Close-ups of Gabriel Garcia Marquez: in a visit with this world-renowned Colombian novelist, our author snapped highlights of his typical workday.

• Author: Bach, Caleb

The most celebrated author in the Americas is waving to us, beckoning us into his studio, which sits outside his tasteful, two-story colonial house, across a grassy interior courtyard. Once inside he greets us warmly, chuckling at our Old Testament names: an encounter, he says, between an archangel, a prophet, and the first person to enter the Promised Land. While offering us some coffee he expresses regret that he couldn't give us a formal interview. "If I do, all the people I've turned down will kill me," he says.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez has been in the news of late due to the publication last October of the first volume of his memoirs, Vivir para contarla [Living to Tell It, Knopf, Fall 2003]. (See our review on page 60 and excerpt on page 64.) The 1982 Nobel laureate from Colombia began the work in 1999, after a close scrape with lymphatic cancer, and completed the 579-page manuscript in just three years. Since its release, the Spanish-language edition has sold more than two million copies (not counting pirated editions), and many more copies will reach eager fans worldwide when translated versions become available later this year.

Throughout his career Gabo, as he is affectionately called, has been a public figure who has given lectures, readings, and interviews about his own work and offered sought-after opinions regarding important moral issues. Only in recent years has he lived a more cloistered existence in order to devote all of his time and energy to the three volumes of his memoir. These days, at his home in the San Angel district of Mexico City, he writes with iron discipline for six hours each day. Despite this regimen, early last January, upon returning from holidays in Havana, he graciously submitted to a brief session on behalf of Americas. It was not a full-fledged interview, but while my son Joel and I photographed Gabo during a typical workday, he commented on a variety of topics.

Extending the traditional welcome, "mi casa es tu casa," he then returned to his desk where still-fresh words of his memoirs emanated from the monitor of his Macintosh. He explained that the computer is linked to others in his several homes so that he can work seamlessly on projects regardless of locale.

While Joel began firing away from close range with his Mamiya, I explained to Gabo that his old friend Tomas Eloy Martinez years before had suggested the idea of a photo essay, perhaps something like "un dia en la vida de Gabo." "Ah yes, Eloy. When Cien anos first came out in Buenos Aires, he hosted me on his television program, Telenoche, also put my portrait on the cover of...