Actually the text should go in the bin. At least that’s what its author wanted during his lifetime. But the sons of the deceased have changed their minds. One of the two has a lot to tell.
It was on Maundy Thursday when the Nobel Prize winner’s heart stopped beating forever. The family had gathered at the home on Calle Fuego in the south of Mexico City. A granddaughter placed yellow roses on the dead man’s stomach because they were his favorite flowers. With a little delay – most of the journalists had already disappeared into the Easter holidays – the news went out to the world: Gabriel García Márquez is dead.
Ten years ago, on April 17, 2014, the Colombian author died at the age of 87. The world lost a novelist who was unparalleled in the vast Spanish-speaking world. With works like “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” “Gabo” put his continent on the map of world literature and also shaped the image of Latin America for generations on this side of the Atlantic. In 1982 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. To mark the anniversary of his death, a small novel from his estate is now being published – accompanied by a memory book from his son Rodrigo García (64), in which he tells about the life and death of his father and his mother Mercedes Barcha (1932-2020).
Author wanted to have the text destroyed
“See you in August” is the name of the novel, which will be released worldwide on Thursday (March 7th) with a lot of journalistic fire. In terms of length, it’s more like a novella, but according to the author’s wishes, the text shouldn’t actually be printed – because from his point of view it was of no use. Rodrigo and his younger brother Gonzalo, the only two children, have now changed their minds – and hope that their father in the afterlife will forgive them.
The publisher Kiepenheuer & Witsch speaks of a “real sensation”. This is definitely not the text, because its existence has been known for a long time. After the author’s death, the remaining estate went to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Back in 1999, “Gabo” read a chapter at the Casa América in Madrid. The audience, including former Spanish Prime Minister Felipe González and the later Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, held their breath, reported the Madrid daily newspaper “El País”. In 2003, “El País” printed another chapter. Afterwards, García Márquez revised the text again and again, but never released it, rather wanting it to be destroyed.
The plot is quickly summarized: Ana Magdalena Bach, the main character, takes the ferry to a Caribbean island on August 16th every year to visit her mother’s grave. On the day of her death, she places a bouquet of gladioli there and tells the deceased about her worries and needs. She is 46 years old and has been happily married for 27 years to a man who was the first and only one in her life. Until the day she hooks up with a complete stranger in a cheap hotel on the lagoon and takes him into her room. From then on she has a different adventure on the island every year and soon feels strange in her old, familiar world.
Moving memories of the son
An entertaining story with some drastic sex scenes – and a successful ending. The master of magical realism probably didn’t choose the surname of the Wrong Wife by chance, because it’s also about music, about Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” in a Bolero arrangement, about Brahms, Mozart and Schubert. The text itself is less melodic and in some places it seems a bit bumpy in German. You’ll look in vain for passages that are so beautifully written that – like in “Gabo’s” classics – you write down the page numbers at the back of the book cover.
In his volume of memories, which will be published in German for the first time on Thursday, Rodrigo García writes about how much his father suffered from dementia in the last years of his life. The funeral service, which lasted three days and during which the urn, wrapped in a yellow silk scarf, stood in the study, was moving. “Aquí nadie llora” – no crying here – ordered the resolute mother. Someone noticed that one of García Márquez’s characters – Úrsula Iguarán from “One Hundred Years of Solitude” – also died on Maundy Thursday. And almost like in the novel, there was a dead bird lying there at the hour of death, which had probably crashed into a glass wall.
It is descriptions like these that make the son’s book so worth reading. Between Rio Grande and Tierra del Fuego, his father was something of a pop star. When he entered a restaurant in Mexico City, the entire restaurant spontaneously applauded. In Rodrigo’s adopted home of California, however, García Márquez was able to dine unnoticed in the posh restaurants of Los Angeles. Often only the Latino park rangers recognized him there, and sometimes they sent someone to buy his books for the maestro to sign after dinner. “This always gave him great pleasure,” writes the son.
Gabriel García Márquez, See you in August, novel, Translated from Spanish by Dagmar Ploetz, 144 pages, hardcover, approx. €23.00 (D), ISBN 978-3-462-00642-1
Rodrigo García, farewell to Gabo and Mercedes. Memories of my father Gabriel García Márquez, translated from English by Elke Link, with numerous illustrations, 176 pages, hardcover approx. €20.00, ISBN 978-3-462-00305-5