We need Gabo. Although he will continue with us in so many ways, it was nice to know that somewhere his footsteps were heard as an old man and his voice as grandfather witch, storyteller. No longer. Is that, as the poet said, "Lady Death that is taking away all the good things that come to us! ... Alone - in a corner - we are leaving the rest ... people miserable of troop! The greedy and perverse selfish souls of rags and heart of bast ..."
A thousand and one nights would not be enough to tell his anecdotes where everything could happen. But one of the specials, not very well known, speaks of him and his son Rodrigo García Barcha. It was the 1980s and his father had already won the Nobel Prize. Rodrigo, his son, meanwhile, was studying film in London and had been there for several years in the midst of colleagues from all over the world.
On one occasion, one of his teachers proposed a surprise topic: students should read No one writes to the Colonel, and take the rooster, an important character in the novel, break it into pieces and reassemble it, to discover the multiple symbolic meanings that were agitated in the animal. That was the final semiotics exam.
There were brilliant jobs. It was affirmed that the rooster, always on the verge of losing his head to be turned into soup and to save his proud and deluded proprietor from hunger, was the revolutionary spirit of the peoples, beset by daily urgencies, but whose proletarian impetus was immortal and that's why he sang announcing a bright morning. Others said that the rooster was the Colonel's religiosity, which kept him alive, in the midst of problems, and that he believed in the promise of a beyond full of gratifications, and that was why he was also immortal.
And so, all the proposals pointed to the depth of the meaning of the rooster, reason for all hope. Rodrigo, Gabo's son, called him and asked him what the rooster meant in the novel. "Tell your teacher that the rooster is the rooster. And do not fuck. " When he presented the work, Rodrigo said: "Last night, the author told me that the rooster is the rooster. And that other disquisitions are not required. That he respectfully suggests other topics."
The professor, indignant, rejected the work arguing that, beyond all, it was unforgivable that the student presumed to have consulted personally with the Nobel Prize. Then, Rodrigo, disqualified, had to say what never would have occurred to him. "And why can not I talk to my dad?"
Only then, his companions of several years, and the authorities of the University, knew that Rodrigo García was the son of Gabriel García Márquez himself, a Nobel Prize winner, and that he had never boasted of his condition. That is fineness.
In life, as in chess, elegance is also valued: Hampe, Allgaier, Berlin 1927.
