Gabriel García Márquez, the famous Colombian writer and author of "One Hundred Years of Solitude," won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982, presenting to the world a vision of reality in which the harshness of social injustices and the violence of his country in the early twentieth century intertwined with colorful strokes of situations that were blatantly exaggerated, if not supernatural. This blend of reality and fantasy, recognized in the literary world as "Magical Realism," would come to be synonymous with the Nobel laureate's work.
Between 2000 and 2006 I lived in Santa Marta, a small coastal city in the Caribbean region, the same one where García Márquez grew up. I will talk about that city in detail in the next chapter. There I was able to clearly recognize the origin of the fantastic vision of reality that can be felt in the aforementioned classic of literature, but also in many of his other works such as "La Hojarasca" and "Chronicle of a Death Foretold." The mix of ancestral indigenous heritage syncretized by religion, the strong influence of the Catholic Church, and the need to escape the harsh reality of poverty and violence already described in this book came together in Colombia to produce a particular vision of reality in which one needs a transcendent, higher meaning that lends sense and purpose to the deprivations, barbarism, and senselessness one has to deal with every day.
For European or Asian readers of One Hundred Years of Solitude, things like visions of miraculous ascensions, alchemical practices, magical powers, and people who turn into monsters are, in an obvious way, elements of fiction clearly distinguishable from reality, but in Colombia, for many, they are an integral, if hidden, part of reality. During my years on the Caribbean coast I heard several "Macondian" stories, such as that of an elderly woman who slept in her coffin to spare her family the trouble of caring for her if she died during the night. However, the most common examples of this belief in the supernatural that I encountered came in the form of superstitions of every kind, from prayers to find lost things to charms to make oneself invisible to one's enemies, along with every kind of ceremony to cure physical ailments.
While it is most likely that García Márquez drew his inspiration from his hometown of Aracataca to shape the fictional town in which many of his stories take place, Macondo could well represent much of rural, poor Colombia of the early twentieth century, or even parts of Latin America with a similar socioeconomic situation and religious background.
One of the main difficulties my parents had to face, being at the same time educated, science-committed teachers and devout practitioners of Catholicism, was probably raising their children with a balance between religious ethics and a critical mind at the same time. It would not have been easy to explain why Santa Claus, or "Papá Noel" as he is known in Latin America, is not real, but the Divine Child Jesus is, or how fortune-tellers are charlatans but priests truly are sages with authority. Additionally, as I mentioned earlier, along with the package of dogmas of the Catholic religion, we Latin Americans also received a hefty baggage of animist beliefs coming from our indigenous ancestors who inhabited the territory of pre-Hispanic America.
In any case, I remember that during my childhood, besides the deep immersion in the Catholic faith that I described in the previous chapter, I grew up witnessing and taking part in numerous superstitious practices that, although supposedly proscribed by the Catholic Church, were in practice ignored or even encouraged by many priests and nuns.
Most of those practices were simple and fun, such as not placing your wallet on the floor so the money doesn't go away, throwing salt over your left shoulder in case you accidentally spill some, keeping a plant of sábila behind the door to drive off bad energies, or wearing amulets like the Catholic scapular or a rosary to protect oneself from evil. However, on one occasion, in the early nineties, my parents—with the blessing of a nun from the family—brought into our home a strange young, thin figure with long, wavy brown hair who seemed taken from one of García Márquez's tales.
I don't remember his name, and that's because we always referred to him as "El Brujo". I think he openly considered himself as such, which was somewhat unusual, since almost always those who perform the practices known as witchcraft prefer to refer to themselves as curanderos or healers, to avoid the negative connotation of the word "brujería".
Those days, my parents—especially my mother—trusted in alternative medicine therapies, above all homeopathy. But they were willing to try more exotic treatments, as long as they were recommended by someone they knew who had benefited from them. It turns out that after hearing the good recommendations about "El Brujo," they contacted him mainly to see my sister, who had had convulsions caused by a fever when she was a little girl, but also to consult him about my recurring episodes of tonsillitis.
Part of the treatment I underwent on the Brujo's recommendation consisted of doing gargles with lemon juice and baking soda, followed by a tortuous physical cleaning of the tonsils that he performed on me himself, using a tongue depressor to which he attached a piece of gauze, fashioning a giant cotton swab. Despite the discomfort of the procedure, the technique seemed to make sense, and the truth is that, whether because of the treatment's effectiveness or because of the contrast between the original pain and the pain generated by the vigorous rubbing, I perceived less throat pain after it was over.
Unfortunately, the improvement was temporary and the pain always returned, and I had to resort to a new throat cleaning or to the dreaded 2.4 million-unit benzathine penicillin (Benzetacil) injections. Because of this, the Brujo recommended having an "operation" done on me with acupuncture to "burn" the tonsils so they would stop bothering me again, since, of course!, the Brujo was also an acupuncturist.
The operation took place in my bedroom, and as preparation my parents had to buy white sheets, white underwear, and hand the Brujo a bottle of ethyl alcohol. I was supposed to keep my eyes closed, but it is not easy to obey when you see needles more than 10 centimeters long on a tray next to the bed. Thanks to keeping my eyes half open, I was able to see that the Brujo, who that day was dressed in black, tied a black cord around his head and performed a kind of magical passes with his back turned toward me and in the direction of the door.
A few seconds later, he turned around and headed toward me, so this time I did close my eyes completely, and after a few minutes I felt him place a band of plasticine around my neck, right below the jaw. One by one, he started driving the needles in, and the truth is I didn't feel any pain, just a strange sensation with each insertion. A few more minutes, and he ended the experience with a sudden yank of the plasticine, which is how he removed the needles.
From that day on, I never had another episode of tonsillitis for the next 25 years. I had been rid of the uncomfortable Benzetacil, but a new curiosity had arisen in me: how would those magical powers that the Brujo had used for my healing actually work?
Around the same time as our treatments with the Brujo, I was taking religion classes during my years at Colegio "Restrepo Millán". The strange thing is that the class, which was traditionally taught by priests, was in this case given by an odd man with dark skin and one eye severely affected by cataracts, who was not only not a priest, but who gradually abandoned the school's official Catholic syllabus to address very strange subjects.
The professor took advantage of the students' natural curiosity about spiritual topics and answered their questions with the official version of the Catholic Church, but he added that "there were secret things that the Vatican wasn't interested in spreading." He also said there was a secret knowledge that, if attained, could guarantee its possessor unlimited access to the mysteries of the Spirit, to parallel universes and past lives.
All that expectation created in a group of sharp-witted adolescents naturally made them practically demand that the teacher reveal what he clearly knew but refused to share. The professor, with a pretense of reluctance, turned most of the classes from then on into sessions of esoterism from the Christian Gnostic Church, founded by Víctor Manuel Gómez, known as Samael Aun Weor, whom I will speak about in detail in a later chapter.
The subjects I learned during these religion-gnosis classes only increased my curiosity about metaphysics and esoterism: astral travel, conjurations, witchcraft, amulets, and other mysteries were explained by the professor with great detail, in a very methodical way. Each topic had a complete synthesis and practical application, as well as a bibliography that generally included Samael himself, but also Ouspensky, Gurdjieff, Blavatsky, Paracelsus, among others.
I got to the point of putting into practice some of the techniques the professor taught us to try to achieve an astral journey, which was the topic that interested me most. One I remember was repeating a prayer indefinitely upon going to bed, until falling asleep still repeating it. The prayer went something like "Take me to the little heaven, Felipe," and it was an invocation to Felipe, the apostle of Christ, who is considered by some Gnostics to have been initiated into esoteric knowledge. His intercession could supposedly help the practitioner leave his body during sleep and travel through time and space with full awareness of it.
Several nights I fell asleep with the prayer on my lips, but without achieving the elusive experience; at least not during that period. Later I will narrate how I finally got to experience what is known as the Out-of-Body Experience or disintegration (desdoblamiento), years later. I also felt curious to attend the talks that the Gnostics offered for free in many spots around the city, but my Catholic formation, already described, and in particular my encounter with Diego and the Catholic charismatic path, kept me away from Gnosticism for the next two and a half decades.
Running parallel to my religious life, there was always a mystical veil that I perceived within Catholicism itself, in the form of visions, prophecies, and missions, but it was also reflected in numerous omens and a marked interest in the supernatural. Throughout my adolescent years I had the occasion of running into witches and sorcerers who always had some message for me or a prophecy about my future. I even became a close friend of a witch famous among politicians and celebrities in Colombia. Through her consulting room passed everything from presidents of the republic to notorious criminals seeking protections against enemies and conjurations for fortune and power.
It was common for people to tell me I had a special aura, that I would become a great leader, or that I had an important mission. It's not that I didn't know it was probable that they would tell the same thing to anyone, but there was something inside me that totally believed those "reveals." Although on very few occasions did I end up handing my money over to these figures, what I did do with frequency was bring them many people I knew so they could avail themselves of their services.
However, the most dire years of my life still lay ahead, before I would penetrate the surface of that mystical world and become a Brujo myself, one to whom others would come seeking some supernatural help.