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

telegrafista,
behind the town church, where his father worked as a telegraphist. The visitor is able to see some of the early twentieth-century tools he used. The place is decorated with yellowed news clippings about the future Nobel laureate, his parents’ romantic liaison, and the publication of major works such as
One Hundred Years of Solitude
and
Love in the Time of Cholera
among some sculptures and drawings by local talent. Given the site’s extraordinarily limited resources, most of the items on display are exposed to the elements—humidity being foremost among them—and are in a slow state of decay.
    There is Doctor Antonio Barbosa’s pharmacy, where Gabriel Eligio would leave messages for his beloved Luisa Santiaga. Pharmacists play a curious role in García Márquez’s oeuvre. In the primal landscape of the Caribbean, à la Gustave Flaubert, they are the promoters of scientific knowledge in society. And there is the Iglesia de San José, where García Márquez was baptized, the Calle de los Camellones, where he played on his way to and from school, and the train station, where a yellow train arrived at 11 A.M. every day, a scene that is depicted in
One Hundred Years of Solitude.
García Márquez attended preschool and the first grade at a local Montessori school. The school was established by María Elena Fergusson, a teacher from Riohacha who taught him how to read and who first ignited his incipient interest in poetry. Years later, he confessed that as a child one of his favorite characters was Sleeping Beauty.
    According to García Márquez, the most famous house in Aracataca belonged to the parochial priest Francisco C. Angarita, who baptized him and his entire generation. Father Angarita was famous for his irascible mood and his moralizing sermons. As a child, García Márquez didn’t know that FatherAngarita had taken a very concrete and consequential position in support of the strike of the banana workers in 1928, and the priest was also an informant for Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the lawyer and later left-wing political figure martyred during
El Bogotazo,
who represented the case of the workers after the massacre. 24 But for purposes of this biography, unquestionably the most important site in Aracataca is García Márquez’s family home.
    â€œMy most constant and vivid memory is not so much of the people but of the actual house in Aracataca where I lived with my grandparents,” he once said. “Every single day of my life I wake up with the feeling, real or imaginary, that I’ve dreamt I’m in that huge old house. Not that I’ve gone back there, but that I
am
there, at no particular age, for no particular reason—as if I’d never left it.” 25
    The family home, now known as the Casa Museo Gabriel García Márquez, has been reconstructed to satisfy tourists’ needs. The
campesino
couple who bought the house from García Márquez sold it to another family, who in turn sold it to the municipality, which planned to turn it into a museum. While changing hands, a large portion of the house was demolished to make room for a more modern structure. When the municipality finally bought it, a group of researchers studied the architecture of the town in the early decades of the twentieth century and analyzed the foundation of the house. Thanks to this endeavor, García Márquez’s family home is now restored to its original condition.
    A plan of
la casa,
recreated by architects Gustavo Castellón, Gilver Caraballo, and Jaime Santos, is in the town’s Casa Museo García Márquez. Looking at it, the structure of the Buendía home in
One Hundred Years of Solitude
becomes more concrete. It is located on Carrera 5, also known as Avenida del Monseñor Espejo, a street graced and perfumed by acaciaand almond trees. Built on a rectangular piece of land, the house consists of three independent