“Many years later, in front of the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía had to remember that remote afternoon when his father took him to see ice. Macondo was then a village of twenty mud and cane houses built on the banks of a river with clear waters that rushed through a bed of polished stones, white and enormous like prehistoric eggs.”
Every literature lover instantly recognizes the beginning of the most iconic novel in Latin America. A region whose perception changed forever after the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1967. Gabriel García Márquez's magnum opus not only knew how to describe a culture of creative superstitions, loving liturgies and worlds that become confused, but also put on the map a fictional town of Macondo to which all the compasses of well-known magical realism point.
On the tenth anniversary of Gabo's death, we follow the trail of yellow butterflies to Aracataca, the seed of Macondo that sighs in the heart of the Colombian jungle.
The Caribbean Sea is left behind. The chiva – a type of colorful bus used by rural populations in Colombia – glides along a road that winds through the tropics. There are three children on a bicycle, the Wayuu woman next to me who gives off a scent of wet earth, and a yellow butterfly perched on the windowsill. As I advance through the 79 kilometers that separate Aracataca from the city of Santa Marta, the landscape mutates, the peaks of the Sierra Nevada watch in the distance and we immerse ourselves in a sea of banana trees whose colors are confused with the uniforms of the military. Until a huge mural by Gabriel García Márquez emerges from the trees to welcome you.
Aracataca was always Macondo, or “that town west of the city of Riohacha, separated by an almost impenetrable mountain range” for the rest of the world. In these confused coordinates lies the mystery, the condition of refuge away from the large tourist circuits that criss-cross the Colombian Caribbean. Whoever comes here does so because they once loved Gabo's work and seek to invoke the magical realism that inspired so many stories of showers of flowers, levitating scrolls and blue ghosts.
The town where Gabriel García Márquez was born, on March 8, 1927, could be like any other, with its families having barbecues next to the Aracataca River – on whose bank quotes from the Nobel Prize are written –, the train track whispering stories of old conquests and a wandering tour guide who suggests I visit the most significant sites.
The first stop is the house-museum where the author was born, admission is free, although I recommend collaborating with the guides who will not hesitate to enlighten the visitor with so many walks through letters. A unique place opened in 2010 where we discovered part of the old furniture from the original home, as well as various extracts and murals related to the writer captured on the walls. Furthermore, the house is divided into various spaces based on typical Caribbean buildings and whose names were approved during his lifetime by Márquez himself. The furniture takes us to so many beloved pages, the crib is still there and, at some point, one imagines grandmother Tranquilina Iguarán in the rocking chair telling old stories to a future writer.
When you leave the house-museum, you discover that all of Aracataca is a reverence to the Colombian writer in the form of libraries and barbershops that bear his name and many other monuments dedicated to his work. Among them, we find the secluded tomb of Melquíades, the gypsy whose traveling circus fascinated the Buendías; or the House of the Telegraphist, where García Márquez's father, Gabriel Eligio, would meet his wife, Luisa Santiaga Márquez. A real encounter that would also inspire Love in the Time of Cholera, another of Gabo's great works.
And there, on a timid street, I find the library of Remedios la Bella, who was described in One Hundred Years of Solitude as “the most beautiful creature that had been seen in Macondo.” The guide gets lost at some point, the sound of a typewriter surrounds the San José church and the bustle still invades Calle de los Turcos, that place described in the novel where the Arabs who arrived in Macondo exchanged jewelry for macaws. Finally, all roads in Aracataca seem to lead to the train track that still sleeps awaiting approval of the Macondo Tourist Route, a proposal that promises rail service between Aracataca and Santa Marta.
The romantic Cartagena de Indias, the coastal town of Riohacha where the murder of Chronicle of a Death Foretold took place; or Barranquilla, city where the author began writing La Hojarasca in 1950. The Gabbi geography is full of corners spread throughout the north of Colombia, but it all started here, in this municipality of 40,000 inhabitants where the connection with his prodigal son becomes in a future link with the world (and tourism).
In the middle of the afternoon the ants continue to cross the walls, the fate of Úrsula Irguarán is written. I get on the goat, we swim in banana trees. Another Wayuu woman has gotten on halfway and the children in white and red uniforms say goodbye to me in the distance. We move away, behind us is the kingdom where magic and reality merge. Only then does the yellow butterfly perched on the window fly away forever.
