A real magic.

I was 16 when I read this book. One Hundred Years of Solitude. By Gabriel Garcia Marquez. There are books that you create true relations with as if they are real people. You meet them; you like their appearance; you start talking to them to get to know them better; you get interested in them and go for the second date; but you are still careful – you don’t express your opinion and don’t get too close; you even think after the fifth date ‘hum, nothing really special. Talks too much’; you try to do other stuff: work, friends, parties; but one day this person calls you and you are like ‘why not’; you meet again, you talk during the whole night; and next morning after half an hour of sleep you suddenly feel so happy; you realize that it would be unnatural to be without this person; you realize that this person is a part of you.

Those were my relations with this magical world of Colombian solitude. Honestly, I didn’t know anything about Latin America and especially Colombia by then (probably wouldn’t even find it on the map). I was reading the book during the northern summer in my home town and I almost physically felt how the whole world was doomed to the endless rain. Every material object, every drop around me suddenly obtained life, they turned out to have their own paths, their own stories, and they didn’t depend on me anymore. That was a world of sad fairy-tale where people killed each other but it was somehow necessary, where people knew their future but it was somehow natural, where children carried all moral debts of their parents and it was somehow inevitable, where the past visually lived in everyone’s life and it was somehow impossible to fight it. With every page, I was drowning deeper and deeper in the magic world of a soul’s life, of the passion’s sounds, of the wind’s sighs, and of the banana’s dreams. Everything in this world had a philosophical sense but you couldn’t get it with your mind, you can only feel it or feel yourself IN it. It was deeper than any philosophy, any discussion, and any religion. It was a pure life, it was a pure magic.

And it was a pure reality. I found out this yesterday when I started reading Marquez’s memoirs Living to Tell the Tale. All stories he tells there contain real facts but they still have a slight shade of the nostalgia for the past, a slight taste of the solitude, a slight color of the ancestral myth. A phantom of the guy who was killed by Marquez’s grandfather making the family leave the town where they lived, little gold fishes with emerald eyes that Marquez’s grandfather was making every day and never sold them; a massacre of three thousands of banana company strikers at the town square – a story that Marquez heard a million of times when he was a child; and the whole atmosphere of regret for the past and attempts to revive this past that lives on every corner of an abandoned, little town Macondo somewhere on the railroad that leads to nowhere.

What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it. A real magic of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.