why I travel, why I read

In 1949, when the future Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez was working as a newspaper reporter in Cartegena, Colombia, his editor asked him to go to the convent of Santa Clara, whose crypts were being excavated, to “see if you can come up with anything” (it was a slow news day).

The convent had already been converted to a hospital and would soon be sold and re-opened as a luxury hotel. When García Márquez arrived, he writes in the introduction to his novel "Of Love and Other Demons,” he found laborers hacking open tombs with axes, opening rotting coffins, pulling out bones and sorting them into piles, balancing sheets of paper identifying the skeletons on top.

As they opened one grave, the workers discovered a mass of red hair, 22 meters in length (a bit more than 72 feet), attached to the skull of a young person. The foreman wasn’t impressed, García Márquez claims, because he believed that human hair grows a centimeter a month after death (it doesn’t). But García Márquez recalled a story his grandmother had told him about a 12-year-old noblewoman “with hair that trailed behind her like a bridal train,” who died of rabies and was believed to have performed miracles.

“The idea that the tomb might be hers was my news item of the day, and the origins of this book,” García Márquez writes.

I have no idea if García Márquez invented this anecdote for the sake of his fiction (perhaps in the quasi-factual style of William Goldman’s prologue to “The Princess Bride") but when I read it, on the second night of the trip to Cartegena I’ve been on all this week, I immediately looked up where I might find the old convent of Santa Clara that had been converted to a hotel, if I might see it for myself.

As it happens, the convent is now the hotel where, last night, I attended the wedding of a good friend from college, the reason I’m in Cartegena in the first place.

“The convent of Santa Clara faced the sea and had three floors of innumerable identical windows, and a gallery of semicircular arches surrounding a dark, overgrown garden,” García Márquez opens the third chapter of “Love and Other Demons.” “There was a stone path through the banana trees and wild ferns, a slender palm that had grown higher than the flat roofs in its search for light, and a colossal tree with vanilla vines and strings of orchids hanging from its branches. Beneath the tree a cistern of stagnant water had a rusted iron rim on which captive macaws performed like circus acrobats.”

This is the type of thing I live for. I had no idea when I packed this novel for my trip that I was in fact traveling for the purpose of visiting the book’s central setting. All I’d done was a basic internet search for “novels that take place in Cartegena,” and chose “Of Love and Other Demons” because I’ve already read “Love in the Time of Cholera.”

Reading García Márquez is an obvious choice in Cartegena. Known here also as Gabo, García Márquez is everywhere. A friend and I stopped in a book stall on the street and found a bookcase full of vintage editions of his books. His face is on 50,000 peso bills. On a tour of a mangrove swamp outside of the city, our guide told us that part of the area, known as “the tunnel of love,” was the set for scenes in several film adaptations of Gabo’s novels.

I have mixed feelings about “Of Love and Other Demons.” The writing is lush and textured and witty. The plot, however, is skeevy. It’s about a 12-year-old girl who, after being bitten by a rabid dog, is committed to the aforementioned convent so that she can be exorcised of the demons the local Catholic bishop believes have possessed her. The 36-year-old priest assigned to the exorcism instead falls in love with her for no apparent reason except, I guess, that she has a mane of golden red hair that has never been cut. She, in turn, goes from mildly hostile to deeply in love with him over the course of a paragraph. It’s unclear to me how self-aware García Márquez is about how creepy the story is; when the two have sex, I can’t tell if the language is meant to be romantic when it should very clearly be read as rape: “Sierva María’s body shivered in a lament, emitted a tenuous ocean breeze, and abandoned itself to its fate.” I am all about the hot priest, but not in this way.

But I’m still glad I read the book here. Obviously, I take great pleasure in seeing the real-life places where stories happened in someone else’s imagination. More importantly, though, the real accomplishment of the novel is how astutely García Márquez examines how the social and political context of colonial Cartegena builds atmosphere and affects people’s lives.

Sierva María’s mother, for example, has essentially abandoned her child to be raised by the enslaved women of her household because she has become addicted to cocaine and is sleeping with a man she bought in the central market of the city. More than once characters comment that the enslaved population of the city will only be honest with each other and will lie to white people; the child, raised in that community, lies habitually and sometimes gleefully to other white people in ways that have consequences to the plot. The priest is the only person in the city who, under the rules of the Inquisition, is allowed to read the banned book section of the church’s library; the banned books are also of consequence to the story. “The city was not what it had once been,” García Márquez writes. “The principal slave markets had been moved to Havana, and the miners and ranchers in these kingdoms of Terra Firma preferred to buy contraband labor at lower prices in the English Antilles. And so there were two cities: one busy and crowded for the six months the galleons remained in port, and the other that drowsed for the rest of the year as it waited for them to return.”

The book, in other worlds, helped me better understand Cartegena as a lived-in city, not just the site of a destination wedding.

Whenever I travel anywhere outside of the United States, and sometimes inside the US too, I try to find a novel that is set there to read during the trip. Last year on a trip to Malaysia, my traveling companion and I both read the same book, and, while neither of us really cared for it as literature, the story contained such a thorough mapping of Penang that we spent so much time pointing out that “this [school/clubhouse/restaurant] is in the book!” that our third friend there started making fun of us.

My habit of reading the fiction of any place I’m visiting is rooted, I think, in a low-level anxiety I have about what my motivations are for traveling and how to be a thoughtful guest in another country, especially as an American. When I’m somewhere as a tourist, I always feel at least a little bit like an asshole, especially when I’m somewhere like Colombia where my grip on the language is shaky to non-existent, enough to mostly navigate a restaurant and a market but not much else.

Most of my travel as a young person was as a student, to countries where I was studying the language and deeply invested in learning about history and culture. I felt good about that: I was a supplicant, eager to ask questions, and my language skills served as a marker to people that I’d put in the work to pay attention to them, that I didn’t want them to accommodate my ignorance. I’m in quite a different situation here in Colombia. I’m not here purely as a stranger — the groom is a close friend, and his family is from this region of the country — but I don’t know as much about the city or the country or the language as I feel I should.

I never want to be the type of American condemned by Graham Greene in “The Quiet American,” which I started re-reading on this trip after I finished the García Márquez novel. In the introduction to the edition I’m reading, the novelist Robert Stone summarizes what Greene found so distasteful: “Americans had a way of showing up under palm and pine, from the deliciously opium laced dream streets of the Far East to the heart of London itself, flattening the ambiance with their uninflected, irrepressible observations,” Stone writes. “From the sensitive traveler’s point of view, it was a case of literally not knowing one’s place.”

Everyone knows American travelers like that. While traveling in Japan, years ago, I met an American man, just arrived in Tokyo from a work trip to the Philippines, who told me that “Filipinos have no culture.” Like most wildly arrogant proclamations, this comment revealed his ignorance not just of the Philippines but of the world generally. Everyone has a culture; we all live in our cultures the way we live in our skins. As the conversation continued, it became even more evident he had not spent very much time during his trip outside of his hotel room.

So I try my best not to be that person, the one whose lack of curiosity is matched in scale only by her confidence in her judgments. I also don’t want to be the privileged person who comes to gawk at other people who don’t necessarily care to be observed, especially since I’m also an enthusiastic if not particularly talented photographer. I want to talk to the teenagers who hang out in the windows of the wall that surrounds the old city, not just take pictures of them like zoo animals. I think a lot about a rule articulated by the travel writer Pico Iyer: “The only question to ask before visiting a place is whether the locals at the other end would rather see you or not.” And I worry about the impact all my air travel has on the climate. There are other, even more innocuous impulses I’m suspicious of, like the impulse to find everyday scenes like people shopping for fruit or riding bicycles quaint and picturesque if they happen in a city that’s foreign. My intentions are innocent: I just want to learn.

Of course, innocence of American intentions is what Greene’s “The Quiet American” is most suspicious of; it comes up again and again in the book. “Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm,” Greene writes. That’s one of the lessons I’ve taken from this book over the years — always be clear-eyed and skeptical of your own intentions.

In Colombia, there’s the added factor of knowing that I’m in no way escaping the shitstorm that is global politics in 2019. A week before I arrived, I read an NPR story that mentioned that an estimated 1.3 million Venezuelans have fled the political and economic crisis in their country to Colombia in the last year an a half. "It's as if we had [a new] city the size of [the port city] Cartagena," Iván Darío González, Colombia's vice-minister of public health, told NPR. This morning, a friend and I wondered if many of those migrants have ended up in Cartegena, or if it’s too far from the border. While I was walking to dinner tonight, two men on the street tried to sell me candy. I rebuffed them and started to keep walking, when one of the men said, in tentative English, “I’m Venezuelan. Please help me.” So, question answered, partly. It was one of many moments on this trip when I wished I spoke real Spanish, and definitely the most upsetting one.

So I am, I suppose, an ambivalent world traveler. But since I arrived nearly a week ago, I’ve also been trying to put into words precisely the strange feeling of relief I have to be outside the United States. Tentatively, I’ve decided that feeling so completely out of place is, ironically, extremely soothing. It’s similar maybe to the pleasure I often feel when I write, the endorphin release from the exertion of moving from confusion to clarity.

And it’s nice simply to feel wonder. I was talking to one of my close friends traveling with me about this feeling. “I just generally love being in countries that are not the US,” she said. “It’s just that everything is exciting, like just little things — going to a supermarket, looking at the different brands, looking at the road signs. It’s just like an alternate reality of how life could be. And then you realize there’s no reason we are the way we are; it’s just kinda random.”

I think she’s exactly right. Being outside the United States reminds me that everything in the world was built from choices, some of consequence and some completely happenstance, and that it’s fun to figure out at least some of what those choices were, and how they helped all of our different realities converge and diverge.

The novels help me with those questions, especially in places where there’s a language barrier that prevents me from being able to chat casually with the people I meet and ask them questions. And, just as how in other countries my language study served as a marker of interest, reading the García Márquez novel helped me build connections. The woman who owned one of the places I stayed was so excited when she saw the book in my bag as I arrived; she turns out to be a literature teacher and was very happy to explain the Colombian education system to me.

By contrast, I find that in order to have those types of conversations organically on a trip, you need to speak the language. For example, local and regional elections will be held in Colombia soon, and the campaigns are everywhere. Cab drivers have posters taped to their windows, walls were painted with campaign slogans like murals. One evening we walked through a square and passed a group of forty or fifty people all on bikes, all wearing t-shirts for a council candidate. There was clear tension, too. I was lucky to be here with this particular group of friends, most of whom speak Spanish nearly fluently, and I made one of them translate some graffiti we saw. “All politicians are the same,” he read. “They are corrupt and rob the people.” Nearby we saw a similar message calling politicians bandits. The next day, the man who drove us to the mangrove swamp pointed out a political convention center on the way. Then he too groused about corruption, telling us about the politicians who want to privatize the beaches.

And if you are going to be a tourist at a 500-year-old Spanish fort and a museum about the Inquisition, I highly recommend doing it as I did, with a friend who wrote a dissertation on Spanish history. Did you know that instead of using the guillotine, the Spanish executed people with garrotes, which are collars that tighten around a person’s neck, breaking the spinal cord and pushing it through the brain? I did not, until this weekend. We also had a long conversation about how museums in Spain and around the world have grappled with depicting the Inquisition; crowds love its gory drama, but museums don’t want to fetishize the violence. Many museums, my friend told me, have decided to use their exhibitions to remind visitors of human rights abuses around the world that continue. The Cartegena history museum, we noticed, took the opportunity to remind us that at any point, we might too be “the other,” persecuted.

When I spent my junior year of high school studying in China, one of my motivations was that the experience would help me grow up into a sophisticated world citizen, bouncing from place to place, maybe fighting for human rights. That year molded me for sure, but in a different way: I came back convinced that it’s arrogant for Americans to believe they can fix so many problems around the world when we dedicate so little attention to our own. That’s part of the reason I became a journalist, part of the reason I wanted to cover American public education, and part of the reason I care so much about local news. A

So I think that traveling — being “the other” — helps teach us how to be curious, how to notice things and find context clues all around us. And it reminds me that I can take those observational skills with me back home, that I can ask the same questions about things as basic as grocery stores in the United States as I do here. Curiosity is a skill, I think, and like any skill, it improves with practice and can atrophy if not put to use. Being in a place that’s completely foreign to you is pretty good practice.

“You know, if you live in a place for long you cease to read about it,” the narrator of “The Quiet American,” a British journalist working in Vietnam named Thomas Fowler, tells Pyle, the titular American. I find that travel shocks me out of that kind of complacency. By trying to learn as much as I can about a place that’s new to me, I always come back with more questions about the places I think I know well. It’s good to learn about the world, and it’s also good to practice the kind of learning you do about the world so you can live that way all the time.

Tell me why you want to read

Since I’ve been on the road, no tailored book recommendations this week, except that you should read something set in the place where you live or where you’re visiting, or written by someone from there. Let me know if you choose something good. And since this issue is basically a long “why I read” essay, if you want a recommendation for yourself, get in touch and tell me why you want to read or how you want a book to make you feel.

I'll also leave you with this: as I was preparing to send this tonight, a friend texted me a photo from a book she's reading, a passage from the novelist Flannery O'Connor that, though my friend had no idea what I was working on, very on theme for this week and the newsletter in general. "People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them," O'Connor wrote. "They don't take long looks at anything, because they lack the courage. The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience, and the novel, of course, is a way to have experience."

Thank you for reading this special Monday edition of the newsletter (Labor Day is the biggest Sunday of summer, maybe?). As always, thanks for bearing with me as I figure this thing out, for the first-draftiness of it, and also for forgiving all the typos that I miss because I write quickly and with no editor.

And as always, if you like this kind of dispatch from my brain and know someone else who might, too, please do share it. You can subscribe here.