A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes Read online

  The sound of a curtain being closed makes me turn, and I realize I have been left alone in the room. I look around. Other than the gurney on which my father lies and another empty table, there is no piece of furniture or equipment in the room, which is impeccably clean and free of any odor unusual to me. I can’t decide if I am in a hurry or if I am not. Both options are appealing. I touch his cheek and it’s cold, but it’s not an unpleasant sensation. In this calm, resting state, his features betray no signs of dementia. I am again able to read on this face his lucidity, his infinite curiosity, and the prodigious powers of concentration that I envy above all his things. He worked most days from 9 in the morning until 2:30 in the afternoon in what I can only describe as a trance. When my brother and I were children, my mother would sometimes send us into his study with a message, and he would stop writing and turn to us while we delivered it. He would look right through us, his Mediterranean eyelids at half mast, a cigarette going in one hand and another burning in the ashtray, and reply nothing. As I became older, I would sometimes add, “You have no idea what I just said, do you?” and still get no answer. Even after we walked away, he remained in that position, turned toward the door, lost in a labyrinth of narrative. I came to believe that with that level of focus there was little one couldn’t achieve. My brother, who works with acute single-mindedness on his art and design, inherited some of it.

  Despite this, promptly at 2:30, our father would be sitting at lunch with us, totally present. He’d often start by announcing that he was writing the best novel since the great Russian novels of the nineteenth century, then move on to any and all subjects, often interrogating us about our day. After the afternoon nap his enthusiasm began to weaken. By dinner time he would comment that the next day’s work was difficult, that it included a couple of serious hurdles, and that clearing them was crucial to the creative success of the book. By breakfast the next morning he was frank about his new level of worry: “If today doesn’t go well, the whole novel might be a bust. If that’s the case, I would abandon it.” Later, at lunch, the cycle would begin again.

  It dawns on me suddenly that he’s not breathing, and it’s spellbinding. Then I’m afraid that he might breathe and that a dead man breathing would be monstrous, and so I watch him closely for a few long seconds until I realize that I am holding my own breath, so I exhale quickly and feel ridiculous. His mustache is as his as the nose and the eyes and the lips. It’s his first and only mustache, the one he grew out at age seventeen and never shaved. He lost it during chemotherapy in his early seventies, but it grew back, like a lizard’s tail. I’m trying to build bridges in my mind between my living father and my dead father and my famous father and this father here in front of me, and I’m failing. I have an instinct to say something, and I think of it: “Well done.” But I don’t say it out loud for fear of sounding earnest or sentimental. I want to take a photograph of him and I do so with my phone. Instantly I feel sick to my stomach with guilt and shame for having violated his privacy so violently. I delete the photograph and instead take one of the roses on his body. He would have been delighted that the pretty young woman worked on him. He would have flirted with her.

  27

  I draw back the curtain and say that we should go on. He is pushed by an attendant from one room to the next, a distance of less than twenty steps. I am momentarily reminded of the short distance traveled by men condemned to death who are sitting in a holding cell and, when the time comes, realize that the execution chamber has been there all along, behind the wall. The room is larger than the previous one but also scrupulously clean. My father’s aide and the two friends are there, but my wife has returned outside to the sitting area. I rush out and wave her back in impatiently, and I don’t know if it’s because I need support or because I refuse to accept her self-effacing ways. Who the hell knows? I want her in there with me and that’s that, and it’s mighty male of me to never consider that she may not want to witness the cremation of her father-in-law.

  The attendant lines up the gurney with the closed doors of the chamber, and for a moment nothing happens. Only the low, discreet hum of the burners can be heard from inside the impeccable, polite machine, awaiting their turn to do the voracious work. Then someone either gives me a look or says something to me (I can no longer remember) that implies that there is no proceeding until I say so. I signal to the funeral director that we are ready, and an operator opens the doors of the chamber and my father is slowly transported inside by a short conveyor belt. My father’s aide says, “Adiós, jefe.” The funeral home workers clap. The yellow roses are still on him, and I remember thinking they would be annihilated in an instant. The body travels until only the head and shoulders remain visible, and then something goes awry and it becomes stuck. One of the funeral home employees walks up quickly and efficiently, as if this occurrence were not unusual, and pushes on both shoulders firmly until the body moves again and is finally engulfed. The doors shut behind it.

  The sight of my father’s body entering the cremation chamber is mesmerizing and numbing. It feels both impossibly pregnant and hollow. The only thing I can feel with any certainty at that moment is that he is not there at all. It remains the most impenetrable image of my life.

  . . . volando entre el rumor oscuro de las últimas hojas heladas de su otoño hacia la patria de tinieblas de la verdad del olvido, agarrado de miedo a los trapos de hilachas podridas del balandrán de la muerte y ajeno a los clamores de las muchedumbres frenéticas que se echaban a las calles cantando . . .

  —El otoño del patriarca

  . . . flying through the dark sound of the last frozen leaves of his autumn toward the homeland of shadows of the truth of oblivion, clinging to his fear of the rotting cloth of death’s hooded cassock and alien to the clamor of the frantic crowds who took to the streets singing . . .

  —The Autumn of the Patriarch

  28

  The following day, Friday, a morning earthquake reminds us that the world goes on. For our visitors from places free of earthquakes, it only adds to the hallucinatory nature of their trip. A little later, my mother receives a call notifying her that Bellas Artes—the National Institute of Fine Arts—would like to hold a memorial for my father, open to the public, with the presidents of Mexico and Colombia in attendance. We are happy to do it, but it can’t be denied that waiting almost four more days before starting to turn the page will be difficult.

  Friends continue to arrive from near and far. The house turns into a cocktail party, a wake with drinks and snacks around the clock and my mother holding court, cajoling, interrogating, passing judgment, indefatigable. There are even people I’ve heard about but never met, friends my parents have made over the last few years, after I moved to Los Angeles. The group reflects their interests: all ages, occupations, and social strata. My mother meets with the occasional guest separately and in private, among them two ex-presidents. Despite her grief, and one must assume her exhaustion, she is cordial and patient. One or two of the visitors she judges harshly after they leave, with a little bitterness and cutting humor. She is not forgiving of anyone who stopped calling after my father lost his faculties, even if just to say hello to her. That shit list is short, but if you’re on it, good luck.

  On another occasion, my brother is told that the president of a major university is at the door. When the door is opened, the man steps forward, delivers a well-constructed if stodgy eulogy, reminiscent of a political stump speech, embraces my brother formally without another word, and departs forever.

  One of my father’s brothers and his wife arrive, as well as a cousin from that side of the family whom I haven’t seen in almost twenty years. Raised in Cartagena, she now lives in a small town in Maine, married to a local, and her stories of adapting the local culture to her, rather than the other way around, are great fun. They are a reminder of my father’s family’s passion for anecdote, embellishment, and exaggeration. Grab your listeners and never let them go. A good story trumps the truth, alway
s. A good story is the truth.

  One afternoon his secretary calls me. She’s worried that everyone at the hospital supply rental company knows my dad passed away in that bed. It could end up anywhere, she adds, sold off or collected as a morbid memento. We decide to buy the bed. For the time being it’s disassembled and placed, until we decide what to do with it, in the garage at the back of the house, out of sight. We say nothing to my mother, who wouldn’t want it around. She’d say it’s there waiting for her to be next.

  My brother retrieves from the funeral home an urn with our father’s ashes. Picking the right urn had been a predicament. My mother wanted something neither expensive nor cheap, elegant but discreet. It appears to pass muster when she sees it, though she does only for a second or two. Her instructions are to put it away in my father’s study until the memorial, and she provides a yellow silk scarf to wrap it in. Then, in what can only be attributed to my own exhaustion, it occurs to me that it’s a good idea for my daughters and my brother’s children to pose with the urn. They are appalled but also find the proposition hysterical, so they do it, mortified and fighting off laughter. What can you do but laugh at the thought of your grandfather reduced to three pounds of ash?

  The party lasts the full three days, and it’s lifesaving, if tiring. On Monday, the day of the memorial, I sit alone at the breakfast table. I look up from my plate to discover a perfect little rainbow forming on the backrest of my father’s chair. The morning sunlight, refracted by the same glass wall that killed the bird a few days earlier, is the source. By midafternoon Monday, the core of the group, a few dozen people, congregate in the garden for a photograph before boarding a fleet of cars and taxis for Bellas Artes. As the group disbands in the garden, my mother calls out her marching orders: “¡Aquí nadie llora!” Nobody’s allowed to cry.

  On the drive to Bellas Artes, I ask a friend if he can carry the urn as we make our way out of the vehicles and into the palace. I don’t want to be photographed carrying it, for no other reason than the action is too private for me to want to see it in the news.

  We gather where the cars drop us off, and we follow the director of the institute upstairs and through halls until we reach a door and step out, quite unexpectedly, into the main hall. I don’t know what I anticipated, but what awaits is intimidating. On one level is a large base where the urn is placed, surrounded by yellow roses. To either side are two large areas of rows of chairs for guests. But facing the urn is a scaffolding with over a hundred photographers, videographers, and reporters. We sit in the first row of the area to our left, among dignitaries and friends who arrived earlier. It’s clear that we are expected to stand guard around the urn, for a few minutes. My brother and I walk with my mother and stand where we are told. The barrage of camera flashes makes a very odd moment surreal. It’s impossible not to think of people we know who might be watching from around the world. It’s not really me who’s there, just this guy in a suit and tie, somewhere between the ages of three and fifty-three, trying his best not to draw attention to himself. After us, my brother’s family stands guard, and eventually my wife and daughters. One of the girls, who suffers from social anxiety, tells me later that she found the experience very painful, almost unbearably so. I feel for her. To be exposed like that, in a most private moment, in sad circumstances, and in the throes of adolescence, must be torture.

  For the next two hours we sit and watch while thousands of people, most of whom have been standing for hours outside in the drizzle, walk through, paying their respects. Many place flowers, mementos, religious figures, or pendants at the base of the platform where the urn sits. Many also drop off my father’s books, or notes of condolence or love, some addressed to maestro, but most, more informally, to Gabo or Gabito. It’s a firm reminder that he also very much belonged to other people.

  The event offers a chance to see a whole new group of friends we hadn’t seen yet, or for a long time. I even spot a few passing by who walk in with the mourners. I signal to them to meet me on the other side of the main hall, and we catch up quickly. Thanks to these encounters, it turns out to be a not unenjoyable event.

  At one point, sitting with my own thoughts, I look more carefully at the faces of mourners passing by. I find myself remembering that my father used to say that everyone has three lives: the public, the private, and the secret. For a moment it occurs to me that perhaps someone from his secret life could be among these people. Before I can dwell on that too much, a trío vallenato that has stood in line arrives, stops, and plays a song to my father. It’s festive and welcome.

  We hear that the Colombian president’s airplane has landed and that he is already on his way to the event. He soon makes his entrance behind his host, the president of Mexico. A pleasant surprise is that many friends of my parents came on that plane, and this new wave lifts our spirits again. My mother greets them with great glee, unabashedly delighted. “¿Qué te parece todo esto?” she asks. (How about this?)

  The national anthems of both countries are played, which changes the mood. The Colombian president, who is close to me in age, is someone my dad knew for years, and they were friends long before he became president. He doesn’t mince words. Gabo, he says, is simply the greatest Colombian who ever lived. My mom watches him with pride, like he’s a nephew who has done well. His brother is also there, a journalist who is one of my mother’s favorite people and who catches her up on the gossip in Bogotá. She’s happy, all things considered.

  Toward the end of the Mexican president’s address, which is otherwise quite good, he refers to us as “the sons and the widow.” I squirm in my seat, sure that my mother will disapprove. When the heads of state leave, my brother walks over to me and deadpans, “The widow.” We laugh nervously. Later my mom speaks her opinion in no uncertain terms, grumpily. She threatens to tell the first journalist who crosses her path that she plans to remarry as soon as possible. Her last words on the subject are “No soy la viuda. Yo soy yo.” (I am not the widow. I am me.)

  My brother and I had promised ourselves that as long as people were standing in line outside Bellas Artes to pay their respects to our father, he and I would stay no matter how late, beyond the departure of heads of state, press, friends, and family. But moments after the event is officially over, it’s clear to us that our good intentions are not enough to keep us from the verge of collapse. So, disappointed by our failure but hoping to forgive ourselves, we leave.

  29

  I fly back to Los Angeles for a couple of days. Until very recently, even when he was unaware of who I was, my father would be disappointed whenever I said goodbye. “No, hombre, ¿por qué te vas? Quédate. No me dejes.” (No, man, why are you leaving? Stay. Don’t leave me.) It was always a kick in the ass—not unlike dropping off a crying child at preschool, but without the conviction, misguided or not, that it’s all for their own good.

  At home there are already hundreds of letters of condolences waiting. In this other reality they seem to refer to an event that happened far away and long ago. I leave them for later, when I might (and eventually do) find them nourishing. On a call with my mother, she tells me that a man came to the door, announcing himself as Mr. Porrúa. She assumes he is someone from the same Porrúa family that owns one of the oldest publishing houses in Mexico. She receives him in the living room and doesn’t recognize him, but he is friendly and effusive, asks after my father’s secretary, my brother, and me all by name, and shares his memories of my father. When the secretary walks in, he jumps to his feet and embraces her effusively. She is too embarrassed to admit she doesn’t remember him. Mr. Porrúa sits again and soon explains that he drove into town in a car that has now broken down. Determined to convey his feelings, he got a lift from a friend who is waiting outside. Would my mother be kind enough to lend him the equivalent of about two hundred US dollars to get his car fixed? My mother gives him cash, the man leaves, and he is never heard from again. Later we discover he is a known con man. She has a good laugh about it.

&
nbsp; Apart from condolences, mail arrives from friends sending me the front pages of newspapers the world over from the day of my father’s death. That takes me into the rabbit hole of the internet, where I see that virtually every front page of any national or regional paper carried the news that day. I read as many versions as I can, each paper stressing different aspects of his life or achievements. Once again, I struggle to reconcile this person in print with the one I’ve spent the last few weeks with—ailing, dying, ashes in a box—and with my childhood dad, the one who eventually became my child and my brother’s. I read through my notes of the last few days, torn about whether to bring them together in some kind of narrative. Like my mother, my dad held fast to their belief that our home life was strictly private. As kids we were held to that standard over and over again. But we are not kids anymore. Old children, perhaps, but not kids.

  My father complained that one of the things he hated most about death was that it would be the only aspect of his life he would not be able to write about. Everything he lived through, witnessed, and thought was in his books, fictionalized or ciphered. “If you can live without writing, don’t write,” he often said. I am among those who cannot live without writing, so I trust he would be forgiving. Another of his pronouncements that I will take to my own grave is this: “There is nothing better than something well written.” That one is particularly resonant, as I am aware that whatever I write concerning his last days can easily find publication, regardless of its quality. Deep down I know I will write and show these recollections in some form or another. If I have to, I will seek refuge in yet another thing he said to us: “When I’m dead, do whatever you want.”