I.

On February 11, 1991, Doctor Jaime Gazabón opened the office door of his dental clinic in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, to find Gabriel García Márquez in the waiting room. It was two thirty in the afternoon; the patient, he recalled, was punctual for his first visit, arriving by chauffeur to the neighborhood aptly named Bocagrande (“Bigmouth”).

When the dentist came out to greet him, the writer had just finished filling out his dental history form: ­“Patient’s name: Gabriel García Márquez. Ocupation: Lifetime patient. Telephone number: Disconnected for nonpayment. If married, occupation of spouse: Yes, she doesn’t do anything. Company employing spouse: Wouldn’t you like to know. Name of the person responsible for the payment of treatment: Gabo, the telegraphist’s son. Is anything bothering you? Do you have any pain? Bothers I have, the pain will come later. Can you tell us who recommended you to the doctor? His universal fame.”

As John Cheever once said, a story is “what you tell yourself in a dentist’s office while you’re waiting for an appointment.”

For the first seven years of consultation, the dentist referred to García Márquez respectfully as ­maestro. He later began to call him compadre (“good friend” or “god­father”). When García Márquez found out that the doctor’s wife was pregnant with her sixth child, the couple’s first son, he asked: “And when are you going to baptize him?” A friend explained to the dentist that in Mexico, where García Márquez had lived for decades, the honor of being a godfather is sometimes asked of the parents and not the other way around. The day of the baptism, García Márquez and his wife, Mercedes Barcha, were the first to arrive at the church.

“I don’t think anything is chance,” Doctor Gazabón later told me. It was a Macondian¹ baptism.

That ceremony wasn’t the first time the families had coincided. Both had once lived in Cartagena de Indias’ Pie de la Popa neighborhood; García Márquez’s sister often went to the Gazabón house to play with the dentist’s sister. The dentist was a year-old baby when the writer was already a twenty-something suckling rooster (from a young age, he exhibited a penchant for teasing others in an attempt to immunize them against solemnity). The writer and the dentist­ were from different generations: when García Márquez won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Gazabón was completing post­graduate study in Oral Rehabilitation at Ohio State University.

The first time the novelist visited the home of his new dentist, he entered through the main door and left through the kitchen so he could...