In early July, 2012, Jaime Garcia Márquez announced the death of one of the most celebrated storytellers of our time. That his brother, Gabriel García Márquez, remained in good health, and still had “the humour, joy, and enthusiasm that he [had] always had” was, somewhat darkly, of scant consolation; senile dementia was robbing him of his memories and his stories, and how can a storyteller exist without his tales?
The proclamation of the younger Márquez when asked if his brother would be able to complete the second part of his autobiography, Vivir Para Contarla (Living to Tell the Tale), or any other literary works: “Unfortunately, I don’t think that’ll be possible,” in its stark finality, was jarring. It was a very personal loss. The writer I have known so intimately was not – could not be – anymore.
It would generally be foolish – vain, certainly – to presume to know someone without having shared so much as a single moment together. Indeed, the human condition being what it is, to truly know someone, to go beyond the everyday masks and roles and reach something approaching the soul, must be among the rarest and most precious of human experiences.
I cannot claim to have met Gabriel Garcia Marquez, to have shared a moment with him, or to have had any sort of contact with the man. Yet I have known the writer, as have millions of others like me.
We have known his grandfather, who told him stories of a civil war he had fought in and taught him lessons on principles of life, and his grandmother, whose straight-faced tales of the supernatural we have grown so familiar with. We have seen glimpses of his life in the Colombian village, and then, when he was forced to leave Bogotá after publishing a series of articles on a ship-wreck that displeased the authorities, in Mexico City, Barcelona, Geneva, Rome, and Paris. We have met his generals and his dictators, his lovers and his childhood friends, his wars and his solitude.
Granted the conduit for all these have been merely the pages of his books, but having seen so many aspects of the writer vividly painted in ink in those pages, so many parts of the storyteller inscribed within those stories, who could deny that we have known him intimately, that our loss is not personal?
I tend to think that for me, the loss had been more personal than some. Gabriel Garcia Márquez, for me, was the gateway. They say that at some point in one’s life, most often during childhood, the page of a book, “that string of confused, alien ciphers,” shudders into life, into meaning. The words speak to us, give us their secrets. At that moment, whole universes are revealed, and we become, irrevocably, readers.
I was only one of the more than 30 million to have bought a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude, and just one of the more than 100 million to have read that book; yet, this book is mine, and mine alone.
And his themes – of oppression, plundering, and abandonment of his native land – are mine too, although these I no doubt share with the millions.
It is easy to talk about the “magical realism’’ that dominates his work, of the butterflies that flutter around the hair of eternal beauties, of corpses that have no weight, of thousands killed and completely erased from living memory in one night, of the disappearance of a village without a trace, but as the writer vigorously and consistently tells us, this literary expression of the “outsized reality” of Latin America must not be confused with literary slights of hand; all of these instances of the apparently magical was based on the realities of his life, simply scaled to fit the scope of his novels.
This outsized reality is “not of paper,” the writer warns, “but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty.”
Living in the tumults of today, among the outsized realities of our country, it is impossible not to find in these words added resonance, another layer of meaning that is deeply personal.
There is a paradox to writing. Writing is perhaps one of the most solitary of human undertakings. A writer’s story takes place in the solitude of his own, personal world, and it is peopled by the phantoms of his solitary mind. Yet, writing is also one of the most public of human undertakings. A writer’s world, his entire private universe, becomes public, the riches of his imagination gifted to anyone who is willing to accept. On the fault line between these two opposing universes, there exists a borderland, another private universe with a population of two: The writer and the reader. It is here that the paradox is resolved, where the private and public universes are amalgamated into one, and that which once belonged to the writer, becomes the sole property of the reader.
Who would dare challenge the intimacy of this gift? And of those of us who have benefitted from it, who will not mourn the death of the source of such magnanimity?
