When I met him, in the main park of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Álvaro Santana Acuña was a boy who a few years ago, he was in his twenties,
had fallen in love with Gabo.
Then he talked about his idol as if he had just seen him, talked to him;
as if he was aware of his friends and his secrets.
What's more, one might think, since the author of
One Hundred Years of Solitude was still alive,
that he had just spoken to him that morning to tell him, for example, that he was in Tenerife, which is a name that also has to do with
One Hundred Years of Solitude. ,
because it corresponds to a place that is close, in Colombia, to Macondo, where that odd novel drinks the air it breathes.
At that time Álvaro Santana, who is now one of the great specialists in (all) García Márquez's work, teaches at Whitman College and Harvard University and every year he travels to Austin to delve into the writer's archives at the University from Texas, studied in depth the work and adventures of the literary hero of his life.
His specialization, which is also his enthusiasm, has recently led him to organize the great exhibition Gabriel García Márquez: the creation of a global writer that started in Austin in 2020, arrived in Mexico City in 2022 and continues around the world , with an upcoming stopover in Colombia, the large homeland of the author of Aracataca.
With that background, and that passion, Álvaro Santana
goes in the footsteps of this literary ancestor whom he never met
, but about whom he knows so much.
He knows everything, and now it seems that he is diving into the new (unpublished) novel that Penguin Random House will release as soon as it approaches, March 6, one of the anniversaries close to the centenary of the writer who was born in a small house in Aracataca that day. spring of 1927. In Madrid, where he made a stopover from Tenerife, his birthplace, I sat down to talk with Álvaro Santana Acuña, and the first thing I asked him was something that was the same thing that Gabo asked people as soon as he saw someone who came from afar:
“What happened?”
In this case I told Santana Acuña
, what was new with Gabo?
And he told me about the theme of his life: “Well, look, many new things, because García Márquez is a theme that never ends… When I started my book on One Hundred Years of Solitude I thought that everything had already been said about that novel.
But I found unknown documents and with them I treated all the most important aspects of the novel in my book.
Then other themes have continued to come that make his story inexhaustible…”
One of the facts that have continued to matter, and remain unique, is that this particular novel “continues to have a life of its own… Note that when I was correcting the proofs of the book
we learned that a star that is more than 91 light years from Earth They named it Macondo,
and that the planet that orbits around it is called Melquíades, like the character of Gabo... Netflix is adapting the novel, and it will be an event of global impact... And now comes the news of the publication of the novel that he left unpolished…”
There is so much, says Álvaro Santana, “there is even the fact that
researchers and journalists explore the issue of the future of the environment
and its relationship with Macondo, its decline or disappearance... As if the history of that village were a kind of parable of how humanity has also destroyed the Earth and it may have a future very similar to the end of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Macondo, which ends up disappearing, after suffering a serious ecological tragedy, which was the rain that lasted more than four years in a row…”
To these events, which have nothing to do with the novel itself, but in which the influence of great literature can be appreciated with the life from which this extraordinary book was born, are added those specific to the work of this island professor, whose exhibition , already known in the United States and Mexico, awaits its turn to open in Colombia in 2025.
“Imagine,” he tells me, sitting in a hotel that was a monastery for the rich in Madrid, where, for example, Paul Bowles stayed, “what it means for a Spaniard from the Canary Islands to be the
curator of an exhibition by the greatest of Colombians.” precisely in Colombia
… It is an enormous honor and responsibility.
The exhibition also aims to demonstrate how García Márquez became a global writer, born and raised in Colombia, but loved by cultures and audiences around the world.”
--What precedes these discoveries or news related to Gabo? Why did you come to him?
--By chance, I arrived by chance.
She was studying at Harvard in the fall of 2007 and there it started to rain as if the end of the world was coming, day after day.
One of those days, going to the library, I said out loud: “It rains here like in Macondo…” I had not yet visited Latin America, I had read One Hundred Years of Solitude fourteen years before, and that question stuck in my head. until the following year I proposed that this topic, Macondo, Gabo, One Hundred Years of Solitude, be the subject of a work of mine on how a book like that becomes a classic... In the course of that research I was at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, to work in the Gabriel García Márquez archive... There they told me that I was the first researcher to access his private archive and I found the letters that Gabo had written to friends of his such as Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, Álvaro Cepeda Samudio, Guillermo Angulo , so many... They approached me with a writer who was not famous when he wrote those letters.
At that time, in those letters, Álvaro Santana says, “Gabo was a writer who corresponded with friends, and talked to them about his insecurities, about his difficulties in developing a professional career as a writer.
He was writing for magazines in which he didn't even want his name to be published, he was embarrassed, because they were aimed at housewives or dealt with sensational issues... "
In those letters he also talked about
One Hundred Years of Solitude
, what it meant for him “that wonderful moment when he could start writing.”
In those letters is the moment
“When Gabo understood what the creative process of the novel should be… There is not Gabo telling how the novel was, but how he was making it, what he felt at the time of writing it…”
And what will this novel be, See You In August, which is not yet known?
Álvaro Santana read it in 2017… “It was more finished than you think… It is a novel, without a doubt.
Gabo's literary voice is recognized.
Perhaps with his creative faculties diminished by his illness.
We are not talking about a new One Hundred Years of Solitude, of course, nor about another
Love in the Time of Cholera...
In any case, it is going to cause quite a surprise, because at this time of cancellations, which have also affected him , the narrative voice is that of a woman... And here we return to García Márquez from
Diatribe of love against a seated man
and from
Monologue of Isabel watching it rain in Macond
o.
Now García Márquez gives voice to a woman who seeks to empower herself, to experiment with her freedom.
It will certainly attract the attention of many readers…”
--And will those of us who love Gabo like it?
--I think so.
It is a novel in the vein of
Live to tell it
and
Memory of my sad whores
.
Despite his illness, García Márquez displays his fabulous ability to use language to surprise us,
to invent metaphors, to create associations between words that no one had thought of before.
See you in August is also another irrefutable proof of his talent, dedication and love for literature.
It is an essential work.
The final touch to a unique career and life.
He didn't know him.
And how do you imagine it?
“As a very private person, worried about his public image, someone who tested you to see if he could trust you.
If you managed to pass those tests you were already in his circle.
Being so famous and sought after, he had to check if other people's interest in him was genuine, that's where those tests came from.
I also feel that he must have been a very generous, very kind, and very nice person, once you sat in the living room of his house where he enjoyed one of the pleasures of life, talking with friends.