"It was as if God [...] was keeping the inhabitants of Macondo in a permanent alternation between excitement and disappointment, doubt and revelation, to such an extreme that no one knew for certain where the limits of reality lay." - Gabriel García Marquez
"Oh.... ¿Hotel del gringo?"
"Sí, sí... hotel del gringo."
It's by that name, not its official one, nor the detailed address I repeatedly give that the other mototaxi owner knows where I'm asking to go. He then instructs the confused younger driver, the one I'm behind on the moto, and after the simple directions we're back off again. Two more turns and it's still my visitor's eyes that spot it first. Hand-painted yellow butterflies around the English words "Gypsy Residence." Like my "sí, sí," my confirmation of "Esta aqui" is muffled through a mouth shield. I take off the motorcycle helmet and pay him an inflated tourist fare, the crumpled green and red pesos equivalent to $3 US instead of $1.50, and I approach the gated door of the man I already know as Tim Buendia.
It's a decision I had to explain away two dozen times. Why instead of the Caribbean beaches, hammocks, and huts of Tayrona, I chose a meandering trip inland to a city of about 25,000. A sharp two-day detour away from Northern Colombia's worn backpacker circuit to a town with one hostel and no hotels. An odd pilgrimage during my first trip to South America to the hometown of the author whose liquid words brought the continent texture to me and made it an imbued land rather than an empty box to check. The too'aged writer who melted the houses of Aracataca into the ethereal atmosphere of Macondo- Gabriel García Marquez. I came to the streets that inspired him so that I could see something of what he saw. And while he long ago abandoned Colombia for Mexico, the nostalgia of Cataca for the labyrinths of a more northern modernity, something of what existed then still echoes. The pedestrian miracles that made his realism a magic one, biographies imbued with the impossible.
Tim is the town's only hostel owner as well as its only English-speaking tour guide. He came in 2008, opening his Gypsy Residence two years later, at a previous location on the farther outskirts of town. At some point, he abandoned his Dutch last name for the more surreal surname Buendia- that of the lineage woven in García Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. And while I don't remember where I first read the article that mentioned a hostel had opened up in the small hometown of García Marquez, or Gabo as he is lovingly known, I knew immediately what it symbolized to me- the coming end of the South America's solitude. The creeping'in of the Twenty-First Century, a second coming of the Banana Company's arrival that changed the lives of those generations a century ago, when international interests entered the grove villages of this removed continent with the new imperialism of unrestrained capitalism. One that brought a barely-concealed slavery and pillaging of both land and culture, flooding broom'swept casas with payment in the form of vouchers for kitchen appliances rather than a living wage. Massacres of still undetermined numbers when the machine guns held by white hands spit metal into brown skin by the thousands, for the galling crime of demanding a day off and pay above the poverty line. The United Fruit Company left long ago, both the Macondo of Gabo's stories and its inspiration of Aracataca; I saw its buildings decaying from behind a fence that kept myself and generations of the town's true residents out. But with South America hosting both the World Cup and Summer Olympics in the coming 3 years, with airline routes expanding and Europe growing increasingly domesticated and homogeneous with every passing EU session, there's no doubt the world will turn increasingly to South America for a rush of the unfamiliar and brave. An influx of visitors that will make English more prevalent and will for the first time divorce the unfathomable from the everyday.
But as of this December those crowds have not yet arrived. And for the two nights I'm staying in the town's only guest lodging, I'm also its only customer, the only foreign tourist walking its streets. And while I can communicate basics and rudimentary conversation spoken in a constant present-tense, my three years on Bs in Spanish lessons aren't enough to keep away the solitude of my foreign tongue. So the night before I take the day-long tour with Tim, he is considerate enough to take me out for a drink with his wife and eight-month old son. Like me, she grew up in a suburban town in Southern California, so while I can speak semi-passable Spanish to the tienda owners of La Hojarasca, a cafe named after one of Gabo's early novellas that's located next to the house where he was born, it's first-language English I'm getting to know Cynthia with, along with Tim's Western European fluency. We drink fresh fruit nectars more refreshing than beers as their infant son laughs with his impossibly innocent smile, which spreads to the nearby abuelas. The couple's love is a beautiful one to witness, absent of Gabo's darker recurrent themes; without the solitude of the true Buendias or the melancholy of Amaranta's shrouded hand. It's also out of place with the subtle but present misogyny of modern Aracataca- the images of bikinied import models airbrushed onto seats of the motos that snake around the carreras and their hungry dirt. Or like the recently-deceased resident, Perro Negro, an oak of man that fathered 39 children before dying, my guess is from exhaustion. From this stagnancy of gender and antiquated mores, something of their love stands apart. And if such disconcordance is obvious to me in the first few hours, I think surely it's been noticed by them as well. A rift that only amplifies their expatriate solitude.
The next morning Tim and I set out and turn the circle of focus on the Aracataca I'm coming to know so that Macondo can appear. He's wearing his typical ensemble- a straw hat and an ankle-length sarong, while sporting a walking stick. A wardrobe that makes him "feel like a character in a Nobel Prize winning novel" as he says repeatedly. He urges that I also take one of the dozens of straw hats to shade from the aggressive sun. And while I grant him that, I decline the offer to also carry a walking stick. The first 20 minutes is more a tour of Tim's life than Gabo's, as we stop again and again to chat with townspeople Tim has befriended during his half-decade in Cataca. But it's equally enjoyable as the advertised itinerary, for in that way I meet the town, like the 95 year-old man, ten years older than García Marquez, who used to visit the ice factory by the river to see the workers cut the large blocks of ice into manageable portions. The venue that inspired the iconic opening line of One Hundred Years of Solitude.
The tour takes us through scenes from Gabo's life and his novels. The train station, his grandparent's home with the workshop for the hand'hammered golden fish, like those of Colonel Aureliano Buendia, the Cataca river that germinated both the town and its name. To a horse'drawn cart that Gabo rode in in 2007, as he was slow'paraded around the streets of Cataca in what will almost surely be his final visit to the place of his birth. It now sits rotting in the "forest of magic realism," another of Tim's charmingly grandiose go-to lines. And the more we walk through Aracataca, the more of Macondo that seeps through. Our meandering pace through dirt streets is slowed even further by the darting of roosters being raised for cockfights, past blue'eyed dogs and stray pigs foraging through weeds and Caribbean shrubs. Walking with the soundtrack of a looped radio commercial shilling for a clothing sale ahead of the coming holy day. Through minute cups of lemongrass tea at dusk with a parrot inspecting the mismatching china from shoulder. Our strides trickle lazy like the brushstrokes of the residents who are repainting their houses, as they traditionally do every December in anticipation of the New Year- a tradition in Aracataca and the hundreds of small villages like it throughout Colombia. Tim and I eventually walk through the mostly waist-deep river, its soft sand forming to my beaten soles still sore from my trek to Ciudad Perdida. With school on holiday, children are spread along the banks and in the stream. A group of five boys huddle as one of their number preps a future meal, gutting and skinning a dead animal we eventually recognize to be a large iguana. Like almost everyone else does, the boys stop to look at us, we two bearded gringos in straw hats walking in tandem- a John, a Jesus, and a River Jordan. The lead boy gestures to his chest with the knife that simultaneously magnifies and dwarfs him and puffingly proclaims, "Soy macho." The boyhood need for masculinity more dear than the life of the endangered reptile he's beheaded. But we smirk and walk on, because we're neither native to this land, nor its moral judgments. And because to our left, two other boys are sprinting along the top of the water, their soles turning the liquid to solid and back again with each frenetic step, racing ethereal in the afternoon. There must be hidden sand just below the surface, but these are the children of Macondo, and so I'll never truly be sure.
Given such abundant magic, visible even to a brief visitor like myself, it's difficult to comprehend why the crowds are not already here. With so much of Marquez's inspiration prevalent, why for now its only pilgrims are strange. Only those that dream the very deepest. Those longing to indulge in and exercise their solitude. Aracataca has weathered the occupation and abandonment of the banana company without growing callous and modern, neither from internal industry nor external influx of tourism. But several times during our walk, Tim and I stop to purchase tiny bags of water. Little overstuffed clear tubes the size of a lone enchilada with corners we bite and tear to puncture. This is the only thing I can drink out of, as well as what I must brush my teeth with at night. The river we walked in, which somewhere along the line holds the discarded heads of iguanas, and torn bicycle tires, and forgotten t-shirts I can somewhat read through the opaque brown liquid- this is the town's water supply. Which is either untreated or so minimally it's effectively useless. Years of corrupt politicians skimming money and broken campaign promises have anchored the mundane to the magical, married the tedious to the divine. It's failed to bring the basic necessities to its citizens by not creating an effective water treatment plant. And it's also kept that money away from the dusty sites of García Marquez, choking the nascent tourism it claims to desire. It's a large reason that Tim's Gypsy Residence is the only hostel in the city, and why when he closes it in February, in less than three months, leaving Aracatca so his wife can pursue opportunities in California (a more northern modernity not unlike Gabo's Mexican expatriation), Macondo will once again be accessible to the outsider only in the pages of books.
Tim tells me that his move away temporary and I want to believe that is true. While I'm wary of a South America flooded with outsiders watering down its cultures, I still don't want to be one of the last Gabo-loving gringos to walk the sand beds of the Cataca or to stand in the cemetery atop crude but honest'built crypts at sunset, seemingly at eye-level with more African palms. I'm rooting for a middle-ground, a preservation of the balance that exists now; not because it's perfect, maybe simply because it's what I'm used to. Tim has an optimism that the town will grow, that the needed tourism infrastructure will be laid, and that at that point he will return to Aracataca and be able to showcase Macondo once again. New Gypsy Residence and all. I support his decision to leave completely. Not only because I want his son to have the comparative luxuries of a California childhood, or for his wife to be back near her roots, but because I want to read the book Tim plans to write about his time in Aracataca. For him to develop fully for readers the city that I can only begin to hint at here. And because I know from my experience of thirty years and forty countries that when there's a chance for our burden of solitude to be lifted, we must take it. If genuine, such authenticity can keep away our otherwise suffocating and melancholy reality.
My last night in Aracataca, I sit reading One Hundred Years of Solitude on a wicker bench in the Gypsy Residence. A few hours earlier I'd walked the museum grounds of Gabo's childhood home that also served as his birthplace, as the spore from which Macondo would later spring. Passages from his novels and his memoir that begins in the very house I'd stood were affixed to walls in large acrylic letters. Not many, but some of these individualized letters were fallen, missing, a small hint that kept bothering me for what it symbolized. That still'sandy infrastructure that had also allowed a regal cart to rot in an African palm forest a few miles away. From twenty feet in front of me Tim calls out "We've lost one of the great leaders of our time. Nelson Mandela." After taking time to think of his legacy and life, I inevitably returned to the lens of Gabo. The eighty-six year old author who is now living in Mexico, with the ruin of dementia feasting harder, his writing career most assuredly over. I thought about the future day when I'll make a similar proclamation about him. Is that what it will take for Aracataca to become a more popular destination? Death what is needed for proper recognition? Am I a pilgrim in the days before a flood? Or one decades after it's already crashed..... Given the poorly-planned infrastructure, the semi-corrupt government, the apparent declining importance of literature in younger American and British and world generations, the inescapable breath of solitude this city exhales, I come to accept that this city may never become the destination that either Tim or myself believe it should be. That though South America will surely come in from the obscure, the distanced, not every city will come along with it. That the life of García Marquez and the city that cradled him may pass undeciphered to dust like Melquíades' scrolls.
Shortly after we walk that afternoon through the ancient former ice factory we meander towards one of the central monuments the town has built to García Marquez. Like most of the tour that 95+ degree day, we aim for shade when we can, squeezing onto narrow sidewalks and crouching our 6'4" frames beneath overhangs of green life. Tim shows off his resident knowledge while he still can. It's depressing to think how few more people will receive a such a passport into Macondo.
"You know what kind of tree this is? Look at the fruit." I silently evaluate the tiny green baubles of potential until he finally helps me out. "Mango."
"Mango? That's surprising- mangos are a heavy fruit and those are very thin branches."
"Yes. Not many mangos survive."
Tim is the town's only hostel owner as well as its only English-speaking tour guide. He came in 2008, opening his Gypsy Residence two years later, at a previous location on the farther outskirts of town. At some point, he abandoned his Dutch last name for the more surreal surname Buendia- that of the lineage woven in García Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. And while I don't remember where I first read the article that mentioned a hostel had opened up in the small hometown of García Marquez, or Gabo as he is lovingly known, I knew immediately what it symbolized to me- the coming end of the South America's solitude. The creeping'in of the Twenty-First Century, a second coming of the Banana Company's arrival that changed the lives of those generations a century ago, when international interests entered the grove villages of this removed continent with the new imperialism of unrestrained capitalism. One that brought a barely-concealed slavery and pillaging of both land and culture, flooding broom'swept casas with payment in the form of vouchers for kitchen appliances rather than a living wage. Massacres of still undetermined numbers when the machine guns held by white hands spit metal into brown skin by the thousands, for the galling crime of demanding a day off and pay above the poverty line. The United Fruit Company left long ago, both the Macondo of Gabo's stories and its inspiration of Aracataca; I saw its buildings decaying from behind a fence that kept myself and generations of the town's true residents out. But with South America hosting both the World Cup and Summer Olympics in the coming 3 years, with airline routes expanding and Europe growing increasingly domesticated and homogeneous with every passing EU session, there's no doubt the world will turn increasingly to South America for a rush of the unfamiliar and brave. An influx of visitors that will make English more prevalent and will for the first time divorce the unfathomable from the everyday.
But as of this December those crowds have not yet arrived. And for the two nights I'm staying in the town's only guest lodging, I'm also its only customer, the only foreign tourist walking its streets. And while I can communicate basics and rudimentary conversation spoken in a constant present-tense, my three years on Bs in Spanish lessons aren't enough to keep away the solitude of my foreign tongue. So the night before I take the day-long tour with Tim, he is considerate enough to take me out for a drink with his wife and eight-month old son. Like me, she grew up in a suburban town in Southern California, so while I can speak semi-passable Spanish to the tienda owners of La Hojarasca, a cafe named after one of Gabo's early novellas that's located next to the house where he was born, it's first-language English I'm getting to know Cynthia with, along with Tim's Western European fluency. We drink fresh fruit nectars more refreshing than beers as their infant son laughs with his impossibly innocent smile, which spreads to the nearby abuelas. The couple's love is a beautiful one to witness, absent of Gabo's darker recurrent themes; without the solitude of the true Buendias or the melancholy of Amaranta's shrouded hand. It's also out of place with the subtle but present misogyny of modern Aracataca- the images of bikinied import models airbrushed onto seats of the motos that snake around the carreras and their hungry dirt. Or like the recently-deceased resident, Perro Negro, an oak of man that fathered 39 children before dying, my guess is from exhaustion. From this stagnancy of gender and antiquated mores, something of their love stands apart. And if such disconcordance is obvious to me in the first few hours, I think surely it's been noticed by them as well. A rift that only amplifies their expatriate solitude.
The next morning Tim and I set out and turn the circle of focus on the Aracataca I'm coming to know so that Macondo can appear. He's wearing his typical ensemble- a straw hat and an ankle-length sarong, while sporting a walking stick. A wardrobe that makes him "feel like a character in a Nobel Prize winning novel" as he says repeatedly. He urges that I also take one of the dozens of straw hats to shade from the aggressive sun. And while I grant him that, I decline the offer to also carry a walking stick. The first 20 minutes is more a tour of Tim's life than Gabo's, as we stop again and again to chat with townspeople Tim has befriended during his half-decade in Cataca. But it's equally enjoyable as the advertised itinerary, for in that way I meet the town, like the 95 year-old man, ten years older than García Marquez, who used to visit the ice factory by the river to see the workers cut the large blocks of ice into manageable portions. The venue that inspired the iconic opening line of One Hundred Years of Solitude.
The tour takes us through scenes from Gabo's life and his novels. The train station, his grandparent's home with the workshop for the hand'hammered golden fish, like those of Colonel Aureliano Buendia, the Cataca river that germinated both the town and its name. To a horse'drawn cart that Gabo rode in in 2007, as he was slow'paraded around the streets of Cataca in what will almost surely be his final visit to the place of his birth. It now sits rotting in the "forest of magic realism," another of Tim's charmingly grandiose go-to lines. And the more we walk through Aracataca, the more of Macondo that seeps through. Our meandering pace through dirt streets is slowed even further by the darting of roosters being raised for cockfights, past blue'eyed dogs and stray pigs foraging through weeds and Caribbean shrubs. Walking with the soundtrack of a looped radio commercial shilling for a clothing sale ahead of the coming holy day. Through minute cups of lemongrass tea at dusk with a parrot inspecting the mismatching china from shoulder. Our strides trickle lazy like the brushstrokes of the residents who are repainting their houses, as they traditionally do every December in anticipation of the New Year- a tradition in Aracataca and the hundreds of small villages like it throughout Colombia. Tim and I eventually walk through the mostly waist-deep river, its soft sand forming to my beaten soles still sore from my trek to Ciudad Perdida. With school on holiday, children are spread along the banks and in the stream. A group of five boys huddle as one of their number preps a future meal, gutting and skinning a dead animal we eventually recognize to be a large iguana. Like almost everyone else does, the boys stop to look at us, we two bearded gringos in straw hats walking in tandem- a John, a Jesus, and a River Jordan. The lead boy gestures to his chest with the knife that simultaneously magnifies and dwarfs him and puffingly proclaims, "Soy macho." The boyhood need for masculinity more dear than the life of the endangered reptile he's beheaded. But we smirk and walk on, because we're neither native to this land, nor its moral judgments. And because to our left, two other boys are sprinting along the top of the water, their soles turning the liquid to solid and back again with each frenetic step, racing ethereal in the afternoon. There must be hidden sand just below the surface, but these are the children of Macondo, and so I'll never truly be sure.
Given such abundant magic, visible even to a brief visitor like myself, it's difficult to comprehend why the crowds are not already here. With so much of Marquez's inspiration prevalent, why for now its only pilgrims are strange. Only those that dream the very deepest. Those longing to indulge in and exercise their solitude. Aracataca has weathered the occupation and abandonment of the banana company without growing callous and modern, neither from internal industry nor external influx of tourism. But several times during our walk, Tim and I stop to purchase tiny bags of water. Little overstuffed clear tubes the size of a lone enchilada with corners we bite and tear to puncture. This is the only thing I can drink out of, as well as what I must brush my teeth with at night. The river we walked in, which somewhere along the line holds the discarded heads of iguanas, and torn bicycle tires, and forgotten t-shirts I can somewhat read through the opaque brown liquid- this is the town's water supply. Which is either untreated or so minimally it's effectively useless. Years of corrupt politicians skimming money and broken campaign promises have anchored the mundane to the magical, married the tedious to the divine. It's failed to bring the basic necessities to its citizens by not creating an effective water treatment plant. And it's also kept that money away from the dusty sites of García Marquez, choking the nascent tourism it claims to desire. It's a large reason that Tim's Gypsy Residence is the only hostel in the city, and why when he closes it in February, in less than three months, leaving Aracatca so his wife can pursue opportunities in California (a more northern modernity not unlike Gabo's Mexican expatriation), Macondo will once again be accessible to the outsider only in the pages of books.
Tim tells me that his move away temporary and I want to believe that is true. While I'm wary of a South America flooded with outsiders watering down its cultures, I still don't want to be one of the last Gabo-loving gringos to walk the sand beds of the Cataca or to stand in the cemetery atop crude but honest'built crypts at sunset, seemingly at eye-level with more African palms. I'm rooting for a middle-ground, a preservation of the balance that exists now; not because it's perfect, maybe simply because it's what I'm used to. Tim has an optimism that the town will grow, that the needed tourism infrastructure will be laid, and that at that point he will return to Aracataca and be able to showcase Macondo once again. New Gypsy Residence and all. I support his decision to leave completely. Not only because I want his son to have the comparative luxuries of a California childhood, or for his wife to be back near her roots, but because I want to read the book Tim plans to write about his time in Aracataca. For him to develop fully for readers the city that I can only begin to hint at here. And because I know from my experience of thirty years and forty countries that when there's a chance for our burden of solitude to be lifted, we must take it. If genuine, such authenticity can keep away our otherwise suffocating and melancholy reality.
My last night in Aracataca, I sit reading One Hundred Years of Solitude on a wicker bench in the Gypsy Residence. A few hours earlier I'd walked the museum grounds of Gabo's childhood home that also served as his birthplace, as the spore from which Macondo would later spring. Passages from his novels and his memoir that begins in the very house I'd stood were affixed to walls in large acrylic letters. Not many, but some of these individualized letters were fallen, missing, a small hint that kept bothering me for what it symbolized. That still'sandy infrastructure that had also allowed a regal cart to rot in an African palm forest a few miles away. From twenty feet in front of me Tim calls out "We've lost one of the great leaders of our time. Nelson Mandela." After taking time to think of his legacy and life, I inevitably returned to the lens of Gabo. The eighty-six year old author who is now living in Mexico, with the ruin of dementia feasting harder, his writing career most assuredly over. I thought about the future day when I'll make a similar proclamation about him. Is that what it will take for Aracataca to become a more popular destination? Death what is needed for proper recognition? Am I a pilgrim in the days before a flood? Or one decades after it's already crashed..... Given the poorly-planned infrastructure, the semi-corrupt government, the apparent declining importance of literature in younger American and British and world generations, the inescapable breath of solitude this city exhales, I come to accept that this city may never become the destination that either Tim or myself believe it should be. That though South America will surely come in from the obscure, the distanced, not every city will come along with it. That the life of García Marquez and the city that cradled him may pass undeciphered to dust like Melquíades' scrolls.
Shortly after we walk that afternoon through the ancient former ice factory we meander towards one of the central monuments the town has built to García Marquez. Like most of the tour that 95+ degree day, we aim for shade when we can, squeezing onto narrow sidewalks and crouching our 6'4" frames beneath overhangs of green life. Tim shows off his resident knowledge while he still can. It's depressing to think how few more people will receive a such a passport into Macondo.
"You know what kind of tree this is? Look at the fruit." I silently evaluate the tiny green baubles of potential until he finally helps me out. "Mango."
"Mango? That's surprising- mangos are a heavy fruit and those are very thin branches."
"Yes. Not many mangos survive."
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Awesome post man. Now you need one for Brazil man!
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