Issue 19: Spring 2013

Miranda France finds the stoic example of one of García Márquez’s most sympathetic characters a helpful corrective whenever she feels worried about her future prospects.

NO ONE WRITES TO THE COLONEL

Times are tough and many of us face the prospect of a poorer old age, as privatesector cuts and a new state pension scheme take effect. While tightening our belts we can draw comfort from the stoic example of one of literature’s most endearing characters, the septuagenarian hero of No One Writes to the Colonel (1961, translated by J.S. Bernstein in 1968) by Colombian Nobel Prize winner, Gabriel García Márquez. The colonel is a model of resourcefulness in the face of cruel bureaucracy. And – although this may sound callous – there is some consolation in knowing that our own fortunes are unlikely ever to fall as far as his.

Living in an unnamed town on the Colombian coast, the colonel has been waiting most of his life for the pension owed to him as a veteran of the Thousand Days civil war (1899–1902). Our hero knows that he is number 1823 on the list of claimants. He also knows that most of the other claimants died while waiting for their pension. Refusing to concede defeat, every Friday he goes to the docks to watch the post arriving by boat. But there’s never anything for him; only the postmaster’s crushing observation that ‘no one writes to the colonel’ .

That would be punishment enough, but the colonel also has problems with his joints and bowels. Much of his day is spent straining in the privy. And – just like here – it never stops raining. The colonel and his asthmatic wife subsist on scraps of food and small loans. Their only child, Agustín, has been executed for distributing clandestine political literature at a cock-fight. He was a tailor and they have been living off the proceeds of selling his sewing-machine. Much else in the house has been sold, but they still have Agustín’s fighting cock, and all hopes are pinned on the animal winning a match several months’ hence. Until that time their choice is between starving themselves while they pamper the rooster, or selling it and forfeiting the hope of any winnings, not to mention losing the last link to their murdered son.

Gabriel García Márquez’s No One Writes to the Colonel (1968), 1982 Picador edition. Courtesy of Helen Barkla.

One of the reasons I love this book is that it was the first novel I read in Spanish (its original title is El coronel no tiene quien le escriba), aged fifteen, and it opened the door on to an intoxicating new world of Spanish, and especially Latin American, literature. Our teacher cleverly spurred us on by hinting at the book’s famous last word – an expletive exclaimed by the colonel after 60 years of rage and humiliation finally prove uncontainable. I tried the same trick with my own son recently, and he was careful to cover up the offending word until he had got to the end of the novel and earned the right to be properly affronted by it. Perhaps more novels should end with swear words.

Even when his subject matter is bitingly sad, García Márquez can’t be matched for warmth and exuberance. Like One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), this story is set during the years of La Violencia in Colombia, a period of civil war and horrifying state repression lasting from 1948 to 1958, and ‘for a long time the town had lain in a kind of stupor’ . Even so, the author finds plenty to laugh about, such as the parish priest who uses church bells to announce the moral classification of new films (twelve bells means ‘unfit for everyone’).

A really good novel can burst its bindings and galvanise its readers. In 2004 a group of fans, knowing that the colonel was based on García Márquez’s own grandfather, went to court to have this ancestor posthumously elevated to the rank of general and perhaps even accorded his overdue pension. ‘The colonel should have someone to write to him, even if it is in the 21st century, ’ one of them argued. I don’t think the case went in their favour, but surely the fictional colonel needs no such elevation; his government may have forgotten him, but readers never will.