JAIME ABELLO BANFI: He always maintained his routine until his last day. He would dress, always elegantly, and go down to his office, where his life-long secretary, Mónica Alonso, was waiting for him. There I don’t know what he did. He would read, I suppose. I don’t know what he read. Then they had lunch, or as they say in Mexico, they ate. They always had a delicious lunch, lunches were very important. First an aperitif. Mercedes, a tequila. Gabo, champagne. In the afternoon they took care of domestic matters and at night they watched a movie like any other couple in the world.
GLORIA TRIANA: On his last visits to Cartagena he was dressed in absolutely perfect white and you could feel his serenity. He produced tenderness in me because he would say things. He would greet you with great warmth but it seemed to me he didn’t know whom he was greeting.
DANIEL PASTOR: On the day of Mercedes’s eightieth birthday he looked very happy. He was wearing a Greek sailor’s cap. I’ve been a friend of his son Gonzalo since we were teenagers. I don’t think Gabo recognized me but he took my hand very sweetly and kissed it and said: “How good to be here with real friends.”
GLORIA TRIANA: One afternoon I went to their house in Cartagena, and he was there with Mercedes, and in front of Mercedes he took my hand and said to me: “Do you know I think of you every day?” And then I said to him: “So do I, Gabo.” And he said: “And why haven’t you told me?” Then I said to him, since she was standing right there: “Well, because I thought Mercedes wouldn’t like my telling you that.” And then he said: “No, no, no. She doesn’t say anything.” He was like that, first with that warmth, but at the same time as serene as a child. You never saw him embittered or anything.
CARLITOS GONZÁLEZ ROMERO: Gabo is flying like an eagle. He’s pure sweetness. With his half-boots and his plaid jackets, he must have dozens of them. I just saw him sitting in his office in Mexico City. He looks handsomer than ever in that afternoon light, in his golden age. He wants to dance. He kept saying: “And who’s going dancing? You look like you’ll go dancing. Take me dancing!” . . . To those who say he’s losing his memory, I want to say: What do you expect, with how hard he set his mind to working to be able to write all those books he gave us?
RODRIGO MOYA: I saw him a year ago at lunch in his house. He sat with me and dedicated the special edition of One Hundred Years: “To Don Rodrigo from Don Gabo.” But there was no more conversation. The person he liked very much was Susana, my wife. He adored Susana. Susana was sitting beside him, on his right, and there was a moment when he had to get up because they were going to give him a massage or something; then Susana helped him up and he, as if he were surprised, turned around. When he saw who had helped him up, he kept looking at her, gave a big smile, and said: “Ay, how delicious.”
GLORIA TRIANA: I gave Gabo his last farewell party in Cartagena. They were going to return to Mexico City and had spent three or four months here, and I told Mercedes that I wanted to give them a party. Make a lunch for him; she knows my lunches have live music, porro and vallenato, his favorites, and cumbia. She said: “Wait, because Gonzalo and my grandchildren are coming, and I want them to be there.” I told the musicians: “The moment he comes in, you begin to play.” He came in dancing a porro. He was absolutely ecstatic. That’s the last image I have of him. It was the last time I saw him.
CARMEN BALCELLS: I remember that perfectly. The last time I saw him in Barcelona. And in my house. I have a memory that I hope stays with me until the last day of my life.
JAIME ABELLO BANFI: I arrived in Mexico City on Monday, April 15, for a conference on journalism. I called Mercedes and she sounded calm. Gabo was weak but stable. We made plans for me to visit them when I was finished with my work. I called again on Wednesday and I felt something else. “How’s everything going?” I asked. “Badly,” she replied, plain and simple. I immediately communicated with my team in Cartagena so they could be prepared.
GUILLERMO ANGULO: I took a plane. I arrived at the house in Pedregal at 1:15 in the afternoon. Gabito had died at 12:08. Rodrigo, the older of the Gabos, said to me: “How good you came, brother. The more of us there are, the better we can share the blows.”
JAIME ABELLO BANFI: The house was surrounded by reporters, cameras, admirers holding yellow flowers, and it was difficult to gain access. I was coming from Calle de Fuego in a taxi when the police stopped me. I showed them my card. I told them I was the director of the Gabriel García Márquez Foundation and they let me through. When I finally could go in I realized that nothing was prepared. Everything was being resolved very quickly but in a coherent way, and with their style. Mexico announced that they would pay him civil tribute in the Palace of Fine Arts. I spoke to his son Gonzalo at about five on Friday afternoon, and he said that in addition to the chamber music by Bartók and other composers that Gabo liked, he also wanted there to be a vallenato group to accompany the people who would wait in line to enter the Teatro Bellas Artes.
GUILLERMO ANGULO: I was the only one besides the family who saw Gabo dead. He looked very well, very peaceful, I gave him a goodbye kiss on the cheek. The vallenatos that had been playing until his death were silent.
CARLITOS GONZÁLEZ ROMERO: That day I found Mercedes in the kitchen surrounded by her sons, daughters-in-law, and grandchildren, and Maestro Angulo. She was serene and tranquil, dressed in the blouse and shoes of a tigress, holding a cigarette and a glass of white tequila, taking phone calls. All the calls were short, she listened, not speaking very much, and at the end she would say: Thank you. When I went back the next day, she already had the box of ashes in her study. I approached and placed a red rose on it. Mónica, his secretary, was there, just beside the urn, and we talked for quite a while.
GUILLERMO ANGULO: Before we went out, Mercedes said to all of us going to Bellas Artes: “Nobody cries here. Here everything’s pure macho from Jalisco.”
CARLITOS GONZÁLEZ ROMERO: I have my pockets full of butterflies made of paper, yellow butterflies they brought from Colombia. Now the presidents have spoken. Let’s do away with the seriousness. There are some electric fans that will make them fly.
KATYA GONZÁLEZ RIPOLL: Look outside. They’re flying. Let’s go there.
Viva Gabo! Viva Gabo!
CECILIA BUSTAMANTE: Viva Gabo!
TANIA LIBERTAD: Viva Gabo!
UNKNOWN VOICE: Viva Gabo!
Notes on the Most Important Voices
JAIME ABELLO BANFI: Director and cofounder of the Foundation for a New Ibero-American Journalism (FNPI), today the Gabriel García Márquez Foundation, created by Gabo in 1994 to contribute to the renovation of journalism in the countries of Latin America. A purebred Barranquillero and lover of Carnival.
ELISEO “LICHI” ALBERTO: The son of the Cuban poet Eliseo Diego, he was also a poet as well as a screenwriter and novelist. Diego always had a stormy relationship with Castro’s regime, and went into exile in Mexico in 1990. It is said that García Márquez helped him leave Cuba and settle in Mexico. In 1997 he published Report Against Myself, accusing the Cuban government of obliging him to spy on his father. He received the Alfaguara Novel Prize in 1998 for Caracol Beach. He died in Mexico City in 2012 at the age of sixty.
GUILLERMO ANGULO: Colombian photographer, writer, documentarian, and orchid grower. A close friend of García Márquez since their poverty-stricken Parisian days. He’s called Maestro Angulo. He lives in Bogotá and cultivates orchids outside the city.
RAMÓN ILLÁN BACCA: Recognized, prizewinning author and professor of literature living in Barranquilla, related to Samarian families of good name. Although his aunts knew Luisa Santiaga, García Márquez’s mother, it was difficult for him to get to know him.
CARMEN BALCELLS: The most powerful literary agent in the Spanish language, credited with having created the “boom.” In the days after Gabo died, she predicted that Gabismo would become a religion. The “Mamá Grande” as Gabo dubbed her, she died in Barcelona in 2015 at eighty-five.
CECILIA BUSTAMANTE: Colombian poet, a friend of García M
árquez.
EMMANUEL CARBALLO: Mexican editor and writer with a long career. He was part of the group of intellectuals who embraced Gabriel García Márquez when he settled in Mexico City in 1963, with his wife Mercedes and son Rodrigo. He was the editor of ERA and founded a literary magazine with Carlos Fuentes. He died in 2014.
PATRICIA CASTAÑO: Documentary filmmaker and producer from Bogotá who served as guide and interpreter for Gerald Martin, the biographer of García Márquez, when he traveled to the Atlantic Coast to interview the writer’s maternal relatives.
IMPERIA DACONTE: The daughter of Antonio Daconte, an Italian immigrant who made a small fortune in Aracataca, where García Márquez lived with his paternal grandparents until he was eight years old. Colonel Nicolás Márquez was a good friend of Daconte’s and visited him frequently with his grandson. Imperia remembers García Márquez as a “cute little blondie” when they were children. She is ninety-seven.
MARGARITA DE LA VEGA: A Cartagenan academic, film producer, and critic who has lived in the United States since 1974. The daughter of Dr. Henrique de la Vega, who was a specialist in ailments of the head and a very good friend of García Márquez.
ALBINA DU BOISROUVRAY: French film producer, activist, and granddaughter of Bolivian tin king Simón Patiño. She met García Márquez during the golden days of the boom when together with Juan Goytisolo in Paris she created Libre, a magazine that published Latin American writers.
MARÍA LUISA ELÍO: She came to Mexico City as a refugee, the child of Spanish Republicans. She married Jomí García Ascot, a poet and filmmaker, the son of a Republican diplomat, and they were an integral part of the group of intellectuals, writers, and filmmakers in Mexico in the 1960s. The film On the Empty Balcony, which deals with the subject of exile and was directed by her husband, is based on one of her stories. One Hundred Years of Solitude is dedicated to her and her husband. She died in Mexico City in 2009.
MIGUEL FALQUEZ-CERTAIN: Poet, playwright, writer, and translator from Barranquilla, he has lived in New York since the 1980s.
HERIBERTO FIORILLO: Writer, filmmaker, and journalist, he has written eight books of essays and fiction, three films, and four newsreels. Creator and director of the La Cueva Foundation and the International Carnival of Arts.
ALBERTO FUGUET: Chilean filmmaker and writer. He was one of the leaders of the movement known as McOndo, which declared the end of magical realism. He was selected by Time magazine and CNN as one of fifty Latin American leaders in the new millennium.
ODERAY GAME: Ecuadorian filmmaker and producer who lived for many years in Paris and Madrid. She now lives in Quito.
AIDA GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: Aida is the second of the García Márquez sisters and the fourth in order of birth. A teacher and a Salesian nun until 1979, she wrote a book about the childhood of the twelve García Márquez children.
ELIGIO “YIYO” GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: The youngest of the eleven siblings of García Márquez, and like him, a writer and journalist. Among his books is Behind the Keys of Melquíades, a journalistic investigation into One Hundred Years of Solitude published in 2001. In that same year he died of a brain tumor at the age of fifty-three.
GUSTAVO GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: A Colombian diplomat and brother of García Márquez. He died in March 2014 at the age of seventy-eight, waiting for a disability pension that never arrived, an echo of Nobody Writes to the Colonel.
JAIME GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: The eighth of the twelve García Márquez siblings, a great teller of stories about the life and culture of the Colombian Caribbean. He is one of the original members of the Foundation for a New Ibero-American Journalism, the foundation García Márquez founded in 1994.
MARGOT GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: The oldest of the García Márquez sisters who, like Gabriel, because of the closeness in their ages, was brought up in the house of their grandparents in Aracataca. García Márquez has said that she was the spine of the family, and that the character of Amaranta in One Hundred Years of Solitude was inspired by her.
KATYA GONZÁLEZ RIPOLL: A Colombian architect born in Barranquilla, “carnival queen” and García Márquez’s goddaughter.
CARLITOS GONZÁLEZ ROMERO: A multifaceted and creative Barranquillero, a designer of costumes and masks for the Barranquilla Carnival. He made Gabo and Mercedes their hooded cloaks when they considered the possibility of returning incognito to celebrate Carnival.
JUANCHO JINETE: More than anything else, he dedicated his life to being a great friend and organizer of whatever he was asked to do, above all by the four friends García Márquez immortalized as “the jokers of La Cueva” in Big Mama’s Funeral and then in One Hundred Years of Solitude. When French intellectuals and world journalists set out to find the origins of Macondo, Juancho acted as their guide. He died in 2010.
TANIA LIBERTAD: A Peruvian singer, a close friend of the García Márquez family.
NEREO LÓPEZ: He is one of the best-known photographers in Colombia. He has received all the possible prizes, for he has been documenting Colombia since the time of the Violence. He was part of the La Cueva group when he lived in Barranquilla as a graphic reporter for El Espectador. He was the official photographer for the committee that accompanied García Márquez to Stockholm to receive the Nobel. In 1997, at the age of eighty, he moved to New York to “open new horizons.” He died in New York in 2015 at ninety-four, leaving a bevy of unfinished photography projects.
EDUARDO MÁRCELES DACONTE: A writer and art critic born in Aracataca, the grandson of Antonio Daconte, the Italian friend of García Márquez’s grandfather. It was thanks to his grandfather, who brought the gramophone and movies to Aracataca, that García Márquez listened to music and saw his first film as a boy.
GERALD MARTIN: An English academic and writer, he spent seventeen years writing the biography of García Márquez, who called him “my English biographer.”
CARMELO MARTÍNEZ: He was a judge in Colombia. A native of Sincé, where the event occurred that García Márquez re-created in Chronicle of a Death Foretold. He has known García Márquez since they were both thirteen years old, when the writer came to live with his parents for the first time. Martínez was the best friend of Cayetano Gentile, the boy whom two brothers murdered over a question of honor. Carmelo was with him that day. García Márquez asked him to recount what happened. He died in Cartagena.
PLINIO APULEYO MENDOZA: A Colombian novelist, journalist, diplomat, and editor of Libre. Among the many books he has written are three about the time he spent with García Márquez. In them he recounts how poor García Márquez was in Bogotá and in Paris. They were intimate friends and companions. He was the one who arranged for him to work in Caracas and for Prensa Latina. In that period, they were both fervent believers in the revolution of Fidel Castro. Their political ideals separated them when García Márquez did not denounce the arrest of the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla in 1971, which is known as “the Padilla Case.” He is the author, along with Álvaro Vargas Llosa and Carlos Alberto Montaner, of the “Manual of the Perfect Latin American Idiot,” an essay that satirizes sympathizers from leftist groups in Latin America. He lives in Bogotá, where he writes a political column for the newspaper El Tiempo.
RODRIGO MOYA: A Colombian photographer residing in Mexico, and a close friend of García Márquez.
SANTIAGO MUTIS: A Colombian poet, the godson of García Márquez, and the son of Álvaro Mutis, who lives in Bogotá. A professor and editor of literary journals at the Universidad Nacional in Colombia. In 1997 he organized a traveling exhibit on García Márquez.
JOSÉ ANTONIO PATERNOSTRO: An economist from Barranquilla, a Barranquilloso, and father of the author.
EDMUNDO PAZ SOLDÁN: A Bolivian writer, one of the most representative of the Latin American generation of the nineties, known as McOndo. His work includes essays, stories, and novels.
KAREN PONIACHIK: A Chilean journalist and consultant who has worked in governmental posts in her country. She served as Minister of Mines and Energy during the first presidency of Michelle Bachelet.
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GREGORY RABASSA: Translator of Spanish and Portuguese into English, who introduced the North American public to the works of the so-called Latin American boom. The translator into English of One Hundred Years of Solitude and four other books by García Márquez. With his translation of Hopscotch he won the National Book Award. It was Julio Cortázar who suggested to García Márquez that he use Rabassa as his translator. Among other authors he has translated are Jorge Amado, José Lezama Lima, Clarice Lispector, and Mario Vargas Llosa. His last years were dedicated to only translating dead poets. He died in New York in 2016.
FERNANDO RESTREPO: A pioneer of television in Colombia, who, with Fernando Gómez Agudelo, coordinated the operations that brought television to the entire country. Nine years later, in 1963, they founded RTI, the first programmer of the state television channels. In 1973 they transmitted the first television program in color. It is the first enterprise to produce its own soap operas and dramatic programs, among them Time to Die, in 1984, with a script written by García Márquez. He is the epitome of a Bogotá gentleman, a slicker.
HÉCTOR ROJAS HERAZO: A Colombian poet, novelist, journalist, and painter, he was García Márquez’s friend when they both worked for the newspaper El Universal in Cartagena, the city to which García Márquez returned after abandoning the study of law and a Bogotá inflamed by the assassination of Jorge Eliézer Gaitán on April 9, 1948. At that time Rojas Herazo was a reporter and columnist on the staff of the paper. He died in Bogotá in 2002.
ARISTIDES ROYO SÁNCHEZ: A Panamanian lawyer and former diplomat and minister of education who helped negotiate the Torrijos-Carter Treaties in 1977. He also served as president of Panama from October 11, 1978, to July 31, 1982, when he was pressured to resign by the military. From 1968 to 1989, Panama was ruled by a military dictatorship that started with General Omar Torrijos and ended with the overthrow of Manuel Noriega with the help of the United States. Torrijos had named Royo and the military deposed him exactly a year after the general died in a helicopter accident. He currently serves as the director of the Academy of Letters of Panama.
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