By Homero Aridjis/Los Angeles Times/MCTThe first time I met Gabriel Garcia Marquez, then an unknown writer in Mexico, was on July 6, 1962, in the office of the producer of Luis Bunuel’s movie Viridiana. I remember the date well because after noticing the headline, Gabo, as he was known to his friends and his fans in Latin America, asked to borrow the evening paper I had just bought, exclaiming “Dammit, today my master died,” referring to William Faulkner.Faulkner famously detested intrusions in his private life, and the funeral in his native Oxford, Mississippi, was sparsely attended by several dozen family members, his publishers and a few writers. In his chronicle of the event in Life magazine, William Styron describes the “monumental heat” as the procession drove past stores closed for the event and townspeople lining the streets, although, according to a local resident, “None of them ever read a word of him”. The coffin was buried “on a gentle slope between two oak trees”.My wife, Betty, and I would occasionally run into Gabo at the Cafe Tirol, a writers’ and artists’ hangout in the Zona Rosa here. One afternoon in 1963, he gave us a ride home. When we got out of the car, he asked if I had read Big Mama’s Funeral. I had never seen the book anywhere. Throwing open the trunk to reveal stacks of copies, he said, “Take as many as you want; at least someone intelligent will read it.”One day in 1964, Ramon Xirau, editor of the literary magazine Dialogos, where I was assistant editor, invited Gabo and me to a fancy restaurant for lunch. For an hour Gabo and I stood waiting by the cash register, until Gabo suggested that I invite him to lunch myself. I didn’t have a cent, as Xirau was supposed to pay me that day. Gabo didn’t have any cash either. Finally we called Xirau’s house, to be told by the maid that he was lunching with his in-laws. Gabo and I went to our homes to eat alone, for our wives had made other plans.Everything changed for Gabo in 1967 with the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude, greeted with rabid enthusiasm by readers and reviewers. In New York, I saw a Puerto Rican talking to a lion in the Central Park Zoo, shouting “Hey, Charlie, hey Charlie” as he pounded on a copy of Cien Anos de Soledad. Aracataca, Gabo’s birthplace in Colombia, had metamorphosed into Macondo, midwifed by Rabelais and Kafka, Faulkner and Juan Rulfo, whose Pedro Paramo and The Burning Plain had been pressed on him by the Colombian novelist Alvaro Mutis with the admonition to read them and learn how to write.During the first Ibero-American Summit, held in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1991, Gabo and I presented a proposal for a continental environmental alliance to the assembled heads of state, including King Juan Carlos of Spain, Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari and secretary-general of the United Nations Javier Perez de Cuellar. Protection of forests and a pact to save the Amazon were among our priorities, along with migratory species such as sea turtles and birds.On August 24, 2005, we met in the Church of Santo Domingo at the funeral service for Natasha Fuentes Lemus, Carlos Fuentes’ younger daughter, who had been found dead two days earlier. Gabo turned to me and said: “Damn, I’m not going to write anymore.” His wife, Mercedes Barcha, asked: “Why do you tell Homero that?” to which he replied: “If I don’t tell Homero, whom should I tell?” And indeed, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, published in 2004, was his last book.- Homero Aridjis is a poet, novelist, environmentalist and former Mexican ambassador to Unesco, and the author of A Time of Angels. This essay was translated by Betty Ferber from the Spanish.