Gabriel García Márquez was born in 1927 in Aracataca, a name much more impressive than the fictional Macondo. He lived his last years in Cartagena de Indias, where in 2007 a tribute was paid to him, attended by, among others, his friend Bill Clinton, who said, in his speech, that he had been the only president of the United States who had read One Hundred Years of Solitude  There we witnessed the “fading of his mental faculties” that his children mention in the prologue. A loss of memory that makes us think of Aureliano Buendía’s fight against the “plague of oblivion,” a method that his son José Arcadio puts into practice. García Márquez died in Mexico City in 2014.

There are actually two writers in one. In the essay One Hundred Deceptions of Solitude I analyzed the magic tricks he uses to dazzle the reader, something that would lead me to heated but civilized discussions with his, and later Vargas Llosa’s, biographer, Gerald Martin. In front of these fireworks, there is the naked prose that we find in, for me a masterpiece, The Colonel has no one to write to him.

As it is now In August See Us, of which its editor, Cristobal Pera, gives us a vivid description of its genesis, and the writer’s children of “the race between the perfection of the artist and the fading of his mental faculties.” Here, as in The Colonel, you reach the nameless town in the Caribbean on a ferry. The colonel mourns with his wife the death of his son Agustín, Ana Magdalena Bach, mourns that of his mother. She too walks in the drowsiness of the sandy streets of the lagoon. There we met the lawyer, a monumental black man, and now in the market there is “a big black woman.” She is meticulous in her movements, as the writer is meticulous with the adjectives, which accentuate the intensity in which the characters live; and the rain accompanies us, as it accompanies the colonel, who has to protect himself with a threadbare umbrella, through which you can see the stars.

The most radically new thing about this novel is the plot. Ana Magdalena Bach at the beginning of the novel is 46 years old, compared to 50 at the end. And age, the passage of time, are very present here. She has been married for three years, in a well-matched marriage, but she needs the company of other men, and she suffers when she finds herself alone, “without a man of charity.” Every August she travels to the island to place a bouquet of gladioli on her mother’s grave. And it is on the island where she lives her sexual adventures. One of the men leaves him a twenty-dollar bill, a humiliation that haunts him obsessively. Another of hers gives her her business card, which she tears up, only to regret it later, another new obsession, and she mourns the misfortune of being a woman in a man’s world. The ending in the cemetery is shocking, of dazzling force; in the words of Cristóbal Pera, “an original theme that she had not addressed before in his works,” although there is some chronicle of an announced outcome.

To the island adventures we must add the relationship with her husband, who she cannot stand that he could be unfaithful. Or that of her daughter Micaela, who wants to profess in the order of the Discalced Carmelites, but at the same time loves nights out. Throughout the novel we are accompanied by music, already present in Ana Magdalena’s last name, with the omnipresence of the bolero. And, of course, the readings, which are part of the biography of a writer and here of the protagonist, among others, El lazarillo de Tormes, The old man and the sea and The stranger. And in my case, I add now with genuine enthusiasm See you in August. [Here you can read the first chapter of the novel]