2007 Colombia
Tired of Buenos Aires and wanted to go deeper into a more vital South America, I decided to return, 20 years on, to Colombia. It would turn out to be more disconcerting than enriching; its energy clashed with my own and I could never belong there, but it was experience gained. You live and learn (then you die and you forget it all).
While I was in Cartagena de las Indias, the Hay Festival came to town and I went to cover it for the Argentinian cultural magazine I was working for. The magazine folded before I could send the material and it’s a dull load of wordage, but I might as well reproduce the articles here: Hay Festival 2008.
I also took some notes during my stay.
While I was in Cartagena de las Indias, the Hay Festival came to town and I went to cover it for the Argentinian cultural magazine I was working for. The magazine folded before I could send the material and it’s a dull load of wordage, but I might as well reproduce the articles here: Hay Festival 2008.
I also took some notes during my stay.
Medellín, November 2007
There was a get-together of people from Sinse, Fabio’s town, at a club down on Calle 80. The band was backed up against the wall by people dancing right up against them. When the trombonist stood on a chair to give his instrument some reach, a few couples rose higher still and danced on tables. The largesse of the women, all of whom shook their booty, would have done Botero proud. One tank of a woman in red aimed herself at people and shunted them across the dance floor. Another in black and white found hilarity in thrusting her tits and pelvis into available and unavailable men. I caught Fabio, early on, making an obscene suggestion with finger and thumb between his legs to one of his cousins, suggesting me. Rum and more rum. The waiters simply brought round ice for it. Two pretty girls and Gloria in a short skirt. A smiling Nordic blonde and a black musician. A lot of hats. More shoving than dancing and no shortage of either. Costeña folk know how to get on down.
Nov 18th
At the Vinacuré, we are greeted at the foot of the steps by a white-gloved footman, at the top by honking geese, and inside by a cornucopia of tack, imagery mixing Catholic Madonnas with Superman, Batman & Robin and Wonderwoman; the tin man and Dorothy from Oz flanking Pablo Escobar; rotating resin figures of bare-arsed circus performers posed on trapezes beneath giant leaves, entire and skeletal; a map of the London Underground, and almost every other symbol of my time on this earth in plastic form. On the dance floor, a leather-clad, bridal transsexual dances superbly to “Man! I feel like a woman,” and the old girl who is our host serves us vodka and orange with lots of ice before jiving with us to salsa and electronica. Jason and Paula winningly in love and lust with each other, Martin and Katia are in the swing of it and lovelorn Daniel in a space of hopeless hope, eyeing the few girls. His favourite hobby is punishing a piece of glutinous red plastic that adheres to flat surfaces. He claims to be practicing drumming, but it is just hammering. He is going to make mega-dollars exporting copper sulphate. Apparently, it is used for everything. It is, he says, a beautiful blue at open-mine sites.
Nov 20th
Violence is still very present in Medellín in the figures of the unpunished killers of Héctor Abad and thousands of others, also in the absence of shock at today’s news that 18 women (mostly prostitutes) have been murdered in the last two weeks.
The loved father of El olvido que seremos was killed a few months before I arrived in Bogotá from London in 1987, when Medellín’s reputation as stronghold of the drugs trade was notorious and it was about to become murder capital of the world. I imagined a small town with dirt roads and guys with pot bellies standing by expensive jeeps, wearing dark glasses and short-sleeved shirts over guns. But the violence was specifically political, in the sense that a monied class funded and directed it: business as a faceless, heartless force. Back then, too, no doubt the city had its pride and its charm. These days, if the city is safe, it is not because the gangs were defeated, but because one of them won and imposed the order of its own rule. In the evening, when a motorcycle passes a café terrace, people no longer dive under the tables.
December 7th
I gave the policeman at the entrance to the Immigration Security Department my cell phone (they always like to have something to hold on to). He asked, rather hopefully, if I didn’t have anything else on me to hand in: “Video camera? Weapons?”
There was a get-together of people from Sinse, Fabio’s town, at a club down on Calle 80. The band was backed up against the wall by people dancing right up against them. When the trombonist stood on a chair to give his instrument some reach, a few couples rose higher still and danced on tables. The largesse of the women, all of whom shook their booty, would have done Botero proud. One tank of a woman in red aimed herself at people and shunted them across the dance floor. Another in black and white found hilarity in thrusting her tits and pelvis into available and unavailable men. I caught Fabio, early on, making an obscene suggestion with finger and thumb between his legs to one of his cousins, suggesting me. Rum and more rum. The waiters simply brought round ice for it. Two pretty girls and Gloria in a short skirt. A smiling Nordic blonde and a black musician. A lot of hats. More shoving than dancing and no shortage of either. Costeña folk know how to get on down.
Nov 18th
At the Vinacuré, we are greeted at the foot of the steps by a white-gloved footman, at the top by honking geese, and inside by a cornucopia of tack, imagery mixing Catholic Madonnas with Superman, Batman & Robin and Wonderwoman; the tin man and Dorothy from Oz flanking Pablo Escobar; rotating resin figures of bare-arsed circus performers posed on trapezes beneath giant leaves, entire and skeletal; a map of the London Underground, and almost every other symbol of my time on this earth in plastic form. On the dance floor, a leather-clad, bridal transsexual dances superbly to “Man! I feel like a woman,” and the old girl who is our host serves us vodka and orange with lots of ice before jiving with us to salsa and electronica. Jason and Paula winningly in love and lust with each other, Martin and Katia are in the swing of it and lovelorn Daniel in a space of hopeless hope, eyeing the few girls. His favourite hobby is punishing a piece of glutinous red plastic that adheres to flat surfaces. He claims to be practicing drumming, but it is just hammering. He is going to make mega-dollars exporting copper sulphate. Apparently, it is used for everything. It is, he says, a beautiful blue at open-mine sites.
Nov 20th
Violence is still very present in Medellín in the figures of the unpunished killers of Héctor Abad and thousands of others, also in the absence of shock at today’s news that 18 women (mostly prostitutes) have been murdered in the last two weeks.
The loved father of El olvido que seremos was killed a few months before I arrived in Bogotá from London in 1987, when Medellín’s reputation as stronghold of the drugs trade was notorious and it was about to become murder capital of the world. I imagined a small town with dirt roads and guys with pot bellies standing by expensive jeeps, wearing dark glasses and short-sleeved shirts over guns. But the violence was specifically political, in the sense that a monied class funded and directed it: business as a faceless, heartless force. Back then, too, no doubt the city had its pride and its charm. These days, if the city is safe, it is not because the gangs were defeated, but because one of them won and imposed the order of its own rule. In the evening, when a motorcycle passes a café terrace, people no longer dive under the tables.
December 7th
I gave the policeman at the entrance to the Immigration Security Department my cell phone (they always like to have something to hold on to). He asked, rather hopefully, if I didn’t have anything else on me to hand in: “Video camera? Weapons?”
Cartagena de las Indias
David said that the house with the grand salamander on the door belongs to the guy who owns Aguila beer and that he has 30 security and a lot of enemies. We sat on yellow plastic stools, hunkered up next to the wrong kind of men. They had little zip-up shoulder bags and gun nozzles sticking out under their white sleeveless shirts. On the way back from picking up my salary at Western Union, I wanted to call in at Hotel Holiday, which does the best book swaps. The one I had, Andrew Klavan’s terrific True Crime, was simply too good to destine to dusty oblivion at the reception desk, so I had to get hold of another swap: a patsy. At one of the book stalls by the park, I asked the guy for the cheapest he had in English. This one, he said, three thou. No, I told him, something for one thou, one that you can’t shift, any old thing. He poked around for a bit, thought about it and said, well, this one—handing me the same one back again. Which was a judicious pick on his part, it being by Shirley Maclaine and unsellable. I came out trumps at Hotel Holiday with a bulky tome of Personal Essays by authors from Seneca and Kenko through Charles Lamb, R.L. Stevenson, Chesterton to North American writers such as Thoreau, James Baldwin, & E.B. White. |
The barrio has a guy who limps around the streets all day making noises that are mostly unintelligible, but occasionally rise to fervent insults hurled at the neighbours by way of greeting. Back when I was a kid, he would have been a spastic, but we don’t say that any more.
At my Getsémani hotel, I am bitten on the thumb in by a rat. I was fast asleep and it had gotten in under the door. I woke in pain, whipped my hand and flung the varmint across the room.
Prices are random, everything’s lackadaisically loose, people less than reliable, and I kind of like that about the place. It’s appropriate. Carts of lemons and plantains and papaya and uchuva and aguacate pushed all over the shop. Life is closer to music than words, so words should move and dance and play. The kind of place you will only ever get anything done by not trying to.
At my Getsémani hotel, I am bitten on the thumb in by a rat. I was fast asleep and it had gotten in under the door. I woke in pain, whipped my hand and flung the varmint across the room.
Prices are random, everything’s lackadaisically loose, people less than reliable, and I kind of like that about the place. It’s appropriate. Carts of lemons and plantains and papaya and uchuva and aguacate pushed all over the shop. Life is closer to music than words, so words should move and dance and play. The kind of place you will only ever get anything done by not trying to.
The singing barrows. Two men push barrows of bricks along the street, the weight making the wheels whine fabulously loudly at awful, wavering, high-pitched notes. It is like a drawn-out manual version of the digital miscellany that an internet dial-up produces.
The orange-clad street sweeper picked up a coin and crossed himself before dropping it in his pocket. It was at just about the same spot that, yesterday, an erect man in his thirties, walking alongside me, stooped down to pluck a small banknote from the middle of the street and continued without breaking stride.
“Premio,” I said to him, arriving at my hotel.
“I saw it,” he said simply.
Said it before time and place progressed and then were gone, and so was he.
Against all odds, the Buenos Aires translating job is still going. Never have I been treated so well by by an employer. It is a luxury to be able to work from Cartagena the hours that I want, the fan going, children playing in the streets, vendors crying their wares as they push by with carts of mandarins, lemons, yucca, onions, papaya, avocados, pineapples, fish and melons, and it pays almost enough to get by on. The hotel is two houses from the waterfront and the roof terrace looks over the old wall and the lagoon to San Felipe castle and the Convent on the Popa beyond.
The orange-clad street sweeper picked up a coin and crossed himself before dropping it in his pocket. It was at just about the same spot that, yesterday, an erect man in his thirties, walking alongside me, stooped down to pluck a small banknote from the middle of the street and continued without breaking stride.
“Premio,” I said to him, arriving at my hotel.
“I saw it,” he said simply.
Said it before time and place progressed and then were gone, and so was he.
Against all odds, the Buenos Aires translating job is still going. Never have I been treated so well by by an employer. It is a luxury to be able to work from Cartagena the hours that I want, the fan going, children playing in the streets, vendors crying their wares as they push by with carts of mandarins, lemons, yucca, onions, papaya, avocados, pineapples, fish and melons, and it pays almost enough to get by on. The hotel is two houses from the waterfront and the roof terrace looks over the old wall and the lagoon to San Felipe castle and the Convent on the Popa beyond.
The Argentinian is poor and obsessive. The Colombian is poor and sociable. The Argentinians are Borges, disappearing down tortuous blind alleys of thought. They claim that their undertaking is getting them somewhere, but this is the lie at the core of their psyche. They do not want a cure. In fact, they take a sick, secret delight in knowing that the analysis is never-ending. Deeply conflicted, they believe that they know everything. The obsessing psyche projects the conviction that it is right, thereby producing the twin characteristics of the porteño's personality that make him so unappealing and disliked: stewing resentment and overweening arrogance. It would never occur to a Colombian to solve matters using just intellect. Given opportunity—decent living conditions, education, jobs—they are a healthy people. The Argentinians think that life itself is in need of solving with their minds.
At 75, Henry is a man on the make still. Wizened, yet not so wise. The little fella thought he could scam me to part with 60 bucks for a guide’s badge. He had the shipping schedule and Asamblea de Dios church handouts which included, inexplicably, among the prayers, the picture of a ship, the number of its passengers and crew, arrival date & time. Henry was looking for a couple of girls for a pock-marked Canadian. Twenty, twenty-one, he told another guide in the park. Thin. I got one, the guy said.
The music I could hear from afar came from a picót, says María. You pay to get in, women one price, men another. That particular picót is the best in Cartagena. Champeta. Better you didn’t go because there are gente mala. She said there’s also telapia, African music. I thought it was a type of fish.
At 75, Henry is a man on the make still. Wizened, yet not so wise. The little fella thought he could scam me to part with 60 bucks for a guide’s badge. He had the shipping schedule and Asamblea de Dios church handouts which included, inexplicably, among the prayers, the picture of a ship, the number of its passengers and crew, arrival date & time. Henry was looking for a couple of girls for a pock-marked Canadian. Twenty, twenty-one, he told another guide in the park. Thin. I got one, the guy said.
The music I could hear from afar came from a picót, says María. You pay to get in, women one price, men another. That particular picót is the best in Cartagena. Champeta. Better you didn’t go because there are gente mala. She said there’s also telapia, African music. I thought it was a type of fish.
|
Parque Tayrona
Mosquitos: “They come to feed us! They come, they come!”
The bus was old, but the collector was reasonable. He didn’t come round asking for fares until after a few kilometres, when it seemed that the thing had a decent chance of getting there.
Mosquitos: “They come to feed us! They come, they come!”
The bus was old, but the collector was reasonable. He didn’t come round asking for fares until after a few kilometres, when it seemed that the thing had a decent chance of getting there.
A giant egg-shaped rock on the seafront. An egg such as that from which the world was hatched. A huge fig that might burst and scatter its red ripe flesh and seeds on sand and sea. A dark bird perched on the tip of its teat.
A squadron of pelicans flies over and waves roar on the reef like a airplane on the tarmac. Where I am camped, by the sea, under a loquat, a Norwegian asserts that lemmings explode when frightened. What a tremendous fabrication! |
Trails through the palms are crossed by leaf-cutter ants bearing a variety parade of watermelon slices and what look like delta wings and an array of parasols. I pick a banana for the first time, so small and unripe that it smells of cucumber. Bats flit by. There is a barely moving stream. The sound of a squirrel sawing on a coconut.
Rotting coconuts are littered around like skulls from a massacre. New growth sprouts from them and banana stalks shoot up from suckers like bamboo. A bird makes a call like air blown through a conch. |
The uphill trek to Pueblito begins at a threshold of great stones that one must crouch under. After which, it is upwards. Up steep, dry or humid creeks. Roots and hollows, leaves and lianas, tumbled rocks and boulders that water has rounded. The next step is the important one. From way up on the ridge, a view of the sea. Signs tell you: 40% there, 60% there. Ferns and creepers, a pair of birds with rich red-and-blue backs. A crackle of falling leaves under the canopy. A one-hundred-ton boulder.
The people would come down to the shore to make a payment to mother earth. Rituals that ensured that the world was kept in balance. Immediately before the village stands a tree. It is very old, very high and undeviatingly vertical. It takes twelve steps to walk around it. The path then levels out and there are what look like threshing circles, but they were formerly the sites of huts, of which there are now few. Don Manuel tells me I may go to the caves. I find a grotto and sit on a stone, letting the pen drop from my grasp and laying my spectacles on the ground. |
What comes to my mind is acceptance, and the learning of it: to accept the given. I didn’t accept the offer of an ice cream when I was in eight or nine and in hospital with a broken leg.
You agreed to accept this life: receive it and take it into your heart. I would not receive lest I was asked of (I think I know well enough now where that came from). I asked Manuel if they still performed the rituals. In Sierra Nevada, he said. And here? I pressed him. In the caves? Yes. To restore balance? He nodded almost imperceptibly. What if the rituals weren’t celebrated? He made no reply (dumb foreigner!). They are necessary. Yes, the keeper of the place said. |
On the way up and on the way down, I am accompanied and guided by butterflies, red-and-black, also tiny whites and, once, a gorgeous big blue. If in Nepal it was Gropius the dog, faithful and cheerful, here it is butterflies, brief and beautiful. Even after bidding me farewell, when I took a wrong turn at the threshold, they came to put me right. I am received with a lizard greeting among the fallen coconuts.
Jamis explained to me how here people will say, “The news was bad today, nothing happened.” Or: “Oh, the news was really good, there was an attack here and a big accident and a disaster there and so many people were killed…”. By the India Catalina, the video played of a man being gored to death by a bull, everybody enjoying the show.
A friend of hers in a house on the edge of Santa Marta had a newborn baby. It cried because she had no milk to give it. In the morning her tits were always dry. Her husband, stayed awake one night and saw a snake come through the window, fasten itself on her nipples and drink her milk, leaving the tip of its tail in the baby’s mouth to keep it quiet. They caught the snake and burned it, so that others would not follow it.
People believe that whirlpools are caused by animals swirling around in the river. A cousin of hers was drowned when his boat capsized in such a whirlpool, thought to have been made by a boa.
A cousin of hers, on her 15th birthday, was getting ready for the all-important party celebrated on that day, when she was struck by a falling coconut and knocked out cold. She revived enough to get groggily through the party.
Cartagena de las Indias, March 21st, Good Friday
A woman wafts incense around her house and a neighbour’s, purifying.
“Nazareno, paséate,” they sing as a Christ figure is paraded in the back of a pick-up, and a lone trumpeter lends his notes to the procession. A truck goes by piled high with speakers for a fiesta somewhere.
There’s a tiny, almost transparent lizard that nips up to the table every afternoon around five o’clock.
They wouldn’t give Juan Pablo the merca without the cash. Shit, I wouldn’t give it him either, gangly strung-out individual with black plastic glasses, can’t stand still on a street corner. When I go back just now to get a beer (stuff the Habana and their cover charge, even if it is only 2½ bucks), I had a hard job persuading the barmaid not to press another gram on me: I really did want a beer. That street corner marks an invisible line where Getsemaní splits between the regular and other limits.
Jamis explained to me how here people will say, “The news was bad today, nothing happened.” Or: “Oh, the news was really good, there was an attack here and a big accident and a disaster there and so many people were killed…”. By the India Catalina, the video played of a man being gored to death by a bull, everybody enjoying the show.
A friend of hers in a house on the edge of Santa Marta had a newborn baby. It cried because she had no milk to give it. In the morning her tits were always dry. Her husband, stayed awake one night and saw a snake come through the window, fasten itself on her nipples and drink her milk, leaving the tip of its tail in the baby’s mouth to keep it quiet. They caught the snake and burned it, so that others would not follow it.
People believe that whirlpools are caused by animals swirling around in the river. A cousin of hers was drowned when his boat capsized in such a whirlpool, thought to have been made by a boa.
A cousin of hers, on her 15th birthday, was getting ready for the all-important party celebrated on that day, when she was struck by a falling coconut and knocked out cold. She revived enough to get groggily through the party.
Cartagena de las Indias, March 21st, Good Friday
A woman wafts incense around her house and a neighbour’s, purifying.
“Nazareno, paséate,” they sing as a Christ figure is paraded in the back of a pick-up, and a lone trumpeter lends his notes to the procession. A truck goes by piled high with speakers for a fiesta somewhere.
There’s a tiny, almost transparent lizard that nips up to the table every afternoon around five o’clock.
They wouldn’t give Juan Pablo the merca without the cash. Shit, I wouldn’t give it him either, gangly strung-out individual with black plastic glasses, can’t stand still on a street corner. When I go back just now to get a beer (stuff the Habana and their cover charge, even if it is only 2½ bucks), I had a hard job persuading the barmaid not to press another gram on me: I really did want a beer. That street corner marks an invisible line where Getsemaní splits between the regular and other limits.
April 16th
Hotel Pedregal has a new night watchman. Roque seems, on first impression at least, to have grasped the principle of door-opening, which Johnny considered to be beneath his station. Which kind of matters when the entrance door is kept locked. Roque doesn’t bother with the computer because there’s footie on the telly. Kelly said whatever you say to him goes in one ear and out the other. I think he may be perfect. |
If the heat in Cartagena is a soup, yet a night breeze off the ocean can make it bearable. Mompox, for all its period charm and friendliness, is humid and bug-ridden. San Gil has a burning sun. San Gil has dry water. San Gil has civil manners and its star is the beauty of its women.
In San Gil I finished Iain Banks’ “Feersum enjinn.” I enjoyed how it develops the notion of substitute constructs, going beyond what I had envisaged for a story about dictator ruling from beyond the grave in a game world, to have them somehow sentient and autonomously conscious. Then there's Bascule and his fond friendship for Ergates the ant, and Banks’ championing the charm and humour of phonemic spelling. When he capriciously shoves in “# browns” at the end, I imagine him replying to the editor’s objections: I know but, hey, humour me. I think I’d have gone for “med a rite #ovit.”
Two squashed rides in taxis from Mompos back to Cartagena. On the chalupa ride up the Magdalena, a small boy used me as one more piece of adult furniture to lean on: natural, adorable trust. I didn’t want it to end. All too soon we were off-loaded amongst the hustlers of Mangangue. |
Experimental noises based loosely on words is one of Getsemani’s chief pastimes. On occasion, it communicates something, such as the marking of a territory, but it is chiefly kept up out of tradition. Children are encouraged to yell from infancy.
The one thing that travelling has brought home to me more than anything else is how most of the people in this world live in poverty. Abject, intractable poverty. The wonder is how much decency remains amongst people living in such conditions. I would expect more to resort to desperate measures. If guerrilla groups form, it is often the direct fault of the haves neglecting the have-nots. My hotel in Cartagena is a prime example of stupid petit bourgeois owners lording it over their employees, checking up on them to make sure they do not arrive five minutes late or leave five minutes early (phoning without speaking and then hanging up), insulting them, making them sign a letter of resignation and a blank sheet(!) on being contracted, and cutting their wages and firing them at will in order to feel the power of it: which is the only thing that they do feel. If this kind of abuse is widespread, it is because the culture of ruler and ruled remains instilled in the country’s mentality; ownership remains concentrated in very few hands, there is no tradition of working class solidarity, unions are persecuted with the approval of the government (union representatives being murdered, hence no TLC from USA this time round, well done the Democrats), and because people given power use it to act as cruelly as they can get away with (with few exceptions).
The one thing that travelling has brought home to me more than anything else is how most of the people in this world live in poverty. Abject, intractable poverty. The wonder is how much decency remains amongst people living in such conditions. I would expect more to resort to desperate measures. If guerrilla groups form, it is often the direct fault of the haves neglecting the have-nots. My hotel in Cartagena is a prime example of stupid petit bourgeois owners lording it over their employees, checking up on them to make sure they do not arrive five minutes late or leave five minutes early (phoning without speaking and then hanging up), insulting them, making them sign a letter of resignation and a blank sheet(!) on being contracted, and cutting their wages and firing them at will in order to feel the power of it: which is the only thing that they do feel. If this kind of abuse is widespread, it is because the culture of ruler and ruled remains instilled in the country’s mentality; ownership remains concentrated in very few hands, there is no tradition of working class solidarity, unions are persecuted with the approval of the government (union representatives being murdered, hence no TLC from USA this time round, well done the Democrats), and because people given power use it to act as cruelly as they can get away with (with few exceptions).
Quickly back into the Pedregal routine, although I’m not sure the nightly wine is the ticket. By mid-morning you need the fan on and sandals off, but thanks to the ocean’s nearness and wafting air, the humidity is nothing like Mompox, home to a million mosquitoes.
April 19th
It has gotten hotter. Hotter and muggier. The computer has slowed down. The overhead fan makes no impression on it. The Saturday afternoon streets of the barrio respond with increased seediness, fiercer stenches, a concentration of dodgy types. The sight of a mattress is enough to break out sweat. The marinero (“mírame ahora: loco, sucio”), who lives in a squat with a chum and generally maintains a sense of coherence, was flat out in a yellow T-shirt in the lobby of a tenement. He might have been dead. Last night a friend of Kelly’s was killed, beaten and shot in the head with a homemade weapon. She described the results to me having seen him this morning in the casket, his face pushed halfway back round his head. His brother wants to go after the guys who killed him. There is an intimation of the place getting less safe, stable and together, as if presaging an economic downturn. Or is it just a change in the weather? After three months, I have learned the walk to jink through it all.
The sound systems had been going all day Sunday, louder than ever before, and there came a point in the evening when they rose together to such extremity that I just laughed. I couldn’t hear what Alfonso sitting right next to me was saying. There was a sluttishness to the street that I could enjoy if I was part of it.
Men and boys at the mercado de Basurto fishing with a piece of string nailed to the end of a stick; the brazen display of sexiness in the way girls dress; the strange administradora of the hotel with dark eye sockets who claims to have clairvoyant powers and to have foiled a plot by Albanians in Italy to assassinate the chief of the security forces.
Children on the block speak to each other through tubes that pass under the buildings, and sometimes the drain in the middle of the patio says something.
Last night the racket outside was infernal. Insufferable vallenatos and the rest, together with the generalized rowdiness and arguments, this time even gunfire, a couple of shots. Just when I got off to sleep, Alfonso switched his TV on full blast. He’s a student and thus semi-educated, but even he can’t grasp the idea of noise not being a disturbance. I mentioned it to him once and he turned it down, but it went back up to full volume as soon as I was gone.
28th April
It has rained just enough to turn the streets fouler. Enough to dislodge and dissolve the accumulated urine and spit of months into small puddles of concentrate, but not enough to run them away. They will dry to patches of fetid stickiness. Instead of washing down the city, the rain simply rearranges dormant dust, skin, hair, sweat, shit, and coats flat surfaces with a grimy, spotted film. A reek is leached from the masonry.
Repetitive noise and shouting are the thing here. Yelling as a way of life. The new street sound among the lads is grunting.
Cartagena, May 1st
Online chess (I am Pugwash):
cfechter:hello amerikain
Pugwash:hi, have fun
cfechter:i am russia
Pugwash:England
cfechter:chess is not fun
Pugwash:alright then
cfechter:I am russia mojo
cfechter:chess here
cfechter:is a serious thing
cfechter:we do not take it lightly
Pugwash:what is it like being a Russia mojo?
cfechter:it is beautiful
cfechter:thank you for asking
Pugwash:I'm glad
cfechter:I am happy you are no amerikain
Pugwash:me too
cfechter:I am going to variate you
cfechter:you realize this amerikain
Pugwash:doesn't sound too good
Pugwash:am not americain, though
After Pugwash's defeat:
Pugwash:I am variated
cfechter:like a child of the night
cfechter:the power of the great russian mojo has overtaken you
Pugwash:well played mojo
cfechter:thank you
cfechter:would you care for me to sing you a song?
Pugwash:yes, please
May 3rd
Bart read from the hotel information for Isla del Pirata: “Forget civilization while you are here.” I felt like I was leaving them marooned when the launch took me away this afternoon. There was bugger-all there.
Bart told me about this guy living in a tower block in England who bought some wooden models of African animals on the internet: an elephant, a giraffe, a rhino. When they were delivered, they turned out to be life size.
May 8th
I saunter to “Donde Héctor” for my beers as dawdlingly as possible so that the night’s soup doesn’t wash its dark heat over me too strongly.
Stella isn’t happy about the gunshots you occasionally get in the street at night. I can’t say I blame her. If it doesn’t bother me, it’s because I don’t feel any maliciousness there. Like it’s another random night noise. I probably ought to revise my take on this subject.
In Cartagena it is considered incorrect to offer a guest something to eat or drink because they would feel obliged to consume it: and drugging for theft is commonplace.
In the early hours, I hear a slapping followed by a tearing sound. For a long while, I couldn't figure it out. I just couldn’t be mithered to get out of bed and see what it was. But then I had to know. I went up to the roof and saw, down the street, lozenges of ice being whacked on concrete seating outside the houses, before being peeled of their polythene wrapping. The broken ice goes into small tanks which are sunk into handcarts to cool fruit juice. The larger versions on the street look like fish tanks. The maracuyá is something else.
I had to leave Buenos Aires before the Chinese laundry lost all my socks and destroyed my last shirt. Here, I must leave because the giant plants in the hotel are displacing me. Downstairs, at the table where I work, huge, thick leaves crowd me out and one plant partly obstructs the kitchen entrance; upstairs, I have to weave through three more to get through to my room.
April 19th
It has gotten hotter. Hotter and muggier. The computer has slowed down. The overhead fan makes no impression on it. The Saturday afternoon streets of the barrio respond with increased seediness, fiercer stenches, a concentration of dodgy types. The sight of a mattress is enough to break out sweat. The marinero (“mírame ahora: loco, sucio”), who lives in a squat with a chum and generally maintains a sense of coherence, was flat out in a yellow T-shirt in the lobby of a tenement. He might have been dead. Last night a friend of Kelly’s was killed, beaten and shot in the head with a homemade weapon. She described the results to me having seen him this morning in the casket, his face pushed halfway back round his head. His brother wants to go after the guys who killed him. There is an intimation of the place getting less safe, stable and together, as if presaging an economic downturn. Or is it just a change in the weather? After three months, I have learned the walk to jink through it all.
The sound systems had been going all day Sunday, louder than ever before, and there came a point in the evening when they rose together to such extremity that I just laughed. I couldn’t hear what Alfonso sitting right next to me was saying. There was a sluttishness to the street that I could enjoy if I was part of it.
Men and boys at the mercado de Basurto fishing with a piece of string nailed to the end of a stick; the brazen display of sexiness in the way girls dress; the strange administradora of the hotel with dark eye sockets who claims to have clairvoyant powers and to have foiled a plot by Albanians in Italy to assassinate the chief of the security forces.
Children on the block speak to each other through tubes that pass under the buildings, and sometimes the drain in the middle of the patio says something.
Last night the racket outside was infernal. Insufferable vallenatos and the rest, together with the generalized rowdiness and arguments, this time even gunfire, a couple of shots. Just when I got off to sleep, Alfonso switched his TV on full blast. He’s a student and thus semi-educated, but even he can’t grasp the idea of noise not being a disturbance. I mentioned it to him once and he turned it down, but it went back up to full volume as soon as I was gone.
28th April
It has rained just enough to turn the streets fouler. Enough to dislodge and dissolve the accumulated urine and spit of months into small puddles of concentrate, but not enough to run them away. They will dry to patches of fetid stickiness. Instead of washing down the city, the rain simply rearranges dormant dust, skin, hair, sweat, shit, and coats flat surfaces with a grimy, spotted film. A reek is leached from the masonry.
Repetitive noise and shouting are the thing here. Yelling as a way of life. The new street sound among the lads is grunting.
Cartagena, May 1st
Online chess (I am Pugwash):
cfechter:hello amerikain
Pugwash:hi, have fun
cfechter:i am russia
Pugwash:England
cfechter:chess is not fun
Pugwash:alright then
cfechter:I am russia mojo
cfechter:chess here
cfechter:is a serious thing
cfechter:we do not take it lightly
Pugwash:what is it like being a Russia mojo?
cfechter:it is beautiful
cfechter:thank you for asking
Pugwash:I'm glad
cfechter:I am happy you are no amerikain
Pugwash:me too
cfechter:I am going to variate you
cfechter:you realize this amerikain
Pugwash:doesn't sound too good
Pugwash:am not americain, though
After Pugwash's defeat:
Pugwash:I am variated
cfechter:like a child of the night
cfechter:the power of the great russian mojo has overtaken you
Pugwash:well played mojo
cfechter:thank you
cfechter:would you care for me to sing you a song?
Pugwash:yes, please
May 3rd
Bart read from the hotel information for Isla del Pirata: “Forget civilization while you are here.” I felt like I was leaving them marooned when the launch took me away this afternoon. There was bugger-all there.
Bart told me about this guy living in a tower block in England who bought some wooden models of African animals on the internet: an elephant, a giraffe, a rhino. When they were delivered, they turned out to be life size.
May 8th
I saunter to “Donde Héctor” for my beers as dawdlingly as possible so that the night’s soup doesn’t wash its dark heat over me too strongly.
Stella isn’t happy about the gunshots you occasionally get in the street at night. I can’t say I blame her. If it doesn’t bother me, it’s because I don’t feel any maliciousness there. Like it’s another random night noise. I probably ought to revise my take on this subject.
In Cartagena it is considered incorrect to offer a guest something to eat or drink because they would feel obliged to consume it: and drugging for theft is commonplace.
In the early hours, I hear a slapping followed by a tearing sound. For a long while, I couldn't figure it out. I just couldn’t be mithered to get out of bed and see what it was. But then I had to know. I went up to the roof and saw, down the street, lozenges of ice being whacked on concrete seating outside the houses, before being peeled of their polythene wrapping. The broken ice goes into small tanks which are sunk into handcarts to cool fruit juice. The larger versions on the street look like fish tanks. The maracuyá is something else.
I had to leave Buenos Aires before the Chinese laundry lost all my socks and destroyed my last shirt. Here, I must leave because the giant plants in the hotel are displacing me. Downstairs, at the table where I work, huge, thick leaves crowd me out and one plant partly obstructs the kitchen entrance; upstairs, I have to weave through three more to get through to my room.