Bedlam Farm Blog Journal by Jon Katz

It’s a bit off my usual writing, but I am utterly in love with the autobiography Gabriel Garcia Martez wrote before he died. Every page – the book is aptly called Living to Tell The Tale, and every page is more wonderful than the one before. Finally, I understand where this great writer – my favorite as long as I could read his books – got the imagination to tell his beautiful stories.

I want to share one short passage from the book. Marquez grew up in banana country, in the town of Aracataca, along the coastal region of Columbia. The city inspired the village of Macondo, which is the central setting for his breakaway book  One Hundred Years Of Solitude. This brilliant novel launched his career and, to this day, insofar as I know, has not been equaled. I have long wondered what sparked the fanatic and mystical writing that was his trademark.

I think I know now.

The autobiography is true, and this one passage caught my imagination and helped me grasp the source of his remarkable writing. I’ll just quote it, and if you wish, you can read it for yourself. I never stopped laughing.

In this passage, Martez recounts his birthplace as a small child. It was a prominent, sprawling place occupied by the family’s widows, grandmothers, sisters, daughters, and various ghosts and spirits. Here, he describes the kitchen, which he was rarely allowed to see or enter. It was the realm of all of the mysterious and fascinating women who gathered there, along with a century-old parrot named Lorenzo:

“Another voice was that of Lorenzo el Magnifico, the hundred-year-old parrot inherited from my grandparents, who would spout anti-Spanish slogans and sing songs from the War for Independence. He (the parrot) was so shortsighted that he had fallen into a pot of stew and was saved by a miracle. On July 20, at three in the afternoon, he roused the house with shrieks of panic.

“The bull, the bull! The bull’s coming!” Only the women were in the house, for the men had gone to the local bullfight held on the national holiday, and they thought the parrot’s screams were no more than a delirium of his senile dementia. The women of the house, who knew how to talk to him, understood what he was shouting only when a wild bull that had escaped the bullpens on the square burst into the kitchen, bellowing like a steamship and in a blind rage,  charing the equipment in the bakery and the pots on the stoves. I was going in the opposite direction when the gale of terrified women lifted me into the air and took me away with them into the storeroom.

The bellowing of the runaway bull in the kitchen and the galloping of his hooves on the cement floor of the hallway shook the house. Without warning, he appeared at a ventilation skylight, and the fierce panting of his breath and his large, reddened eyes froze my blood.

When his handlers succeeded in taking him back to the bullpen, the revelry of the drama had already begun in the house and would last more than a week, with endless pots of coffee and sponge cakes to accompany the tale, repeated a thousand times and each time more heroic than the last, of the agitated survivors.”

This book will keep me happy and mesmerized for a long time, and there are 500 more pages to go. I’m so glad to share a taste of this genius and his creativity.

Even this small story is masterfully done. The best was yet to come.