Second draft/ analyzing fiction/ Repishkova Tatiana

Analyzing fiction: "Tito's Good-bye"

"There is no greater misfortune than dying alone"    

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Death. Just a sound of this word makes ones shudder, others freeze with a light smile of curiosity on their lips. Death has always been a riddle for us, we never know how, when and why we will kick the bucket, never know what is waiting for us after.  But we never expect the death be sudden.  Most of us draw a picture of calm and peaceful death in a bed with children and grandchildren around us. But what can be worse than unexpected death? When so many things have not been done, when so many words have not been said.

Sudden death is the thing that happened with a main character in Cristina Garcia's "Tito's Good-bye" story.  Agustin "Tito" Urena was a Latino man who was born in Cuba. He had been living there for many years before he had nothing to do but to flee to America because of the unstable political situation in his homeland. For the rest of his life Tito has been associated Cuba with a happiness, with a life he has always dreamt to have but never had. Not for a long, but he was happy in Cuba, he had everything an ordinary man wishes to have: his own big house, lovely wife, children. He had everything and lost everything.  Big house became a rented apartment, lovely wife that seemed so fragile for him once, turned to a nasty woman he could not stay longer, his own children became someone else's children. He himself was a reason for all of his losses.

After Tito moved to America he was trying to adjust himself to live there. From a humble honest man he changes to a "Scrooge" man, who was trying to save each dime he could. He became just a one man from "grey mass of ordinaries". He rented an office in Little Italy, a neighborhood in lower Manhattan, which crawling with the poorest and uneducated immigrants. He was trying to make money helping them to forge employment records, doctoring birth certificates, securing sponsors, acting as an important man by making meaningful pauses and throat cleaning when he talked to them.  

He lost everything that made him happy and was left alone to deal with his regrets. In one Friday day all alone he faced his death, sudden heart attack and he was falling down on the floor in his office.  The only word he was able to say was a stupid Spanish swearing word "coño". Nobody was looking for him until Monday's morning when the city came back to life and when people were rushing to their offices. And seems like even the weather was mocking on him staying cold and preventing the smell from his decaying body to find him earlier.