Train to Aracataca

It was February, 1950. A young man was making his way as a writer and sometime-newspaper-columnist on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, when a woman came by. Here was someone Gabriel García Márquez knew well but barely recognised. “I’m your mother,” she said.

Just forty-five, but already having raised eleven children, she was going grey. Adjusting to a first pair of bifocals,“her eyes seemed larger and more startled” than her son recalled. But there it was, the “mischievous smile of her better days.” And there, too, “the Roman beauty of her wedding portrait, dignified now by an autumnal air.”

Mother required Gabito’s company for an errand back in time.

His grandparents’ house was in Aracataca. Inland, into “the banana region.” It had been his own home until the age of eight. But he and his family hadn't lived there in years, and it had fallen to his mother to return and arrange for the house's sale.

Not unlike the boat a contemporary traveller might have sought to travel down Colombia's Magdalena River, the daily train they boarded at Ciénaga “was a ghost of its self.” Gone was the rich upholstery. The cane seats, bronze trim, the tinted glass. Gone the three classes of carriage. Gone the punctuality. It was a “ghost train,” soon carrying almost nobody.

Until the mother and her son are joined by a “young priest” from the region. He wore “an explorer’s boots and helmet,” García Márquez recalled decades later, “and a rough linen cassock darned in square patches like a sail.” And when he spoke —which turned out to be often— “it was as if he were in the pulpit.”

Gabito, his mother, and the priest. Charcoal, ink, watercolour. 31 January 2022.

The aspirant writer, beside his mother on a train at “a crucial moment in . . . life,” is riveted on the churchman. While he isn't described as carrying a book, or even reading anything in particular, the young priest brings the news, preaching local talk, rumour and wonderings. Would or would not the United Fruit Company be “coming back to reestablish the past”?

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* Gabriel García Márquez, Vivir para contarla (Barcelona: Grijalbo Mondadori, 2002), and Living to Tell the Tale (London: Penguin Books, 2004), translated by Edith Grossman, Chapter 1: 315-17; 4-61.

painting by Kenneth Mills