Gabriel García Márquez by Ilan Stavans Read Free Book Online Page A

having lived in the big cities of Barranquilla, Cartagena, and Bogotá—García Márquez returned to Aracataca with his mother to sell his childhood home for $7,000 to a couple of old peasants, or
campesinos
, who had recently won the lottery. That sentimental journey served as the opening episode in
Living to Tell the Tale
and was an invaluable narrative viewpoint from which to relate his foundational past. Luisa Santiaga was nothing if not practical. The character based on her in
Love in the Time of Cholera
is romantic but down to earth. And García Márquez has suggested that Úrsula Iguarán has some of his mother’s features. 23
    In spite of its seriousness, this relationship was more grounded than the one García Márquez had with his father. Gabriel Eligio didn’t come from Riohacha to Aracataca to visit García Márquez until several months after he was born, in large part because his in-laws had made it so difficult for him to be with Luisa Santiaga. The families made peace and he eventually came back, but after a period working as a telegraphist, he left town again to become a homeopathic doctor. This and his future departures, all apparently related to work, turned Gabriel Eligio into a ghostlike figure in García Márquez’s childhood.
    In an article entitled “
Vuelta a la semilla,
” published on December 21, 1983, García Márquez wrote, “Contrary to what many writers good and bad have done across history, I have never idealized the town where I was born and where I spent the first eight years of my life. My memories of that time—as I have repeated so often—are the most clear and real I have, to the point that I’m able to evoke as if it wasyesterday not only the appearance of each of the houses that are still preserved, but even to spot a crack that didn’t exist during my childhood.” García Márquez argued that trees always live longer than people and he believed that the trees in Aracataca were able to remember us, perhaps even better than we remember them. Yet, in spite of the similarities between Aracataca and Macondo, García Márquez remarked that every time he returned to his birth town he had the impression that it resembled less and less the fictitious one, with the exception of a few external elements, such as the unrelenting heat at two in the afternoon, its white and burning powder, and the almond trees that line its streets. On June 25, 2006, due to the international attention García Márquez had brought, there was a referendum to rename the town “Aracataca-Macondo,” although it failed due to a low turnout.
    It’s been almost a century since García Márquez was born, and Aracataca has hardly changed. He is its only famous child and claim to glory. One dramatic transformation in recent years, not only in Aracataca but in the entire region, is the rise of a tourist trade that attracts hordes of people who love his books. García Márquez isn’t directly involved in these efforts. Local agencies, government-run as well as private, in Aracataca, Riohacha, Barranquilla, and, primarily, Cartagena, decided to capitalize on the attention the writer had brought to the region. In order to understand the phenomenon (literature as a magnet for tourism), I took a tour. I boarded a bus in Barranquilla that took me to Aracataca. The poverty I saw was moving. I spoke with local merchants, students, politicians, waitresses, journalists, policemen, and librarians, among others. They talked about the lack of financial support from the federal government, which remembers the town only when there is a García Márquez anniversary—an event that always brings an influx of tourists.
    Aracataca, as I discovered, now parades tourists to some of the sites where García Márquez spent his childhood. Some of them are now even makeshift museums. There is, for instance, the
Casa del