nathan’s Reviews > The City and Its Uncertain Walls > Status Update

As Jorge Luis Borges put it, there are basically a limited number of stories one writer can seriously relate in his lifetime. All we do—I think it’s fair to say—is take that limited pallet of motifs, change the approach and methods as we go, and rewrite them in all sorts of ways. Truth is not found in fixed stillness, but in ceaseless change and movement.

However—there isn’t just one reality. Reality is something you have to choose by yourself, out of several possible alternatives.

“Did you know that? The two of us are nothing more than someone else’s shadows.”

What is real, and what is not? In this world is there really something like a wall separating reality from the unreal? I think there might be. No, not might—there is one. But it’s an entirely uncertain wall. Depending on circumstances and the person, its texture, its shape transforms. Like some living being.

I was no longer a seventeen-year-old boy. Back then, I had all the time in the world. But not now. The time I have now, and the ways I can use it, have become so limited. What I sought now was the gentle warmth that lay inside, beneath her defensive wall. And the rhythmic beat of the heart that lay pulsing beneath. At this point was I asking for too little? Or too much?

In my forty-some years, was this the true state of affairs of my life until now? What was the starting point, and where did the destination lie—if indeed there was one? The more I thought about it, the less sure I was. At a loss was more the right expression.

“I’m used to waiting,” I’d told her. But was I, really? My breath hung there in the air like a white, hard question mark. Was I used to waiting, or was it that I just wasn’t given an alternative? And what is it I have been waiting for all this time? Did I really grasp what it was I was waiting for? Was I simply patiently waiting for it to become clear what I was waiting for?

“True. But I think that although that way of telling stories might fit the critical criteria of magical realism, for García Márquez himself it’s just ordinary realism. In the world he inhabits the real and the unreal coexist and he just describes those scenes the way he sees them.”

“In [Marquez’s] stories the real and the unreal, the living and the dead, are all mixed together in one,” she said. “Like that’s an entirely ordinary, everyday thing.” “People often call that magical realism,” I said.

My first thought was that we were having a massive earthquake. But it was no earthquake. The shaking was coming from inside me. The shaking inside me was merely projected in the external world. I rested my elbows on the desk, covered my face with my hands, and closed my eyes. I slowly counted to myself, patiently waiting for the illusion to pass.