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fuss and bother you had to go through in those days to get a girlfriend.” 6
    Love is the quintessential ingredient in García Márquez’s oeuvre and it might well have been at that point, in his late teens, when he first recognized its depth and scope. “I believe one thing,” he told a reporter decades later in Havana, “all my life I have been a romantic. But in our society, once youth is gone, you are supposed to believe that romantic feeling is something reactionary and out of style. As time passes and I grew older, I came to realize how primordial these sentiments are, these feelings.” 7
    Mercedes was from the Bolívar Department, where the Roman Catholic Diocese has a see. It was one of the places where García Márquez’s father had been a telegraphist. Her Mediterranean beauty hypnotized him. He couldn’t stop dreaming about her. She reminded him of an Egyptian goddess, an image that long remained with him. In the eighteenth chapter of
One Hundred Years of Solitude
he pays tangential tribute to Mercedes. The last Aureliano, after a long seclusion, leaves the house twice. On his second outing, “he had to go only a few blocks to reach a small pharmacy with dusty windows and ceramic bottles with labels in Latin where a girl with the stealthy beauty of a serpent of the Nile gave him the medicinethe name of which José Arcadio had written down on a piece of paper.” 8
    According to transcripts dated February 25, 1947, García Márquez enrolled in the Universidad Nacional in Bogotá to study law. He did it mainly to please his parents. Coming as he did from a town of barely 20,000 people, the metropolis seemed colossal to him. But size wasn’t necessarily a synonym of depth. He perceived it as “a distant, gloomy city where an unrelenting drizzle had been falling since the beginning of the sixteenth century.” He told his friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza that “the first thing I noticed about the somber capital was that there were too many men in too much of a hurry, that they all wore the same black suits and hats as I did, and that there wasn’t a woman to be seen. I noticed enormous Percherons drawing beer wagons in the rain, trams which gave off sparks like fireworks as they rounded the corners in the rain, and endless traffic jams for interminable funerals. These were the most lugubrious funerals in the world with grandiose ornate hearses and black horses decked out in velvet and black plumed nosebands, and corpses from important families who thought they had invented death.” 9 In the seventh section of
One Hundred Years of Solitude,
García Márquez describes an army of lawyers all dressed in black suits who do little else but cater to the status quo.
    Was García Márquez ready to become a lawyer? It is difficult to ascertain the extent of his commitment. His studies bored him to death. In
Living to Tell the Tale,
he quotes George Bernard Shaw: “Since very little I had to interrupt my education in order to go to school.” Judging from the recollections of his siblings, the exact sciences weren’t his forte. 10
    According to the same transcripts, during his first year he did well in all his courses, except statistics and demographics. Boredom appears to have taken the upper hand; García Márquez’s transcript for the second year reveals him to havebeen frequently absent, which resulted in the failure of various courses. 11 Years later he would say that instead of attending classes, he read novels. In other words, it was the educational system that disappointed him; his interest in knowledge—especially in literature—remained strong.
    His passion for literature (which he called the “
sarampión literario,
” the literary chickenpox) dates to this time. He read the European classics. “My literary education began [then],” he told a journalist. “I would read bad poetry on the