He was born in Aracataca on a glorious March 6. Although he began his professional career working for local newspapers -in Cartagena-, his true destiny would be high-flying writing. His ascension would begin with a short novel, Litterwhose action would take place between 1903 and 1927, – just the year in which he came into the world.
From that moment on, reading it was like a premonition: three characters, representatives of three different generations, unleashing -each on their own- an interior monologue centered on the death of a doctor who had just committed suicide. In that story the figure of an old colonel appeared for the first time. Later they told us that the leaves were the symbol of a banana company, and therefore also a metaphor for the sad and atrocious intervention of the evils that had unraveled and continue to tear Latin America apart. The world still did not know that it had already begun to take shape one hundred years of solitude and probably neither did he.
Later, in 1961, he published El colonel no tiene que le scribe. Between the pages of it was already the rain that does not stop, a devastating loneliness, the longing for past battles, poverty. A woman who was barely a shadow and not very loving company. There was also the rooster, tied forever at the feet of a colonel who had yearned for letters ever since. The following year she published some of his stories – eight in all – under the title Big Mama’s Funerals. She seemed to be preparing us for his monumental work, but it was too late.
We already lived within the same walls that I had imagined, we knew the same people, we were dotted with magic, we did not know if Cartagena really existed, Aracataca was real, or if we were all from a legendary and mythical place called Macondo. Fascinated, we always knew it, but we never cared: the territories described by his pen were really the same thing.
When the story of the Buendía lineage arrived, the universe ended up opening and closing. We read the great saga of the history of Latin America, love seen from all temperatures and angles of a prism, hope and despair, memory, oblivion, and the lessons that life insists on repeating to us along with the mistakes we carry the most. of a century repeating. Yellow butterflies, women who flew away to heaven holding on to a sheet or who, while burning their hands on a stove, burned to the bone. A novel that we couldn’t put down until the last page and we read over and over again, always challenging ourselves to memorize the Buendía family tree, so as not to tie ourselves to one until death –like José Arcadio– if we couldn’t.
Theorists spoke of magical realism. The intellectuals of the Latin American boom. The critics stated that “one hundred years of solitude” was the most important writing by Gabriel García Márquez and that together with Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes, had changed the history of Spanish-American literature.
arrived the Nobel Prize in 1982. With him, the expressions of “Gabo, our favorite writer” and “example of universal excellence”. Also the impressive data: he was the author of the most translated novel on this side of the world – into 35 languages – and the most read in Spanish. To our happiness, the gossip that, despite having been published in Buenos Aires, by Editorial Sudamericana, with an initial circulation of 8,000 copies, the 18 months of its completion and all its pages had been written in Mexico City. . And so, now adopted, now a brother, now a neighbor, we never stop following the stories from his pen.
When Gabo died, nine years ago, we realized that we would no longer have a second chance on earth to hear his words again. But in the end we resign ourselves and are glad for the time that has elapsed.
Until today, the perfect date to organize a personal party. Thinking about him for at least a while and fulfilling a wish for his birthday: reading it again with the same emotion as before. Remember when he said that the memory of the heart eliminates bad memories and magnifies the good ones, and not throw ourselves into his great novels or complete the reading of his Complete Works. Read now, for example, the little piece of the story “Someone messes up these roses”, which I put here today:
“Since it is Sunday and it has stopped raining, I plan to take a bouquet of roses to my grave. Red and white roses, the kind she grows to make altars and crowns. The morning was saddened by this gloomy and overwhelming winter that has made me remember the hill where the townspeople leave their dead. It is a bare place, without trees, barely swept by the providential crumbs that return after the wind has passed. Now that the rain has stopped and the midday sun must have hardened the soap on the slope, I could reach the mound at the bottom of which my child’s body rests, now confused, crumbled between snails and roots.
Then, dear reader, you can celebrate today’s birthday, because yesterday was also Sunday and it hasn’t rained for a long time.
