It
was as if God had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise and
was keeping the inhabitants of Macondo in a permanent alternation between
excitement and disappointment, doubt and revelation, to such an extreme that no
one knew for certain where the limits of reality lay. It was an intricate stew
of truths and mirages that convulsed the ghost of José Arcadio Buendía under
the chestnut tree with impatience and made him wander all through the house
even in broad daylight. Ever since the railroad had been officially inaugurated
and had begun to arrive with regularity on Wednesdays at eleven o’clock and the
primitive wooden station with a desk, a telephone, and a ticket window had been
built, on the streets of Macondo men and women were seen who had adopted
everyday and normal customs and manners but who really looked like people out
of a circus. In a town that had chafed under the tricks of the gypsies there
was no future for those ambulatory acrobats of commerce who with equal
effrontery offered a whistling kettle and a daily regime that would assure the
salvation of the soul on the seventh day; but from those who let themselves be
convinced out of fatigue and the ones who were always unwary, they reaped
stupendous benefits.
Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014) grew up listening to family tales,
eventually becoming a journalist. His fiction work introduced readers to
magical realism, which combines more conventional storytelling with vivid fantasy.
His novels Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) and El amor en los tiempos del
cólera (Love in the Time of Cholera) have drawn worldwide audiences, and he won a Nobel Prize in
1982.
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