A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes Read online

  After my dad leaves the hospital, his discharge form is published in a tabloid. It appears that my brother may have dropped the document and that it was found by a visitor to the hospital, who in turn gave it as a gift to her daughter who is recuperating from surgery and who is an avid reader of my father’s books. How it made it to print remains a mystery.

  7

  Ever since word got out that my father was hospitalized, press and supporters have started to gather outside the house. On the day he arrives from the hospital, close to one hundred people are there, and the city government has stationed police to maintain a perimeter around the front door. The ambulance carrying him backs into the garage, but it is too long to allow the garage door to close again. My brother, a housekeeper, and my father’s secretary hold up bedsheets to protect him from being photographed as he is carried out the back of the ambulance and into the house. The published photo of my brother holding up sheets to protect whatever privacy remains infuriates me. Still, I remind myself, most of the people who are at the door are his readers and some serious press outlets, not tabloids.

  Friends and doctors who come or leave are shamelessly accosted by journalists asking for updates. Family members usually drive into another garage and close the doors behind us, so we are spared. My dad’s secretary tells me that on one of the very few occasions that week that my mother left the house, upon her return the garage door failed to open. She had no alternative but to walk about ten steps to the front door. As she stepped out of the car, the street fell dead silent in a spontaneous and remarkable show of respect. She walked the distance, head slightly bowed as if lost in thought, but apparently no more perturbed than if she were walking from her bedroom to the bathroom, unaware or unconcerned that the climate changed for her. My father said many times that she was the most surprising person he ever met.

  We decide that my father cannot be placed in the master bedroom, where his care will disrupt my mother’s sleep. He is placed down the hall from her, in a guest room that also serves as a screening room. Decades ago, it was a large terrace where high school students gathered to smoke, but it was eventually enclosed.

  After he is installed in the hospital bed, my father’s first words, delivered through a raspy whisper and hard to make out, are “I want to go home.” My mother explains that he is home. He looks around with something like disappointment, apparently recognizing nothing. He takes his right hand up shakily to his face in a gesture that is very much his. The hand lands on the forehead and then slides down very slowly over the eyes, closing them shut. A frown and tightly pursed lips round it out. It’s a gesture that he uses as a sign of exhaustion or concentration or when he is overwhelmed by something he just heard, usually something to do with a person’s hardship. We see it frequently over the next few days.

  My father will be taken care of by his two regular aides and two nurses who work in two shifts. The day nurse is impressive. She was recommended by the hospital when my father was released. She is in her late thirties, married, no children, cordial, even-tempered, confident, and she radiates common sense. Her logs are detailed and neatly written in longhand, medications and supplies impeccably laid out, curtains in the room pulled and drawn throughout the day to maintain only a soothing amount of brightness in the room. The beauty of witnessing someone who is outstanding at what she does, in conjunction with the comfort brought about by the support of an empathetic health worker, makes her a compelling presence. She is also affectionate with her patient, often addressing him as mi amor or chiquito hermoso (lovely little one). Only once do I see her flustered. In revising a doctor’s latest instructions, she finds either what she considers an incomplete form or an inconsistency in the papers regarding my father’s “Do Not Resuscitate” orders. For a good half hour everything is put aside as she reviews the documents while leaving phone messages. Finally, she speaks with the cardiologist and is satisfied with what she is told. After a final set of initials from my mother and my assurances that everything reflects everyone’s wishes, she returns to her routine, visibly relieved.

  Every now and then my father awakes, and it’s cause for excitement around him. Family, caretakers, and not infrequently a visiting doctor are happy to interact with him. We ask him questions, listen carefully to his answers, and encourage conversation. We are delighted that he’s alert, and for the doctors and nurses there is the thrill of chatting with the legendary maestro. He speaks with a deliberateness that makes you forget, in the happiness of the good moment, that he is years deep into dementia and that the man we are talking to is hardly there at all, can hardly make sense of any of it, is hardly himself.

  A few times a day his weight is shifted in the bed, and he is massaged and stretched. If he is awake, I can see a sleepy kind of pleasure come over him. One afternoon, a young doctor—who was the chief intern at the hospital, son of a Colombian father—stops by. He asks my father how he feels, and the answer is “Jodido” (Screwed). The nurse informs, as part of the long rundown, that my father has skin chafing and that they have been “cuidando sus genitales” (taking care of his genitals), applying cream to the area. My father is listening and makes a face of appalled horror. But he’s smiling, and his expression doesn’t lie: he’s joking. Then, just to be clear, he adds: “Quiere decir, mis huevos” (You mean, my balls). The room is in stitches. His humor has survived dementia, it seems. It’s part and parcel of the most essential him. Overall, my father was a modest man with respect to his physique. Timid, even. But I don’t think he would have found any lack of dignity in how he was taken care of. He would have been very touched by the affection he received.

  When it’s time for the nurses’ change of shift, the two nurses and two aides, as well as one or both housekeepers, gather in the room for a few minutes. My father’s secretary comments, looking at his feet during a change of bedsheets, that she had heard he has beautiful feet but she had never seen them. The women all look at them and agree. Where on earth she could have heard that, I have no idea. I’d rather not ask.

  The sound of a chorus of female voices sometimes stirs him awake. He opens his eyes, and they light up as soon as the women turn to him and address him with affection and praise. On one of those occasions, I am in the next room when I hear the group of women laughing loudly. I walk in to ask what’s happening. I’m told my father opened his eyes, took a patient look at the women, and said calmly: “No me las puedo tirar a todas” (I can’t fuck all of you).

  A moment later, when my mother walks in, her voice and her presence entrance him.

  8

  Throughout my childhood, both my parents took naps in the afternoon, almost without exception. Every now and then my father would ask us to wake him up if he slept past a certain time. My brother and I learned at a very early age that it was a risky assignment. If you were standing too close when you told him to wake up or if, God forbid, you nudged him, he would be startled to the point of waking up screaming, waving his arms around trying to protect himself from something or someone, terrified, gasping for air. It would take several moments for him to relocate himself in this world. So we developed a system: stand at the door of the bedroom and call out his name in a calm, quiet monotone. He would still jolt awake sometimes, but more often than not he wouldn’t. And if the reaction was that of horror, we were able to retreat to the hallway quickly.

  After a good awakening, he would rub his face with both his hands as if slowly washing it, then call with his favorite nickname for us, Perro Burro (Donkey Dog). He’d wave us over, order us to kiss him, and then proceed to ask: “What is new? How is life?” It was not unusual also to hear him at night moaning and gasping and my mother shaking his shoulder vigorously to wake him up. I once asked him after a turbulent nap what he was dreaming. He closed his eyes to retrieve it.

  “It’s a beautiful day and I am in a canoe without oars, drifting very slowly, peacefully, down a placid river.”

  Where is the nightmare in that, I asked.

  “I
have no idea.”

  I know he must, however. Despite his persistent denial of anything deliberately symbolic in his writing, and his disdain for any academic or highbrow theories that could shed light on imagery in his stories, he knows that he is a slave to the unconscious, like everyone. He knows things are standing in for other things. And like so many writers, he is obsessed with loss and with its greatest manifestation, death. Death as order and disorder, as logic and nonsense, as the inevitable and the unacceptable.

  9

  In his early seventies, during and after several rounds of chemotherapy, my father wrote his memoirs. The project was initially conceived as a series of books, the first one starting with his earliest memories and ending with his move to Paris at age twenty-seven to work as a correspondent. But after the initial one, he wrote no others, mainly because he became fearful that writing about periods of success could evolve, like so many of the memoirs of the famous, into little more than name-dropping. A night with so-and-so, visiting a famous painter’s studio, plotting with this or that head of state, breakfast with a charismatic insurgent.

  “Only the first book would be of any interest, to me, anyway,” he said, “because it covers the years that made me a writer.”

  In another context he once said, “Nothing interesting happened to me after the age of eight.”

  That’s how old he was when he moved away from his grandparents’ house, the town of Aracataca, and the world that inspired his early writing. His first few books, he admitted, were trial runs for One Hundred Years of Solitude.

  In researching his memoirs, he reached out to friends from as far back as preschool, many of whom he had not seen or heard from since. In some cases, he was only able to speak to a son or daughter or wife because the friend had already passed away. He had expected that some would have died along the way, but he was taken aback by those who had died in recent years: men who had lived entire, relatively happy and productive lives and had died in their seventies, the average life expectancy in the world. The deaths of these men his own age were not tragic, simply the end of natural life cycles. After this period, he took to saying, “A lot of people are dying that weren’t dying before,” and he enjoyed the laughter it provoked.

  10

  Despite his gregarious nature and an apparent comfort with public life, my father was quite a private, sometimes even secretive, person. This is not to say that he was unable to enjoy fame or that, after decades of adulation, he was unscathed by narcissism, but still there was always in him a suspicion of celebrity and of literary success. He reminded us (and himself) several times over the years that neither Tolstoy, Proust, or Borges ever won the Nobel Prize, nor did three of his favorite writers: Virginia Woolf, Juan Rulfo, and Graham Greene. Often it seemed to him that his success was not something he had achieved but something that had happened to him. Up until late in life, as his memory was fading, he never reread his books for fear that he would find them embarrassingly wanting and that it would paralyze him creatively.

  11

  I fly back to Los Angeles for a couple of days to continue work on a film I am editing. It’s a story of fathers and sons, and the long climactic scene, which we are working on, involves the death of the father through a series of circumstances for which the son may be partly to blame. There is a confrontation followed by something like an accident, a dying scene, a carrying and washing of the corpse, and a final ritual of sorts that obliterates the body, erasing the father forever from the surface of the earth. The fact that I have to work on this as my father is in his final weeks is a grim coincidence that is not lost on anyone. I embrace it like it’s just something that has to be weathered and accepted: God’s sense of humor. But as time goes by, I can’t pretend that working on these scenes isn’t grating. It’s debilitating. I hate myself for having written such a story. I overeat, chocolate mostly, to deaden some of the pain. Maybe the only story worth telling is one that makes you laugh. I’ll do that next time, I’m sure. Or perhaps not.

  For a few years after I started directing films, I was often asked what artists had influenced me. I dutifully fired off a list of names, partly original, mostly obvious, until the day came when I realized I was being dishonest. No director, writer, poet—no painting or song—has exerted much influence on me compared to my parents, my brother, my wife, my daughters. Most things worth knowing are still learned at home.

  12

  When I return to Mexico, my father has been back home just over a week, but already my mother seems very tired. She asks me if I really think it’ll be months, and she asks in a way that makes it clear she doesn’t feel like she can stomach that time frame. My father’s convalescence in the house is nevertheless a quiet one. He’s in a room away from the main bedrooms, tended to day and night, and he appears generally at peace. In the rest of the house, it would seem nothing out of the ordinary is happening. For my mother, however, the clock is ticking ruthlessly slow in that room, and as loudly as cathedral bells.

  I say to her that I don’t think it’ll be that long, but my estimate is based on nothing but my desire to comfort her. The next morning his cardiologist returns, and after a long examination of my father he changes his estimate. It will not be months now, most likely weeks. Three, maybe, at the most. My mom listens in silence, smoking, perhaps equal parts relieved and dismayed.

  Later, a gerontologist of about forty stops by to advise on end-stage care. He is the youngest of the many doctors that we’ve dealt with recently, which is unexpected if we presume that the young should be unable to understand the trials of old age. My mother interrogates him like she does everyone. He reveals that he has suffered from a lymphoma that is in remission, and I see him in a whole new light. He looks vulnerable suddenly, and self-conscious. The possibility that he may be in more imminent danger than his patients several decades older must be disquieting. He says that when the time comes, if we want to move things along, my father’s water drip could be interrupted. A handful of countries, he informs us, consider water a human right that can never be denied a patient under any circumstances. Mexican law differs, and it is not uncommon for family members to interrupt hydration when the end is very near. The patient by then is usually sedated, he says, and will not suffer. We listen in silence, like we’re watching a strange monologue in an experimental play. The ideas are intriguing and absurd. Practical, compassionate, murderous.

  13

  My mother and I are sitting together watching cable news when she says to me out of the blue: “We have to be prepared because it’s going to be a zoo.” She’s referring to the reaction in the media and among readers and friends the world over when my father dies. Many started to call or write as soon as the news broke of his hospitalization. Then a few outlets stated that he had come home to spend his last days. He’s eighty-seven years old, so it’s not greatly speculative to suppose that he may in fact be in trouble.

  We decide, together with my brother, that as soon as my father dies, we will make a handful of calls to journalists we know personally. It’s a short list: two newspapers in Colombia; one is the most influential in that country; the other is the one where my father began his career in his early twenties. In Mexico, we settle on one of the foremost journalists in the country, a woman who has news shows on both television and radio. We will also call a few close friends who can spread the news as they see fit. His agent and friend is one of them, of course, as are a couple in Barcelona, as well as one of his brothers, the point person for the family in Colombia. They have already been warned that we’re close to the end.

  Entonces cruzó los brazos contra el pecho y empezó a oír las voces radiantes de los esclavos cantando la salve de las seis en los trapiches, y vio por la ventana el diamante de Venus en el cielo que se iba para siempre, las nieves eternas, la enredadera nueva cuyas campánulas amarillas no vería florecer el sábado siguiente en la casa cerrada por el duelo, los últimos fulgores de la vida que nunca más, por los siglos de los siglos, volvería a rep
etirse.

  —El general en su laberinto

  Then he crossed his arms over his chest and began to listen to the radiant voices of the slaves singing the six o’clock Salve in the mills, and through the window he saw the diamond of Venus in the sky that was dying forever, the eternal snows, the new vine whose yellow bellflowers he would not see bloom on the following Saturday in the house closed in mourning, the final brilliance of life that would never, through all eternity, be repeated again.

  —The General in His Labyrinth

  14

  I fly to Los Angeles again to spend a few more days in the cutting room. My second night at home, I go to bed early, but after I turn out the lights I’m worried that the phone will ring in the middle of the night and scare the wits out of me. It does both. I hear my brother’s voice on the other end, sounding deliberately calm.

  “Hey. He has a high fever. The doctor says you better come back.”

  After I hang up, I book an early flight on my phone and I lie awake in the dark. I am overcome by a great sadness for my brother, my mother, and me. When my brother and I were children growing up in Mexico and Spain, the rest of the family on both sides was in Colombia, so we had a strong sense of the four of us as a unit, a club of four. Now the club is about to lose its first member. It’s almost crushing.