So long, Gabo
Sometimes, some people contrive to attain immortality by their accomplishments and become living ancestors. But when such immortals pass into the night, it is always stunning for the generations that have been bred on their legends.
I never met Gabo but I felt I knew him intimately. I first encountered his work in 2008 when a friend, who thought there were the faintest hints of similarities between my budding writing and Gabo’s, offered me his novel, Love in the Time of Cholera. I read it and discovered the literary father I didn’t realise I was looking for. I gobbled up everything I could find that Gabo had written thereafter and felt such a connection I had never felt with any other writer before.
This connection was reinforced when in January, 2013, as part of the Gabriel Garcia Marquez fellowship, I walked through the streets of Aracataca, the small Colombian village where he was born and felt as if I have been there before, seen the people before. I felt I knew their stories already.
Walking those streets was like walking into one of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s enchanting novels. On the familiar railway platform, an all too recurrent feature in Gabo’s stories, one would expect to see the Colonel, protagonist of his novella No One Writes to the Colonel, sitting on the platform waiting a mail that never comes. What you will eventually see though is the ice house that inspired Gabo to send Jose Arcadio Beundia on a mission to build a city with mirror walls that later became Macondo, perhaps the most famous fictional city in the world, in his most famous novel One Hundred Years
Colombain Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, affectionately called Gabo, passed away in Mexico City Thursday April 17, 2014. Sunday Trust’s Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, who is also a 2013 Gabriel Garcia Marquez Fellow writes about his visit to Gabo’s village, the man and his legacy.
of Solitude.
You will also see Buendia’s wife, Ursula, sitting, looking into the distance, like one lost in a century of solitude. This Ursula, made of metal, reclines in a little museum dedicated to Gabo in Aracataca. It is a small affair, a disused telegraph office where Gabo’s father used to work. His father too seems like a familiar old friend, and hearing his stories of unsanctioned love for Gabo’s mother, one realises that one had met him through Florentino Ariza, that character who in Love in the Time of Cholera waited 50 years for a woman’s husband to die so he could rekindle his relationship with her.
The museum has personal relics that had belonged to the family - a charcoal iron, old personal effects like typewriters, family photos, including those of his father and mother and other household items and of course, the metallic Ursula that Gabo had created with his words. Most of these things the curator told us were thrown out when the Colombian government decided to rebuild the Marquez family house into a museum to honour the Nobel laureate in 2010. The villagers salvaged the discarded things and set up their own museum, which they maintain at their own expenses.
The new museum is just on the corner from the old telegraph office. Incidentally Gabo himself never got to visit it. He had been living in Mexico the last 30 years and when he had visited Aracataca, the crowd had been so huge he couldn’t get through.
The white walls of the museum bear plaques with excerpts from Gabo’s works. And it is here that one sees the rooms where Gabo’s grandfather, a Colonel, used to sit with his friends and recount their war stories. The curator would show you the window Gabo used to hide behind to listen to these stories, stories that he eventually retold in his own fashion. Even the famous gold fish his grandfather the colonel used to make (those appeared in Chronicles of a Death Foretold) and the room in which he made them are exhibited as well as the bed on which he was born.
The curator would also show you the drawings Gabo had made on the walls and tell you how tolerant his grandmother had been (Gabo himself had said if she had stopped him from drawing, perhaps he would never have become a writer). It is from her that Gabo would learn one of the most important lessons in his life. You see, his grandmother was a great story teller herself, and in the evenings, Gabo would sit at her feet to listen to her tell the most fantastic stories, some of them so outrageous as to be outright unbelievable. But as Gabo told the Paris Review in an interview, his grandmother told her stories with utmost sincerity that one can’t help believe them.
“For example, if you say that there are elephants flying in the sky, people are not going to believe you. But if you say that there are four hundred and twenty-five elephants flying in the sky, people will probably believe you. One Hundred Years of Solitude is full of that sort of thing. That’s exactly the technique my grandmother used. I remember particularly the story about the character who is surrounded by yellow butterflies. When I was very small there was an electrician who came to the house. I became very curious because he carried a belt with which he used to suspend himself from the electrical posts. My grandmother used to say that