Oh Old Man

You, idol, mentor, father, legend, demi-god, THE reason why I delude myself into thinking that I can do what you do, God preserve you and the readers of your first autobiography, Living To Tell The Tale.


The exiled Pablo Neruda (right) with García Márquez in Paris. 1956.
Taken from Macondo.

I try to read you. Oh, I really, really try!

Short of clipping my eyes open and needling my feet, I keep reading this book, this inchoate book you'd written during the sunset of your life. But I always fall asleep after four or five pages - this, when some years ago, I was able to read Cien Anos De Soledad without pause, without food, without sleep for two straight days. Is it because you meander, or is it because you drop so many names that ring no bells for me, poets and generals long dead, obscure families and even more obscure artists? Could it also be because the pacing is slow, so slow that sometimes, for five to six pages at a time, there is no action - just stasis, the intense scrutiny of a room, a face, a name, or even what you'd had for lunch with Pablo Neruda 20 years ago (poached eggs and coffee, the sugar was rancid, and so were you)?

But that doesn't mean this first part of your three-book autobiography isn't a masterpiece.

Here, you show us your true Macondo, you confess to being afraid of telephones, and you boast about being able to memorize poems and stories at the drop of your cigar. Of course, you also tell us how you lost your virginity - you were 14, in a whorehouse, collecting money for your father's homeopathy practice, "dying little deaths" on top of a woman who was pretending to siesta. More importantly, it's your writerly advice we seek: you keep saying, read, read, read, because there's no other way to learn how to write but by dissecting the "secret carpentry" of stories.

I'm on page 290, and though I'm bone tired and there are other things I must do - work, chapters needing to be completed, a body to diminish with exercise, social obligations and pleasures, small, square attempts at love - I devote an hour to you Gabo, before I sleep, before I dream the dreams I know I must write.

194 more pages to go.