Upon hearing of the death of Gabriel
Garcia Marquez, I half expected the air next to me to shimmer as his
energy went through the ether visiting all of those who would gladly
give themselves as a conduit and home for his Muse, from whom he is
now free. But then I remembered my own foibles. The pettiness in
which I cling to things I probably shouldn't. The way that I allow
others and their opinions of me to dictate how I work and what I do,
or don't do, and the way I'm willing to fall upon the sacrificial
knife for nearly anyone or anything that comes along and challenges
the ADD way in which I work but don't. Why would a Muse like Her,
who has worked with the greatest of slaves to Her cause for all these
years want with a hack, unknown, and basically uneducated writer like
myself? Especially since I am so incredibly unaccomplished and
worthless on almost all accounts. I took a deep breath and cried at
the air that didn't shimmer and went around the yard looking for some
magic to realize, but there was none, just an owl feather stuck to a
yucca and a cracked, elongated rubber bouncy ball that bounced with
the greatest of wobbles the world has never seen. The cat, the one
that's not missing, likes to chase the ball, he can't bring it back,
it's too big for that, but he will wait for you to come and pick it
up and throw it again.
This land has no magic in it, in fact
it is a place where there can be nothing resembling magic or realism
here, it's more like a giant pile of energy where anything is
possible but nothing is, a surrealist landscape that promises and
delivers exactly what one chooses. When the end comes I've no doubt
it will still be here, doing its thing, but slightly different, but
not that different. It's funny to think about, but the ability of
this land to support human life is ancient and creaky, and yet of all
land I've seen just a few minor changes would wipe that ability away,
leaving only the craggy and thorny, the hardened and twisted and
odoriferous.
I wonder why I would want Marquez's
Muse anyway. What kind of sick taskmaster was she? What did she do
to and with him, to inspire such beauty from his pen? Did she
torture him at night in the form of some ancient love of whom he
never could speak? Did she scream like a siren a banshee wail across
the jungle and rivers like a tortured prisoner of war, while he
sought endlessly to find and rescue her? What did she do to make him
feel so much? Who would really want to feel that way? I am not a
poet or author on that level. This Muse, of all the Muses would be
too much for me to handle and yet, I still find myself wondering if
she is a vampire, a hydra, a sick friend who will die but hangs on to
the last moments of her life just to be visited by you. You know if
you visit her, she'll die straight away, she'll slip off into the
goodnight forever and you'll be left knowing that you killed her.
Who was she Gabriel?
I think she was a very young girl who
you took when you were too old and you felt weird about it, but not
weird enough to not take, and that she probably was old too, maybe
even at the same time in that way women like that have of being both
old and young, and maybe she wasn't young at all but old, and kind,
and sweet like butterscotch is sweet, but not like chocolate. I
think you probably had your way with her once or twice, maybe even a
few times, before you discovered the truth about muses and how
important it is to not give them anything they want, including and
especially sex. Maybe she was just the girl whose hair you pulled in
the play yard when you were a small brown skinned and black haired
boy with a mischievous glint and an unknowable urge to pull her hair,
and there was no real answer or reason, you just had to. You just
had to pull her hair, you just had to chase her around with a frog or
little snake, hoping to elicit some squeal from her, and that was the
beginning of love. It is all the beginning of love, for love is ever
beginning and never ending. That's what the wisest men say, who
knows if they are right or not, for love itself seems to often turn
into the conquering wyrm with gaping maw and venomous teeth,
preparing to clench around our necks and bite them off.
One time she was a bandit woman,
revolutionary and dusty, insane with an eye patch where she was
stabbed one day as the rag tag and broken remnants of the army came
through town expecting a complete victory, since it was such a small
town, just a mudhole on the side of the river, just a place of old
men and women and children since all the men of fighting age had long
gone to either fight for the army or resistance, mostly the
resistance, and the women had taken to working the banana plantations
and the fields, all the jobs the men did before they went to war, and
some of the women volunteered their services to the offices, to
helping the resistance or army organize, to work in communications to
expand their nets far beyond the current capabilities. But this
woman, she was there in the field the day the troops rolled in and
lined up all the old men, women and children and threatened them with
rifles and said things like “Tell us you love the greatest leader!”
and if they remained silent for too long the rifle was lowered and
the trigger tickled but not squeezed and the demand repeated, and if
still silence answered them, the trigger was squeezed and as the old
man or woman, flung back and to the ground with a new hole in his or
her head, right between the eyes, brains and blood splattered on the
ground behind and beneath them, the person next to them, spouse,
friend, brother or grandchild they may be was immediately asked the
same question. This would have continued until everyone was sorted
into either the camp of the dead or the camp of the loyal but she
appeared wearing a red and black cape, a hat and a mask, with a sword
and cut down the first of the killers with it, then pulled the
revolver from her belt and took care of six more. Before long others
helped and many old men and women, many children who saw their
grandmothers and grandfathers cut down by the soldiers' unfair guns
helped the strange woman in the costume and when the bayonet of the
empty gun of a young soldier who was only seventeen stabbed the left
eye, and he pulled it out, the flow of blood ran down the mask, he
looked into her face for the first time and saw who she was; the most
beautiful woman he'd ever seen, and as she crumpled, holding her hand
over her eye, brandishing the sword to cut him down for his awful
work on her, the whole of the scuffle stopped and he grabbed her very
sharp sword with his naked hand and let it cut him as he took it away
from her, and helped her away from the rest of them, the soldiers and
children and old people whose bodies littered the ground with their
broken fleshiness, and went with her to the pharmacy, apologizing the
whole way, “Senora I am so sorry, I did not know, please let me
help you, please,” and she did not resist him. In the pharmacy he
found antiseptic and aspirin, he wanted something stronger and knew
where there grew coca and as she sobbed for her loss, he asked her to
please stay still, wait there for him to come, and on his way out to
the coca field to bring her something better he was shot dead by one
of the children who saw him stab the woman in the eye. After many
hours she emerged from the pharmacy, a bandage over her ruined eye,
she had to do the work herself, and that night when she looked at all
the bodies in the pile, and finally found him, she decided that she
could never love a man as long as she lived, and her eyepatch became
as her chastity belt, her mind itself as strong as a steel trap, a
beam holding up the tallest building in the world, became a great
enforcer at her command and as each year was peeled away, she became
even stronger until, after all the fighting was over and the village
was returned to its state of relative peace, she became the leader
and stayed that way until she died many decades later.
Another time she was an aged madame, a
pimp of young girls who sat upon her fat and ate bananas and
chocolate all the day while her girls worked hard in the back rooms
of the too opulent house. One day she went to a shrine to pray to
the Virgin as she was plagued by gout, rheumatism, and a long dry,
rasping cough that would not abate or lighten. She was on her knees
in the black mourning weeds she always wore out, for her husband was
long dead, having fallen off a boat in the river and been eaten by a
crocodile ten years before, leaving her alone with two daughters she
believed to be ugly, who delighted all who knew them but her, when
the Virgin began to speak to her, its shadow cast upon the ground
before it at a different angle than the sun, and the shadow's lips
moved but not the statue itself. “You,” said the Virgin, “have
done well, now you must take your daughters and leave this town.”
“Why?” she asked, but the Virgin
was silent and spoke no more that day. For the next week she showed
up at the shrine every day in the morning and stayed until very late
at night, she stopped booking her daughters' affairs, and even
allowed them to leave the house. While she was at the shrine praying
to the virgin the daughters went to town for the first time in their
lives. It was true that most knew of Flora and Annabelle's work, but
having never seen them or met them unless they were paying customers
didn't really think much of it. There is a way in which the abstract
is forgivable even when it is atrocity, say some, and I doubt very
much that it is true. But the concrete vision of the girls twelve
and thirteen years of age, pretty, slight, underfed, obviously
overworked and having had very little kindness in their lives was too
much for the townspeople and on the seventh night a crowd met the
woman as she left the shrine of the silent Virgin.
“What have you done child?” she
asked Flora who remained as silent as death, as the unspeaking
virgin.
“I said what have you done?” this
time she asked Annabelle, who was just as silent as her sister.
“We have come for you, Madame, we
have come to take you away from here, to justice,” and with that
they grabbed her by the wrists and tied them up and drug her through
the streets, stumbling to the jail. A few days later, she swung on
the gallows and as she was ready to be knocked off the table where
she stood, she saw the Virgin in the crowd, sad eyed, head bowed,
look up at her and say, one last time “See, I told you to leave
town,” as she was pushed from the table and the world ended with
one incredible snap.
But there's more and more and more and
more and more. Gabriel, you saw love and beauty everywhere, you saw
justice as innate even in the screaming howl of injustice and you
felt love much deeper and more primitively than any of us will ever
feel. Maybe. I would wash your feet with lavender and rosemary
water; I would sing your name across the valleys to the moon and
stars if only I could spend some time with her, your Muse, the woman
who led you to your madness and out of it again. But alas, we are
but alases in the flow of time.
Salut!
