The Brooklyn Rail

In Gabriel García Márquez’s posthumously-released novel, Until August, a woman visits the island where her mother is buried, a nameless speck off the Caribbean with blue lagoons and herons that call only at night. After laying a bouquet of gladioli on the panoramic hilltop that provides her mother’s resting place, Ana Magdalena Bach returns to the third-rate hotel in which she has booked a room before taking the ferry back home, shamelessly flirting with a silver-haired man in the dining hall. At the age of forty-six, Ana Magdalena has been married for twenty-seven years and has only ever seen her husband naked, but that soon changes when she sleeps with her random acquaintance, who never tells her his name.

The night of pleasure is tender and passionate, the anonymity giving Ana Magdalena the freedom to explore her desires, which more than two decades of marriage could not. “Why me?” the man asks her, and she responds: “It was a flash of inspiration.” And yet, the heady romance of the tryst is broken when she wakes up alone, her clothes folded with almost serene gentleness, and the staggering insult of a twenty-dollar bill slipped in the pages of her copy of Dracula.

Dogged by debate since its release in March, Until August is an unfinished novel by the late master of magical realism, a book Márquez wanted destroyed as he struggled in the final throes of dementia. “This book doesn’t work,” he told his sons, who, now, a decade later, have published the slim book in a self-acknowledged “act of betrayal.” Barring the ethics of violating a dying author’s last wishes, Until August, surprisingly, does work: if not as a novel, then perhaps as a novella, its meager but heavily-packed 110 pages effecting the same profound effect as a fairy tale, with the highly modern, morally complicated heroine spurring its atmospheric narrative.

Returning home to the arms of her husband, the handsome music teacher Doménico Amarís, Ana Magdalena is haunted by her night on the island, the episode triggering an all-consuming self-awareness of her desirability to men. “She had always been besieged with offers, yet she was so indifferent to them that she ignored them without pity,” Márquez writes. “After returning from the island, she felt as if she had a stigmata on her forehead, visible only to men, a mark that could not go unnoticed.” Her husband’s concern only deepens her guilt and the unforgiving nature of her secret; she begins smoking cigarettes again, flushing the remnants in the toilet before he wakes up in the morning. Her marriage has been a happy one, underscored by the compatibility of two best friends, and the domestic tranquility of a grown son and daughter, perhaps so picture-perfect as to be boring, but after her infidelity, Ana Magdalena wonders if her husband, who she truly loves, hasn’t betrayed her in the same way.

The compendium of cheating women in literature stretches from the scarlet A stitched on Hester Prynne’s clothes after she dallies with a pastor in seventeenth-century Massachusetts to Marguerite Duras’s jilted heroine Lol Stein, who embarks on a limerence-induced affair with her married friend’s lover. Márquez’s treatment is arguably subtler, as his heroine’s self-exploration transcends the realm of sexual awakening, speaking to an urge that is more natural, if not banal, in Ana Magdalena’s choice to take single-night lovers. In this way, Until August is more similar to novels like Leïla Slimani’s Adèle, where a married Frenchwoman is addicted to the thrill and chase of extramarital sex (most of which is bad—she rarely orgasms), or Anaïs Nin’s A Spy in the House of Love, which centers on a failed actress’ affairs with several different men. (It’s worth noting Anaïs Nin herself was bigamous, and had an affair with friend and fellow writer Henry Miller documented in Henry and June; life imitates art.) But while the unfaithful protagonists of both these novels compulsively have sex outside of marriage due to their commitment issues and childhood traumas (an unmistakable reflection of Freudian conceits), Ana Magdalena is a conundrum, and it’s precisely this mystery—and Márquez’s pointed refusal to rationalize why she continues to cheat—that defines the haunting charm, and eloquent silences, of the novel.

Márquez’s mastery lies in his effortless interplay of imagery with emotions, sharply exposing how women’s sense of self-worth and sexuality are inextricably linked to their physical appearance, and the inevitability of aging. Before that first rendezvous on the island, Ana Magdalena “stretched her cheeks back with the heels of her hand to remind herself of what she’d looked like when young”, brushes her black hair and rubs vaseline on her lips before “confront[ing] her autumnal, motherly face in the mirror.” After the cheapening experience of being mistaken for a prostitute, she opts for a black silk dress and faux emerald jewelry for her second visit to the island. And yet, the hyper-visibility of attiring herself in a glamorous outfit, conceived as an armor, instead provokes the attention of a charming con artist, who forcefully dances with her then takes her to bed through lying and manipulation.

As such, in experimenting with the transactional power of desire, Ana Magdalena begins to live in the world of men—but only on her own terms, as she still has the perpetual option of leaving the island. It is not a relationship or a long-term affair she really wants; she rips up the business card of a friendly hookup in disgust, denies the pursuit of a lawyer who has always wanted her, and after a younger man unsuccessfully tries to woo her, demurs, “At my age, all women are alone.” Indeed, Ana Magdalena’s affairs only heighten her loneliness, and the idyll of the island provides a wistful backdrop to a woman’s contradictory feelings about aging and loss.

What started as a sensual letting go of herself becomes a cyclical habit, a prison locked in the allure of freedom, and she suspects her husband might know about her island infidelity. When she learns an unknown silver-haired man leaves flowers on her mother’s tombstone, the narrative comes full circle in a poignant way only Márquez could pull off (even if it’s beyond the grave). In an act more audacious than her adultery, Ana Magdalena exhumes her mother’s bones, bringing them in a bag as her husband watches in shock. The surrealist touch of the exhumation lends the short book the power of a fable, showing the late author at the height of his storytelling powers. In a style reminiscent of the postcolonial magical realism he defined, Márquez blends the banal with the beautiful, the enchanting with the humdrum, and the ironic with the prophetic.