“Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan,” Brother Juniper thinks before launching into his inquiry.
In a March 6, 1928, letter to a former student who was writing a paper about his novel, Thornton Wilder wrote, “The book is supposed to be as puzzling and distressing as the news that five of your friends died in an automobile accident.”
Later, in another letter to the same student, Wilder wrote:
Try adding this paragraph toward the end of your paper.
Mr. Wilder’s book is on the form of a question. It is a question that we ask many times a year when we read about accidents in the paper. The friends and relations of those who have died in accidents must often put the question to themselves: was there some intention or meaning or reason for the fact that that particular person should die at that particular moment?
Many pieces of writing are crafted around a question, or a series of questions, that the writer is seeking answers to. When I began writing my family memoir, Brother, I’m Dying, I wanted to find out what it was like for my father and uncle to spend nearly thirty years living apart from each other, one in New York and the other in Port-au-Prince, then find themselves near death at the same time—my father—from pulmonary fibrosis; my uncle—while a prisoner of the United States Department of Homeland Security, after fleeing Haiti in fear for his life and seeking asylum in the U.S. at eighty-one years old.
That quest led me not only to tons of current and historical research and conversations with family members but to a lawsuit filed with the assistance of an immigrant advocacy group, Americans for Immigrant Justice, which demanded that the U.S. government turn over my uncle’s detention and medical records. I’m not sure I completely understood everything my uncle and father went through at the very end, but I tried to get as close as possible by learning as much as I could about both their lives and their deaths. I was writing that book, I kept reminding myself, because they could not.
Many of the characters in The Bridge of San Luis Rey are writers. They are playwrights, scribes, letter writers, and students of literature. Perhaps this is Wilder’s way of showing that writers are especially equipped to address sometimes-unanswerable questions.
In an essay published in Vanity Fair magazine a few weeks after the September 11 attacks, Toni Morrison wrote that she wanted to speak directly to the dead. At that time, this is all that seemed to make sense.
Speaking of the broken and the dead is too difficult for a mouth full of blood.… To speak to you, the dead of September, I must not claim false intimacy or summon an overheated heart glazed just in time for a camera. I must be steady and I must be clear, knowing all the time that I have nothing to say—no words stronger than the steel that pressed you into itself; no scripture older or more elegant than the ancient atoms you have become.
At the ten-year commemoration of the September 11 attacks, then British prime minister Tony Blair read the final lines of The Bridge of San Luis Rey at a New York memorial service: “There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
Too often we look for these “bridges” after people are gone. Perhaps, another novelist tells us, we should connect while we’re still alive. Chitra Divakaruni’s 2010 novel, One Amazing Thing, tells the story of nine people who are trapped in the basement of an Indian consular office after an earthquake in an American city that resembles San Francisco. The nine include two consular staff members, a couple in a strained marriage, an African American soldier who immediately puts himself in charge, an older Indian Chinese woman and her granddaughter, a young Muslim man embittered by the treatment of Muslims after September 11, and a university student who’s reading The Canterbury Tales when the earthquake happens.
“Until now death had been a cloud on a distant horizon.… Suddenly it loomed overhead, blotting out possibility,” Divakaruni writes. As the situation worsens, the university student asks the others to share one important story from their lives, to tell each other “one amazing thing” about themselves.
Trapped in a small space with an increasing level of danger, these characters become less of a “collection of disembodied voices,” as Murakami puts it, while they’re telling their stories. They become Malathi, Mangalan, the Pritchetts, Cameron, Jiang, Lily, Tariq, and Uma. Each one has a face, a life, a family, hopes and fears, contradictions and dilemmas. Each one has a place in his or her own drama and then in the larger drama of the earthquake.
“Everyone has a story,” Uma, the university student, reminds them, echoing one of Joan Didion’s most cited lines from her essay “The White Album”: that we tell ourselves—and perhaps each other—stories in order to live. A story, Divakaruni writes, is “sometimes greater than the person who speaks it,” which is why our stories can outlive us.
Jiang, whom no one thinks can speak English until she’s the first to volunteer her story, tells her granddaughter Lily that when she was young she used to hear stories about spirits who came back to warn the living about the places they died.
“So many people must have died in this quake. Perhaps they can save us?” Lily replies.
Spirits and stories may not be able to save us, but we never stop trying to access them. Cameron, the former soldier, answers in his own way Tolstoy’s question in Confession: “Is there any meaning in my life that wouldn’t be destroyed by the death that inevitably awaits me?”
“How foolish humans were to travel the world in search of history,” thinks Cameron. “Under my shoulder blades and over my head were the oldest histories of all: earth and sky.” Both of which, we now know, are not as constant and stable as we might wish them to be. We can’t plant our feet in the clouds—unless we’re Susie Salmon—and there are times when we can’t plant them in the ground either.
In his 1992 novel, Mao II, Don DeLillo considers the difficulties one novelist, Bill Gray, faces while trying to tackle massive global events in recent times. DeLillo also wrote a post–September 11 novel called Falling Man, which evokes the “jumpers,” but Mao II addresses a broader range of disasters and includes an ongoing conversation about them.
The risk of post-disaster writing is that the writer’s creation might pale—or fail—in comparison to the news, documents, photographs, video, and, more recently, cell phone footage.
“Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture,” Bill Gray declares. “Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.” Still, Gray, who refers to himself as a “sentence-maker,” concedes that “there’s a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer’s will to live.”
I agree. There’s a heart-stopping, breathtaking, indescribable element to some sentences that even the most carefully chosen image can’t match, due to the sentence’s precision, specificity, clarity—or ambiguity, opacity, or mystery—rhythm, lyricism, and sometimes even shock value. The writers I discuss in this book are extraordinary sentence-makers. Since writers tend to have toiled the most on their opening sentences, consider the captivating first sentences of a few of the works I have mentioned so far.
Christopher Hitchens, Mortality:
I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death. But nothing prepared me for the early morning in June when I came to consciousness feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse.
Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon:
The North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance agent promised to fly from Mercy to the other side of Lake Superior at three o’clock. Two days before the event was to take place he tacked a note on the door of his little yellow house:
At 3:00 p.m. on Wednesday the 18th of February, 1931, I will take off from Mercy and fly away on my own wings. Please forgive me. I loved you all.
Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey:
On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travel
ers into the gulf below. This bridge was on the highroad between Lima and Cuzco and hundreds of persons passed over it every day.
Chitra Divakaruni, One Amazing Thing:
When the first rumble came, no one in the visa office, down in the basement of the Indian consulate, thought anything of it. Immersed in regret or hope or trepidation (as is usual for persons planning a major journey), they took it to be a passing cable car.
Opening sentences yank us out of our lives and into other lives. They also carefully set the stage for what’s to come. They are our first opportunity to meet a writer, or character, and decide whether or not we want to spend the next few hours or days with them. They are, as many writers have said, anchors, hooks, handshakes, embraces, pickup lines, promises, and as science fiction writer William Gibson told the Atlantic’s Joe Fassler, “something like filing, from a blank of metal, the key for a lock that doesn’t yet exist, in a door that doesn’t yet exist.”
“Do you know why I believe in the novel?” declares Bill Gray. “It’s a democratic shout. Anybody can write a great novel, one great novel, almost any amateur off the street.… Some nameless drudge, some desperado with barely a nurtured dream can sit down and find his voice and luck out and do it.”
I too yearn not for a singular authorative voice on any particular event or subject, or disaster, but for a chorus of voices. DeLillo’s Bill Gray, Haruki Murakami, Thornton Wilder, Chitra Divakaruni, and others remain my companions while I try to describe my own version of a shattered world. Still, there will always be books like theirs. Writers will never stop writing them, because, alone or en masse, people will continue to die, and though it happens every day, when it hits close to home, we will always be caught off guard. We will always be amazed that it’s touched our lives as well.
On December 17, 2012, nearly three years after the earthquake in Haiti, I was in Miami, looking at cathedrals, while others were burying their dead. It was the first day of a design competition to choose an architectural plan to rebuild Notre Dame de l’Assomption, Our Lady of the Assumption, Port-au-Prince’s most famous cathedral. This cathedral was so central to the city that before it was leveled in the January 12, 2010, earthquake, its turrets could be seen from most places in the city, as well as from the sea; mariners used a light on the cupola of the church’s north tower to help bring their ships into port.
The Catholic archbishop of Port-au-Prince was killed in the earthquake, along with nuns, priests, and parishioners. This is what, in part, motivated me, a non-architect and a non-Catholic—but a lover of cathedrals—to agree to join a panel of architects, engineers, and priests to help select three designs out of the one hundred and thirty-four that had been submitted.
I had also grown up in the shadow of Notre Dame de l’Assomption. I’d spent the first twelve years of my life in the poor but vibrant neighborhood that in part surrounds the cathedral. The chimes of the church’s bells had guided the routines of my childhood, even my most painful days. My entire primary school was taken to Notre Dame de l’Assomption every Friday for Mass, no matter what religion we practiced individually.
Three days before we started looking at the cathedral designs in Miami, twenty-six people, twenty of them children, had been killed by a gunman at their school in Newtown, Connecticut. Earlier that day the gunman had murdered his mother; then, as the police closed in on him after the killings, he took his own life. Two of the children, children my oldest daughter’s age, were being buried on the day of our meeting.
Looking at design after design, potential cathedral after potential cathedral, I thought of a reading I’d heard at one of the Masses I had attended at Notre Dame de l’Assomption as a child. A prophet, Ezekiel, finds himself in a valley filled with dried human bones. A loud voice asks him from the heavens, “Son of man, Can these bones live?” The bones then rattle and rise out of the ground, “tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them.… breath entered them … they came to life and stood up on their feet—a vast army.”
Ezekiel’s bones, as well as the ones found by my cousins, now remind me of parts of Gabriel García Márquez’s seminal novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. Certainly I am reminded of the part where Rebeca, the dirt-eating orphan, arrives in Macondo at the Buendía family compound, carrying her parents’ bones in a canvas sack. We never learn who her parents are, only that they are hers, and that she is carrying their bones with her until she can bury them.
García Márquez seems to invent death in One Hundred Years of Solitude. The world he creates is “so recent that many things lacked names.” Initially, there are no cemeteries in Macondo. The village’s first residents recall the biblical Adam and Eve before their fall. Unlike Adam and Eve, though, Macondo’s residents are fully aware of death before their paradise is affected by it.
When the gypsy prophet Melquíades becomes the first person to die in Macondo, he doesn’t stay dead for long, bringing the notion of immortality to the village.
“He [Melquíades] really had been through death,” García Márquez writes, “but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude.” Death in One Hundred Years of Solitude is indeed solitary, leading to an intense longing among the dead to rejoin the living. But death is also spectacular, mystical, massive, quick, and, eventually, plentiful.
A translation is as much the work of the translator as it is of the writer. García Márquez is famously known to have claimed, some say hyperbolically, that he preferred Gregory Rabassa’s English translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude to his own Spanish original. The novel, as well as the first sentence—one of the most famous in literature—circles around Colonel Aureliano Buendía, moving in a few words between the present and the past, between memory and reality, and between life and death.
Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo.
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
This is indeed one of those first sentences that, to link William Gibson’s metaphor to García Márquez’s own introduction to the world of his novel, unlocks a door that doesn’t yet exist but behind which everything has already happened and is only waiting to be revealed.
There are countless revelations in this novel, including the intimate feel of the poetic narrative language in which the book is written. However, some of the most profound and beautiful scenes involve death. There is the foreshadowed attempted execution of Colonel Aureliano Buendía, who believes “that a person doesn’t die when he should but when he can.” There’s the actual execution of Arcadio, who, due to an interminable speech citing his endless list of charges, finds the entire affair “ridiculous.”
Then there is Remedios the Beauty, ascending to heaven. Remedios the Beauty, like the Caribbean goddess of love, Oshun, whose signature color is yellow—as in the yellow flowers and butterflies that show up throughout the novel—possesses the powers of beauty, inherent sexuality, and death. Remedios the Beauty’s smell tortures men even after they’ve died, “right down to the dust of their bones.” García Márquez narrates Remedios the Beauty’s ascension to heaven so matter-of-factly that he leaves no room for us to question it.
Remedios the Beauty simply rises, “waving good-bye in the midst of the flapping sheets that rose up with her, abandoning with her the environment of beetles and dahlias and passing through the air with her as four o’clock in the afternoon came to an end, and they were lost forever with her in the upper atmosphere where not even the highest-flying birds of memory could reach her.”
The power of García Márquez’s so-called magical realism is in embedding concrete factual details in his most fantastical descriptions, he told the writer Peter H. Stone in a 1981 Paris Review interview.
That’s a journalistic trick which you can also apply to literature. For example, if yo
u 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.… When I was writing the episode of Remedios the Beauty going to heaven, it took me a long time to make it credible. One day I went out to the garden and saw a woman who used to come to the house to do the wash and she was putting out the sheets to dry and there was a lot of wind. She was arguing with the wind not to blow the sheets away. I discovered that if I used the sheets for Remedios the Beauty, she would ascend. That’s how I did it, to make it credible. The problem for every writer is credibility. Anybody can write anything so long as it’s believed.
There’s also the magisterial passing of the family patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, whose death invokes a rain of yellow flowers. The next time the town finds itself in a deluge is after the massacre of the town’s striking banana company workers.
García Márquez’s rendering of this massacre was inspired by the December 6, 1928, massacre of United Fruit Company workers in the coastal town of Ciénaga. The workers were demanding better pay and working conditions but were branded as hoodlums, rabble-rousers, and communists. Pressured by the United States government, which threatened to invade to protect its interests in the banana trade, the conservative Colombian government sent in troops who shot down the demonstrators from the roofs of buildings around a public square. It’s been estimated that somewhere between forty and two thousand people were assassinated, the confusion resulting from the government’s refusal to admit that the army had killed more than a few people and that they had loaded the dead onto the banana trains and dumped their bodies into the sea. In the novel, José Arcadio Segundo will believe until his dying day that more than three thousand people died.
The Art of Death Page 5