30
I return to Mexico to spend time with my mother and to see friends from Barcelona who were not able to fly earlier. We have been close to them since 1968, and now that the cocktail party is over, it’s mostly just us in the house. It’s good to enjoy them in relative peace and quiet, but it also makes my father’s absence more evident. They are both therapists, and they were two of my father’s main confidants. He was never in therapy, arguing that the typewriter was his analyst. Whether he was afraid that therapy would take away even a sliver of his creativity or was uneasy with the undressing that may come with it, we’ll never know. He did sometimes encourage us to talk to close friends or family about our worries, or we would end up paying a professional to listen to them.
My main desire during this visit is to talk to my father about his own death and its aftermath. I stop by his study in the back of the garden, where his ashes are locked away in a cabinet and where, as with the rest of the house, a return to normality is creeping back in, slowly but relentlessly. My mother hasn’t returned to the study, and never will. The room where my father died has returned to its old form. Among my daughters, niece, and nephews, it’s a room to be avoided. I decide to sleep there in an attempt to renormalize it as a guest room. I spend an uneventful night, for better or worse.
31
I board an early flight back to Los Angeles. It’s my eighth flight to or from Mexico City in three weeks. As the aircraft taxies slowly toward the runway, I am suddenly overwhelmed by the clarity with which I can feel that my father’s magnificent time on earth has passed. During takeoff I am filled with sorrow, but the unexpected coupling of the emptiness of loss with the powerful energy of the engines is strangely exhilarating. As the landing gear retracts and the airplane banks left, two volcanoes can be seen to the east, backlit by the rising sun: Popocatepetl, hundreds of thousands of years older than the written word, and Ixtacihuatl, lying in state. As we reach ten thousand feet, a bell chimes like a gentle alarm clock. I recline my seat and look around. The woman next to me is reading One Hundred Years of Solitude on her phone.
El capitán miró a Fermina Daza y vio en sus pestañas los primeros destellos de una escarcha invernal. Luego miró a Florentino Ariza, su dominio invencible, su amor impávido, y lo asustó la sospecha tardía de que es la vida, más que la muerte, la que no tiene límites.
—El amor en los tiempos del cólera
The captain looked at Fermina Daza and saw on her eyelashes the first glimmer of wintry frost. Then he looked at Florentino Ariza, his invincible power, his intrepid love, and he was overwhelmed by the belated suspicion that it is life, more than death, that has no limits.
—Love in the Time of Cholera
32
Our mother died in August 2020. It all happened more or less as we thought it might, given that, after sixty-five years of smoking, her lung capacity was ever diminishing and in her last years she was on oxygen around the clock. Her spirits, however, never waned. She watched news on television for several hours a day while checking other news on a tablet and staying in touch with her global web of friends through two landlines and three cell phones lined up in front of her. In her last few months we chatted on video almost every day, and although there was little to report beyond world events, she seemed like her old self, if a little bored to be isolated from most of her cronies. Even in declining health and with diminishing mobility, she did not seem overly anxious about her condition. I couldn’t see major cracks in her demeanor. Was it fearlessness, denial, or pretense? She excelled in all three areas at different times.
“When do you think this pandemic will be over?” she asked me often. It’s late 2020 now, and I still wouldn’t have an answer for her. Unable to travel, I saw her alive for the last time on the cracked screen of my phone, and again five minutes later, gone forever. Two brief live videos, separated by eternity, from which my capacity for storytelling has yet to recuperate. What can I possibly recount that has any more power? In the days following her death I expected her to call me to ask, “So what was it like, my death? No, slow down. Sit. Tell it properly.” She’d listen, I imagine, alternating laughter with greedy hits of the cigarettes that killed her. She’d talk to friends the world over, receive their condolences with amusement and bright vanity, before inquiring, with greater interest, about a child’s divorce or an object stolen.
My father had pressured her for years to quit smoking, and she tried a few times, very reluctantly, but failed. Even in her early days on oxygen she sometimes asked me to hold the mask in my hand while she took a few puffs of a cigarette. “Don’t turn the machine off,” she would say. “I’ll be right back on it.” My father’s warnings of what the death of a smoker could be haunted my brother and me forever. Those worries proved useful, however, because we (or I should say my brother, who was on the ground with her) were very vigilant that her exit not be painful or racked with anxiety. It was neither.
Most of my father’s drafts of work in progress were salvaged by my mother behind his back, because he was firmly against showing or preserving unfinished work. Many times during our childhood, my brother and I were summoned to sit on the floor of his study and help him rip up entire previous versions and throw them out—an unhappy image, I am sure, for collectors and students of his process. His papers and his reference library went to the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, and my mom took great pleasure in the opening ceremonies of that collection. Both my brother’s family and mine were there, and she enjoyed and took shelter in the company of her grandchildren. The granddaughters gave her particular pleasure, I suppose, because as the grandkids grew older the girls remained more interested in her daily concerns and followed her health issues more closely. She gifted them with her old handbags and accessories, sometimes so generously that the girls were uneasy to accept them. But not too uneasy. One of my daughters felt that my mother was the person in the world that she most resembled and found that a source of pride, and my niece was, among us all, arguably the most physically present in her last years. My other daughter was very diligent in reaching out to her from abroad with regularity and was very affectionate with her. My mother’s own grandmother had been a towering figure in her life, a matriarch respected and feared, and that, I believe, contributed to her weakness for granddaughters. She loved my brother’s sons, but she believed that boys tended to retreat into their own worlds as they grew older, and she accepted it. These are only my theories, of course, and if she heard them she would scoff at them, turning away from me impatiently.
Two years after my father’s death, we took his ashes to Cartagena. They were placed inside the base of a bust (uncanny in its resemblance to him), in the courtyard of a colonial building, now open to the public. There was an official ceremony, preceded and followed by the obligatory open-house cocktail party at my parents’ house. Like the one around the time of my father’s death, it went on for several days, but since the mood was more jovial, my mother made sure there was live music late into the night. I found the days somewhat emotional and perhaps a little tiring but, curiously, I thought at the time, not too much. It all seemed quite bearable. On my final day there, I stopped early in the morning at the courtyard for one last look at the resting place of the ashes. It was stunning to think they would be there, that he would be there, for a very long time, centuries perhaps, long after everyone now living was gone. The ride to the airport was a sad one, and twenty-four hours after landing in Bogotá I was hospitalized with a bladder infection and a blood clot in my leg. Perhaps the previous days had been more stressful than I thought.
It’s been only three months since my mother died, and I am surprised by how quickly her stature has grown for me. I am unable to walk past a photograph of her without spending a moment looking at it. Her face seems kinder and more beautiful than ever, even in old age. A lifelong sufferer of anxiety (and perhaps unaware of it), she was nevertheless enormously capable of enjoyment. Her interest (like my father’s) in life itself and in
the lives of others was inexhaustible. My feelings about my father, though loving, were complicated by his fame and talent, which made him several people that I’ve had to work to integrate into one, always bouncing back and forth between mixed emotions. There are also complicated feelings regarding the long, painful goodbye that was his loss of memory, and the guilt of finding some satisfaction in feeling temporarily more mentally powerful than him. My feelings toward my mother are now, surprisingly, utterly uncomplicated. This is the kind of statement that makes therapists raise their eyebrows, and yet it’s true. She was afraid of big expressions of emotion, and in our childhood she encouraged us to keep a stiff upper lip. But with time I came to understand that this was a condition that she inherited from her parents, who very likely inherited it themselves. She didn’t even know she was afflicted with it, and whenever I suggested she might benefit from therapy or medication, her reaction was unequivocal: “No. No soy una histérica.” (No. I am not a hysteric.)
I am thankful that I was able to understand this while she was still alive, and to accept it, and so what is left is only affection and an infatuation with the life force that emanated from her. She was frank and secretive, critical and indulgent, brave, but afraid of disorder. She could be prickly and judgmental but also quick to forgive, especially when a person shared their troubles with her. Then she was on their side forever and won over their devotion. With my brother and me, she was not physical, but profoundly affectionate in her attitude, increasingly so as the years went by. Her complex personality has surely contributed to my lifelong fascination with women, especially multifaceted women, enigmatic women, and what are often referred to, I think unfairly, as difficult women.
I have a renewed admiration for my parents. I admit that this perspective (some would call it revisionism) is not uncommon. Absence makes us grow fonder and more forgiving, and we recognize that our parents were walking on feet of clay like everybody else. In my mother’s case, I am amazed at how, given the period and place she was born into, she grew into the person she became, holding her own or even commanding the world that my father’s success offered them. She was a woman of her time, with no higher education, a mother, a wife and homemaker, but many younger women with big lives and successful careers openly admired and envied her grit, her resilience, and her sense of herself. She was known by her friends as La Gaba, a nickname based on my father’s Gabo and therefore patriarchal, and yet no one who knew her believed she had grown into anything but a great version of herself.
In a restaurant two years before her death, my mom told me that after her, the first born, her mother had two babies who died in infancy. I was surprised that I had never heard this. I asked if she had any recollection of it, and she said yes. She remembered clearly her mother holding a dead baby in her arms. She cradled her left arm, showing me how.
“Why haven’t you told me this before?” I inquired.
“Because you never asked,” she replied. Silly me. Sometime later I asked about it again, hungry for more details, but she denied not only having told such a story but also that she had ever seen a deceased baby sibling. I was dumbstruck. This was not senility or dementia. Her memory was always ironclad. I insisted. “No. It never happened,” she said with finality. I let it go that day, but I was resolved to return to that mystery again in the future, in case the wind had changed, but time ran out.
I also spent fifty years of my life not knowing that my father had no vision in the center of his left eye. I found out while accompanying him to the ophthalmologist, and only because the doctor mentioned it after the exam.
I wish I knew how my parents remembered their younger selves, or that I had even an inkling of what they thought of their place in the world, back when their lives were confined by the small towns of their Colombian childhoods. I would give anything to spend an hour with my father when he was a rascal of nine, or with my mother when she was a spirited girl of eleven, both unable to suspect the extraordinary lives that awaited them. And so, in the back of my mind is the preoccupation that perhaps I didn’t know them well enough, and I certainly regret that I didn’t ask them more about the fine print of their lives, their most private thoughts, their greatest hopes and fears. It’s possible that they felt the same about us, for who can fully know their own children? I am eager for my brother’s thoughts on this, since I am sure a home is a very different place for each one of its inhabitants.
A decision regarding the future of the house awaits us. My brother and I are enthusiastic about visiting the house museums of writers and artists of the past, and of other unhappy successful people of that ilk, so we are leaning in that direction. I am a little surprised, nevertheless, by my willingness to open the doors of our own family home to anyone and everyone. Perhaps it’s a desperate stab at defeating the passage of time, or at least at sparing us the heartache of having to empty it and sell it to strangers.
The death of the second parent is like looking through a telescope one night and no longer finding a planet that has always been there. It has vanished, with its religion, its customs, its own peculiar habits and rituals, big and small. The echo remains. I think of my father every morning when I dry my back with a towel the way he taught me after seeing me struggling with it at the age of six. Much of his advice is always with me. (A favorite: be forgiving of your friends, so that they may be forgiving of you.) I remember my mother each time I walk a guest to the front door when they’re leaving, because not to do so would be inexcusable, and whenever I pour olive oil on anything. And in recent years, the three of us look back at me from my face in the mirror. I’ve also endeavored to guide my life by their seldom spoken but unimpeachable rule: do not be crooked.
Much of our parents’ culture survives in some form in the new planets created by my brother and me with our families. Some of it has merged with what our wives brought, or chose not to bring, from their own tribes. With the years, the splintering will continue, and life will lay upon my parents’ world layers and layers of other lives lived, until the day comes when nobody on this earth holds the memory of their physical presence. I am now almost the age my father was when I asked him what he thought about at night, after turning out the lights. Like him, I am not too worried yet, but I am more aware of time than ever. For now, I am still here, thinking of them.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank:
My wife, Adriana, and my daughters, Isabel and Ines.
My sister-in-law, Pía, and my niece and nephews Emilia, Mateo, and Jerónimo.
The many friends, employees of my parents, doctors, and nurses that I referred to in the book.
Luis Miguel Palomares, Luis and Leticia Feduchi, Mónica Alonso, Cristóbal Pera, Sofía Ortiz, Diego García Elio, Maribel Luque, Javier Martín, Neena Beber, Amy Lippman, Julie Lynn, Bonnie Curtis, Paul Attanasio, Nick Kazan, Robin Swicord, Sarah Treem, Jorge F. Hernández, and Jon and Barbara Avnet.
Photographs
Gabo at 13 or 14.
He was already a chévere. A dandy.
Reproduced by courtesy of the García Márquez Family Archive
Mercedes at 17.
That face says it all.
Reproduced by courtesy of the García Márquez Family Archive
In the late 1960s, when
smoking was still good for you.
Reproduced by courtesy of the García Márquez Family Archive
Gonzalo, Gabo, Rodrigo.
Los Angeles, 2008.
© Steven Pyke
October 12th, 1982,
the morning the Nobel prize was announced.
Reproduced by courtesy of the García Márquez Family Archive
October 12th, 2012,
thirty years later, same place, same tree,
same robe for the occasion.
Reproduced by courtesy of the García Márquez Family Archive
Who would dare say
old people aren’t beautiful?
Reproduced by courtesy of the García Márq
uez Family Archive
Calle Fuego 144.
The worst-kept secret in town.
Reproduced by courtesy of the García Márquez Family Archive
Gabo at home, taking his Tuesday nap
under a large Colombian ruana.
Reproduced by courtesy of the García Márquez Family Archive
Gabo’s study since 1976.
Reproduced by courtesy of the García Márquez Family Archive
Mercedes’s 80th birthday celebration.
Reproduced by courtesy of the García Márquez Family Archive
With my brother, Gonzalo, our families, and Mercedes, aka El Cocodrilo Sagrado (The Sacred Crocodile), La Madre Santa (The Holy Mother), La Jefa Máxima (The Boss Supreme).
Reproduced by courtesy of the García Márquez Family Archive
Gabo leaves home.
Reproduced by courtesy of the García Márquez Family Archive
A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes Page 6
