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Chapter 4 ____________________________ From Melquíades to Vernet How Gabriel García Márquez Escaped Spanish Censorship On September 21, 2001, Barcelona’s Casa Batlló on Passeig de Grácia, one of the most emblematic buildings of Catalan modernisme , became the setting for the auction of a unique manuscript: the author-corrected galley proofs of Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (1967) [One Hundred Years of Solitude]. The auction house, Subastas Velázquez, justified its choice of location by underscoring García Márquez’s ties with Barcelona. After years of precarious living conditions in Mexico City, where the author wrote Cien años de soledad between 1965 and 1966, Gabo (as he is best known in literary circles) decided to settle in Barcelona in October 1967; he resided there until 1975. There he would interact with an emerging colony of Latin American expatriates and fellow Boom writers as well as with notables of the Catalan intelligentsia such as Carlos Barral. Not only was this city the place “from where he maintained contact with the world and with Latin American literature,” the auction house’s catalogue announced, but it was also the residence of his agent Carmen Balcells, who symbolizes the more than thirty-year relationship between García Márquez and Barcelona: “ésta fue y es su ciudad y hasta Barcelona nos desplazamos para subastar el día 21 de setiembre de 2001 las dichas primeras pruebas de galeradas de Cien años de soledad” [“this was and is his city, and to Barcelona we go to auction the aforementioned galley proofs of One Hundred Years of Solitude on September 21, 2001”] (Subastas Velázquez 4).1 109 Subastas Velázquez launched this event as one of the most significant and unique auctions in their history, and the press followed suit with a barrage of articles about the novel, its author and the circumstances that led to the auctioning of the galley proofs, calling the event “un hecho doblemente inédito por tratarse de un autor vivo y porque es la primera vez que en España se realiza una subasta de estas caracter ísticas” [“a doubly unique event since an auction like this for a living author has never taken place in Spain before”] (Manrique “Instituciones públicas” 45). In view of all the media hype and the fact that García Márquez is a “sure thing” on the book market (it is widely rumored that he received ten million dollars for his 2002 memoirs Vivir para contarla [Living to Tell the Tale]), the auction firm saw very encouraging prospects for a successful sale. The opening price was no small change, 95 million pesetas (roughly half a million dollars). A price hard to match for private collectors, and even for governmentfunded collections and libraries or university archives. Such a high-end cost contributed to making the auction the widely publicized cultural event that it was. It was a stimulus, too, for critics, journalists, and García Márquez himself to revisit the publication history of the Boom generation’s flagship novel; and for us it is an occasion to reflect on how literary manuscripts become commodities on the market at large. What led the auction house to put such an exorbitant price tag on these proofs? After all, as galleys they are twice removed from the original handwritten notebooks; and they can be regarded as an autograph document only because of the dedication on the first page and the handwritten corrections made by García Márquez. These autograph markings, however, do not seem to justify the high price on their own. As Eligio García Márquez, the author’s brother, has confirmed in Tras las claves de Melquíades [In Search of Melquíades’ Secrets], the original notebooks were destroyed by García Márquez and the typescript of Cien años de soledad he sent to Editorial Sudamericana in 1966 was lost when the publishing house moved to the San Telmo neighborhood in Buenos Aires. It is because of the disappearance of these originals that the galley proofs are now considered, “according to UNESCO,” the only autograph document of the novel (Marcos). The press incorrectly asserted that it was the “manuscript” of the novel, which only existed in the form of García Márquez’s handwritten notebooks. Subastas Velázquez made a similar claim when they tried to sell the galleys as the “sole available autograph material” for...

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