Give me some reasons why Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a great writer
Sir,
In response to my brother's question about 'why Gabriel Garcia Marquez, I respond:
Image: GGM with Fidel at the baseball. Writers and revolutionaries enjoy relaxation
The reason why, is because some express it better than others. Perhaps because they feel it, or for whatever reason. We can live it, differently, or vicariously.
We were discussing the story of the river boat captain coming home and tooting his boat siren, which served the dual purpose of warning his mulatto woman of great beauty, that her naughty boy must leave, but then there was the time.....
Anyway, we couldn't find it in GGM's novels, and you recalled it was in his biography - or autobiography. That sent me on a Saturday morning search, each Saturday for the last month, in the sunshine (if it be so) sitting with the pot of tea or flask of coffee, and working methodically through the the biography.
I found it. In his autobiography, entitled Living to Tell the Tale.
But we mixed two stories, and along the way, to page 217 or so, there were so many lovely and poignant words, I don't know where to start and stop. Let me share it. Publisher AA Knoff, USA, 2003, originally published as Vivir para contarla, by Mondadori, Barcelona, 2002.
His autobiography starts at the time in his late teens or so when his mother asks him to go with her to sell the house. He has ceased attending to his studies, and his father in the background wishes to extract an undertaking that he will take them up again. But Gabriel is unwittingly gathering material which will serve him for his life, and more, with material for writing.
Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.
He is reading William Faulkner whilst travelling with his mother to go to the old house near the Carribbean, (Aracataca) to prepare it for sale.
Let me share some extracts.
My parents married on June 11, 1926, in the Cathedral of Santa Marta, 40 minutes late because the bride forgot the date and had to be awakened after eight in the morning. That same night they again boarded the fearful schooner so that Gabriel Eligio could take possession of the telegraph office in Riohacha, and they passed their first night together in chastity, overcome by seasickness...
The spirit of perpetual evasion was sustained by a geographical reality. The Province had the autonomy of a separate world and a compact and ancient cultural unity in a fertile canyon between the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and the Sierra de Perija, on the Colombian Caribbean.....The rust of power barely reached it from the interior of the country, stewing in its own broth over a slow fire: laws, taxes, soldiers, bad news incubated...
I lived one of the great fantasies of those years one day when a group of men came to the house, dressed alike in gaiters and spurs, and all of them with a cross of ash drawn on their foreheads. They were the sons fathered by the colonel across the entire length of the Province during the War of a Thousand Days, and they had come from their towns almost a month late to congratulate him on his birthday...
I believe that the essence of my nature and way of thinking I owe in 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. Of the many I remember, Lucia was the only one who surprised me with her youthful perversity when she took me to the alley of the toads and lifted her dress to her waist to show me her copper-coloured thatch of hair....
Because the things I recounted seemed so outrageous that they thought they were lies, not thinking that most of them were true in another way....I learned only years later that Dr B was the only one who had defended me with a wise argument: "Children's lies are signs of great talent".
Those who knew me when I was four say that I was pale and introverted, and spoke only to recount absurdities, but for the most part my stories were simple episodes from daily life that I made more attractive with fantastic details so that the adults would notice me...
...that was my life in 1932, when it was announced that Peruvian troops had taken the undefended town of Leticia, on the banks of the Amazon River. ...Patriotism exacerbated by the duplicitous attack of the Peruvian troops provoked an unprecedented popular response. ... For me, it was one of the happiest times because of its disorder. The sterile rigor of schools was broken and replaced by popular creativity on the streets and in the houses...a unanimous shout resounded throughout the country: "Long live Colombia, down with Peru".
[collecting debts for his father] ...Before I could speak she asked me what I wanted. She told me to come in and bar the door, and with an index finger that said everything she signaled to me: "Come here"
I went there, and 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.
She handled me inside my trousers with five agile fingers that felt like ten. 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 faceup 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"... 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.
(and here the story I mixed up) :
One day when I was visiting Cesar, a surprising woman came to visit him. Her name was Martina Fonseca, a white cast in the mold of an intelligent, autonomous mulatta, who may well have been the poet's lover.... She was wearing a dress of embroidered linen that purified her beauty, a bead necklace, and a flower of living fire in her low cut neckline. What I now appreciate most in memory is the way in which she invited me to her house without the slightest indication of pre-meditation. He husband, a ship's pilot on the Magdalena River, was on his regular twelve day voyage. What was strange about her invitation? Except that it was repeated for the rest of the year when her husband was away on his ship.
The fluidity of the secret love that burned over a blazing fire from March to November was surprising. We were safe from all danger because her husband would announce his arrival in the city with a code so that she would know he was coming into port. That is what happened on the third Saturday of our affair, when we were in bed and the distant howl was heard. She became tense.
"Be still," she said to me and waited for two more howls. She did not jump out of bed, as I expected on account of my own fear, but she continued, undaunted: "we still have more than three hours of life left".
She had described him to me as a "Huge black over two meters tall with an artilleryman's tool".
[so that wasn't the true story of the pistol on the table].
...By mistake, I proposed to one who passed close by, but who was not one of them, that she come with me, and she responded with exemplary logic that she could not because her husband was sleeping at home. But two nights later she told me she would leave the street door unbarred three times a week so I could come in without knocking when her husband was not there.
I remember her names but I prefer to call her what I called her then: Nigromantra, or Necromancer. She would turn twenty at Christmas, and she had an Abyssinian profile and cocoa skin. Her bed was joyful and her orgasms rocky and agonized, and she had an instinct for love that seemed to belong more to a turbulent river than to a human being....
Her husband had the body of a giant and the voice of a little girl. He had been a police officer and he brought with him a bad reputation for killing Liberals just to keep up his marksmanship. The neighbours complained that she disturbed the peace of the dead with her howls of a happy dog, but the louder she howled the happier the dead must have been to be disturbed by her.
...the following Wednesday I fell asleep again and when I opened my eyes I found my injured rival contemplating me in silence from the foot of the bed. My terror was so intense that it was difficult for me to continue breathing. She, who was naked, too, tried to place herself between us, but her husband moved her away with the barrel of his revolver.
"Cheating in bed is settled with lead".
He put his revolver on the table, opened a bottle of cane rum, put it next to the revolver, and we sat facing each other to drink without speaking.....
We had finished the first bottle when the storm broke. He opened the second, pressed the muzzle against his temple, and stared at me with ice cold eyes. Then he squeezed the trigger hard, but it clicked. He could not control the trembling of his hand when he gave me the revolver.
"It's your turn," he said.
It was the first time I had held a revolver, and I was surprised that it was so heavy and warm. I did not know what to do. I was soaked in glacial sweat, and my belly was full of a burning foam. I tried to say something but had no voice. It did not occur to me to shoot him, but I returned the revolver to him without realizing it was my only chance.
. .
™Andre Gromyko II - Nixon St, Sandy Bay. September 2017
In response to my brother's question about 'why Gabriel Garcia Marquez, I respond:
The reason why, is because some express it better than others. Perhaps because they feel it, or for whatever reason. We can live it, differently, or vicariously.
We were discussing the story of the river boat captain coming home and tooting his boat siren, which served the dual purpose of warning his mulatto woman of great beauty, that her naughty boy must leave, but then there was the time.....
Anyway, we couldn't find it in GGM's novels, and you recalled it was in his biography - or autobiography. That sent me on a Saturday morning search, each Saturday for the last month, in the sunshine (if it be so) sitting with the pot of tea or flask of coffee, and working methodically through the the biography.
I found it. In his autobiography, entitled Living to Tell the Tale.
But we mixed two stories, and along the way, to page 217 or so, there were so many lovely and poignant words, I don't know where to start and stop. Let me share it. Publisher AA Knoff, USA, 2003, originally published as Vivir para contarla, by Mondadori, Barcelona, 2002.
His autobiography starts at the time in his late teens or so when his mother asks him to go with her to sell the house. He has ceased attending to his studies, and his father in the background wishes to extract an undertaking that he will take them up again. But Gabriel is unwittingly gathering material which will serve him for his life, and more, with material for writing.
Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.
He is reading William Faulkner whilst travelling with his mother to go to the old house near the Carribbean, (Aracataca) to prepare it for sale.
Let me share some extracts.
My parents married on June 11, 1926, in the Cathedral of Santa Marta, 40 minutes late because the bride forgot the date and had to be awakened after eight in the morning. That same night they again boarded the fearful schooner so that Gabriel Eligio could take possession of the telegraph office in Riohacha, and they passed their first night together in chastity, overcome by seasickness...
The spirit of perpetual evasion was sustained by a geographical reality. The Province had the autonomy of a separate world and a compact and ancient cultural unity in a fertile canyon between the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and the Sierra de Perija, on the Colombian Caribbean.....The rust of power barely reached it from the interior of the country, stewing in its own broth over a slow fire: laws, taxes, soldiers, bad news incubated...
I lived one of the great fantasies of those years one day when a group of men came to the house, dressed alike in gaiters and spurs, and all of them with a cross of ash drawn on their foreheads. They were the sons fathered by the colonel across the entire length of the Province during the War of a Thousand Days, and they had come from their towns almost a month late to congratulate him on his birthday...
I believe that the essence of my nature and way of thinking I owe in 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. Of the many I remember, Lucia was the only one who surprised me with her youthful perversity when she took me to the alley of the toads and lifted her dress to her waist to show me her copper-coloured thatch of hair....
Because the things I recounted seemed so outrageous that they thought they were lies, not thinking that most of them were true in another way....I learned only years later that Dr B was the only one who had defended me with a wise argument: "Children's lies are signs of great talent".
Those who knew me when I was four say that I was pale and introverted, and spoke only to recount absurdities, but for the most part my stories were simple episodes from daily life that I made more attractive with fantastic details so that the adults would notice me...
...that was my life in 1932, when it was announced that Peruvian troops had taken the undefended town of Leticia, on the banks of the Amazon River. ...Patriotism exacerbated by the duplicitous attack of the Peruvian troops provoked an unprecedented popular response. ... For me, it was one of the happiest times because of its disorder. The sterile rigor of schools was broken and replaced by popular creativity on the streets and in the houses...a unanimous shout resounded throughout the country: "Long live Colombia, down with Peru".
[collecting debts for his father] ...Before I could speak she asked me what I wanted. She told me to come in and bar the door, and with an index finger that said everything she signaled to me: "Come here"
I went there, and 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.
She handled me inside my trousers with five agile fingers that felt like ten. 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 faceup 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"... 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.
(and here the story I mixed up) :
One day when I was visiting Cesar, a surprising woman came to visit him. Her name was Martina Fonseca, a white cast in the mold of an intelligent, autonomous mulatta, who may well have been the poet's lover.... She was wearing a dress of embroidered linen that purified her beauty, a bead necklace, and a flower of living fire in her low cut neckline. What I now appreciate most in memory is the way in which she invited me to her house without the slightest indication of pre-meditation. He husband, a ship's pilot on the Magdalena River, was on his regular twelve day voyage. What was strange about her invitation? Except that it was repeated for the rest of the year when her husband was away on his ship.
The fluidity of the secret love that burned over a blazing fire from March to November was surprising. We were safe from all danger because her husband would announce his arrival in the city with a code so that she would know he was coming into port. That is what happened on the third Saturday of our affair, when we were in bed and the distant howl was heard. She became tense.
"Be still," she said to me and waited for two more howls. She did not jump out of bed, as I expected on account of my own fear, but she continued, undaunted: "we still have more than three hours of life left".
She had described him to me as a "Huge black over two meters tall with an artilleryman's tool".
[so that wasn't the true story of the pistol on the table].
...By mistake, I proposed to one who passed close by, but who was not one of them, that she come with me, and she responded with exemplary logic that she could not because her husband was sleeping at home. But two nights later she told me she would leave the street door unbarred three times a week so I could come in without knocking when her husband was not there.
I remember her names but I prefer to call her what I called her then: Nigromantra, or Necromancer. She would turn twenty at Christmas, and she had an Abyssinian profile and cocoa skin. Her bed was joyful and her orgasms rocky and agonized, and she had an instinct for love that seemed to belong more to a turbulent river than to a human being....
Her husband had the body of a giant and the voice of a little girl. He had been a police officer and he brought with him a bad reputation for killing Liberals just to keep up his marksmanship. The neighbours complained that she disturbed the peace of the dead with her howls of a happy dog, but the louder she howled the happier the dead must have been to be disturbed by her.
...the following Wednesday I fell asleep again and when I opened my eyes I found my injured rival contemplating me in silence from the foot of the bed. My terror was so intense that it was difficult for me to continue breathing. She, who was naked, too, tried to place herself between us, but her husband moved her away with the barrel of his revolver.
"Cheating in bed is settled with lead".
He put his revolver on the table, opened a bottle of cane rum, put it next to the revolver, and we sat facing each other to drink without speaking.....
We had finished the first bottle when the storm broke. He opened the second, pressed the muzzle against his temple, and stared at me with ice cold eyes. Then he squeezed the trigger hard, but it clicked. He could not control the trembling of his hand when he gave me the revolver.
"It's your turn," he said.
It was the first time I had held a revolver, and I was surprised that it was so heavy and warm. I did not know what to do. I was soaked in glacial sweat, and my belly was full of a burning foam. I tried to say something but had no voice. It did not occur to me to shoot him, but I returned the revolver to him without realizing it was my only chance.
. .
™Andre Gromyko II - Nixon St, Sandy Bay. September 2017
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