Gabriel García Márquez by Ilan Stavans Page A

changing colors of the traffic lights. On December 17, 1930, his grandmother took him on his second trip to Barranquilla, where he met his second sister, Aida Rosa. Barranquilla was commemorating the centennial of Simón Bolívar’s death, and García Márquez recalled seeing a group of airplanes doing pirouettes in the sky, particularly a little black plane “
como un gallinazo enorme,
” like an enormous vulture, drawing circles in the air.
    In 1934 his parents returned from Barranquilla to Aracataca to live with his maternal grandparents. Along came two more siblings, Margarita and Ligia. García Márquez’s parents were concerned about the parochial nature of the town’s school. He had gone to a Montessori school, where his teachers were nothing if not devoted and where he fell in love with reading. But Gabriel Eligio and Luisa Santiaga wanted their off-spring to have access to a better educational system, so they established themselves in Sucre. Eventually the family movedto Barranquilla’s Barrio Abajo neighborhood, where they lived from 1937 to 1939.
    In school the boy fell in love with drawing. García Márquez would make doodles and show them to adults. One of his favorite books at the time was
The 1001 Nights.
When drilled by Father Angarita, who wanted to make sure the young didn’t waste their time on dull readings, García Márquez told him of his passion for this book. He had an uncensored adult edition that didn’t suppress “scabrous episodes.” “It surprised me to learn,” he later said, “that it was an important book, for I had always thought that serious adults could not believe that genies came out of bottles or doors opened at the incantation of magic words.” 1
    The importance of this Persian classic in his oeuvre cannot be overestimated. There are many connections between this anthology of folktales and stories and
One Hundred Years of Solitude.
The narrator of
The 1001 Nights,
Scheherazade—which in Persian means “townswoman”—must survive by telling a story to her husband, the sultan Shahryar, each night. The sultan has a penchant for killing spouses who don’t entertain him properly in the evening. There are similarities between Scheherazade and Melquíades, the Bedouin in García Márquez’s magnum opus, a larger-than-life, ghost-like character who dies only to come back again and who drafts the saga of the Buendía family in scrolls. His narrative foretells events and frames the genealogical epic within, roughly, a hundred years. Melquíades and the Wandering Jew are mythical figures who appear in the novel. García Márquez shaped his novel as a compendium of folktales. Different subplots acquire a life of their own as the overarching story unfolds, but they are all connected by the characters’ relationships with the Buendía family.
    Another book that greatly influenced García Márquez at the time was the Bible. This was never fully acknowledged, given his anti-clerical views. But in a deeply Catholic countrysuch as Colombia—notwithstanding its exposure to African culture brought to the Caribbean coast by the slave trade in the sixteenth century—biblical narratives are ubiquitous not only in Sunday sermons but in popular culture and other forums. There were constant biblical references in music, newspapers, and other media. Local politicians invoked characters from the Bible to make a critical point. This influence is important because
One Hundred Years of Solitude
is shaped like a Bible story, complete with natural disasters, famine, and wars. Incest is at the heart of the Buendía curse. That curse is behind the concept of the Chosen People: like the people of Israel after Abraham is called by God to leave his home in
Genesis
12:1–2 in search for a new land where he will become the patriarch of a great nation, one susceptible to scorn, the Buendía