On March 18, 1999, Gabriel García Márquez’s readers received the happy news that the Colombian Nobel laureate was working on a new book comprised of five autonomous tales with the same protagonist: Ana Magdalena Bach. The journalist Rosa Mora published the exclusive in the Spanish newspaper El País three days later alongside the first story of the book, “En agosto nos vemos” (Edith Grossman’s translation, “Meeting in August,” would appear in The New Yorker later that same year). García Márquez had read it aloud a few days earlier in the Casa de América in Madrid, where he was participating together with another Nobel laureate, José Saramago, in a forum on the strength of Ibero-American creativity. Instead of giving a speech, he surprised his audience by reading an early version of the first chapter of the novel the reader now has in hand. Rosa Mora added: “ ‘En agosto nos vemos’ will form part of a book that will include another three 150-page novellas, that Gabo has already practically written, and will probably include a fourth, because, as he explains, he’s had another idea he’s drawn to. The common denominator of the book is that they will be love stories between older people.”
A few years later fortune crossed my destiny with that of García Márquez, one of my touchstone authors since adolescence. My impassioned reading of his work, along with that of Juan Rulfo, Jorge Luis Borges, and Julio Cortázar, had led me to cross the Atlantic to pursue a doctorate in Latin American literature at the University of Texas at Austin. In August of 2001, I was back in Barcelona working as an editor at Random House Mondadori when Carmen Balcells summoned me to a meeting at her agency, which was almost empty in the summer. She wanted me to speak on the phone with García Márquez, who needed a trusted editor for his memoirs. His usual editor, my dear friend Claudio López de Lamadrid, was on vacation. Thus began my shoulder-to-shoulder work with the Colombian writer on the final version of Vivir para contarla (Living to Tell the Tale), revising a manuscript that arrived by drip feed into my email inbox or by fax and that I returned with my annotations, which mostly consisted of fact-checking. He was especially grateful for the information that Kafka’s Metamorphosis, the reading of which had changed his narrative universe, had not actually been translated into Spanish by Borges, even though the Argentinian edition he’d read proclaimed on the cover that it had been. Although he was in Los Angeles recovering from an illness, the long-distance editorial work allowed me to witness the writer’s craftsmanship, from the rewriting of the chapter devoted to the “Bogotazo” to the brilliant change of a single letter in the Spanish title to avoid a conflict with another author. Even though an unexpected chance allowed me to meet him personally along with his wife, Mercedes Barcha, in a Barcelona restaurant, we did not renew our author-editor relationship until 2008.
In May 2002, after a long stay in Los Angeles, Gabriel García Márquez and Mercedes Barcha returned to their house in Mexico, where they were met by a new personal secretary they had just hired, Mónica Alonso. Her account was crucial in reconstructing the chronology of the creation of Until August. According to Mónica Alonso, on June 9, 2002, the writer finished revising the final galleys of his memoir, with the editor Antonio Bolívar’s assistance. After clearing his desk of various versions and notes for the submitted book, he received the news that his mother had died that very day. With that enigmatic coincidence, the circle that had begun with the opening of his memoir—“My mother asked me to go with her to sell the house”—was now closed. The writer found himself without an imminent project when, going through the drawers in his study, Mónica found a folder that contained two manuscripts: one called “Ella” and the other “En agosto nos vemos.” Between August 2002 until July 2003 García Márquez worked intensely on “Ella,” the title of which he would change to Memoria de mis putas tristes / Memories of My Melancholy Whores when it was published in 2004/5. This would be the last work of fiction published in his lifetime.
But the publication in May 2003 of another fragment of Until August would seem to be a public declaration that García Márquez was still moving forward with his last narrative project. The third chapter of Until August came out as an unpublished short story, with the title “The Night of the Eclipse,” in the Colombian magazine Cambio on May 19, 2003 and a few days later in El País. According to Mónica Alonso, starting in July 2003 the writer began to work intensely again on the manuscript of the novel. That’s how, from then until the end of 2004, he accumulated five successively numbered versions, apart from a few early first drafts and a version that he had brought back from Los Angeles. All these dated versions are among the writer’s papers in safekeeping at the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin.
After reaching the fifth version he stopped work on the novel and sent a copy to Carmen Balcells. “Sometimes books need to be left to rest,” he confided to Mónica Alonso. An important event awaited him, the celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Cien años de soledad, with a commemorative edition by the Real Academia Española, and the preparations were going to keep him busy. His participation in the opening session of the congress, on March 26, 2007, in Cartagena, would be one of his last big public events.
In March 2008, now settled in Mexico as editorial director of Random House Mondadori, I resumed my relationship as his editor. Carmen Balcells put me in charge of working with García Márquez on a book collecting his public speeches, which would be published two years later under the title Yo no vengo a decir un discurso / I’m Not Here to Give a Speech. Frequent visits to his study, at least once a month, turned into a long conversation about books, authors, and the subjects covered in the speeches themselves.
In the summer of 2010 Carmen Balcells informed me in Barcelona that García Márquez had an unpublished novel that he couldn’t find an ending for, and asked me to encourage him to finish it. She told me it was about a mature married woman who visits the island where her mother is buried and finds the love of her life. Upon my return to Mexico the first thing I did was ask Gabo about the novel and repeat his agent’s words. Gabo was amused and confessed that it wasn’t the love of her life that his protagonist finds but a different lover on each visit. And to prove that he did indeed have an ending, he asked Mónica for the latest version, in one of the German Leuchtturm binders he always used for his manuscripts, and he read me the last paragraph that closed the story in a dazzling way. He was very protective of his work in progress, but a few months later he allowed me to read three chapters out loud to him. I remember the impression I was left with: absolute mastery of an original theme he had not tackled previously in his work, and the desire that one day his readers could share it.
His memory did not allow him to fit together all the pieces and corrections of his last version, but the revision of the text was for a time the best way to occupy his days in his study, doing what he most enjoyed: suggesting an adjective to change here, or a detail there. Version 5, dated July 5, 2004, was clearly his favorite, and on its first page he wrote “Grand final OK. Info about her CH 2. NB: probable Final ch / Is it the best?” He decided with Mónica to overturn some of the suggestions annotated on previous versions. Mónica also kept a digital version which contained all the fragments of other options or scenes the author had previously considered. Those two documents are the basis of this edition.
The relationship between an author and an editor is a pact of trust based on respect. The privilege of working with Gabriel García Márquez is a constant exercise in humility that, in my case, was laid down in his own words when Carmen passed me the telephone for our first conversation: “I want you to be as critical as possible, since once I decide it’s finished I don’t revise anything.” My work on this edition has been that of a restorer facing a great master’s canvas. Starting from the digital document kept by Mónica Alonso, and comparing it to version 5, where he consolidated small corrections from other versions, I have checked each of his annotations, handwritten or dictated to Mónica, each modified or cut word or sentence, each option in the margin, to decide whether to incorporate it into this final version. An editor’s task does not consist of changing a book but of making what is already on the page stronger, and that has been the essence of my work. That includes, among other things, checking and correcting facts, from the names of musicians or authors mentioned to the coherence of the age of the protagonist as he had planned in his marginal notes.
I hope that readers of Until August share the same respect and astonishment that I have felt the dozens of times I have read this text, readings during which I’ve sensed the presence of Gabo over my shoulder, as in the photo Mónica took of us together one day when we were checking the proofs of his book of speeches.
My gratitude to Rodrigo and Gonzalo García Barcha for the trust they placed in me that August day when they called to tell me they’d decided that Until August should be published and that I would be the editor. This was a daunting responsibility, but their encouragement and trust throughout the process has been the greatest recompense for the editorial assignment of a lifetime. The memory of Mercedes Barcha, who decided to open the doors of her house to me as well as the study, has been ever present in these months. Mónica Alonso’s fidelity and commitment to the writer have been essential to getting the text into our hands and I thank her for the time she has devoted to reconstructing the history of its writing. We are also all in debt to the team at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, where the writer’s archives are housed, for their work of digitally reproducing the manuscripts of the novel, essential to piloting this edition into harbor: Stephen Enniss, Jim Kuhn, Vivie Behrens, Cassandra Chen, Elizabeth Garver, and Alejandra Martínez. I thank my friend the great editor Gary Fisketjon for a conversation that helped me overcome a bout of editor’s block. His experience has served as a guide, as has that of our much-missed editor in chief, Sonny Mehta, who would have loved to publish this book. Very special thanks to my wife, Elizabeth, and our children, Nicholas and Valerie, for their support during my long spells shut up in the attic with this novel. Finally, my most profound gratitude to Gabo, for his humanity, simplicity, and the affection he always served up to anyone who approached thinking he was a god, to demonstrate with his smile that he was a man. His memory over these months has been the greatest incentive to getting here.
—Cristóbal Pera
February 2023