Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the transmutation of memory

In the world of García Márquez, reality and magic are inseparable, and coincidences are not a matter of chance but of fate. The characters of the Nobel Prize Literature winner in 1982 are victims of destiny, they are chained to their time, beings who wander through life with their eyes always looking to the past, longing for moments that were petrified as mere possibilities. García Márquez did not write about heroes that triumph in the face of adversity; he wrote about the ordinary man and the little things of everyday life. But for him, nothing was too small or insignificant, and that’s where the greatness of his stories is hidden.

The Colombian never started at the beginning, for him a simple “once upon a time…” is not enough to give life to his characters. For Gabo, a good story is one that begins at the end, and which is the most impassable ending of all but death? Although most of his stories circulate through the sphere of death, loneliness, restlessness, and sadness; in all of them, death is transformed into life. He finds between the tears small loopholes where joy and hope discover a corner to inhabit. That corner is the memory, memory not as a record of events but as a mechanism that frees us from time, a tool that allows men to recreate themselves time and time again.

That is why García Márquez works’ build from retrospection, his characters transpire melancholy and their homes reek of suffocating memories. Both his stories and his novels tell stories of things no longer present but that continues to torment. Juvenal Urbino will forever remember the love of Fermina Daza when she smells the bitter almonds. Aureliano Buendía will not forget the day he first met the ice. What is Macondo but the memories of its inhabitants written in indecipherable scrolls that will be erased by the wind? The beauty of memory is that it does not need to be written in a book to stay. For many, memories are inseparable from time, but for García Márquez memories are always recreated, and therefore always alive, always present.

Perhaps this is the reason why the interest of the readers has remained alive for so long because while reading his stories we realize how amazing every day can be. To read his words is to remember that every day we can relive the innocence of the first times, that all the objects around us help keep in our memory all the moments that we have ever lived. In the world of Gabo, in Macondo, everything is a memory, everything is immortality. It is only through the certainty of uncertainty that man reaches catharsis and manages to understand his own death. It is only at the end that the beginning becomes important.

Although the destiny of the Buendías was to die in oblivion, García Márquez will remain in the memory of a lineage of readers who grew bounded to hope, loved till death and were amazed by his words. The death of the writer is therefore only the beginning of the memory, each of the words he bequeathed the world will keep alive his endless memories. And it is possible not to remember the words or their stories or their characters, what is truly valuable –and which was proven during the tribute offered to the writer at the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City where thousands of people gathered to say their last goodbye– is that each one of his readers keeps some memory related to Gabo: the first time they read any of his books, walking through the streets of Pedregal expecting to see some flash of the writer, the confusion and overwhelm caused by the name Aureliano Buendía, and such a large etcetera as the number of his followers.

So what to think of the end of man, of the beloved husband, of the protective father. He who loved to explore memory spent his last years diminished by the loss of it, the lucidity that illuminated his works had abandoned him. Like his characters, he became elusive, even a bit ghostly, just a specter of the writer he once was. He ended up being a weak figure that walked between the always fresh yellow flowers that make his home happy, giving the world a chronicle of a death more than announced. I would like to think that García Márquez did not lose his memory, but in each of his words, he placed a little bit of him. His greatest job in life was to transform moments into memories because that way Gabo will never die but will forever live in our memory.