When Gabriel García Márquez wrote
One Hundred Years of Solitude
in the sixties, he said that one of the most difficult moments came the day he typed the death of the memorable Colonel Aureliano Buendía. Gabo left his study in the house where he lived in Mexico City, looked for his wife Mercedes in a room and heartbrokenly announced: "I killed the colonel." "She knew what that meant to him and they remained together in silence with the sad news," recalls her son, Rodrigo García, about the grief his parents endured. Now it is he, Rodrigo, who types his own duel with a new book to say goodbye to his parents:
Gabo and Mercedes: A Farewell
.
This sweet goodbye, published this month by Random House in Colombia and Spain, is the new tribute that Rodrigo, a film director, pays to the Nobel who died in 2014, and to his mother, Mercedes Barcha, who passed away in August of last year. "My father complained that one of the things he hated most about death was the fact that it would be the only facet of his life that he could not write about," writes Rodrigo, who intermingles the narrative of the last days of his life. parents with the deaths that Gabo did write. That of Simón Bolívar, for example, in
El General en su Laberinto
(“he saw through the window the diamond of Venus in the sky that was leaving forever”), or the day that Úrsula Iguarán, the matriarch of
One Hundred Years of Loneliness
that "woke up dead on Holy Thursday", just like Gabo died on Holy Thursday 2014.
Mercedes Barcha Pardo and Gabriel García Márquez October 12, 1982, the morning the Nobel Prize was announced.Rodrigo García Barcha / Penguin Random House
"I didn't have to think much to remember those passages," Rodrigo García said at a virtual press conference to promote the book's launch.
"The obsession with loss and death is a very common obsession of writers, it almost makes one think that it is part of the writer's DNA: the obsession with loss and with what things end, and how the purpose of life frames the experience of life.
So I remembered perfectly all those deaths of their main characters.
In recent years, Rodrigo García (Bogotá, 61 years old) has committed to transforming some of his father's books into large film productions: he is executive producer of
Noticia de un Secuestro
(which is produced by Amazon Prime and is currently filming in Colombia) and of the version that Netflix prepares of
One Hundred Years of Solitude
(which is still in a pre-production phase
)
.
But the family has always been very cautious about not revealing their intimacies, so Rodrigo's book is a small window to the pain in his parents' house when Gabo lived his last days.
"We are not public figures," his mother told him, who made sure that the intimacy of the home did not appear in the newspapers.
"I know that I will not publish these memories while she can read them," admits the son now.
If his parents could read it now, Rodrigo said at the press conference, "I would like to think that they would be happy and proud, although surely my mother would tell me: 'how gossipy'"
More information
Rodrigo García: "The work of my father, Gabo, can only be filmed in Spanish"
Gabo, in Rodrigo's book, lived during his last years a version similar to that played by Anthony Hopkins in
The Father
: a man anxious because he begins to lose his memory and who feels lost among his relatives. "Why is this woman here giving orders and managing the house if it is not mine at all?" Gabo complained when he did not recognize his wife, Mercedes. “Who are those people in the next room?” She asked a maid on duty when she did not recognize Rodrigo and Gonzalo, her two sons. “This is not my home. I want to go home. To my father's ”, the writer asked when he wanted to return, not to his father's house, but to his grandfather's, a colonel who cared for him until he was eight years old and who inspired the figure of Colonel Aureliano Buendía.
But Gabo's last days are also those in which he returns to the sweetest of his childhood in Aracataca, the Colombian town where he was born in 1927. Gabo could recite poems from the Spanish Golden Age by heart, but when he lost that ability, “ he could still sing his favorite songs. " Gabo spent his last days listening to vallenatos, the music from the Colombian coast that he grew up with. "Even in his last months, unable to even remember anything, his eyes lit up with excitement with the opening notes of an accordion classic," writes Rodrigo García. "In the last couple of days, the nurses started blaring all [the vallenatos] in her room, with the windows wide open." The songs of Rafael Escalona flooded the house in Mexico like lullabies to say goodbye."They return me to the past of his life as nothing else could," writes the son.
"The final stage [of my father] was already easier," he clarifies at the press conference.
“There is a tremendous stage in which the person is aware that he is losing his memory, so not only seeing the person without his faculties, but also very anxious to lose them, is a tremendous and very hard stage.
The final stage was sad, but calmer.
In that final stage he was calm, he did not suffer from anxiety, he was very distracted, he did not remember many things, but he was fine, he was calm, and that comforted us ”.
Mercedes Barcha Pardo and Gabriel García Márquez in Spain, 1968. Rodrigo García Barcha / Penguin Random House
Although the last days of Gabo are the ones that are taken the most by the pages of this book, the last chapter is dedicated to the death of Mercedes, called “la Gaba”, a nickname that Rodrigo García rightly calls “patriarchal”. "But despite that, everyone who knew her knew that she had become a magnificent version of herself," writes the son. Rodrigo describes her as "a woman of her time": without university studies, mother, wife, housewife. But at the same time the one that directed the success of her father and the one that generated envy for "her self-awareness." In one of the best scenes in the book, Rodrigo and Gonzalo squirm in their chairs when a Mexican president (whose name they do not mention, but with the dates it is clear that it is Enrique Peña Nieto), refers to the family as “los sons and the widow ”.Mercedes then “threatens to tell the first journalist who comes across that she plans to marry as soon as possible. His last words about it are: 'I'm not a widow. I am me, '”Rodrigo writes.
Mercedes Barcha died in 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, without all the cameras and followers who mourned Gabo's death.
But like her husband, she would have demanded of her children that if they were to type his death, they did it so well that they left every reader in deep mourning.
In the days after her death, Rodrigo says that he was constantly waiting for a call from her.
A call in which Mercedes would ask: “So how was my death?
No, calm down.
Sit down.
Tell it well, without haste. '
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