Struggling out of its solitude

Here in the birthplace of Latin America’s most famous living writer, security is an ephemeral concept. Locals will swear to you that the surrounding roads are safe, even in the queasy hours between dusk and dawn. But just two years ago, 11 government soldiers were blown to pieces after being lured into a guerrilla minefield on the edge of town. Even the majestic Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta hides nasty surprises: In fall 2003, eight foreign backpackers were kidnapped while searching for the ancient “Lost City” in the nearby mountain jungle.

Getting here from the nearest airport requires driving nearly an hour south from Colombia’s Caribbean coast, past the Great Swamp, along a two-lane road strung with vast banana plantations and disheveled villages. Every mile or so brings a sandbagged bunker or a posse of troops, part of the Bogota government’s quixotic campaign to crack down on the Marxist rebels who’ve waged a four-decade civil war against it.

Then suddenly the banana fields part, giving way to humble concrete domiciles and dusty streets lined with almond trees. Traffic slows to a crawl. A sign appears with a picture of the Nobel Prize-winning author swarmed by monarch butterflies, welcoming visitors to the pueblo where Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born on March 6, 1928, but seldom sets foot anymore. That hasn’t stopped people here from cherishing private mementos of him or curbed their gratitude for the fame he has brought to their town, which he rechristened Macondo in his fiction, including his breakthrough novel, “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”

Now more than ever, it seems, this municipality of 20,000 is trying to preserve Garcia Marquez’s connection to Aracataca and use his legacy to attract cultural pilgrims from South America, Europe and the United States. But that will require building a bridge between the fantastical world of Macondo, where human beings take flight and love affairs smolder across decades, and the more troubling reality of Aracataca, a poor, remote community, hemmed in by geography and violence, that time has largely passed by.

Town leaders say their efforts have been hampered by a lack of money and federal support and by Colombia’s reputation as a country torn apart by 40 years of civil war and murderous narco-traffickers. Even Lonely Planet, the intrepid traveler’s bible, didn’t list Aracataca in its 2003 Colombia guide.

Still, a number of people here believe the town’s fortunes could begin to turn around as it develops attractions to evoke the spirit of “Gabo,” as the author is called throughout Latin America. Planned -- or hoped for -- are three interrelated projects: a restoration and conversion of Garcia Marquez’s childhood home into a fully functioning museum, a walking tour that would include sites associated with the author’s family history, and an interactive sculpture park, near the old train station, honoring Garcia Marquez and his fellow Latin literary lion, the late Mexican writer Juan Rulfo, whose novel “Pedro Paramo” was one of Gabo’s key influences.

Aracataca’s mayor, Pedro Sanchez, who says local tourism doubled last year to 600 visitors, claims that his government is the town’s first to actively promote Garcia Marquez’s legacy. But for financial support, he says, the town must look elsewhere than Colombia’s hard-pressed national government, hundreds of miles away in Bogota.

“The only plan we have is to get the international community to promote him [Garcia Marquez], because he’s a world writer,” says Sanchez, sitting in his office in front of a giant mural depicting Garcia Marquez, photographer Leo Maiz (another Aracataca native son) and Simon Bolivar, the Great Liberator of South America, who died in 1830 in the nearby coastal city of Santa Marta.

Funding for the sculpture park, designed by the Colombian artist Hugo Zapata, comes from Colombia’s Cemex cement company through the Mexican Embassy in Colombia. The park will consist of 80 concrete modules, suitable for sitting on while chatting or people-watching. The mayor said he also will be meeting this spring with officials of Mexico City’s National Autonomous University, which annually awards two scholarships to students from Aracataca.

The mayor says only one other government has shown much interest in ensuring that Gabo’s hometown doesn’t forget him: Mexico’s.

Stranded between hope, despair

Aracataca’s name comes from a fusion of two indigenous words meaning, roughly, “clear water that goes to the sea.” (A river of the same name courses through town and flows to the Caribbean.) It’s a friendly, informal place of quiet residential avenues and noisy billiard parlors, where campesinos on their way to the fields trudge along gravel roads carrying machetes.

In the town center, near the pretty, white-steepled church, donkeys take refuge from the punishing heat under palm trees, and tin-roofed tiendas sell water in small plastic bags because aluminum cans and bottles are too expensive.

In one sense, Aracataca is all of Colombia, if not all of Latin America, stranded between isolation and integration, despair and hope, war and peace, a people’s collective dreams and its nightmarish actualities. Both sides of this dichotomy have always been part of Garcia Marquez’s imagination, though it’s usually the “magic” part of his “magic-realist” sensibility that gets emphasized by booksellers.

Yet this region also is distinct, geographically and temperamentally. Locals credit Gabo’s books with capturing its tropical, mixed-race congeniality, which has more in common with the rest of the Caribbean than with the chaotic cities of Bogota and Medellin in Colombia’s mountainous midsection. Garcia Marquez writes in his memoir “Vivir Para Contarla” (Living to Tell the Tale) that his identification with this landscape and its natives “may well have been a master key in my occupation as a writer.”

“We have been relegated and forgotten by the rest of the country,” says Luz Marina Garcia Sanchez, director of the town library, which has translations of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” in Chinese, Arabic, Portuguese and Norwegian. “Garcia Marquez opened the door on a different world.”

Even though Garcia Marquez has spent most of his adult life outside Colombia, the rare occasions when he has returned here still burn in people’s minds.

Sitting in a rocking chair on the sidewalk across from Gabo’s old home, Carlos Nelson Noches, 74, talks about the author’s family, which he has known for decades. He remembers vividly the celebration in town after Garcia Marquez won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. More than 100,000 people came, Nelson says, and thousands of butterflies were released into the air. “It was spectacular,” he says.

Alfredo Correa, a furniture maker, can remember his mother once asking his friend Garcia Marquez, a talented artist, to paint a butterfly, and he remembers that in spirit, the young Garcia Marquez took after his famous grandfather, Col. Nicolas Ricardo Marquez. Pausing from work in his backyard studio, Correa shows some visitors a black-and-white photo of himself with Gabo in 1967 that he keeps squirreled away in a book. No, he hasn’t read the author’s memoirs, Correa says, laughing. He didn’t need to. He lived through many of them.

A decaying monument

Perhaps Gabo’s biggest local booster is Rafael Dario Jimenez, 47, a poet and author who serves as the town’s cultural coordinator and oversees the former Garcia Marquez family home, a rambling assemblage of bland new concrete structures and rustic wooden buildings dating to when the author’s grandparents, the colonel and his wife, settled here in the early 1900s.

The “Casa Natal,” as it’s called, was declared a national monument nearly 20 years ago, but you wouldn’t suspect it from the ramshackle maintenance and haphazard displays of artifacts: some family photographs; a couple of Gabo’s childhood drawings; a carved saint of Italian-Dutch extraction with missing hands; and an old Siemens telegraph machine, like the one that Gabo’s father might have used in his work as an operator. The compound also includes a small auditorium for conferences, poetry readings and other cultural events.

Because it’s a national landmark, the house can’t be repaired, reconstructed or modified without government permission, Jimenez says. But much of the former family living quarters already has been torn down or replaced. “It has been disappearing,” Jimenez says. “It hurts me that there was a house of wood that stood for 80 or 90 years. The community should take care of it.”

To that end, Jimenez says, he is trying to create a nonprofit foundation that could maintain the house through private contributions. Eventually, he hopes, a small hotel can be built in town to accommodate visitors, and he wants to develop “tourist kits” that would contain street maps indicating local points of interest.

One of these sits across from the Garcia Marquez family home, facing Avenue Monsenor Espejo. It’s the former commissary of the United Fruit Co., Jimenez says, which lifted the region into relative prosperity in the early 20th century but was reviled for its role in an infamous 1928 massacre of striking banana workers. Eventually, the company pulled up stakes, leaving the town to its fate.

What madeleines were to Proust’s Combray, perhaps, plantains are to “the hermetic realm of the banana region,” as Garcia Marquez has described it. Even the name Macondo, the author writes in “Vivir Para Contarla,” was lifted from the only banana plantation along the old train route that had its name written over the gate.

Railroads are equally evocative in Garcia Marquez’s writing, and even in its current boarded-up state, Aracataca’s train station hints at a grander era. On a recent day its platform was empty except for a pair of lovers on a stone bench and two men playing checkers with bottle caps. One of them, a private security guard, said a freight train would be passing by later, but there were no longer any passenger trains.

Jimenez, though, harbors hopes that the passenger trains will return, bringing tourists with them. (“Nostalgia, as always, had wiped away bad memories and magnified the good ones,” Garcia Marquez writes in his memoir. “No one was safe from its onslaught.”)

But why stop with phantom trains and haunted banana groves in an area so lush with historical contradiction?

A Garcia Marquez regional tour also could take in the Great Swamp, a miles-long expanse of salt flats and “muddy, desolate water” (“Vivir Para Contarla”) between the Caribbean and the Magdalena River, where people dwelling in garbage-strewn shacks eke out a living by fishing in the ocean. The Great Swamp area has long been sympathetic to narco-traffickers, who dole out favors and a few pesos to the poor in return for loyalty and silence.

It could encompass the fancy new condominiums and smoky cafes of Barranquilla, the brawny port city where Gabo nurtured his budding writing career as a newspaperman. And farther on, the white-sand beach resorts of Santa Marta, some of which, according to one local ex-military officer, were paid for with laundered drug money.

It could even include the house in Santa Marta, now a continental shrine, where Bolivar, dispirited and dishonored by those who once followed him into battle, drew his last breath. “America is ungovernable,” the Great Liberator concluded near the end of his life. “Those who serve the revolution plow the sea.”

Meanwhile, Mayor Sanchez is busy looking for a sister city to partner with Aracataca. He wonders about Oxford, Miss., final resting place of William Faulkner, whose mythical Yoknapatawpha County is Macondo’s literary twin. Or Comala, the west-central Mexican town where Rulfo set “Pedro Paramo.”

Those who can stomach reality without losing faith in life’s magical possibilities are encouraged to apply.