I spent the weekend in Barranquilla, a medium-sized city a couple hours north of here on the coast. I made the trip with my housemate Carlos, who is originally from there.
We spent Saturday at the market downtown, browsing the colorful stores with their homemade bags and counterfeit name-brand jeans and shoes. That night we went to a soccer game in which Barranquilla-based Junior played a team from the Southern city of Cali.
It was a tie, which I quickly learned merely meant twice as much post-game drinking: the jubilation of not losing combined with the sorrow of not winning. On Sunday we went to a resort hotel in nearby Santa Marta, rotating between the pool and the beach while listening to the Brazilian music wafting from the speakers.
It was a fun weekend, but it was the trip I took on Monday that made it really special for me. Barranquilla is only a couple hours away from Aracataca, the birthplace and hometown of Gabriel García Marquez, Colombia’s most famous writer and winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature. I had found the phone number of a guide named Rubiela buried in an online forum, and had arranged to meet her to take a tour of the city.
Marquez is known for popularizing the literary style known as magic realism, which is the use of magical or fantastic occurrences embedded in everyday, normal events. In his stories and novels these occurrences are not the center of the plot, and they aren’t treated as especially surprising either by the narrator or the characters.
The result is that the reader is torn between a resistance to hearing about babies born with pig tails and children flying around on magic carpets and the suspension of disbelief that he is able to provoke by speaking of these things as totally normal. I came to this town in part to understand how this country boy could go from the backwaters of Colombia to being praised as one of the most important authors of the twentieth century. I saw it as a kind of literary pilgrimage, a journey to the place of origin of a great writer with the goal of understanding how he came to be, and the humble hope of taking away some lessons for achieving similar imagination in my own writing.
The scenery on the bus ride into the interior was classic Colombia: the jungle-covered mountains of the Sierra Nevada rose on the left, their melancholy peaks shrouded in mist, standing shoulder to shoulder as if guarding a highland treasure. On the right banana and plantain plantations stretched as far as the eye could see, the bright green and yellow leaves marshalled into neat rows contrasting with the unrelenting disorder of the surrounding jungle.
The road was mostly deserted, except for the occasional wayside store catering to motorists and the dirt roads that periodically veered off the highway toward their mysterious destinations. The bus stopped periodically to let passengers off or take more on, while inside they all watched Conan the Barbarian on the hopelessly small, dark screen at the head of the aisle. The movie just wasn’t the same without Arnold’s thick Austrian accent, and I spent my time staring out the window not thinking about anything in particular, which I am particularly skilled at.
Arriving in Aracataca, I was taken by a mototaxi to the old telegraph office, where I met Rubiela, who was to be my guide. She showed me around the building, which was kind of a makeshift Gabriel Marquez museum and displayed a number of faded newspaper articles covering his numerous awards and honors, especially his 1982 Nobel Prize. There were paintings of him and his friends, statues depicting characters from his books, and the old telegraph equipment that his father had used working as the town telegrapher.
A few blocks from the telegraph office the city had built a reproduction of the house Marquez grew up in, a sprawling plantation-style hacienda where generations of extended family had lived and grown up. Rubiela pointed out some of the real-life locations behind Marquez’s most well-known stories, and explained how the family dynamics and history of the place had shaped both his memories and perceptions.
It seemed every aspect of the town had found its way into his novels: I saw the tiny room at the back of the property where the family kept the two Indians that they had bought for 300 pesos; the room where they kept the 72 chamberpots that they were forced to buy when the entire student body of the local school for girls spent the night; the company store on the corner where a young Marquez had first seen the “magic” that was ice; the train that the banana company had used to haul off the hundreds of victims of the massacre it had committed, to dump them into the sea.
I had a realization seeing Marquez’s novels coming to life before me that, in retrospect, should’ve been obvious even without ever having set foot in Aracataca. His novels are known for their “magic realism,” the art of combining magic and reality in a way that is both exhilarating and disarmingly familiar.
But as anyone who has spent any time on the Colombian coast can tell you, that’s just how life is here. Just look out your window or walk down the street: you can’t help but be confronted with a world of mystery and superstition, where the most common events are explained with appeals to the magical world; a place where the absurd and the mundane are interchangeable, where any attempt to apply the logic of the modern world is rebuffed with a resounding round of laughter that seems to ring out of the very soil. If I may offer my humble opinion on a literary master, I would suggest that Marquez’s talent is not necessarily imagination, but rather the rare ability to describe the naturally magical nature of this place to those who have never experienced it for themselves.
In Marquez’s book “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” the city of Macondo (his name for Aracataca) experiences a storm that causes it to rain for 4 years, 11 months and 2 days without stopping. Sitting in a restaurant with half a dozen local residents and watching this same rain pour down for what seemed like hours, I realized that the secret to writing (and life?) is not traveling to exotic locales or having spectacular experiences; the secret is seeing the uniqueness and the magic of whatever is happening right before your eyes, even if you are “just” a little boy in an insignificant village in the jungles of the Third World.
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