Abel's Eden.

• Author: Garcia Marquez, Gabriel
• Position: Latitudes - Reprint

I have a picture by Abel Quezada in my dining room. It's the portrait of a middle-aged woman seated next to a red column looking lonely and dejected, with an almost empty carafe of rose and a half-drained glass. She has a white shift printed with April flowers and a Mona Maris hairdo, and it's impossible to tell whether the fight in her eyes comes from their becalmed sea-green, or from the glisten of tears. For both her face and the solitude of her tipple betray an old sorrow. At night, when the fights are OUt, the carafe empties altogether and only the last sip remains at the bottom of the glass; yet by morning they are always replenished.

This tale begins more years ago than I can remember, one Sunday that Abel's wife Yolanda invited us to his first studio in Cuernavaca, for one of the florid salads that if hung up could well be mistaken for one of her husband's pictures. The house was a kind of domesticated precipice, seven levels linked by a tentacular staircase plunging to the tropics among boisterous blooms and crazed birds. The first level contained the reception room and main bedroom. On the second, going down, were the other bedrooms, the kitchen and dining rooms, and a terrace overlooking the great jungles of the South. On the tied, lower still, was the painting studio and a spacious conservatory surrounded by astral panes. From here, during the December festivities. one could see right across the Pacific Ocean as far as the snows of Fujiyama.

Abel is the only Sunday painter who paints every day, night included. He paints all the time, even when asleep; sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night and notes a dream so that he can paint it the following day. He paints as he breathes, stopping only to start again, and he paints wherever he may be on this wide world this globe he trots reside and out as if it were a little thing that belonged to him.

In the Cuernavaca studio that afternoon there were a lot of pictures painted over the week, some hung up, others on the floor, most stacked against the wall, but the one I succumbed to was still on the easel. It was, of course, the one with the woman who now stares at us from her golden frame as we eat. Except that then she was a child of about four, playing with her dolls in the harlequin hall of some Florentine palazzo.

"I want that picture," I told Abel.

"It's yours," he said.

The deal was as simple as that, but delivery took haft a lifetime, which I spent running round the world...