'I came to Zapotal to die once and for all.' Thus opens A Date with the Lady, the debut novel of Mexican author Mateo García Elizondo. If the sentence reminds us of the opening lines of The Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez (On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on), it may not be a coincidence.
A Date with the Lady, about a young Mexican man who is trying to kill himself, is full of magical realism, just like those of Márquez, the author's grandfather. "It is a ghost story that drifts between reality and fantasy and between the world of living and the world of the dead," says Elizondo about the novel, which was published in Spanish two years ago.
In his first visit to India, to participate in the fourth edition of the Mathrubhumi International Festival of Letters (February 2-5) in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, the 35-year-old author narrated the influence of his grandfather on him and his writing. The son of Gonzalo Garcia Barcha, the youngest son of Márquez, and Pia Elizondo, the daughter of Mexican literary giant Salvador Elizondo, Mateo García Elizondo is following a profound literary tradition, but on his own terms.
The new generation of writers in the Spanish language needs to step away from the shadow of their great predecessors and create their own literature, Elizondo, who was born in Mexico City in 1987, feels. "It is sort of intimidating to compare yourself with the writings of those who were very big (like Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges and Carlos Fuentes). But at the same time, old influences are difficult to escape from and hard to avoid. And that is not necessarily a bad thing," he says. "You just need to do your own things."
Elizondo is doing just that. He was a student at the University of London studying journalism when he wrote his first major work, the screenplay for the Mexican feature film, Desierto, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2015. "It was about a group of Mexican migrants crossing a desert (desierto in Spanish means desert) running into a vigilante. It was an action film," he says. The director and co-writer of Desierto was Jonás Cuarón, the son of legendary Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón.
"I started my writing career in cinema," recalls Elizondo. "I first wrote for short films before writing the script for Desierto with Jonás," he adds. Desierto was followed by A Date with the Lady, which won him the City of Barcelona Award and catapulted him into one of the finest young writers in the Spanish language today. "After the novel came out, Granta asked me for a short story," he says. Capsule, the short story published in 2021, is about a man sentenced to life imprisonment for a murder. "He is locked in a metal capsule and shuttled into outer space. He takes a small shrub with him for oxygen." The man then escapes from prison, but has nowhere to go in outer space.
Elizondo, who has never visited Aracataca, the Colombian town that is the birthplace of Márquez, remembers the first book he received from his grandfather. It was The House of the Sleeping Beauties by Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata, the first Japanese writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968. "I was seven-years-old. My grandfather gave me a book for adults. He said this was the book he wanted to write," says Elizondo. "Memories of My Melancholy Whores (a 2004 novella by Márquez) was a tribute to Kawabata's own novella," he adds.
Growing up in a family of great writers as a teenager, Elizondo realised he wanted to become a writer. "I was in my teens and it was more of a romantic idea," he says. An award-winning author now, he is keen to acknowledge the influence his Nobel laureate-grandfather had on his literary journey. "Gabo (Márquez) was always telling stories and telling how to tell stories. He said you have to keep the reader interested in the story, otherwise you would lose them. He was influenced by his grandfather (Colonel Nicolas Márquez), and grandmother (Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes)."
"My grandmother (Mercedes Barcha) was a rock. The one who allowed Gabo to be Gabo was Mercedes. She is less remembered because she was a woman and didn't sign the books. But she was in the books," says Elizondo, who wants readers to judge his book on its own. "Growing up around Gabo gave me the love for books, but I can't deny that it is a kind of burden. When A date with the Lady was published, the newspapers described it as the novel of Gabo's grandson. There was a shadow cast on the book. It is very difficult to manage being Gabo's grandson."
The young writer agrees he has several favourite works of Márquez. "When I read One Hundred Years of Solitude, I understood about Gabo. It is a chronicle of my family. I understood why Gabo became a writer. I was blown away when I reached the end of the novel. He really worked it out." Elizondo's favourite short stories of Márquez are The Ghosts of August and Light is Like Water. My father and uncle (Rodrigo, the eldest son of Márquez) are the protagonists in Light is Like Water. They were living in Barcelona then."
Elizondo has already received a glimpse into the scripts of the upcoming Netflix adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude, executive-produced by his father and uncle. "I read a few scripts of the series and found them touching, maybe because I am Gabo's grandson," he says.
Elizondo credits his sister Emilia García Elizondo with guarding the legacy of their grandfather. Emilia, who also lives in Mexico City, recently discovered a box of letters written by Márquez at their home. An inscription on the box said, grandchildren. The box contained letters their grandfather had received from famous personalities like Cuban president Fidel Castro and US president Bill Clinton. Emilia made sure the letters were available to the public, opening an exhibition last year at the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City.
"The Gabo that everyone knows is not the person I knew," says Elizondo. "I encountered him when I was very young. What I knew was this old man who was becoming a child. Sometimes I was older than him. It was very sad to see him losing his memory. He didn't even remember his own books. It was touching and also magical. At the end of his life, he was living in a kind of trance. He died on a Thursday like Ursula (in One Hundred Years of Solitude) and a bird came to his studio (like in the novel). A lot of things kept coming from his books into his own life in the end."
For Elizondo, books and literature are magical. "I am interested in magic. I tend to see Gabo as an alchemist who was making magic in his laboratory," he says. "Fiction is the most magical thing there is. In writing, you are creating magic out of words."
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