Accidental Blogger

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Colombia’s only Nobel Laureate, recenty visited his home town of Aracataca which he immemorialized as the fictional town of Macondo in his literary tour de force One Hundred Years of Solitude. Garcia Marquez, who lives in Mexico City, returned to his place of birth after twenty four years and for the eighty year old author who suffers from lymphatic cancer, this may well be the last visit. He was warmly welcomed by the town’s people where his formal title is "El Nobel."  However the name that greeted him everywhere he went was his nickname – Aracatacans spiritedly chanted "Gabo, Gabo!"

The natives of Aracataca are of two minds on what their most famous son has done for them. Some think that his world wide reputation as a leading literary figure is honor enough for the obscure place of his birth. Others feel that Garcia Marquez should have done more to improve the living conditions of his impoverished home town. (the author dismisses that as an inappropriate demand; he is a writer and not a mayor, he points out.) But to the delight of the townsfolk, Garcia Marquez and his wife have recently persuaded Colombian authorities to build a rail line to connect Aracataca with the coastal resort town of Santa Marta which might bring in much needed tourism cash to the isolated and neglected town. There was even a referendum (it failed due to poor attendance by voters) to determine if the town should be renamed Aracataca-Macondo in order to fuse fiction with fact.

But homecoming is not an unvarnished joy for the author who has been an exile for a long time.  Things have changed in his absence. The home that is the place of his birth and his literary inspiration, is no longer the home of his reality (see my recent post on a related subject).  In fact, Garcia Marquez did not stick around in Aracataca for long. After arriving on the train that he helped put on track as a boost for Aracataca, he skipped town within a short time.

ARACATACA, COLOMBIA — When a passenger train crawled into the station bringing Gabriel Garcia Marquez back to his hometown for the first time in 24 years, tears welled up in the Colombian writer’s eyes. …..

….. "I think he wanted to pay a tribute of love to his people who had been asking him to come back for years," said Jaime Abello, who runs a journalism school sponsored by Garcia Marquez. The author began his career as a newspaper reporter.

"The magic of Garcia Marquez is that he was capable of turning his cultural heritage into works of art, and people are so grateful for that," Abello said. "They love him."

So what explains his long absence from the town that inspired some of the greatest fiction to come out of Latin America?

For one thing, his visits often degenerate into chaotic scrums as fans, journalists and hangers-on chase after him. Garcia Marquez, who lives in Mexico City, even skipped his mother’s funeral in 2002, partly because he feared his appearance would be too distracting.

He last toured Aracataca in 1983, the year after he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. As he grew older, he avoided the town because trips down memory lane can be painful, said Juan Gossain, a well-known radio personality who befriended the author in the 1960s.

"He wanted to avoid the clash between his poetic memories and hard reality," Gossain said. "Friends have died. Houses no longer exist. The trees that he remembered are no longer there." …..

With the help of $500,000 from the Colombian government, the childhood home of Garcia Marquez is being renovated to mimic the Buendia household in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Officials went so far as to hold a referendum on changing the name of the town to Aracataca-Macondo. But the effort came up short because not enough people turned out to vote. Now they are banking on the newly christened "Macondo Train" to bring fresh faces and tourist dollars to town.

Yet after dismounting the train, even Garcia Marquez didn’t find much worth sticking around for. After a lunch of fried fish and coconut rice, he skipped the re-enactments of scenes from his novels by schoolchildren, avoided a pack of journalists and took the first bus out of town.

See the full story here.