Márquez: Nostalgia begins on a record

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Unlike all writers, good and bad, from ancient times to the present, I never idealize the village where I was born and grew up to be eight years old, and my memories of that era—which I have said many times—are the purest and truest things that have been preserved in my mind.

Not only can I recall as if I were just yesterday what every house that survived in the village looked like, but I can even find a crack in a wall that didn't exist when I was a child.

The trees in the village usually live longer than people, and sometimes I get the impression that they remember us as much as we remember them.

I was walking like this in the dusty, steaming streets of Arakataka, where I was born and came back a few days ago, sixteen years after my last return.

Suddenly reunited with so many childhood friends, I was upset, and because of the appearance of a large group of children, I was a little dazed, as if I saw my own figure in the days when the circus came, but I still maintained enough sanity, and I was still surprised to see what had not changed...

Despite the green belt decoration, the small square is still the same, still dusty, the Almond trees are as listless as in the past; the church has been painted again and again for nearly half a century, but the clock dial of the big clock on the tower is still the same. "It's nothing," someone told me, "even the people who repair the bells are still the same." ”

There was a man in the village who had immigrated from Italy, Don Antonio Daconte, who brought a lot of new things to the village of Alacataca: silent films, billiard halls, rental bicycles, phonographs, and the earliest radios, all thanks to him. That's where I saw the smashing of houses.

It was one night when people were running to tell each other that the elves were smashing the house of Antonio Daconte's house, and the whole village ran to see it. In fact, it is far from what people think, this is not like a horror drama at all, but more like a happy festival, but there is no piece of glass that does not suffer.

I couldn't see who was throwing it, but I saw stones flying from all directions, and the magical properties of not hurting anyone, only hitting their targets accurately— everything made of glass.

Long after that fascinating night, our children still occasionally sneaked into Don Antonio Daconte's house and opened the lid of the water tank in the dining room to see the elves, all motionless, almost transparent, bored underwater.

A few days ago I recalled this and one thing in the hot village, and my old friends and relatives seemed to be really happy about our reunion after many years.

It is the same source of poetry, its rhythm echoes in half the world, in almost all languages, but seems to exist more in memory than in reality. There is no other place than it endured deeper forgetting and abandonment, farther away from God's ways. How can we not feel that an emotion of defiance is rising, almost distorting the human soul?

This is always the case, we used to think that we were too far away from happiness, but now we think the complete opposite. This is the trick of nostalgia, which extracts those painful moments and paints them in other colors, and then puts them back where they no longer feel painful.

Like those old photographs, they all seem to be covered with a layer of happiness, from which we can only be surprised to see that we were young when we were young, and there were not only us on it, but also the house, the trees in the background, and even the chairs we used to sit on.

Once, on a night between wars, Che Guevara once told the people he was sitting around the fire that nostalgia began with eating. That's true, but it only applies when people are hungry. I think it starts with music. In fact, from the moment we are born, our past is moving away from us little by little, but this can only be felt when a record is finished.