On the flight the next day, for a moment I am not sure if I’m flying to or from Mexico City, such has been the daze of the last few days. Once at the airport, while walking between immigration and baggage claim, I dial my brother.
“He has less than twenty-four hours,” he says.
Fuck. How did we go from “He has only months” to “It’s more likely a few weeks” to twenty-four hours? After dozens of conversations with nurses, surgeons, oncologists, lung specialists, chief residents, and gerontologists, all of whom sternly avoided speculation, the boldness of this new prediction is ruthless. My father’s cardiologist has taken pains at every turn to explain the difference between the possible and the probable. Now we are in the definitive. The authority with which they can assert that his life will be over within a day appears to be remarkable, but apparently there’s no major math to it. The kidneys are failing. Potassium is building up in the bloodstream. It will stop the heart. It’s the same end of hundreds of millions of individuals before him. Life, as old as it is and as many times as it has been lived, continues to be mercifully unpredictable. Death, when it orbits this closely, seldom disappoints.
I walk toward the baggage carousel with tears running down my face.
15
I ask the day nurse to let me know if she sees in my father any change or symptom that may indicate to her that the end is near. I add that there is no pressure to provide a warning, but that if she sees anything, I will appreciate it. My brother’s wife and their children have flown in from their home in Paris, and my wife and our daughters will be flying in the next morning.
That afternoon, while my mother naps, I work a little in my father’s study. I look out toward the house, and it’s remarkable how quiet it is. I walk out to the garden and stand very still and marvel that nothing betrays the fact that a person’s life is ending in an upstairs bedroom.
The house is in a neighborhood developed in the forties and fifties by the architect Luis Barragán. It was originally comprised of modernist residences that were joined, in the seventies and eighties, by mansions of dubious architectural merit. My father was never enthusiastic about the area. But he found a house by an outlier, Manuel Parra, who created his own style—a fusion of Mexican colonial, Spanish, and Moorish styles, often incorporating doors, window frames, and stonemasonry salvaged from demolitions. Despite the unlikely list of ingredients, the homes he designed feel genuine and are welcoming. My father always admired his work and thought it fun, if not a little perverse, to inhabit one of his homes in this neighborhood of brainy modernist and gaudy marble palaces.
In my teens, I would frequently lie on my back on the grass and look up at the sky and feel strongly attached to this garden. (Even then I was aware that it was about as unexciting a favorite spot as a boy could have.) From that vantage point, the end of the day was pleasurable. For those who have spent years in Mexico City, it is no surprise that often the late afternoons can be unique. Sometimes, after the rain, there is a new transparency and a lovely fragrance in the air, and the Ajusco peak can be seen in the distance, and there comes over the city a sudden stillness, and the feeling of not being in the polluted, chaotic megalopolis, but in the splendid valley that it once was, and for a moment there is a sense of both longing and possibility. My brother and my sister-in-law were married here in sunny weather, and during the reception an hour later a furious storm pummeled the tents with hail the size of marbles. My father was delighted. As he saw it, it could only be a harbinger of good things. They’ve been married over thirty years.
A party was also held in this garden for my father’s sixtieth birthday, and he chose to invite only friends of his generation. Some younger friends were offended, and they confronted him with it. He was firm with them, unapologetic: the house could not accommodate everyone in his very large life, so he chose only people in his age group. In private he was mortified that he had hurt anyone’s feelings.
I walk around the ground floor of the house. The kitchen has been cleaned up after lunch, and the living room looks like it has always looked. That is not precise, of course, but the furniture, the art, and the trinkets have accumulated in easy layers decade after decade, forming something both vaguely new and reassuringly old. Dating any of it with any accuracy is impossible. There is a small, ancient rock formation that resembles a flower with petals as sharp as paring knives that was already there in the early eighties; a handwritten poem by Rafael Alberti that must be from the seventies, after his return to Madrid from forty years in exile; a self-portrait by Álejandro Obregón with shrapnel holes in it (drunk one night, the artist shot his painted self in the eye with a revolver, angry that his adult children were fighting over ownership of the painting); and a book of photographs by Jacques-Henri Lartigue that I’ve been looking at since I was twelve.
For about twenty-five years, there was a parrot in the house that could sometimes be heard whistling to an absent pretty girl when a door shut or a phone rang in the afternoon; after its exertion, it would settle in to rest quietly for the rest of the day. Not many of us paid much attention to the bird, but everyone was heartbroken when it died.
16
I walk upstairs and look into my father’s room. The day nurse takes notes while the aide reads a magazine. My father is perfectly still, in something like sleep, but the room feels different from the rest of the house. For all the tranquility, time now seems to move faster here, like it’s in a rush, impatient to make time for more time. It’s disconcerting.
Standing near the foot of the bed, I look at him, diminished as he is, and I feel like both his son (his little son) and his father. I am acutely aware that I have a unique overview of his eighty-seven years. The beginning, the middle, and the end are all there in front of me, unfolding like an accordion book.
It’s a dizzying sensation to know the destiny of a human being. Of course, the years before I was born are a concoction of things told to me by him or his siblings or my mother, or recounted by relatives, friends, journalists, and biographers, and embellished by my own imagination: My father as a boy of six playing goalkeeper in a soccer game and feeling that he was playing very well, better than usual. A year or two later, looking at a solar eclipse without a proper glass and forever losing the sight at the center of his left eye. Watching from the door of his grandparents’ house as men walked by carrying the dead body of a man, and the wife walking behind them holding a child in one hand and the husband’s severed head in the other. Spitting into his fruit gelatin or eating plantain chips from his shoe to discourage his many brothers and sisters from poaching his food. In adolescence, a trip up the Magdalena River toward boarding school, feeling miserably alone. From his time in Paris, an afternoon he visited a woman and tried to extend the visit so as to be asked for dinner, since he was broke and hadn’t eaten in days. After that failed, rummaging through her garbage on the way out and eating out of it. (He told this to others in front of me when I was fifteen, and I felt as embarrassed as an adolescent can feel by their parent.) There was also in Paris a melancholy Chilean girl, Violeta Parra, that he occasionally ran into at get-togethers of Latin American expatriates. She wrote and sang beautiful, heart-wrenching songs and eventually took her own life. One afternoon in Mexico City in 1966, he walked up to the room where my mother read in bed and announced to her that he had just written the death of Colonel Aureliano Buendía.
“I’ve killed the colonel,” he said to her, distraught.
She knew what that meant to him, and they sat together in silence with the sad news.
Even in the long period of great and rare literary acclaim, wealth, and access, there were ugly days, of course. The death of Álvaro Cepeda at forty-six from cancer, and the assassination of journalist Guillermo Cano by drug cartels at sixty-one. The deaths of two brothers (the youngest of sixteen siblings), the alienating aspect of celebrity, the loss of memory and the inability to write that came with it. He eventually reread his books in his old age, and it was like reading the
m for the first time. “Where on earth did all this come from?” he once asked me. He continued to read them until the end, eventually recognizing them as familiar books by the cover but understanding very little of their content. Sometimes, when closing a book, he would be surprised to find his photograph on the back cover, so he would reopen it and attempt to read it again.
Standing there, at the foot of his bed, I’d like to think that his brain, despite the dementia (and perhaps aided by the morphine), is still the cauldron of creativity that it always was. Fractured, perhaps, unable to return to thoughts or to sustain story lines, but still active. His imagination was always prodigiously fertile. Six generations of the Buendía family make up One Hundred Years of Solitude, but he had enough material for two more generations. He decided not to include it for fear the novel would be too long and tiresome. He thought great discipline was one of the cornerstones of writing a novel, particularly when it came to framing the shape and limits of the tale. He disagreed with those who said it was a freer, and therefore easier, form than a screenplay or a short story. It was imperative, he argued, that the novelist draft his or her own rigorous road map in order to traverse what he referred to as “the treacherous terrain of a novel.”
The journey from Aracataca in 1927 to this day in Mexico City in 2014 is about as long and extraordinary a journey as a person can have, and those dates on a tombstone could never begin to encompass it. From where I’m standing, it looks like one of the most fortunate and privileged lives ever lived by a Latin American. He’d be the first to agree.
17
On Wednesday night, sleep is choppy. I am anxious that I will be woken up by a knock on the door telling me that he has died. I get up at dawn and walk to his room, and the nurse informs me that he didn’t stir during the night. He is in the exact position I last saw him, breathing almost imperceptibly. I wonder if the nurses are still stretching and repositioning him to avoid bedsores or whether we are beyond that. I shower and dress and return to the room. Now, in the morning light, he looks like someone else, an austere twin brother with gaunt features and translucent skin that I don’t know as well. I feel differently about this guy. Detached. Maybe that is the purpose of the transformation, to help you uncouple, just as a simple look at your newborn instantly triggers feelings of attachment.
In the kitchen I sit alone at the table with the silent cook, who has worked on and off in the house for decades and whom my father enjoyed very much because of her fiery temper. She gives me a look at one point but says nothing. Soon she steps out to look in on her boss “in case he needs anything,” she says.
After breakfast I can hear the vallenatos playing in my father’s room. It’s his favorite musical form, and he always returned to it after periods of infidelity with chamber music or pop ballads. Even as his memory loss accelerated, he could, if given the opening verse, recite from memory many of the poems of the Spanish Golden Age. After that ability waned, he could still sing along to his favorite songs. The vallenato is an art form so particular to the world he was born into that even in his last months, incapable of remembering practically anything, his eyes would light up with excitement at the opening accordion notes of a classic one. His secretary would often play long compilations of them as he sat in his study, happily trapped in a time tunnel. So now, in the last couple of days, the nurses have started to play them loudly in his room, windows wide open. They fill the house. Some of them are by his compadre Rafael Escalona. In this context, I find them haunting. They take me as far back in his life as anything possibly can, and I travel through it and back to the present, where they play like a final lullaby.
My dad greatly admired and envied songwriters for their ability to say so much and so eloquently with so few words. While writing Love in the Time of Cholera, he submitted himself to a steady diet of Latin pop songs of love lost or unrequited. He said to me that the novel would be nowhere as melodramatic as many of those songs, but that he could learn much from them about the techniques with which they evoked feelings. He was never a snob about art forms and enjoyed the work of people as diverse as Béla Bartók and Richard Clayderman. He once walked by as I was watching Elton John playing his best songs on television, alone at the piano. My dad was only vaguely aware of him, but the music stopped him in his tracks, and he eventually sat down and watched all of it, enthralled. “Carajo, this guy is an incredible bolerista,” he said. A singer of boleros. It was very much like him to refer something back to his own culture. He was never intimidated by Eurocentric references that were common everywhere. He knew that great art could blossom in an apartment building in Kyoto or in a rural county in Mississippi, and he had the unwavering conviction that any remote and rickety corner of Latin America or the Caribbean could stand in powerfully for the human experience.
He was an omnivorous reader, and he enjoyed things like ¡Hola! magazine, the case studies of a physician, the memoirs of Muhammad Ali, or a thriller by Frederick Forsyth, whose political views he deplored. Among his less heralded literary loves was Thornton Wilder, and Ides of March was on his nightstand for what seemed like half my lifetime. There were also dictionaries and language reference books, which he picked at constantly. I never once saw him not know the meaning of a word in Spanish, and he could also offer a reasonable guess at its etymology. I was once struggling to remember the word that describes the critical interpretation of a text, and for a moment he was beside himself, putting everything aside in a frantic effort to retrieve it from the tip of his tongue. His delight was palpable as he quickly called out, “Exegesis!” It was not an obscure word, but far removed from his world. It was a word that, in his view, belonged to academia and to intellectual concerns, which were all a little suspect to him.
18
Later that morning, a bird is found dead inside the house. The back porch had been enclosed a few years earlier to make a visiting and dining area overlooking the garden. The walls are glass, so it is surmised that the bird flew in, became disoriented, crashed against the glass, and fell dead on the sofa, precisely on the spot where my dad sat regularly. My father’s secretary informs me that the employees in the house are divided into two groups: those who think it’s a bad omen and want the bird thrown in a trash can, and those who think it’s a good omen and want it buried among the flowers. The Trashists have taken the upper hand, and the bird is already in a garbage can outside the kitchen. After further debate, the bird is placed in a corner of the garden, above ground for now, while its final destination is decided. It is eventually buried near the parrot, in a plot that also includes a puppy. The existence of the pet cemetery was always kept from my father, who would have been perturbed by it.
19
We are gathered at noon, my mother, my brother, and his family, who flew in from France the previous evening. Also newly arrived from Bogotá in the hours before dawn is our cousin from our mother’s side, who lived with us for long periods as a child and is as close to my parents as a daughter. The mood is surprisingly light, I suppose because no one is inclined to mourn the living and because it’s a reunion, after all, and mostly of young people.
Through the glass doors I see my father’s secretary come out of his office in the back of the garden and move quickly toward us. I catch her eye, and she calls out that the nurse wants to talk to me. She is trying not to alarm anyone, but it’s clear that something has come up. I walk out as calmly as I can, but the room falls silent.
As I am approaching the guest room, the day nurse walks out to meet me. “His heart has stopped,” she says nervously. As I walk into the room, I initially find my father looking no different than he did less than ten minutes ago, but after only a few seconds I realize how wrong I am. He looks devastated, as if something had hit him—a train, a truck, lightning—a thing that caused no injuries other than knocking the life clean out of him. I walk around the bed and up to him and curse under my breath. The nurse is alternately checking for a pulse with a stethoscope and dialing a doctor. I can tell that
she is momentarily worried that my anger may be directed at her for not giving me a warning as I requested, but since I am not really engaging her directly, she moves on from that preoccupation.
She finally reaches my dad’s cardiologist. She explains that there has been no heartbeat for almost three minutes. The doctor asks to speak to me. He gives me his condolences and offers to come to the house, but I know he is far away that day, on a day off, and I tell him it’s not necessary. We had already agreed that when the time came, he would alert the chief resident at the hospital to come to the house to fill out the paperwork. I phone downstairs. My mother answers and I say, “His heart stopped,” and I can hardly get through the third word without my voice breaking, but I think she hangs up before she can hear it. I return to my father. His head lies to the side, his mouth is slightly agape, and he looks as frail as a person can look. Seeing him like this, in this most human scale, is both terrifying and comforting.
I see my mom walking up the stairs and toward the guest room, followed by my brother and his family. She is usually the slowest mover, but it’s evident that everyone has chosen to let her lead. Over the past few weeks, she has relied on my brother and me for dozens of decisions, but when she walks into the room and sees my father, it strikes me how their decades together give her complete authority over this moment. They were strangers to each other once, which is unimaginable. They first met as neighbors, and when he was fourteen and she was ten, he playfully asked her to marry him, and she ran home crying. On the day of their wedding, fifty-seven years and twenty-eight days before this moment, but at the exact same time of day, she would not put on the dress until she knew he was outside the church so there would be no chance of being left at the altar in a wedding gown.
A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes Page 3