Equipped with a special ear to convince the language to obey him, the most musical novelist of the 20th century, Gabriel García Márquez, the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, the son of the telegrapher of Aracataca, perhaps the best prose writer that long history has known. time that separates him from the past, this Wednesday he summoned the stars of poetry to share with him in Barcelona the greatness of his writing.
The reason is the existence of an unusual, unexpected book, and even rejected by him when his relationship with reality and also with the future began to worsen.
Pushed by the novelty, unusual because Gabo's presence on the shelves seemed to be complete, former friends of his from Barcelona, his Spanish and Latin American editors, journalists, admirers of his work and his career, came together in a kind of tribute that seemed also, as he would have wanted, a concert of words and music, or just music, meaning also the words of his literature.
His most anticipated and most improbable book,
In August See You
, which over the years overcame the curse with which he himself had cornered him (“we must destroy it,” he came to tell his children) is already on the street, it was long precisely this Wednesday, March 6, when he would have turned 97 years old, in the midst of an expectation that can only now surpass the one that for some years aroused the most enervating of his darings, One Hundred Years of Solitude.
And the concentration, between admiration and gratitude, was in Barcelona, the talisman of the life of young Gabo, who became more famous in Barcelona that still supported the rotten roots of Francoism.
Attacked by the disease that found its name when he was a boy, Alzheimer's, Gabo ended up being disobeyed by his sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo, who, helped by a great editor who had already been his father's, Cristóbal Pera, told him its publishers (Random House throughout the Spanish-speaking world; Planeta in Mexico and Central America) who could already count on this posthumous music that was always titled, when Gabo knew and when he no longer knew, In August See You.
This celebration of the birth of a novel, and there will be no more novels, Gonzalo said in the definitive presentation of this discovery, took place in Barcelona, where Gabo learned about the success of One Hundred Years of Solitude while simulating the Catalan gauche divine dances. that he was not yet truly a writer... He lived for months pretending to be someone else, even though his name was Gabo, but on those Bocaccio nights suddenly his best friends (that's what Beatriz de Moura, the creator of Tusquets, told me) found him boasting about being the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude.
“Because he was,” Beatriz told me.
He lived in Barcelona, with his wife, with his two children, on Caponata Street, waiting for Paco Porrúa, his editor from Argentina, to tell him that that wonder, One Hundred Years..., that would open the heavens of Olympus to him, In effect it was going to make him a millionaire.
That premonition wasn't anything.
When he and Mercedes Barcha, the boys' mother, got married, someone told his father-in-law stories: that boy will always be starving.
To anyone who wanted to listen, Gabo told him, so that he could go with the story to his father-in-law, that one day he would be a millionaire.
He was, also a millionaire of readers.
In Barcelona, where he wrote barefoot and danced like a Colombian, he learned of the good news that accompanied the fate of the most important novel in Spanish literature of the 20th century, there he lived his family love affair with the city, shared the honeys of the boom until who broke up with Mario Vargas Llosa, and found the great love of his writing life: Carmen Balcells, the literary agent who ensured that the wealth that came from one side did not go to him on the other.
The agent and he never left or interrupted each other, until the end of Gabo's days, who died two years before Carmen.
Until she could breathe, that astral meeting (Carmen loved to check her luck by consulting the stars) gave them mutual benefits.
She, Carmen, like the children, like those who read the different phases of the novel that now reappears as an exciting novelty, had the feeling that it was frankly exaggerated to break it into pieces, to throw what was written into the weeping trash of history.
The children say in the prologue of this edition that it is now a matter of universal reading, because in a long time a book has not created so much expectation, that I hope their father forgives them for having removed this work of art from the university archives.
At the event in Barcelona, where the Argentine actress Barbara Lennie read paragraphs that filled the auditorium of the Gabriel García Márquez Library with emotion, the setting for this celebration, the secular absolution of Héctor Abad Faciolince, a Colombian like him, in love, was heard. of the text and its music.
Héctor said, looking at Gonzalo: “You consider yourself forgiven.”
There were many people at this event who still remember Gabo who wrote barefoot or playing with his children;
the one who received visitors, to remove his shyness or embarrassment, activating a device that gave off a ghostly laugh.
With that car-fixing outfit, he seemed to live in the childhood limbo of his children, in a house that tasted like Bach and he was still like a prankster from Cartagena de Indias and the legendary cover of One Hundred Years of Solitude was already on his small shelf. .
There was that atmosphere of surprise and joy this March 6, as if Gabo had indeed returned, after a long excursion, to the city of Barcelona, and was among old friends, like Leticia Feduchi and her children, listening in the Library that Jazz music or some of the compositions of his most beloved musicians are named after him.
Fervor for Gabo.
Xavi Ayen, one of the great writers of journalism who knows about the boom, Pilar Reyes, the director of literature at Random House, and the countryman Abad Faciolince, the son Gonzalo, put literature, evocation, to an act that seemed a welcome resurrection.
That atmosphere, full of music and words, seemed directed by Gabo and Carmen Balcells (someone said: “It's as if Carmen Balcells and Gabriel García Márquez were resurrected at the same time”) in the city that was a large part of the lives that both They celebrated.
I have lived for years alongside writers, working with them, reading them, giving them coffee or going on excursions, from Paul Bowles to Elena Poniatowska, Octavio Paz or Jorge Luis Borges, I have seen all of them talk about themselves and about others.
The person I met when I still didn't know what writers were like was precisely Gabriel García Márquez.
With his cardboard laughter he opened the street where he kept the privacy of the house, his head weighing on hands that he had trained so that they would surprise him by listening to his rhythm, which remains intact in this novel that is the symphony for a sad woman who spent her life traveling to regain her joy.
Some are saying that perhaps this book, in fact, could have expected its fate out of nowhere.
We would have missed Gabo's best metaphor.
Whoever opens this book, which is like a piggy bank of secrets, also opens a box of tears through which he walks, opening the door to those who have the will to involve themselves with his way of saying, with his melancholy.
That face that Gabo had when, at the end of his lucid times, he began to know that what was before him was only the past, is better understood here, in this music box with which he said goodbye to the health of living.
This novel has revealed him to be recognized again with the joy of being read as if for the first time and this book will once again inaugurate his journey through the music of writing.