If you are interested in
the news of the literary world, most probably you have heard that a posthumous
novel by the Colombia Nobel prize winner Gabriel García Márquez will be
released next year. The story began here, in Oneonta, New York.
I was aware that among the papers was a posthumous novel
that García Márquez´s family had decided it would remain unpublished. After
reading the novel, En Agosto nos vemos (Until August), and the
unfavorable concept of a reader commissioned by his literary agency, I realized
that keeping the novel unpublished was an injustice to the writer´s legacy.
García Márquez had been writing the novel for about ten
years (between 1997 and 2007), but the decline of his mental faculties forced
him to give up. He was incapable of taking the novel to his most polished
version and of defending the work he had made.
In my opinion, the novel was not only complete, but was a
beautiful literary work in the captivating style of the author of masterpieces such
as One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time
of Cholera.
After returning to Oneonta, I wrote an article in defense
of the novel. The article, “La soledad de las palabras” (Solitude of
the Words), was published in Mexico in Confabulario, the literary
magazine of the newspaper El Universal. After the article, I gave newspaper
and radiointerviews in which I developed further
my arguments in favor of publishing the novel.
In addition to emphasizing on the quality of the novel, I
explained how the editing work could be done, and sustained that this novel, in
which García Márquez explores the sexuality and the liberty of a female
character, would be a more dignified closure to his literary work.
The advocacy had a huge effect. Soon after the publication
of my article, the author´s family and agency ordered a reassessment of the
novel and, last April, they announced its upcoming publication in March of
2024.
It has been an honor and a pleasure to have been
instrumental in the recovery of this literary treasure. Once again, literary
research has demonstrated the impact it can make in the world.
My book on García Márquez
was published last April by Lexington books, and it includes an English version
of the defense of the novel.
A Defense of a Posthumous Novel
Every writer—regardless of his fame or prestige—is a
misunderstood artist. When Gabriel García Márquez was twenty-five years old, a
pompous Argentinian publisher read his first novel, Leaf Storm, and advised him to find another job.1 In 1961, In Evil Hour, his third novel, received a major literary prize only
after García Márquez yielded to the conditions of a priest who was part of the
panel of judges—eliminate the lewd language and change the title of the book,
which initially was This Shitty Town. That same novel received additional abuse when some callous publishers disregarded García Márquez’s
Caribbean Spanish and “translated” the novel into the Spanish from Spain. Even
when he was a recognized writer, García Márquez savored the bitterness of rejection.
On July 15, 1981, a year before he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature,
the editors of the New Yorker Magazine notified him that they would not
publish his story “The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow” because he could not
“move the reader to accept its bold and beautiful concept.”2 In 2004, when there were no doubts about the everlasting
quality of his work, his novel See You in August (En agosto nos vemos) was sentenced to silence,
apparently due to the opinion of a single person. Since 2014, after the death
of García Márquez, that final and slightly unfinished novel has been kept in an
archive that very few readers manage to access. Before finishing our pilgrimage
throughout the Caribbean Troubadour’s territories, I propose to explain why it
is urgent, fair, and necessary that See You in August finally be
published and given the closure that his literary legacy deserves.
THE WOMAN
WHO WALKED IN BEAUTY
See You in August tells the story of ten years in the life of Ana Magdalena
Bach, a beautiful and mature Caribbean
woman, happily married and mother of two children. Her home is filled with
music, and she is an insatiable reader. Her husband, who is the director of the
local conservatory, is Ana Magdalena’s father’s successor in that position.
The couple’s children are also musically inclined. Their twenty-one-year-old
son is the first cello in the city orchestra. Micaela, their daughter, is
eighteen years old, bears the name of her maternal grandmother, can play any
instrument and learn any melody by ear, but she is a free being and insists on
becoming a nun. They live in a place in the Caribbean that is an amalgam of
many real places.
The story focuses on what
happens each year around a precise date, August 16, the anniversary of the
death of Ana Magdalena’s mother.3 For
reasons that are not clear at first, the mother asked to be buried on a nearby
island, which can only be reached by
ferry. The island seems to be another nostalgic return to the Cartagena where
the author lived through decisive moments: it has that public market where he
once felt he was being reborn, it has a spectral lagoon “inhabited by blue
herons.” With determination and subtlety, Ana Magdalena insists that she make
the annual trip alone to bring flowers to her mother. That single adventure
away from her family includes a night in a hotel alone, with Ana Magdalena as
an absolute mistress of her time and her gestures. The novel begins with the
journey in which the established ritual deviates and includes a sexual
encounter with a man “with metallic hair” and a “romantic pointy mustache,” who
“seemed to be alone in the world.” They had met at the hotel bar. After the
first sip of liquor, Ana Magdalena “felt good, mischievous, capable of
anything, and embellished by the sacred mix of music and gin.” It was she who
took the initiative, with challenging and unmistakable looks, and the shy man
decided to play along. The conversation flowed smoothly. She was “shepherding
him with her fine touch.” They were united by their common love for Dracula,
the novel by Bram Stoker, which Ana Magdalena had brought to the island at that
time. She never knew his name. This was the second man in her life, and even
she was surprised by her own audacity. They loved each other throughout the
night until he couldn’t give her any more pleasure. But it all ended in a
bittersweet way, when Ana Magdalena discovered the next day that the man had
left her—between the pages of Dracula—a twenty-dollar bill.
Upon returning home, still
confused by what had happened, Ana Magdalena found herself drawn into her
husband’s love games. While they made love on the bathroom floor, Ana Magdalena
thought of the stranger, “she thanked him for what he deserved, forgave him the
unforgivable, without love or rancor, she anxiously searched for him in the
longing of her conscience to cling to him at the top end, but she did not find
him.” In order not to
spoil the readers’ experience that the novel deserves and expects, I will
simply say that this trip to the island is repeated every year with variations,
in the manner of igneous crowns, and in each cycle new things are revealed to
us. The development of the character is at the height of its author. We see Ana Magdalena
move from humiliation and guilt to a secret pride in what happened and an excited
expectation about what will happen when she returns to the island. In the fleeting flashes
that we have of her family life, we see in her the distrustful character and
the verbal slips typical of the guilty. On a certain occasion, she forces her
husband to confess a remote infidelity, but she keeps quiet about her recurring
affair. Only to her dead mother does she confess all her truths. In her annual
returns to the island, we see her take control of her freedom for a single day,
choose her occasional lovers, and have good and bad encounters (on one
occasion, a hotel employee, whom she thought she had seduced, charged her for
his sexual services). Over the years, she begins to look in those men for a
kind of idealized lover who has the vague features of the first one. During one
of her visits to the grave, Ana Magdalena discovers that someone else is
bringing flowers to her mother. Thus, she concludes that Micaela had a furtive
lover on that island and understands that the destiny of both is more united
than she first imagined. The last time she visits the island, when she is
already fifty years old, Ana Magdalena sleeps with a man who claims to be a
bishop and, the next morning, freed from her ritual of liberation, she decides
to dig up her mother’s bones and take them home.
THE DESTINY
OF A NOVEL
See
You in August is at the Harry Ransom
Center of the University of Texas at Austin. It is part of a large treasure of
manuscripts, personal documents, photographs, and letters purchased in 2014 from García
Márquez’s family. The first chapter of the novel was published by García
Márquez as a short story in newspapers and magazines in 1999. The novel is a
further development of the character and the story. Along with the most
advanced version of the novel and drafts of several chapters, there is the
report of a reader commissioned by Carmen Balcells’s literary agency. The fate
of the work seems to have been sealed with that condescending opinion, which
served as a reference for García Márquez’s family to decide that the novel
would not be published. With an arrogance that betrays his inexperience, the
author of the report offers an impoverished synthesis of the story. Aware that
he cannot be completely dismissive, he allows himself to praise as a fortunate
subtlety of the plot the fact that Ana Magdalena throws herself into her
periodic infidelity despite having a happy relationship with her husband. He
makes a lukewarm and formal praise of the style. He mentions echoes of “The
Tell-Tale Heart,” the short story by Edgar Allan Poe, in the passage where
guilt seems to drive the protagonist to reveal her secret. But he strikes down
any possibility of publication by describing the novel as a repetitive and
elongated short story. His narrowness is more noticeable when he says that See
You in August is a novel inferior to Memories of My Melancholy Whores. In his report he does not mention
any other novel by García Márquez and, considering the way in which he ignores
the resonances of those novels in this last one, it is possible to doubt that
he knew them.
Let’s be
clear, neither Memories of my Melancholy Whores nor See You in August
are novels on a par with García Márquez’s masterpieces. We cannot measure
them in relation to One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Autumn of the
Patriarch, or Love in the Time of Cholera. But these minor novels
are the last words of an author who earned and deserves our respect and
attention. Furthermore, by silencing his latest literary effort, we are
preventing García Márquez from giving his literary career a dignified and
coherent closure. Memories of My
Melancholy Whores is a nostalgic tribute to the years García Márquez lived
in Barranquilla, in the early 1950s. In it he imagined the stagnant
respectability he would have achieved had he not followed that wandering
destiny that led him first to live in many places. His latest novel published
so far is full of merit. His literary references insist on showing us the love and respect García Márquez had
since a very young age for medieval and Golden Age Spanish literature. The
novel is also an homage to Yasunari Kawabata’s The House of Sleeping
Beauties. The image of the sleeping virgin is heir to the tradition of
courtly love. But that nonagenarian vampire—who feeds on youth and beauty—was
not the final image with which García Márquez wanted to close his literary
career. Therein lies the importance of See You in August. Omitting the
true last novel by García Márquez is like skipping—without caring to do so—the
last chapter of One Hundred Years of Solitude and pretend we have read
it complete. The greatest merit
of See You in August is that for the first time García
Márquez dares to make a woman the main character of his novel. He only had
tried that in a short theatrical monologue, Diatribe of Love against a
Sitting Man. After the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude,
scholars highlighted the complexity and consistency of his female characters.4 García Márquez said he had not been aware of his ability
until then and attributed it to the fact that he spent his early childhood in a
world of women, where the only male figure was his grandfather, Colonel Nicolás
Márquez. As I have pointed repeatedly, he inherited from his grandmother, Tranquilina Iguarán, the distant and
impassive tone with which the extraordinary events of One Hundred Years of
Solitude are narrated. Over time, García Márquez would develop a very close
relationship with his mother, Luisa Santiaga Márquez. Mercedes Barcha, his
wife, was both support and inspiration. On numerous occasions, García Márquez
declared that he felt more comfortable in the company of women. But the praise
he received for the female characters in One Hundred Years of Solitude had
a chilling effect on him. He himself would admit that, from that moment on, it was more
difficult for him to write about women. For many years, García Márquez would
admit that Úrsula Iguarán and
Amaranta Úrsula were his favorite:
Úrsula holds the world together. That is contrary to what I
saw in real life—as a child. The women in my
grandfather’s household were often quite unworldly. However, I believe that in
most cases women are the practical sex. Úrsula is the prototype of that kind of
practical, life-sustaining woman. After Úrsula, I most like her
great-great-granddaughter Amaranta Úrsula. Of all the Buendía offspring, she is
the one that most resembles the original Úrsula—but without the older woman
complexes and prejudices.
García Márquez’s difficulty writing about women, after One Hundred Years of Solitude, is obvious. The sleepwalker Eréndira
is more a symbol than a character. The Leticia Nazareno of The Autumn of the
Patriarch is diluted in a few pages. The Ángela Vicario of Chronicle of
a Death Foretold is silent and her secret remains inaccessible. The Fermina
Daza from Love in the Time of Cholera, the Sierva María from Of Love
and Other Demons, or the Delgadina from Memories of My Melancholy Whores
are little more than pieces of scenery. The silencing of See You in
August has been partly responsible for the fact that García Márquez’s work
has been the object of attacks by a sector of criticism that acts as a kind of
moral police. The absence of See You in August in the corpus of
this author has been in part responsible for his dismissal as a representative
of a macho tradition. Only in this novel, written in the twilight of his
creative power, did García Márquez dare to fully inhabit a female character: a
mature woman who manages to escape from her family and social prison to become
the mistress of her body and her freedom. Only with its publication can critics
reasonably pronounce the final word on García Márquez’s relationship to
machismo.
See You in
August confirms the plasticity of
García Márquez’s language at the end of his creative career. It is also a
tribute to music. Bach, the surname of the protagonist, celebrates the composer
whose work García Márquez said he would take to a desert island. As usual in
García Márquez’s work, See You in August is populated by codified
personal experiences and abounds in literary tributes. The narrator makes a
complete inventory of the protagonist’s readings on her consecutive travels to
the island. In the early 1980s, García Márquez declared that the “many”
literary references found in his books “are always things I am reading at the
moment of writing.”5 The reference to Dracula is an homage to one of
García Márquez’s favorite novels. After reading The Ministry of Fear, by
Graham Greene, Ana Magdalena Bach devotes herself to reading fantasy
literature. A revealing detail of the novel is a reference to the “third story
of the Martian Chronicles,” by Ray Bradbury. In 1982, during an interview after the announcement of
the Nobel Prize, García Márquez
confessed “the sin” of being a devoted reader of Ray Bradbury.6 Bradbury’s short story, “Midsummer Night,” is a tribute to
the mysterious— incomprehensible—nature of poetry. It describes, with spectral
images that seem to have spilled over into García Márquez’s novel, the
adventure of a poem by Lord Byron (“She Walks
in Beauty”), which the inhabitants of Mars repeat in fascination without knowing
its origin or meaning. The characters in Bradbury’s story have, like Ana
Magdalena, yellow eyes. Byron’s poem, in a way, is a description of Ana
Magdalena, that woman in whom “the best of light and shadow come together in
her appearance and in her eyes.”
The eventual publication of See You in August does not mean that it will not be
criticized. No book is without objections. When One Hundred Years of
Solitude appeared, Miguel Ángel Asturias said that it was a simple
plagiarism of Balzac’s In Search of the Absolute, and as I mentioned
before, it is said that, for Borges, it could have been fifty years shorter.
There will be those who say that any attempt by a man to build a female
character is an abusive and patriarchal gesture. Literary eroticism is a slippery
slope, and it is to be expected that his descriptions of Ana Magdalena’s
encounters with her lovers will be criticized.
But the truth is that here the “huge tools”7 of other books become more
detailed and complex matters:
After a long hour of banal whispers,
she began to explore him with her fingers, very slowly, from his chest to his lower
abdomen. She continued with the touch of her feet along his legs and verified
that all of him was covered by thick [In the last draft, García Márquez
replaced the adjective and wrote in pencil: “smooth”] and tender hair as April
moss. Then she reached out again with her fingers for the resting animal and
found it dejected but alive. He made it easier for her with a change of
position. She recognized it with her fingertips: the size, the shape, the
gasping frenulum, the silken glans, topped by a hem that looked as if it had
been sewn with baling needles. She counted the stitches by touch, and he
hastened to clarify what she had imagined.
“I was circumcised as an
adult.” And he finished with
a sigh, “It was a very rare pleasure.”
“Finally,” she said, “something that was
not an honor.”
They kissed on the mouth for the
first time. She wanted to assault him again, but he revealed himself to her as
an exquisite lover who slowly raised her to the point of boiling. He firmly
imposed himself on her, handled her as he pleased, and made her happy.
Allowing García
Márquez to close his work with a female perspective is an act of justice. The
decision not to publish the novel was presented to the public opinion as proof
of his family’s lack of interest in making easy profits from his legacy. The
novel was described as an unfinished work that did not measure up to the rest of its author’s
oeuvre. But the lack of interest in profiting from his legacy is contradicted
by the amount of refried and scraped pots that have been published after García
Márquez’s death. The contradiction is even more obvious when we observe the
nonchalant way in which his family has ignored García Márquez’s determination not to allow One Hundred Years of Solitude to be made into a film or
TV series.
If it’s true that, at the end
of his life, García Márquez was more flexible about that determination, if it’s
true that his will is being honored, why not give a similar respect to the last
words he wrote? The novel never had a definitive version, but it is a fact that
García Márquez managed to complete it. The first draft of the last chapter
shows us a man struggling with the last creative forces he had left. It is
possible to imagine the tremendous difficulty with which he managed to overcome
the obstacles imposed by his age and the increasing loss of his mental
faculties. The creative energy abandoned him in the last part of the process,
and he was no longer able to defend his book until he could see it published.
But his effort deserves our respect. Without much difficulty and with minimal
interventions, a loving editor—someone who knows and appreciates García
Márquez’s oeuvre—could finish the job. No matter how many alterations and
betrayals are needed, they will never be as many or as unfortunate as giving
Colonel Aureliano Buendía or Remedios the Beauty the faces of famous actors.
THE MIRROR OF DEATH
The ending of See You in August is perhaps the main reason why the novel should be
published. It is much more significant, for García Márquez’s legacy, that his
work as a whole culminates in this reunion with his mother; an encounter which
is, at the same time, a reflection on death and on the mysterious privilege of
being alive. In Memories of My Melancholy Whores, the character
people know as Mustio Collado does not have a certain link with his ancestors,
he is essentially a caricature. Except for the distant tragedy in Of
Love and Other Demons, García Márquez tried to ignore death—his lifetime
fear, ever more real and closer to him—and decided to confer open and happy
endings to Love in the Time of Cholera and Memories of
My Melancholy Whores.
See You in August, on the contrary, ends with the eyes
turned to death, to the afterlife from where the dead look at us. Here we also
find those magicians who populated many
of his books (and we should not forget that García Márquez saw himself both as
troubadour and magician). It would not be surprising if the future came to
judge that last passage of the last novel as one of his best, when Ana Magdalena (with
her biblical name) sees herself reflected in her mother’s corpse and
understands their shared destiny.
The caretaker and a gravedigger for
hire unearthed the coffin and ruthlessly opened it with the arts of a sideshow
magician. Ana Magdalena then saw herself in the open drawer as if in a
full-length mirror, with an icy smile and her arms crossed over her chest. She
saw herself identical and with the same age as that day, with the veil and the
crown with which she had married, the emerald diadem and the wedding rings,
as her mother had arranged it with her last breath. Not only did she see her as
she was in life, with the same inconsolable sadness, but she felt seen by her
from death, loved and mourned by her, until the body fell apart in its own
final dust, and only remained the rotten skeleton that the gravediggers cleaned
with a broom and mercilessly stored in a bag.
At the beginning of that mosaic of
wonders that is One Hundred Years of
Solitude, there is a powerful
image that makes us shudder and we are quick to forget, because keeping it very
present is intolerable. A little girl arrives at the Buendía house carrying her
parents’ bones in a canvas bag. It is Rebeca, who also brings with her the
plague of oblivion. From that novel, most of us readers prefer to remember the
light and colorful yellow butterflies of Mauricio Babilonia or the little gold
fishes of the senile Colonel Aureliano Buendía. At the end of the road, García
Márquez wanted to return to the image of that bag of bones that we all drag
along. Ana Magdalena Bach, the protagonist of See You in August,
joins “diapers and shroud” when she reunites with the body of her dead mother.
That was the image chosen by García Márquez, the “resounding tail”8 with which he wanted to end his career as a
writer.
García Márquez’s relationship with his mother was endearing.
Luisa Santiaga Márquez was not only a mediator
with his father, who had a hard time accepting that his son abandoned his law
career to become a writer (“You will eat paper,” Gabriel Eligio García
sentenced).9 Before succumbing to the same oblivion that would take over
her son, Luisa Santiaga was one of the most attentive readers of his writings,
even if it were only to be outraged by his way of representing relatives and
acquaintances. The writer felt that he had inherited from her the visionary attitude
that helped him navigate and find direction in his life and in his work. Luisa
Santiaga was even the guardian of her memories and her soul. One of the most
precious jewels in the García Márquez archive in Texas is a letter his mother
wrote to García Márquez on March 6 1983:
“Gabito: Today I was waiting for your call more than ever.
For being the day of your birthday (Sunday), like the day you were born at 9 in
the morning. I guess you didn’t get through or you weren’t in Mexico. Well,
this brings you my con- gratulatory hug, may God give you many years of life,
so you will have the joy of
seeing your children the same as I,
who already have great-grandchildren. I tell you that I read yesterday’s
column, I liked it so much that without lying to you I feel so happy and proud,
more than with the Nobel Prize you received. I remember one day many years ago talking
to you and complaining that you were not the Catholic that I wanted you to be.
Then you told me, in the afterlife you will realize when you see me in the
position or the place where God wanted me. You will see. Time was responsible
for persuading me about this. I follow your actions step by step and I trust
that if you continue like this, there is no doubt that the virtue of charity is
rewarded by God.”
García Márquez’s weekly phone call to
his mother was sacred. Because he was traveling in Asia, that was the
only Sunday he couldn’t call
her. In his memoir, he would use the detail she gave him in the letter about
the day of the week and the hour of his birth. What made Luisa Santiaga happier
and prouder than the Nobel Prize was the private audience with the Pope, which
García Márquez evoked on the occasion of John Paul II’s visit to Central
America. Perhaps in no other part of his work, as in the three paragraphs of
that March 1983 column, does the word God appear so many times.
García Márquez wanted his last novel
to be a secret dialogue with his mother. He chose a woman because he wanted to celebrate her
in himself. He also wanted to express his calm acceptance of death and his
willingness to take the leap into the afterlife.
Two hours later, Ana Magdalena gave one last look
of compassion to her own past, and a goodbye forever to her strangers of a
night and to the many hours of uncertainty that remained of herself scattered
on the island. The sea was a pool of gold in the afternoon sun.10 At six o’clock, when her husband saw
her enter without mysteries the house, dragging the bag of bones, he could not
resist his surprise.
“It’s what’s left of my
mother,” she told him and anticipated his horror. “Don’t be scared, she understands.
Furthermore, I think she is the only one who had already understood it since
she decided to be buried on the island.”
The eldest of the eleven children of
the telegrapher of Aracataca and his devout
and clairvoyant wife spent his life reflecting on loneliness and found that the
solution and the answer to that enigma was found in love. Looking for and
asking for love, he became the most famous writer of his time. The irony of the
story is that his last words have been denied love and, for now, they remain
condemned to a fate of silence and solitude.
Notes:
1. Mendoza, The Fragrance of Guava, 55.
2. Gabriel García Márquez Collection. Harry Ransom Center. University of Texas. Austin,
Texas.
3. In an interview given in the late
1990s, García Márquez admitted the influence in this story of the movie Same Time, Next
Year, directed by Robert Mulligan. Muñoz, Boris,
“La alergia del Gabo,” in Para que no se las lleve el viento, 656.
4. García Márquez referred particularly to Ernesto Volkening,
“who made me con- cious of it. I wasn’t too happy about having it pointed out,
because now I no longer create female characters with the same spontaneity as I
used to.” Mendoza, The Fra- gance of Guava, 106.
5. Juan Gustavo
Cobo Borda, Para llegar a García Márquez (Bogotá:
Ediciones Temas de Hoy, 1997), 180.
6. Alberto Oliva,
“Puedo morir tranquilo, ya soy inmortal,” in Para que no se
las lleve el viento, 240.
7. García Márquez, The Autumn of the Patriarch, 23.
8. See, in chapter 8, García Márquez’s statement about the importance of the end- ing of a story.
9. Darío Arizmendi, “Entrevista radial,” in Para que no se las lleve el viento, 488
10. When asked by Plinio Mendoza what was his favorite color, García Márquez answered, “The yellow of the Caribbean seen from Jamaica at three in the afternoon.” Mendonza, The Fragrance of Guava, 117.
