from Autumn of the Patriarch

GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

Gabriel García Márquez is primarily known, in this country at least, for his monumental One Hundred Years of Solitude (Bill Clinton’s favorite book), yet I believe his subsequent work, El Otono del Patriarca (The Autumn of the Patriarch), to be an even finer literary achievement. For a long time I read nothing but Autumn; it seemed so complete, so lyrical and poignant, so exquisitely sad and oceanic that I would finish and, instead of starting something new, I’d just pick it up and read it again.

My respect for him is so great, it halts my pen. I feel like I’m one of those proverbial monkeys given typewriters and eternity, who looks up from his own page of garble and sees Hamlet emerging from his neighbor’s keys. Both One Hundred Years of Solitude and Autumn of the Patriarch are so far beyond what virtually any other contemporary writer has written you wonder if he didn’t find some manuscripts in a crashed UFO. Reading García Márquez at his finest gives you the impression that there is nothing more important in this god-lost world than writing, but he’s so good he makes you never want to write again yourself.

But alas, we beat on. For even the master himself has not been himself in the last twenty-five years. No surprise, perhaps, for the reaction to the 1974 release of Autumn was probably a major disappointment to the writer at the height of his powers. Though at least as ambitious, the book was nowhere near as well received as One Hundred Years (released seven years prior). Autumn is a masterpiece, but it’s a difficult read, and the three-page sentences and fifty-page paragraphs try the patience of many readers. Consequently even today it lingers in partial recognition.

The following passage, however, is not only wonderfully sexy and evocative, but demonstrates in miniature the snowfall rhythm and complexity of the novel, which, rereading it now, tempts me again never to read anything else.

I couldn’t conceive of the world without the man who made me happy at the age of twelve as no other man was ever to do again since those afternoons when after school he would be lying in wait for the girls in blue uniforms with sailors’ collars, he would call to us, entice us with candy, they all ran off frightened, all except me, when no one was watching I tried to reach the candy and he grabbed me by the wrists with a gentle tiger’s claw and lifted me painlessly up into the air with such care that not a pleat in my dress was wrinkled and he laid me down on the urine-scented hay, he was more frightened than I, you could see his heart beating under his jacket, he was pale, his eyes were full of tears, he touched me in silence with a tenderness I never found again, he made my little buds stand out on my breasts, he put his fingers underneath the edge of my panties, he smelled his fingers, he told me, it’s your smell, I didn’t need the candy any more to climb through the stable skylight to find him waiting for me with his bag of things to eat, he used bread to soak up my first adolescent sauce, he would put things there before eating them, he gave them to me to eat, he put asparagus stalks into me to eat them marinated with the brine of my inner humors, delicious, he told me, you taste like a port . . . he left me to boil in the incandescent fleeting mallow sunsets of our love with no future telling me that not even he himself knew who he was. . . .

—translated by Gregory Rabassa, modified by Jack Murnighan