I Will Not Fully Die: A Biography of Gabriel García Márquez

By Conrado Zuluaga

García Márquez left only his words: a dozen novels, a book of his short stories, several unforgettable reports, another book with his speeches, hundreds of interviews and reports, five volumes of his newspaper columns, and according to some reports, an unpublished novel. In all of them there are brilliant episodes that provide even the most unsuspecting reader with many satisfying moments. The best, most meaningful and lasting memory, and the most valuable tribute to someone who throughout his life firmly repeated, “I write so that my friends love me more,” is by reading his work. Translation: Kieran Tapsell, Lidia Bilbatua. Digital co-edition: Luna Libros, eLibros

• Language: English
• Publisher: eLibros
• Release date: Mar 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9789585634091

Book preview

Onetti

My Vocation is that

of a Magician

My name, Señor, is Gabriel García Márquez. I’m sorry: I don’t like the name either because it is a string of common names with which I’ve never been able to identify. I was born in Aracataca, Colombia. My sign is Pisces and my wife Mercedes. Those are the two most important things that have happened to me in life, because I’ve been able to survive by writing, at least until now.

These are the first lines of one of the less popular pages written by García Márquez. Maybe that’s because they are not found in any of his famous novels or his well-known books of short stories, and not even in his memoirs. They are in the book Retratos y autorretratos (Portraits and Self-portraits) (1974), published in Buenos Aires, by the photographers Sara Facio and Alicia D’Amico. The portraits are those created by the photographers, and the self-portraits are by the very fashionable Latin American writers of that time. Some preferred not to write anything, like Juan Rulfo, and his page appeared blank; others relied on texts from their books, like Octavio Paz; but several of them, like Juan Carlos Onetti and Gabriel García Márquez, wrote their own uninhibited biographical sketches. The self-portrait of the Aratacataca telegraphist’s son continues:

I am a writer because I’m shy. My true vocation is that of a magician, but I become so flustered trying to do tricks that I’ve had to take refuge in the solitude of literature. Both activities, in any case, lead to the only thing that has interested me since I was a child: that my friends would love me more.

Even though authors lie all the time, those who have closely followed Gabriel García Márquez’s career will only have to remember some of his repeated statements to understand that the writer in this case tells the truth.  When drawing on the walls of the silversmith’s workshop, being a magician in childhood, a pianist or accordion player later in adolescence, an encyclopedia seller, a poet, a filmmaker, a storyteller or writer of fables, one of his strongest motivations has always been that well-defined aspiration: that his friends would love him more.

One of the events that best revealed the Colombian writer’s temperament and that would define an unwavering course of conduct in his subsequent public career took place in Caracas. The author arrived in the Venezuelan capital at the end of August 1968, for the purpose of accompanying Mario Vargas Llosa at the reception ceremony for the Rómulo Gallegos prize. A lecture by the Colombian writer was included as part of the program. His bubbling popularity — as well as that of Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), which in fourteen months had already gone into eight editions — went beyond anyone’s predictions. When García Márquez appeared before the audience, he discovered that he had nothing to say to the people who had filled the room or, worse, that he wasn’t even convinced himself about what he intended to say. He was completely unaware of how this kind of appearance worked. In response to the most elementary and specific questions, he answered with a story that could go on and on indefinitely. Then, in his eagerness to control the situation that was getting out of hand — a circumstance that would never happen again — he reversed the terms of the relationship, and questioned the public that overflowed the room:

 "[...] I can tell you, for example, how I started writing. It never occurred to me that I could be a writer, but in my student days, Eduardo Zalamea Borda, in charge of the El Espectador literary supplement in Bogotá, published a note saying that the new generations of writers were not worth a pinch of salt, and there was no new storyteller or novelist on the horizon." And he concluded by saying that he was criticized because in his newspaper, he only published pieces by old and well-known writers, and nothing by young people. The truth is, he said, there are no young writers. A feeling of solidarity with my own generation then came to me, and I decided to write a story, if for no other reason than to silence Eduardo Zalamea Borda who was my great friend, or at least later became my great friend. I sat down, wrote the story, and sent it to El Espectador. On the following Sunday, I received a second shock when I opened the newspaper and found my story took up a whole page, with a note by Eduardo Zalamea Borda admitting that he had made a mistake and stating that ‘the genius of Colombian literature has risen from this story’, or something similar. This time I really felt sick and I said to myself: ‘What a mess I have made! And now what can I do so that Zalamea Borda doesn’t lose face?’ The only solution was to keep writing." (El Espectador, Bogotá, May 3, 1970).

García Márquez became a writer not as a calling but as a commitment, it can be said, and as a challenge between Eduardo Zalamea and the young university student. Sooner rather than later, the reader will understand that the Colombian writer has been responsible for mixing fact and fiction around his own career to a point where it is impossible to establish the line of separation. Deciding, at any age, to be a writer is like betting on yourself. Making it public is the obvious outcome of the same question. But that’s not the end of this matter. Those who dig around the newspapers of the time will find his story, La tercera resignación (The Third Resignation), on page 8 of the Fin de Semana supplement for Saturday September 13, 1947. What you will not find anywhere in that edition is the apology by the supplement’s editor. There is an apology, but it only appeared a few days later in his column La ciudad y el mundo (The City and the World). And six years later, when the writer won the First Prize of the Colombian Writers and Artists Association with his story Un día después del sábado (A Day after Saturday), Zalamea mentioned him again in his column, in which he maintained that García Márquez was the best Colombian writer in many years.

The confrontation he experienced with the public in Caracas — facing an audience that expected him to talk about himself, to theorize a little about his profession, to give an opinion about the work of his colleagues and to predict the future of literature — led to another decision as important as continuing to write: never again to participate in a lecture or be part of round tables or academic discussions. He would just be a narrator and a storyteller.

"I confess to you — he said thirty years later in La bendita manía de contar (The Blessed Mania of Storytelling) — that for me the heritage of the griots, of the storytellers, of those venerable elders who recite morality tales and the dubious adventures of Las mil y una noches (The Thousand and One Nights) in the Moroccan souqs, that lineage, is the only one that is not doomed to a hundred years of solitude or to suffer the curse of Babel."

Gabriel García Márquez, Gabo, as everyone knows him, both his friends and those who have never spoken to him, was born in 1927 in Aracataca. In his memoirs he explains the origin of the town and its name:

"It was born as a Chimila Indian settlement and entered history on its left foot as a remote district without God or law in the municipality of Ciénaga, more debased than enriched by the banana fever. It bears the name not of a town but of a river: Ara in the Chimila language, and Cataca, the word with which the community recognized its leader. Therefore, we natives do not call it Aracataca but use its correct name: Cataca." (Vivir para contarla (Living to Tell the Tale)).

His parents, Luisa Santiaga Márquez and Gabriel Eligio García, had to overcome the implacable opposition of her parents, Colonel Nicolás Ricardo Márquez Mejía, Papalelo, and Tranquilina Iguarán, Mina, who agreed with primitive obstinacy, as is still the case today in many places, with the idea that every boyfriend is an intruder. This courtship of star-crossed lovers, so well described on one occasion by the novelist, saw her parents erect a fierce fence around her, until they took her away from Aracataca for a trip through the foothills of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. The writer turned this experience into literature in a novel that he published three years after the award of the Nobel Prize, El amor en los tiempos del cólera (Love in the Time of Cholera). Luisa Santiaga is not Fermina Daza, and Gabriel Eligio is not Florentino Ariza, but the difficulties the characters in the novel had to overcome during their first courtship, the hardships they faced during the trip on which Fermina’s father sends his daughter when he finds out about her love for the city’s telegraphist, as well as the form and inventiveness to which the couple resorted to continue having news of each other, are powerfully based on the reality of his parents’ experience.

As it almost always happens in these cases of entrenched love, there is no human power capable of defeating them. It is the same with literature. When Luisa Santiaga and Gabriel Eligio managed to recover the thread of their romance and understood that they would be separated again on his appointment as a telegrapher in Riohacha, they found this intolerable. Monsignor Espejo’s mediation achieved the desired consent, and the couple were married in the cathedral of Santa Marta on June 11, 1926, without the presence of the colonel or his wife. The last misgivings disappeared when the couple announced a few months later that Luisa Santiaga was expecting a child, and Gabriel Eligio ended up accepting that his wife should give birth in her parents’ house:

This was how and where the first of seven boys and four girls was born on Sunday, March 6, 1927, at nine in the morning and in an unseasonable torrential downpour […] I should have been named Olegario, the saint whose day it was, but nobody had the saints’ calendar near at hand, and with a sense of urgency they gave me my father’s first name followed by that of José, the Carpenter, because he was the patron saint of Aracataca and March was his month. Miss Juana de Freytes proposed a third name in memory of the general reconciliation achieved among families and friends with my arrival into the world, but in the formal baptism certificate issued three years later they forgot to include it: Gabriel José de la Concordia. (Living to Tell the Tale).

Childhood can be one of the most useful periods or, at least, one of those preferred by those who, during their working life, are tempted by the mirage of memories to make up stories about their calling, their misfortunes, parental guidance, involvement of neighbours of the same age or the initial and disconcerting turmoil in front of a pretty girl. In October 2002, García Márquez put before the Spanish speaking world the first volume of his memoirs of 580 pages, covering the years between his birth and the trip to Europe as a correspondent for El Espectador, twenty-seven years later. The writer dwells on many events, sometimes with unnecessary repetition. They are experiences that he considers from this old age without remorse as decisive in his personal life and public career: his first aesthetic experience, his terrible fears, his initial frustrations as reader and writer, his follies as an accordion player, or the invincible snatches of nostalgia that forced him to admit to himself that he had no way out. He had to write so as not to die.

The Only Men Were

My Grandfather and Me

García Márquez grew up in his grandparents’ house because his family was dragged along by the entrepreneurial dreams of Gabriel Eligio, who had resigned his job as a telegrapher and was determined to settle in Barranquilla as a self-taught homeopath with his own pharmacy. The grandparents insisted that little Gabriel stayed with them in the security of the house in Aracataca. That’s why for the first seven years of life, he was looked after by his grandfather Papalelo, the colonel of the War of the Thousand Days, who, many years later still carried on his shoulders the remorse of having killed Medardo Pacheco from Barrancas, and by Mina, the grandmother Tranquilina, who always lived surrounded by female relatives, and by her husband’s illegitimate daughters or his brothers, and by the Guajiras who became part of the family’s servants, and who ended up being treated as if they had always been members of the family. A troop of evangelical women (the writer’s description) who were in charge of the kitchen, made the animal shaped sweets, and did the rest of the housework, including looking after the budget, because the Colonel found his business of making fish out of gold more satisfying than money, and because retirement after holding different public offices as a war veteran only formed part of the family’s dreams.

I believe, he wrote in his memoirs, 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. (Living to