A Mexican love story

I

Love is not measured by diamond rings, but snoring nights

—Mercedes Barcha Prado, Nobel Prize in Literature 1990

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Mercedes came like every morning and placed a yellow flower upon my desk. “Gabriel, what are you going to write today?” she asked me.

“I do not know,” I responded, and she gave me a smile—the same smile she has been given me for the past fifty-six years and the reason why I married her.

I look at her, and the twenty-four thousand hairs of my mustache smile at her. It is no longer pretty. It is still thick. “Thicc,” in the words of Donald Trump, “thicc.” My mustache is “thicc.” I like how Donald Trump says, “thicc.” Everyone has a good quality—even Trump. In my opinion, my mustache is still well kept. Mercedes thinks otherwise. Dependent on her mood or my behavior. But she is crazy. Like all women are mad. Especially when they love you a lot. Then they are fantastic. Mercedes was so crazy. She married me.

She was rich, and I was just a poor soul who spoke pretty. That’s crazy. When she met me, I had no mustache. Then my mustache grew. It grew a strong brown the color of the coffee bean of Coatepec. She always played with my mustache, and when she gets mad, she says, “Cut it! Trim it a little? It’s too rough!”

When she is furious. Always between the eleventh and the seventeenth of every month and entirely out of nowhere, I honestly think she keeps a scoreboard or has a tally sheet in a black chalkboard with an infinite supply of expensive Japanese chalk that never cracks or breaks; I think she gets me for the twenty-thousand-and-one nights I have not allowed her to sleep because of snoring, she kindly elbows me or steals the whole damn blanket, I do not know if this is true, the stealing of the blanket most definitely, because I always make sure to tuck myself in and pull the blanket over me and when I wake up it is all gone, all gone, I am only left with my white underwear, the one with two little blue stripes and one sock, one sock, what happened to my cute little white sock, who knows, only Mercedes knows or the walking-hand we call in Macondo (la mano pachona). Yes, only her or the walking-hand knows what is really going on. The problem has become so bad I never want to leave the house and look like the only idiot walking down Mexico City with unmatching pairs.

“Gabito, baby. My love. You are crazy,” Mercedes tells me.

“No, Mercedes. My love. Come over here and let me give you a kiss. You still love me? I love you too. I do not think you understand.”

“What, Gabo? What do I not understand?”

“The power of the socks,” I tell her, and she starts laughing like I am stupid. Ah, that is why I love her so much. But she always teases me, and this is a serious thing. Right?

“Mercedes, my cinnamon in a coffee cup before the sun rises due east. When you are still in bed, and your hair is not combed, and you are all the way to the left, and I am still in the same place where I closed my eyes and smiled and thanked you, your father, and not your mother. Your mother never liked me, right?”

"Stop lying. My mother always loved you. What she never liked about you, my chamomile in my cup of tea before the sunsets due west before your snoring and your kicking begins.

“Mercedes, stop lying. Snoring, maybe. Kicking? No, Mercedes, never.”

“Um. Um. Um. Do not give me that face, my lavender in my air freshener as the sun is gone and the moon shines bright.

“You are such a thief, Mercedes. Stealing my best lines.”

“You are such a thief, Gabito. Stealing my beauty with your snoring and farts.”

“Farts, Mercedes? Stop tickling me. Mercedes, stop. Stop, Mercedes. You know I am ticklish. Mercedes, stop. The grandkids are home. Mercedes, stop. My cheeks are hurting.

"You need to lose weight.”

“Mercedes, stop making me laugh. No. No. No. No. No. Not there. Stop.”

“Give me a kiss?”

“Mercedes.”

“Give me a kiss, Gabriel?”

“The grandkids, Mercedes!”

“Stop being so melodramatic, Gabriel García Márquez. The Nobel Laureate crowned by Queen Silvia Renate Sommerlath of Sweden. And the audacity, Gabo!”

"Stop.”

“To take her out and dance our favorite song!”

“Stop. You are making me laugh and hurting me. How do you even know her three names? You are crazy.”

“Give me a kiss.”

“Stop. You are making me laugh. You hear those footsteps?”

“Give me the kiss and stop playing.”

“Muah.”

“A good one, Gabriel García Márquez! You did not even take me out that night. You know that, right?”

“I asked you. My love, can I dance with the Queen? Stop. Stop. Jajajaja. Muah!”

“Better. Much better. You are some dumb, Gabo. Now give me another kiss for being dumb!”

“If the grandkids come. I am going to blame it on you.”

“Let the grandkids come. There’s nothing bad about love.”

“Stop. My cheeks hurt. Not there. No there. Mercedes, stop. I am ticklish.

“You liked her dress, right?”

II

A trick question and a pair of shoes

This is a trick question, and I will love her until my last breath. The reality is I never want to leave her. She has always been with me. She made me possible. She gave me two beautiful kids, and she has always been so just that she gave me one and gave herself the other.

We only had two children. Children are expensive, especially in a capital, but this was not true in Mexico City because of Mercedes Raquel Barcha Pardo and the twenty-million feet who circulate the most colorful, frank, and generous capital in the world.

Our walking shoes might be fake. Really fake. But our hearts are not.

They are kind and pure, like the leather produced by the ranching families from St. Martin of the Mining Hands, Guanajuato to the Three Black Lakes of Our Lady of Assumption, Jalisco. The leather is sold with tired hands, the hopes of getting paid what is worth, and a proud and finished product in the fifty-seven blocks that make up the Josefina neighborhood of León, Guanajuato.

In nineteen fifty-seven, I recognized a familiar face. “This one,” wanted coffee.

“Fatty, do not be like that, please. Especially in Paris,” Mercedes told me as she pinched the most expensive thing I have ever bought in my entire mammal existence. New Yorkers call it “peacoat.” Pea’coat? A coat that covers green-wrinkled peas? No. The world has it upside down. Its proper name should be “a Russian coat” because it looks Russian. Only someone as strong as a Russian has the discipline of not feeling itchy, not scratching, and putting up with Mercedes’s scolding. “Stop scratching! You are going to make it worse.”

“Women, this thing cost twenty-seven thousand Mexican dollars. You know how much money this is, women. Twenty-seven thousand dollars? And then? You lose the receipt. You know we can get our money back? I can take this off,” and I tug from the inside-in with the same intensity of a Mexican soccer player after scoring at Aztec Stadium, “off the day before,” I tell Mercedes.

“Gabriel, stop lying. You will die. Look at you,” she tells me. “Uuuuu, she is so cold.”

“Ah fatty, you are cold?”

I want to tell her so many things. Like why on earth are two Caribbean souls walking down “Boulevard Saint-Michel” from the “Seine River” on the first of January. Mercedes called this day “the day of the incident.” Mercedes is such a good host as her late mother, Mrs. Raquel, that she entertains the whole block and tells everyone, “our door is always open.

In one of those, our doors are always open days; I do not remember when. There were at least 50 people.

Mercedes is such a good host as her late mother, Mrs. Raquel, that she entertains the whole block and tells everyone, “our door is always open.” In one of those “our door is always open” days, I do not remember when, there were at least fifty people, all Mexican, all Colombian, two or three Jewish women, who are just like Mexican women in every sense of the word, and only two guys. This is where the story gets good.

III

The day I met Hemingway

and found Conversations with Shakespeare, Monarchs & Maids

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(To be continued)

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