By Laurie Babinski
Art Editor
The wrinkles on my face gathered in sympathy when I read his last words.
“Viva Iria Flavia.”
Madrid’s daily newspaper El Pais reported them the day after writer Camilo Jose Cela, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1989, died at age 85 last spring. After spending a summer in Spain, the country of Hemingway, expatriates, bullfights and vino, I could understand his undying patriotism in the face of his own mortality.
As the Spaniards say, “Me suena bien.” That sounds good to me.
My mind reeled back to remember other famous last words, but I drew a blank. Further mental search turned up nothing besides Julius Caesar, whose “Et tu, Brute?” wasn’t the most profound in his choice of final phrases.
Few people get their last words published when they die. Why Cela?
At first, I assumed it was because of his fame. Cela was known throughout the Iberian Peninsula and Central and South America on the same level that novelist Carlos Fuentes is known to a slightly younger generation.
But if the black and white hammer is going to fall on anyone who wields a pen for a living as some sort of cruel death-by-one’s-own-instrument tactic, that puts the weight of the world on anyone who skillfully crafts a sentence. And it scares me even more.
For a journalist like myself, do I have to write, edit and re-edit what I’m going to say so that it sounds good when I die?
Final words often end up being a disaster. American expatriate Gertrude Stein asked those surrounding her deathbed, “What’s the answer?” When all she received was a morbid silence, she rephrased. “In that case, what’s the question?”
Cela managed to dodge the bullet fairly well with a touching tribute to his hometown in romantic Spanish form. But what if his birthplace had not been Iria Flavia nestled in the green hills of Galicia, but instead had been Bollullos de Condado in the desert-like southern province of Cadiz (pronounce the ll like a y, and you get the picture)? Would they have printed his last words then?
I’m only 21 and I don’t plan on needing my last words anytime in the next, oh, 50 years at least. But I am one of those people who lives by the Boy Scout motto, “Be prepared.” I carry around a purse the size of a cruise ship. Inside is everything I need for any emergency. As I haul it from place to place, I gawk at the Southern California elite who tote their tiny pocketbooks under their arms, minuscule things that could only hold no more than my dorm room key. They would procrastinate and hope that when the white light closes in on them, a flash of brilliance will offer divine inspiration. That’s not me.
The deafening siren going off in my head told me that I had to act, and I had to do it now. After all, I dreaded ending up like Pancho Villa, who told the pool of reporters surrounding him, “Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something.”
Leave it to reporters to get it verbatim. There are so many roads famous figures have taken in choosing their last words, all of which reflect with pinpoint accuracy the life of their creator.
“Friends applaud, the comedy is over,” Beethoven observed. Life must have seemed like God’s personal joke on him — a deaf composer. Erskine Childers had the same idea. While facing a firing squad, Childers quipped: “Take a step forward, lads. It will be easier that way.” But since I often fail to find the humor in life, and certainly don’t plan to bump into it on my way to the pearly gates, I nixed that idea.
Others have taken a more self-centered approach. “Drink to me,” Pablo Picasso reportedly said. Humphrey Bogart also looked to the bottle for inspiration. “I should never have switched from Scotch to Martinis,” Bogie concluded. But since I choose Diet Coke and coffee — anything with caffeine — over alcohol, it doesn’t make for as romantic a prospect. “Long live Diet Coke?” A good advertisement for 7-11 Big Gulps, but hardly profound.
The dialogue in my head was like a bad self-help seminar. Define yourself in one immortal phrase. Forget turning — the wheels in my head spun out of control and smoke poured out of my ears.
Some call me a journalism junkie, so anything having to do with grinding away my life in print for a pittance would be appropriate. French grammarian Dominique Bouhours found this method optimal. “I am about to — or I am going to — die; either expression is used,” he thoughtfully stated. I can’t even get pronouns to agree with their antecedent nouns. Trust me, it’s all the copy editor’s work you see here.
Next.
American book publisher Andrew Bradford cleverly combined God and his work. “Oh Lord, forgive the misprints.” But if I don’t want to be remembered for my appalling grammar, I certainly don’t want to be remembered for the misprints in what I edit. But the religious aspect sure did sound appealing. I looked further.
“God bless … God damn,” said James Thurber, an American cartoonist and author. Call me squeamish, but I’m not so sure I want to condemn God just before I meet him. Maybe a positive spin?
“God will forgive me. It’s his job,” said Heinrich Heine, a liberal German poet. Perfect, I thought, but what if it’s Sunday and God’s at rest? Hmmph.
With few avenues left to pursue and my contacts blurring over from the effort, I stumbled on Karl Marx’s last words. Yearning to be alone in his final moments, Marx snapped at his servant: “Go on, get out. Last words are for fools who haven’t said enough.”
And Lord knows I have.
February 13, 2003
