It was not possible for us to find another story like that, because it was not one of those that are invented on paper. Life invents them, and almost always by dint of blows. We learned this later, when we attempted to write a biography of Ramon Hoyos, the formidable Antioquian cyclist crowned national champion that year for the third time. We launched it to the kind of clamor learned in the series on the sailor, and we stretched it into nineteen installments before realizing that the public preferred Ramon Hoyos riding up mountains and reaching the finish line first, but in real life.
We caught sight of a minimal hope of recovery one afternoon when Salgar phoned and told me to meet him right away in the bar of the Hotel Continental. He was there with an old friend of his, a serious man who had just introduced him to his companion, an absolute albino in laborer's clothes, with hair and eyebrows so white he seemed dazzling even in the half-light of the bar. Salgar's friend, a well-known entrepreneur, introduced the man as a mining engineer who was excavating in an empty lot two hundred meters from El Espectador, searching for a legendary treasure that had belonged to General Simon Bolivar. His companion--a very good friend of Salgar's, and of mine from that time on--guaranteed the truth of the story. It was suspect because of its simplicity: when the Liberator, defeated and dying, was preparing to leave Cartagena and continue his final journey, it is assumed that he chose not to take with him a substantial personal treasure, which he had acquired during the penuries of his wars as a well-deserved reserve for a decent old age. When he was preparing to continue his bitter journey--it is not known whether it was to Caracas or Europe--he had the prudence to leave the treasure hidden in Bogota, under the protection of a system of Lacedaemonian codes very typical of his time, so that he could find it whenever he needed to, from any part of the world. I recalled these reports with irresistible longing as I was writing The General in His Labyrinth, where the story of the treasure would have been essential, but I could not obtain enough facts to make it credible, and as fiction it seemed weak. That legendary fortune, never recovered by its owner, was what the seeker was seeking with so much eagerness. I did not understand why they had revealed this to us until Salgar explained that his friend, impressed by the story of the shipwrecked sailor, wanted to give us background to this story so that we would follow it until it could be published with comparable publicity.
We went to the site. It was the only empty lot to the west of the Parque de los Periodistas and very close to my new apartment. The friend explained with a colonial map the coordinates of the treasure in the real details of the hills of Monserrate and La Guadalupe. The story was fascinating, and the prize would be a news item as explosive as that of the shipwrecked sailor, and of greater significance worldwide.
We continued visiting the site with a certain frequency to keep up-to-date, we listened to the engineer for endless hours founded on aguardiente and lemon, and we felt farther and farther away from the miracle, until so much time went by that we did not have even a hope left. The only thing we could suspect afterward was that the tale of the treasure was no more than a screen for exploiting without a permit a deposit of something very valuable right in the center of the capital. Though it was possible that this too was another screen for keeping the Liberator's treasure safe.
These were not the best times for dreaming. After the story of the shipwrecked sailor, I had been advised to spend some time outside Colombia until the situation eased, because of death threats, real or fictitious, that reached us by various means. It was the first thing I thought of when Luis Gabriel Cano asked me without any preamble what I was doing next Wednesday. Since I had no plans, he told me with his customary stolidity to prepare my papers for traveling as the paper's special correspondent to the Big Four Conference that would convene the following week in Geneva.
The first thing I did was telephone my mother. The news seemed so huge that she asked if I was referring to some farm called Geneva. "It's a city in Switzerland," I told her. Without agitation, with her interminable serenity in assimilating the most unexpected upheavals from children, she asked how long I would be there, and I said I would be back in two weeks at the latest. In reality I was going only for the four days of the conference. But for reasons that had nothing to do with my will, I stayed not for two weeks but almost three years. Then I was the one who needed the lifeboat even if only to eat once a day, but I was very careful not to let the family know. Someone once tried to upset my mother with the lie that her son was living like a prince in Paris after deceiving her with the story that he would be there for only two weeks.
"Gabito isn't deceiving anyone," she said with an innocent smile, "but sometimes it happens that even God needs to make weeks that are two years long."
I never had realized that I was a stateless person, just as much as the millions displaced by violence. I had never voted because I did not have a citizen's identity card. In Barranquilla I had identified myself with my reporter's credentials from El Heraldo, where I had given a false date of birth in order to avoid military service, and I had been delinquent for the past two years. In cases of emergency I identified myself with a postal card* that the telegraph operator in Zipaquira had given to me. A providential friend put me in touch with the manager of a travel agency who agreed to get me on the plane on the appropriate date by means of the payment in advance of two hundred dollars and my signature at the bottom of ten blank pages of stamped paper. This was how I learned by chance that my bank balance was a surprising amount that I had not had time to spend because of my reporter's zeal. My only expenditure, aside from personal expenses that were no more than those of a poor student, was the monthly dispatching of the lifeboat to the family.
On the eve of the flight, the manager of the travel agency chanted to me the name of each document as he placed them on the desk so that I would not confuse them: identity card, record of military service, notarized receipts from the tax office, and certificates of vaccination against smallpox and yellow fever. In the end he asked me for an additional tip for the skinny boy who had been vaccinated twice in my name, as he had been vaccinated every day for years for clients in a hurry.
I traveled to Geneva in time for the inaugural meeting of Eisenhower, Bulganin, Eden, and Faure, with no languages but Spanish and an allowance for a third-class hotel, but backed up by my bank account. I was expected to return in a few weeks, but I do not know by what strange premonition I gave everything I owned in the apartment to my friends, including a stupendous library on cinema that I had collected in two years with the advice of Alvaro Cepeda and Luis Vicens.
The poet Jorge Gaitan Duran came to say goodbye while I was tearing up old papers, and he had the curiosity to look through the wastebasket in case he found something he could use for his magazine. He rescued three or four sheets ripped in half and skimmed over them as he put them together like a puzzle on the desk. He asked me where they were from and I said it was the "Monologue of Isabel Watching the Rain in Macondo," deleted from the first draft of Leaf Storm. I told him it was not unpublished, because it had appeared in Cronica and in the Magazine Dominical of El Espectador under the same title, which I had made up for it, and with an authorization I remembered giving in a hurry in an elevator. Gaitan Duran did not care, and he published it in the next issue of his magazine Mito.
The farewell party at Guillermo Cano's house was so tumultuous that when I arrived at the airport the plane had already left for Cartagena, where I was to sleep that night in order to say goodbye to my family. By a stroke of luck I boarded another one at noon. It was just as well, because the domestic atmosphere had expanded since the last time, and my parents and brothers and sisters felt capable of surviving without the lifeboat that I was going to need more than they in Europe.
I traveled to Barranquilla by highway very early the next day to take the flight to Paris at two in the afternoon. In the bus terminal in Cartagena I ran into Lacides, the unforgettable porter at The Skyscraper, whom I had not seen since that time. He fell on me
with a real embrace and his eyes full of tears, not knowing what to say or how to treat me. After a hurried exchange because his bus was arriving and mine was leaving, he said with a fervor that touched my soul:
"What I don't understand, Don Gabriel, is why you never told me who you were."
"Ah, my dear Lacides," I answered, more pained than he, "I couldn't tell you because even I don't know who I am yet."
Hours later, in the taxi that took me to the airport in Barranquilla under the ungrateful sky, more transparent than any other in the world, I realized I was on the Avenida Veinte de Julio. In a reflex that had formed part of my life for the past five years, I looked toward the house of Mercedes Barcha. And there she was, slim and distant, like a statue seated in the doorway, wearing a green dress with golden lace in that year's style, her hair cut like swallows' wings, and with the intense stillness of someone waiting for a person who will not arrive. I could not avoid the awful premonition that I was going to lose her forever on a Thursday in July at so early an hour, and for an instant I thought about stopping the cab to say goodbye, but I preferred not to defy again a destiny as uncertain and persistent as mine.
On the plane I was still tortured by stomach spasms of remorse. At that time there was a fine custom of putting on the back of the seat in front of you something that in plain language was still called writing materials. A sheet of notepaper with gold edges and a matching pink, cream, or blue envelope of the same linen paper, sometimes perfumed. In my few previous trips I had used them to write farewell poems that I turned into little paper doves and sent flying when I got off the plane. I chose sky blue and wrote my first formal letter to Mercedes seated in the doorway of her house at seven in the morning, with the green dress of a bride without a beloved and the hair of an uncertain swallow, not even suspecting for whom she had dressed at dawn. I had written her other playful notes that I improvised at random and had received only verbal and always elusive responses when we happened to run into each other. This was not meant to be more than five lines to give her official notice of my trip. But at the end I added a postscript that blinded me like a flash of lightning at midday at the very instant I signed it: "If I do not receive an answer to this letter within a month, I will stay and live in Europe forever." I did not allow myself time to think about it again before I put the letter in the mailbox at the desolate airport in Montego Bay at two in the morning. It was already Friday. On Thursday of the following week, when I walked into the hotel in Geneva at the end of another useless day of international disagreements, I found her letter of reply.
GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD
COLLECTED STORIES
IN EVIL HOUR
INNOCENT ERENDIRA AND OTHER STORIES
LEAF STORM
LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA MEMORIES OF MY MELANCHOLY WHORES
NEWS OF A KIDNAPPING
NO ONE WRITES TO THE COLONEL
OF LOVE AND OTHER DEMONS
ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE
STRANGE PILGRIMS
THE AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH
THE GENERAL IN HIS LABYRINTH
THE STORY OF A SHIPWRECKED SAILOR
www.penguin.com
GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD
'My favourite book by one of the world's greatest authors. You're in the hands of a master' Mariella Frostrup
'On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on ...'
When newly-wed Angela Vicario and Bayardo San Roman are left to their wedding night, Bayardo discovers that his new wife is no virgin. Disgusted, he returns Angela to her family home that very night, where her humiliated mother beats her savagely and her two brothers demand to know her violator, whom she names as Santiago Nasar.
As he wakes to thoughts of the previous night's revelry, Santiago is unaware of the slurs that have been cast against him. But with Angela's brothers set on avenging their family honour, soon the whole town knows who they plan to kill, where, when and why.
'A masterpiece' Evening Standard
'A work of high explosiveness - the proper stuff of Nobel prizes. An exceptional novel' The Times
'Brilliant writer, brilliant book' Guardian
www.penguin.com
GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
COLLECTED STORIES
'The stories are rich and unsettling, confident and eloquent. They are magical' John Updike Sweeping through crumbling towns, travelling fairs and windswept ports, Gabriel Garcia Marquez introduces a host of extraordinary characters and communities in his mesmerising tales of everyday life: smugglers, bagpipers, the President and Pope at the funeral of Macondo's revered matriarch; a very old angel with enormous wings. Teeming with the magical oddities for which his novels are loved, Marquez's stories are a delight.
'These stories abound with love affairs, ruined beauty, and magical women. It is essence of Marquez' Guardian
'Of all the living authors known to me, only one is undoubtedly touched by genius: Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Sunday Telegraph
'Marquez writes in this lyrical, magical language that no one else can do' Salman Rushdie
www.penguin.com
GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
IN EVIL HOUR
'A masterly book' Guardian
'Cesar Montero was dreaming about elephants. He'd seen them at the movies on Sunday ...'
Only moments later, Cesar is led away by police as they clear the crowds away from the man he has just killed.
But Cesar is not the only man to be riled by the rumours being spread in his Colombian hometown - under the cover of darkness, someone creeps through the streets sticking malicious posters to walls and doors. Each night the respectable townsfolk retire to their beds fearful that they will be the subject of the following morning's lampoons.
As paranoia seeps through the town and the delicate veil of tranquility begins to slip, can the perpetrator be uncovered before accusation and violence leave the inhabitants' sanity in tatters?
'In Evil Hour was the book which was to inspire my own career as a novelist. I owe my writing voice to that one book!' Jim Crace 'Belongs to the very best of Marquez's work ... Should on no account be missed' Financial Times
'A splendid achievement' The Times
www.penguin.com
GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
INNOCENT ERENDIRA AND OTHER STORIES
'These stories abound with love affairs, ruined beauty, and magical women. It is the essence of Marquez' Guardian
'Erendira was bathing her grandmother when the wind of misfortune began to blow ...'
Whilst her grotesque and demanding grandmother retires to bed, Erendira still has floors to wash, sheets to iron, and a peacock to feed. The never-ending chores leave the young girl so exhausted that she collapses into bed with the candle still glowing on a nearby table - and is fast asleep when it topples over ...
Eight hundred and seventy-two thousand, three hundred and fifteen pesos, her grandmother calculates, is the amount that Erendira must repay her for the loss of the house. As she is dragged by her grandmother from town to town and hawked to soldiers, smugglers and traders, Erendira feels herself dying. Can the love of a virgin save the young whore from her hell?
'It becomes more and more fun to read. It shows what "fabulous" really means' Time Out
'Marquez writes in this lyrical, magical language that no-one else can do' Salman Rushdie 'One of this century's most evocative writers' Anne Tyler
www.penguin.com
GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
LEAF STORM
'Marquez writes in this lyrical, magical language that no-one else can do' Salman Rushdie 'Suddenly, as if a whirlwind had set down roots in the centre of the town, the banana company arrived, pursued by the leaf storm'
As a blizzard of warehouses and amusement parlours and slums descends on the small town of Macondo, the inhabitants re
el at the accompanying stench of rubbish that makes their home unrecognizable. When the banana company leaves town as fast as it arrived, all they are left with is a void of decay.
Living in this devastated and soulless wasteland is one last honourable man, the Colonel, who is determined to fulfil a longstanding promise, no matter how unpalatable it may be. With the death of the detested Doctor, he must provide an honourable burial - and incur the wrath of the rest of Macondo, who would rather see the Doctor rot, forgotten and unattended.
'The most important writer of fiction in any language' Bill Clinton 'Marquez is a retailer of wonders' Sunday Times
'An exquisite writer, wise, compassionate, and extremely funny' Sunday Telegraph
www.penguin.com
GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA
'An amazing celebration of the many kinds of love between men and women' The Times
'It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love ...'
Fifty-one years, nine months and four days have passed since Fermina Daza rebuffed hopeless romantic Florentino Ariza's impassioned advances and married Dr. Juvenal Urbino instead. During that half century, Florentino has fallen into the arms of many delighted women, but has loved none but Fermina. Having sworn his eternal love to her, he lives for the day when he can court her again.
When Fermina's husband is killed trying to retrieve his pet parrot from a mango tree, Florentino seizes his chance to declare his enduring love. But can young love find new life in the twilight of their lives?
'A love story of astonishing power and delicious comedy' Newsweek