What do the yellow flowers of Gabriel García Márquez mean?

When the news of the death of Gabriel Garcia Marquezseveral of his readers went to his home in Mexico City to bring him bouquets of yellow flowers. Those roses of that color became an imprint of him, which he reflected throughout his novels and he also used them in his personal life as a symbol of good luck.

The color yellow It was used several times in his most distinctive work One hundred years of lonelinesswhen Mauricio Babilonia was persecuted yellow butterflies -although it was believed that the nocturnal walk of these insects was a symbol of bad luck– or when they fell tiny yellow sky plants while they took measurements of José Arcadio Buendía’s coffin, turning it into a amulet.

According to him International Center for the Legacy of Gabriel García Márquezbefore turning eight years old, the Nobel Prize winner learned from his maternal grandfather, Colonel Nicolas Márquez, who yellow flowers were a symbol of good luck.

From that moment on, García Márquez did not let go of his personal amulet. While he was writing One hundred years of loneliness He could not miss by his side his Smith Corona electric typewriter and a branch of yellow roses that his wife Mercedes Barcha renewed from time to time.

Such was the case that when he received the Nobel Prize in Literature He kept a yellow flower in his tuxedo pocket to ward off death, a saying that a fortune teller told Gabriel’s mother, that “when someone receives it, they die.” In addition, there was a rose on the coffee table in his hotel room and a few others in the buttonhole of the tailcoats of the friends who accompanied him.

Beyond the important role it had in the life of the creator of Love in times of anger, those roses were not always Márquez’s favorites. In an interview for the magazine Man of the world In 1977, the Colombian writer was asked about his favorite flowers and he responded: “the flower I like the most is the Red rose that Mercedes puts on my desk every morning when I start writing.”

Although when they questioned him about his favorite coloranswered that it was “the yellow of the Caribbean sea at three in the afternoon in Jamaica”, an answer that will have made him change his mind about the color of the rose.