I’ve been looking for this book for a long time. It was one of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s early works, a short story of just a few pages, but it said so much about Marquez and his writing that I never gave up on wanting to read it. It’s been a few decades since I looked for it and couldn’t find it anywhere, so I forgot about looking for it, but I never stopped thinking about it.

It was the only one of his works I hadn’t read, which left a hole in me. To me, Marquez is more than a writer; he is a spirit of a kind.

The story was worth the wait. I’ll finish it tonight. It’s pure Marquez, a brilliant blend of fantasy, love, and feeling, it foretells things to come. I tracked down a seller a month ago and got the book a few days ago. It’s not a book but a worn paper pamphlet published by Penguin Books in the 1950s. I found it offered for sale on Amazon, the last place I would have thought to look, from a book dealer on the other side of the country.

It is everything I imagined and more. Here is how it begins:

“On the third day of rain, they had killed so many crabs inside the house that Pelayo had to cross his drenched courtyard and throw them into the sea because the newborn child had a temperature all night, and they thought it was due to the stench. The world had been sad since Tuesday. Sea and sky were a single ash-gray thing, and the sands of the beach, which on March nights glimmered like powdered light, had become a stew of mud and rotten shellfish. The light was so weak at noon that when Pelayo was coming back to the hose after throwing away the crabs, it was hard for him to see what it was that was moving and groaning in the rear of the courtyard. He had to go very close to see that it was an old man, lying face down in the mud, who, in spite of his tremendous efforts, couldn’t get up, impeded by his enormous wings.”

How can anyone not read a book that begins like that? I will sit down with a glass of scotch and read the rest of it tonight.