Gabriel Garcia Marquez: The Early Years by Ilan Stavans

Author:Ilan Stavans
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Palgrave Macmillan, ISBN-13: 9780312240332
Published: 2010-08-01T16:25:59+00:00

Chapter 7

S l ee p l e ss i n M a co n d o

In the Dictionary of Imaginary Places, fi rst published in 1980,

Alberto Manguel and Giovanni Guadalupi catalog the nonexistent geographies invented by literati, such as L ewis

Carroll’s Jabberwocky Wood, Daniel Defoe’s Crusoe Island,

Jonathan Swift’s Brobdingnag, J. R. R. Tolkien’s MiddleEarth, and Jules Verne’s Saknussemm’s Corridor. Each of

these places is surveyed in a succinct, provocative entry.

The following describes Macondo in One Hundred Years of

Solitude:

Macondo, a Colombian village founded in ancient times

by José Arcadio Buendía, whose boundless imagination always stretched farther than the inventiveness of

nature. The founder had placed the houses in such a

way that the inhabitant of each could reach the river

and then fetch water with exactly the same degree of

effort as his neighbor; and the streets had been planned

in such a manner that all houses received the same

amount of sunshine throughout the day. For the benefi t

of the population he built small traps to catch canaries, robins, and nightingales and in very little time the

village was so full of their singing that the gypsy tribe

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136 Gabriel García Márquez

which every year visited Macondo to show the inhabitants the newest eighth marvel of the world would let

themselves be guided by the music.

Toward the east Macondo is protected by a high

and forbidding range of hills; toward the south by

marshes covered with a kind of vegetable soup. The

marshes rise toward the west and become a large body

of water in which cetaceans of delicate skin, with the

face and torso of a woman, lure sailors with their fi rm

and tempting breasts. To the north, many days’ march

away through a dangerous jungle, lies the sea.

From a small village of some twenty mud and

bamboo huts, Macondo became a town with shops

and a marketplace. The prosperity made José Arcadio

Buendía free all the birds he had carefully trapped and

replace them with musical clocks which he had obtained

from merchants in exchange for parrots. These clocks

were so synchronized that every half-hour the town

would shake with a sound of ringing bells and every

midday a musical explosion of cuckoos and waltzes

would glorify the beginning of the siesta. Buendía also

replaced the acacias lining the streets with almond

trees and found a system of giving them eternal life.

Many years later, when Macondo became a city of

wooden houses and zinc roofs, ancient almond trees

still bloomed in the older streets, though there was no

one in the town who could remember having witnessed

their planting.

Among the most notable events which form the

history of Macondo is the unusual insomnia epidemic

that struck the town. The most terrible thing about it

was not the impossibility of sleep—because the body

would not tire itself either—but the gradual loss of

memory. When the sick person became accustomed

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Sleepless in Macondo 137

to staying awake, memories of his childhood would

start to vanish, followed by the names and concepts

of things; fi nally he would lose his own identity and

consciousness of his own being, sinking into a calm

lunacy without a past. Bells were set up around the

village and whoever passed them would give them a

tug to prove that he was still sane.

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