Sin título

Gabriel Garcia Marquez By: Gabriela U

Continuing with his childhood

• Gabriel García Márquez was born in Aracataca (Magdalena) on March 6, 1927. He grew up as an only child among his maternal grandparents and aunts, because his parents, the telegrapher Gabriel Eligio García and Luisa Santiaga Márquez, went to live, when the little boy Gabriel counted only five years, to the population of Sucre, in which Don Gabriel Eligio opened a pharmacy and Luisa Santiaga would give birth to the majority of the eleven children of the marriage.
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Continuing With His Childhood

• García Márquez's grandparents were two very particular characters and marked the literary journey of the future Nobel: Colonel Nicolás Márquez, veteran of the Thousand Days War (1899-1902), told Gabriel countless stories of his youth and of the civil wars of the nineteenth century, took him to the circus and the cinema, and was his umbilical cord with history and reality. Doña Tranquilina Iguarán, her cegatona grandmother, spent the days telling fables and family legends, while organizing the life of the members of the house according to the messages she received in dreams: she was the source of the magical, superstitious and supernatural vision of reality. Among her aunts, the one who marked him the most was Francisca, who wove her own shroud to end her life.
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Childhood

• Gabriel García Márquez learned to write at the age of five, at the Montessori school in Aracataca, with the beautiful young teacher Rosa Elena Fergusson, whom he fell in love with: she was the first woman to disturb him. Every time he approached her, he wanted to kiss her, and just by seeing her he went to school with pleasure. Rosa Elena instilled punctuality and the habit of writing directly in the pages, without an eraser.
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Childhood

• In that school he remained until 1936, when the grandfather died and had to go to live with his parents to the sabanero and river port of Sucre. From there he went to the San José de Barranquilla School, where at the age of ten he was already writing humorous verses. In 1940, thanks to a scholarship, he entered the boarding school of the Liceo Nacional de Zipaquirá, a really traumatic experience: the cold of the boarding school in the City of Salt made him melancholy and sad. Always immersed in a huge woolen bag, he never took his hands out of his sleeves, because he was in a cold panic. During the six courses he spent at the Liceo de Zipaquirá, he had to travel at least twice a year, by steamboat, the Magdalena River, the main river artery in the country; this experience, perhaps the last remarkable one, and especially that astonished early childhood in Aracataca until the age of nine, with the unstoppable flood of stories and legends heard from his grandparents and his aunts, form the mythical substrate from which García Márquez would leave for composition One Hundred Years of Solitude and most of his works. In Zipaquirá, he had as professor of literature, between 1944 and 1946, Carlos Julio Calderón Hermida, who in 1955, when he published La Hojarasca, presented him with the following dedication: "To my professor Carlos Julio Calderón Hermida, who was put in the head that pod that I wrote ". Eight months before the Nobel delivery, in the column he published in fifteen newspapers around the world, García Márquez declared that Calderón Hermida was "the ideal professor of literature."

Law student

• En 1947, presionado por sus padres, se trasladó a Bogotá para estudiar derecho en la Universidad Nacional, donde tuvo como profesor a Alfonso Lopez Michelsen y se hizo amigo de Camilo Lopez Restrepo. La capital del país fue para García Márquez la ciudad del mundo (y las conoció casi todas) que más lo impresionó, pues era una ciudad gris, fría, donde todo el mundo se vestía con ropa muy abrigada y negra. Al igual que en Zipaquirá, García Márquez se llegó a sentir como un extraño, en un país distinto al suyo: Bogotá era entonces "una ciudad colonial, (...) de gentes introvertidas y silenciosas, todo lo contrario al Caribe, en donde la gente sentía la presencia de otros seres fenomenales aunque éstos no estuvieran allí".
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