Travel to the García Márquez archive in Austin to reveal all the secrets of his unpublished novel

The last chapter of Gabriel García Márquez's literary work was always there, in boxes number 1 and number 2 of the writer's archive that the family sold in 2014 to the Harry Ransom Center, a brutalist fort on the campus of the University of Austin, Texas.

Distributed in yellow folders, there are five versions with hand-corrections of the short novel

In August See You

, dated between June and July 2004, plus two “drawer copies” and another called “from Los Angeles” after the city in which the writer worked on it while fighting cancer, as well as a lukewarm reading report and several fragments sent to Barcelona to his agent, Carmen Balcells, before García Márquez, who was declining in his last decade, in 2010 or perhaps 2011. through the abyss of dementia, said: “This book is useless.

"We have to destroy it."

See you in August

it was not destroyed.

It will be released on March 6, the day on which the writer would have turned 97 years old.

The launch, simultaneous in 40 languages—in Spanish, by Literatura Random House, except in Mexico and Central America, where it is a Planeta thing—promises to be one of the publishing events of the year around the world.

The heirs, Rodrigo García and Gonzalo García Barcha, children of the Colombian Nobel Prize winner and Mercedes Barcha, who died at the beginning of the pandemic, reviewed the novel a couple of years ago and decided that it deserved to be published.

“That was his last effort against the fading of his memories,” Rodrigo, the first-born, a renowned Hollywood filmmaker, explained a couple of weeks ago in a video call from Mexico City.

“He worked intensely on it.

And then, as he forgot things, he forgot that book too.

My theory is that when he said it didn't work he had lost the ability to judge it.

It's not as polished as his other novels, but it's not an incomprehensible mess either.

I think it was him who no longer understood anything.”

To put order in the materials that remained at his death, 10 years ago this April, the heirs turned to the editor Cristóbal Pera, who worked with the writer “from Barcelona, ​​in the distance” on his autobiography,

Vivir para narrala

(2002), and - already as editorial director of Random House Mondadori México - in the compilation of his public texts,

I do not come to say a speech

(2010).

Pera, who is now editorial director of Planeta in the United States, in his free time in the attic of his house in New Jersey compared all the corrections made in red with the devilish handwriting of the septuagenarian García Márquez.

“I didn't have to add anything, that doesn't even need to be said, but rather try to understand which version was closest to the final.

Do the editor's work as if he were next to him, following his notes,” he clarifies.

One of the numerous photos of Gabriel García Márquez deposited in the writer's archive at the Harry Ransom Center, in Austin (Texas, USA).

Photographer Indira Restrepo took it at Gabo's house in Mexico City.Roberto Antillón

Corrections to 'See you in August'.Roberto Antillón

The children's minds were to respect as much as possible the state in which the story was left when their father gave up continuing with it, to the point that, Rodrigo García says, they refused to fix “a couple of contradictions” when some of them the translators into other languages ​​made them see them.

Just as its author left it, the plot of the 110-page novel is complete.

The protagonist is a middle-aged woman named Anna Magdalena Bach, like the composer's second wife, an enigmatic baptism that was surely a wink from the music-loving Gabo, because his readers already know that for him names were an important matter: “(T)he “Characters in my novels do not walk on their own feet until they have a name that identifies with their way of being,” he wrote in his memoirs.

Anna Magdalena Bach's way of being is that of someone who embarks on a journey of sexual exploration outside of marriage that coincides with the visit every August 16 to the island where her mother's tomb is to plant gladioli and also to update it.

It is not clear exactly when or where the story takes place, but it is a contemporary story, which adds interest in the context of the rest of the writer's work.

When they sold Austin the archive—80 boxes of papers, 67 computer diskettes, and 15 boxes and three large folders, totaling a little more than 10 linear meters—the heirs restricted access to

In August See You

While they decided what do with that material.

It was not included in 2017 in the digitization of 27,000 documents, which, as explained in a room at the Harry Ransom Center by Jim Kuhn, responsible for that operation, was limited to “just over half of the total”, that is, all the materials over which the family has intellectual property.

That excluded many photographs and letters, whose correspondents, from Woody Allen to Bill Clinton and Akira Kurosawa to Fidel Castro, retain their copyright in what they wrote.

“It was an act of generosity, and a very good way to share the writer's legacy and creative process,” adds Kuhn.

“It is not so common for families of authors of that magnitude to allow it, because it is believed, I would say erroneously, that it negatively impacts the sale of books.”

Although anyone who wants to read, say,

Love in the Time of Cholera

can do so for free by consulting the manuscript online, Rodrigo García downplays the importance of the family's gesture.

“After all, if you put the title of any novel in Google you get a PDF;

It’s incredible,” he laments.

Digitization did not diminish the interest of in-person consultation of the Colombian Nobel documents either.

Kuhn recalls that the García Márquez archive, with which he wanted to open up to Latin America an institution that houses a Gutenberg Bible, the Watergate papers and legacies of James Joyce, Robert De Niro, Virginia Woolf, JM Coetzee and David Foster Wallace, is among the most requested by researchers who come to the center's sepulchral reading room.

Stephen Ennis, director of the Harry Ransom Center.Roberto Antillón

Megan Bernard, director of Administration and Conservation of the center.

Roberto Antillon

When researchers were later allowed to consult the unpublished novel, the Colombian writer and journalist Gustavo Arango, who read it in Texas, published an article singing its benefits, and that was another of the reasons that moved the family, Pera says, to finally publish it, beyond the portions that had already seen the light, and before someone photographed it in the reading room and spread it on the Internet. “Of course, they don't edit it now because a question of money,” adds the editor.

“Gabo's work is very alive, they don't need it in any way.

In China alone, 10 million copies of One Hundred Years of Solitude have been sold in recent years

.”

In the archive there is also a trace of the public life of

In August See You

.

There are photos of a 1999 event at Casa de América, organized in Madrid by the General Society of Authors, in which you can see the writer, who read a version of the first chapter there, together with another Nobel Prize winner, José Saramago.

EL PAÍS journalist Rosa Mora, who was at that event, wrote a chronicle in which she explained the plot and said that it was the first of the “five autonomous stories” that would make up her next book: “they seem like absolutely closed, autonomous stories.” , but they form a unitary whole,” the article said.

In a telephone conversation from Barcelona, ​​Mora remembers: “There was great expectation because word spread that Gabo was going to read something new.”

"We were all very aware of him at that time, we must keep in mind that he was not an author who published every two or three years, and that he liked to announce things, give clues, that did not materialize until some time later."

The following Sunday, the newspaper published a revised version of that text.

In one of the boxes of letters to his agency there is also a trace of when Gabo decided to give the newspaper other material related to the unpublished novel, which came out in 2003 with the title

The Night of the Eclipse

.

In all these publications (also, when the Spanish newspaper

La Vanguardia

published the first chapter again a few days after the author's death) it was highlighted that

In August See Us

would complete the trilogy “about love in middle age” begun with

Of love and other demons

and

Memory of my sad whores

.

“That's also why we wanted to publish it,” says Rodrigo García, “because I think it closes this triptych very well in a feminist key.

From his point of view, that of a woman, it seemed to us that it was going to expand Gabo's world for his readers, and above all for his female readers.

The start of 'In August See You' in its version of June 21, 2004. Roberto Antillón

The different versions kept in Austin are written in Palatino font, the type used in the first Apple computers, which Gabo embraced with enthusiasm (the last one he had is also in the Harry Ransom Center).

“He only used them to write and read the newspaper, nothing more.

He was a very perfectionist and liked to finish the page clean, so with the typewriter he wasted time correcting errors,” Rodrigo García remembers.

“With the computer he went from one page a day to four or five.”

On those pages, the author pointed out reiterations in red or in pencil, eliminated phrases like “the black clouds filled her with a dark omen” or changed his mind about the age of the protagonist: close to old age at the beginning, 36 years later , and finally 46.

A careful study of those erasures and marginal notes allows us to peek into the writer's mind just before she got lost in his labyrinth.

They helped Pera interpret her intentions.

The editor based it, she says, on the fifth version, which was inside a black Leuchtturm folder, her favorite, in which she wrote “Big OK.”

He compared it to a “[Word document] kept by her secretary, Mónica Alonso.”

Although, in reality, Pera's work on the novel had begun long before his children called him two years ago.

“One day in 2010, Balcells told me in Barcelona: 'Cristóbal, you have to get Gabo to finish the novel he has in hand,'” she remembers.

“When I returned to Mexico I told him.

He, amused, clarified that it was indeed finished, and to demonstrate it he read me the last paragraph.

Then, for months he didn't let me see him anymore, until one day he allowed me to read three chapters aloud to him.

It was very exciting".

In the reconstruction process, Pera also had the help of Alonso, who was his faithful (and still discreet; he declined to participate in this report) secretary during the last years, while the writer, who had always considered himself, as his biographer recalls, , Gerald Martin, a “memory professional” began to lose it.

This “painful process” was recorded by Rodrigo García in the moving book

Gabo and Mercedes: a farewell

,

an account of his grief and the end of his parents.

In it, he narrates those years with frankness, without even skipping the “very difficult months” in which he “remembered his lifelong wife, but believed that the woman in front of him, claiming to be her, was a imposter.”

“Why is this woman here giving orders and running the house if she is not mine at all?” he asked.

“It's not him, mom, it's the dementia,” the son said.

“Something that distinguishes him as a writer is his continuous self-editing process.

He was always improving the texts, which reveals his status as a journalist,” explains Álvaro Santana Acuña, professor of Sociology at Whitman College, in the State of Washington.

“Due to his health problems, in the case of

In August See You

he was left halfway.

Five versions may seem like a lot, but we must remember that 18 of

Memoria de mis putas tristes

are preserved. Of his first books there is normally only one, because until he was 45 years old he was a globe-trotting writer, who changed countries every so often, and did not I could carry files or libraries.”

Santana Acuña is one of the people who best knows the Austin archive.

His study helped him write the book

Ascent

to Glory

(

2020), a kind of biography of the literary triumph of

One Hundred Years of Solitude

.

And the Harry Ransom Center asked him to curate the

Gabriel García Márquez exhibition.

The creation of a global writer

, in which the scholar was able to put Gabo in the context of other great authors of the 20th century, teachers or friends such as Joyce, William Faulkner, Jorge Luis Borges or Julio Cortázar, with treasures kept in Texas.

The exhibition was seen in Austin and Mexico City, and is scheduled to travel to Colombia next year.

Archive folders in Austin.Roberto Antillón

Photos of García Márquez and his wife, Mercedes Barcha.Roberto Antillón

That idea was due to the institution's efforts to disseminate the legacy, according to the center's director, Stephen Enniss.

In an interview in his office, before the gaze of TS Eliot, portrayed on canvas, and a bronze bust of the Irish poet Derek Mahon, to whom he dedicated a biography, Enniss recalled that completing that acquisition was his first big blow when he arrived. in charge a decade ago.

“One day I got a call from a dealer in New York named Glenn Horowitz, who asked if we would be interested.

We were lucky to be the first ones they asked, because I think anyone would have run to raise the money,” he says.

At first, he did not want it to be known how much money, but a transparency request from the AP agency to the Texas attorney general ended up revealing that $2.2 million was paid.

Ten years later, Enniss continues to defend that secrecy: “Counting how much you give to heirs for a file is inflationary.

Then another family will come who, obviously, believe that his father is worth as much literary value as Gabo and they will want the same, or more.”

The purchase sparked criticism for the decision to send the Nobel treasures to the United States instead of leaving them in Colombia, where he was born, or in Mexico, his home for decades.

Perhaps for this reason, the center worked to catalog and make the archive available to the public as soon as possible.

In 2015 he opened it for consultation.

Two years later, digitalization arrived.

“In addition, we keep it alive, we continue to buy whenever there is an opportunity,” warns Megan Barnard, deputy director, who explains that there is a box that was added in 2022 with papers found in the family home after the death of Mercedes Barcha.

The last item to arrive after its acquisition at an auction is a letter from around 1950 addressed by García Márquez to his friend Carlos Alemán in which he already talks to her about the central character of

One Hundred Years of Solitude.

That the archive is extraordinarily accessible is proven by the fact that it only takes 20 minutes for anyone who arrives in Austin with an identification document to finish the typescript of

One Hundred Years of Solitude

in their hands and discover that its legendary first paragraph (“Many Years later, in front of the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía had to remember that remote afternoon when his father took him to discover ice...") there were almost three.

Santana Acuña regretfully compares the fate of Gabo's legacy with that of his agent's papers.

“The Spanish State bought them [in 2010 and after Balcells' death in 2015] and so many years later they are still in boxes, they are not even accessible to researchers, we are no longer talking about their digitization,” he laments.

And it is certainly a shame.

If one looks at her letters preserved in Austin, one will discover a prose writer who, although she was ruthless when it came to

business

, was also affectionate with those who represented her and mastered the arts of irony;

for example, when sending my regards to her star author: “I send you a big hug and we'll see what the hell we can give you for your birthday.

“The three thousand dollars thing is very trite.”

Typescript of 'One Hundred Years of Solitude'. Roberto Antillón

The Balcells office continues to represent with the zeal of its founder the legacy of García Márquez, whose next milestones are the celebration of the centenary of his birth, in 2027, and the premiere of the first eight chapters of the series that Netflix is ​​preparing from

One Hundred Years of Solitude

, scheduled for the end of the year.

Another issue in which his heirs also decided to contradict the writer: “The objection he had is that he preferred it not to exist visually, but only in the imagination of the readers,” admits Rodrigo García.

“But, often, as a film and television lover that he was, he also said that, man, it wouldn't be bad if it could be done in many hours.

One hundred, he said.

What he didn't want was for it to be a two-hour movie, four, at best, with Hollywood actors.

And he had no prejudice with television;

"He liked good series."

García adds that the family came to the conclusion that “sooner or later, it was going to be done.”

“If not our children, the grandchildren, and if not, when the novel ends up in the public domain.

We saw the interest of Netflix, that they were going to spend good money on the production, that they were not going to have the bill of a soap opera, and that they were also going to listen to us with all our demands, so it seemed like the time."

Those conditions were that it be given the necessary extension and that the series be filmed in Spanish, in Colombia and with a Latin American team.

“There will surely be a lot of debate about this.

People will say that Gabo didn't want to.

But hey, there is something that will always free us from guilt, and that is that he used to tell us: 'When I'm dead, do whatever you want.'

It will be thanks to that phrase, a phrase that would not be out of place in the mouth of one of the lapidary characters in his novels, that García Márquez's readers will be able to return to Macondo with the series.

Also next week, finally,

we will see In August,

the last chapter of his literary work.

Final page of version number 4 of his posthumous novel, saved in one of the Leuchtturm folders that he liked so much.Roberto Antillón

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