My mom’s first instinct as she crosses through the door is to take charge. The nurse and the aide are propping my father’s head up and working to keep his mouth shut by tying his jaw with a towel around the head. “Tighter,” my mother calls out as she approaches the bed. “That’s it.” She looks my father up and down with detachment as if he were her patient. She pulls the sheet up to his chest, smooths it over, puts her hand on his. She looks at his face and caresses his forehead, and for a moment she is unfathomable. Then a brief convulsion overcomes her, and she erupts into tears. “Pobrecito, ¿verdad?” (Poor little thing, isn’t he?) Even before her own pain and sadness comes a profound sympathy for him. I’ve seen her cry only three times before in my whole life. This one lasts no more than a few seconds, but it has the power of a burst of machine-gun fire.
The next few moments are a blur. My mother walks away and sits outside in the hallway. For the first time in months, she lights up a cigarette rather than an e-cigarette. I ask the nurse to put my father’s dentures back on, before his jaw sets, and it’s a relief how much better he looks with them in place. My brother and his family stand around the bed, distraught. His oldest son and daughter knew my father well when they were little, before his memory started to fade. They seem inconsolable. Word spreads, and in an order that I can no longer recall, one person after another who works in the house makes their way to the door or to his bedside and looks on in disbelief. There is no apparent self-consciousness or awkwardness in expressing pain or grief in front of the others. The surroundings fade away and each and every person has their own singular encounter, not just with the deceased but also with the event itself, as if death were a communal property. Nobody can be denied their relationship to it, their membership in that society. And death as something that is, rather than as the lack of something, is sobering to behold. That seems to be the case even for the nurses in the room. They go about their business, but it seems to me that they are now in their heads, unable to avoid reflection. It’s not an occurrence that must ever get old.
20
The day nurse and the aide clean and prepare my father’s body for the journey to the mortuary. The nurse asks my mom if there are clothes she would like my father to wear. She says no, so the nurse suggests a simple shroud. My mother produces a fine, white, embroidered bedsheet and hands it over with little ceremony.
While my father is being prepared, a physician fills in the necessary papers for the death certificate. We realize the calls to the press must wait. A close friend is in the air at that very moment, traveling from Colombia to say goodbye to my father, as is a friend from Mexico who is flying back from her family holiday. But I am mostly concerned about my teenage daughters, who are also in midflight with my wife, traveling from Los Angeles. I don’t want them to land and turn on their phones and read that their grandfather is already dead. So we decide to stay put and call no one until everyone lands and checks in with us. It would make my dad laugh. “Vestidos y alborotados” (All dressed up and nowhere to go).
When I look into the room again, my father’s entire body is wrapped from his feet to the base of the skull. The bed has been lowered so he lays flat, except for a very thin pillow that props up his head ever so slightly. His face has been scrubbed, and the towel tied around his head has been removed. The jaw is set, and the dentures are in place. He looks pale and serious but at peace. His thin gray curls flat against his head remind me of a patrician bust. My niece places yellow roses on his abdomen. They were his favorite flowers, and he believed they brought him good luck.
Over the next few hours we sit with my mother who, as she often does, turns on the news to distract herself. On TV is a show about the life of Octavio Paz, the poet and diplomat who died a few years earlier and was a casual friend of my parents. My mom watches a few minutes of the show, but it’s clear from her expression that her thoughts are with the documentaries she suspects she will be watching in the coming days and weeks.
Suddenly she says, to no one in particular, that my dad is probably already with Álvaro, the friend who died the previous year, “tomando whisky y hablando paja” (drinking whiskey and talking trash).
The house phone rings, and she answers it herself, which she seldom does. It’s a friend they do not see very often. He’s calling to inquire about my dad’s health, and he’s offering any help that may be needed. My mother listens patiently and thanks him perfunctorily, but at the first opportunity tells him that my father has already died. It’s not necessary to hear him on the other side to imagine the shock of the news, especially the matter-of-fact tone in which it is delivered. She goes on to explain that it all happened just in the last hour, as if she were talking about a food delivery. My niece and nephews, who know her well, are appalled but also struggling to control their laughter. Once I give them a knowing look, they lose it and have to walk away.
21
The friend from Colombia has already landed, but I don’t find out until the doorbell rings and I am told that he is downstairs. I descend and walk briskly into the kitchen and almost stumble into him, and without a proper greeting I blurt out that my father has died. He is one of my dad’s oldest cronies, and I have blindsided him. He’s stunned and speechless and his eyes glaze over, as if revisiting in his mind a lifetime of friendship in a matter of seconds. I think to myself that I must be very tired and tense to break the news so clumsily and that I have to do better.
The friend who is returning from her holiday also checks in, and finally my wife lands and calls me from the airplane. I tell her the news and her sadness touches me, so much so that I am incapable of talking to my daughters. I want to wait until I see them in person.
I call a few friends and relatives, and each call is harder than the previous one. It’s a group that has been kept up to date, so nobody is surprised, but everyone is silent or almost silent over the line. It’s more a vacuum than a silence. Most of them have the mission to call other people, and they set off to do so without much comment. My father’s agent of almost fifty years only says, “Qué barbaridad,” and she says it like things in the world that have forever been impossible have finally come to be. In my mind I can see her face, eyes closed, engrossed in the idea of it, attempting to go deep inside herself, where the unimaginable might gradually become real. “Qué barbaridad,” she repeats. “That’s terrible,” then we hang up. With many of my father’s lifelong friends I perceive a similar reaction. Beyond the sadness is the disbelief that such an exuberant, expansive man, forever intoxicated with life and with the travails of the living, has been extinguished.
I sit down to call the news outlets we had agreed on, but it being late in the day on a Good Thursday, reaching directors of news organizations in Catholic countries proves impossible. It’s almost as slow a news cycle as Christmas Eve, and so everyone is away until Monday. We had been going stir-crazy, sitting around for almost two hours, prisoners of news everyone is expecting us to deliver, and now there’s no one to hear it. Finally, we ask the friend who just flew in from her family holiday, who is a radio personality with a large following, to announce it on social media. It’s only a matter of minutes before the home phones and cell phones start to ring, and the number of reporters, well-wishers, and police officers at the front door multiplies.
Amaneció muerta el jueves santo. La enterraron en una cajita que era apenas más grande que la canastilla en que fue llevado Aureliano, y muy poca gente asistió al entierro, en parte porque no eran muchos quienes se acordaban de ella, y en parte porque ese mediodía hubo tanto calor que los pájaros desorientados se estrellaban como perdigones contra las paredes y rompían las mallas metálicas de las ventanas para morirse en los dormitorios.
—Cien años de soledad
They found her dead on the morning of Good Thursday. They buried her in a coffin that was not much larger than the basket in which Aureliano had arrived, and very few people were at the funeral, partly because there were not many left who remembered her, and partly becau
se it was so hot that noon that the birds in their confusion were flying into walls like day buckshot and breaking through screens to die in the bedrooms.
—One Hundred Years of Solitude
22
Shortly after the news of my father’s death is made public, his secretary receives an email from a friend she hasn’t talked to in a long time. The friend wanted to know if we were aware that Úrsula Iguarán, one of his most famous characters, also died on a Good Thursday. She has included the passage from his novel in her email, and in rereading it, my dad’s secretary discovers that after Úrsula’s death, disoriented birds flew into walls and fell dead on the ground. She reads it out loud, clearly thinking about the dead bird earlier in the day. She looks at me, perhaps hoping I am foolish enough to venture an opinion on the coincidence. All I know is that I can’t wait to retell it.
23
My family arrives at the house, and after greeting me with delightful affection, my daughters’ principal focus turns to their grandmother. All five grandchildren have always been very protective of her. She appears at ease, talkative, asking after their lives as usual. They take it in stride, as they are accustomed to unexpected reactions from her. They consider their grandmother an original—eccentric and grounded, formal and outrageous, always testing the limits of political correctness. They admire her, but she also makes them laugh, which has contributed greatly to their love for her.
The friend who flew in from Colombia asks my mom for permission to see my dad, and she agrees. I offer that choice to my daughters. One declines. The other accepts and looks at her grandfather from a distance, offering little comment, but her expression betrays curiosity competing with grief.
By now the news is on television, and biographies of my father, short and long, old or hastily assembled, are running on several channels. My mother clicks back and forth between them, engrossed but without comment. We gather around her to review the life and achievements of a man who lies, deceased, a room away.
24
Two men from the mortuary are at the door. Their small van is backed into the garage and the door closed behind it. The people who work at the house mobilize quickly to say their last goodbye. The cook approaches and caresses my father’s face and whispers in his ear, “Buen viaje, Don Gabriel.” She is not tall and strains to reach his forehead. She finally kisses his nose, then the back of his hand. My brother whispers something in my father’s ear that I cannot hear. The moment is so intensely intimate it’s almost unbearable. I back away and leave the room. The others stand around the bed or outside the room in silence, looking at him. My mother does not approach again.
The two men transfer my father into a body bag with surprising ease, flowers and all, then strap the bag down firmly onto a stretcher. The carrying of the stretcher out of the room and through another room and down the stairs is a breathtaking sight. In all the possible events that my imagination had offered me over the last few days, this moment was never foreseen. The men move expertly, but nothing in their demeanor betrays any excessive familiarity, let alone boredom, with a task that they have performed innumerable times, with people of all ages and in all circumstances. Their attitude imbues the task with dignity. It’s what even strangers do always and everywhere for people who have died: take care of their bodies with seriousness. As he is carried down the stairs slowly, the stretcher has to be tilted until it is almost vertical, to negotiate the turn at the landing. For a moment I imagine my father upright, as if at attention, unseen and unseeing in the dark. We are all standing at the top or at the bottom of the stairs, watching in silence. Only my mother is seated, looking on, inscrutable. Unlike the death earlier, or the cremation later that evening, the feelings regarding this moment are devoid of mystery. They cut to the bone: he is leaving home, and he will never return.
As the stretcher is placed in the mortuary van, I move with my brother and our children to a window that overlooks the street. There are about two hundred people outside the house, admirers (whom my dad would rather call readers), press, and police. Neighbors watch from their windows and rooftops. The garage door opens, and the van makes its way slowly and carefully through the crowd as policemen bark orders that go mostly ignored. My daughters watch in astonishment. Their grandfather’s fame is sometimes something concrete, other times abstract and far from their world in California. Once, when they were little, they walked into a restaurant in Mexico City with him, and the establishment broke out into applause. It was enchanting to hear them retell it. During my parents’ stays in Los Angeles, I frequently took them out to lunch to some of the trendiest restaurants, where they ate surrounded by the local rich and famous, in anonymity. Usually it was only the Latino valet parking attendants who recognized my father, and on a couple of occasions they sent one of their own to buy books so that he could inscribe them after the meal. Nothing could give him greater pleasure.
25
When we arrive at the funeral home in the early evening, there are hundreds of people gathered out front, the crowd spilling out to the avenue. Since my father’s body was delivered here, there has been the expectation that a service will be open to the public, or at least to friends. Traffic has to be diverted, and police carve out a way for our car to make it into the parking garage. Later I hear from friends that they were there.
A funeral director and the general manager of the funeral home meet us with the courteous and sober formality that is characteristic of the profession but also profoundly Mexican. We wait in an improvised seating area at one end of the underground garage, near a door that leads to the crematorium. With me are my wife, two family friends, and one of my father’s aides, who was extremely attached to him (some of her coworkers speculated that she was in love with him). After several hours of conversations and news watching, innumerable phone calls and emails, and many exchanges with friends who arrived at the house in the last hours, it already feels like days have gone by since my father died. I feel numb. My mind tries several different avenues—sadness, memories, logic—they all meet shallow dead ends. A half-hearted, punchy sense of humor is the only thing I can access.
We are told it will still be a while before my father is ready for cremation. My mother’s orders are clear: do it tonight, as soon as possible. So we wait.
I pick up a call from an actor friend in Los Angeles. Talking to him is a welcome break, but it also makes my life in California feel a world away. The very necessity of switching languages, which under normal circumstances I do effortlessly, feels like work this time, like playing a badly written role or trying to fool a border agent.
All of a sudden, my double life feels psychotic. No two neighboring countries, it has been said, are more different, even despite the Mexican presence in the US. It’s more than language and culture; it’s a state of mind and a worldview, with enviable things on both sides, but as different as the two sides of a coin. I have become as bicultural as I can imagine a person becoming, but on this day, which is so much about my father’s universe, the duality feels strained.
I didn’t realize until well into my forties that my decision to live and work in Los Angeles and in English was a deliberate, if unconscious, choice to make my own way beyond the sphere of influence of my father’s success. It took me twenty years to see what was obvious to people around me: that I had chosen to work in a country where a language was spoken that my father couldn’t speak (he was fluent in French and Italian, but only fluent enough in English to read the news), where he spent little time, had few close friends, and for years had no visa that allowed him entrance. I also chose writing and directing for film, which was his lifelong dream before failed attempts at selling his bizarre stories drove him to turn them into some of the most acclaimed novels of his century. I started off timidly, in a career as a cinematographer that was not totally unsuccessful but that eventually collapsed under the weight of other ambitions. When I was about to go into preproduction on my first film, my father asked if he could read the screenplay.
I could tell that he was concerned for me, afraid as he always was that everything and anything my brother and I did would be judged against his achievements. Fortunately for both of us, he liked the screenplay. He loved my finished films and showed them off shamelessly to his friends or to anyone who could be dragged into a screening.
In his later years my father suggested we write a screenplay together, for me to direct. He had always wanted to write a film about a middle-aged woman with a successful career who suspects her husband is having an affair; she soon discovers that her husband does indeed have a lover, but it’s a woman very much like herself, with similar customs and tastes, who lives in an apartment very much like theirs. In fact, he thought the same actress should play both women. But when we sat down to develop it, his diminishing memory made for frustrating conversations. They were painful for me, and so I either postponed them or cut them short, hoping he would forget. It was a while before he finally did, and he may have sometimes thought that I was simply not interested. To this day, that episode remains a source of sadness.
26
Eventually, we are asked inside the mortuary. To the right is the crematorium, and to the left is a prep room where, I am told, I can spend a few moments with my father. In that room we are met by an attractive young woman in scrubs. She shakes my hand and gives me her condolences and adds that, although it was not requested, she worked on my dad a little, and she hopes that is all right. She has applied subtle makeup on him, combed his hair, and trimmed his mustache and the unruly eyebrows that my mother brushed with her thumb innumerable times over the years. This practice of prepping the dead for viewing was disturbing to my father, like everything having to do with funereal practices. (He never attended a funeral. “I don’t like to bury my friends,” he’d say.) But now he looks ten years younger and merely asleep, and I am surprised by how happy I am to be able to see him like this one last time, even if it’s with the help of cosmetics. The bedsheet is even more tightly wrapped around him than before, and I know in life his claustrophobia would have made it unbearable. It’s the first moment that it occurs to me that he is beyond things. (He once recited poetry in his head for forty-five minutes, eyes closed, to survive the claustrophobia of a long PET scan.)
A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes Page 4
