Gabo: The Creation of Gabriel García Márquez

Gabo was... simply... a higher being.

Every time you read one of Gabo's books,

you feel like you want to read more from him.

His charm. His special way of looking at life.

The most famous writer to come out of South America and the whole world.

He is our greatest pride, the greatest that we, Cataqueños, could ever have.

The literary world

is in mourning this afternoon,

as Colombian Nobel prize winner Gabriel García Márquez

has just passed away in Mexico City.

...we, fable weavers, who believe everything,

feel entitled to believe that it is not too late

to undertake the creation of the opposite utopia.

A new and sweeping utopia of life,

where there is no one to decide for others, down to the way they die,

where love is really true and happiness is possible,

and where the families condemned to live one hundred years of solitude

will have, at last and forever,

a second chance on earth.

García Márquez was the first contemporary classic I read.

And One Hundred Years of Solitude was one of the novels

that made me realize that this was what I wanted to do with my life.

No one can be a writer if they're completely satisfied.

All of literature is born from a certain dissatisfaction

with life, with one's life story, with the world as it is,

and writing is an attempt to correct these deficiencies.

How on earth did a boy who came from a small town on the Caribbean coast

end up writing a book that transformed

twentieth century Western literature?

First, one must look for the answers in his childhood.

Gerald Martin has spent two decades researching the details of his life.

It was a small town of between five and ten thousand inhabitants.

It was unknown to the world and it still is.

At the same time, it was going through its most important moment.

The United Fruit Company was everywhere in northern Colombia.

There were Gringos, Jamaicans, people from all over the Caribbean

coming to work in Aracataca.

So obviously, as it was a booming town, there were a lot of quarrels, fights,

a lot of alcohol, brothels, and plenty of violence.

It was a town where lots of things happened.

Macondo, the magical world in his books,

was inspired by Aracataca, where he spent the first nine years of his life.

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad,

Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon

when his father took him to discover ice.

Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses back then,

built on the bank of a river of clear water

that rushed along a bed of massive, white

polished stones that looked like prehistoric eggs.

The world was so new that many things did not have a name,

and, in order to mention them, it was necessary to point at them."

He was born in his grandfather's house.

His mother and her husband, Gabriel Eligio, had been banished.

Her family was one of the wealthiest in Aracataca and they did not approve

of her marriage to someone who was from a "grim" area of northern Colombia.

He was an adventurer, a romantic.

When the boy turned one year,

his parents, Luisa Santiaga and Gabriel Eligio moved to Barranquilla.

She had had another child and took that child with her,

leaving Gabriel behind.

What was that child bound to think?

That he had been, "abandoned."

"It's a recurring dream which persists even now.

What is more, every single day of my life I wake up with the feeling,

real or imaginary, that I have dreamt of myself in that house.

It is not that I have returned to it, but I am there all the same.

My age is unknown and I have no particular reason to be there.

It is as though I had never left that big, old house."

It was the greatest of joys, because when you're a child,

you love big spaces to run, jump and do whatever you want.

Even more so when we knew it was our grandparents' house,

where we could do anything we wanted

because nothing was forbidden there.

When his family moved out, at that moment they left...

They went to work elsewhere, I obviously don't remember exactly where.

Little Gabo was then left under the care of his grandfather and grandmother.

To his grandfather,

he was his little Napoleon, as he called him,

and little Gabo spent a lot of time with him.

My grandfather was a very considerate person,

perhaps due to his lifestyle and his earnest nature.

My grandparents were somewhat cultured,

even without having had a formal university education or anything.

Grandma was superstitious.

She would instill fear in us about everything.

We were all cowardly and easily-frightened.

If anyone suddenly opened an umbrella inside the house,

she would tell them to close it or someone would die.

Little Gabo would ask her why and the question scared her.

He was the darling of the house.

In the afternoon, you would hear

frogs croaking in the garden

and she would tell them: "Come by tomorrow and I'll give you salt."

Because she believed that they were witches.

To me, it was a very strange life.

The women who lived before my grandmother

lived in a supernatural world.

A fantasy world where anything was possible.

Where the most wonderful things were commonplace,

but Grandpa was probably

the most concrete person that I've ever met.

And he told me stories about the Civil War.

The vicissitudes of politics.

He spoke to me as if I were an adult.

So my life was divided between these two worlds.

García Márquez's grandfather,

Colonel Márquez, played a crucial role in the Thousand Days' War,

the civil war between conservatives and liberals,

in the early twentieth century.

It left an incredibly negative legacy in Colombia.

On festivities,

when Gypsies arrived and the fruit vendor, the candy vendor arrived,

the circus would come.

I remember that magician doing prestidigitation things.

He did all these magic tricks that fascinated little Gabriel.

On the one hand, there was fascination for the intense life of the people,

on the other, there were fears and experiences that were hard to explain.

My thesis is that García Márquez thought...

he was buried in his grandfather's house.

Living in a house of elderly people.

A grandfather who talked about death all the time,

a grandmother, who was an extraordinary, superstitious woman,

and, according to whom, there were ghosts everywhere.

It was an eerie, magical childhood, with all those things he made up.

But at the same time, it was also a very bleak childhood.

When he was nine years old, his father came looking for him.

García Márquez went off to live with his parents for the first time.

If Aracataca is Macondo, Sucre is the darker,

more sinister town of his other early works.

My dad, I think, was a regular guy,

he had a license to practice homeopathy,

so he combined this trade with a pharmacy he owned,

and in this way he was more or less capable of supporting the family.

Gabito used to say that he held some sort of suspicion

because my dad was a strong guy.

His father was sometimes away for months

and left the family incredibly impoverished.

García Márquez was his mother's rock.

My mom always liked us to use the right word,

she read us stories from the Sunday paper.

We got to primary school, already knowing how to read

because she had taught us.

When he was a child in Sucre,

I think he was quite innocent.

His father was very different from the Colonel.

His attitude towards sex and relationships with women...

was more typical of what you would expect from the coast.

Isidro Álvarez is a writer from Sucre who shows me around the key places,

and I worried a bit about

the possible rift between fiction

and the reality that I was about to see.

Here in this space, just outside the village,

was the location of La Hora,

the brothel where all young men in this town lost their virginity.

García Márquez was also initiated there, when he was barely twelve years old,

by one of the girls who worked at the place.

In most of his interviews,

he says it was a wonderful thing,

and that he discovered sex and that somehow... "Thanks dad", and so on.

However, there is an interview...

that he later confirmed with me,

where he says it was the scariest thing that ever happened in his life.

Later he had many other far more positive experiences in his teenage years.

Shortly after this radical change in his life,

he heard of the death of his grandfather.

Its impact further strengthened his perpetual horror of death.

I think that was the breaking point, because he later states

that after his grandfather's death, nothing seems to be of interest to him.

When Grandpa died, the world was over, it was completely over,

but the memory of Grandpa, who supported me the most

so that I could do what I most wanted,

which was to express myself. That was Grandpa's memory.

It's hard to forget a grandfather like that.

It would take García Márquez many years

to transform the reality of his childhood into fiction.

The diverse themes and atmospheres in his books,

the war stories, his grandmother's ghosts,

the world, sex, the fear of incest,

all of that is rooted here.

It is very difficult to imagine

what Colombia was like in 1943.

I was in a house

where a sibling was born every year.

Then I realized that leaving was the only possible alternative,

so I decided to go from Barranquilla to Bogota,

to sit for a scholarship exam.

I went on a boat that crossed the Magdalena River.

It normally took eight days to get there,

but if the boat broke down, depending on the time of year,

it could take up to fifteen or sixteen. You never knew.

Besides, you didn't mind if the boat broke down. It was a party.

That boat was at times a two-week party,

where you danced, where García Márquez sang

all the songs he knew by heart, non-stop.

Gabito was a born musician,

I was convinced he had become a singer.

The Magdalena River quickly became a metaphor,

because it was the route he took to get from his culture, his family,

to the distant, cold, remote places of the Colombian capital and its environs.

The coldness and remoteness were not only geographical, they were also existential.