Gabriel Garcìa Màrquez
Cent'Anni Di Solitudine

Try to escape from Macondo.

You can't.

You close the book and feel the hand with the black bandage of Amaranta on your shoulder. Next to you sits Melquíades the gypsy, smiling toothlessly, tinkering with his new invention in his hands, while the music of Pietro Crespi reaches you from the hallway.
You reopen it, and the room fills with red ants and the yellow butterflies of Mauricio Babilonia. In your pocket, you find the red dust you had hidden away from Rebeca's hunger. Outside, it starts to rain, and begonias bloom on the walls.

Now that I am in front of the execution gallows, I think about the story of a hundred years of this lineage, a flow of generations, divided among twenty chapters and the absurd fear that a descendant might be born with a pig's tail, divided among pages that multiply, reverse time, dilate it, but shorten the distances of a world of abstraction, in the hand of a writer who weaves characters from magical realism, intertwines adventures, lands, journeys, a place that builds itself before your eyes slowly, where everything moves and everything stays still. I think that Stubbornness has the taste of the thirty-two revolutions raised in the civil war, all lost. 

Exactness is the right word for the brief happiness of Colonel Aureliano Buendía and little Remedios with lily skin and green eyes.

What Love is, Ursula told me, her eyes sealed by darkness made her stumble on her own footsteps, yet she was the only one still seeing the specter of José Arcadio Buendía under the chestnut tree.
Passion has the color of the dark of night, of the damp sheets on which Pilar Ternera lay, the woman whose laughter frightened the doves and who taught José Arcadio for the first time how to love. Stasis has the sound of every drop from the four years, eleven months, and two days of rain, when what keeps us alive is no longer even the instinct of preservation, but becomes the habit of fear. 

Resignation resembles the vicious cycle of Colonel Aureliano Buendía's little gold fish, in a place where life consumes and repeats itself infinitely and infinitely and infinitely, in a ring where the same rain, the same names, the same war, the same ghosts revolve, where everything stays and nothing ever truly goes away, and even if the characters die, they always return, where even reality blurs its edges, becomes opaque, turns into mist, gets lost in the plague of insomnia that struck the village and the alienation of José Arcadio Buendía.

Aware that even aiming at the heart, I might hit the only empty space in the middle of the chest, I know what name to give to that depth of solitude that I recognize in my eyes when I see myself in a puddle, sitting in my circle of chalk. It's the same as the Buendía's.

(To the Aureliano Buendía I have known.)