Years of Solitude:the Autobiography of Gabriel GarciaMarquez

Years of solitude
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/...>

The acclaimed autobiography of Gabriel Garcia
Marquez provides a riveting insight into the life
and loves of one of the world’s greatest writers.
In this second set of extracts he recalls scraping
a living as a lonely young journalist on El
Heraldo, losing his virginity in a brothel and
living with the consequences of his father’s serial
philandering

Monday October 13, 2003
The Guardian

That night Alfonso told me he had spoken to the
management of the paper and they liked the idea of a new
columnist, as long as he was good but without too many
pretensions. In any case, they could not resolve
anything until after the New Year holiday. And so I
stayed with the pretext of the job, even though they
might tell me no in February.

That was how my first piece was published on the
editorial page of El Heraldo in Barranquilla on January
5 1950. I did not want to sign my name so that I would
have the cure ready in case things did not work out,
which is what had happened at El Universal. I did not
have to think twice about the pseudonym: Septimus, taken
from Septimus Warren Smith, Virginia Woolf’s deluded
character in Mrs Dalloway. The title of the column - La
Jirafa [The Giraffe] - was the secret nickname I alone
knew for my only partner at the dances in Sucre.

It seemed to me that the January winds blew harder than
ever that year, and you almost could not walk into them
on the streets they castigated until dawn. The topic of
conversation when you woke was the devastation caused by
the mad winds during the night, when they carried away
dreams and henhouses and turned sheets of zinc from the
roofs into flying guillotines.

Today I think those wild winds swept away the remains of
a sterile past and opened the doors to a new life for
me. My relationship with the group was no longer based
only on pleasure and became a professional partnership.
At first we commented on the subjects we planned to
write about or exchanged observations that were not at
all doctoral, though they were not to be forgotten.

The definitive one for me came one morning when I went
into the Japy as German Vargas was finishing his silent
reading of La Jirafa, cut out of that day’s paper. The
others in the group sat around the table waiting for his
verdict with a kind of reverential terror that made the
smoke in the room even denser. When he finished, without
even looking at me, German ripped it into pieces, did
not say a single word, and mixed the scraps of paper
into the trash of cigarette butts and burned matches in
the ashtray. No one said anything, the mood at the table
did not change, and the episode was never commented on.
But the lesson is still useful to me when out of
laziness or haste I am assaulted by the temptation to
write a paragraph just to get out of a difficult
situation.

At the cheap hotel where I lived for almost a a year,
the owners began to treat me like a member of the
family. My only fortune at the time consisted of my
historic sandals, two changes of clothing that I washed
in the shower, and the leather briefcase I had stolen
from the most exclusive tearoom in Bogota during the
disturbances of April 9. I carried it with me everywhere
with the originals of whatever I was writing, which was
the only thing I had to lose. I would not have risked
leaving it under seven locks and keys in the armoured
vault of a bank. The only person to whom I had entrusted
it during my first nights there was Lacides, the
secretive hotel porter, who accepted it as security for
the price of my room. He gave intense scrutiny to the
strips of typewritten paper entwined in corrections and
put the briefcase away in the drawer of the counter. I
ransomed it the next day at the time I had promised and
continued meeting my payments with so much rigour that
he would accept it as a pledge for as many as three
successive nights. This became so serious an
understanding that sometimes I would leave it on the
counter without saying anything more than good evening,
and take the key down from the board myself and go up to
my room.

German was always aware of my needs, to the point of
knowing if I did not have a place to sleep, and he would
slip me the peso and a half for a bed. I never knew how
he knew. Thanks to my good behaviour I became close to
the hotel personnel, to the point where the little
whores would lend me their own soap for my shower.
Presiding over life at the command post, with her
sidereal breasts and calabash cranium, was the hotel’s
owner and mistress, Catalina la Grande [Catherine the
Great]. Her full-time man, the mulatto Jonas San
Vicente, had been a deluxe trumpet player until his
gold-filled teeth were knocked out in a mugging meant to
steal everything he had. Battered and without the wind
to play, he had to change professions and could find
nothing better for his six-inch tool than the golden bed
of Catalina la Grande. She too had an intimate treasure
that in two years helped her to climb from miserable
nights on the river docks to the throne of a great
madam. I had the luck to become familiar with the
cleverness and free hand of both in making their friends
happy. But they never understood why I so often did not
have the peso and a half to sleep, and yet very elegant
people came to pick me up in official limousines.

Another happy event of those days was that I became the
only co-pilot of Mono Guerra, a taxi driver so blond he
seemed albino, and so intelligent and good-natured he
had been elected honorary councilman without running for
office. His dawns in the red-light district were like
movies, because he himself took charge of enriching them
– and at times making them crazy - with inspired
detours. He would let me know when he had a slow night,
and we would spend it together in the lunatic redlight
district where our fathers and the fathers of their
fathers had learned how to make us.

I never could discover why, in the middle of so simple a
life, I sank without warning into an unexpected apathy.
My novel-in-progress - La Casa - begun some six months
earlier, seemed like an uninspired farce to me. I talked
about it more than I wrote it, and in reality the small
amount of coherent writing I had were fragments that I
published earlier and later in La Jirafa and Crónica
when I did not have a topic. In the solitude of my
weekends, when the others took refuge in their houses, I
was lonelier than my left hand in the empty city. My
poverty was absolute and I had the timidity of a quail,
which I tried to counteract with insufferable arrogance
and brutal frankness. I felt I did not belong anywhere,
and even certain acquaintances made me aware of it. This
was most critical in the newsroom at El Heraldo, where I
would write for as many as 10 hours straight in a remote
corner without talking to anyone, enveloped in the dense
smoke from the rough cigarettes I smoked without pause
in unrelieved solitude. I wrote at top speed, often
until daybreak, on strips of newsprint that I carried
everywhere in my leather briefcase.

In one of my many acts of carelessness in those days I
left it in a taxi, and I understood this without
bitterness as one more dirty trick played on me by my
bad luck. I made no effort to recover it, but Alfonso
Fuenmayor, alarmed by my negligence, wrote and published
a note at the end of my column: "Last Saturday a
briefcase was left in an automobile for hire. In view of
the fact that the owner of the briefcase and the author
of this column are, coincidentally, the same person,
both of us would be grateful if the person who has it
would be kind enough to communicate with either one of
us. The briefcase contains absolutely no objects of
value: only unpublished ’jirafas’." Two days later
someone left my rough drafts at the porter’s office at
EI Heraldo, without the briefcase and with three
spelling errors corrected in green ink in a very fine
hand.

My daily salary was just enough to pay for my room, but
what mattered to me least in those days was the abyss of
poverty. On the many occasions when I could not pay for
it, I would go to read in the Cafe Roma as if I were
what in reality I was: a solitary man adrift in the
night on the Paseo Bolivar. Anyone I knew would receive
a distant greeting from me, if I deigned to look at him,
and I would walk along to my habitual place, where I
often read until I was startled by the sun. For even
then I was still an insatiable reader without any
systematic formation. A reader above all of poetry, even
bad poetry, because even in the worst of spirits I was
convinced that sooner or later bad poetry leads to good.

In my pieces for La Jirafa I showed a great sensitivity
to popular culture, in contrast to my stories, which
seemed more like Kafkaesque riddles written by someone
who did not know what country he was living in. But the
truth of my soul was that the drama of Colombia reached
me like a remote echo and moved me only when it spilled
over into rivers of blood. I would light one cigarette
without finishing the one before, I would breathe in the
smoke with the longing for life seen in asthmatics
gulping down air, and the three packs I consumed each
day were evident on my nails and in an old dog’s cough
that disrupted my youth. In short, I was shy and sad,
like a good Caribbean, and so jealous of my intimate
life that I would answer any question about it with a
rhetorical digression. I was convinced my bad luck was
congenital and irremediable, above all with women and
with money, but I did not care, because I believed I did
not need good luck in order to write well. I did not
care about glory, or money, or old age, because I was
sure I was going to die very young, and in the street.

’I felt a delicious terror’

During that first vacation in Sucre my father had the
strange idea of preparing me for business. "Just in
case," he told me. The first thing was to teach me how
to collect pharmacy bills at people’s houses. One day he
sent me to collect several at La Hora, a brothel without
prejudices on the outskirts of town.

I went up to the half-closed door of a room and I saw
one of the women from the house, barefoot and wearing a
slip that did not cover her thighs, taking a nap on an
air mattress. Before I could speak to her she sat up,
looked at me half-asleep, and asked me what I wanted. I
told her I had a message from my father for Don Eligio
Molina, the proprietor. But instead of giving me
directions she told me to come in and bar the door, and
with an index finger that said everything she signaled
to me: "Come here."

As I approached, her heavy breathing filled the room
like a river in flood, until she grasped my arm with her
right hand and slipped her left inside my fly. I felt a
delicious terror.

"So you’re the son of the doctor with the little drops,"
she said, as she handled me inside my trousers with five
agile fingers that felt like 10. She took off my
trousers and did not stop whispering warm words in my
ear as she pulled her slip over her head and lay face up
on the bed wearing only her red-flowered panties. "This
is something you have to take off," she told me. "It’s
your duty as a man."

I undid the button but in my haste I could not remove
them, and she had to help me by extending her legs and
making a swimmer’s rapid movement. Then she lifted me by
my armpits and put me on top of her in the academic
missionary position. The rest she did on her own, until
I died alone on top of her, splashing in the onion soup
of her filly’s thighs.

She lay in silence, on her side, staring into my eyes,
and I looked back at her with the hope of beginning
again, this time without fear and with more time. All of
a sudden she said she would not charge me the fee of two
pesos for her services because I had not come prepared.
Then she lay on her back and scrutinised my face.

"Besides," she said, "you’re Luis Enrique’s big brother,
aren’t you? You have the same voice."

I was innocent enough to ask her how she knew him.
"Don’t be an idiot," she said with a laugh. "I even have
a pair of his shorts here that I had to wash for the
last time."

It seemed an exaggeration considering my brother’s age,
but when she showed them to me I realised it was true.
Then she jumped out of bed naked, with a balletic grace,
and dressed.

"It’s your first time, isn’t it?"

My heart skipped a beat.

"What do you mean?" I lied. "I’ve done it at least seven
times."

"Anyway," she said, "you ought to tell your brother to
teach you a couple of things."

My initiation triggered a vital force in me, and I
wondered how many times I would be able to get two pesos
so I could go back to her. My brother Luis Enrique burst
his sides laughing at the idea that someone our age
would have to pay for something that two people did at
the same time and made them both happy.

’Yourpapahas ason by another woman’

What I perceived in the air was something much more
dense. My mother seemed to care only about the health of
Jaime, her youngest, who had not managed to overcome his
premature birth. She spent most of the day lying with
him in her bedroom hammock, oppressed by sadness and
humiliating heat, and the house began to resent her
neglect. My brothers and sisters seemed to have no
supervision. The order of our meals had relaxed so much
that we ate without schedule, whenever we were hungry.
My father, the most home-loving of men, spent the day
contemplating the square from the pharmacy and the
evenings playing idle games at the billiard club. One
day I could not bear the tension any longer. I lay down
next to my mother in the hammock, as I had not been able
to do when I was a child, and asked her what the mystery
was that we breathed in along with the air in the house.
She swallowed an entire sigh so that her voice would not
tremble and opened her heart to me: "Your papa has a son
by another woman."

From the relief I detected in her voice, I realised the
disquiet with which she had been waiting for my
question. She had discovered the truth through the
clairvoyance of jealousy, when a young maid came home
filled with excitement because she had seen Papa talking
on the phone in the telegraph office. A jealous woman
did not need to know anything else. It was the only
telephone in town, employed only for long-distance calls
arranged ahead of time, and it had uncertain delays and
minutes so expensive that it was used only in cases of
extreme gravity. Each call, no matter how simple,
aroused a malicious alarm in the community of the
square. And so when Papa came home my mother watched him
without saying anything to him, until he tore up a piece
of paper he was carrying in his pocket that was the
announcement of a judicial complaint because of a
professional abuse. My mother waited for the chance to
ask him point blank whom he had been talking to on the
telephone. The question was so revealing that my papa
could not find an immediate answer more credible than
the truth:

"I was talking to a lawyer."

"I know that already," said my mother. "What I need is
for you to tell me about it with the frankness I
deserve."

My mother admitted afterwards that she was the one who
was terrified at the can of worms she might have opened
without realising it, for if he dared tell her the truth
it was because he thought she already knew everything.
Or that he would have to tell her everything.

That was the case. Papa confessed that he had received
notification of a criminal complaint against him for
having abused in his consulting room a sick woman whom
he had drugged with an injection of morphine. It must
have happened in a forgotten jurisdiction where he had
spent brief periods of time to attend patients without
money. And he gave immediate proof of his rectitude: the
melodramatic tale of anaesthesia and rape was a criminal
slander by his enemies, but the boy was his, conceived
under normal circumstances.

It was not easy for my mother to avoid the scandal
because someone very influential was standing in the
shadows and manipulating the strings to the plot. There
was the precedent of Abelardo and Carmen Rosa, who had
lived with us at various times and had everyone’s
affection, but both of them had been born before her
marriage. But my mother also overcame her rancour at the
bitter pill of a new child and her husband’s infidelity,
and fought at his side in a public way until they had
discredited the lie about the rape.

Peace returned to the family. However, a short while
later, confidential news came from the same region,
about a little girl with a different mother whom Papa
had recognised as his, and who was living in deplorable
conditions. My mother wasted no time on quarrels and
suppositions, but did battle to bring her to the house.
"Mina did the same thing with all of Papa’s scattered
children," she said on that occasion, "and she never had
any reason to regret it." And so she succeeded on her
own to have the girl sent to her, with no public furore,
and she mixed her into the already numerous family.

All of this was past history when my brother Jaime met a
boy identical to our brother Gustavo at a party in
another town. It was the son who had caused the legal
complaint. He was well brought up and pampered by his
mother, but our mother took all kinds of measures and
brought him home to live - when there already were 11 of
us - and helped him to learn a trade and become
established in life. Then, I could not hide my
astonishment that a woman whose jealousy was
hallucinatory could have been capable of such actions,
and she herself responded with a sentence that I have
preserved ever since as if it were a diamond: "Well, the
same blood that’s in my children’s veins just can’t go
wandering around out there."

(c) Gabriel Garcia Marquez Edited extracts from Living
To Tell The Tale by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, translated
by Edith Grossman, to be published by Jonathan Cape on
November 6 at 18.99 pounds.