Gabriel García Márquez by Ilan Stavans Page B

worth nothing if it could not be used to invent a new way of preparing chick peas.” 23
    The use of the “plaything,” (in the Spanish original, “
que la literatura fuera el mejor juguete que se había inventado para burlarse de la gente
”) appears to mirror Cervantes’s narrative strategy in his satire of chivalry novels, in which few of his contemporaries emerge without a kick in the butt. Similarly, the tantalizing
mise en abysme
of García Márquez’s scene (where he refers to himself), in which fictional characters interact with real people, echoes the recurrent metaliterary devices in
Don Quixote.
Among them, in Part II, are the moments in which the knight and his squire encounter people who have either read or heard about Part I and who compare the flesh-and-blood Don Quixote and Sancho with their literary counterparts. The essence of this playfulness is the art of being a
mamador de gallos:
not to take any aspect of life, no matter how serious, without cracking a joke. 24
    When García Márquez moved to Cartagena de Indias, he knew his own career as a student was at an impasse, maybe even at an end. His dream of becoming a writer occupied most of his attention, and journalism was intimately connected to it. “Journalism keeps you in contact with reality,” García Márquez stated in 1982. “Literary people have a tendency to take all sorts of detours into unreality. Besides, if you stick to writing only books, you’re always starting from scratch all over again.” 25 To write and to do it well and under a deadline suited his aspirations. Plus, how else could he make ends meet?
    In Cartagena, García Márquez had a fortuitous street encounter with the writer and doctor Manuel Zapata Olivella, who took him to the editorial offices of
El Universal,
a liberal newspaper founded just a few months earlier, in March 1948, by Domingo López Escauriaza. The offices were in the Plaza de San Pedro, on the corner of Calle San Juan. In May, García Márquez started writing a column called “
Punto y aparte.
” These pieces were produced rapidly. They had a poetic quality to them, and they explored the enchanting,thought-provoking elements of daily life that would capture a reader’s attention. In total, he wrote forty columns, the last one at the end of 1949. 26
    García Márquez led a bohemian life during his Cartagena years. He spent his evenings at the office, his nights in bars getting drunk with close friends, and his dawns in whore-houses. As a reporter, he needed to be able to move around, talk to people, and navigate Cartagena’s treacherous neighborhoods, from the poorest to the most luxurious. He not only covered the city, he turned it into a larger home of sorts. With the exception of Aracataca and its tangible influence on the shaping of Macondo’s mythical qualities, the Colombian place that is easiest to recognize—and to celebrate—in García Márquez’s fiction is Cartagena. In his view, it was a place to experiment with the possibilities of love. For instance, at the Paseo de los Mártires he had spent the night sleeping on a bench while drunk when a biblical deluge soaked him to the bone. He caught a terrible case of pneumonia, spent a couple of weeks in the hospital, and was given a heavy dose of antibiotics, which, as he relates in
Living to Tell the Tale,
were said to have atrocious side-effects, such as early impotence. In his memoir, García Márquez recalls the Torre del Reloj, a bridge that in ancient times linked the Old City with a poor neighborhood known as Getsemaní, and the Plaza de los Coches, the site of a slave market in the colonial period, a reference that appears in
Of Love and Other Demons.
In his newspaper columns García Márquez often wrote about the Plaza de la Aduana, where there is a church that houses the remains of the Spanish priest Pedro Claver, who the people