For years now, perhaps since he died, Lugar común la muerte travels with me, the book by Tomás Eloy Martínez, whom I never forget. I think of it at many moments in life; it has never left my memory. I remember it especially, and that is why that book goes with me, at the moment we received in Cartagena de Indias the news of Tomás’s death on that last day of January 2010.
We were afraid it would happen, time was saying it would soon occur, until the bad news arrived. We were at Gabriel García Márquez’s house. No one spoke louder than another. Gabo looked at the skies, for he no longer knew what lay inside proper names. I could not forget, in all that time, a trip of Tomás to Mexico, how he knew how to laugh, how he lived with others the joy of being alive, Tomás Eloy. With him was his son Ezequiel, what a flawless pair, what joy.
In that moment, in Cartagena de Indias, memory was the crown of the life of those of us who loved him. When news of his death became known I saw him there in that place in Mexico, laughing, him and his son. When friends die, parents die, those who no longer return except in memory, we are left with the anger of not hearing them any longer. In that moment in Cartagena, what he would want to tell me came to me again and again. And he laughed. Gabo’s house did not know it, but there he was laughing again, too, Tomás Eloy Martínez.
We were there—the wife of Gabo, Mercedes, Spanish and Colombian friends. We were receiving information about the sad news of the author of La novela de Perón. Gabo, that great journalist, no longer understood the feeling of the news that happened; he had lost irrevocably the memory that had given so much to the history of literature.
So Gabo watched us speak as if he were receiving news from another world. A year earlier Gabo had shown his study to Juan Luis Cebrián, to other friends. I noticed that on his desk there was only some kind of table bare of anything, and he showed it to us as those who no longer know who they are and, above all, who they were. I saw Gabo then saying without a voice, as if coming from another world to say, in an instant, that he was leaving.
Perhaps that moment, in which Gabo was the least forewarned about Tomás’s death, is the one that has never escaped those moments of my life. One is always leaving, and that seemed to be a moment, I think, in which I was learning what the word goodbye would mean when you no longer know what it signifies. And perhaps that is why this book, Lugar común la muerte, continues to be the signal of how death comes into the life of homes. And this one arrived precisely when we were visiting Gabo, who no longer knew.
Now I see on my Tenerife desk that index: Perón dreams of death, Saint-John Perse disappears, Lunar phases of Macedonio, The Borges Version, Arguments of life and death… I keep it like gold. Tomás Eloy is speaking in his house, and how strange it seems that he no longer has a voice when you look at him looking, and now it would be so important for him to return…
I hear him recount what he heard Borges say about Lugones: “What a strange Lugones: a man so intelligent, with so many readings, how did he never think of writing a book?.” Both, Tomás said, had a habit of solitude, but Macedonio’s mind was more hospitable.”
Parece de Tomás esto que él subraya como si hubiera sido dicho por
That moment in which we all learned that the author of Santa Evita had died sits, then, in the throat of my memories, as if Tomás himself were calling me in dreams to warn me that he would no longer be with us for ages. I saw him one noon in Madrid, when I already knew he would have no more loves; he was sad, listening to us speak as if we were leaving, but I never felt, not even when he did not speak, that he was not with us when he felt like crying.
On that sunset to which I yielded as the one who could make calls or run errands, it was Gabo who did things with more energy. Absent from the deaths, the author of Cien años de soledad was offering to be useful in the darkness of life. He offered to Mercedes to fetch or carry water or anything that would ease the suffocation of the moment.
Gabo didn’t know what was happening, but thanks to him the words passed, until he created that moment of memory of Tomás. Without being near or far, he was the one who drew him with more calm, with the louder voice, looking at us. I felt at that moment, as we were saying goodbye to the author of Lugar común la muerte, that, just as with Gabo, there was an entire world feeling the same strangeness, the same desolation, but one could only say it in silence.
That immortal figure in the history of literature sat again in the seat that belonged to him, which happened to be the one next to mine. In one of those comings and goings Gabo had leaned to my ear to ask me about what kept us talking.
I had also whispered to him, into the ear, the sad nature of the news, which at that moment would already be spoken of everywhere. I told Gabo: “Tomás Eloy Martínez, your friend, has died.” I have told this many times: at that moment Gabo fell into a somber silence until he broke with something that would always be, whenever news so sad as this occurred, his way of condolence: “He was the best of all of us.”
Tomás had died in Buenos Aires, after a long and terrible illness; his knowledge of life did not break, but he ceased to speak. In his house, where I saw him some time before, he did what he could to draw others (his friends, his children) to the words that he could not say.
He was always there, in those voiceless times, ready to turn words into a possibility. In those times he remembered his way of telling stories (about his country, about Rio de Janeiro, about any place in the worlds he traversed, about the Venezuelan exile, for example…).
One of the moments when memory does not keep him in life, exactly, comes all the time, as if he were sitting with us again in the house of Gabriel García Márquez, his friend, in Cartagena de Indias, the afternoon when the news burst like a lightning bolt that Tomás had died in Buenos Aires, after a long illness that he faced with a fortitude his children amplified.
On that occasion Gabo was already without memory and asked about the nature of our pain. At first he was a witness to our astonishment before the death of Tomás Eloy Martínez; at a certain moment Gabo, that man without memory, stood up from his chair, which was beside mine, and offered Mercedes, his wife, to help with anything while we talked about whatever, which in this case was the sadness of Tomás’s death, one of his great friends.
So for some time I carry with me those texts, as if he, Tomás, could speak to me from beyond what is his but through his books, the most fertile memory of his past. He left a note that what he wrote in Lugar común la muerte might end up becoming a matter of forgetting. That book has never left me, and today, for reasons not entirely clear, has lived with me as if it were there waiting for the sea of the island to bring me once more the laughter of Tomás Eloy celebrating, as on a day in Mexico that also included his son Ezequiel.
I was watching them laugh.
—————————