Dear friends,
In 1982 when the great Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez won the Nobel Prize for literature, he said,
On a day like today, my master William Faulkner said, “I decline to accept the end of man”. I would fall unworthy of standing in this place that was his, if I were not fully aware that the colossal tragedy he refused to recognize thirty-two years ago is now, for the first time since the beginning of humanity, nothing more than a simple scientific possibility. Faced with this awesome reality that must have seemed a mere utopia through all of human time, we, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of the opposite utopia. A new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth.
Today we stood by the clock tower, an iconic symbol of Cartagena. It looks down on the Plaza where two hundred years ago slaves were sold. More slaves arrived here than anywhere else on this continent.
We also sat on a bench in the square dedicated to the Great Liberator of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and Bolivia: Simon Bolivar. The bench is said to be where Fermina sat, a character from the Garcia Marquez novel, Love in the Time of Cholera.
A group of school children on a field trip gathered beneath the statue of the great Liberator and scattered peanuts to the pigeons. They waved as I asked to take their picture.
Today we shopped, walked, ate and drank Colombian beer. We watched a bit of the the World Cup in Donde Fidel, a well-known local salsa bar. We chased away a never ending army of street vendors with endless “no, gracias.”
Every afternoon at about one o’clock the skies open up and so much rain comes down that some streets are filled with water from curb to curb.
So we time our lunch to correspond with the rain. Today we ate at a restaurant in Plaza San Diego. Looking down on us was a huge photograph of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Fred Klonsky 