One thing I learned about myself a long time ago is that I’m not really happy unless I’m reading a book. That’s not to say I have to be reading at every moment, I just like to have a book pendiente, as they say in Spanish, to be in the middle of a book, to have it waiting for me. This was part of my general annoyance with training, I think. My ability to focus seemed to be off at all times, so it took me a long time to decide what book I wanted to try and read. Because I was annoyed at not having Spanish class, I decided I should probably read a Spanish book to kind of make up the difference, and the one book in Spanish I brought with me was a copy of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.

The thing is, it’s often hard to motivate myself to read in Spanish because it annoys me that I’m so much slower than in English. Reading in Spanish is kind of like exercise for many of us; we keep thinking it would be a good idea, but sometimes we just don’t let ourselves get around to it. Though we find when we do get out there and do something we actually feel really good for having done it. That’s exactly what it’s like for me anyway. I begin reading, underlining all the words I don’t know. I alternate how I look up the words, depending on my mood, whether I look them up one at a time, or one paragraph at a time, or two pages, and sometimes I just want to read without bothering to look anything up. The point is to make it through and understand what just happened. I think this sometimes makes your reading revelations a little more poignant, a little more pronounced because I still feel like I’m deciphering some code in order to get the message.

So when I started this book and was reading, almost simultaneously from the book as well as the dictionary I had to laugh remembering when I was sitting in the Fanjoy’s living room reading a book, across from Dick who was also reading, and he looked up a bit entertained, but kind of confused and asked me why I was reading two books at once. Hah. I then explained that one was the book, and one was the dictionary. He said, “Oh, good. I thought maybe that was just something they taught you to do at that school of yours.”

Here I was, reading two books at once again, and not focusing very well on anything. There was a lot going, a lot of words I didn’t know. Jose Arcadia Buendia lived in and isolated village on the river bank, and he kept meeting up with this gypsy who’d bring him interesting little contraptions and talk about new ideas with him. The gypsy had traveled all over the world and had all sorts of stories. I didn’t know the words for the instruments, like a compass, or the gypsies who accompanied him, the words for acrobats and jugglers. I did understand that Buendia kept studying all of these things, he spent a year in his laboratory before emerging one night for dinner and declaring that the world was round. His wife told him if he was going to go crazy he should not take the children with him. But he was convinced he was in the right. He had all these thoughts turning over and over in his head, things the gypsy had brought up, and he said to his wife:

“En el mundo estan occurriendo cosas increibles…Ahi mismo, al otro lado del rio, hay toda clase de aparatos magicos, mientras nosotros seguimos viviendo como los burros.”

My translation: ” There are incredible things happening in the world…Right over there, on the other side of the river, there are all kinds of magical aparati, while we continue living like donkies.”

All of a sudden I felt so inspired. We’re the gypsies from the other side of the river.