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Two years ago, I was sitting in a toasty pub just outside of Temple Bar in Dublin, Ireland. I was reading the last page of Joyce’s Ulysses and drinking a frothy Guinness. In the months leading up to that moment, I had been working through that book and traveling around the country. The book taught me so much about the culture, and my experiences in the culture helped me understand the enigma that was the book.

A few weeks ago, I finished a similar process but in a very different place. I was resting in a hammock beneath an avocado tree, reading the final page of Cien Años de Soledad, by Gabriel Garcia Márquez. I was in El Valle de Cauca, Colombia, in a remote farmhouse or finca that belongs to the uncle of a friend of mine. 

I had begun the book a few weeks prior, and it became my travel companion to a few places. I began it in Santa Marta, but I also took it with me to  Aracataca, the birthplace of Garcia Márquez (or Gabo, as he is affectionately referred to here in Colombia). 

The book came with me to various other cities in Colombia, and everywhere I went, I would see or experience things that made more sense or gained new context in light of what I had recently read.

In this short reflection, I want to share a few of such experiences and connect them where I can to the text.

If one reads Cien Años — or other Gabo texts such as El Coronel no Tiene Quien le Escriba — one will immediately notice the prevalence of roosters in the stories. Here on the coast, they are a fixture of daily life even in the city — and now, every time I am unceremoniously awoken at 4:30 AM by the cacareo of a rooster, I cannot help but feel as though I am living in Gabo’s fictional  world of Macondo. 

Another symbol that many remember from the book is that of the “yellow butterflies” which appear alongside the character of Mauricio Babilonia. This tender symbol of love provides a magical and almost mythical quality to the character and to the book. What I learned here is that around the end of spring and the beginning of summer, Colombia becomes full of such butterflies. My first time seeing them was during a road trip I took from Santa Marta to Mompox, and since then they have become a fixture of my time here. 

Beyond roosters and butterflies, there are so many other themes and symbols that have gained new context for me after having spent time living here on the coast. 

This whole region feels somewhat surreal in and of itself. Santa Marta, for example, is a shockingly underdeveloped city. It was one of the first cities founded in América (1525), and it boasts an impressive natural profile. The rich jungle of the Sierra Nevada, replete with Caimán, monkeys, toucans, sloth, and even jaguar, lies only a few miles away — while the city itself possesses innumerable beaches of stunning beauty and magnitude. Additionally, the great national park of Tayrona and the famous beach town of Palomino are a short drive away. 

If you value history, you can see La Quinta de San Alejandrino, which served as the final resting place of the great Simon Bolívar. You can also see the beautiful Catedral Basílica which, legend has it, still holds the ashy remains of Bolívar’s heart.

My point with all this is not to sell you a ticket to Santa Marta, but to show that with all that this town and region has, it still is relatively unknown and unappreciated from a worldwide standpoint. Not even my more worldly American and European friends knew about it before I came. It almost feels forgotten — isolated — like so much of the coast of Colombia and so much like Gabo’s fictional town of Macondo. 

Another thing one will notice as one reads Cien Años de Soledad is the maddening repetition or similarity of the characters’ names. 

For example, José Arcadio Buendía has two sons — one named Aureliano and the other named José Arcadio. José Arcadio (the son) has a son named Arcadio; and Aureliano (the other son of the original José Arcadio Buendía) has 17 sons with 17 different women that are all named Aureliano and then also another son named “Aureliano José”.  Arcadio, the son of José Arcadio (who is the son of José Arcadio Buendía) has a son named “Aureliano Segundo” and another named “José Arcadio Segundo”. But sometimes, they are referred to without the “segundo”. 

This is just a small sample of the maddening “name game” that Gabo plays in his book. One might ask: why would a mentally stable author do such a thing to his readers? 

The answer to this question is complicated, but I will mention one reason that I believe that Gabo engages in this puzzling practice, and it is something that only my experience here could have allowed me to see. 

A frequent weekend activity for me during my time living in Santa Marta has been going to the nearby town of Taganga to fish and snorkel. I usually go with my friend and colleague, Sean, who knows one of the fishermen there who goes by the name of Chapu (although I have heard him called a few other names as well). We meet Chapu at the dock, pay him for gas, and set out in his skiff. He doesn’t pilot the boat because his license was taken away from him many years ago for some run-ins with the law; his son, also called Chapu, is usually the one who pilots the boat. Just last weekend, we decided to go out much further, all the way to a very beautiful and remote beach. Chapu junior decided that he wanted to bring his wife as well as his son along as well to enjoy the journey. As you probably imagined, the son of Chapu (junior) was also called Chapu. 

This more extreme example made me reflect on the names of other people here. So many of my students have the same names or share one name in common. I have a student names Juliana Vives Campo and Juliana Campo Vives, for example. The process of naming here in Colombia and Latin America more generally is very different than it is in the anglosphere, where austerity, individuality, and sometimes isolation are valued more than the extravagance, collectivism, and congeniality that the latin people embrace. Gabo’s frustrating name game, among many other things, provides the reader with a hyper-saturated example of this Latin American custom. 

Looking at the founding of Macondo, I can make another interesting connection. 

Macondo was founded by José Arcadio Buendía after a feud of honor led to his killing Prudencio Aguilar. Once he killed Prudencio, he and his family fled and eventually found the land and started the town of Macondo. 

After having enough conversations and learning about people’s family histories here in Colombia, I realized that this was not mere invention from Gabo, but in many ways a real description of Colombia.

For example, a dear friend of mine who lives in Medellín told me the story of how her family ended up there. It’s a story that really isn’t too far off from the drama that led to the founding of Macondo. A feud began between her grandparents and another family in the nearby region of El Valle de Cauca. One thing led to another and a few members of the other family murdered two of her uncles in cold blood. Once this happened, her family started to flee as one by one the other family stole their properties and essentially ex-communicated them from that town and that region. They moved to Medellín, and although my friend has an aunt (from a different side of the family) that has property down in El Valle, she rarely travels to the nearby town and always uses a different name. She says she knows people there who have told her that “people still occasionally ask around about people with her last name”. 

This type of drama, almost inconceivable to the American visitor, is all too common in the recent history of the families of Colombia, and seeing this one can see Gabo’s reason for making the founding of Macondo what it was. 

There is so much more that I have seen and experienced here that has made reading the works of Garcia Márquez so much more fulfilling and illuminating. So much of the seeming senselessness and madness of this beautiful country, particularly of the coast, shows itself on every page of Gabo’s books and on every walk one takes around the town. 

This is not an analysis of Gabo’s great book. This is only a reflection on the beautiful and enlightening experience I’ve been able to have by reading Cien Años de Soledad while living here in Santa Marta and traveling around Colombia this year. 

My year here, just like Gabo’s book, has been full of madness, solitude, and of course, magic — even when that magic comes in the form of something as simple as the fluttering wings of a yellow butterfly. 

AW