STRANGE AND MAGICAL
In this collection, readers inhabit strange spaces and cross the world of the living into the world of the dead, slipping out of the human form to live life inside the body of a cat.
During my recent east coast trip, I was gifted this book by the late Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez. While I hadn’t planned to read the collection just yet, it became the perfect companion during the week of our return for the wrong reasons.
We landed after a much delayed flight and on the day of our return, we found ourselves clearing our throats constantly. We were feverish and listless. Our son who had seen us off the previous day reported midday that he was down with Covid. Hours later my husband and I tested positive.
Between the fever, the strange slightly disembodied state of being and the incessant body ache, García Márquez’s COLLECTED STORIES became the perfect companion for a febrile self from which life had temporarily ebbed. Several stories in the collection were about that liminal space we find ourselves in sometimes, when we’re hovering between the world of the living and the world of the dead. I’ve always felt that illness, however major or minor, wrests us from the business of life and pushes us towards a momentary peek at death. After reading several stories in this work, I will say that García Márquez is a whiz at taking us there, too.
I’m an ardent devotee of García Márquez and I will even read his Safeway grocery list with a sense of urgency. Hence a reader may find me a little biased. Marquez always seems to be able to drag me kicking and screaming into a world that I shudder to enter.
I didn’t want to read some of the stories in this book and I’m yet to finish all because I’ve been unable to concentrate for too long this week. I was revolted even as I began some but I read on, fascinated, knowing that I was being led to a place from which the view was going to be both refreshing and panoramic.
She was tired of being the center of attention, of being under siege from men’s long looks. At night, when insomnia stuck its pins into her eyes, she would have liked to be an ordinary woman, without any special attraction. Everything was hostile to her without the four walls of her room. Desperate, she could feel her vigil spreading out under her skin, into her head, pushing the fever upward toward the roots of her hair. It was as if her arteries had become peopled with hot, tiny insects who, with the approach of dawn, awoke each day and ran about on their moving feet in a rending subcutaneous adventure in that place of clay made fruit where her anatomical beauty had found its home.
That’s how, without ever being told who exactly the protagonist was, I realized that she, Eva, was now a spirit that had left the body of a beautiful woman and had subsequently entered the body of a cat, slipping through the fur and the whiskers into a whole different place with new possibilities.
García Márquez is celebrated for employing magical realism, for looking at the world with fresh new eyes. In Eva Is Inside Her Cat,, it’s clear that everything has a much deeper meaning than what just appears on the surface. Was García Márquez implying that women were inherently unhappy with the physical qualities they had been given at birth? Perhaps. Eva is clearly a beautiful woman whose insomnia drives her insane. When she dies—and how she died is unclear although there are hints about suicide—her spirit hovers in the home.
She felt changed into an abstract, imaginary being. She felt changed into an incorporeal woman, something like her suddenly having entered that high and unknown world of pure spirits.
In the end we are transported back some 3000 years, making us wonder if the author is merely reminding us that woman have felt thus since the beginning of time. They are preoccupied with the notion of physical beauty (or the lack of it) and it ultimately becomes a burden their mind cannot bear.
I’m never sure I’ve grasped all the facets to his stories and I often find myself rereading them to see if there are details I missed on a first iteration. In the story about Eva, the symbolism of the desire to eat an orange eludes me even after several reads.
In García Márquez’s work, I know I can always look forward to the audacious energy he packs into what should be the most solemn of stories. Big Mama’s Funeral, despite the title, is, literally, a riot. Consider Big Mama’s birthday celebrations while she lived and it becomes clear why the city, the nation, the Pope, and, heck, the world itself, participated in her funeral. Let’s take a look at her birthday fanfare.
The festivities used to begin two days before and end on the day of her birthday, with the thunder of fireworks and a family dance at Big Mama’s house. The carefully chosen guests and the legitimate members of the family, generously attended by the bastard line, danced to the beat of the old pianola which was equipped with the rolls most in style. Big Mama presided over the party from the rear of the hall in an easy chair with linen pillows, imparting discreet instructions with her right hand, adorned with rings on all her fingers. On that night the coming year’s marriages were arranged, at times in complicity with the lovers, but almost always counseled by her own inspiration. To finish off the jubilation, Big Mama went out to the balcony which was decorated with diadems and Japanese lanterns, and threw coins to the crowd.
Every page of García Márquez serves up sarcasm, snark, mysticism, surrealism, history, and humor in long loopy sentences that often make me a little winded. Reading him is tantamount to being buried in an avalanche of ideas in which the words melt away even as I savor them.
The stories in this collection are spread over 337 pages. When the stories I managed to read rolled to their end, I’d gleaned something about what it means to be sentient in the world of mortals—about how some of us are marked to be larger than life, how it’s only in the dying we sense the beauty of a life well-lived, how the love of a blind grandmother can morph into x-ray vision through a bathroom door, and how a gnarly toothache can build an invisible bridge between a penurious dentist and a ruthless mayor of his town.