Nickie Muir: In hands of fallen angels

Nickie Muir

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.

Garcia's enchanted madness made absolute concrete sense here. He was a writer in a place where to be outspoken was potentially life threatening and yet he never ceased to write exactly what he thought in his journalism and fiction.

He answered to no paymaster and suffered most of his adult life financially for it.

It's impossible to read Marquez and not walk hand-in-hand with love and fear.

A master of the joy in a throw-away line and yet, a penitent on a pilgrimage of grief and nostalgia. He could as Jim Flynn, author of the Torchlight List of books too good to miss, "convince you that what Anglo-Saxons call romantic love pales in comparison to the Latins ... his memories of the artistic scene of Bogota - render London and New York rather tame".

A rank individual, he knew that: "Humanity, like armies in the field, advances at the speed of the slowest." An adept juggler of eros and agape. And if by reading Love in the Time of Cholera you have not dedicated yourself to being a life-long supplicant to the church of love in all its forms, there is something seriously wrong with you. Adios maestro. May fallen angels guide you. There always have been men born with pig's tails and others guided by floating clouds of butterflies.