Gabriel Garcìa Màrquez
Cent'Anni Di Solitudine

“Tell them you don’t die when you must, you die when you can”

I don’t remember the words exactly, but that’s more or less what Colonel Aureliano Buendía said to his mother when she informed him of the bad omen brought by his father’s spirit, who had come to learn of his latest initiative.

The line stuck in my head because I got the impression that the colonel saw death as a release, although I’m not so sure it’s the right interpretation. It’s just one of the many confused reflections on death that came to my mind while rereading the book during a time when a few little things happened that led me to these thoughts. And so that’s what it’s about: not a review, not the usual funny takes inspired by a work that I make in reviews, nothing remotely cheerful, just a bit of confused incoherent musings on death.

My roots run deep in a small village in the Asti region that not too long ago was full of life, especially in summer, and it took just under 20 years to erase any trace of dozens of families who lived there for generations. A few tombstones and some bones are all that’s left. Life has moved elsewhere.

I found myself walking its streets often these months. There are few people living there now, the landscape mostly consists of ghost houses with utopian “for sale” signs attached, giving the idea that they are made of cardboard as the prolonged abandonment has made them fragile, able to be swept away by the force of the wind like what happens in Macondo.

The memories of faces I could meet with my gaze on those streets as a boy, and the voices and sounds I could hear then, all things I took for granted as immutable characteristics of that place, overlap with today’s eeriness and I can’t help but think of all that life reduced to dust, to nothing.

What is the past? What has passed ultimately may not have even existed, it was all an enormous deception, in reality, something else happened that we don’t remember. Convincing oneself that something else entirely happened makes as much sense as remembering what really happened. Really for whom? For those who have memories that justify using that adverb, once they’re gone the meaning of “really” will go too, since we’re referring, anyway, to nothing, to dust.

The three thousand dead on the never-ending train, the banana company workers, the banana company itself, Colonel Aureliano Buendia are a legend, none of this ever happened.

Alright capish-people, it’s likely that this isn’t the point of the forgotten events described by the author, but this is what the book conveyed to me: the nonsense and inconsistency of existence. This rushing to birth and raise children who sooner or later won’t be there anymore, and before leaving, will in turn rush to do the same, and so on for generations until reaching human beings toward whom we can now feel no affection because we will never know them, and those who preceded them will leave nothing but dust. I hope no one is offended by these words, I have no children but I have the utmost respect for parental love. These are just reflections.

In the first part of the book, the author struggles to layer life on top of life almost compulsively, stringing together in bulimic pages with few dialogues and no titles, generations of Aurelianos and José Arcadios like beads of a necklace, with their genetic defects, powerful male genitals destined to satisfy insatiable female bellies, itchy and incestuous affections towards aunts. Even the use of the surreal, a gut-level surreal, of flesh blood and sweat, South American, seemed to me aimed at making existence more pantagruelian, stultifying the reader to finally let them savor how illusory it all is.

War and death arrive, but life is still stronger, the 17 Aurelianos, and then more death. Aureliano Segundo’s revelries filling the house with matters to be dealt with, and the fertility of his farms, seem to have the upper hand over the nothingness that instead begins to gain ground. And in the end, only dust.

During this time, the loss of a dear friend, a gentle soul, to a terrible illness left me dry as desert sand.

I find myself thinking selfishly about the fragments of my life attached to that person she carried with her. Lost forever. It’s no longer possible for me to go back to relive them mentally with the bittersweet hint of melancholy. I can go back, yes, but only to respectfully contemplate a simulacrum, yes a simulacrum I would say, a simulacrum of something that no longer exists. I am a statue of salt crumbling gradually into nothing. Dust.

The genre is somewhat thrown together haphazardly, not having found an option that suits me.

Tristezzaaaaaaa, per favore vai viaaaa ...