No One Writes to the Colonel
— 1961 —
New York: HarperPerennial Modern Classics, 1999; translated from the Spanish by J. S. Bernstein; 64 pages; originally published in 1961 as El coronel no tiene quien le escriba; published in Collected Novellas with Leaf Storm and Chronicle of a Death Foretold
FIRST LINES
The colonel took the top off the coffee can and saw that there was only one little spoonful left. He removed the pot from the fire, poured half the water onto the earthen floor, and scraped the inside of the can with a knife until the last scrapings of the ground coffee, mixed with bits of rust, fell into the pot.
PLOT SUMMARY
It is a simple story. An impoverished, aging, retired colonel, living with his asthmatic wife in a backwater Colombian river town, awaits the arrival of a military pension he had been promised fifteen years earlier. As the elderly couple scrape by, selling off their household items to buy food, he keeps a rooster that belonged to his dead son, killed in Colombia’s political turmoil.
The colonel hopes the rooster will win an approaching cockfight. But his wife presses him to sell the rooster so they can buy some food. The weekly arrival of the mailboat at the docks is the key to his other hope, the long-awaited pension:
The colonel saw it dock with an anguished uneasiness. On the roof, tied to the boat’s smokestacks and protected by an oilcloth, he spied the mailbag. Fifteen years of waiting had sharpened his intuition. The rooster had sharpened his anxiety.
Anxiety and waiting. For this aging veteran of Colombia’s past wars, these are the things that define his life. Along with hope, which in the colonel’s case, is definitely “the thing with feathers”—as Emily Dickinson famously wrote—a rooster he must feed while starving himself.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
Born in Aracataca, a small town near Colombia’s Caribbean coast, on March 6, 1927, Gabriel García Márquez was the eldest son of a postal clerk, telegraph operator, and pharmacist who could barely support his wife and twelve children. When his father left to take a job in a city pharmacy, García Márquez spent his early childhood living with his maternal grandparents in a large rambling house. His grandfather was a colonel and veteran not unlike the character in No One Writes.
This home, his grandparents’ remarkable stories, superstitions and old folktales, and this town were the seeds of the mythical village of Macondo that plays such a role in his work. “I feel that all my writing has been about the experiences of the time I spent with my grandparents,” the man affectionately known as Gabo would recall.
After his grandfather’s death, García Márquez was sent to school in Barranquilla, Colombia. He abandoned law studies for journalism during a violent period in Colombia’s history and became a struggling newspaper writer in Barranquilla, where he lived in the garret of a brothel. “It was a bohemian life: finish at the paper at 1 in the morning, then write a poem or a short story until about 3, then go out to have a beer,” he said in an interview, according to the New York Times. “When you went home at dawn, ladies who were going to Mass would cross to the other side of the street for fear that you were either drunk or intending to mug or rape them.”
During the 1950s, García Márquez was a newspaper correspondent living in Paris while reading American authors, like Hemingway and Faulkner, along with Proust, Joyce, and Russian writers. They helped shape his style. As García Márquez would later explain:
The whole notion that I am an intuitive is a myth I have created myself. I worked my way through literature, reading, writing, reading and writing—it’s the only way…. [The] tricks you need to transform something which appears fantastic, unbelievable into something plausible, credible, those I learned from journalism. The key is to tell it straight. It is done by reporters and by country folk.”
When the newspaper he wrote for shut down, García Márquez was stranded and scrounged for money while working on drafts of a first novel, In Evil Hour, and No One Writes to the Colonel. Both would be published in the early 1960s in Spanish (later appearing in the United States).
In 1958, he returned to Colombia and married Mercedes Barcha, his childhood sweetheart. The couple had a son, Rodrigo, in 1959, before García Márquez joined Prensa Latina, the official Cuban press agency in New York, after Fidel Castro came to power. His friendship with Castro would cause political problems with the U.S. government, and other writers were critical of his support for Castro, who imprisoned dissidents and writers.
In 1961, García Márquez took his wife and son on a Greyhound bus trip through the American South because he wanted to see “Faulkner country.” They moved to Mexico City, where Gonzalo, a second son, was born in 1964. It was there, in 1965, that he began writing Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), his masterpiece of “magical realism.”
“For 18 months, he had holed up in his office in their home while Ms. Barcha kept the landlord, and the world, at bay,” wrote Penelope Green in Mercedes Barcha’s New York Times obituary in 2020. “When he emerged in late 1966… she asked: ‘Did you really finish it? We owe $12,000.’ She then pawned her hair dryer and the couple’s blender so she could pay the postage to send the manuscript to his Argentine editor.”
Published in 1967, it was an immediate success. It would eventually go on to sell more than 50 million copies.
That allowed him to move to Barcelona, Spain, with his family and begin work on his next novel, The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), which told of a dictator in a fantastical Latin American state who rules for so many decades that nobody can recall what life was like before him. Next came the 1981 novella, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, which uses journalistic techniques to tell the story of twin brothers who murder the man responsible for taking their sister’s virginity.
Hailed by the Nobel Prize committee for novels and short stories that “led us into this peculiar place where the miraculous and the real converge,” Gabriel García Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. In announcing the award, the committee lauded
the extravagant flight of his own fantasy, traditional folk tales and facts, literary allusions, tangible, at times, obtrusively graphic, descriptions approaching the matter-of-factness of reportage…. With his stories, Gabriel García Márquez has created a world of his own which is a microcosmos.
Published in 1985, Love in the Time of Cholera was García Márquez’s most romantic novel, inspired by his grandparents. It told the story of the resumption of a passionate relationship between a recently widowed septuagenarian and the lover she had broken with more than fifty years before. The General in His Labyrinth (1989) conjured up the last days of Simón Bolívar, the father of South America’s independence from Spain.
After a lymphatic cancer diagnosis in 1999, García Márquez began work on his memoirs and published another novella. By 2012, he was suffering from dementia and had stopped writing. He died in Mexico City in April 2014 at age eighty-seven.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ IT
There is sheer artistry in the writing of García Márquez. This novella lacks the sense of the fantastical—the essence of the magical realism for which he is most famed. Instead, it is highly realistic, even while carrying absurd elements. Like many other famous literary characters who are waiting—expectantly, desperately—the seventy-five-year-old colonel symbolizes a deeper sense of the weight and futility of hope.
This is what the Nobel Committee meant when it said:
A tragic sense of life characterizes García Márquez’s books—a sense of the incorruptible superiority of fate and the inhuman, inexorable ravages of history. But this awareness of death and tragic sense of life is broken by the narrative’s apparently unlimited, ingenious vitality…. The comedy and grotesqueness in García Márquez can be cruel, but can also glide over into a conciliating humour.
WHAT TO READ NEXT
After this novella, read the two short works published in the same collection: Chronicle of a Death Foretold (Crónica de una muerte anunciada, 1981; English translation, 1982) recounts the murder of a man in a so-called honor killing by twin brothers; Leaf Storm (La Hojarasca, 1972; English translation, 1972), the author’s first novella, introduces the fictional village of Macondo, setting of his most famous work: One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Sooner or later, the masterwork One Hundred Years of Solitude must be read. As a reviewer put it in the New York Times:
When it gets hot in Macondo, it gets so hot that men and beasts go mad and birds attack houses. A long spell of rain is remembered to have lasted, not weeks, but four years, eleven months and two days. When a plague hits the region, it is no ordinary killer but an “insomnia plague,” which gradually causes people to forget everything including the names and uses of the most commonplace objects. In order to combat the memory loss, the villagers label chairs and clocks, and even hang a sign on the cow.
This imaginative world, the creation of Gabo, is what has made his work timeless and why Carlos Fuentes described him as “the most popular and perhaps the best writer in Spanish since Cervantes.”