Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mercedes Barcha. Book, love, life.

"I've learned so much from you people...

I learned that everyone wants to live at the top of the mountain, not realising that true happiness lies in the journey to the top itself.

I learned that when a newborn baby first squeezes his father's finger with his fist, the feeling of that touch remains for the rest of his life.

I learned…"

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Some authors can make a deal with the reader with one sentence. Causing fire in the hearts and completely transferring them to another place - to their stories, making the characters and readers one whole, residents of one big world.

One such author is Gabriel García Márquez, who created magical realism in works that have already become part of world literature until the end of human history.

Gabriel García Márquez was born on 6 March 1927 in Aracataca, a small river village in Colombia. In the family of Eligio García and Luisa Santiago Márquez Iguarán.

A few months ago I had the opportunity to visit Aracataca, a remote town between the banana groves and mountains of the Caribbean. A remote place where every house, road hole or ramshackle fence, revolves around the Nobel Prize for Literature. An old family home, now turned into a museum, dotted with phrases and antique furniture. Paper butterflies touching some trees or specimens of lost urban art. All this represents the best storyteller of this city (and Colombia) that they gave to the World.

It was here that little Gabo listened to the stories of his grandmother, a woman who was superstitious but also had a rich imagination. And it was these stories that inspired his later work. As well as the famous telegraph office in Arakataka, where his father worked before

The human body was not made for the years it could live.

As a child, the would-be writer was a rather shy boy. But that didn't stop him from writing humorous poems for a wall newspaper, a boarding school in Barranquilla. And in 1947, in Bogotá, he studied law. However, he decided to link his future with journalism, which he combined with writing short stories. He drew inspiration from works such as Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis and One Thousand and One Nights, or some of his grandmother's stories, in which fantastical events were always present in the ordinary, everyday world of people.

In his early years, Gabriel García Márquez met the love of his life, Mercedes Barca. When they first met, she was 9 years old and he 14, he was so smitten with the girl that he immediately asked her to marry him.

I've just realised that all the poems I've written are dedicated to you. Be my wife." Mercedes replied, "I agree. But, if you don't mind, I'll finish school first.

Thirteen years later they were married. There was no engagement or anything like that. They just waited patiently for each other. It was Mercedes who became Gabriel's most faithful companion and friend.

He called her the crisis manager," their son Rodrigo Garcia said, "sometimes he didn't even realise there was a crisis.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The love that gave birth to a legend.

After the birth of his son Rodrigo in 1959, the family moved to Mexico City. Because of threats from various Cuban dissidents and CIA agents who were extremely unhappy with his collaboration with the newspaper Prensa Latina (founded by Fidel Castro).

A good writer can certainly make good money. Especially if he cooperates with the state.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Based in the Mexican capital, Gabriel Marquez and his family faced one of the worst economic situations of their lives. Essentially left unemployed and without means of subsistence, the writer began work on a new novel called One Hundred Years of Solitude.

"I had a wife and two young sons. I worked as a PR manager and edited film scripts. But to write a book, I had to give up my job and other employment.
I pawned the car and gave the money to Mercedes. Every day she got me paper, cigarettes and everything else I needed for work, in one way or another. When book was finished, it turned out that we owed the butcher 5,000 pesos - a lot of money. Word got around that I was writing a very important book, and all the shopkeepers wanted to participate. I needed another 160 pesos to send the text to the publisher, and I only had 80 pesos left. So I pawned a mixer and a Mercedes hair dryer. When she heard about it, she said: "The last thing I need is for the novel to turn out badly".

The new book suffered a thousand setbacks and was rejected by everyone. But in 1967 it finally made it to an Argentine publisher publishing house who decided to publish the book. They had no idea that the novel would eventually become a sales phenomenon and the perfect vehicle for creating a universe of its own, with all those stories representing an entire continent. And in 1982, Gabriel Garcia Marquez received the Nobel Prize for Literature. He is world-famous for his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Gabo's last book was a controversial one, the novel is about an old man who falls in love with a teenage girl. Forbidden and incomprehensible love always arouses the wrath of a righteous society, anything that breaks the mold should be forbidden and condemned. Those are the rules. And of course this work was banned in Iran and some other countries, this novel was the last published by the author before his death. He died on 17 April 2014 due to lingering lymphatic cancer

I don't wear a hat so as not to take it off in front of anybody