A son’s touching tribute to a titan of modern literature
In this moving farewell, Rodrigo Garcia writes an intimate account of grief and acceptance, says Manuel Roig-Franzia
While Gabriel Garcia Marquez, that conjurer of literary magic, lay dying, a freshly deceased bird was discovered precisely at the spot on the sofa where the Nobel Prize winner always sat in his Mexico City home.
The household staff were split on what to make of it. Half of them – “the Trashists” – thought it was a bad omen and that the bird should be thrown in the dustbin. The other half thought it was a good omen and that the animal should be buried among the flowers in the garden.
Eventually they interred it in the garden alongside – of course because it just had to be – the remains of a parrot.
Not long after the discovery of the dead bird on the sofa – when the world had finally lost the Colombian maestro at the age of 87, in 2014, after years of suffering the effects of dementia – a friend emailed Garcia Marquez’s secretary to point out a strange coincidence. The author had died on a Good Thursday, the same holy day as one of his most enduring characters, Ursula Iguaran, the matriarch in his masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Iguaran’s death at the age of 120 is accompanied by disoriented birds that smash into walls and fall dead.
When Garcia Marquez’s son Rodrigo Garcia learns of the synchronicity, he decides he isn’t “foolish enough” to offer an opinion on the coincidence.
There’s a universality to these scenes of the small rites of death. At one point, Rodrigo asks the nurse to put in his father’s dentures. He’s relieved by how much better he looks
“All I know is that I can’t wait to retell it,” Rodrigo Garcia writes in his contemplative book about the deaths of his mother and
father, A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes: A Son’s Memoir of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mercedes Barcha.
Just as he did on the occasion of his father’s death, Rodrigo avoids connections between Garcia Marquez and the characters in his father’s complex, endlessly analysed works. Instead, he has written an intimate and surprisingly relatable chronicle of grief and acceptance, albeit one that also offers a glimpse into one of the most famous literary figures of all time. Though the book is hardly a tell-all, it does offer some intriguing tidbits. For example, Rodrigo reveals that Garcia Marquez did not like to keep early drafts of his books, so when Rodrigo and his brother Gonzalo were young, Garcia Marquez asked them to “sit on the floor of his study and help him rip up entire versions” of his work and discard them – “an unhappy image, I am sure, for students of his process”.
Rodrigo – a Los Angeles-based writer, director and producer, whose film Nine Lives, about the intersecting existences of nine women, garnered critical praise – was conflicted about the idea of writing about his father.
“I am appalled that I am thinking about taking notes,” he observes while shuttling between Los Angeles and Mexico City. “Perhaps it might be better to resist the call and to stay humble ... Humility is, after all, my favourite form of vanity.”
There’s an instinct among some sons to finish the work of their fathers. Reading Rodrigo’s recollections, one gets the idea that he might have had just such an urge – whether he knew it or not.
“One of the things he hated most about death was that it was the only aspect of his life he would not be able to write about.”
In the final hours, as his father is slipping away, diminished physically and mentally and nearing the end, Rodrigo sorts through emotions that can be hard to reconcile.
“I feel differently about this guy,” he muses at one point. “Detached. Maybe that is the purpose of the transformation, to help you uncouple.”
When his father is gone, Rodrigo finds himself marvelling at the literary titan’s “human scale”. He finds it both “terrifying and comforting”.
There’s a universality to these scenes of the small rites of death. At one point, Rodrigo asks the nurse to put in his father’s dentures. He’s relieved by how much better he looks.
But this is also no ordinary death. And we’d almost feel cheated, wouldn’t we, if the creator of such sinuous plot lines left us without a few twists? So it’s almost a relief when Rodrigo breaks the tension by describing how the family’s long-planned announcement of Garcia Marquez’s death unraveled because none of their preselected journalists could be found on a religious holiday. They end up asking a radio-personality friend to break the news on social media.
At the mortuary, Rodrigo and other family members are greeted by an attractive young woman in scrubs. Rodrigo thinks to himself that if his father were alive, he would have flirted with her.
Though she hadn’t been asked to do so, the woman had touched up his father a bit, combing his hair, and trimming his moustache and his signature unruly eyebrows. Rodrigo, to his surprise, is happy to see him like that one last time, a final image closer to the man with whom he’d grown up.
The funeral home workers applaud as his father is placed on a conveyor belt. Gabriel Garcia Marquez has almost disappeared when the belt gets stuck leaving his head and shoulders still visible.
A worker steps over and pushes down hard on both shoulders. Gabo is finally engulfed in flames.
“The sight of my father’s body entering the cremation chamber is mesmerising and numbing,” Rodrigo writes. “It feels both impossibly pregnant and meaningless.”
As its title suggests, the book is a tribute not only to Gabo but also to Mercedes, his wife, who died in August 2020. At the loss of his parents, Rodrigo expresses some remorse: “I didn’t know them well enough, and I certainly regret that I didn’t ask more about the fine print of their lives, their most private thoughts.” And yet Farewell reveals that perhaps he knew them better than he realised – and now we do, too.
‘A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes’ by Rodrigo Garcia is out on Thursday, published by HarperCollins (£12.99)
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