It’s the time of Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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For Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian nobel laureate, this is a memorable year—his 80th birthday, the 40th anniversary of the publication of his masterwork, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and, this week, a return after 25 years (officially, anyway) to his birthplace, Aracataca, immortalized as Macondo.
He and his wife, Mercedes Barcha, traveled back to Aracataca in the inaugural trip of a train dubbed the Macondo Express, adorned with images of the yellow butterflies, like those that always accompanied Macondo’s irrepressible Mauricio Babilonia.
Forty years earlier, recalls Tomás Eloy Martínez in the Argentine daily La Nación, Garcia Marquez had traveled to Buenos Aires, where Cien Años de Soledad was initially published.
Fame and fortune was still in the future, the hardships of paying his family’s bills in Mexico City and securing with the postage to ship off the manuscript the present. The initial printing was only 8,000 copies.
But word was already coursing through Latin American literary circles about the seminal achievement that would eventually sell more than 30 million copies, translated into 35 languages. One morning 40 years ago in Buenos Aires, Eloy Martínez recounts, García Márquez suddenly got up from the breakfast table, took his wife by hand, stopped traffic at a busy downtown intersection, and kissed her right there on the street.
``He did it because I was thinner then,’’ his wife said recently, recalling the romantic episode.
``Don’t say that,’’ cautioned García Márquez, ``because I’m capable of doing it again right now.’’
Posted by Patrick J. McDonnell and Andrés D’Alessandro in Buenos Aires