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Times Literary Supplement Article about Gabo and The Magdalena River

This article was published in July, but it´s hard to access online.
Enjoy,
Josh

Along the Magdalena
Travels with Gabriel
García Márquez
JOSHUA MARCUS
When Gabriel García Márquez was almost sixteen, he left his family and the swamp village of Sucre to take up a scholarship at a high school in the Colombian capital, Bogotá. To get there, he took what was to be a life-changing journey up the Magdalena River, the Mississippi of Colombia. Nearly sixty years later, Latin America's most renowned literary ambassador wrote in his autobiography, "Today I can dare to say that the only reason I would want to be a boy again is to enjoy that voyage once more". These were the words that inspired me to make a pilgrimage to the Magdalena.

The territory between a writer's environment and his work is his dreamland. For García Márquez, "Each voyage taught us great lessons about life that connected us in ephemeral but unforgettable ways to the life of the towns we passed through". Even if they were ghost towns now, I wanted to see the dust that was left, and I decided the best way to do this was to re-create the journey down the Magdalena that flowed through his stories. García Márquez's first passage was on the David Arango. Seventeen years later, in 1961, it was the last steamboat left on the river when it caught fire and burned to ashes. "My youth ended that day, and the little still left to us of our river of nostalgic memories had gone to hell. Today the Magdalena River is dead, its waters polluted, its animals annihilated", Márquez wrote. His novels Love in the Time of Cholera and The General in His Labyrinth are an attempt simultaneously to publicize the destruction and revivify the "dead" environment.

The General in His Labyrinth portrays Simón Bolívar, the South American Liberator, at the end of his life as an exile. To leave the country, he embarks on a voyage down the Magdalena. His first stop is Honda, "with its bridge of Castilian stone spanning the great marshy river, with its walls in ruin and its church tower destroyed by an earthquake". During the colonial era, local rapids made Honda the last significant port along the river. When I arrived, the walls and tower had been restored to their natural disasterprone intactness, but a rainbow assortment of landfill items swept down the marshy river. Children used old tyres to turn the rapids into their Splash Mountain. Except for these and a handful of elderly fishermen, two dozen bridges, many of them collapsed or unusable, helped the rest of the population stay away from the Magdalena and its surrounding tributaries.

Soon after leaving Honda, Bolívar notices the beginning of environmental degradation: "The fish will have to learn to walk on land because the water will disappear". A century later, in Love in the Time of Cholera, the

Magdalena riverboat captain says, "In a few years, we'll ride the dry riverbed in luxury automobiles". His prophecy almost came true for me, but instead of a fleet of Mercedes and Lexus, I took the minibus jalopies. In the towns, I had to bribe men with beers just to get them to talk about boats. Most said nothing and walked away after the ten seconds it took them to guzzle a bottle. Roads, no matter what their condition, have superseded the water.

It was steamboat transport, popularized soon after Bolívar's death, which brought much of the devastation. In Love in the Time of Cholera, "There were calcinated flatlands stripped of entire forests that had been devoured by the boilers of the riverboats, and the debris of godforsaken villages whose streets remained flooded even in the crudest droughts". The protagonist, Florentino Ariza, runs the riverboat company. "With his mind clouded by his passion for Fermina Daza, he never took the trouble to think about it, and by the time he realized the truth, there was nothing anyone could do except bring in a new river." It has never come and, in fact, the Magdalena has abandoned Mompox. The town sits on an island in the river, and the arm it borders has filled with sediment. As Mompox's river frontage became stranded, so did the town. The most recent history books in the local library end in the 1830s, immediately after Bolívar's last visit.

Since the town has been deserted by an increasingly obsolete river, it has had little reason to exist, so it has not changed. García Márquez's Bolívar says, "Mompox doesn't exist. Sometimes we dream about it, but it doesn't exist". In response, Bolívar's servant, Jose Palacio says, "At least I can testify to the existence of the Santa Barbara Tower". The now 400-year-old church is a Hansel-andGretel-like pastel of flowers, palm trees, Baroque bell tower and balcony. Atop barbershop poles secured into the church's façade, carved lion heads appear to be dazed by the insufferable heat. Without these relics, Mompox would indeed have disappeared when the history books say it does. The reason it has not, and the only thing that has happened since Bolívar, is the recent appearance of tourists and the accompanying hotels, eating places, and motorized transport. It is as though the forgotten time between now and then had been compressed into an instant.

This idea is central to García Márquez's work. The narrator of One Hundred Years of Solitude "had not put events in the order of man's conventional time, but had concentrated a century of daily episodes in such a way that they coexisted in one instant". The bridge over the Magdalena between Puerto Salgar and La Dorada, a little downriver from Honda, is this Márquezian concentration of time in solid form. As I walked along the east bank, state-of-the-art fighter jets from Palanquero Air Force Base filled my ears with sonic booms. A handful of soldiers armed with M-16s guard the steel-and-concrete-trussed bridge and ordered me not to take any pictures while I walked across it. The Magdalena drained Colombia's garbage like a giant gutter beneath me. On the other side, I descended the bank beneath the bridge to an outpost of huts, mud, sunken canoes, and families. They had no electricity or running water and, of course, no boats for sale. I tried to take photographs but a villager warned against it because it is in a military zone. This prohibition was the one thread connecting the two sides. If visual depiction is restricted, perhaps that is why stories are so prevalent.

The two banks are opposite sides not just of a river but also of a century. In between flow all the history, all the stories, the natural and human cycles that have occurred to get from this "godforsaken village whose streets remained flooded even in the crudest droughts" to a military installation with a twenty-first-century arsenal funded by a nation thousands of miles away. The bridge that spans the river is the structure that allows everything to "coexist in one instant", to unite the beginning and end of a story, of a century. The soldiers guard the bridge vigilantly because it is a crucial communication route – for vehicular traffic, certainly, but also in the sense that like Márquez's fiction its time-altering properties make life easier, more bearable and more connected.

Poverty, violence, corruption and heartbreak are endemic for several of García Márquez's characters, including Florentino Ariza and Bolívar. But the stories Márquez tells of their lives carry away their sorrows, leaving the poetic and the timeless. The river of his literature, the Magdalena is a metaphor for the paradoxes, beauty, sentimentality, escapism, everything that has been described as "magical realism"; and all this has its metaphor in the Magdalena. At the same time, the pollution, the blood, the misunderstanding and injustice, all the parts of life we wish did not exist, are dumped into the river in overwhelming quantities, beyond our control. The bridge is not for ever and will eventually collapse, will become extinct. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, "The history of the family was a machine with unavoidable repetitions, a turning wheel that would have gone on spilling into eternity were it not for the progressive and irremediable wearing of the axle". The family and their town, Macondo, are wiped out, Bolívar dies, and Florentino Ariza's love is requited only at the end of his life when Fermina Daza's husband dies.

When I came to the Magdalena, I feared that I would just be one more thing dumped into it. And I cannot say now that I understand the region or have found its heart, "lost in the jungle of the Magdalena". It would be easy to be disheartened by this, to question the reason and purpose of his "poetic transposition of reality", as García Márquez has called it: "I think a novel is reality represented through a secret code . . . different from real life, although it is rooted in it". Since nearly everything that occurred during my trip, the towns, the people, the river itself, was poeticized, different from real life, I needed one real thing, one real person connected to García Márquez's dreamland as a balance.

Jaime García Márquez's favourite among his brother's books is Love in the Time of Cholera. The novel describes "the ruins of the very old and heroic city of Cartagena de Indias, the most beautiful in the world, abandoned by its inhabitants . . . the walls still intact, the brambles in the streets, the fortifications devoured by heartsease". Yet it is the city where Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza live. García Márquez noted, "It's a doubling of the city. Let's say it's the same city in two distinct periods, two different temporal spaces". If the Magdalena River is the outskirts of the Márquezian dreamland between reality and fiction, the walled city of Cartagena is the capital that protects its heart.

Jaime García Márquez's tour of "La Cartagena de Gabito" unlocked it for me. He has the same broad nose and expressive eyes as his older brother, whom he calls little Gabo, but his face and demeanour are more jocular. Jaime's stories grant access to the two periods: one of García Márquez's life, especially the moments that brought about Love in the Time of Cholera, and one that is the era of the actual story. His colleague Francisca and his nephew joined us. The latter is doing research for the film version of the book, which is about to begin production – the biggest ever in Latin America. During the tour, Francisca told me, "My theory is that Jaime tells the stories to Gabo and Gabo writes them. He's the real Macondo". While I cannot confirm that, Jaime's oral storytelling is as prodigious in its interweaving of fiction and reality as his brother's tales.

Jaime pointed to a canary-yellow fivestorey building crowded with empty balconies and says, "Jeremiah de Saint-Amour lived on the second floor". Love in the Time of Cholera begins with Dr Juvenal Urbino rushing to that house and noticing "the scent of bitter almonds" because his friend Jeremiah has just committed suicide with gold cyanide. Soon after, the novel reveals that Dr Urbino lent Jeremiah the money to set up a photography studio with all the necessary chemicals. Jaime then told his brother's "most striking story from childhood": it seems a five-year-old Gabriel García Márquez discovered that his grandfather's chess opponent, a Belgian immigrant, Don Emilio, with many identical qualities to Jeremiah, poisoned himself in the same way. Jaime added that his grandfather introduced Don Emilio to silversmithing, which gave him the necessary gold cyanide. While this appears to parallel the novel, it is impossible to know if this is true or not. Jaime wasn't alive then, so he either created this anecdote from the novel, or heard it from his brother, even though Gabo did not write about it, and memories of events that occurred when he was five must be deemed dubious.

Jaime explained: "My brother maintains that his literature is inseparable from his life. This way he cannot confuse what is real". By constructing such a definitive symbiosis, a melding of his experiences and imagination, Gabriel García Márquez has created his own memories. He has in effect done for himself what every human individual seeks to do during his or her life: to achieve a sense of control over it. What García Márquez as an artist and a person can teach us is that imagination and dreams may become true, not in the typical fairytale or long-term sense we think of, but in the day in day out, ups and downs of life. The epigraph of his autobiography is "Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it".

By peterucker on Oct 27, 2007, 14:38 in Friendly Talkzone.

bill230 says on Oct 27, 2007, 15:13:

Really enjoyable read. Thanks.

0 funny, 0 helpful.