Friday, at 3.50am I woke up and read the text message from a
friend (a fellow Gabo admirer) that Gabriel Garcia Marquez was no more. To say
that it plunged me into untold misery would be too dramatic, to say that I was
shocked would be lying, for I expected the news of his death anytime, since
last year, when I realised that the mind that created all those magical places
for me to dwell in was lost in dementia. I always wished I could enter there
and float in the vast expanse of his imagination, as naked as a new born child,
amidst those memories of childhood demons, adolescent love and nights smelling
of flowers that once wilted in the noon. To love someone, what does one need to
know, what does one need to feel? A connection, an intuition that spells
intimacy, and a willingness to love without expecting anything in return? If
that is so, then I was in love with Gabriel, the only difference being that Gabriel
gave me a lot in return- hope, sorrow, love, passion, and most of all, to
believe in the magic of the world around me. Through him, I lived in Macondo, Aracataca,
Madrid, Geneva, Cartagena. Through him, I met the countless men and women who
have stayed with me to love me, pray with me, terrorise me, but never to leave
me. I understood that people everywhere are the same, and that reality is a
boring place to live in. Through him, I fancied myself as Remedios, the one who
flew into the sky. Ever since the first time I read One Hundred Years of Solitude to Story of the Ship-Wrecked Sailor, and all the rest in between, Gabriel
never failed to charm. The book that revealed Gabriel to me the most was Living to Tell the Tale (thank you,
Sunil), in which Gabriel writes about his childhood and early adult life and it
becomes clear where he gets it all from. The eternal optimism and the courage
with which he faced his life, his ability to comprehend the emotions of the
multitude of people whom he met daily, all reflects in his characters- all the
more reason why Gabriel and his works can be anyone. The jealous passions, the
obstinacy of lost love, the death-like desire for vengeance, the discovery of
treasures where others saw only dull monotony, these are Gabriel’s revelations
to the ones who could their eyes into his world. And if he did that, then
wasn’t he indeed the lover of me and a million other souls? Then doesn’t he
cease to be Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Gabo, and become to me, my Gabito (I do
not remember where I read this name or who first called him that way, but that
is the only way I could think of him for a long time.)?
Then that night, when I heard of his death, what I felt was
not shock, nor misery, but an energy that kept me awake for the rest of the
night; thinking of all the times he wrapped me in his stories and made me a
part of them, I held him close and smelled him as a woman would her lost lover,
gone but never forgotten.
Gabito, I love you.
Good one, moolu.
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