She walked, without looking up, past a man selling posters, past the beggars near an old church. And, glancing at the posters, examining the beggars, I lost her. I paused, looked aside, and then she was gone. So I contented myself with the posters. They were of Bolivar, Christ and Che Guevara; but they were hard to tell apart. They seemed like versions of the same person: the same sorrowing eyes, the same mulish good looks and heroic posture. The political posters in Barranquilla had been similarly emblematic-the right-wing candidates had looked fat and complacent, while those of the left resembled a composite of this patriot, saviour and revolutionary. The other posters were of blonde nudes, Jane Fonda, Joseph Stalin (bearing a warning about 'Yankys'), Marlon Brando and Donald Duck. The one I bought was the best of the bunch. It showed Christ on the cross, but he had managed to pull his hand away from one nail, and still hanging crucified, but with his free arm around the shoulder of a praying guerilla fighter, Christ was saying, 'I also was persecuted, my determined guerrilla.'
The beggars were everywhere, but they tended to linger near the churches and holy places, much as in Calcutta, to catch people when they are conscience-stricken. They were blind, lame, palsied; children, women, old men, infants - naked in the cold - being dangled on the knees of cringing hags. Here were two sisters, one in an orange crate with a scribbled sign saying she is paralyzed (And this is my sister . . .). Some are not begging, but merely camped out on a traffic island in the middle of the city, boiling grey liquid in tin cans; or holed up next to a wall, or living (like the young boy I saw every day I was in Bogotá) in the rubble of deserted buildings. The signs the importuning beggars carry are pathetically blunt: I am a leper and / am sick and We are orphans, and some carry placards with potted histories of bad luck and disease. The ones who do tricks draw crowds - the Indian contortionists, the blind musicians.
See the blind beggar dance, the cripple sing,
The sot a hero, lunatic a king.
To remark on the numbers of beggars is perhaps to make an observation of no great insight, like saying it is a continent of soldiers and shoeshine boys. One could even say that, in Colombia as elsewhere, it takes a degree of organization to beg. But why, I wondered, were so many of them children? Not sick or lame, and not carrying signs, they lived among the ruined buildings and ran in packs through the streets. They were lively, but they lived like rats. I asked several Colombians about them, and the Colombians were surprised by the ignorance of my question. They were gamins, they said - the word is the same in Spanish and English; and I ought to be careful of them, for most were pickpockets and sneak-thieves. It does not occur to the wealthy Colombian that these urchins are anything but vermin, and why house them or feed them when it is so much cheaper to put up a high fence around the house to keep them out?
I spent my days in Bogotá church-going (elegant interiors with a touch of voodoo: ladies jostle in line to collect pints of holy water; No Jugs, Only Bottles reads the sign), and climbing the hills, and admiring the old American cars - here a Nash, there a Studebaker - until I began to lust after one myself and regret that my father had sold his 1938 Pontiac. It struck me that the next great craze in America will be these indestructible cars of the 40's and 50's, restored to perfect condition. And when I grew tired of suspicious-looking youths who approached me ('Ay, meester, joo from New Jork?'), and depressed by the beggars and gamins, I turned to Boswell for cheer. It was in Bogotá, one grey afternoon that I read the following passage: 'Where a great proportion of the people are suffered to languish in helpless misery, that country must be ill-policed and wretchedly governed: a decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization. - Gentlemen of education, he observed, were pretty much the same in all countries; the condition of the lower orders, the poor especially, was the true mark of national discrimination.'
14
THE EXPRESO CALIMA
There is a very good reason for the Bogotá railway to end at the town of Ibagué. After Ibagué there is such a precipitous pass that, to imagine it, you would have to picture the Grand Canyon covered with greenery - deep green gorges and green peaks and ledges and cliffs. The genius for building railways through such places disappeared around the turn of the century. Not long ago, the Colombians extended the railway from Girardot to Ibagué, but having got that far they were flummoxed by the Quindio Pass. There are impassable rapids in it, and high mountains around it; the walls of the gorge are vertical. It is remarkable that a road exists, but it is not much of a road. It takes six hours to go the 65 miles from Ibagué to Armenia, where the train resumes, heading south to Cali and Popayán; from there, it is a short hop to Ecuador.
Descending the cordillera from Bogotá, I felt I had recovered my health. My head cleared at this lower altitude, the trench between two mountain ranges. The hills were fine-textured, like great soft piles of green sand, poured on the plain beside the tracks. Telegraph lines ran by the railway, and the district was so humid that small plants had taken root on the slack wires. They grew in the air like clusters of orchids, their blossoms and leaves dangling.
At Girardot the train stopped. Everyone got out. I stayed in my seat reading Boswell.
'We have arrived,' said the conductor. He was on the platform; he spoke to me through the window.
'I have not arrived,' I said. 'I am going to Ibagué.'
'You will have to take the bus. This train does not go there.'
They did not tell me that in Bogotá.'
'What do they know in Bogotá? Ha!'
Cursing, I walked to the bus station. The Ibagué bus had already left, but there was another bus to Armenia leaving in a few hours. That would take me through the Quindio Pass; a night in Armenia, then chug-chug to Cali. I bought my ticket and went to have lunch. I had left Bogotá too early to have breakfast, so I was ravenously hungry.
The restaurant was small and dirty. I asked to see the menu. There was no menu. I asked the waitress what there was to eat.
'Dish of the day,' she said. Today it is beans Antioch-style.'
Beans Antioch-style: it did not sound bad. We were in the province of Antioquia. Perhaps this was a local delicacy? But names can be so misleading. They could call this dish anything they pleased, but I knew hog-jowls when I saw them. Flies buzzed around me, around the fatty maw in my plate. I ate the beans and a slice of bread and handed it back.
Girardot lies on the upper reaches of the Magdalena River, but here the river is too shallow to be navigable by anything larger than a canoe. And the bridge over it was being painted. The bus became stationary in traffic and for an hour and a half it did not move. This meant a late arrival in Armenia and, what was much worse, a dangerous night-time ride along the hairpin curves of the Quindio Pass. The Colombians are good-tempered people. They are used to waiting for buses that are late, used to riding buses and trains that do not arrive. They do not complain; they rarely speak. I complained, but got no response. So I read about Doctor Johnson. 'He used frequently to observe, that there was more to be endured than enjoyed, in the general condition of human life. . . For his part, he said, he never passed that week in his life which he would wish to repeat, were an angel to make the proposal to him.' And I thought: A week ago I was in Barranquilla.
I looked up. Our bus had not moved: that same sign advertising beer; the child still in the doorway with his tray of fried cakes; the piles of broken brick; and on the road the line of trucks and buses.
'This is terrible,' I said.
The man next to me smiled.
We were nowhere. We had come from nowhere. Ibagué, Armenia, Cali: they were names on the map, no more than that.