Silvana Paternostro (front row, second from right) poses for a photo with her journalism class, taught by Gabriel García Márquez (third row from front, center, in glasses).

Last week, we had the pleasure of featuring Silvana Paternostro’s “Solitude & Company,” an oral biography of Gabriel García Márquez from our Summer 2003 issue. But Silvana also wrote, for our Winter 1996 issue, “Three Days with Gabo,” an essay about the time she spent at a small journalism workshop hosted by García Márquez in Cartagena that spring. As Silvana writes: “For us, Latin American journalists in the early stages of our careers, he is a role model. We like to say that before he was a novelist he was a reporter. He says he has never stopped being one.” The essay provides a charming account of García Márquez’s professorial style—somehow both whimsical and practical—and it serves a reminder of his formidable talents as a journalist and an observer:

It has been said that Gabo is too creative to be a good journalist. After all, he is the same writer who in his novels, with a straight face, had Remedios the Beauty levitating to the skies and the smell of Santiago Nasar after his well-announced death penetrating the entire town.

As if reading my mind he says, “The strange episodes in my novels are all real, or they have a starting point, a basis in reality. Real life is always much more interesting than what we can invent.” He says that the ascension of Remedios the Beauty was inspired by a woman he saw spreading clean white sheets with her arms stretched out to the sun. He has also said that “to move between the magical and the incredible, one has to become a journalist” … He begins to read paragraphs out loud from some of our articles; he offers light copyediting. Some of the sentences are too long and Gabo pretends to be choking as he reads along. “We have to use breathing commas,” he says. “If not, the hypnotic act does not work. Remember, wherever there is a stumble, the reader wakes up and escapes. And one of the things that will make the reader wake up from hypnosis is to feel out of breath.”

We’ve made Silvana’s essay available online for free; you can read it here. It’s a fitting conclusion to our tribute to García Márquez—he will be missed.