No One Writes to the Colonel

Written in a Latin Quarter attic

In 1955 García Márquez was a reporter in Europe for the Bogotá newspaper El Espectador. He then stayed on as a freelance journalist based in Paris until 1957. Colombia's military ruler, General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, shut down El Espectador and El Independiente, the papers he wrote for. He was left poor and out of work.

He lived on the seventh floor of the Hôtel de Flandre, at 16 rue Cujas in the Latin Quarter. The room was a tiny attic with no heating. The landlady, Madame Lacroix, let him fall behind on the rent without complaint.

In June 1956 he was working on another novel, the book later published as La mala hora (In Evil Hour). The colonel's story pushed in. He put the unfinished draft in a drawer and started on the old man waiting for his pension.

He was waiting for money himself, a check from friends in Barranquilla that never came. In a 1977 interview he described the routine. He would walk down seven floors with no elevator, find no letter, climb back up and write another page. Somewhere along the way he realized the letter would never come.

He wrote it in winter, he said, with snow outside and a coat on in the cold room. He still wanted the book to feel as hot as Aracataca, the town where he was born.

His grandfather's pension

The story started with his grandfather, Colonel Nicolás Márquez, a Liberal veteran of the Thousand Days' War. He died still waiting for the pension the Conservative government owed him. The Nobel biography says he grew up with his mother's parents, and that his grandfather was a colonel from the civil war at the turn of the century.

He mixed that memory with another. As a young reporter for El Heraldo in Barranquilla, he had seen a sad old man waiting for a boat at the market with silent anxiety. Years later in Paris, waiting for a letter himself, he recognized the feeling.

He had always thought the pension story would make a comedy. Then his own money ran out in Paris, and the comedy turned into something darker.

Eleven drafts and a rooster

García Márquez rewrote the book many times. In 1977 he said nine times. In 1985 he said eleven drafts. In one early version the colonel wrings the rooster's neck and makes a stew of it.

He threw that ending out. Killing the rooster was an easy way out for the writer, he said, but it did not fit a colonel who was a fighter prepared to hold out to the end.

Critics have read the rooster as a symbol of the people's struggle. García Márquez disagreed. He told the story of his son at a school in Mexico, who was asked what the rooster symbolized. The boy answered that, according to the author, the rooster was just a rooster, and he failed the question.

For years he called this his best book. He changed his mind only after Chronicle of a Death Foretold came out in 1981.

From a magazine to books in Medellín and Paris

He finished the book in Paris in 1957 and sent it to his friend Germán Vargas. Vargas passed it to Jorge Gaitán Durán, who published it in the magazine Mito in the May–June 1958 issue.

The book edition came about by chance. At a hotel pool in Barranquilla, the Medellín publisher Alberto Aguirre offered him 500 pesos for the story that had run in Mito, and García Márquez sold on the spot. Aguirre Editor published it in Medellín in 1961.

The French translation arrived before the English one. The Paris publisher Julliard brought out Daniel Verdier's translation, Pas de lettre pour le colonel, in 1963. J. S. Bernstein's English translation followed from Harper & Row in 1968, together with the stories of Big Mama's Funeral.