Bitácora de vuelo

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Visita Bitácora de vuelo

Una entrevista, a propósito de la publicación de En agosto nos vemos

En el programa "La mañana"de NTN24.

La historia del rescate de En agosto nos vemos

 Como no hay plazo que no se cumpla, en pocas semanas el mundo conocerá la novela de Gabriel García Márquez que durante muchos años permaneció inédita y guardada en un archivo de la Universidad de Texas. Reproduzco un artículo escrito por solicitud de El Diario de España (5 de mayo de 2023), en el que hablo de mi papel para que la familia del nobel colombiano reconsiderara su decisión de no publicar la novela. Incluyo también enlaces al texto publicado en México (16 de julio de 2022) con el que todo comenzó y una entrevista para El club de lectura, de Caracol (agosto de 2022), en la que insistí en que la historia de Ana Magdalena Bach debía ser publicada.

Nueve años después de su muerte, Gabriel García Márquez vuelve a ser noticia. A finales de marzo, el Instituto Cervantes anunció que el escritor colombiano es el autor latinoamericano más leído y el autor más traducido del español en el siglo XXI. El 28 de abril, sus editores anunciaron que el próximo año publicarán su novela En agosto nos vemos. Para los lectores de García Márquez, el lanzamiento de un nuevo libro suyo siempre ha sido un motivo de celebración. Para mí, la alegría tiene un motivo adicional. He tenido el honor de ser instrumental para que esta novela finalmente se publique.

De En agosto nos vemos se han tenido noticias fragmentarias. En 1999, su autor divulgó como un cuento el que sería el primer capítulo de la novela. García Márquez seguiría trabajando en el texto por varios años. En 2007, cuando el mundo hispánico le rindió un homenaje en Cartagena de Indias durante el IV Congreso Internacional de la Lengua Española, le habló con entusiasmo a un amigo suyo de la novela que estaba escribiendo. Pero, al final, el proyecto quedó abandonado. La pérdida de sus facultades mentales le impidió completar esa historia de amor que sería la culminación de su carrera literaria.

Tras la muerte de García Márquez, el 17 de abril de 2014, En agosto nos vemos volvió a ser noticia y muchos nos ilusionamos con la idea de poder leerla. Pero la familia del autor anunció que no sería publicada. Todo indicaba que Memoria de mis putas tristes (2004) sería la impresión final de quien en su momento fue considerado el escritor vivo más importante de la lengua castellana.

Mustio Collado, el protagonista de Memoria de mis putas tristes, es un buen representante de ese arco temático que empieza con la muerte y la soledad, para culminar –en las últimas obras de García Márquez– con el amor como obsesión principal. Es posible citar frases del libro que son memorables: “No te vayas a morir sin probar la maravilla de tirar con amor”. Pero no dejaba de ser problemático que el protagonista de su última novela se dejara encasillar tan fácilmente como “pervertido” o “depredador”. Esa novela le daba un cierre “mustio” a una obra que merecía mejor suerte. La publicación de En agosto nos vemos no solo confirma la vigencia de Gabriel García Márquez, también representa la reivindicación de su legado.

Retrato de un gabólogo

Mi vida ha estado entretejida con la de García Márquez. No olvido la impresión que me produjo a los doce años la lectura de La hojarasca, su primera novela. En 1975, cuando apareció El otoño del patriarca, corrí a prestar el libro en la biblioteca de mi escuela, pero no entendí casi nada. De aquella primera lectura –del que hoy es mi libro suyo favorito– solo me quedó el recuerdo de unas vacas que se comían las cortinas en el balcón del palacio presidencial.

Nací y crecí en Medellín, una ciudad que ya empezaba a ser una de las más violentas del mundo, como lo refleja Noticia de un secuestro, y la lectura fue mi refugio. Decidí estudiar periodismo porque García Márquez me había mostrado con el ejemplo que ese era un buen camino para llegar a ser escritor. A comienzos de la década de 1990, decidí marcharme a Cartagena de Indias y allí empecé a trabajar en El Universal, el mismo periódico donde cuarenta años atrás García Márquez había iniciado su carrera de periodista.

La soledad de las palabras

El Harry Ransom Center es como una caverna llena de tesoros. En los días que estuve allí también miré los manuscritos de James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, G. K. Chesterton y Evelyn Waugh. Los archivos de muchos otros artistas destacados están allí. La decisión de la familia de García Márquez fue acertada. Es difícil pensar que esos materiales estuvieran mejor guardados y disponibles para los investigadores en otro lugar. Regresé a casa con la urgencia de causar revuelo y, en pocos días, escribí un artículo, “La soledad de las palabras”, que envié a Confabulario, el suplemento cultural del diario El Universal de México, con la esperanza de que fuera leído por la familia de García Márquez.

El artículo de Confabulario (julio 16, 2022), en defensa de la publicación de En agosto nos vemos.

En el artículo hice una sinopsis de esta novela cuyo paisaje es una mezcla de muchos espacios del Caribe. Conté que es la historia de diez años en la vida de Ana Magdalena Bach, una mujer hermosa y madura (“de cabello indio, piel de color y textura de melaza, ojos de topacio y oscuros párpados portugueses”), felizmente casada y madre de dos hijos. Expliqué que la historia en cinco capítulos se concentra en lo que ocurre cada año alrededor de una fecha precisa, el 16 de agosto, el día del aniversario de la muerte de de su madre.

El viaje a la isla se repite cada año con variaciones. A lo largo de la novela, somos testigos de la transformación del personaje, de la forma como la culpa afecta su matrimonio, de sus triunfos furtivos y sus fracasos. En uno de sus viajes se entrega en un auto a un hombre con aire de “vampiro triste” (poco después, Ana Magdalena descubre que es un criminal buscado por las autoridades, “estafador y proxeneta de viudas alegres y solitarias, y probable asesino de dos”). En otra ocasión, Ana Magdalena cree haber seducido a un empleado del hotel, hasta que el chico le cobra por sus servicios. Cuando no encontró con quien acostarse, se llenó de pesadumbre y lloró de rabia “por la desgracia de ser mujer en un mundo de hombres”. Para Ana Magdalena, “perder una noche era perder un año”. Llegó a preguntarse “si sería capaz de salir a la calle a parar automóviles hasta encontrar a alguien que le hiciera el favor de su agosto”.

En el archivo del Harry Ransom Center hay un informe de lectura que cuestiona la calidad de la novela. Es posible inferir que ese único juicio determinó la decisión inicial de la familia de García Márquez de que no se publicara. En mi artículo me dediqué a dar razones para justificar que se reconsiderara esa decisión. Hablé de su forma, su lenguaje y su contenido. Destaqué sus referencias literarias y musicales. Señalé la aceptación de la muerte, el homenaje implícito a su madre y los ecos de otras obras de García Márquez. Expliqué el poco trabajo de edición que requería. Dije que ese esfuerzo de un hombre batallando con las últimas fuerzas creativas que le quedaban merecía consideración. La razón de más peso era que esta novela, la única suya donde el personaje principal es una mujer, representa un final mucho más digno para el conjunto de su obra.

La entrevista, con Norberto Vallejo, para El club de lectura de Caracol (agosto de 2022).

Al artículo en México le siguió una extensa entrevista radial que se transmitió en Colombia. Al poco tiempo supe, a través de su biógrafo Dasso Saldívar, que los hijos de García Márquez y su agencia literaria estaban reconsiderando la decisión y buscando otras opiniones. El pasado 28 de abril me desperté con la noticia de que la novela saldrá a la luz el año entrante y con una invitación de elDiario.es a contar la historia detrás de la noticia. Si llegaron a este punto, esa historia es la que acaban de leer.

El libro Caribbean Troubadour (publicado en abril de 2023) incluye el capítulo “A Defense of a Posthumous Novel”, basado en el artículo de Confabulario.

A Defense of a Posthumous Novel

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.

 

This week García Márquez´s family announced the release date of the Spanish edition of En agosto nos vemos (March 6) The English edition, under the title Until August, will be released on March 24. 

In the Spring of 2022, I was giving the finishing touches to my book Caribbean Troubadour: Perspectives on the Life and Works of Gabriel García Márquez, but I had the feeling that something was missing, and decided to explore the García Márquez Papers, available at the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas.

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.

Here is the chapter:

 

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.