“Many years later, in front of the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia...” but wait, wait, because he also puts something on the front page of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. “For Jomi García Ascot and María Luisa Elío”. Today, they are both dead: García Ascot left in 1986; Elio in 2009; his last breath was in Mexico. But the first, the cry of the newborn, recently wounded by the world, was made in Pamplona by María Luisa Elio, in Calle Emilio Arrieta, in August 1926.

On June 17, the film En el balcón vacío was presented in her honour at the Cinema and Women exhibition organized by IPES in Pamplona. Directed by García Ascote, the screenplay is based on the texts of Elio. It was considered by some to be the first experimental film made in Mexico and, perhaps for that reason, never passed through commercial cinemas, despite having received awards at various festivals.

It wouldn’t have helped, at least if we talk about screening in Spanish cinemas, the theme of the film. En el balcón vacío tells the story of Gabriela: a boy who, looking out the window, sees how a Republican is arrested; a boy who, seeing this, understands the meaning of the Civil War; a boy who, together with his family, has to leave Pamplona; and a boy who, many years later, having learned all the suffixes of the word “exile”, returns to his homeland, has already arrived.

This was more or less the life of María Luisa Elio: her father, Luis Elio, was a lawyer by profession, from the aristocratic family, but a republican. And when Mary Louise was not even ten years old, they came to her house looking for her father. However, he survived the barracks and was kept for three years in the house of some Carlist friends who could not carry the terror of the blue shirts. Almost at the end of the war he went to the other side; he joined his family in Paris. And from there to Mexico. Elio would return to Pamplona in 1970 after the death of his father. He received this return in the book Time of Llorar. The first sentence says: “Now I realize that coming back is going.”

He met García Márquez in the 1960s in Mexico. Elio and then her husband, García Ascot, were in the intellectual circles of the capital who: They were acquaintances of Juan Rulfo, Octavio Paz, Elena Poniatowska... And he met the Colombian writers thanks to them. It is not a mere anecdote, considering the subsequent impact of Rulfo’s literature on Márquez’s style.

The first to hear of the Hundred Years of Soledades were Elio and García Ascot. It took Gabo three or four hours to tell Elio the whole novel, and at the end, when asked what he thought, Elio said: “If you write that, it will be insane; it will be insane.” Elio’s name remains forever on the first page of this wonderful madness.