In March 2014, Gabriel Garcia Marquez came down with a cold. He was eighty-seven-years-old. His wife was not hopeful about him surviving and phoned her sons, based in Los Angeles and Paris, respectively, to tell them. Rodrigo Garcia reached Mexico City before his brother and realised that his father needed hospitalisation. It was then that he also discovered their mother’s resistance to admitting her husband to hospital as she did not think he would make it. Gabriel Garcia Marquez was diagnosed with pneumonia and in the course of medical investigations, cancerous patches on his lung and liver were also detected. The chances of recovery were bleak given his frailty and his ill-health. It was decided that the Nobel Prize winning author would be taken home and made comfortable. The doctors were not sure about how much time he had. It could range from a few weeks to a few months. 

A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes: A Son’s Memoir is by Rodrigo Garcia ( HarperVia). His son realised that this was the end game for his illustrious father and he should write about Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s final moments on earth.

Writing about the death of loved ones must be about as old as writing itself, and yet the inclination to do it instantly ties me up in knots. I am appalled that I am thinking of taking notes, ashamed as I take notes, disappointed in myself as I revise notes. What makes matters emotionally turbulent is the fact that my father is a famous person. Beneath the need to write may lurk the temptation to advance one’s own fame in the age of vulgarity. Perhaps it might be better to resist the call and to stay humble. Humility is, after all, my favorite form of vanity. But as with most writing, the subject matter chooses you, and so resistance could be futile.

Paris Review, “A Great Storyteller Loses His Memory”, 2 August 2021

Rodrigo Garcia chose to publish it after both his parents had passed away. “I know I will not publish this memoir until she is unable to read it.” His mother passed away in August 2020. Hence, the memoir has been published in 2021. Rodrigo Garcia is a filmmaker based in Los Angeles. He is a screenwriter and director. His theatrical films include Nine Lives, Albert Nobbs, and Last Days in the Desert, and he has directed episodes of Six Feet Under, The Sopranos, and the pilot of Big Love, for which he received an Emmy nomination. Obviously, his career has helped him hone his skills as a storyteller. Although nothing can prepare you to tell the story of your parent’s declining health and eventual death. To maintain a clear-eyed perspective on the events that occurred in quick succession from the time Gabriel Garcia Marquez fell seriously ill requires immense amounts of self-will and training as a skilled and sensitive narrator.

Standing near the foot of the bed, I look at him, diminished as he is, and I feel like both his son (his little son) and his father. I am acutely aware that I have a unique overview of his eighty-seven years. The beginning, the middle, and the end are all there in front of me, unfolding like an accordion book.

…

I fly to Los Angeles again to spend a few more days in the cutting room. My second night at home, I go to bed early, but after I turn out the lights I’m worried that the phone will ring in the middle of the night and scare the wits out of me. It does both. I hear my brother’s voice on the other end, sounding deliberately calm.

“Hey. He has a high fever. The doctor says you better come back.”

After I hang up, I book an early flight on my phone . . . 

****

Later a gerontologist of about forty stops by to advise on end-stage care. (He is himself is in remission from lymphoma. He has advice for us on the last stages, vis-à-vis hydration and sedation.) …We listen in silence, like we’re watching a strange monologue in an experimental play. The ideas are intriguing and absurd. Practical, compassionate, murderous.

****

Yet, while preoccupied with his father and the arrangements it would take to organise home care, the author is able to spare a thought on the nurse:

The beauty of witnessing someone who is outstanding at what she does, in conjunction with the comfort brought about by the support of an empathetic health worker, makes her a compelling presence.

There are many instances in the memoir when he comments upon the staff busying themselves with their chores but it is never written as if there is a divide between “us” and “them”. He does it with great poise. There is an exquisite moment in the book when the staff come to pay their last respects Gabriel Garcia Marquez as he is laid out on his bed.

Rodrigo Garcia then goes on to describe the funeral arrangements followed by the memorial service. His mother had insisted that the cremation take place on the same day itself. There were chaotic scenes outside their home but they managed to conduct the funeral on time. It was a very private affair. Four days later the Mexican and Colombian presidents held a joint memorial service at Mexico City. Marquez had been born in Colombia but chose to spend more than fifty years of his life in Mexico City. It was a grand affair.

This beautiful memoir is peppered with references to his father’s craftsmanship as a writer. Memories come flooding back. One of these is a poignant episode the son recalls of his father appreciating songwriters and singers for their techniques.

My dad greatly admired and envied songwriters for their ability to say so much and so eloquently with so few words. While writing Love in the Time of Cholera, he submitted himself to a steady diet of Latin pop songs of love lost or unrequited. He said to me that the novel would be nowhere so melodramatic as many of those songs, but that he could learn much from them about the techniques with which they evoked feelings. He was never a snob about art forms and enjoyed the work of people as diverse as Béla Bartók and Richard Clayderman. He once walked by as I was watching Elton John playing his best songs on television, alone at the piano. My dad was only vaguely aware of him, but the music stopped him in his tracks, and he eventually sat down and watched all of it, enthralled. “Carajo, this guy is an incredible bolerista,” he said. A singer of boleros. It was very much like him to refer something back to his own culture. He was never intimidated by Eurocentric references that were common everywhere. He knew that great art could blossom in an apartment building in Kyoto or in a rural country in Mississippi, and he had the unwavering conviction that any remote and rickety corner of Latin America or the Caribbean could stand in powerfully for the human experience.

He was an omnivorous reader . . .

A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes: A Son’s Memoir is a very touching tribute to a larger-than-life father who was venerated by millions around the world. But it is also an equally moving account of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s wife, Mercedes. They had met when they were little children as ten and fourteen-year-olds. From the moment he met her, Marquez knew he would marry Mercedes. But she had her own space and identity and was respected for it. So, when the Mexican president referred to her at the memorial service as “the widow”, she was infuriated, saying rightly so, “I have an identity. I am not just the widow.”

Read the book. Weep, but also celebrate life as Rodrigo Garcia does.

18 August 2021