The stowaway on the Santa Maria

Author: Jacqueline Balcells

Publisher: SM

On March 4, 1977, hours after receiving the first copy of his now emblematic novel ¡Que viva la música!, Andrés Caicedo from Cali committed suicide with sixty seconal pills.

He was 25 years old. A precocious writer and organizer of cultural movements, he was, above all, a film fanatic. A cinephile, a cinephile, a cinephagist, is how Alberto Fuguet, who traveled to Cali, his birthplace, to trace the person behind the cult figure, describes him. There, family and friends provided him with letters, diaries, film reviews, clippings, and loose notes. With this material, Fuguet edited and directed *My Body Is a Cell*, a true autobiography of Andrés Caicedo, a first-person documentary where Caicedo himself recounts everything he felt and thought—texts that perhaps he wanted to leave for posterity and that today distance him from the author of books for young people and transform him into a voice that whispers and shouts from the most intense abysses of loneliness and drift.

This reissue includes previously unpublished photographs of the author, taken shortly before his death, which also seem to be an intentional legacy. More than thirty years after his death, Caicedo has become a myth of the tormented young creator, and his work is increasingly recognized throughout the Americas and Europe. In My Body Is a Cell, Caicedo recounts—unveils himself, opens up—and reveals what truly lay behind his now-famous glasses, long hair, and rocker physique: a fragile, divided being who turns to literature and film as forms of salvation.