In informants, Maria Elvira Arango’s program, aired a report a few days ago that I haven’t been able to get out of my head, and this column is an attempt to find out why. They titled it, prudently, with the least dramatic of the phrases that could have accounted for the drama of its protagonists: “Adrift”. In little more than fourteen minutes of good reporting, the journalist Jose Monsalve puts together a hair-raising and moving tour of the municipality of Sucre – to which people often refer by the name of their department, as if they had to comply with giving the someone’s last name: Sucre-Sucre–, where it has rained uninterruptedly for three months, and whose inhabitants have resigned themselves to living in a town that no longer has streets, but canals. In the luckiest houses the murky water only rises a foot above the ground, but in most people it is up to their waists, and it is no exaggeration to say that they have already forgotten what the ground was like where they live.
The whole life of the town is hopelessly disrupted, but sometimes the flood has dire consequences. Monsalve collects the testimony of Diana Nazzer, a young woman who was washing her elderly mother in the flood waters when she felt a whiplash on her leg: it was a snake the size of an arm. “We have already killed two,” explains Diana Nazzer. Monsalve asks: “In the house?” And the woman clarifies: “Inside the house.” Days later, when her mother died, Diana had to watch over her on a tambo, which is what the locals call the platforms that they have improvised throughout the town to be able to walk or sleep or pray above the waters. And the report follows the body through the flooded streets to the flooded church and then to the flooded cemetery, where the water – the dark water, covered with a layer of dead vegetation – reaches the waist of the bereaved: all those who they went to bury Ruth Nazzer in a vault, above the submerged dead.
Even so, sunk in a quagmire of a bad horror movie, I recognized the cemetery, just as I had earlier recognized the plaza’s quay and the plaza itself, with its pastel-colored cathedral and its buildings full of stories that I knew. I was passing through Sucre in August or September 2014, during a several-day trip through places in Colombia that had only one thing in common: being part of the life of Garcia Marquez. We were filming a documentary (an English director, an Argentine cameraman and me), and I walked along those streets without water with Isidro Alvarez, a writer from Sucre who knows better than anyone the relationship between the people and the fictions that told it. We were in the alley where Santiago Nasar died in Chronicle of a Death Foretold, and we crossed the square as his murderers crossed it, the Vicario brothers; we walked under the almond trees to the river, where the boats from La mala hora would have passed; and then, going down to the biographical reality of Garcia Marquez, we stopped in front of the house where the girl Mercedes Barcha lived, and also in front of the place where Gabriel Eligio Garcia’s pharmacy was located.
Sucre is the nameless town (the most hostile and gloomy counterpart of Aracataca-Macondo) where many of Garcia Marquez’s great fictions take place. His family arrived in 1939 on board one of those boats from the novels, after having made the first part of the journey that brought them from the coast by steam. Many years later, Luisa Santiaga Marquez told biographer Gerald Martin that Gabito, being the eldest son, had been commissioned to organize the trip; he remembered him going up to the deck of the steamer, panicked because he had counted the children and one was missing. “And it was him,” said Luisa Santiaga. “It was that he hadn’t told himself.” Gustavo, the younger brother, would also remember the arrival: she told Silvia Galvis that the new residence was “a town where snakes entered the houses and there was no light; a town that in winter was flooded to the point that the land disappeared under the water and immediately the swarms of mosquitoes appeared”.
In “Monologue of Isabel watching it rain in Macondo”, which Jose Monsalve recalls in his report, it rains all day Sunday and all Monday and all Tuesday and all Wednesday and all Thursday, and more than one voice says the same phrase: “It’s like it will never clear up.” And also these words, which I read thinking of Diana Nazzer and the funeral of her mother: “Now we have to pray. The water broke the graves and the poor dead are floating in the cemetery”. Another of those interviewed in the report by Los informantes, the municipal inspector Obman Campo, remembers Garcia Marquez because his mother remembered him. “She used to come to this town especially during vacation times,” he says. And then he talks about “The Funerals of the Big Mama”, whose house, according to legend, is there, in Sucre; and he talks about Chronicle of a Death Foretold, because everyone knows the true story on which the novel was based, and everyone knows what happened there, in those streets and that square that are now flooded.
But he doesn’t talk about La mala hora, where Father Angel goes out for a walk, killing time before the appointment with the mayor, and arrives at the area of the floods, where there is only a dead cat floating among the flowers. Sucre is in that novel a place of political tensions where the authorities usually consider the citizens as enemies, and vice versa. That’s what I thought when I heard Obman Campo describe, as if it were something surprising, Sucre’s curious luck: “In other countries, the towns that are on the banks of the river are rich. We have something that is the other way around: the towns that are on the banks of the river are the poorest”. Why is this happening?
Yolanda Gomez, a seventy-year-old woman who takes the journalist to her flooded house, has her version of the causes: “Everything that comes is swallowed by the Magdalena,” she says. “All the help that comes, they steal it and say: They drowned. The boards were drowned. Meals were drowned. Everything drowned.” “Resources were drowned,” says Jose Monsalve. Shortly before, Yolanda has given a sad verdict: “This is an abandoned town that has no mourners.” I don’t know if this is the word that she has said, but it is the one that I have understood. In the dictionary I find this definition: “In a duel, relative of the deceased.” It is as if Sucre were dying and nobody, neither in Sincelejo nor in Bogota, had noticed.
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Source: EL PAIS
