About two years after returning home from the coast of Colombia where I served in the Peace Corps in the late 1960s, I began hearing about a Colombian novel recently published in English that was being universally acclaimed for its literary brilliance.
One Hundred Years of Solitude written by Gabriel García Márquez was already a sizzling literary sensation, a worldwide bestseller in every language its translation was published.
As I read One Hundred Years of Solitude for the first time, I recognized among its pages certain characteristics of the village of Manaure where I had lived on the Atlantic coast of Colombia for nearly a year.
No, my village never boasted of having a citizen comparable to Remedios the Beauty who, being too beautiful and wise for this world, one afternoon ascended into the sky and was never heard from again.
But perhaps because the natural setting of my little village of Manaure (up in the mountains above Valledupar) made it so picturesque, peaceful and timeless a place, I was tempted to liken it to García Márquez's fictional village of Macando which is actually based on Aracataca, a village where the author lived with his grandparents when he was around fourteen years of age in the early 1940s. (I visited Aracataca one weekend while I lived in Manaure because one of my Peace Corps training buddies was stationed there. It's about a four-hour bus ride from Manaure.)
Sitting in my little apartment on Perry Street in the West Village where I lived after returning from the Peace Corps, it was not difficult to remember back to living in a place very much like Macando where all thoughts about the history of a place and the glory of history were largely illusionary. Where people would lay their best-laid plans but then would subsequently be compelled to live out self-destructive, negative patterns that repeated from generation to generation.
By contrast, we North Americans are such irrepressible optimists, believing, or willing to do anything to make believe we believe that our past remains just that, in the past, untethered to our futures, which we hope and pray are limitless.
And so in One Hundred Years of Solitude, we have six generations of the Buendía family, where the names of the family patriarchs down through the generations are simply variations on one another, and where over the course of the novel, their lives often seem like minor variations on existing themes that only grow worse and then become still worse and then grow worse still. Meanwhile, as one might expect, for the most part the women are the bedrock of each generation, most effective in their attempts to escape entropy, and the powerful downward pull of destiny.
Although as an American I was an outsider in my village of Manaure, I had one thing going for me that enabled me to instantly empathize with people living in a place where nothing happens, where things only get worse, and that often careens towards the edge of forgetfulness. What was that one thing I had going for me? All my life I've been mildly depressed. That's a big plus when you're living in Manaure or reading García Márquez and in your head living in Macando. Sometimes I've managed to overcome it, but as one gets mired down in the generations of Buendías in One Hundred Years of Solitude one experiences what it's like to be locked in the vice grip of history that won't let you go, that will never let you go.
Gabiel García Márquez taught me by his example that Colombia is not only worth writing about, it rewards one with a myriad of magical, paradoxical and ambiguous possibilities such that I'm still fascinated with events I experienced when I lived there, and probably will be until the day I die.
This, too: There is very little difference between mild depression and what Garcia-Marquez means when he uses the word "solitude." Both include being isolated from the larger world. Both include sadness and forgetfulness that can be a cover for selfishness and self-centeredness.
Thus, I find when traveling in Colombia, just as when I am immersed in the pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude, or a novel by another Colombian author, I've learned that writing and reading about Colombia is my passion, my life's work. It will always be so. Although I am now seventy-three years young, I am not that far removed from what I sensed and observed when I was a very young man living in my little village of Manaure.
By luck or by fate while serving in the Peace Corps I became acquainted with some Colombian leftist revolutionary soldiers from the same group with whom President Juan Emanuel Santos recently concluded a peace treaty (winning him the Nobel Peace Prize for his effort, by the way). That revolutionary group is called the FARC. Although the FARC has been around since 1964, in 1967-68 when I was in Colombia, some of the soldiers checked me out to see if I was a C.I.A. agent. No doubt they had every intention of assassinating me if, indeed, they decided I was one. I, in turn, took it upon myself to check them out and received one of the greatest gifts one can receive: To see one's enemy as one's friend and one's friend as one's enemy. To love one's neighbor as one would love oneself. Therein is the way out of solitude, self-centeredness, and selfishness, by the way. Love.
I can't wait until you get to read it.
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