Love in the Time of Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez’s fame as a writer of fabulous tales appears to have extended to the very tips of his toes. One of the enduring images in Rodrigo García’s lovingly irreverent memoir, A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes, is the specter of his ailing father’s feet.

In a scene worthy of One Hundred Years of Solitude or Love in the Time of Cholera, García recalls his father’s secretary commenting on them as she changed his bedsheets. “She had heard he had beautiful feet but she had never seen them,” García writes. “Where on earth she could have heard that, I have no idea. I’d rather not ask.”