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 Aurelinao had arrived, and very few people were at the funeral, partly because there were not many left who remembered her, and partly because it was so hot that noon that the birds in their confusion were flying into the walls like day buckshot and breaking through screens to die in the bedrooms"
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Shortly after the death of Gabriel García Márquez on Thursday 17th April, 2014, his secretary received an email from a friend who wanted to know whether Úrsula Iguarán, the matriarch of the Buendia family and one of the most famous characters of One Hundred Years of Solitude, also died on a Good Thursday. The aforesaid passage from his novel was quoted in the email and, in rereading it, the secretary discovered that after Úrsula's death, disoriented birds flew into walls and fell dead on the ground. Earlier in the day, by a stark coincidence, a bird had fallen dead on the sofa where Márquez sat regularly in his home in Mexico City. As the walls of the room were glass, it was surmised that the bird might have flown in, became disoriented and crashed against the glass.
The novelist's filmmaker son Rodrigo García doesn't venture to form an opinion on the coincidence but he movingly retells the events, as they unfolded, before Gabo passed away in the cruellest of months. 'A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes' (2021) is an intimate, honest and heartfelt tribute from a son for his father. What really stands out in the memoir is the author's bittersweet and insightful reminiscences of the literary giant.
Looking at the dead body of Márquez, the author wonders: "I'm again able to read on this face his lucidity, his infinite curiosity, and the prodigious powers of concentration. He worked most days from 9 in the morning until 2:30 in the afternoon in what I can only describe as a trance, lost in the labyrinth of narrative." The son tells us that Márquez was an omnivorous reader who enjoyed reading diverse things like the case studies of a physician, the memoirs of Muhammad Ali, or a thriller by Frederick Forsyth. While writing 'Love in the Time of Cholera' he had submitted himself to a steady diet of Latin pop songs of love lost or unrequited.
Writing about the death of loved ones is perhaps as old as writing itself, yet it could well be a mighty task if the subject happens to be a legend like Gabriel García Márquez. One of the things Gabo most hated about death that it would be the only aspect of his life he wouldn't be able to write about. Rodrigo García has however admirably accomplished the onerous job of chronicling the last days of Márquez, a feat Gabo up there would surely be proud of. Márquez used to say that there was nothing better than something well written. The language and narrative style of the memoir quite satisfies the master's dictum.
Márquez passed away at the ripe age of 87. Mercedes Barcha - his wife, muse and companion for 56 years - died six years later when she too reached 87. Her death in 2020 prompted Rodrigo to get the notes published that he had so guiltily taken during his father's last days. The death of the second parent, though heartbreaking, completed the circle of loss while renewing the son's admiration for his parents. The book has come out beautifully well from this revisionist perspective as it were.
When Márquez was eighty, his son remembers asking him what that was like.
"The view from eighty is astonishing, really. And the end is near." "Are you afraid", asked Rodrigo. "It makes me immensely sad." Reading the book I was truly moved by how forthcoming Gabo was, especially given the cruelty of the questions.
(The reviewer is a Joint Secretary rank officer in the Government of Jharkhand. Singh is a bibliophile having a voracious appetite for reading)
