Tributes to Gabo
The Colombian Andes are categorically uninhabitable for humans. If jaguars, anacondas, poison dart frogs, or guerilla soldiers don’t kill you, cholera surely will. The thick and breathing tangle of green has claimed many naïve lives — some in search of gold, others looking for Eden. And yet, perched high in the thorny jungle of Leticia lies the town of Commando.
The town name was an unfortunate mistake. Confusing Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s fictional One Hundred Years of Solitude for fact, three men — all Colombian patriots — had set off on an expedition to search for the lost land of Macondo. Their names were Jorge Andres Trespalacios, Juan Carlos Valdez, and Estefan Cortez Cortos and, as was to be expected (and as their wives continued to remind them for the rest of their lives), they failed. Refusing the possibility of failure, they chose to make their own Macondo, settling instead on a strip of land where the jungle was not too oppressive and the jaguars and snakes and frogs and guerillas were disinterested in them. The settlers built sturdy homes with clay walls and palm roofs. When they finished, they retrieved their wives from their old homes and carried them piggy-back style to their new lives of rain and green. They survived off of bananas alone.
By this point, they had forgotten their initial quest, forgotten their once beloved Gabo, forgotten Macondo and its utopic allure. They called the city Commando.
This was a story Ana María Trespalacios, great granddaughter of Jorge Andres Trespalacios, had heard thousands, maybe millions, of times. Her mother would recite it as she prepared the huevos for breakfast, repeat it as she carefully wrapped the tamales for lunch, and once more over dinner’s arroz con frijoles. Sometimes, if she was particularly nostalgic, she’d sing the tale over an afternoon cafecito. In each iteration, the story was the same. The valiant explorers, the crushing blows, their ultimate triumph. “You should be proud of su familia,” her mother would say. But Ana María wasn’t. And who could blame her? They were stuck in a jungle town whose name was also the word for free-balling.
All she wanted was for something — anything — to happen. She daydreamed of guerillas raiding their homes and displacing them, of enormous boulders crushing their clay homes, of sinkholes, of floods, of earthquakes, of mudslides, of jaguar attacks, of drought. Anything, and she would finally be free of this godforsaken, suffocating place.
But nothing happened.
Instead, every day was more of the same.
Ana María woke up to the familiar warmth of sunlight tinged with jungle green and the soft suggestion of her mother’s humming. She washed her face, hands, and feet in the basin of water at the foot of her bed, pouring the rest over the wildflowers that grew just below the base of the window. She pulled a yellow dress over her head and tightly fastened her black chancletas around her feet. Finally, she braided her black hair into two neat braids that swished around her hips.
When she walked into the kitchen, she saw her mother was sitting at the dining table, sipping her cafecito as she read the last page of One Hundred Years of Solitude for the thousandth time. She had already prepared the huevos, which sat in a piling heap at the center of the table. It was a scene so familiar Ana María could see it perfectly with her eyes closed.
“Buenos dias, mija.”
“Buenos, mamá.”
She joined her mother at the wooden table, filled a teacup with lukewarm café, and served herself some breakfast. While Ana María enjoyed her coffee and huevos, her mother — right on cue — began to recount their origin story. Pues, el papá de su bisabuelo y dos otros hombres decidieron… When the story was finished, Ana María washed her mug in the sink. It was right then that they started to hear the rumbling.
It began as a faint pitter-patter, like the sound of rain beating against the roof. Then it grew, transforming into an emphatic drum roll. And then, suddenly, it swelled into loud thunderous clapping. With every moment, the thumping grew louder. Despite her mother’s warnings, Ana María ran outside towards the rumbling, and felt her knees shaking as the earth trembled beneath her. She looked up, following the trunks of the banana trees all the way to their green tops. Then, she saw it: an enormous, spherical mound of rock plunging down the mountainside, flattening any and everything in its path.
She watched as the boulder squashed the banana trees against the jungle floor, the great jungle flattened in an instant. And then, in one swift turn, she watched as the boulder rolled over her home.
She watched the windows explode, the walls crumble, the roof collapse. She heard the muffled shriek, and then the penetrating silence as the rock continued on its way. She cried softly, her gaze fixed on the pathetic parcel of ruins, for it was hard to learn to be careful what you wish for.
***
It wasn’t easy living with Ernesto Sanchez Flores. It was even harder being married to him, or at least that’s what his wife, Sofía Uribe Flores, thought.
The pair had met more than twenty years ago when they were undergraduates at the National University of Colombia. Trying to complete their quantitative reasoning requirement early, they had wound up in the same freshman Economics class, and every lecture, without fail, Ernesto sat behind Sofía. Each class period was the same deal: Sofía took detailed notes, Ernesto did not. Instead of paying attention, the curly-headed boy would fool around with static electricity, methodically rubbing his jeans against the polyester seat to generate friction. As if the repetitive thumping in the row behind her wasn’t annoying enough, Ernesto would use the friction to shock the neighboring students, giggling with maniac delight as his unsuspecting prey were met with the sting of energy. He was, in all senses of the word, a nuisance, and Sofía avoided interacting with him at all costs.
But one day Ernesto decided to shock Sofía.
In that day’s class, the professor began to introduce the topic of behavioral economics. “He decided to buy a bicycle,” he declared, restating the results of the problem he had just solved on the board, “but why?” Sofía didn’t know why, and she certainly didn’t know why, and for that reason she was engrossed, frantically scribbling down the professor’s every word.
“Because he thinks he needs it,” the professor explained emphatically.
Ernesto was not listening. Instead, he was leaning forward into Sofía’s row, plotting his next attack. Slowly, so as not to make a sound, he extended his electrically charged pinky finger and, in one swift motion, tapped the top of her right ear. The pain rushed down the side of her head like an avalanche. And then, it vanished. She knew exactly what had happened.
Bursting with anger, Sofía snapped her head around. She stood up, ready to shame Ernesto in front of the entire lecture hall. But, when she laid her eyes on his lanky frame and huge brown eyes, the words flew out of her mouth like an exhale: “Te amo.”
They didn’t talk for a few months after that because what she had done was weird. But sure enough, within a year they were dating. And, after eight years, the pair had gotten married, and the wedding had been beautiful, and they had five wonderful children named Úrsula and Immanuel and María José and José María and Contracepción, and they had a wonderful marriage filled with love and joy and fulfillment and who the hell was Sofía kidding she couldn’t take it anymore. Ernesto was still the same idiotic pendejo tan bobo she had met in Economics lecture and whatever flicker of promise she had seen in him had extinguished long ago. Now, as she smoked a cigarette out the window of their Bogotá apartment, she contemplated her decisions, agonizing over the long and painful years of dissatisfaction. In the master bedroom, her crazed husband rubbed balloons together.
What had she done? Why had she done it? And could it have been for the very same reason for buying a bicycle that their professor had explained all those years ago in Economics lecture?
***
“Habitación 301,” Sara repeated to herself as she walked down the hallway of ‘El Hotel Mejor’ and towards her room. Drenched with rainwater and clenching a rusted key in one palm, she tried to ignore her discomfort. She reached the room at the end of the hall and let herself in. The room was simple, but clean. Sara noticed a bowl of fruit next to an old TV.
No matter how ‘Mejor’ the hotel claimed to be, Sara did not want to be there. She had been driving home from Bolombolo, a small town perched in the Colombian Andes, when she got caught in the rainstorm. Her family had warned her of the rain, had told her it could get rough, that she should leave the next morning, but she had ignored their advice. She was tired of being a guest.
The rain had been light at first, dusting the dashboard of the car with a mist that was more annoying than anything else. But as Sara continued to drive down the winding road, the rain picked up. The first specks of water floated down and pattered lightly against the roof of the car. Then, the droplets began to get heavier, thumping loudly overhead. As Sara tried desperately to focus her attention on the road, the globs of moisture continued to grow, pounding against the car like cannonballs.
Suddenly, Sara realized that the giant raindrops were not amorphous — they resembled fruits. She was witness to a tempest of translucent grapes, oranges, guavas, and bananas, which fell and, upon collision with the car, vanished into thin air. Unsure if her eyes were fooling her, Sara rolled the window down and extended her arm. Within seconds, a transparent pineapple fell into her palm, shattering against her skin.
Awestruck, Sara turned her eyes back to the road, but her vision was blurred by a tentacle-like stream of water that rested on the windshield. Shifting her weight forward, Sara peered up. She saw the clear and glistening roots, the trunk, the branches, and the leaves of an enormous oak tree, composed entirely of water. She shrieked and slammed on the brakes.
For a moment, all was still — the water tree suspended in air like an apparition.
Then, the tree fell, crashing down against the hood of the car, water rushing over the top of the car, and spilling in through the open window. Sara thrashed against the force of the water, struggling to keep her head above the flood.
Now, safe in ‘El Hotel Mejor,’ Sara walked towards the fruit bowl next to the TV. She peered into the bowl and discovered that — besides a small sign that read Disfrútelo — it was empty. With that, Sara felt the tears well up in her eyes. She fell to her knees, pulled the bowl to her face, and sobbed hard. When she lifted her head, she looked down: at the base of the bowl lay hundreds of perfect, glistening apple seeds.
