The Nobel
Prize winning Gabriel García Márquez who died on 17 April 2014 was considered by
many as the greatest author ever in the Spanish language.
Of all these character,
Marquez’s elderly ones are more intriguing. They reveal certain internal
resources which they have been scarcely aware of or unable to use before,
bringing out how it sometimes feels to be old in a world that scarcely notices
the challenges of ageing.
She has already
purchased her burial plot and taught her dog, Noi, who sheds real tears, to
locate the plot in the cemetery and cry over her grave. She has also made
arrangements for a neighbour girl to take care of Noi after she dies and to let
him loose on Sundays so that the dog can visit her tomb. Then, one rainy night,
she and Noi hitch a ride home to get out of the weather. Maria trembles in the
darkness, certain that the mysterious man who gives them a lift and asks to
come up to her apartment is the Grim Reaper himself. Then, to her delight and
surprise, she realizes that the stranger is actually a customer.
However, this
story’s potency lies in the intricate ways in which the author gradually builds
up towards the fact that; Maria does not know herself anymore because of her
calendar age.
When she hitches a ride in the car of an unknown young man, in a raging
storm at first, ‘she felt she was in a strange, happy world where
everything was arranged ahead of time.’(p112) This is the magical moment for
her because it pushes her away from brooding over old age and subsequent
death. She even feels ‘intimidated by
her misery.’(p112) and on looking closely at the man, ‘she thought he was not
handsome but had a distinctive kind of charm.’ (p113) When the man furtively
looks at her ‘she felt ugly and pitiful.’ (p113) And ‘she regretted still being
alive at her age.’ (p113)
This means that she is, unknown to herself, still on the lookout for a
man. When the man decides to respect her and drive her right to her front door
instead of letting her off at the corner, she looks at him and sees ‘a male
stare that took her breath away.’ He asks profusely to come in and join her even
when she protests against it.(p113)And when he demonstrates his desire for her
by insisting on locking up the car and following her upstairs, for apparent
passionate sex, ‘she knew it had been worth waiting for so many years…’ (p115)
Bon Voyage, Mr. PresidentIn the opening short story to Strange Pilgrims, “Bon Voyage, Mr. President,” a deposed Latin American president is in Geneva for medical advice and treatment concerning a mysterious ailment. An ambulance driver, who happens to be a fellow countryman, takes his opportunity to ingratiate himself with the former leader, hoping to turn their friendship to his advantage. The ageing ex-president is not wealthy as thought, but destitute, and must be supported by his newfound acquaintances. Upon rescinding his ban on vice: drinking, eating red meat, smoking, eating shellfish and others, he finds happiness in friendship and being alive despite old age and being forced out of his country. Homero, the ambulance driver for the hospital in which the deposed president is being cured, has arranged with a funeral parlor to hawk its services to mortally ill patients and plans to sell the former politician a complete package, including embalming and repatriation.
He sat on a wooden
bench under the yellow leaves in the deserted park, contemplating the dusty
swans with both his hands resting on the silver handle of his cane, and
thinking about death. (p3)
The above lines
create an image of a very spent, lonely and tired person and from the onset; one
guesses correctly that this must be an old person in distress and regret. But
there remains, for a discerning reader; visible traces of a life of vigour,
careful self- cultivation, glory and plenty rioting from underneath this wreck:
He had the arrogant
mustache of a musketeer, abundant blue-black hair with romantic waves, a
harpist’s hands with the widower’s wedding band on his left finger and joyful
eyes. (p4)
Then the cruellest
sentence in this arrangement tries to supersede all that: ‘The years of glory
and power had been left behind forever, and now only the years of his death
remained.’ (p3) Beneath that, is even a crueller rendition of the plight of the
old man. He suffers from an insistently ‘devious’ pain whose position in his
body the doctors had not been able to locate in both Martinique and Geneva. As
they search for it very actively all over his body, they go to and fro almost
like officers after a criminal:
They looked for the
pain in his liver, his kidneys, his pancreas, his prostate, wherever it was
not. Until that bitter Thursday, when he had made an appointment… at the
neurology department with the least well-known of the many physicians who had
seen him… (p4)
And when they
locate it, it is as if the old man’s pain is a little devious animal, as
hideous as it is devious. It is described as a very active thing with a
youthful life of its own:
“Your pain is
here,” he (neurologist) said…His pain was improbable and devious, and sometimes
seemed to be in his ribs on the right side and sometimes in his lower abdomen,
and often it caught him off guard with a sudden stab in the groin. The doctor
listened to him without moving, the pointer motionless on the screen. “That is
why it eluded us for so long,” he said. (p5)
One has a feeling that the old man is crushed.
At his advanced age; he cannot undergo an operation whose results are certain,
cannot afford the fees for the operation all by himself, needs moral support
which he cannot mobilise at this point since he is a stranger in Geneva and
worse, a deposed president.
But the old man is
intrinsically as indefatigable and daring too as the pain in his body. In the
face of apparent doom, his whole life drama replays and recreates itself,
seemingly pathetic but blest with an uncanny ability to ride through a storm.
He becomes more
resolute, returning to the coffee that health experts had previously managed to
turn him away from. He becomes realistic, agreeing to acquaint with Homerio and
wife and eventually allowing them, when the worst comes to hand over jewellery
and personal accessories to them to sell in order to raise his operation fees.
He strips himself for the sake of his health. Homerio’s wife, Lazara eventually
realises that the old man is still the graceful, cunning and calculating
politician of old in spite of his ill health, old age, loneliness and poverty.
To her, he gradually moves from being a ‘What a son of a bitch!’(p24) to being,
as she admits to herself:
…one of the best
looking men she had ever seen, with a devastating seductive power and a stud’s
virility. “Just as he is now, old and fucked up, he must still be a tiger in
bed,” she said. (p24)
After his five
hours of surgery and subsequent recuperation, the old man demonstrates a
vicious desire for life and it is said that: ‘He devoted himself to his
rehabilitative exercises with military rigor…’ (p33) He struggles on until his return to the
Caribbean and subsequently moots a return to politics. Lazara’s description of
him is one of the most memorable sentences in this story: ‘My God! Nothing can
kill that man.’ (p34)
The seeming defeat
of Maria and that of the deposed President is only an initial outlook. The
resilience and constant retreat to the drawing board that you see in the
elderly characters in these stories, confirm in a huge way the views that-
just as sure as there is loss, there are gains that come with old age. These
gains have been largely overlooked. Although young people, for example, may be
fast and agile, they lack experience and knowledge. Their futures demand that
they focus on their own personal advancement more than that of the broader
community. The impressive physical resilience in the young is not matched by the
emotional resilience, which comes much later in life. Marquez’s elders crawl
towards a certain destination and new pedestals
+(By Memory Chirere)
