Gabriel García Márquez Read online

  In other ways, too, García Márquez is a rare phenomenon. He is a serious but popular writer—like Dickens, Hugo or Hemingway—who sells millions of books and whose celebrity approaches that of sportsmen, musicians or film stars. In 1982 he was the most popular winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in recent times. In Latin America, a region that has never been the same since García Márquez invented the small community of “Macondo,” he is known everywhere by his nickname, “Gabo,” like silent cinema’s “Charlie” or soccer’s “Pele.” Although one of the four or five biggest personalities of the twentieth century in his continent, he was born in the proverbial “middle of nowhere,” in a town of less than ten thousand mainly illiterate inhabitants, with unpaved streets, no drainage and a name, Aracataca, aka “Macondo,” which makes people laugh when they first hear it (though its closeness to “Abracadabra” should perhaps make them cautious). Very few famous writers from any part of the world have come from such a small-town background, and yet fewer have lived their era, both culturally and politically, as fully and intimately as this one.

  García Márquez is now a wealthy man, with seven homes in glamorous locations in five different countries. In recent decades he has been able to demand (or, more usually, refuse) $50,000 for a half-hour interview. He has been able to place his articles in almost any newspaper in the world and receive huge sums for them. Like those of Shakespeare, the titles of his books appear in ghostly fashion in headlines all over the planet (“one hundred hours of solitude,” “chronicle of a catastrophe foretold,” “autumn of the dictator,” “love in the time of money”). He has been forced to confront and endure an astonishing level of celebrity for half a lifetime. His favours and his friendship have been sought by the rich, the famous and the powerful—François Mitterrand, Felipe González, Bill Clinton, most of the recent presidents of Colombia and Mexico, and many other celebrities besides. Yet despite his dazzling literary and financial success, he has remained throughout his life a man of the progressive Left, a defender of good causes and a constructor of positive enterprises, including the founding of influential institutes of journalism and film. At the same time his close friendship with another political leader, Fidel Castro, has been a constant source of controversy and criticism for more than thirty years.

  I have been working on this biography for seventeen years.* Contrary to what I was told by everyone I spoke to in the early days (“You’ll never get to see him and if you do he won’t cooperate”), I got to meet my man within a few months of starting work and, although he could not be said to have been brimming with enthusiasm (“Why do you want to write a biography? Biographies mean death”), he was friendly, hospitable and tolerant. Indeed, whenever I have been asked if my biography is an authorized one my reply has always been the same: “No, it is not an authorized biography, it’s a tolerated biography.” Yet to my mingled surprise and gratitude, in 2006 García Márquez himself told the world’s press that I am his “official” biographer. Probably that makes me his only officially tolerated biographer! It has been an extraordinary privilege.

  As is well known, the relationship between biographer and biographee is invariably a difficult one, but I have been extremely fortunate. As a professional journalist and a writer who himself uses the lives of those he has known in the elaboration of his fictions, García Márquez has been forbearing, to say the least. When I first met him in Havana in December 1990, he said that he would go along with my proposal on one condition: “Don’t make me do your work.” I think he would agree that I have not made him do my work and he has responded by helping when I have really needed his assistance. I have carried out some three hundred interviews in order to produce this biography, many of them with crucial interlocutors who are no longer with us, but I am aware that Fidel Castro and Felipe González might not have been among the list if “Gabo” had not given some sign to say that I was “OK.” I hope he still thinks I am OK now that he is in a position to read the book. He has always declined to give me the kind of “heart to heart” that biographers inevitably dream of, on the grounds that such interaction is “indecent,” yet we must have spent a total of one full month together at different times and in different places over the past seventeen years, in private and in public, and I believe that few other people have heard some of the things that he has said to me. Yet he has never tried to influence me in any way and he has always said, with the combined ethic and cynicism of the born journalist: “Just write what you see; whatever you write, that is what I will be.”

  This biography was researched in Spanish, the works all read in Spanish, most of the interviews conducted in Spanish, yet it has been written and is now published in English (though the Spanish translation will appear in 2009). Moreover, it goes without saying that the more normal procedure is for a biography, especially the first complete biography, to be written by a compatriot who knows the country of origin as well as the subject himself and who understands the smallest nuances of every communication. That is not my case—besides, García Márquez is an international figure, not just a famous Colombian—but, as the man himself, perhaps not altogether sincerely, once sighed when my name was mentioned in conversation: “Oh well, I suppose every self-respecting writer should have an English biographer.” I suspect that my only virtue in his eyes was my obvious lifelong love for and attachment to the continent in which he was born.

  It has not been easy to find my way through the multiple versions that García Márquez has given of almost all the important moments in his life. Like Mark Twain, with whom he can profitably be compared, he loves a good yarn, not to mention a tall tale, and he likes a story to be satisfyingly rounded off, not least the formative incidents that make up the story of his own life; at the same time he is also playful, antiacademic and strongly in favour of mystification and downright mischief-making when it comes to putting journalists or professors off the scent. This is part of what he calls his mamagallismo (more of this later; for the moment one may discreetly translate it with the British term “piss-taking”). Even when you can be sure that any particular anecdote is based on something that “really” happened, you still cannot pin it down to a single shape because you find that he has told most of the well-known stories about his life in several different versions, all of which have at least an element of truth. I have personal experience of this mythomania, by which I too have become joyfully infected (in my own life, though not, I hope, in this book). The García Márquez family were always impressed by my tenacity and preparedness to engage in the kinds of investigation to which only mad dogs and Englishmen would resort. Thus I have found it quite impossible to kill off the myth which García Márquez himself has disseminated, and evidently believes, to the effect that I—and this is apparently characteristic of my manias—once spent a rain-drenched night on a bench in the square at Aracataca in order to “soak up the atmosphere” of the town in which my subject was, reputedly, born.

  After so many years I can hardly believe that the book finally exists and that I am here writing its preface. Many burned-out biographers much more illustrious than I have concluded that the time and effort invested in such a labour are not worth the candle and that only the foolish and the deluded would begin such a task, led on, perhaps, by the possibility of communing and identifying with the great, the good or the merely famous. I might have been tempted to agree with this conclusion; but if ever a subject was worth investing a quarter of one’s own life in, it would undoubtedly be the extraordinary life and career of Gabriel García Márquez.

  Gerald Martin, July 2008

  * I had reached over two thousand pages and six thousand footnotes when I finally realized that perhaps I would never finish the project. What lies before the reader, then, is the abbreviated version of a much longer biography, almost completed, which I intend to publish in a few more years, if life is kind. But it seemed sensible to delay that gargantuan task and to distil my discoveries and such knowledge as I have accumulated into a brief, relati
vely compact narrative while the subject of this work, now a man past eighty, is still alive and in a position to read it.

  PROLOGUE

  From Origins Obscure

  1800–1899

  ONE HOT, ASPHYXIATING MORNING in the early 1930s, in the tropical coastal region of northern Colombia, a young woman gazed through the window of the United Fruit Company train at the passing banana plantations. Row after row after row, shimmering from sun into shade. She had taken the overnight steamer, besieged by mosquitoes, across the great Ciénaga swamp from the Caribbean port city of Barranquilla, and now she was travelling down through the Banana Zone to the small inland town of Aracataca where, several years before, she had left her first-born child Gabriel with her ageing parents when he was still a baby. Luisa Santiaga Márquez Iguarán de García had given birth to three more children since that time and this was her first return to Aracataca since her husband, Gabriel Eligio García, took her away to live in Barranquilla, leaving little “Gabito” in the care of his maternal grandparents, Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes de Márquez and Colonel Nicolás Márquez Mejía. Colonel Márquez was a veteran of the bitter Thousand Day War fought at the turn of the century, a lifelong stalwart of the Colombian Liberal Party and, latterly, the local treasurer of the municipality of Aracataca.

  The Colonel and Doña Tranquilina had angrily disapproved of Luisa Santiaga’s courtship with the handsome García. He was not only a poor man, and an outsider, but also illegitimate, a half-breed and perhaps worst of all, a fervent supporter of the detested Conservative Party. He had been the telegraphist of Aracataca for just a few days when his eyes first fell upon Luisa, one of the most marriageable young women in the town. Her parents sent her away to stay with relatives for the best part of a year to get the wild infatuation with the seductive newcomer out of her head, but to no avail. As for García himself, if he was hoping that his marriage to the Colonel’s daughter would make his fortune he was disappointed. The bride’s parents had refused to attend the wedding he eventually managed to organize in the regional capital of Santa Marta and he had lost his position in Aracataca.

  What was Luisa thinking as she gazed out of the train window? Perhaps she had forgotten how uncomfortable this journey was going to be. Was she thinking of the house where she had spent her childhood and youth? How everyone would react to her visit? Her parents. Her aunts. The two children she hadn’t seen for so long: Gabito, the eldest, and Margarita, his younger sister, also now living with her grandparents. The train whistled as it passed the small banana plantation named Macondo which she remembered from her own childhood. A few minutes later Aracataca came into view. And there was her father the Colonel waiting in the shade … How would he greet her?

  No one knows what he said. But we do know what happened next.1 Back in the old Colonel’s Big House, the women were preparing little Gabito for a day he would never forget: “She’s here, your mother has come, Gabito. She’s here. Your mother. Can’t you hear the train?” The sound of the whistle arrived once more from the nearby station.

  Gabito would say later that he had no memory of his mother. She had left him before he could retain any memories at all. And if she had any meaning now, it was as a sudden absence never truly explained by his grandparents, an anxiety, as if something was wrong. With him, perhaps. Where was grandfather? Grandfather always made everything clear. But his grandfather had gone out.

  Then Gabito heard them arrive at the other end of the house. One of his aunts came and took his hand. Everything was like a dream. “Your mamma’s in there,” the aunt said. So he went in and after a moment he saw a woman he didn’t know, at the far end of the room, sitting with her back to the shuttered window. She was a beautiful lady, with a straw hat and a long loose dress, with sleeves down to her wrists. She was breathing heavily in the midday heat. And he was filled with a strange confusion, because she was a lady he liked the look of but he realized at once that he didn’t love her in the way they had told him you should love your mother. Not like he loved grandpa and grandma. Not even like he loved his aunts.

  The lady said, “Aren’t you going to give your mother a hug?” And then she took him to her and embraced him. She had an aroma he would never forget. He was less than a year old when his mother left him. Now he was almost seven. So only now, because she had come back, did he understand it: his mother had left him. And Gabito would never get over it, not least because he could never quite bring himself to face what he felt about it. And then, quite soon, she left him again.

  LUISA SANTIAGA, the Colonel’s wayward daughter, and mother of little Gabito, had been born on 25 July 1905, in the small town of Barrancas, between the wild territory of the Guajira and the mountainous province of Padilla, to the east of the Sierra Nevada.2 At the time of Luisa’s birth her father was a member of a defeated army, the army of the Liberal Party vanquished by the Conservatives in Colombia’s great civil war, the War of a Thousand Days (1899–1902).

  Nicolás Ricardo Márquez Mejía, Gabriel García Márquez’s grandfather, was born on 7 February 1864 in Riohacha, Guajira, a sunbaked, salty, dusty city on the north Atlantic coast of Colombia and diminutive capital of its wildest region, home to the redoubtable Guajiro Indians and refuge for smugglers and traffickers from colonial times to the present day. Little is known about Márquez’s early life except that he received only an elementary education but made the most of it and was sent westward, for some time, to live with his cousin Francisca Cimodosea Mejía in the town of El Carmen de Bolívar, south of the majestic colonial city of Cartagena. There the two cousins were brought up by Nicolás’s maternal grandmother Josefa Francisca Vidal. Later, after Nicolás had spent a few years wandering the entire coastal region, Francisca would join his family and live under his roof, a spinster for the rest of her life. Nicolás lived for a time in Camarones, a town by the Guajira shoreline some fifteen miles from Riohacha. Legend has it that he was a precocious participant in one or more of the civil wars that regularly punctuated nineteenth-century life in Colombia. When he returned to Riohacha at the age of seventeen he became a silversmith under the tutelage of his father, Nicolás del Carmen Márquez Hernández. It was the traditional family occupation. Nicolás had completed his primary education but his artisan family could not afford for him to go further.

  Nicolás Márquez was productive in other ways: within two years of his return to the Guajira, the reckless teenage traveller had fathered two illegitimate sons—“natural sons,” they are called in Colombia—José María, born in 1882, and Carlos Alberto, born in 1884.3 Their mother was an eccentric Riohacha spinster called Altagracia Valdeblánquez, connected to an influential Conservative family and much older than Nicolás himself. We do not know why Nicolás did not marry her. Both sons were given their mother’s surname; both were brought up as staunch Catholics and Conservatives, despite Nicolás’s fervent Liberalism, since the custom in Colombia until quite recently was for children to adopt the political allegiance of their parents and the boys had been brought up not by Nicolás but by their mother’s family; and both would fight against the Liberals, and thus against their father, in the War of a Thousand Days.

  Just a year after the birth of Carlos Alberto, Nicolás, aged twenty-one, married a girl his own age, Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes, who had been born, also in Riohacha, on 5 July 1863. Although Tranquilina was born illegitimate, her surnames were those of two leading Conservative families of the region. Both Nicolás and Tranquilina were, visibly, descendants of white European families and although Nicolás, an incorrigible Casanova, would dally with women of every race and colour, the essential hierarchies from light to dark would be implicitly or explicitly maintained in all their dealings both in the home and in the street. And many things were best left in obscurity.

  And thus we begin to grope our way back into the dark genealogical labyrinths so familiar to readers of Gabriel García Márquez’s best-known novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. In that book he goes out of his way not to help his readers
with reminders about the details of family relationships: usually only first names are given and these repeat themselves obsessively down through the generations. This becomes part of the work’s unspoken challenge to the reader but it undoubtedly reproduces the confusions and anxieties experienced by its author when, as a child, he tried to make sense of the tangled historical networks of family lore.

  Take Nicolás, who was born legitimate but brought up not by his parents but by his grandmother. Of course there was nothing unusual about this in a frontier society underpinned for security by the concept of the extended family. As we have seen, he had two illegitimate sons before he was twenty. There was nothing unusual about that either. Immediately thereafter he married Tranquilina, like Altagracia, a woman from a higher class than himself, although, to balance things up, she was illegitimate. Furthermore, she was also his first cousin; this too was common in Colombia and remains more common in Latin America than most other parts of the world though of course, like illegitimacy, it still carries a stigma. The couple had the same grandmother, Juanita Hernández, who travelled from Spain to Colombia in the 1820s, and Nicolás descended from her original legitimate marriage whereas Tranquilina came from her second, illegitimate relationship, after she was widowed, with a Creole born in Riohacha called Blas Iguarán who was ten years her junior. And so it transpired that only two generations later two of Juanita’s grandchildren, Nicolás Márquez Mejía, and Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes, first cousins, were married in Riohacha. Even though none of their surnames coincided, the fact was that his father and her mother were both children, half-brother and half-sister, of the adventurous Juanita. You could never be sure who you were marrying. And such sinfulness might bring damnation or, worse—as the Buendía family members fear throughout One Hundred Years of Solitude—a child with a pig’s tail who would put an end to the family line!