Marquez (left) with Brazilian writer Adonias Filho.
Among the countless possessions I have lost in my life, there is one whose loss rankles especially: a first edition of Doce Cuentos Peregrinos, a collection of short stories by Gabriel García Márquez (published in English as Strange Pilgrims). To this day I’m unsure whether the book, with a handwritten dedication by the author, was mislaid as I moved from Mexico to England, or whether I carelessly lent it to a friend. I have been thinking a lot about that book since I woke, on the morning of my 40th birthday, to the news that the Colombian writer had died in Mexico City at the age of 87.
There were earthquakes all over Latin America in the days preceding his death. In Mexico, unseasonal hailstorms closed motorways and damaged property. These were the kinds of portents that seemed to occur regularly in his novels—and which, he always insisted, were an inescapable part of Latin American reality.
The outpouring of public grief has been remarkable, though not surprising. There are few Spanish language readers—and even fewer Spanish language writers—who have not been affected and shaped by his work. Yet his admirers have been mourning him for many years now, as evidence emerged over the past few years that he might no longer delight us with another book. “I’ve written enough, haven’t I?” he once said to his biographer. “People can’t be disappointed, they can’t expect any more of me, can they?”
My earliest contact with his work happened in secondary school, when, without knowing much about the author, we were made to read The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor—the masterly piece of reportage, published in instalments in the 1950s, with which he launched his journalistic career. Later, our adolescent discovery of One Hundred Years of Solitude had the same life-changing impact as its protagonist’s famous discovery of ice. We gulped it down, breathlessly updating each other on the progress made overnight. A close reading of Love in the Time of Cholera –which, it was generally agreed, had one of the best opening lines in world literature—became a rite of passage. At university, his writing was cited as a case study in the most effective use of adjectives (“astonished breasts” is one memorable example).
I met him twice. The first time was in Cuba, in the mid-1990s, during a reception at Havana’s Palace of the Revolution. He stood next to Fidel Castro, a mischievous grin under his bristling moustache. He felt comfortable in the presence of power—indeed, power was one of his recurrent themes. El Comandante towered over everyone in the room, but it was El Gabo, as García Márquez was known, who commanded everyone’s attention. Later that evening, a smaller group that included García Márquez reconvened at a restaurant in downtown Havana. I recall very little of that conversation, apart from his wife Mercedes reproaching him for ordering another round of drinks.
The second meeting, perhaps a couple of years later, happened in Mexico City. The occasion was a dinner for a visiting Spanish dignitary. Once again, the Colombian was the main attraction. I remember him talking about the ceremony at which he was awarded the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature. On their way to claim the prize, recipients walk down a long corridor hung with the portraits of previous winners. He recalled stopping in front of the photographs of Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Mann (who, he told his listeners, would have won the Nobel twice had the second world war not broken out) and William Faulkner.
All evening I sat on my copy of Doce Cuentos Peregrinos, not wishing to appear like yet another star-struck reader (it was one of the misfortunes of García Márquez’s life—one he accepted with enormous grace—to have copies of his books shoved into his hands everywhere he went). But as he prepared to leave, I took my chance. I followed him to his car and requested an autograph. He asked which of the stories in the book I preferred. “The Airplane of the Sleeping Beauty,” I said, referring to the tale of a man besotted with a woman he sees before boarding a flight at a Paris airport, only to find himself sitting next to her on the plane, where all he can do is watch her sleep for hours. He winked at me, as if acknowledging a fellow voyeur. He opened the book and wrote, in his shaky, tipsy handwriting: “For Ángel and his sleeping beauty.”
