Out There: a novel (28 page)

He read by the light of the moon and on into the next day, read until he forgot that the wall upon which he leaned was not the one at the end of Tesuque Street under the shade of ponderosa pines but instead the wall surrounding the compound of GGM. He had never been a fast reader—he decided this was because he enjoyed the sentences too much to hurry—and so it took him all of the following day and night to finish reading, just an hour before the sky began to shift into morning.

Jefferson was considering the beautiful sad end of the story of the Buendía clan—mourning the losses left by those ants and trying to fathom what it all meant—when he heard the shuffle of slippers on the other side of the wall. At first he thought it was just his own mind imagining the shuffle of José Arcadio Buendía’s slippers as he made his delirious ghostly rounds of the old family home in the novel, but then he concentrated and took a firm hold of his reality. He could see that this was no dream, that he was most definitely slumped against the posole-colored wall with the novel clutched against his chest, and that he could hear chickens scratching in the gravel on the other side. There was the old turquoise door, carved with visions of the cosmos; there was the faint odor of garbage from the neighbor’s cans, just five feet away; and then, an undeniable
cock-a-doodle-doo
. And there it was again, the shuffle of what sounded like slippers on the other side.

Jefferson sat up and dusted himself off, put the novel down next to him, and tried to arouse his brain. Could it be?

Oh, no. He looked down at himself. A mess. But there was no time to try to make himself look prepared or presentable. He was dirty, hungry, and tired. Remedios whimpered the whimper of a neglected pup.

He stood up, dusted off his sweats, and moved toward the turquoise door, trying to plan what he would say to whoever it was, about to discover him there on the sidewalk in the predawn night And then, just as he breathed a hopeful sigh, the heavy handle began to turn, and as he watched—like the sound of distant birds singing unknown arias, like the jangle of the tambourines of gypsies and the accordions of generations of drunken musicians—the gate swung outward and he heard a bass voice, as deep as the ocean, humming a playful melody, one of those Sousa marches Esco liked to play on the CD player in the kitchen when she was cleaning.

A stooped, white-headed figure in pajamas moved out into the moonlight.

A man, yes, very old, shuffling in his robe and slippers, the back of his head shimmery and threadbare, his tilt fixed on something several feet from the gate, down in the street. Jefferson looked—the newspaper. Thrown down there rather than up on the sidewalk where it should have been. Behind the old man, a small guinea hen and a white Pekingese followed,
trit-trot, trit-trot,
anxious improper bodyguards.

The old man’s legs did not seem to work so well, and as Jefferson watched, he shuffled the few feet and began to bend down, trying to reach the extra eight inches beyond the sidewalk to the street, where his newspaper lay. Even after he’d bent all the way down, his fingers didn’t quite reach, and he mumbled something to the hen and the dog, Jefferson guessed a curse against the paperboy, and slowly raised himself back up to standing and surveyed the scene around him. The dark quiet of night was loosening its hold, and the old man scratched the back of his head and took a deep breath.

Jefferson hated to see an old man, any old man, struggle like this. He wanted to help, but now he was afraid of frightening him, giving him a heart attack. And then, almost worse, if that old guy turned out indeed to be the famous writer—Jefferson could not even bring himself to think the three full words
gabriel garcía márquez
in that moment; it embarrassed him, it seemed so unlikely—he would have no idea how to explain himself. Why was he sitting at the famous writer’s back gate? This was not the introduction he had hoped for, although in truth he had not planned an alternative.

On his second attempt, the old man brushed the newspaper with his fingertips, but he still could not grasp the thing. Jefferson hated watching this. For several seconds he considered whether to pretend to have been a passerby and retrieve the newspaper himself and hand it to the old man, but he felt he had been hiding and watching too long, that his position was inexplicable at best, and more likely infuriating. It was too bad he hadn’t announced himself at the start, when the gate swung open, but he hadn’t, and now he felt as if he should remain only an observer.

The old man began a third try at the paper then, chuckling to himself and the hen and the little dog. You had to be very old to have a chuckling perspective on anything at this time in the morning, Jefferson thought—it must have been around 4:00 a.m. The man reached out and steadied himself against the turquoise gate that, Jefferson had been told, led to the garden of Gabriel García Márquez.

Now the old man was shaking his head, having failed for a third time to grasp the paper. He had wrinkles far deeper than the man Jefferson had imagined from the picture on the novel’s back cover. Where were the broad shoulders, the thick, hairy chest, the dense, moist skin he’d guessed went along with those eyebrows? Where was the gangster speaking in incredibly long sentences?

Having failed to reach the paper by stooping, the old man placed his hands on his thighs and folded himself down until he was crouched in a low squat, able to put his palms on the walkway in front of him and his knees on the walkway under him and his toes on the walkway in back. He moved like an old dog toward an old bone, the guinea hen clucking next to his head and the Pekingese standing at attention near his feet.

Jefferson watched all this, trying to reconcile the scene with all his previous expectations.

And then, success. The old man grasped the newspaper with his right hand, pulled it to his chest, and, reversing the process, sat back on his knees and heels and sighed another deep sigh. Jefferson sighed with him, and smiled. It was possible that this old man was just the kind of old man who could have been a younger man once, sitting at a typewriter all day long, smoking cigarettes, writing complicated and beautiful sentences, writing important stories. It was possible.

Concerned that the old man would go back through the gate without noticing him, Jefferson stepped out from against the wall, scuffing his sneakers against the pavement and clearing his throat and freeing Remedios from his tight grip. “Um, excuse me, sir?”

But he and the pup seemed only to have caught the attention of the Pekingese. The dog pranced several paces in their direction and began a low growling as the old man moved methodically from his kneeling position to take a seat on the curb. He proceeded to unwrap the paper from its plastic bag and rubber band as if unaware of any larger commotion. He had just begun humming that Sousa march again when the Pekingese began to bark, moving in a semicircle around Remedios, who had retreated to perch atop Jefferson’s feet. But the old man kept reading and humming.

“Excuse me? Mr. García Márquez? Mr. García Márquez?” Jefferson said it as loudly as he felt comfortable speaking at that hour. Someone from the house or a neighbor would hear the commotion soon. When even that didn’t rouse the old man, he took the risk of grabbing Remedios in his arms, leaping with her over the little dog, and landing just a few feet from the old man, saying once again, “Excuse me, sir. I’m so sorry to startle you
 . . . I’m really sorry, but your dog— Habla inglés?” Jefferson said finally, suddenly remembering that he was in Mexico City, and that he didn’t have any proof that this old man sitting before him was actually Gabriel García Márquez, and that even if he was the famous writer, his English at four o’clock in the morning was probably not so good.

“Yes, I speak English,” the old man said, laying the paper on his knees and turning to face Jefferson. “Where did you come from, anyway? I didn’t notice you there.”

“Oh, wow, it is you. You’re him. You’re GGM—I mean, García Márquez. Oh my god, oh my god,” Jefferson said as he moved closer to the old man and focused in on those eyes he’d studied so many times from the back cover of his book. The old man had taken the growling Pekingese into his lap, and the guinea hen scratched nearby.

Jefferson was smiling so hard, his head was back in Iraq in his bunk, thinking of the war story he had wanted for so long to tell the famous writer. For a long while he had lumped it all together as one big bad experience, like a mouthful of rotten tomato he had to swallow, but in that predawn moment next to the old man, the little seams Jefferson had used to sew it all up together began to unravel, and the individual stories of war cried out to be remembered individually. He remembered the day he saw Tristan’s hand blown off, and the other time he’d thought he’d stepped on a land mine but hadn’t, and also about those three little Iraqi girls and how he’d sometimes imagined them as butterflies flying up into heaven. There was so much to share, so many stories García Márquez would appreciate, but Jefferson found himself unable to speak, and so he just sat there next to the old man and smiled, clutching the tattered paperback to his chest and a few times shaking his head and saying it over and over,
Oh my god, oh my god
.

Without fanfare a peacock had joined them on the curb and strutted now to the street, just in front of where they sat. The old man said something to the bird, an endearment, Jefferson thought, and within moments the peacock had swept his tail feathers up and out behind him in a wide arc. “See, I’m the boss,” said the old man, pointing to the plumage and laughing out loud at his joke.

This seemed like the invitation for which Jefferson had waited so long. All his hesitation melted away, and as he watched the bird strut, he too gained confidence. He looked into the old man’s eyes.

“You see, sir, my name is Jefferson Long Soldier. And your book,
One Hundred Years
—
One Hundred Years of Solitude,
no?—it saved my life. Literally. I mean it, man.” Jefferson took the old man’s hands in his own. “It saved my life. I’m telling you the truth, see.”

The old man looked into Jefferson’s eyes, nodding, saying nothing.

“So that’s why I rode down here, no, on my cousin’s motorbike to find you, see? I needed to find you so I could tell you how much you mean to me, and so I could thank you. For saving my life, you know? So here I am. . . . Thank you,” Jefferson said, looking up at the old man again because his eyes had once again shifted down to the stones. “Thank you, Mr. García Márquez . . . Mr. Gabriel García Márquez . . . thank you . . . for saving . . . my life.”

Without knowing it, Jefferson had started to cry. His shoulders were shaking, and his chin was pinned against his chest, his hands now supporting his head. He was thinking about all the things he had wanted to say to the old man, all the quotes he’d memorized and planned to recite just to pay homage. How he wanted to explain to the writer how high school students weren’t really old enough to read literature like
One Hundred Years
, at least not the high-schoolers he’d known at Santa Fe High, and that it had, unfortunately, taken Real Live War to make him understand why great writers write at all. That he thought a really good idea would be to teach great literature to soldiers in war zones. But all the questions he’d had—whether GGM had been a soldier himself (Jefferson guessed he must have been) and whether he’d had to kill anyone, and whether his real-life family in Colombia was anything like those bizarre Buendías in Macondo, and whether he’d ever ridden on a magic carpet for real—turned to silence as the two of them listened to the waking of the day. All his emotion, all his praise and sympathy and love, came out only as a muddled mess of tears.

After a few minutes the old man reached out with his right hand and patted Jefferson on the shoulder. Then he stood up slowly and motioned for Jefferson to follow. Remedios and the Pekingese and the guinea hen scampered underfoot as the two of them began to walk down the narrow street Jefferson had come to know so well and then turned down a dirt lane and then another and another until they became lost in the labyrinth of San Ángel, the light of the moon their guide.

The old man spoke every now and then, pointing out the blossoms of flowering vines and noting the homes of friends, the workshop of a favorite potter, a woman who had made him a set of ice cream bowls, a shrine to Our Lady of Guadalupe, the tree from which he occasionally swiped mangos. But mostly he was quiet, peering up into the starry night, clucking his tongue at the moon, chuckling at unspoken jokes.

Jefferson guessed they had rounded the end of a large arc and had begun circling back toward the García Márquez compound when the old man told the story of his own grandmother and grandfather, how they had met on a starry night in the city of Riohacha. “They were wonderful people,” the old man said.

They passed a small grass plaza surrounded by smaller, simpler homes before the old man stopped and turned to Jefferson, almost as if he’d just remembered his presence. “Tell me a story now,” García Márquez said, and when Jefferson hesitated, the old man said, “Tell me a story about your grandmother.” As Jefferson thought what story he might tell, the famous writer explained that he believed that everyone became a natural storyteller when the subject was his own grandparents. “These are the first people we come to know, truly know, as separate from ourselves,” he said. “With our parents, we are too close, but with our grandparents, we begin to see the possibility of myth, of magic, of tragedy and of unexpected miracles. With our grandparents we begin to comprehend that the world is very large and forgiving.”