gabo.

For a certain reason, I find myself sitting on a lonesome chair in the London suburbs, if we could call that neighborhood that. Geographically it certainly is. Identity wise it more certainly is.

Apart from the unknown reason for which I am there, people watching is certainly a part of activity, but that can only last so long, for within a day or two you figure out how so very "ethnic" this place is, as Mr. Sun Zhongyuan would use as description.

It then comes down to reading material to save the day. Metro, handed out freely and normally not even worth a glimpse, suddenly becomes enticing with its forever entertaining guilty pleasures section and that seemingly everlasting British glory in the Olympics, when in reality Brits can only contend to become the best of the rest, far from even seeing second place. But even Metro has its expiration time, for there are only so many countable words or pages you can read.

So you then down Love in the Time of Cholera, a book so evocative that once touched upon, the words unseat you from your immediate surroundings, especially when you were once made marginally familiar with the particular setting in the book.

Countless crisscrossing themes of love and whatnot make for a slow and fluid reading, but my eyes lay elsewhere. Dr. Juvenal Urbino's initial reaction upon return must have been resounding to many of those Colombians who have had an opportunity to study abroad.

He liked to say that this love was the result of a clinical error. He himself could not believe that it had happened, least of all at that time in his life when all his reserves of passion were concentrated on the destiny of his city which, he said with great frequency and no second thoughts, had no equal in the world. In Paris, strolling arm in arm with a casual sweetheart through a late autumn, it seemed impossible to imagine a purer happiness than those golden afternoons, with the woody odor of chestnuts on the braziers, the languid accordions, the insatiable lovers kissing on the open terraces, still he had told himself with his hand on his heart that he was not prepared to exchange all that for a single instant of his Caribbean in April. He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past. But when he stood at the railing of the ship and saw the white promontory of the colonial district again, the motionless buzzards on the roofs, the washing of the poor hung out to dry on the balconies, only then did he understand to what extent he had been an easy victim to the charitable deceptions of nostalgia.

The ship made its way across the bay through a floating blanket of drowned animals, and most of the passengers took refuge in their cabins to escape the stench. The young doctor walked down the gangplank dressed in perfect alpaca, wearing a vest and dustcoat, with the beard of a young Pasteur and his hair divided by a neat, pale part, and with enough self-control to hide the lump in his throat caused not by terror but by sadness. On the nearly deserted dock guarded by barefoot soldiers without uniforms, his sisters and mother were waiting for him, along with his closest friends, whom he found insipid and without expectations despite their sophisticated airs; they spoke about the crisis of the civil war as if it were remote and foreign, but they all had an evasive tremor in their voices and an uncertainty in their eyes that belied their words.

Then mom asks why Urbino's face was so pale, to which he replied, "It's life over there, Mother. You turn green in Paris." Gabriel Garcia Marquez then proceeds.

A short while later, suffocating with the heat as he sat next to her in the closed carriage, he could no longer endure the unmerciful reality that came pouring in through the window. The ocean looked like ashes, the old palaces of the marquises were about to succumb to a proliferation of beggars, and it was impossible to discern the ardent scent of jasmine behind the vapors of death from the open sewers. Everything seemed smaller to him than when he left, poorer and sadder, and there were so many hungry rats in the rubbish heaps of the streets that the carriage horses stumbled in fright. On the long trip from the port to his house, located in the heart of the District of the Viceroys, he found nothing that seemed worthy of his nostalgia. Defeated, he turned his head away so that his mother would not see, and he began to cry in silence.

What stuns is how relevant this still is, despite the change of time and not space. Knowing not Cartegena but Cali four years ago, and knowing Paris only as a frequent passer-by, you can almost replace those exact words for a student who attended a Lycée Francais Paul Valéry de Cali, studied in Paris for a while and crossing the entire city on the road home from Alfonso Bonilla Aragon Airport. Replace home in District of Viceroys for home in Ciudad Jardin, you need only to notice the change in the location of power cables, where in majority of the city they are run overhead in a somewhat chaotic manner, occasionally knocked down by a falling tree during a thunderstorm, yet upon entering Ciudad Jardin, they quietly disappear as they become buried underground. 

Perhaps students are less emotional these days, or at least emotional in a different way. Perhaps Colombia has a GDP now nearing 5%. Perhaps Chinese immigrants are no longer smuggled in to build the Panama railway, but today flood the country with car dealerships. Perhaps Colombia is now finally at peace, plagued no longer by cholera while FARC has declared ceasefire, and drug wars ceasing to exist despite a still flourishing industry. Perhaps Cartagena has cleaned up its ports, built clubs where even Hillary Clinton is seen partying in. 

Perhaps.

But for certain parts of the country, time seems to have frozen. It is almost echoing that never-ending cycle evoked so powerfully in One Hundred Years of Solitude, which so very accurately describes Colombia. Times change, people change, ways of life changes, but certain things remain unchanged. Certain people will never meet certain other people, and people living in certain places will never notice certain other places.

All that said, there are still many reasons to love the country, regardless which part of the country you know or have lived in, as is the case for any other country in the world, for countries and cities are always constructed in layers and are hence ever multifaceted. At least, in this part of London where I am sitting for an unknown reason, such is the case.