Rodrigo Garcia’s ‘A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes’ is a son’s tribute

Rajesh Sharma

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Memory is our gift and curse. It gives us identity but also makes us vulnerable. We do not want to remember that we live in time, in death’s shadow. A memoir is a marathon of heroic and tender remembering in search of reconciliation. It redefines the writer’s relation with time, with all that exists in time and will cease to exist with its passage.

Rodrigo Garcia’s ‘Farewell’ is a son’s memoir of his departed parents, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mercedes Barcha. He is a screenwriter and director and lives in Los Angeles. Conscious of the formidable shadow cast by his famous father, he chose to follow a different calling instead of becoming a writer. And yet the reader of this moving little book, which is at once serious and light, cannot but admire his mastery of the storyteller’s craft. The son rises to stand in his own circle of light, with a grace that impresses and touches. The portrait he draws of Marquez is refracted through a relationship that is affectionate but complicated.

He grieves without inhibition and writes earnestly about grieving. And his control never loosens. You watch him watching himself and can see that the control comes from a firmly maintained inner distance. You sense it also in the narrative economy, in the solemn rhythm and in the pace of narration.

Rodrigo faces up to the harrowing reality of Gabo’s disintegrating self as dementia progressively eats away the aging writer’s memory. The old man is distraught by the prospect of a mind without memory, his principal tool and raw material. One day the secretary sees him standing alone in the garden, brooding. I’m crying, he tells her, but without tears. The coming end makes him immensely sad, he tells his son.

That Rodrigo is a discerning reader with a passion for writing is obvious from his selection of the passages from Marquez’s novels that adorn the five parts of the book as epigraphs. Premonition lights them up, as if their writer had somehow foretold his own fate in the stories he spun.

Rodrigo reminds the reader that for Marquez, the demand of writing was absolute: ‘If you can live without writing, don’t write.’ The fulfilment it brought was absolute too: ‘There is nothing better than something well written.’ The man of cinema that he is, Rodrigo cannily chooses what to show of his father’s life and work to the reader. You get to see Marquez on his writing desk with his immense powers of concentration. You admire his austere discipline and perseverance. You are astonished by his disarming simplicity: he would say that nothing interesting had happened to him after the age of eight, which echoes in Rodrigo’s own conviction from experience that ‘most things worth knowing are still learned at home’. Marquez was suspicious of hierarchies instituted in the arts and mocked the itch to intellectualise that afflicts many professional readers of literature. He disagreed with those who thought that the novel was an easier and freer form for telling one’s stories. It had to have a rigorously worked out shape, he believed, within which alone the story could come alive.

Mercedes died in 2020, six years after her husband’s death. Rodrigo’s relationship with her was, in comparison, uncomplicated and warm. She was a simple woman and had no higher education. When during Gabo’s memorial service the Mexican President described her as a widow, she was offended. ‘I am not the widow. I am me,’ she would later tell people. In spite of her husband’s enormous shadow, she had grown to be ‘a great version of herself’, as Rodrigo says with a supreme bow to her memory.

This is a mourner’s memoir no doubt, but it is more about life. In ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’, Marquez wrote: ‘It is life, more than death, that has no limits.’ His son keeps that faith.