In the book “Gabo and Mercedes: a farewell” García Márquez’s son exposes a nostalgic and intimate account of his family.
In the life and work of García Márquez there is talk of gadgets and mysteries. From beginning to end, his passage through the world was surrounded by a magic that goes beyond the name of the literary genre where his literature is pigeonholed. That same magic, which may well be called poetry, was reaffirmed the moment death, almost as an image and likeness of the one that the Colombian writer once portrayed in One Hundred Years of Solitude, sent a kind of carrier pigeon that predicted that the dreaded and most natural moment of our human condition was yet to come.
In the book Gabo and Mercedes: a farewell, Rodrigo García Barcha tells that on the morning of April 17, 2014, when Gabriel García Márquez died, “a dead bird appears inside the house. A few years ago, what was once a terrace was covered to make a dining room and living room overlooking the garden. The walls are made of glass, so it is presumed that the bird flew in, became disoriented, crashed against the glass and fell dead on the sofa, more precisely in the place where my father usually sits ”.
A bad omen, but it is a scene traced from One Hundred Years of Solitude, not only because of the bird, but also because it is also the day that one of the main characters in one of García Márquez’s most remembered novels dies: Holy Thursday (…) They buried her in a little box that was barely larger than the basket in which Aureliano was carried, and very few people attended the funeral, partly because not many remembered her, and partly because that noon it was so hot that disoriented birds crashed like pellets against the walls and broke the metal screens of the windows to die in the bedrooms ”, he says in the book recounting the death of Úrsula Iguarán.
“I just had to accept it. It was something incredible, inexplicable. Rather than explain it, it must be accepted and enjoyed as an event that is so tied to images of Gabo that they are surprising, but one cannot begin to speculate what it means and how it happened. You have to accept it as a very beautiful event to tell about it ”, said Rodrigo García.
Black and white images and the word goodbye as a painting that evokes the nostalgia of a son who longs for the memories of those years in which he shared with his parents, in which he was understanding the meaning of the phrase of public, private lives and secret that his father pointed out and always fully defended.
“I always had to do a job of making the various Gabos. My dad, the one who lived at home, the one who wrote at home, the one who was famous, the one who was sick, the one who died. Everything is a process of integration. Now that he is gone, I have to integrate those two people, the absent one and the one who is still alive in the world of literature and readers. But more and more I focus on what is personal and not on what is fame. What remains is them as people, as parents and the relationship with us. Everything tends to be personal and not about success ”.
Follow the news of El Espectador on Google NewsAnd then the problem of privacy arises, of making public the story of two deaths that would undoubtedly mark. And then we know that unjust fate of a lost memory, of lost memories, as if García Márquez had once again been a character in One Hundred Years of Solitude and was infected by the plague of oblivion that fell on Macondo. And we know how those years and the last days were passing in which the end seemed more and more imminent. And we also learned that, unlike the death of his father, with whom he shared until the last minutes of his life, it was impossible for him to be with his mother, because the pandemic complicated the closeness and he had to assume the mourning without having He was able to say goodbye by grabbing his hand and gazing at that fragility prior to death.
“With the mother I had a final stage. It was difficult, no doubt. It was very fast. He had a decline and died two days later. At first I did not travel because the contagion was in bad times in Mexico. The next day I realized that maybe we were in a very risky stage with her. When I was planning the trip, my brother spoke to me and told me that he was no longer arriving. In that sense I was sad, but it was also what many people experienced in 2020. Not being able to travel, not being able to see people in person, but it is not that I want to compare the tragedies that many people experienced with their loved ones isolated in hospitals. Finally, my mother was home with my brother and his family. It was sad without a doubt, but you have to accept it. Gabo has been losing his memory in the last three or four years. You could sit with him, he was calm, but he didn’t recognize us. It was part of what he had to accept. Mercedes, despite the fact that she was physically handicapped, her head was always very whole and she was always herself until the end. I miss her a little more because I was very present with her and we talked every day until two days before she died, perhaps that is why I have her more present, but I think about both of them every day. Parents grow up after death. On the one hand, due to age one has more perspective, one sees them more humanely, one accepts them with their defects. But despite that, the figure stands out ”.
We feign a kind of surprise when death stalks us as a maneuver to defend ourselves against our own vulnerability and finitude. Death, the one that García Márquez hated because it was the only stage of life about which he would never be able to write, is the one that Rodrigo and his entire family had to assume, but he especially wanted to embrace it to try to understand and give his own opinion about her: “Writers are obsessed with loss, with the passage of time and its greatest manifestation, which is death. It is that contradiction. It is natural and totally unacceptable. It is the mystery with which one lives ”.
