Macondo on the Mind

Vonnegut, Fuentes, and now García Márquez. All three departed the world during spring, and I can remember each sharp sadness fully. When you fall in love with a living author’s work, it’s as if there is a tacit companionship—a lighted tunnel between the two of you. But then the brief candle flickers out.

Whether it’s for sanity, serenity, or mere serendipity, novels compel us. They recount the permutations of human experience—love, loneliness, death, desire, and nostalgia—in an espresso-like concentration of vicarious thrill. They are the autodidact’s ambrosia.

Vonnegut lampooned the world’s absurdity for me, Fuentes laid the sometimes-sordid foundations of power bare to me, but Gabriel García Márquez taught me how to dream.

It was love at first line.

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember the distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

Who can read that opening of his greatest work “One Hundred Years of Solitude” without the exhilaration of wonderment—a momentary relapse into dreamy childhood where you can just stroll through the immaculate scenery of García Márquez’s mind.

I spent many months here, ambulating through the supernatural writing, lost in the optics: the clouds of yellow butterflies that hover around Mauricio Babilonia, Father Nicanor’s levitation after drinking a cup of hot chocolate, Juvenal Urbino’s fateful ladder fall while rescuing his pet parrot from the mango tree, and the haunting tableau of the palace of the unspeakably powerful patriarch, overrun with cows after his death.

I never knew you were allowed to write like that. And I devoured as much as I could.

I didn’t know that writing about the supernatural with journalistic precision and matter-of-factness could so beautifully neutralize the effect, the way that the people shrug at the very old man with enormous wings once another circus trick comes to town.

“If you say that there are elephants flying in the sky, people are not going to believe you. But if you say that there are four hundred and twenty-five elephants flying in the sky, people will probably believe you,” García Márquez once remarked.

When you destabilize the magic of the impossible, the stuff that’s real becomes all the more wondrous. A first introduction to ice stays memorable 16 years later.

But these were never just pretty stories. “One Hundred Years of Solitude” reads like a phantasmic Book of Genesis with generation after generation suffering the same story—Macondo is a place where time circles on itself rather than pass, linking the archaic origin story with the political strife of later days. The 32 insurrections led by Colonel Buendía and the 3,000 banana plantation workers massacred allude too much to the political discord of the last century in Latin America for the novel to be a self-contained, solipsistic unit.

“We have to do more things in our culture than American writers do in theirs. They can have more time for themselves and for their writing, whereas we have social demands,” Carlos Fuentes once said.

He explained: “Pablo Neruda used to say that every Latin American writer goes around dragging a heavy body, the body of his people, of his past, of his national history. We have to assimilate the enormous weight of our past so we will not forget what gives us life. If you forget your past, you die.”

That duty is apparent in García Márquez's novel “The Autumn of the Patriarch,” which he described as a “poem on the solitude of power.” It is made up of the breathless and desperate sentences of a fictional ruthless Latin American dictator who goes unnamed, who nonetheless conjures forth many names: Pinilla, Trujillio, Franco, and too many more.

The abject loneliness of the cruel general, like the deathbed narrations of Fuentes’s Artemio Cruz or the aloofness of Mahfouz’s Gebelawi, captures the emptiness of the internecine dictatorships that plagued his home during his lifetime. It’s a plague that unfortunately survived him.

I’m nowhere near the wordsmith García Márquez was, so I will close with my favorite sentences of his:

“In the shattered schoolhouse where for the first time he had felt the security of power, a few feet from the room where he had come to know the uncertainty of love, Arcadio found the formality of death ridiculous. Death really did not matter to him, but life did, and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia.”

For the man revered by millions as Gabo, life was what mattered, and I hope that his last thoughts were nostalgic and not fearful. But I will still miss him.

Idrees M. Kahloon ’16, a Crimson editorial executive, is an applied mathematics concentrator in Dunster House.