Drunk on Marquez
I’m reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ collected short stories, which I’ve been doing sporadically since the first I read in college – “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” – grabbed hold of my imagination and made me desperate for more. My slow pace is mainly because I’m a lazy slug with the attention span of a bluegill; I like to tell myself, though, that I’m pacing myself, terribly afraid that I will run out of new Marquez stories to read before I run out of days to live. What, then, would I have to look forward to?
To read Marquez is to realize that life is beautiful precisely because life is a bloody mess. He explores the culture of Latin America, full of poverty, political revolutions, war and Catholicism, and introduces us to characters heavily influenced by all those forces yet thankful for each breath and fully able to see beauty amid squalor. We see the big world on a human scale, meeting the wives of political scoundrels, the mothers of thieves, priests’ maids and, of course, the political scoundrels, the thieves and the priests themselves.
Here’s his introduction to the widow of Jose Montiel, a political scoundrel, in “Montiel’s Widow:”
“She was sincere, that fragile woman, lacerated by superstition, married at twenty by her parents’ will to the only suitor they had allowed her to see at less than thirty feet; she had never been in direct contact with reality. Three days after they took her husband’s body out of the house, she understood through her tears that she ought to pull herself together, but she could not find the direction of her new life. She had to begin at the beginning.”
And here’s his introduction to a political crony and escaped prisoner, Nelson Farina, in “Death Constant Beyond Love:”
“For the first time in twelve years, Nelson Farina didn’t go to greet the senator. He listened to the speech from his hammock amidst the remains of his siesta, under the cool bower of a house of unplaned boards which he had built with the same pharmacist’s hands with which he had drawn and quartered his first wife. He had escaped from Devil’s Island and appeared in Rosal del Virrey on a ship loaded with innocent macaws, with a beautiful and blasphemous black woman he had found in Paramaribo and by whom he had a daughter. The woman died of natural causes a short while later and she didn’t suffer the fate of the other, whose pieces had fertilized her own cauliflower patch, but was buried whole and with her Dutch name in the local cemetery. The daughter had inherited her color and her figure along with her father’s yellow and astonished eyes, and he had good reason to imagine that he was rearing the most beautiful woman in the world.”
One of the more inspiring parts of grad school, for me, was the speech given to us at graduation by Pete Hammil (sp?), an old-school New York journalist, master storyteller and recovering alcoholic. During his speech, in which he implored us to report in the spirit of Don Quixote, he said, “When I think I’m pretty good, I just read some Faulkner.” For me, if I ever start to harbor delusions that I know how to write, I just read Marquez.
