Gabriel García Márquez by Ilan Stavans

structures. To the left is García Márquez’s grandfather’s office. As one enters the building, there’s a patio that lies adjacent to a visitors’ room. Behind the grandfather’s office is a garden with a fragrant jasmine tree. Beyond the garden is the grandparents’ bedroom. There is also a pantry, the kitchen, and another patio. Then come a few surprises: a room containing statues of saints, a room for suitcases, a silversmithing workshop, a hallway flanked by two chestnut trees and filled with begonias, and a carpentry shop. I found the latrine at the back of the property.
    One of the most stunning scenes in
One Hundred Years of Solitude
takes place in chapter seven, when José Arcadio Buendía’s son, the eldest child and the sibling of Colonel José Arcadio Buendía and Amaranta, dies mysteriously. This remains one of the only—
the
only?—unsolved mysteries in
One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Expelled from the family home, José Arcadio Buendía moves into another house with Rebeca. 26 One September afternoon, he comes home, greets Rebeca, who is taking a bath, goes to his room, and soon after a gunshot is heard. But when his mother, Úrsula, enters the room, she doesn’t find a weapon, nor does she find a wound on her son’s body. Immediately after the gunshot, a trickle of blood spills out from the victim onto the street. García Márquez’s description is superb:
    A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a straight angle at the Buendía house, went in under the closed door, crossed the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on tothe other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta’s chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano José, and went through a pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Úrsula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread. 27
    In a 143-word segment (in the Spanish original the total is 149) that pays homage to the luminous imagery of French novelist Boris Vian, the victim’s blood goes from one end of town to the Buendía family home in search of its origins. Readers of the novel and visitors to the Casa Museo in Aracataca will note the accuracy with which García Márquez describes not only the town streets but each and every one of the rooms in the house. But what’s truly tantalizing is the metaphor built by the trickle of blood: unquestionably, in
One Hundred Years of Solitude
the house represents the foundation. And for the writer, the actual place where he spent his childhood is
el origen.
    It has been said that had García Márquez never left Aracataca in 1936, when his parents took him to live with them in Sucre, he would never have become a writer. 28 By then his parents had had other children. His departure from the family home—and the enclosed environment in which he had been nurtured by his grandparents and the many women there—felt like a break. The house had allowed him to remain in his fantasy world within an adult habitat. His relationship with each of the people in the family home, and with the town as a whole, was seared in his mind forever. Leaving Aracataca was equivalent to being expelled from paradise.

Chapter 2
Apprenticeship

    On November 9, 1929, García Márquez first visited Barranquilla—a major industrial port city on Colombia’s Caribbean coast with a population of approximately 250,000, where his parents were living at the time—to see his newborn sister Margot, the third child. He was only two years and eight months old, but he remembered the