I have recently been re-reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, only this time in the original Spanish. I find it a particularly appropriate novel here because the mix of the magical and the real in the village of Macondo that Gabriel Garcia Marquez created reflects something of the character of the village that I live in.

Certainly some of the families here have some great stories behind them, and the interactions between them are fantastic. Sometimes five generations live within a hundred yards of each other, and all the village dynasties are all connected by marriage at several points. People go to live in the cities, and sometimes never come back except for a visit, but there is a sense that these long term urbanites are all campo at heart – no matter how long they may live in Santo Domingo, they are still from this small mountain village.

Each family has its characters, its matriarchal grandmother and her husband who spends his days looking after his fighting and cocks and telling stories about how life was in the village when he was a lad. These stories are always interesting, and very frequently completely untrue. There are then the serious, quiet sons, and the heavy drinking street fighting men. The younger women are generally subservient to their husbands, and do as they are told, except the rare individuals who give hope for feminism.

The magical is not necessarily present on the surface, but once this mundane patina is scratched, a belief in the supernatural appears, if nothing that I would scientifically label as magic. I remember having a very technical chat with a friend here about how to tell when his crops were suffering from different diseases, how one could tell when they didn’t have enough phosphorus and so on, only for him and his colleagues to suddenly jump up and start throwing stones at a small bird sitting in a nearby tree. He explained that this was an evil species of bird that came down at night and sucked your brains out as you slept, and thus had to be killed on sight before it killed you.

When you ask people about their religious believes, they will always tell you that they are catholic, and indeed every Friday during Lent there was processions and singing on the road that leads through the village. Pictures of the Holy Family decorate every house, but many have their pictures of their particular saints in the back room. People take care of these little shrines, decorating them with flowers and various bits of paraphernalia bought at shops that cater for these. This is of course Santeria, part of a spectrum of syncretised African, native Caribbean and Roman Catholic beliefs that includes Dominican and Haitian vodou.

I haven’t been able to see any of the more extreme bits of magic, such as possessions and so on, but I do know that there is a witch living near by. When chatting to a friend, her sister walked past, talking to herself. I was informed that she was rather mad, and that I should make sure that I watch out for her, but that she herself was not the witch. My friend informed me that her sister’s husband had an accident whilst trying to illegally hook his house up to the mains electricity supply. As a result he was crippled, and so to stop his wife running off with another man who was better able to service her needs, he visited the witch who put a curse on her to send her mad, and therefore make sure that no man would run off with her.

If anyone has any tasks for the witch to perform, let me know by email and I’ll see what I can do.