Gabriel Garcia Marquez did not die today.
Instead, it was his illegitimate grand nephew, Gabriel Garcia Garcia Marquez, who was eerily like him, except where the one was merely careless, the other was cruel — or is it the other way around, in the end?
Marquez (the other one), who was born at some point when the sky wept and was simultaneously full of turtledoves doing something unusual, spoke three languages by the time he was eleven days old, and had the penis of a forty-year-old gypsy. Nobody was sure what to do about this, but the nuns thought it was hilarious.
His wet nurse, a jungle woman, used to pass the steamy hours cracking nuts with her toes and teaching him mystical acrostics, until his overbearing father caught wind of it and sent the tyke off to the village priest to be instructed in Latin, brutality, and alchemy; but somehow, at age fifteen, he came home instead a man, a man in sweltering pants who knew how to dance in a way that made women’s hair grow long and savage at the mere sight of him.
Only one woman was immune to his charms, and this made him hunger after her with an unreasoning hunger. He thought only of her, in and out of days, through through night and day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year to where the wild things are, and also a shitload of prostitutes and barely pubescent girls that he banged and sometimes even loved, but honest to goodness, the whole time, he was only thinking of her. Those sweltering pants.
On the day he didn’t die, the crows wept. The tobacco leaves shivered in the windless field. The bells tolled at midnight, and no one knew why, but when they tolled, they smelled like jasmine. Ai, did they smell like jasmine. The woman smelled it through her veil, and she knew it was time to open that letter at last. A letter more stamp than envelope, having travelled swelteringly around six continents and back in search of her, who was living in his woodshed the whole time.
For she! She was that jungle woman. And now he had been dead, and it was too late, and had been for some time.
If he had died on this day, the children, all of whom were named “Gabo” or “Marky Mark” would have playfully mutilated his once powerful now impotent corpse. Instead, he died back in 2014, but people on Facebook think it just happened and are sad about it all over again. Which is just how he would have wanted it.
Marquez and his illegitimate grand nephew Marquez are survived by their mutual half-brother, who has the same name, but a different mustache.
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Garbriel Garcia Marquez photo by Ver en vivo En Directo via Flickr (Creative Commons)
write a novel Simcha! Or short stories! Or poetry….PLEASSSSEEEE. Thanks
I saw someone robbed at knife point in a nice part of Cartagena and the cops then beat him to death with motorcycle helmets.
And really, to be fair, Colombians *are* a different kind of human. They actually think the way the old dude wrote. It’s almost not an exaggeration. At the last judgement nobody will say, “these were simple folk.” I guess that’s what you get when a bunch of conquistadors collide with headhunters and African slaves.
Weird sh*t happens there. We’re not accustomed to it because our country was settled by a bunch of stiff-upper-lipped Europeans. I wouldn’t want to trade necessarily, but I do envy some of that lust for life. They definitely see their lives with about 18 more shades of color and dimension. It’s very exhausting.
Here’s a brief example:
A bunch of my husband’s relatives died terrible, odd deaths. One of them died on her seventh birthday because her taffeta birthday frock caught on fire while she was blowing out the candles on her cake. Her little brother died almost instantly when a Pharmacist administered a drug with a needle that had an air bubble in it. Another aunt died because she bought some kind of snake-oil-diet-elixir which paralyzed her from the waist down. Soon after, she was mowed down by a truck while crossing a street in her wheel chair. (and yes, a visit to a Bruja is more normal to them than you would think possible). Another aunt was shot in the head in Bogota’s “Palace of Justice” by communist Guerrillas. My husband’s maternal grandfather, an engineer and man of honor and prestige, died a slow lingering death because a surgeon left little scissors in his belly after he removed his appendix. His wife, a grand matriarch who never cooked a single meal or drove a car was wealthy but notoriously thrifty with her time and money. My husband had only one conversation with her in his life. She made scheduled appointments for tea with her vast sea of progeny. Being one of fifty cousins, with 12 aunts and uncles on one side meant he only got to have one appointment before he moved to Ecuador where his father built oil pipelines, refineries, bridges and sewer systems–many in the jungle. (That’s where I personally met a monkey in the little mining town of “Lago Agrio” leaning up against a post smoking a cigarette. I am, not. lying.) The town is known for it’s brothels stocked with toothless prostitutes. They are toothless by choice because this fetches them a higher price.
I will not discuss the details.
My husband’s paternal grandfather, also an engineer, came from a family of politicians. He was six foot two and married to a tiny little woman who was four foot-something and a quarter black (we did our DNA test! (And yes, my dear Colombian is also British and Irish, American Indian, Western European (more than me!), Greek/Italian and even Eastern European Jewish and a whole lot of Iberian.
–It’s a nearly scandalous tapestry of a whole lot of people up to a whole lot of things.
YES!
I read a few lines of this to my indignant Colombian, who drew himself up, with eyes blazing like righteous Empanadas.
“Do you not see what thees woman is DOING?” He demanded.
If it was a question, there was no time sacrificed to an answer because his arms were spread wide like the eagle preparing to devour the injured, suckling Capybara.
“No man has written with such grace, and layers, and layers and layers of poetry!
–Infusing mere words with profound meaning and masterful rhythm! The others–IMITATORS! Every one of them! –Simulating his genius, attempting the unattainable! Grasping futilely at his otherworldly command of the language! The English language is not CAPABLE of infusing the subtleties of the SPANISH LANGUAGE. His. books. cannot. be. translated. into. English.”
With that, he sniffed righteously, turning back to the clicking of his keyboard, his back still stiff with honor tinged with contempt.
I guess I’m a philistine since I had to look him up. Then I thought, “Oh, I read ‘Love in the Time of Cholera'” and then realized that that was “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.”
From your bit here, I can’t tell whether I should read him or not. Also, have you run across Magic Realism Bot on Twitter?
Hee!