My 26 Exchange, writes Tom Lynham, is with the Colombian writer Rubén Darío Flórez Arcila. He has composed a poem entitled AMAZONAS, EL CIELO Y LA TIERRA especially for the event. I don’t know anything about him and do not speak Spanish. I have a vague idea where Colombia is and have heard all the grizzly stereotypes, but know nothing about the heart and soul of the country. Feel I have to fence this project to make it manageable. Decide not to contact Rubén – his piece should stand on its own. Decide not to mug up on Colombia’s history. Decide not to even attempt a crude familiarization using a Spanish dictionary or internet translation site, but to explore his work through the eyes and ears and mouths of others. I will find Colombians living in London, discover what the poem means to them, and interpret it through their lives.
Middle of March, armed with a batch of email addresses I draft and send carefully crafted flyers introducing myself, International PEN, Free the Word, 26 Exchanges and explaining the point of the exercise. My day-job writing for design consultancies, businesses and institutions is dictated by life-and-death deadlines, and communications zing back and forth with a speed that never ceases to amaze me. Likewise, I am expecting enthusiastic Colombians to leap through the screen of my laptop, but no one shows up. I chase possibilities via other routes; searching on-line for clues that might yield a telephone number or Facebook reference. I email gentle nudges. Eventually a few responses limp in but they all have complications that get me nowhere. Free the Word is imminent and I have not met anyone. The more I do the less it seems to happen.
I trudge down to the Elephant & Castle; three floors of derelict retail units marooned by a moonscaped roundabout. It’s a flat grey mizzling Sunday afternoon and I wish for a carnival of Latin Americans meeting and greeting, but the only people present are urban fugitives sheltering from life. The crumbling complex has all the subversive ambiguity of a Paul Rego painting. The deli counter is shut, the cafeteria chairs and tables stacked, and La Bodeguita restaurant is spreckled with a few lonesome eaters.
I find myself loitering in Foyles. One Hundred Years of Solitude floats out from a shelf and wags its finger at me. I’ve tried to read this book before but struggled. I’ve devoured Gunter Grass and Vladimir Nabokov (Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s comrades-in-words) so maybe it’s time to try again. I scan the blurb and flick through the chapters: Colombian writer. Labyrinthine plot. Skeins of metaphor. Comic invention. Colliding motives. Magical realism. Byzantine genealogy. I buy it and begin reading on the Central Line back to Liverpool Street. Over the next few days the book slowly explodes inside me: a New World of mountains, swamps, stormy rivers and endless rainy seasons, plague and despair, dysfunctional dynasties, omens and portents, the ghosts of Sir Francis Drake’s dogs, priests who levitate after drinking hot chocolate; a wild girl who eats earth and flakes of whitewash, catastrophic ambitions, parrots reciting Italian arias, criss-crossing genders, gallons of bodily fluids, perpetual motion machines, marauding bands of gypsies wielding dazzling technologies, viral insomnia - and all this in a town where nobody dies. My impasse is melted by miracles of the imagination. And something is moving the ether too. The floodgates open and Colombians from all over London start inviting me to dance.
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