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A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes: A Son’s Memoir of Gabriel García Márquez and Mercedes Barcha
Rodrigo Garcia
By
Published: Oct 03, 2021
Category:
Memoir
People tell me, “I’ve read a book that changed me.” I’m not convinced. They seem unchanged to me. “One Hundred Years of Solitude” was the greatest novel I’d ever read when I read it at 23, but it didn’t change my life and I didn’t think for a minute I was doomed as a writer because I’d never write a book that good. “Love in the Time of Cholera” did change me when I read it a few years later, because it proposed an admirable goal — an intense, long-lasting love. Life teaches us that this romantic ideal is rarely attainable, though we try to attain it nonetheless. Love stories have that power.
“A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes: A Son’s Memoir of Gabriel García Márquez and Mercedes Barcha” is also a love story. Rodrigo Garcia, one of Marquez’s sons, is an accomplished screenwriter and director, whose credits include “Six Feet Under,” “The Sopranos,” and “In Treatment.” And yet he’s ambivalent about writing this book.
There’s the not small matter of his father’s pronouncement: “Everyone has three lives: the public, the private and the secret.” His son is in dangerous territory with this memoir — he’s invading his parents’ private and possibly secret lives.
And then he has his own issues: “Beneath the need to write may lurk the temptation to advance one’s own fame in the age of vulgarity. Perhaps it might be better to resist the call and to stay humble. Humility is, after all, my favorite form of vanity. But as with most writing, the subject matter chooses you, and so resistance could be futile.”
The subject is, in the end, irresistible. García Márquez and his wife, Mercedes Barcha, met when she was nine and he was fourteen. They died in 2014 and 2020, respectively. We know a lot about the writer, little about his wife. Let’s start with her.
She was a woman of her time, with no higher education, a mother, a wife and homemaker, but many younger women with big lives and successful careers openly admired and envied her grit, her resilience, and her sense of herself. She was known by her friends as La Gaba, a nickname based on my father’s Gabo and therefore patriarchal, and yet no one who knew her believed she had grown into anything but a great version of herself.
The details are endearing. On the day of her wedding, she wouldn’t put on her wedding dress until she knew he was at the church. She liked to remind her two sons that “we are not public figures.” In her home “the line between the public and the private” was strictly enforced. After Mexico’s president referred to her as “the widow” during a memorial service for García Marquez, she threatened to tell the first journalist she encountered of her plans to remarry.
The anecdotes about Marquez are equally endearing. He worked for five hours a day, seemingly in a trance. When his children entered, he looked at them, but had no idea what they said. At lunch, he was completely present, often announcing he was writing the best novel since the Russians. He never attended a funeral. His own was the first.
The heart of the book is the writer’s slow journey to death. “Memory is my tool and my raw material. I cannot work without it,” Marquez would repeatedly plead to his son. “Help me.” But there’s no help to give. Marquez is becoming unable to write or recognize familiar faces. He can’t follow conversations. For the first time, he rereads his own books. He’s surprised to see his face on the book jackets. He asks, “Where on earth did all this come from?” Even worse: dying will be the only part of his life he won’t be able to write about.
From the book:
A few months earlier a friend asked how my dad was doing with his loss of memory. I told her he lives strictly in the present, unburdened by the past, free of expectations for the future. Forecasting based on previous experience, which is believed to be of evolutionary significance as well as one of the origins of storytelling, no longer plays a part in his life.
“So he doesn’t know he’s mortal,” she concluded. “Lucky him.”
The future is also not completely behind him. Often at dusk he asks, “Where are we going tonight? Let’s go out to a fun place. Let’s go dancing. Why? Why not?” If you change the subject enough times, he moves on.
“Who are those people in the next room?” he asks a housekeeper.
“Your sons.”
“Really? Those men? Carajo. That’s incredible.”
His secretary tells me that one afternoon she found him standing alone in the middle of the garden, looking off into the distance, lost in thought.
“What are you doing out here, Don Gabriel?”
“Crying.”
“Crying? You’re not crying.”
“Yes, I am. But without tears. Don’t you realize that my head is now shit?”
On another occasion, he said to her: “This isn’t my home. I want to go home. Home to my dad. I have a bed next to my dad’s.”
We suspect he was referring not to his father but to his grandfather, the colonel (and the inspiration for Colonel Aureliano Buendía), with whom he lived until he was eight. The colonel was the most influential man in his life. My father slept on a small mattress on the floor next to his bed. They never saw each other after 1935.
“That’s the thing about your father,” his secretary says to me. “Even ugly things he can talk about beautifully.”
He dies. His sons watch as the body is taken away. “The feelings regarding this moment are devoid of mystery. They cut to the bone: he is leaving home, and he will never return.”
There’s a big book to write about this marriage. This is the short one — 176 pages, 25 of them photographs. It tells as much as Garcia can. It’s very beautiful, it’s enough. [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here. For the audiobook, read by the author, click here.]
