The Magic of Macondo 

and other stories from Latin and South America

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Amsterdam, June 13th 2025–While I sit quietly at lunch in the hotel somewhere in Northern Colombia, waiting for inspiration for a story about Venezuelan refugees who often cross from here to Aruba and Curaçao to escape the regime of first Hugo Chávez and now Mr. Maduro, a towering waitress with a hump high on her back waddles toward me. Actually, I’m here primarily to better understand the truth of Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian writer. If such a truth exists. That truth is that at this moment I’d rather stay alone with my thoughts and not be disturbed. But I’m easily swayed.

“A handsome young man like you,” she says, “shouldn’t sit alone. Wait, I’ll send someone to keep you company.” And moments later, a beautiful Colombian woman slides into my table. She orders a glass of Coca-Cola and we make an appointment for when I return from a trip I’m taking to Aracataca, the birthplace of Gabriel García Márquez, about whom I’m also going to publish something.

Earlier that week I met the publisher of his books in Colombia in Barranquilla, along with a publicity agent from the publishing house, and shortly after, a newspaper photographer joins us. The next day I’m in the newspaper with photo and all, and a piece about Gabo’s truth.

I had met him earlier during a conference in Cancún, and he not only invited me to his home in Barcelona, Spain, but also to Bogotá, and if he wouldn’t be there, we could always meet in Havana. Because he found it truly wonderful, if I were to believe him, to tell me his story.

The lunch with the publisher lasts from around half past twelve until eight in the evening, and what I learned is that if I really want to get to know the Nobel Prize winner, I should go to his hometown. Then I’d truly experience him. As he really is.

The bus jolts over the dusty road from Barranquilla to Aracataca, through the heart of Caribbean Colombia. Through the window I see the landscape full of pineapple plants that shaped Gabriel García Márquez gliding by – vast plains where heat shimmers above the asphalt, small villages with colored houses and palm trees bending in the sea breeze. It’s as if I’m traveling through the pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude, on my way to the mythical Macondo that found its origin here.

Three months earlier I sat across from the Nobel Prize winner in a hotel in Cancún, during a literary conference. Gabo, as everyone called him, told me about his youth in Aracataca, about his grandmother who told him stories as if they were the most natural thing in the world. “She taught me that there’s no difference between fantasy and reality,” he had said, while his eyes looked somewhat bored, because he was telling it for the umpteenth time. “In Aracataca the most incredible things happened, and no one found that strange.”

Now, as the bus enters the small town, I already feel that magical atmosphere. Aracataca seems to stand still in time. The streets are wide and dusty, the houses low with large windows and verandas where people in rocking chairs brave the afternoon heat. Children play in the street, their laughter mixed with the sound of vallenato music from a nearby radio. I ask an older man to take a photo of me with my camera in front of the house, but he refuses my request and says he’s never done such a thing and therefore doesn’t want to.

García Márquez’s birthplace stands there modestly, a typical Caribbean colonial house with white walls and green shutters. A sign points visitors the way, but it doesn’t feel touristy – more like a pilgrimage site for story lovers. As I step over the threshold, I’m overwhelmed by a feeling of recognition. Here, in these rooms, began the imagination that would later conquer the world. Many fruit trees that I can also encounter in Suriname.

In the backyard still stands the almond tree that the writer listened to when the wind played through the leaves. “That tree told me my first stories,” he had told me in Cancún. “Every evening, when my grandmother put me to bed, I heard the leaves whispering about strange events – flying carpets, rain that lasted years, people who disappeared into thin air.”

As I wander through the house, with its high ceilings and tile floors that provide cooling against the tropical heat, I understand how the reality of this little place could merge with the fantastic. The boundary between dream and reality has always been thin here. In the rooms where Gabriel slept as a child, time seems to stand still, as if the stories from then still hang in the walls waiting to be told.

This visit to Aracataca is, I think, more than ordinary curiosity – it’s a pilgrimage to the origin of magical realism, to the place where a little boy learned that the most improbable stories are sometimes the most truthful.

When I’m back in Bogotá, I look up Carolina, a journalist at the newspaper, and tell her that Gabriel isn’t there, despite the appointment. She shrugs and says he’s very unreliable. Maybe because of his busy schedule, maybe because he has changed a lot since his prize and fools people.

I decide to make and publish the story without him and also decide to write about 

Jorge Luis Borges, with whom I can make an appointment at his home on Maipú in the heart of downtown Buenos Aires without too much fuss. Close to Plaza San Martín, with, in my opinion, the most beautiful trees in the world.

The ancient doorman of the equally old building on Calle Maipú first looked at me suspiciously when I asked for Borges. His gaze slid over my uncertain Spanish and foreign appearance before he reluctantly gestured toward the elevator. The cage rattled upward through the twilight of the stairwell, where the smell of coffee and old books hung.

His maid opened the door, while he stood behind her, his head slightly tilted, reaching for the voice he heard and leaning on his walking stick. His eyes, affected by visible cataracts, seemed to look right through me at something only he could see. “Come in,” he said in perfect high English, as if he had already guessed my nationality from my way of breathing.

The apartment was small and overflowing with books. They stood in every bookcase, lay on tables, were stacked against the walls. Borges moved through them with the certainty of someone who knew every square centimeter. His fingers glided along the spines as if he were greeting them.

“I can no longer read them,” he said while his caretaker poured tea, “but I still know them. Each book has its own breathing, its own weight in the hand.”

We spoke about Kipling, about Anglo-Saxon poetry, about the labyrinths of Crete. Borges’ voice was soft but urgent, each sentence polished like a gem. One more beautiful than the other. Outside the traffic of Buenos Aires could be heard, but inside time seemed to have stopped.

In a thoughtless remark about Argentine literature, I made an unforgivable mistake and dropped the name of Juan Domingo Perón, as if I were talking about the weather.

The effect was immediate. Borges stiffened, his cup halfway to his mouth. The friendly conversation froze in the air. He set the cup down – too hard, so that the tea spilled over – and stood up somewhat unsteadily.

“That name,” he said, his voice suddenly sharp as a knife, “that name is not used and spoken in this house.” His face was distorted, his blind eyes seemed to flame. “Never. Do you understand?”

He walked to the window, his back turned to me, his hands clenched. “What that man… what that regime did to this country…” He couldn’t finish the sentence, as if the words were too bitter to speak.

The silence that followed was unbearable. I mumbled an apology, but Borges didn’t hear it or didn’t want to hear it. He stood there, an old man alone with his powerless memories, his anger too, and his recollections, while the shadows of the trees from Plaza San Martín crept in through the window.

When I left, he didn’t shake my hand. The door fell softly but definitively shut behind me, and I stood again in the dim hallway, wondering if I had just met one of the world’s greatest writers or a man imprisoned in his own irreconcilable past.

By boat I sail from Buenos Aires to Montevideo. Capital of Uruguay, called by some the Switzerland of Latin America. There I met Eduardo Galeano, another giant among Latin American writers, at his home.

The teapot has long been cold on the small wooden table between us. Eduardo no longer has an eye for it – his hands move expressively through the air while he talks, his voice swells and falls like the waves of the Río de la Plata further away. 

Through the window of his modest house in Montevideo, the golden light of late afternoon falls in, making his wrinkled face softer but unable to temper the fierceness in his eyes.

“Look,” he says, and he leans forward as if he’s going to tell me a secret, “they tell us that we are poor. But how can a continent be poor that is so rich in gold, silver, copper, iron ore, oil?” What is poor? What is rich? He laughs. “We were not born poor. We were made poor.”

His fingers tap on the table edge, a nervous rhythm that underscores the urgency of his words. The books around us – stacks of them in every available place – seem to listen along. The history of Latin America lies here spread out in all its pain and glory. The exploitation and slaughter of our people.

“For five centuries,” Eduardo continues, “they have opened our veins and let our blood flow away. First the gold of the Aztecs and Incas, which financed Europe’s Renaissance. Then the sugar from our plantations, built on the backs of enslaved Africans. Now the coffee, the bananas, the beef – always for their prosperity, never for ours.”

He stands up and walks to the window, his silhouette outlined against the evening light. “And when we try to go our own way, choose our own leaders, build our own economy – then come the marines, or the CIA, or the World Bank and IMF with their conditions.” His voice sounds tired now, as if the weight of all those stories has suddenly caught up with him.

I reach for the teapot and notice that it has indeed grown cold. Eduardo turns around and smiles apologetically. “Forgive me,” he says, “I talk far too much. But these stories, they must be told. They live in me like fever in the blood.”

Outside, Montevideo begins to awaken for the evening, but here in this room history hangs heavy in the air, like cigarette smoke that just won’t clear. I go back to my hotel Victoria, in the city center, to reflect on what was said. But I’m not surprised when I can’t fall asleep.

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