Three years ago, Cartagena found me. Much to my surprise, it  was not the Cartagena of my childhood and “Romancing the Stone” frame of reference. I expected to find the same car-chases and hand-biting crocodiles that Jack Colton and Joan Wilder encountered when I arrived late one humid night in November, but all that met me was drizzling rain and potholes large enough to swallow one of those crocodiles as the taxi cab careened down the blackened highway.

When I awoke the following morning to explore, those preconceptions faded as the imposing fortresses that guarded the pastel-colored haciendas and hushed plazas appeared. It was the stuff of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s dreams, and mine since reading his books a lifetime before in my small-town land-locked days of adolescence. Cartagena could not be real, I told myself as I climbed the crumbling stones of its fortress.

At first I thought he was a statue, standing on top the rock wall, keeping guard like a 16th century centurion watching for pirates. But as I got closer, the young man pulled out a handkerchief, blowing his nose before sitting down on the wall’s ledge. He stopped me in my tracks and I stood motionless, inexplicably overly cautious and concerned I would disturb him if I took another step. An eternity passed as I leaned against the cool stone, watching him as he watched the blues and greens of the Caribbean Sea. I wish I knew what he was thinking. Was he solving a personal problem in his head? Was he meditating, comforted by the distant crash of the waves that would have carried us to Africa if we had let it? Or was he, like I, so transfixed with the sea’s infinity that nothing else mattered? I will never know what the silent young man was thinking.

There is a perfect sentence from Marquez’s story “Love in the Time of Cholera” that says “It was a lone voice in the middle of the ocean, but it was heard at great depth and great distance.” Perhaps the young man could hear it as he contemplated that sea’s infinity. Maybe next time I will hear it, too.