On the last page of Gerald Martin's excellent biography of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the biographer recounts a conversation he had with his subject after a function in the Columbian city of Cartagena in 2007. Marquez, or Gabo to his friends, had given a speech to the guests that also included Carlos Fuentes and Bill Clinton. Gabo, then 80, already old and weak, talked about his years of living in poverty with his wife and how _ because he hardly had any money _ he could mail only half the manuscript of One Hundred Years Of Solitude to the publisher when he completed it.
Living To Tell The Tale , a 2002 autobiography by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
When the speech ended, Martin wrote, the ovation lasted several minutes.
Later, the biographer had a brief moment to talk with Marquez about the reception of the event. He recalls the conversation in the book Gabriel Garcia Marquez, A Life:
"You know, many people around me were weeping," Martin said to Gabo.
"I was weeping, too. Only inside."
"Well, I know I will never forget it."
"Well, what a good thing you were there," said Marquez. "So you can tell people we didn't make up the story."
The mystical boundaries between memory and fiction, between what's real and what's remembered, between what's made up and what actually happened, is the literary motor behind most of Marquez's novels. So it was particularly poignant when Marquez's brother broke the biggest literary news of last week by telling a group of students in Cartagena that the Columbian author, now 85, is suffering from senile dementia.
"He has problems with his memory," said Jaime Garcia Marquez. "Sometimes I cry because I feel like I'm losing him."
The reaction was swift and, at least on Thai Facebook, verged on dewy-eyed sentimentalism. Marquez, who won the Nobel Prize in 1982, is a hero to a number of Thai readers who, though falling short of brandishing his great works like the Bible, relish evoking the term "magical realism" as a proof of sophistication.
Elsewhere, the news brought concern, sadness, even disbelief. A few days after the story broke, Jaime Abello, director of the New Journalism Foundation created by Marquez himself, wrote on his Twitter: "Please, enough messages of solidarity: Gabo is not insane. He's just an elderly person who has lost a bit of memory."
One absolute consequence of Gabo's condition, according to his brother, is the writer's inability to continue with the second volume of the planned trilogy of his autobiography. The first book, called Living To Tell The Tale, came out in 2002, and the first chapter began with Marquez's characteristic part-memory-part-myth sentences: "My mother asked me to go with her to sell the house. She had come that morning from the distant town where the family lived, and she had no idea how to find me."
From then on, Marquez reconstructs his own life with such vividness and lucidity, digging up the implacable ghost of his maternal grandfather, Colonel Nicolas Marquez, an influential figure in the writer's life, and describing in details the complex, ever-extended structure of his family. Naturally, readers hunt for clues and references to the stories and characters in his novels, with the prized target being the evidence of the real Macondo, the town in which One Hundred Years Of Solitude is set. It's a dream book for literary fanboys, and they're largely forgiven, for Living To Tell The Tale has the dazzling clarity and mythical fascination of Marquez's fiction. And as we pause and wonder how the writer can remember a large anthology of small details and trifling dialogue from his 80-year-old life, we're reminded by a defining sentence highlighted at the beginning of the book: "Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it."
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, A Life , a 2008 biography by Gerald Martin.
For writers, and especially this writer, the sovereign of memory is more powerful than the province of fact, even when he's talking about his own life.
Living To Tell The Tale has 484 pages, and it ends before Gabo, as newspaper columnist and struggling novelist, started writing "the book".
Gabo-groupies waited with a slobbering expectation for the second volume that will now never arrive, and it was left to Gerald Martin to fill in the blank. Martin did more than that: His 2008 book, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, A Life, is a definitive biography of the writer, more extensive and meticulous, with an ever greater obsession with ancestry and its lasting impact, than Gabo's book itself.
It tends to gush, no surprise, and the exotic swamp of the Columbian coast makes a predictable return. But it's one of the finest biographies as it looks at the life and work of Marquez with an equal measure of passion and erudition.
Martin spent over two decades interviewing hundreds of people, including many hours with Gabo, and his book gives us everything, or almost everything, that Gabo didn't have the chance to write or re-examine. It also contains thoughtful commentaries of most of Marquez's books, and particularly a long discussion on One Hundred Years Of Solitude (perhaps the only qualm I have about Martin's book is how it strays too close to the perpetuation of a romance that a writer's life mirrors his novels). To Marquez, memory trumps accuracy. To Martin, it's the opposite, and it's a biographer's job to set out on a quest for truth, filtering it from dreams and remembrances.
It probably is, eventually. In a sad twist, the great Gabo's losing his memory, and the point that has been raised since the news became public is the fact that in One Hundred Years Of Solitude, the patriarch of the Buendia family becomes a raving senile (Ursula, the soul of the story, also loses her memory).
Romantics can make a lot up from that, but what happens to Gabo is no romance. It is cruelty, for there are a few things more tragic in life than the betrayal of memory. Gabo knew that best, long before it happened to him. For us, the only way to honour this great writer is to remember, and the simplest way to do it is, without doubt, to read.
