Dear Patricia
What an exceptional piece of writing
And what an exceptional person you are
Hope Thecla is reading it and recalling the lunch you hosted for us in New
York.
She was fond of you and your simplicity
George Menezes
----- Original Message -----
From: "Goanet Reader" <goanetrea...@gmail.com>
To: "Goa's premiere mailing list, estb. 1994!" <goanet@lists.goanet.org>
Sent: Wednesday, April 30, 2014 3:58 AM
Subject: [Goanet-News] Goanet Reader: Adios maestro... remembering Marquez,
the man, the writer (Patricia J. Pereira-Sethi)
Adios maestro... remembering Marquez, the man, the writer
By Patricia J. Pereira-Sethi
devika...@yahoo.com
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Colombian novelist
whose *One Hundred Years of Solitude* established
him as a colossus of 20th-century literature, died
on Maundy Thursday at his home in Mexico City. He
was 87. Sadly, it brought closure to his own
personal chronicle of a death foretold: a
courageous combat with lymphatic cancer diagnosed
fifteen years ago, followed by a darkening
dementia. His intense and sensitive eyes,
strikingly enhanced by bushy black eyebrows, no
longer exploded with the fire of youth; the power
of his pen had lost much of its punch. His
autobiography, *Living to tell the Tale*, which he
had planned as a three-part series, now stands
incomplete at Volume One.
The iconic writer, who won the Nobel in Literature in 1982,
was a conjurer of magic realism, flushing out the fantastic
in the familiar. In awarding him the prize in 1982, the
Swedish Academy of Letters said he had created "a cosmos in
which the human heart and the combined forces of history,
time and again, burst the bounds of chaos."
His masterpiece has been translated into more than 35
languages and has sold 60 million copies. It has been
described by critics as "the greatest revelation in the
Spanish language since Don Quixote of Cervantes."
In accepting the Nobel, Garcia Marquez remarked that "poets
and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels
are all creatures of that unbridled reality. We have had to
ask but little of imagination: our crucial problem has been a
lack of conventional means to render our lives believable."
* * *
I met Garcia Marquez through his friend Fidel. The Cuban
President asked me to join him and his guests at a barbecue
in the hills of Santiago the day after his marathon address
commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Revolution.
Gabo, as García Márquez was affectionately called,
was present with his elegant wife Mercedes. On the
ride back to Havana aboard the President's plane, I
sat with Gabo while he related his experiences in
India when he accompanied Fidel to the Nonaligned
Summit in New Delhi in 1983.
He told me that Prime Minister Indira Gandhi claimed to be a
great fan of his writings and had asked him to autograph
several copies of his books for her. He said he was both
surprised and pleased to learn that Indians, who had
themselves produced fantabulous epics in the Mahabharata and
Ramayana, enjoyed reading his novels.
He also interrogated me about journalism in the West and how
it functioned. For more than three decades the State
Department had denied him a visa to travel to the United
States: he had been a member of the Colombian Communist Party
in the 1950s, he continued to espouse left-wing causes and he
had an unduly close friendship with Fidel. Gabo attributed
American behaviour to what he termed "an almost pornographic
obsession with Castro." (The ban was rescinded in 1995 after
President Bill Clinton invited him to a private lunch on
Martha's Vineyard).
During my assignment for *Newsweek* in Cuba, I met
the diminutive and rotund author on more than one
occasion. He was a consummate party giver. He
threw several receptions at his home in Havana:
singer Harry Belafonte and actors Jack Lemmon,
Gregory Peck, Robert Redford were present, among
others. I attended the inauguration of the Escuela
Internacional de Cine y TV (EICTV) at San Antonio
de los Banos, a film school which Gabo helped fund
and guide. It allowed impoverished and talented
students from developing nations to train gratis
for two years in the art of movie making, from
script writing to directing and acting (there were
three students from India the first year).
Mercedes and Gabo came to lunch as well: they especially
enjoyed desi vegetarian dishes, sending their cook over to
learn a few recipes. Always immaculately dressed in two-tone
ensembles, with matching cravat and handkerchief, snappy
white and black shoes, a black Movado watch on his wrist, a
rakish Panama hat on his head, he appeared to be compensating
for the days when money was scarce and his mother criticised
him for looking like a beggar.
Mercedes told me about Gabo's great sense of discipline: he
wrote daily from 8 in the morning to 2 in the afternoon. But
he had to have dinner guests every evening, she said, so he
could relax and unwind over several glasses of his favourite
whisky on ice.
His mind withered if he did not indulge in stimulating
conversations daily, he invariably gathered new ideas from
such repartee. Gabo enjoyed good food and wine, cigars and
cognac, chocolates and cheesecakes, complaining petulantly
about his endless battle with the bulge. In complete
contrast to his youth when he was emaciated and scrawny for
want of cash: he locked himself up in a garret to complete
*One Hundred Years of Solitude* with six packs of cheap
cigarettes a day for company.
Gabo was fanatical about facts, and since Fidel Castro shares
a similar bent, Gabo would show his first drafts to the Cuban
President to corroborate logic and details. He told me that
Fidel, expert sailor and fisherman that he is, picked up
several nautical errors in Gabo's *Story of a Shipwrecked
Sailor*, the tale of a seaman lost on a life raft for ten
days.
"When I finish a book, I don’t write for a while," he said in
course of a conversation. "Then I learn how to do it all
over again. The arm goes cold; there's a learning process
you have to go through before you rediscover the warmth that
wafts over you when you are writing."
He also worried incessantly about whether translations were
capable of effectively communicating the intent and depth of
his words in Spanish. To prove his point, he gifted me two
versions of *Love in the Time of Cholera* and told me to
check that out. He autographed the Spanish version with the
comment that he was giving me the book in order to improve my
language skills. He further told me how he preferred to hold
back the publishing dates until one of his two favourite
translators, Gregory Rabassa and Edith Grossman, was free to
work on the translation.
Most important he taught me that you could read the
works of every great author -- Hemingway, Faulkner,
Twain and Melville to Dickens, Tolstoy, Proust and
Kafka -- which he did as a young man, "but you must
develop your own style to succeed. Never imitate
anyone or you will become commonplace," he added.
"Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry.
With both you are working with reality, a material
just as hard as wood."
His novels strain with similar brilliance, a testament to his
cosmic talent and capacity to weave words together. "Nobody
deserves your tears, but whoever deserves them will not make
you cry." "No medicine cures what happiness cannot." "The
problem with marriage is that it ends every night after
making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before
breakfast... the most important thing in a good marriage is
not happiness, but stability." "What matters in life is not
what happens to you but what you remember and how you
remember it." "Human beings are not born once and for all on
the day their mothers give birth to them: life obliges them
over and over again to give birth to themselves."
"It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they
grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams."
"I don't believe in God, but I'm afraid of Him. If God
hadn't rested on Sunday, He would have had time to complete
the world." "Fiction was invented the day Jonas arrived home
and told his wife that he was three days late because he had
been swallowed by a whale." "A person doesn't die when he
should, but when he can."
As one Latin American editorial eulogised him:
"Physically, we may have lost a titanic
intellectual but his novels have emblazoned his
immortality on our world. Goodbye dear friend.
May you rest in peace, knowing that you have left
your soul in words for us forever."
--
Patricia J Pereira-Sethi is former UN Bureau chief,
*Newsweek* magazine. She is now based in Goa.