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Overview
Determined to eliminate modern conveniences from his journey, he begins traversing the river by tugboat. He makes an exception for a cell phone that maintains a sporadic signal at best, in efforts to keep in touch with his mother, whose health is deteriorating. Jacobs cannot help but notice parallels between his mother's dementia and his travels through Colombian township––home to the world's highest incidences of early–onset Alzheimer's.
While navigating the mysterious river and unfamiliar territory—both emotional and geographical—Jacobs comes across Gabriel Garcia Márquez, whose own faltering memory shows a growing obsession with the Magdalena River of his youth. When Jacobs and his companions are apprehended by FARC guerillas who turn out to be as quirky and affable as they are intimidating, life begins to imitate the magical realism of Márquez's signature works. Shortly after being released from captivity, the FARC camp is bombed by the Colombian air force, leaving no likely survivors among his oddly likeable captors.
Exploring themes of adventure, endings, and "the utter pointlessness of it all," Jacobs can only forge onward in his reflection of the mystical river.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781619021969 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Catapult |
| Publication date: | 11/12/2013 |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
I was on my way at last to the Magdalena, in an airport lounge at Bogotá, in transit from Madrid, waiting for a delayed flight to the Caribbean port of Barranquilla. It was early evening, and dark, fast- moving clouds gave a sad and restless look to this high, mountain- walled city, making me think of the teenage García Márquez, newly arrived here after his life-changing first journey along the Magdalena and already pining for the perpetual summer of his coastal childhood.
Exactly a year had passed since my encounter with the writer in Cartagena, in the course of which my own yearning for the Caribbean world had become at times unbearably intense. A disturbing deterioration in my mother's dementia had led me continually to postpone my long-planned Magdalena quest. I had spent much of the year in a deeply introspective mood, searching for solutions for my mother, reflecting on her past, remembering my father, looking back to the time when I could never have imagined my parents' gradual loss of dignity and independence, when I knew nothing of the pathology of mental decline, when I had thought of memory as a source of mystery and awe.
My once high-flown notions of memory dated back to my adolescence, when I had been introduced to the multidisciplinary writings of a brilliant generation of cultural historians associated with London's Warburg Institute. One day I discovered Frances Yates' curious and compelling The Art of Memory, which traced the impact on the Middle Ages and Renaissance of an elaborate memory system evolved by the ancient Greeks. I was unable then to follow all of Yates' exceptionally involved and subtle argument. But I was taken by the idea of occult philosophers adapting for their own esoteric purposes a system that had originally been intended to have a purely practical application. I began to view memory as a key to an understanding of life's secrets.
I went on to spend much of my student years enclosed within the Warburg Institute, above whose entrance portal was inscribed the name of the ancient goddess of memory, Mnemosyne. The name became a daily reminder of memory as the central factor in our lives, the mother of the muses and the root of all knowledge. The sense of embarking on an intellectual adventure every time I entered the Institute was one that inspired in me early ambitions to become an academic.
These ambitions faded during the many years I researched a doctoral thesis. The academic world I had once perceived in terms of vast intellectual and imaginative range came to appear restrictive and petty. The exposure of my PhD supervisor and principal referee as a former Russian spy forced me finally into a decision I had already half taken. I took up a freelance life of writing and travelling. Combining the two activities meant I could explore academic subjects with the freedom and freshness I had so admired in the intellectual mentors of my schooldays.
My early travels were driven by a love of art and architecture, and by a wish to visit as many countries as possible. But, with time, I began to concentrate on Spain and Latin America, and to be guided less by objects than by an interest in people and nature. I started also to indulge in the idea of travel as a metaphorical progression akin to walking through one of the philosophical landscape gardens that had obsessed me when I was younger. I remembered visiting with my parents an Italian garden in which water from an upper spring was directed downhill into an expanding labyrinth of channels and ponds leading to a giant basin emblematic of the sea into which all lives flow.
The older I got the more I appreciated the role of travel as a stimulus to memories, and the way in which journeys even to new places were somehow always awakening memories of places seen in an ever-receding past. I was entering a phase of life in which my desire for travelling, far from being diminished, was acquiring a heightened urgency. Witnessing the decline of my parents was like a lesson to me, calling up a Latin phrase as firmly embedded in my classically trained consciousness as the name Mnemosyne: carpe diem.
By the time of my meeting with Gabriel García Márquez in January 2010, Colombia had become the main focus of my longing for distant travel. Its echoes of old Spain satisfied my growing nostalgia, while the jubilance of its Caribbean world appeared to me now like a necessary affirmation of life. Though my mother's continuing insistence on living alone made it impossible for me for the time being to consider lengthy journeys away from Europe, I allowed myself a brief return visit to Colombia in July. I had been invited there for the celebrations marking the country's two hundred years of independence from Spain.
These festivities coincided with the last days in power of President Álvaro Uribe, who was keen to be remembered as the man who brought stability to his country after two centuries of near-constant internal strife. As part of this public relations exercise, I was flown by helicopter to a model indigenous village in the coastal range of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, where Uribe addressed the tribesmen with a talk about how this terrestrial paradise had now been rid of all the guerrillas, paramilitaries and drug traffickers who had once infested it. But the climax for me was climbing afterwards to an isolated bird sanctuary, where a break in a torrential rainstorm exposed at sunset an epic panorama of snow, jungle and sea.
I caught in that moment my first glimpse of the Magdalena – as a faint glimmer of gold alongside the distant lights of Barranquilla. The next morning, flying back to Bogotá from the coast, I saw the river again, and was able to follow its dark grey band from the waterlogged flatlands of its estuary into the enormously long valley dividing the eastern and central ranges of the Andes. Then the plane swerved away and the view below me was obliterated by clouds. Hidden beneath their blanket, somewhere to the south, lay the Magdalena's source. Though neither García Márquez, nor Colombia's early explorers, nor any of the travellers who had inspired my early interest in the river, had been to that place, I was resolved to do so myself. I envisaged the source as the ultimate goal of my forthcoming journey, as the mythical spring where Mnemosnye greeted travellers at the end of their lives.
My mother's condition deteriorated rapidly from July onwards, but my elder brother and I, perennial ditherers, were unsure as to what we should do about her. Numerous visits to doctors and hospitals did not solve this problem but at least gave me a better understanding of the physiology of memory. Memory, instead of being the complement to imagination and the soul, was now explained as a neatly ordered mechanism involving millions of neurons being triggered from different parts of the brain to produce specific types of memories: short-term, long-term, explicit, implicit, episodic and semantic.
Whereas my father's brain had been affected by protein abnormalities known as plaques and tangles, my mother's, I was told, was displaying the symptoms of normal vascular deterioration. In the continuing absence of a cure for dementia and Alzheimer's, a third of the world's population is expected to end up like her by the middle of this century.
Doctors assured my brother and I that we were doing exactly the right thing in allowing our independent-minded mother to continue staying in the house she had lived in for over fifty years. However, this did not lessen our sense of a crisis about to happen. We remained helpless onlookers watching her retreat into an ever more distorted version of her past.
Italian by birth, my mother had lived mainly in London since marrying my Anglo-Irish father at the end of the Second World War. She had been an actress in a Sicilian touring company when they had first met, but had turned later into a housewife of exceptionally rigid habits. For as long as I could remember she had maintained a pudding-bowl hairstyle, together with a weekly routine and timetable so unvarying that I knew, say, that our clothes would be washed on Monday and stuffed peppers served for supper on Sunday. She mistrusted spontaneity, even when it came to entertainment, which was limited to Saturday dinner parties, a Friday evening visit to the cinema or theatre, an extremely reduced television diet (mainly nature programmes, political debates and serializations of fictional classics) and, above all, reading.
From five o'clock each afternoon she sat down in an armchair to read, her feet resting on a stool, her legs wrapped in a blanket. She began with the newspaper (always the Daily Telegraph) before moving on to a novel or memoir, or very occasionally a biography. There were certain books she read again and again, including Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, parts of which she knew almost by heart. Many of her other favourites were by Italian contemporaries of hers such as Leonardo Sciascia, Primo Levi and Natalia Ginzburg, whose writings seem to have helped keep alive the memory of her itinerant Italian upbringing.
Though my mother ended up almost more fluent in English than in her native tongue, she continued to pepper her conversation with Italian phrases and family sayings of the kind that make up Natalia Ginzburg's quirky memoir, Family Lexicon. She also shared with Ginzburg a family full of eccentric North Italian relatives and ancestors. They would provide her with anecdotes to be brought up on every possible occasion.
Both my parents were incorrigible tellers of stories about themselves and their families. My brother and I, and even our friends, were subjected to stories we had heard hundreds of times before, but were always incapable of stopping, even if we muttered that we knew them already or displayed our obvious boredom. Moreover, the stories were taken from a repertoire that became increasingly restricted over the years, in line with the diminishing excitements in my parents' later lives. In my mother's case, the stories came to focus on a number of key incidents up to the time my brother and I were young children. The settings were invariably Italian.
Following the illness and death of my father, my mother's life became almost totally uneventful. She no longer invited anyone to dinner, hated having her routines spoilt by people dropping by to see her, and restricted her inessential outings in London to an occasional visit to the theatre. More than ever she took refuge in the world of her books and memories.
Then suddenly her memories started failing and she became gradually incapable of reading. Up to the age of eighty-six, she had remained a beautiful and self-contained woman, capable of living on her own, not needy of outside stimulus, always elegantly dressed, in perfect health and looking much younger than her years. Had she died then, peacefully in her sleep, after an evening with one of her children, she would have had good reason to be contented. But the perfect construct she had tried to make of her life would from that point onwards be completely undermined.
The first symptom of her mental decline was paranoia. She thought that the Filipino cleaner she had reluctantly taken on was stealing from her. She sacked the cleaner, employed another one, got rid of her as well, and then decided to do all the housework herself, which made her more tired than ever and consequently more prone to the fits of violent anger and hysteria that heralded the second phase of her condition, and which were usually followed by brief moments of sadness and contrition, and the realization that the remarkable self-control which had hitherto held her life together, and enabled her to maintain a polite facade in front of others, was disappearing.
'I'm not going mad, I'm not going mad,' she said repeatedly, as she began to lose everything, her keys, her jewellery, her hearing, her rationality, her clothes, her peace of mind, her desire to live. She said she would kill herself if only she knew how, and asked me if boot polish would do the trick.
Soon she was sensing strange presences in the house, entertaining an imaginary man for breakfast, saying goodbye to my dead father before he set off for work, looking inside her sons' former bedroom in search of the children she had known as 'the boys'. 'The boys went out early this morning and have not returned!', she would ring to tell me in a panic, and I would have to remind her that I was in fact one of the boys and I was perfectly safe and sound, but I was worried about her and she shouldn't continue living on her own. 'There's nothing wrong with me!', she would shout, slamming down the phone.
Her diminishing, episodic memories revealed deep traumas and underlying guilt: she constantly relived the moment when she was heavily pregnant with me and had been spun underwater by a giant wave; she talked about having killed my father by sending him in his last few months to live in a home.
She clearly feared more than anything what she had done to my father. She could not bear the idea of living with anyone other than her children. She kicked out all the day-time carers I sent to look after her, and tried holding on as hard as she could to her strict domestic routines of the past half century. She even maintained her habit of sitting down to read, even though she would stare endlessly at the same page, taking in almost nothing. She was existing mainly on implicit memories, the memories that enable you to function without thinking.
In an attempt to unearth the happy memories from her past I sat down with her to leaf through family photo albums of the last sixty years. I found then further confirmation of what I had come to notice more and more in the course of 2010: that my mother had lost virtually all remaining sense of time and place. She looked at photos taken on an Italian beach in 1955 and thought they were of a recent holiday. She looked at photos of her North London home, my brother's Italian Alpine retreat and the Spanish village where I had mainly been living in recent years, and thought they were all the same country.
She turned out to have no clear idea of where she was, or who I was, other than knowing that her house was pleasingly familiar and I was someone she loved. In the end she decided I was her husband. 'Oh look, there you are,' she said, pointing to a beach shot in which I appeared as a curly-headed toddler, except she was not pointing to me at all but to my handsome thirty-year-old father, who was holding me in his arms.
That I was being mistaken in my late fifties for my young father was difficult at first for me to take in, and also resulted in much jealousy on my mother's part, after I kept on disappearing abroad, and going home nightly to another woman ('Can't you see how insulting that is?', she would say). But the delusion had at least one positive effect. My father, who had gradually slipped from my thoughts since his death from Alzheimer's at the age of seventy-six, returned to shadow me.
He had been a kind, generous but distant father, with whom I had only known any degree of intimacy when his memory was already failing. After suffering several years of insecurity in the aftermath of the war, he had settled down to a stable job as a company lawyer for Shell, earning large sums of money, but coming home always late and distracted, with little time other than for my mother, whom he unreservedly adored and with whom he never quarrelled. The sense of exclusion I sometimes felt in London generally disappeared during family holidays, when I had glimpses of what was perhaps my father's true self, or at least what he had been like before being constrained by his work and my mother's draconian routines. He became the person whom I had heard described by some of his university friends, someone open to any challenge, driven by passionate instincts and prone to fits of mad dancing. Seeing García Márquez rise so joyously to his feet that night in Cartagena had brought back one of my most recurring memories of my father – a memory of him breaking into a joyous sprint on the racecourse at Epidaurus, until being told off by my mother, who said that at his age he should be more careful, because such sudden pressure on the heart could easily be dangerous.
For all my father's apparent contentment with life, he must have been constantly beset by frustrations. Probably his greatest regret was not to have pursued until it was too late the literary ambitions he had harboured since his teens. His years at Shell brought him recognition in his field of law, a good salary and even an OBE. But he longed all the time to give up his job and devote himself to writing. In his late fifties, after much less experienced colleagues had been promoted above him, he finally decided he had had enough. He retired early, to become immersed in the first of several projects he had been thinking about for ages.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Robber of Memories"
by .
Copyright © 2013 Michael Jacobs.
Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint.
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Table of Contents
Map x
Prologue: The Writer Remembers 1
Part 1 Distant Summer 11
Part 2 Upriver 71
Part 3 The Disappeared 153
Epilogue: Carnival 259
Further Reading 267
Acknowledgements 271