GREGORY RABASSA: It happened the way earthquakes happen. We can’t predict earthquakes, even though we know they’re going to happen.
EMMANUEL CARBALLO: An astonishing case in the history of literature in Spanish. It’s something genetic. There are genes that predestine you to be a great writer, and he worked very hard. He didn’t devote himself to literature gratuitously, but he worked very hard. Very, very disciplined. He left all his jobs, borrowed money, sold things, and shut himself up in his house for eight months to write. His entire family, his wife, his sons, his friends, we all made an empty space around him because he was frenetically dedicated to one thing. They lived very modestly in a small apartment, there were no luxuries there, they spent only what was necessary.
Everyone agreed that he should have peace, time, and affection. And thanks to that—principally to his family and his friends— the novel was written. I was the person who read the novel from the time he began to write it until he finished it, and because I was reading and commenting chapter after chapter every week, by the time he brought over the next chapter I had nothing to correct, nothing to replace, because all my suggestions were already there in the novel.
MARÍA LUISA ELÍO: He gave me pieces to read. What Gabo had written at night, he would read us parts the next day . . . And from that first moment you realized it was a marvel. He knew it.
GUILLERMO ANGULO: No, he didn’t know. In fact, he was very doubtful that it would be a good novel. When it was published, he sent me a copy. I read it. I liked it a great deal. He sent me another copy. I don’t have my copy because I had to pass it on to Germán Vargas, and Germán Vargas had to pass it on to Plinio. And I ought to tell you something that I don’t believe anyone has told you and that no one is going to tell you: Plinio reprimanded him because it was anti-Communist. “What? The country’s full of problems and you’re writing a fairy tale?”
MARÍA LUISA ELÍO: One isn’t a fool and I can be very cutting where literature is concerned. I mean, whomever it is can be a very famous writer, and if I don’t like it, I don’t like it. So I read it and I knew that this Señor García Márquez was very great. I didn’t doubt it for a second . . .
I thought the book was really good. But I’ll be frank with you: to that degree, no.
SANTIAGO MUTIS: They lost control of the situation. Abroad and in Colombia too. Because Gabo became an event, a phenomenon. Everyone kneeled down before him. I don’t know whether Gabo tells this or Tomás Eloy Martínez. One week after they published the novel there, Gabo travels to Buenos Aires not because of One Hundred Years of Solitude but to be a judge at a fiction competition. One night they go to the theater, and when Gabo goes in someone recognizes him, the entire audience gets up and applauds him. That’s where it began. And it hasn’t stopped! It didn’t stop. Ever. That is, they never left him alone.
RODRIGO MOYA: On November 29, 1966, Gabriel García Márquez visits me in my home in the Condesa Building, accompanied by his wife Mercedes, so that one of my photographs would illustrate the first edition. I took the photographs in my house, which had a good deal of natural light. He arrived wearing a plaid jacket. He loved those plaids. He looked impassive but he certainly was conscious of the camera. He was conscious that he had created a masterpiece. He had already written a great deal, he had already had success, and throughout the work you can breathe the certainty that only geniuses have. I had that impression then. Of course, not the magnitude. Gabo was just thirty-nine years old. But a foretelling of what was to come.