They said that your brother read to you, you spent the afternoon in your backyard, listening to your own stories without leaving Macondo , smiling from your own tenderness . They said you remembered the Colonel, the Buendía, Florentino declaring love to Fermina . They said your face lit up when Mercedes passed and you flirted with her.
Not only of memories is memory made. Back in the eighties, Havana enjoyed watching as you appeared in the Plaza Vieja, or the silhouette of a car, heading west on the Malecon. You knew how to be one of us and life was not the same; you taught us that cinema and literature could breathe.
Your world became ours. Latin America was never so close, we never better understood than in your artwork, all made of memories, impossible realities, to emphatic and incredible truths. Time could never be described in better shape, the time of a home, a landscape, a river on which a boat goes up and down with two lovers delivered to their kiss.
Until now we knew where you were, far, in your world of memories and rested in the space of the enlightened. You were with us, your way, watching the reading again and again, and some more, your books.
It hurts when writing is what is missing, if the shape of reading will never be the same and what we are is so fragile that imaging you in past is as absurd as absurd is the certainty of your absence.
Reality is not job for writers. Maybe that’s why you decided to get lost in the oblivion of the wise that already they will know live forever. You cannot look at the world with such intensity, with such brilliance, and know give it away with the cunning and malice of the simple wise, the poor, without risking their lives in each letter. And you did it. Today the world is a little emptier. Until yesterday I believed in the miracle of your next novel, your thrilling interviews, and your surgeon journalism.
Forgetting is a way of knowing. This world leaves us too much death for so little life as you knew. But you are wise, and this forgetfulness as consistent with your work has helped you to stay forever walking the streets of my Havana, writing in your Colombia, in the mystery of divine DF or in the divine memory of your sad whores.
Author
Jorge de Armas
