That night Alfonso told me he had spoken to the management of the paper and they liked the idea of a new columnist, as long as he was good but without too many pretensions. In any case, they could not resolve anything until after the New Year holiday. And so I stayed with the pretext of the job, even though they might tell me no in February.

That was how my first piece was published on the editorial page of El Heraldo in Barranquilla on January 5 1950. I did not want to sign my name so that I would have the cure ready in case things did not work out, which is what had happened at El Universal. I did not have to think twice about the pseudonym: Septimus, taken from Septimus Warren Smith, Virginia Woolf's deluded character in Mrs Dalloway. The title of the column - La Jirafa [The Giraffe] - was the secret nickname I alone knew for my only partner at the dances in Sucre.

It seemed to me that the January winds blew harder than ever that year, and you almost could not walk into them on the streets they castigated until dawn. The topic of conversation when you woke was the devastation caused by the mad winds during the night, when they carried away dreams and henhouses and turned sheets of zinc from the roofs into flying guillotines.

Today I think those wild winds swept away the remains of a sterile past and opened the doors to a new life for me. My relationship with the group was no longer based only on pleasure and became a professional partnership. At first we commented on the subjects we planned to write about or exchanged observations that were not at all doctoral, though they were not to be forgotten.

The definitive one for me came one morning when I went into the Japy as Germán Vargas was finishing his silent reading of La Jirafa, cut out of that day's paper. The others in the group sat around the table waiting for his verdict with a kind of reverential terror that made the smoke in the room even denser. When he finished, without even looking at me, Germán ripped it into pieces, did not say a single word, and mixed the scraps of paper into the trash of cigarette butts and burned matches in the ashtray. No one said anything, the mood at the table did not change, and the episode was never commented on. But the lesson is still useful to me when out of laziness or haste I am assaulted by the temptation to write a paragraph just to get out of a difficult situation.

At the cheap hotel where I lived for almost a a year, the owners began to treat me like a member of the family. My only fortune at the time consisted of my historic sandals, two changes of clothing that I washed in the shower, and the leather briefcase I had stolen from the most exclusive tearoom in Bogotá during the disturbances of April 9. I carried it with me everywhere with the originals of whatever I was writing, which was the only thing I had to lose. I would not have risked leaving it under seven locks and keys in the armoured vault of a bank. The only person to whom I had entrusted it during my first nights there was Lácides, the secretive hotel porter, who accepted it as security for the price of my room. He gave intense scrutiny to the strips of typewritten paper entwined in corrections and put the briefcase away in the drawer of the counter. I ransomed it the next day at the time I had promised and continued meeting my payments with so much rigour that he would accept it as a pledge for as many as three successive nights. This became so serious an understanding that sometimes I would leave it on the counter without saying anything more than good evening, and take the key down from the board myself and go up to my room.

Germán was always aware of my needs, to the point of knowing if I did not have a place to sleep, and he would slip me the peso and a half for a bed. I never knew how he knew. Thanks to my good behaviour I became close to the hotel personnel, to the point where the little whores would lend me their own soap for my shower. Presiding over life at the command post, with her sidereal breasts and calabash cranium, was the hotel's owner and mistress, Catalina la Grande [Catherine the Great]. Her full-time man, the mulatto Jonás San Vicente, had been a deluxe trumpet player until his gold-filled teeth were knocked out in a mugging meant to steal everything he had. Battered and without the wind to play, he had to change professions and could find nothing better for his six-inch tool than the golden bed of Catalina la Grande. She too had an intimate treasure that in two years helped her to climb from miserable nights on the river docks to the throne of a great madam. I had the luck to become familiar with the cleverness and free hand of both in making their friends happy. But they never understood why I so often did not have the peso and a half to sleep, and yet very elegant people came to pick me up in official limousines.

Another happy event of those days was that I became the only co-pilot of Mono Guerra, a taxi driver so blond he seemed albino, and so intelligent and good-natured he had been elected honorary councilman without running for office. His dawns in the red-light district were like movies, because he himself took charge of enriching them - and at times making them crazy - with inspired detours. He would let me know when he had a slow night, and we would spend it together in the lunatic redlight district where our fathers and the fathers of their fathers had learned how to make us.

I never could discover why, in the middle of so simple a life, I sank without warning into an unexpected apathy. My novel-in-progress - La Casa - begun some six months earlier, seemed like an uninspired farce to me. I talked about it more than I wrote it, and in reality the small amount of coherent writing I had were fragments that I published earlier and later in La Jirafa and Crónica when I did not have a topic. In the solitude of my weekends, when the others took refuge in their houses, I was lonelier than my left hand in the empty city. My poverty was absolute and I had the timidity of a quail, which I tried to counteract with insufferable arrogance and brutal frankness. I felt I did not belong anywhere, and even certain acquaintances made me aware of it. This was most critical in the newsroom at El Heraldo, where I would write for as many as 10 hours straight in a remote corner without talking to anyone, enveloped in the dense smoke from the rough cigarettes I smoked without pause in unrelieved solitude. I wrote at top speed, often until daybreak, on strips of newsprint that I carried everywhere in my leather briefcase.

In one of my many acts of carelessness in those days I left it in a taxi, and I understood this without bitterness as one more dirty trick played on me by my bad luck. I made no effort to recover it, but Alfonso Fuenmayor, alarmed by my negligence, wrote and published a note at the end of my column: "Last Saturday a briefcase was left in an automobile for hire. In view of the fact that the owner of the briefcase and the author of this column are, coincidentally, the same person, both of us would be grateful if the person who has it would be kind enough to communicate with either one of us. The briefcase contains absolutely no objects of value: only unpublished 'jirafas'." Two days later someone left my rough drafts at the porter's office at EI Heraldo, without the briefcase and with three spelling errors corrected in green ink in a very fine hand.

My daily salary was just enough to pay for my room, but what mattered to me least in those days was the abyss of poverty. On the many occasions when I could not pay for it, I would go to read in the Cafe Roma as if I were what in reality I was: a solitary man adrift in the night on the Paseo Bolívar. Anyone I knew would receive a distant greeting from me, if I deigned to look at him, and I would walk along to my habitual place, where I often read until I was startled by the sun. For even then I was still an insatiable reader without any systematic formation. A reader above all of poetry, even bad poetry, because even in the worst of spirits I was convinced that sooner or later bad poetry leads to good.

In my pieces for La Jirafa I showed a great sensitivity to popular culture, in contrast to my stories, which seemed more like Kafkaesque riddles written by someone who did not know what country he was living in. But the truth of my soul was that the drama of Colombia reached me like a remote echo and moved me only when it spilled over into rivers of blood. I would light one cigarette without finishing the one before, I would breathe in the smoke with the longing for life seen in asthmatics gulping down air, and the three packs I consumed each day were evident on my nails and in an old dog's cough that disrupted my youth. In short, I was shy and sad, like a good Caribbean, and so jealous of my intimate life that I would answer any question about it with a rhetorical digression. I was convinced my bad luck was congenital and irremediable, above all with women and with money, but I did not care, because I believed I did not need good luck in order to write well. I did not care about glory, or money, or old age, because I was sure I was going to die very young, and in the street.

'I felt a delicious terror'

During that first vacation in Sucre my father had the strange idea of preparing me for business. "Just in case," he told me. The first thing was to teach me how to collect pharmacy bills at people's houses. One day he sent me to collect several at La Hora, a brothel without prejudices on the outskirts of town.

I went up to the half-closed door of a room and I saw one of the women from the house, barefoot and wearing a slip that did not cover her thighs, taking a nap on an air mattress. Before I could speak to her she sat up, looked at me half-asleep, and asked me what I wanted. I told her I had a message from my father for Don Eligio Molina, the proprietor. But instead of giving me directions she told me to come in and bar the door, and with an index finger that said everything she signaled to me: "Come here."

As I approached, her heavy breathing filled the room like a river in flood, until she grasped my arm with her right hand and slipped her left inside my fly. I felt a delicious terror.

"So you're the son of the doctor with the little drops," she said, as she handled me inside my trousers with five agile fingers that felt like 10. She took off my trousers and did not stop whispering warm words in my ear as she pulled her slip over her head and lay face up on the bed wearing only her red-flowered panties. "This is something you have to take off," she told me. "It's your duty as a man."

I undid the button but in my haste I could not remove them, and she had to help me by extending her legs and making a swimmer's rapid movement. Then she lifted me by my armpits and put me on top of her in the academic missionary position. The rest she did on her own, until I died alone on top of her, splashing in the onion soup of her filly's thighs.

She lay in silence, on her side, staring into my eyes, and I looked back at her with the hope of beginning again, this time without fear and with more time. All of a sudden she said she would not charge me the fee of two pesos for her services because I had not come prepared. Then she lay on her back and scrutinised my face.

"Besides," she said, "you're Luis Enrique's big brother, aren't you? You have the same voice."

I was innocent enough to ask her how she knew him. "Don't be an idiot," she said with a laugh. "I even have a pair of his shorts here that I had to wash for the last time."

It seemed an exaggeration considering my brother's age, but when she showed them to me I realised it was true. Then she jumped out of bed naked, with a balletic grace, and dressed.

"It's your first time, isn't it?"

My heart skipped a beat.

"What do you mean?" I lied. "I've done it at least seven times."

"Anyway," she said, "you ought to tell your brother to teach you a couple of things."

My initiation triggered a vital force in me, and I wondered how many times I would be able to get two pesos so I could go back to her. My brother Luis Enrique burst his sides laughing at the idea that someone our age would have to pay for something that two people did at the same time and made them both happy.

'Your Papá has a son by another woman'

What I perceived in the air was something much more dense. My mother seemed to care only about the health of Jaime, her youngest, who had not managed to overcome his premature birth. She spent most of the day lying with him in her bedroom hammock, oppressed by sadness and humiliating heat, and the house began to resent her neglect. My brothers and sisters seemed to have no supervision. The order of our meals had relaxed so much that we ate without schedule, whenever we were hungry. My father, the most home-loving of men, spent the day contemplating the square from the pharmacy and the evenings playing idle games at the billiard club. One day I could not bear the tension any longer. I lay down next to my mother in the hammock, as I had not been able to do when I was a child, and asked her what the mystery was that we breathed in along with the air in the house. She swallowed an entire sigh so that her voice would not tremble and opened her heart to me: "Your papá has a son by another woman."

From the relief I detected in her voice, I realised the disquiet with which she had been waiting for my question. She had discovered the truth through the clairvoyance of jealousy, when a young maid came home filled with excitement because she had seen Papá talking on the phone in the telegraph office. A jealous woman did not need to know anything else. It was the only telephone in town, employed only for long-distance calls arranged ahead of time, and it had uncertain delays and minutes so expensive that it was used only in cases of extreme gravity. Each call, no matter how simple, aroused a malicious alarm in the community of the square. And so when Papá came home my mother watched him without saying anything to him, until he tore up a piece of paper he was carrying in his pocket that was the announcement of a judicial complaint because of a professional abuse. My mother waited for the chance to ask him point blank whom he had been talking to on the telephone. The question was so revealing that my papá could not find an immediate answer more credible than the truth:

"I was talking to a lawyer."

"I know that already," said my mother. "What I need is for you to tell me about it with the frankness I deserve."

My mother admitted afterwards that she was the one who was terrified at the can of worms she might have opened without realising it, for if he dared tell her the truth it was because he thought she already knew everything. Or that he would have to tell her everything.

That was the case. Papá confessed that he had received notification of a criminal complaint against him for having abused in his consulting room a sick woman whom he had drugged with an injection of morphine. It must have happened in a forgotten jurisdiction where he had spent brief periods of time to attend patients without money. And he gave immediate proof of his rectitude: the melodramatic tale of anaesthesia and rape was a criminal slander by his enemies, but the boy was his, conceived under normal circumstances.

It was not easy for my mother to avoid the scandal because someone very influential was standing in the shadows and manipulating the strings to the plot. There was the precedent of Abelardo and Carmen Rosa, who had lived with us at various times and had everyone's affection, but both of them had been born before her marriage. But my mother also overcame her rancour at the bitter pill of a new child and her husband's infidelity, and fought at his side in a public way until they had discredited the lie about the rape.

Peace returned to the family. However, a short while later, confidential news came from the same region, about a little girl with a different mother whom Papá had recognised as his, and who was living in deplorable conditions. My mother wasted no time on quarrels and suppositions, but did battle to bring her to the house. "Mina did the same thing with all of Papá's scattered children," she said on that occasion, "and she never had any reason to regret it." And so she succeeded on her own to have the girl sent to her, with no public furore, and she mixed her into the already numerous family.

All of this was past history when my brother Jaime met a boy identical to our brother Gustavo at a party in another town. It was the son who had caused the legal complaint. He was well brought up and pampered by his mother, but our mother took all kinds of measures and brought him home to live - when there already were 11 of us - and helped him to learn a trade and become established in life. Then, I could not hide my astonishment that a woman whose jealousy was hallucinatory could have been capable of such actions, and she herself responded with a sentence that I have preserved ever since as if it were a diamond: "Well, the same blood that's in my children's veins just can't go wandering around out there."

© Gabriel GarcÀa MÀrquez Edited extracts from Living To Tell The Tale by Gabriel GarcÀa MÀrquez, translated by Edith Grossman, to be published by Jonathan Cape on November 6 at £18.99