The Magic Dust of Marquez
We landed in this magickal town yesterday. The place we are staying at is a little villa out of time, with all the elements of magic that Marquez writes about in his most famous books. Until I got to this city, I thought that his magickal descriptions of Colombia and the little villages he described were products of a deeply imaginative fiction, but now I realize that they are merely accurate descriptions of the actual magick of this place. It is truly unique, and I have never been to a city like it. We are staying at the Casa Mara, a villa guest house run by a mad old woman who has the look and feel of a 60s movie starlet that whose career never quite took off. She has been through three husbands and is on her current boyfriend, a tall dark mulatto man, one with a demeanor that lead would lead me to imagine him to be the villain in romance novels from an earlier time and age.
Cartagena is located on the north coast of Colombia and has a tropical Bombay type climate with much of the same weather, with humid, sultry, ocean laden air. It is inhabited by the darker African Spanish racial intermix, the mulattos. Everyone here is of a Negroid mix with the Spanish and indigenous,giving them deep coffee skin, negro hair and a laid back and slow coastal attitude to life. Life here is about music, theatre, painting, eating and culture. It is slow, old world, and Spanish, replete with siesta, drinking, singing and dancing. The streets have obvious prostitutes with brazen gazes, easy going men sitting on street corners playing cards on folding table, lazy people asleep in the sun and a sense of true magick. It is reminiscent of Prague in many ways, with small local restaurants and cafes on cobble stone streets, serving typical coastanio or coastal food.
Our Casavilla has a tiny swimming pool in the center courtyard, coastal music of the region and piano solos playing from invisible speakers all around, there are two sea horse fountains spewing into the pool from either side and one cannot miss the two beautiful giant parrots in a huge cage that talk to you politely and rudely in Spanish (and the many other languages they have acquired from passing guests) as they feel inclined. There is pet male peacock on the terrace who spreads his wings and dances at least once a day, a gift to our villa owner from the days she spent in Rajasthan. The place has old world architecture, old clocks, portraits of our hostess at various ages on the walls and an air of being a place where time has stood still. I can almost feel a layer of time dust, from another era, coating the whole place, preserving its stasis.
