Gabriel García Márquez. Photograph by Daniel Mordzinski.

Gabriel García Márquez died ten years ago this April, but people all over the world continue to be stunned, moved, seduced, and transformed by the beauty of his writing and the wildness of his imagination. He is the most translated Spanish-language author of this past century, and in many ways, rightly or wrongly, the made-up Macondo of One Hundred Years of Solitude has come to define the image of Latin America—especially for those of us from the Colombian Caribbean.

I have been writing about Gabo since 1995, when I met him for three days during a journalism workshop he led and decided that he himself would make an interesting subject. Colombia’s god of magical realism reminded me of my grandfather, I wrote in my first piece about him, which was later published in the Winter 1996 issue of The Paris Review. In the early 2000s, I began interviewing his friends, family, fans, and naysayers for an oral biography that appeared in an early form in the magazine’s Summer 2003 issue. When he died in 2014, I was putting the final touches on the book that came of it: Solitude & Company, my collection of voices about the prankster who lifted himself from the provinces and won the Nobel Prize. A few days after his death, his agent and confidant, Carmen Balcells, told me, close to tears, that the world would now see the rise of a new religion: Gabismo. I was interested in this prediction, as a journalist.

And so I kept abreast of the story of Gabo’s life and legacy after he died. His archives were transferred to the University of Texas at Austin. In 2020, his wife, Mercedes Barcha, whom he called his sacred crocodile, died. In Colombia, the itinerant school of journalism that he started—the one where I attended his workshop—became the Gabo Foundation. And then there were unexpected developments: in 2019, Netflix announced a series based on One Hundred Years of Solitude—an adaptation he’d sworn would never occur. (Macondo has been rebuilt by art directors somewhere in the interior of Colombia.) In 2022 a journalist reported that he’d had a daughter, who was born in Mexico City in 1990 and whose existence he’d kept secret from the public. And this week, a novel, Until August, is being published posthumously in Spanish, English, and twenty other languages. It’s the story of a forty-six-year-old married woman who decides she’ll have a one-night stand every August 16, the day she makes a solo overnight trip to the unnamed Caribbean island where her mother is buried to put gladioli on her grave.

I decided, last year, to turn on my recorder again and ask about these past ten years since Gabo died. As I’ve continued to follow his story, Gabo, always a prankster, continues to surprise.

GABRIEL ELIGIO TORRES GARCÍA (García Márquez’s nephew): The last time we saw him, his cancer had already metastasized and his memory was affected, but he could still speak and carry on a conversation. He arrived and exclaimed, “When were all these people born?”

GUSTAVO TATIS GUERRA (poet and journalist): He looked like a lost grandfather—hugging his sisters, his nephews, his family, but still very lost.

GABRIEL ELIGIO TORRES GARCÍA: He was always coming up with these literary and poetic phrases, but at the same time he was just such a prankster.

MILAGROS MALDONADO (art promoter and friend of García Márquez’s): He said that what scared him most in life was losing his memory as he aged. I didn’t know that was a thing in his family.

GUSTAVO TATIS GUERRA: He resolved the whole oblivion thing with a hug and a smile, saying, “I know that I love you. I know I love you.”  Read More