Literary Places

by Sarah Baxter

  Monroeville’s literal and literary heart is the County Courthouse. Completed in 1904, this Romanesque clock-towered seat of justice was used until 1963. Attorney A.C. Lee fought many cases here, with daughter Nelle Harper Lee watching from the balcony. In the 1970s the building was almost demolished. But it was surreptitiously placed on the National Register of Historic Places and saved. Restored to its 1930s glory, the Courthouse is now a museum where you can sit in the judge’s chair, climb to the ‘coloreds’ balcony’ and, each spring, watch the Mockingbird play, which recreates the novel’s action in situ.

  A circuit of the square passes the two-storey Monroe County Bank Building (inside which A.C. Lee once practised law) and the tiny jailhouse – ‘a miniature Gothic joke’ – where the likes of Tom Robinson were once interred; it’s now an annex to the Sheriff’s Department. Alabama Avenue leads from the square’s southeast corner. A little way down, past the car parks and uninspiring office buildings, is Mel’s Dairy Dream, a small retro drive-thru selling burgers and shakes. This was the site of Lee’s childhood home, torn down in 1953. Next door, a low brick wall is all that’s left of the Faulk house, where a young Truman Capote would stay while visiting his Monroeville cousins, and where Truman and Nelle Harper became lifelong friends.

  According to Atticus, ‘You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view … Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.’ Visiting Monroeville lets you walk a little with Harper Lee.

  CARTAGENA

  Which?

  Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez (1985)

  What?

  Colonial Caribbean-lapped city in Colombia where magic is made real

  THE CITY is steaming. The downpour has stopped and now the temperature’s high as hell, the air hanging heavy with humidity, jasmine, birdsong and expectation. Yellow-red-pink walls burn in the sun. It seems barely a city at all but a lurid painting created in a fever dream; blurred brightness, hidden meanings. The shade of the square provides little escape. You’re still assaulted by the Caribbean heat, by the sound of heels clattering the cobblestones, by pecking pigeons, hawkers touting Cuban cigars, the sickly smooch of lovers. A hot breeze blows through, carrying not respite but stories – stories from out at sea, from the cannon-topped battlements, from behind closed shutters, from centuries past. Cartagena: a city of stories, where magic dances down every street …

  Gabriel García Márquez was born in the Colombian river town of Aracataca, lived peripatetically between Europe, Cuba and Mexico City but is inextricably linked with Cartagena. He arrived in the coastal city in 1948, just as La Violencia – a ten-year civil war – broke across the country. He studied at Cartagena University, and worked as a newspaper reporter, but left after only a year, never to live there full time again. And yet, this city – its palette, its pulse – infuses his writing. Márquez once confessed that ‘all of my books have loose threads of Cartagena in them’.

  This is never more apparent than in El Amor en los Tiempos del Cólera – Love in the Time of Cholera. The novel, based on the love affair of Márquez’s parents, is set in the ‘city of the Viceroys’, a port on the Magdalena River somewhere near the Caribbean Sea – unnamed by the author but oozing with the essence of Cartagena. The streets and squares are fictitious, but wandering the real-life city it’s impossible not to see the stage of Márquez’s love story: that of odd young romantic Florentino Ariza and his sweetheart Fermina Daza. After one ‘casual glance’ at 14-year-old Fermina, Florentino falls impossibly in love. He stalks Fermina across the city, mounting a vigil outside her half-ruined house, going places she might be, playing violin to her in church. When Fermina marries staid, respectable Dr Juvenal Urbino instead, Florentino continues to lurk around the city – on trams, down alleys, by the docks – racking up hundreds of sexual encounters while still proclaiming fidelity to Fermina. He waits 51 years, 9 months and 4 days to win her back.

  Cartagena was founded by the Spanish in 1533. It was a literal treasure chest, used to store looted New World gold and silver before it was shipped back to Europe. The Spanish wrapped the city in sturdy ramparts to fend off attacks from buccaneers and Brits; these protective murallas (walls) were bolstered over subsequent centuries, becoming the most extensive fortifications in South America. Today, they continue to safeguard the Old Town’s cluster of handsome churches, bright-hued houses, tropical courtyards and terracotta tiles. It’s a confined, candy-coloured bubble, where magic might brew.

  Cartagena is in better shape now than when Márquez arrived. The state of ruination, when ‘weeds hung from the balconies and opened cracks in the whitewashed walls of even the best-kept mansions’ has been reversed. Long known for guerrilla fighting, drugs trafficking and corruption, Colombia has cleaned up its act in the early 21st century. In Cartagena, houses have been restored and weeds replaced by tamed creepers and neat window boxes.

  Indeed, the Old Town is as colourful, sensual and multi-sensory as Márquez’s imagination. Cumbia music pumps from bars and spills into the streets. Food is everywhere, from rainbow-bright lollipops to fried snacks sizzling in vats of hot oil on the pavements. Dark-skinned palenqueras, descendants of the first free slaves, sashay in their vibrant full-skirted dresses and costume jewels, balancing bowls overflowing with tropical fruit on their heads. They’ll pose for photos in exchange for tourist dollars. But then, the whole city is photogenic, from the elegant wrought-iron lampposts to the balconies dripping with bougainvillea. Flowers of all kinds – roses, gardenias, camellias – symbolise love in Márquez’s novel, and flourish in abundance on the real streets of Cartagena.

  It’s possible to seek out Florentino and Fermina. Entering the Old Town via the main gate, walking under the clock tower, you enter the Plaza de los Coches, once used as a slave market. Across the square is the Portal de los Dulces, the colonnaded and tangerine-hued passageway that became Márquez’s Portal de los Escribanos, or Arcade of the Scribes. Florentino, rejected by Fermina, employed his literary powers here, writing missives for ‘unlettered lovers’, free of charge. You won’t find poets under the shade of the arches today, but rather a line of little stalls selling a tooth-stinging array of sweet confections: sugary pastries, caramel swirls, glass jars jammed with muñecas de leche (milk dolls) and coconut cocada sweets.

  A little further north is leafy Plaza Fernández de Madrid, inspiration for the Parquecito de los Evangelios – the Little Park of the Evangelists – where love-lorn Florentino spent many hours, hoping to glimpse Fermina. There are benches where you can sit, like Florentino, ‘pretending to read a book of verse in the shade of the almond trees’. The Daza house was supposedly based on the white, vine-smothered mansion on the square’s eastern side.

  Just like Márquez’s fictional city, Cartagena is a cauldron in which magic can brew. Where love can explode, colours can blind, parrots can kill. It is lyrical, vibrant, sweet and strange. It has, as Dr Urbino states, ‘no equal in the world’.

  CHILE

  Which?

  The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende (1982)

  What?

  Mysterious Latin nation terrorised by dictators and laced with magic

  THE LANDSCAPE seems but a dream; a hazy memory. The shrouded sky part conceals the fruitful valley, with its twisted vines, dashing stream, distant mountains; only the snow-slathered peak of a volcano stands proud and clear. A vast estancia – a huge swathe of hopeful farmland – lays vague claim to this patch of wildness, but remains at the mercy of Mother Nature in this half-forgotten country at the end of the earth …

  Though its location is never stated, La Casa de los Espíritus – The House of the Spirits – breathes Chile. Author Isabel Allende declined to place her story of three generations of the Trueba family; it plays out in an unnamed country in Latin America. But despite its magic-realist flights of fancy and geographic unspecificity, there’s little question of the setting. The novel is part personal saga, part document of
the country’s 20th-century history.

  Allende has admitted as much; she once said that in writing The House of the Spirits, she ‘wanted to recover all that I had lost – my land, my family, my memories’. The Chilean author had spent long periods of her early life living in Santiago. But when the military coup of 1973 saw the toppling of President Salvador Allende – the world’s first democratically elected Marxist president and Isabel’s first cousin once removed – she fled to Venezuela. The House of the Spirits, which began life as a letter to her dying grandfather, was written while the author was in exile and her homeland – ‘that country of catastrophes’ – was in the grip of Augusto Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship.

  The novel begins around 1920, at a time when Chilean politics were in flux. It spans more than 50 years and two main locations: the ‘big house on the corner’, in the centre of the nameless capital, and Tres Marías, the Trueba’s countryside estate. Real events creep into the narrative. The earthquake that tears down Tres Marías and saw ‘buildings fall like wounded dinosaurs’ echoes the 1939 earthquake that devastated Chile, killed nearly 30,000 people and yet caused limited international stir: ‘the rest of the world, too busy with another war, barely noticed that nature had gone berserk in that remote corner of the globe’. Politics are ever present too – from issues of women’s rights and socialism to the build-up to the coup. But there’s also joy and beauty, from the conjured spirits, to the girl with the long green hair to the wild expanses of the sun-baked campo (countryside).

  As Allende doesn’t name her country, it’s impossible to follow a Trueba trail with precision. But you might start in Santiago’s Plaza de Armas – the name of many a Latin city’s main square – where violent patriarch Esteban Trueba first sees ‘Rosa the Beautiful’ buying liquorice, and where you can stroll past the palm trees, chess players and towers of the Neoclassical cathedral. You could visit the museum at Las Chascona, former house of Pablo Neruda, who ‘appears’ in the novel simply as the Poet, or the Museum of Memory and Human Rights, which commemorates victims of the Pinochet regime. You might even explore the Brasil and Yungay barrios (municipalities), where the wealthy built fine mansions in the 19th and 20th centuries – less eccentric versions, perhaps, of the twisted, protuberance-encrusted house where clairvoyant Clara Trueba spoke to spirits.

  Then, like Esteban, you could leave the metropolis. The Chilean train network has shrunk to a handful of lines, but the southbound service from Santiago’s Gustave Eiffel-designed Alameda Station still offers an escape into the campo. Through the window of the train, Esteban watches ‘the passing landscape of the central valley. Vast fields stretched from the foot of the mountain range, a fertile countryside filled with vineyards, wheatfields, alfalfa and marigolds’. Similarly, the long, thin plain south of Santiago, flanked by the Andes and the coastal range, is Chile’s most fertile region. This rural riot of orchards, pastures and grape-heavy vines – where horse-drawn carts still clop along the highway – is just the place to imagine Tres Marías appearing on the horizon.

  SARAH BAXTER grew up in Norfolk, England and now lives in Bath. Her passion for travel and the great outdoors saw her traverse Asia, Australia, New Zealand and the United States before settling into a writing career.

  She was Associate Editor of Wanderlust magazine, the bible for independent-minded travellers, for more than ten years and has also written extensively on travel for a diverse range of other publications, including the Guardian, the Telegraph and the Independent newspapers. Sarah has contributed to more than a dozen Lonely Planet guidebooks and is the author of the first book in the Inspired Traveller’s Guide series, Spiritual Places, as well as A History of the World in 500 Walks and A History of the World in 500 Railway Journeys.

  AMY GRIMES is an illustrator based in London. Drawing inspiration from nature and the natural world, Amy’s work often features bright and bold illustrated motifs, floral icons and leafy landscapes. As well as working on commissioned illustrations, Amy also sells prints, textiles and stationery under the brand of Hello Grimes.

  First published in 2019 by White Lion Publishing,

  an imprint of The Quarto Group.

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  Digital edition: 978-1-78131-811-9

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