"There is no one to write to the colonel" is my favorite work.
GGMarkes
Winter in the Colombian town of Sucre and the French capital are related only by the calendar sequence - when this Caribbean pueblo is already immersed in tropical greenery, the wind from the Seine dispels even the most persistent walkers from the boulevards Saint Michel and Saint Germain.
But the hunger that haunted the Colonel from Marquez's novel of the same name for about a hundred pages and Gab himself during his "Parisian days" was "the same thing".
Gabriel García Márquez arrived in Paris in December 1955 as a correspondent for the Bogota daily "El Espektador". Having, like a true Colombian "costenos", performed a few clumsy pirouettes in the Parisian snow, García Márquez took up residence at the Hotel d'Flandre at 16 Rue Cujas, in the Latin Quarter. A numerous colony of South American political emigration fled from the "holy family", Latin American dictators - Odri, Somoza, Armas, Trujillo, Batista - warmly accepted the future Nobel laureate who arrived in the "capital of the world" with a couple of bundles. Their help will be all the more valuable as Marquez's parent paper "El Ekspektador" as well as its short-lived successor "El Independiente" will soon be suppressed by a cynical combination of censorship and outright intimidation.
Without money, permanent employment, influential acquaintances, with an unfinished novel in manuscript - "Evil Fate" - Gabo will reluctantly set off on "Balzac's path" - to deceptive literary fame, a cold attic and... a passionate love affair.
Drama in the novel, drama in life, Tačia was in an advanced stage of pregnancy: she was still looking after the children, scrubbing the floors, vomiting from the effort. Terrible, terrible weather - she will say later
García Márquez met María Concepcion Quintana, a Spanish woman with a complicated name and a simple nickname Tacia, on a pale March evening in the company of a Portuguese colleague. Tacia carried the cross of an emancipated woman of the Franco era with dignity (she crossed paths with the church, she lived alone) but also the painful memory of a passionate relationship with Blas de Otero - a great Spanish poet with an unstable character. Acquaintance with Gab was not "love at first sight" - it was more like "shipwrecked love".
"I would say that at first glance I didn't like Gabriel: he seemed despotic, arrogant, but somehow timid: a truly unattractive combination. I liked James Mason-type men - Blass was quite a bit like him - the British gentleman type, not the handsome Latino-lovers like Tyrone Power. I also always preferred older men, and Gabriel was more or less my age. He immediately began bragging about his work, seeming to consider himself a journalist rather than a writer. My friend left the bar at ten, and we stayed there, talked, and then started walking the streets of Paris. Gabriel said terrible things about the French... and if the French later returned the favor, because they proved to be too rational for his magical realism". Only that night, as they walked the endless boulevards of Paris with Gab's enchanting stories of sleepy Caribbean towns, her reticence towards this unusual Colombian melted like the snowflakes that glittered on Gab's coat.
A cup of hot chocolate, the discreet semi-darkness of cinema performances, walks along the Parisian quays, were only short-lived bursts of happiness. A return ticket to Colombia sent by the paper's management Pythianly foreshadowed something more ominous - days of poverty, hunger, despair. The money from the plane ticket sale was quickly spent, and Gab's hotel debts grew alarmingly. He only received change for the collected empty bottles and old paper from the nearby grocers. They prepared lunch on bones "borrowed" from a nearby butcher. Tačia was looking after the children all the time, scrubbing the floors. Upon returning "home", she found an unheated room, an empty pantry, Gab immersed in the world of the distant town of Sukra. Arguments, quarrels, exchanges, bitter monologues followed, and their love melted away like snowflakes left behind on Parisian candelabra.
(...) Misunderstandings in life, misunderstandings in the novel. García Márquez never manages to develop that unfortunate "Evil Fate". One of the secondary characters of the novel rebelled, an aged colonel who once, before the smell of overripe bananas, fled from Macon to Sucre, a suffocating river pueblo lost in the tropics of Colombia. Sometimes he spreads his arms like a biblical prophet, this tortured veteran of civil wars, sometimes with the dignity of Roman patricians he demands "the right to speak". The original novel, "Zla kob", was bound with a tattered bow and placed at the bottom of a rickety closet, and the sharp, crooked handwriting of the Parisian poor will write the following months on the pages of "The Colonel has no one to write", a future masterpiece of short prose: the story of a tortured man and to his suffering wife who live for the rooster - the last memory of a murdered son, a story of lost ideals, an indifferent environment and hope lost in bureaucratic labyrinths.
The starting point for this work by Marques was a vague and nostalgic memory of a man who waited for days at the fish market in Barranquilla with some "quiet anxiety" for a boat. Somewhere nearby were Gab's grandfather, Colonel Marquez who was hoping for a pension from the Thousand Day War, Rafael Escalone's father, also a colonel - in Colombia in those years every third uniform was a colonel's - De Sica's Umberto D, but also all that they had been through Gabriel Marquez and Tačia passed by in the indifferent French capital.
(...) Drama in the novel, drama in life, Tačia was in an advanced stage of pregnancy: she was still looking after the children, scrubbing the floors, vomiting from the effort. Terrible, terrible weather - she will say later.
"I have to admit that he was completely honest about the pregnancy. You could really say that about him. We had an open discussion and he asked me what I wanted. I think he would be quite happy if he had a child. Il s' assouvit, as they say here: he agreed to all my wishes, I was the one who didn't want it. He knew how serious I was about children, so he knew I would expect him to marry me. There was both good and bad. He just let me do whatever I decided. I don't think he was as horrified as I was. From his Latin American point of view it was probably not so unusual and shocking; he might even have been proud, for all I know him."
An unfortunate event will resolve her painful dilemma. She was rushed to Maternite Port Royal - a gloomy building surrounded by endless squares of hospital silence. Gabo made regular evening visits, but they both knew that everything was over between them.
(End in next issue)
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