Free Gabriel García Márquez by Ilan Stavans Page B

every critic agrees that it is enduring. 23
    On September 13, 1947, at the age of twenty, García Márquez published his first short story,
“La tercera resignación”
(The ThirdResignation), in the evening newspaper
El Espectador,
one of Bogotá’s most important dailies. It appeared on page eight, in the section
Fin de semana
(Weekend) edited by Eduardo Zalamea Borda. It would be the first of eighteen short stories he would write before publishing his first book,
Leaf Storm.
A little over a month later, his second and third stories,
“Eva está dentro de su gato”
(Eve Is Inside Her Cat) and
“Tubal Caín forja una estrella”
(Tubal Caín Shapes a Star), were published in the
Fin de semana
supplement.
    García Márquez wrote for long hours, secluded from everyone else, on a typewriter. In an article entitled
“El amargo encanto de la máquina de escribir,”
he discussed the difference between writing in longhand and typing. He suggested that the former had an aura of mystery but that the latter was the inevitable outcome of modern life. “Truth is that everyone writes in whatever way possible, because the hardest thing of this arduous business isn’t how one handles tools, but the way one succeeds in putting one word after another.” 24
    Although it is essential to recognize the value of translation in García Márquez’s literary education, it would be wrong to suggest that all the influences on his oeuvre were foreign. All artists are shaped by their provenance, and García Márquez was no different. Equally important, if only for its aesthetic consistency, was the work of Colombian authors. García Márquez responded to nineteenth-century romantic and naturalistic novels, but he sought ways to create something fresh and different, to be a new voice that would allow Colombian literature to be viewed beyond its regional confines and to be embraced by the international literary community.
    The Colombian novel is defined by its geography. The coastal narrative of
One Hundred Years of Solitude
belongs to a tradition shared by other Caribbean nations. Not surprisingly, García Márquez is often compared to baroque authors such as Alejo Carpentier and José Lezama Lima. Thatcoastal tradition is represented by Juan José Nieto’s novel
Ingermina
(1844). As Raymond Leslie Williams, a scholar of the Colombian novel, has mapped it out, other national traditions include the narrative based in the interior highlands, such as Eugenio Díaz’s
Manuela
(1858) and Eduardo Caballero Calderón’s
El buen salvaje
(1963); the Antioquian tradition, evident in Tomás Carrasquilla’s
Frutos de mi tierra
(1896) and Manuel Mejía Vallejo’s
El día señalado
(1964); and the Cauca tradition, encompassing works that range from Jorge Isaac’s
María
(1867) to Gustavo Alvarez Gardeazábal’s
El bazar de los idiotas
(1974). 25
    While studying law at the Universidad Nacional in Bogotá, a crucial moment took place that served as a catalyst in García Márquez’s apprenticeship as a writer. In 1948 the populist Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, a charismatic, immensely popular leader of the Liberal Party and a presidential candidate, was assassinated during a riot in Bogotá; he was fifty years old. García Márquez remembers that day as a watershed moment in his life.
    Trained in the law at the Universidad Nacional, Gaitán had been mayor of Bogotá and minister of education. Gaitán was killed during a period known as
La Violencia,
in which violent clashes between liberals and conservatives resulted in the death of several hundred thousand people. In a speech he gave the year he died, Gaitán said, “If I am killed, avenge me!”
    The events took place on April 9. The nation’s capital was hosting the Pan-American Conference, which was devoted to trade issues, although politics occupied