- Gail Wilson Kenna
Gabriel García Márquez begins his story with this description. “On the third day of rain they had killed so many crabs inside the house that Pelayo had to cross his drenched courtyard and throw them in the sea, because the newborn child had a temperature all night and they thought it was due to the stench…..The light was so weak at noon that when Pelayo was coming back to the house after throwing away the crabs, it was hard for him to see what was moving and groaning in the rear of the courtyard….A very old man, lying face down in the mud, who in spite of his tremendous efforts, could not get up, impeded by his enormous wings.”

This is part of the first paragraph of an eight-page story in Leaf Storm, a short story collection published in English in 1972, before Gabo’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. The angel in the story cannot rouse himself because of his huge buzzard wings, which are dirty and half-plucked. Instead of reverence among the villagers, this angel arouses derision and is treated as a kind of circus animal. Soon Pelayo even charges money to see the captive angel. Yet despite reduction to spectacle, the degraded angel shows superhuman patience and resilience. Slowly he recovers and finally manages to set off in an ungainly flight, disappearing into the heavens.
The first time I read this story I thought of Franz Kafka’s Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis, who awakens one morning as a cockroach. In the second half of the 20th century, it felt as if Gabo had created Gregor’s double. But his old man is transfigured and given a return skyward, unlike the younger Gregor who dies with a rotten apple in his back. Literature was never quite the same after I read Kafka my junior year at USC in 1964, and never quite the same after Gabo came into my life in 1985 in a class on Latin America in Montgomery, Alabama, at the Air War College.

Twenty-three years after Gabo wrote his story about a very old man, his novel Of Love and Other Demons was available in English by 1995. Yet the genesis of this story began in 1949. The short novel’s preface relates that García Márquez was a young reporter in Cartagena then, and one day was assigned to cover the story of the convent’s crypts being uncovered. (Today that same convent is a luxury hotel.) That day in the niche of the high altar, laborers found the skull of a young girl with a seventy-foot stream of living hair the color of copper. Gabo saw the hair and remembered the legend his grandmother had told him of a 12 year-old marquise with hair that trailed behind her and who was venerated for miracles she performed along the Caribbean coast.
The novel begins with a quote from Thomas Aquinas: “For the hair, it seems, is less concerned in the resurrection than other parts of the body.” How very García Márquez! To which I will add this final remark.After I taught a course in 2015 on Gabo’s Nobel Prize-winning novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, a student asked if I could recommend a shorter and easier novel for her book club.“Yes, Of Love and Other Demons. Short and memorable.”She later sent an email to let me know her book club hated the book and thought it was the worst novel they ever read.”
Next week:How Gabo helped me to love Latin America.