In the cradle of magical realism

Many years later, when he sat down to face his computer screen, Gabriel Garcia Marquez would write about that distant afternoon when his mother insisted that he accompany her to sell his childhood home here.

At that time, in 1950, Aracataca was a forgotten village, built along the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, white and enormous like prehistoric eggs--or so Garcia Marquez recalled.

“Now, with more than 75 years measured out, I know it was the most important decision of many in my career as a writer,” he writes in his just released autobiography. “That is to say, the most important decision in my life.”

Garcia Marquez, now the Nobel Prize-winning eminence grise of Latin American literature, has just published the first of what he hopes will be a three-volume autobiography titled “Vivir Para Contarla” or “Living to Tell It.” Now available only in Spanish, Random House has the rights to publish an English translation in the future. The work is a dreamy account reaching from childhood to the publication of his first novel, “Leaf Storm,” published in 1955.

More than anything, the book is a portrait of a man coming to terms with his artistry, a self-examination by the former journalist of the who, what, where, when, why and how of his life. But it is also a love letter to his past, a fond recollection of the place where he first gathered the material for his most famous novels, sweeping and startlingly original works such as “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and “Love in the Time of Cholera” that have ever since defined Latin America literature.

“He has said that he owes everything to the fact of having been born in [Aracataca] and having been raised until 10 or 11 in the home of his grandparents,” said Dasso Saldivar, Garcia Marquez’s earlier biographer. “With complete certainty, I can say that if he had been born and raised in another place, he would not be the great writer he is today.”

It is the influence of this quirky little village on the man, and in turn, his influence on the town, that is one of the primary building blocks of his work.

Garcia Marquez’s grandparents helped found Aracataca, a tiny town wedged between the snow-capped Sierra de Santa Marta mountain range and a vast marsh known simply as “The Great Swamp.” They arrived after his grandfather killed another man in a duel over family honor, a story that found its way into “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”

His grandfather, Col. Nicolas Ricardo Marquez, fought in one of Colombia’s bloodiest civil wars, known as the War of a Thousand Days. One of the famous generals in that war, Gen. Rafael Uribe -- a distant relative of current President Alvaro Uribe -- often visited the Garcia Marquez home.

The town’s economy was, and is today, based on the banana. When Garcia Marquez was a boy, the entire area was controlled by United Fruit Co., predecessor to Chiquita Brands International. The company’s iron-fisted dominion led to a protest by banana workers in 1928 that ended in a massacre, with government forces shooting unarmed civilians. That story too played a prominent role in “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” as well as the autobiography.

In fact, a tour of the town reveals just how closely Garcia Marquez’s novels are intertwined with this place. Macondo, the fictional town in his novels, is in many ways Aracataca reborn, molded into a universal symbol where love and hate, vengeance and jealousy, humor and ridicule play out against a gaudy canvas.

If there is anything that “Living to Tell It” reveals, it is that Garcia Marquez is an author grounded in place. He signals as much early in his autobiography, as he tells his mother he has become so inspired during their visit to his hometown that he will defy his father by dropping out of school to become an author.

“Tell him I love him very much and that, thanks to him, I am going to be a writer,” he tells her. “Nothing else but a writer.”

Throughout the voyage, Garcia Marquez writes, he continually read “Light in August”--a book by William Faulkner, who set many of his novels in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County in Mississippi where Faulkner was raised.

The similarities between Macondo and Aracataca are unmistakable. There are the railroad tracks that run through both towns. The almond trees and banana groves. The butterflies fluttering everywhere. The sleepy town square, baking in the heat. And then there is the surrealism. Even today, Aracataca has a strange and secret feel, like a beach with a hidden riptide beneath the waves. It is a place that seems almost lurid with idiosyncrasy.

There is, for instance, Luis Agamez, a toothless, 48-year-old painter who wanders the town’s dirt streets carrying two of his massive oil paintings. One features the magical Aracataca River. The other, Garcia Marquez.

“I have painted more than 200 pictures of him,” Agamez says, offering to sell one for $70. “He’s my idol. He’s the god that inspires me, apart from the God that inspires all Christians.”

Then there is the mayor, Efrain Antonio Garcia, who at first glance appears a deadly serious bureaucrat. He has fired all but 18 of the city’s 543 employees and contractors in a desperate effort to reduce the city’s deficit. Then he recounts his idea to boost tourism: He hopes to paint every house in town a different color with paint donated from a nearby factory.

“The idea is to make Aracataca a more attractive place,” he says. “We want to see if we can improve our services to make it an enjoyable place to stay.”

Finally, there is Eduardo Vanegas, a 36-year-old municipal worker. As he tours through town on his motor scooter, a train bearing heaps of black coal from Alabama-based Drummond Coal Co. rushes through town, clack, clack, clack--a metronome far too rapid for the town’s somnolence.

“Does anyone ever get hit by the train?” a visitor asks.

“Oh sure,” Vanegas says, “I was hit three times.”

And so the story comes out, how the 8-year-old Vanegas was fishing on the train bridge one day when the train came into view. He froze, too terrified to move. He threw himself down on the tracks as the train rushed over, then raised his head to see what was happening. The train smashed into the back of his head, sending his forehead crashing into the sharp edge of the crosstie beneath him. His brother, fishing nearby, called to him, so he raised his head again to answer, only to be smashed down again.

Buzzing through town on the motorcycle, deftly dodging stray pigs, dogs and cows, he lifts his hair to proudly reveal the scars he carries from the day. He is known even now around town as the “Train Survivor.”

“There were 14 cars,” he said, “and I was in the hospital for 14 days. Even Garcia Marquez couldn’t make that up.”

The concordance between Garcia Marquez’s fictional world and his real one extends even to his childhood home, which the family sold when it moved off Colombia’s Caribbean coast.

Before he won the Nobel Prize in 1982, the government had been wary of Garcia Marquez’s leftist leanings, accusing him of financing one of this nation’s numerous guerrilla groups. But after the award, they welcomed the prodigal son with open arms, buying his home and declaring it a museum and national landmark.

But like the colonel in one of Garcia Marquez’s stories who waits for a pension check that never arrives, the museum has sadly rotted over the years, its funding diverted by government corruption or indifference. Paint peels off the walls. The smell of mildew fills the air. The walls seem to sag inward. In back, an auditorium that was supposed to host cultural affairs sits empty, with no budget to buy chairs.

Colombia “deserves better than this,” says Edgar Perez, the sad-faced museum director.

Besides the tumbling-down museum, there is little else in town linked directly to the author. And even as the publication of his autobiography has sparked in Colombia an unrestrained, almost delirious celebration of Gabo, as the author is affectionately known, almost nobody here remembers Garcia Marquez, who moved away when he was around 8.

There is one relative left, 66-year-old Nicholas Arias, a first cousin. He met Garcia Marquez only once, when the writer came to town to sponsor a festival of vallenato, Colombia’s accordion-laced brand of country music.

“When I think of him, I feel proud,” said Arias, his eyes shining out from his face, tanned yet smooth like a worn baseball glove.

“He is a Colombian. A native of this town. And my cousin.”

Others have a more mixed reaction.

Vanegas, the train survivor, remembers as a young boy the last time Garcia Marquez came to visit, after he received the Nobel Prize in ’82. There was a grand presentation in the town square. To prepare for it, Vanegas and the other children went around capturing butterflies in big nets, to release as Garcia Marquez made his speech. Butterflies are found throughout Garcia Marquez’s work.

Vanegas says he was inspired by seeing the Nobel Prize winner from his town. But then Garcia Marquez vanished. “He never came again,” he says. “He hasn’t even come back to say hello.” Then he grins, and roars off on his scooter.

But if Vanegas has any lasting anger toward Garcia Marquez, he is one of only a handful of Colombians to harbor any ill feeling toward him. Garcia Marquez is perhaps the single most revered person in Colombia today.

“If you had to define it with only one word, I would say that what Colombians feel for Garcia Marquez is simply love,” says Juan Gossain, the director of one of Colombia’s largest radio networks and an old Garcia Marquez friend. “Garcia Marquez has demonstrated to the world that we are not so brutish, so stupid, that we are able to produce a writer like him, that it’s not all violence and coke, that we are able to produce art.”

Indeed, the Gabomania surrounding the book provides a temporary relief in a country weary of violence. Colombia’s 40-year-old internal war leaves some 4,000 people dead each year, most of them civilians. It is a terrible, nearly incomprehensible mesh of drug violence, territorial control and strife over economic and social justice.

Local newspapers have devoted countless articles praising his name. One magazine published an entire issue--including an article bylined by Fidel Castro, a Garcia Marquez friend and fan--as a paean to the writer.

A recent editorial in El Tiempo, the country’s largest newspaper, was even more emphatic: “The personal story of Garcia Marquez is an allegory of the story of Colombia, spattered with violence, magic, solidarity, austerity, horror, creativity, humor and fantasy,” it said.

“Living to Tell It” sold more than 300,000 copies in Spain in its first 10 days, and more than 160,000 in Colombia. It is already undergoing second printings in Peru and Mexico.

The autobiography, begun in the mid-1990s, was completed in a flurry of concentration after Garcia Marquez was diagnosed with a rare form of lymphatic cancer in 1999. The cancer is now in remission, though Garcia Marquez still journeys from his home in Mexico every three months for check-ups in Los Angeles.

His son, Rodrigo Garcia, lives in L.A., a writer and director whose credits include the HBO series “Six Feet Under” and the movie “Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her.”

Friends of Garcia Marquez deny that the book originated from a sense of mortality, despite his sickness and his beloved mother’s death earlier this year. But they differ as to why, exactly, he chose to write it.

Some say he wanted to provide a guide to his novels, a self-exegesis to the many works written in a literary style known as magical realism, which features a realistic narrative interlaced with the fantastic: sudden shifts in time, the appearance of ghosts and other improbable events. Others say he wanted to provide a guide to other writers, a case study of one writer’s journey of discovery.

And yet others think he wanted simply to leave his own record of his life.

Garcia Marquez himself isn’t talking. He has granted few interviews of late, preferring, friends say, to let his work speak for him. “He wants each person to imagine what they want to imagine in this work,” says journalist Maria Elvira Samper, a close friend in Bogota. “His autobiography is simply another novel.”