Like stepping through the looking glass the first time, I picked up a copy of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.
In a cold flat in Wellington where the lowering clouds drifted in through open windows, I read his work of magic realism more as an exercise in magic than realism and was enchanted nonetheless. Until I got to South America. Buenos Aires - that bruised beauty who swears like a lucked-out whore all the while working you over with her effortless grace in a bid to get you to stay.
Here angel-faced children surfaced from stormwater pipes to swap saint cards for ear-rings in order to eat.
Military dictators raised the children of women they'd tortured and killed, accosted by broken-hearted grandmothers in the local pizzeria and beaten half to death while onlookers picked up their orders and carried on. Justice was random and rare - and best left alone when finally delivered.
A place where I was forbidden to criticise the haphazard charity legacy of Eva Peron in front of my mother-in-law. Not because of any philosophical differences on politics but because Evita had once sent her mother an entire household in a cargo train when she was left a homeless widow with six children after a fire. An 8-year-old doesn't forget the reality of that kind of magic or kindness. I learned that the impossible, in South America, quite frequently happens but it takes the art of seeing to notice. This was a place where the entire spectrum of the left wing; the thinkers and doubters - the singers and poets - were rounded up and shot or drugged and dropped from helicopters into the silver river.
