was manifested once more in the Bogotazo of 1948, planting in the young García Márquez an iron sense of the futility of liberal and conservative ideologies. Like Colonel Aureliano Buendía, he came to believe that “the only real difference between liberals and conservatives is that liberals attend the five o'clock mass and conservatives attend the eight o'clock mass.” He forever after agreed with Simon Bolívar's famous statement that “I am convinced to the marrow of my bones that only an able despotism can rule in America.” An able despot, a
good
patriarch, a new and anti-imperialist Uribe Uribe would become Gabito's ideal. To find such a figure, he would embark on a long and difficult path. And instead of cannons, his tools would be words, just as his grandfather had wanted.

 

II

Gerald Martin's
Gabriel García Márquez: A Life
is an authorized biography, the official version of the writer's literary and political saga. The book is divided into three sections. The first, centered on Colombia from 1899 to 1955, overlaps to a certain degree with Gabo's own
Living to Tell the Tale
, but it freshens up the family history with new information, sketches each member of the extended family in the house of Aracataca, and provides a detailed reconstruction of student life at the prestigious school of San José. It touches on the few joys and the many sorrows of García Márquez's family, enriched and impoverished each year by the arrival of a new sibling. And above all, it describes the vicissitudes of a penniless young man in a succession of cities (Cartagena, Barranquilla, Bogotá), surrounded by journalist friends and literary mentors, passionately committed to pursuing a life as a writer, and willing to earn his living by selling encyclopedias or adapting radio soap operas.

Curiously, Martin almost entirely bypasses the cultural context in which García Márquez grew up—the open and lighthearted atmosphere of the Caribbean, with its extraordinary liberality, its carnivalesque sensuality, its worship of poetry, its musicality, its propensity for outrageous jokes, black magic, and easy death. He somewhat exaggerates the richness and the complexity of García Márquez's literary education, which seems to have been limited to Darío and the Spanish Golden Age, quite a bit of Faulkner and Hemingway, some Kafka, a touch of Freud, and even less of Mann.

Although very few letters or primary documents from private or public archives are cited in his book, Martin—known to the García Márquez clan as Tío Jeral (“Uncle Jeral”)—spent seventeen years interviewing more than five hundred people: family members, friends, colleagues, editors, biographers, hagiographers, and academics (most of them inclined to speak favorably of the writer). These testimonies are vivid and sometimes dubious. Irrefutable firsthand accounts, like that of García Márquez's longtime friend the intellectual and diplomat Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, confirm the young writer's crushing poverty—but did he really live in a room of only ten square feet? Did he really accustom himself to a “virtual disregard of his own bodily needs”? And elsewhere, did he really sleep with the wife of a military man who, upon discovering him in the act, forgave him out of gratitude to his homeopath father? Did he write
Leaf Storm
, his first novel about Macondo, inspired by the trip with his mother to Aracataca? And did this trip—so strikingly similar, as Martin suggests in a note, to the journey at the start of
Pedro Páramo
, the novel by Juan Rulfo that was crucial in setting the tone for
One Hundred Years of Solitude—
really take place in 1950, and was it as fundamental to his experience and creativity as his memoirs indicate? A letter not mentioned by Martin, dated March 1952 and published in
Textos costeños
(García Márquez's first volume of journalism), seems to suggest otherwise:

 

I've just returned from Aracataca. It's still a dusty village, full of silence and the dead. Unsettling; almost overwhelmingly so, with its old colonels dying in their yards, under the last banana trees, and an impressive number of sixty-year-old virgins, rusty, sweating out the last vestiges of sex at the drowsy hour of two in the afternoon. This time I chanced it, but I don't think I'll go back alone, especially after
Leaf Storm
comes out and the old colonels decide to get out their guns and fight a personal and exclusive civil war against me.

 

Martin's second section follows Gabo from his European wanderings and his time in Paris in 1955–57 through his marriage in 1958 to Mercedes Barcha—the astute and patient sweetheart of his adolescence—and his adventures in New York as a reporter for
Prensa Latina
, the Cuban news agency created after Castro's triumph, up to the year 1961, when he settled for good in Mexico, a hospitable country (happily authoritarian, anti-imperialist, and orderly, at least in that era). There his two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo, were born, and there for the first time he made a decent and reliable living at a couple of American advertising agencies (J. Walter Thompson and McCann-Erickson) and successfully directed two commercial magazines (
La familia
and
Sucesos para todos
). He also tried his luck in the film business and published
No One Writes to the Colonel.
In Mexico he renewed old friendships (especially with Álvaro Mutis) and started many new ones, no less fecund and long-lasting (for example, with Carlos Fuentes), bought his own house and car, enrolled his sons in the American School, was menaced by writer's block, feared being a victim of a “good situation,” and finally, in 1967, at the age of forty, surprised generations of readers with the appearance of
One Hundred Years of Solitude
.

“Everyone has three lives, a public life, a private life, a secret life,” García Márquez warned his biographer. Beyond the notable revelation about the writer's grandfather, Martin's book unravels only a single episode in García Márquez's “secret life”: his relationship in Paris—before his marriage—with an aspiring Spanish actress. Stormy and ill-fated, this affair was important not only in itself but as inspiration for
No One Writes to the Colonel
and the disturbing short story “The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow.” But other aspects of his “secret life” remain in the shadows. Why did he suddenly break off his relationship with
Prensa Latina
? Only the Cuban archives, if they are ever opened, can shed light on that. What was the arc of his long epistolary engagement to Mercedes Barcha? Impossible to know. Both claim to have burned their letters. How did his ties to his fellow writers evolve? Except for the letters exchanged with Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza and a few others, the available literary archives were not consulted by Martin.

The account of the European “private life” of the bohemian writer, who loved to sing and dance, contains some moving anecdotes. Is it true that he “collected bottles and old newspapers and one day had to beg in the Metro”? As Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza points out, a deeper truth is that García Márquez seemed totally uninterested in the experience of Europe. He lived in an insular mode, immersed in his own projects. According to Martin, “it is striking how much of Europe East and West he managed to see,” but García Márquez himself says, “I just drifted for two years, I just attended to my emotions, my inner world.”