Gabriel García Márquez by Ilan Stavans Read Free Book Online

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.” 18 A wide constellation of females, from relatives to servants, surrounded him. There were his five aunts: Tía Elvira Carrillo, his grandfather’s illegitimate child and his mother’s half-sister; Tía Francisca Cimodosea Mejía, known as La Cancerbera; Tía Mama, a beloved cousin who had grown up with his grandfather and who raised García Márquez in Aracataca; Tía Wenefrida Márquez, his grandfather’s older sister; and Tía Petra Cotes, who died at the age of one hundred in the Aracataca home while sitting on a rocking chair in a hallway filled with begonias.
    There were other women, too, such as Tía Margarita Márquez Iguarán, his grandmother’s sister, who died of typhus at the age of twenty-one and is arguably the model for Remedios the Beautiful, although the actual name may come from yet another aunt, Remedios Núñez Márquez, his grandfather’s eighth natural child. Such abundance of female models in his childhood marked him forever. In
One Hundred Years of Solitude
it was the Buendía women who grounded the family and safeguarded the collective memory. They were at the helm, raising the next generation, while the men explored the world, fought wars, and built their reputations. Women defined the home: what was morally acceptable and what wasn’t, what everyone’s diet was, who was a welcome visitor, and so on.
    These home-bound women stood in sharp contrast to another type of woman: the intrusive mistress who often stole a family man away through concupiscence. Just as in
One Hundred Years of Solitude,
in García Márquez’s family husbands were constantly bringing home their out-of-wedlock offspring. Aside from his three children with Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes, Nicolás Ricardo had a total of nine illegitimate children. And García Márquez’s own father, Gabriel Eligio, had four: Abelardo García Ujueta, Carmen Rosa García Hermosillo, Antonio García Navarro, and Germaine (Emy) García Mendoza. 19
    And there were the maids, with some of whom García Márquez was physically intimate. One was Trinidad, the daughter of one of the workers in the family home. In his autobiography, García Márquez describes how she took away his innocence, as he put it. Trinidad was only thirteen. Suddenly music started to play from a nearby house. She held him so tightly that “she took my breath away.” He explains, “my intimacy with the maids could be the origin of a thread of secret communications that I believe I have with women and that throughout my life has allowed me to feel more comfortable and sure with them than with men.” 20
    García Márquez’s relationship with his own mother, however, was more distant. 21 Her seriousness defined her in his eyes. He once said, “perhaps it comes from having gone to live with her and my father when I was already old enough to think for myself—after my grandfather died.” As a result of his parent’s itinerant life, which meant moving the family from one place to another, he didn’t live with his parents “under the same roof for very long because a few years later when I was twelve, I went off to school, first to Barranquilla and then to Zipaquirá. Since then we’ve really only seen each other for brief visits, first during school holidays and after that whenever I go to Cartagena—which is never more than once a yearand never for more than a couple of weeks at a time. This has inevitably made our relationship distant.” 22
    Luisa Santiaga, while a somewhat peripheral female figure in García Márquez’s family constellation, was the family anchor. In March 1952, at the age of twenty-five—after