Gabriel García Márquez

Aracataca, and the newspaper that sent him away

He was born on 6 March 1927 in Aracataca, a small town in the banana country of Colombia's Caribbean coast, and spent his first years in the house of his grandparents. His grandfather was a colonel who had fought in the Thousand Days' War, the civil war that killed perhaps a hundred thousand Colombians between 1899 and 1902, and who spent the rest of his life waiting for the veteran's pension the government kept promising. His grandmother told him ghost stories in the same tone she used for the price of flour. Both of them, he said later, were the whole of his literary education.[2]

He gave up the law degree he had begun in Bogotá for journalism, wrote for papers in the Caribbean cities of Cartagena and Barranquilla, and by 1954 was a reporter at El Espectador, one of the two great newspapers of the capital. In 1955 he interviewed the only survivor of a Colombian navy destroyer that had lost eight men overboard, and ran the story as a serial: the ship had been carrying smuggled cargo that shifted in heavy weather, which was not what the government had told the country. The navy was a branch of a military government, and the paper had just embarrassed it. In July 1955 El Espectador sent its inconvenient young reporter to Europe as a correspondent.[1]

He filed from Geneva, Rome and Vienna through the autumn, and at the end of 1955 came on to Paris. Then the cable arrived. General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla — the army commander who had seized power in Colombia in 1953 and ruled it until 1957 — had shut El Espectador down. The correspondent had no paper, no salary and no assignment. He cashed in the plane ticket home for the money, and stayed.[1]

The garret on the rue Cujas

The room was in the Hôtel de Flandre, a cheap hotel on the rue Cujas, a short street that runs past the Sorbonne, the old University of Paris, in the Latin Quarter — the university district of the 5th arrondissement, which had absorbed penniless foreign writers for centuries and now absorbed one more. He took an attic room on the top floor. His landlady, seeing that the Colombian upstairs was writing something, let the bill run: the debt reached more than a year's rent before it was settled, and biographers have generally treated her patience as one of the necessary conditions of the book that came out of it.[2]

The poverty was not literary. He returned empty bottles and old newspapers for the deposit money, ate where friends were cooking, and learned which cafés would let a man sit a long time over one coffee. France was in the middle of the Algerian war — the eight-year conflict, from 1954 to 1962, by which Algeria won independence from French rule — and the police were stopping Algerians in the street; more than once they stopped him instead, taking the dark-haired, moustached foreigner for one. He was, by his own account, freezing, hungry and completely happy, because for the first time in his life nobody expected any copy from him.[2]

No One Writes to the Colonel

What he wrote in the attic was a short novel about waiting for money. Its hero is a nameless old colonel in a river town, a veteran of the Thousand Days' War, who has walked to the post office every Friday for fifteen years to collect the pension letter the government has never sent. He and his wife are starving. They own one asset — a fighting cock that belonged to their murdered son — and the novel is the argument about whether to sell it. It ends on a single word of refusal — mierda, "shit" — so blunt that Spanish readers still quote it.[3]

The mechanism of the book is the mechanism of the writer's own life that year: a man in a rented room, checking for a letter with money in it, from a country that has stopped answering. García Márquez rewrote it obsessively, sentence by sentence, and always maintained afterwards that hunger had done the editing — the prose is stripped to nothing, with none of the flood of miracles that would arrive ten years later with One Hundred Years of Solitude and the town of Macondo. He drafted a second novel in the same stretch. They were published as El coronel no tiene quien le escriba ("No One Writes to the Colonel") in 1961 and La mala hora ("In Evil Hour") in 1962, and the Harry Ransom Center, the American archive that now holds his papers, dates both to these Paris years.

He was not alone in the room. Tachia Quintana, a Basque actress from Bilbao living in Paris on odd jobs and small stage parts, was his companion through 1956 and much of 1957; they shared the poverty, quarrelled over the book that would not end, and she became pregnant and lost the child. The relationship broke up in 1957. She never sold her side of it, and the two remained on speaking terms for the rest of his life; his biographer Gerald Martin, who interviewed her, treats that year as the emotional source of the loneliness in the Colonel.[2]

The maestro across the boulevard

In the spring of 1957 he was walking down the Boulevard Saint-Michel, the wide street that runs through the Latin Quarter, when he saw the American novelist Ernest Hemingway, author of The Old Man and the Sea and the model for a generation of plain-spoken writers, on the opposite pavement with his wife, the journalist Mary Welsh. Hemingway was fifty-seven and world-famous; García Márquez was an unpublished reporter with no money. Crossing to introduce himself seemed impossible, and letting him pass seemed worse, so he cupped his hands and shouted the one word across four lanes of traffic.[4]

Master!

¡Maestro!

That was the whole encounter: a shout, a wave, and a friendly goodbye in Spanish. The two never met. He described it twenty-four years later in an essay for The New York Times Book Review, and used it to say what he thought he had taken from Hemingway — not the myth of the hunter and the boxer, but the craftsman's lesson Hemingway called the iceberg principle: a story shows only its surface, and leaves the mass of what the writer knows submerged beneath it. He would apply that discipline to the Colonel and then break it magnificently in the novel that made him famous.[4]

Macondo, and everything after

He left Paris in 1957 for a long trip through Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, then Caracas, where he was working when the Cuban revolution succeeded in 1959. He married Mercedes Barcha in 1958, worked for the Cuban news agency Prensa Latina, and settled in Mexico City in 1961, writing film scripts and advertising copy while the novels sold in the hundreds of copies. In 1965 he stopped everything and wrote for eighteen months. Cien años de soledad — One Hundred Years of Solitude — appeared in Buenos Aires in 1967, and made him, almost overnight, the most widely read living writer in Spanish.[5]

The Swedish Academy gave him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. He went on writing — Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Love in the Time of Cholera, The General in His Labyrinth — kept his reporter's habits and his friendship with Fidel Castro, the communist leader of Cuba, which cost him admirers, and died in Mexico City on 17 April 2014. His archive, some eighty boxes of drafts, notebooks and computer files, went to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, where the record of the Paris years sits at the front of the story: 1955 to 1957, a foreign correspondent without a newspaper, and two novels written in a rented room.[6]