Maiden Voyages

by Mary Morris

  In El Tiempo that morning I had read that General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, who took over Colombia in a military coup in 1953 and closed down the press before he was overthrown in 1957, was launching a new bid for power on a Peronist platform, and I had thought that perhaps people at the party would be talking about that, but they were not. Why had the American film industry not made films about the Vietnam War, was what the Colombian stringer for the Caribbean newspaper wanted to talk about. The young Colombian filmmakers looked at him incredulously. “What would be the point,” one finally shrugged. “They run that war on television.”

  The filmmakers had lived in New York, spoke of Rip Torn, Norman Mailer, Ricky Leacock, Super 8. One had come to the party in a stovepipe preacher’s hat; another in a violet macramé shawl to the knees. The girl with them, a famous beauty from the coast, wore a flamingo-pink sequinned midriff, and her pale red hair was fluffed around her head in an electric halo. She watched the cumbia dancers and fondled a baby ocelot and remained impassive both to the possibility of General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla’s comeback and to the question of why the American film industry had not made films about the Vietnam War. Later, outside the gate, the filmmakers lit thick marijuana cigarettes in view of the uniformed policía and asked if I knew Paul Morrissey’s and Andy Warhol’s address in Rome. The girl from the coast cradled her ocelot against the wind.

  Of the time I spent in Bogotá I remember mainly images, indelible but difficult to connect. I remember the walls on the second floor of the Museo Nacional, white and cool and lined with portraits of the presidents of Colombia, a great many presidents. I remember the emeralds in shop windows, lying casually in trays, all of them oddly pale at the center, somehow watered, cold at the very heart where one expects the fire. I asked the price of one: “Twenty-thousand American,” the woman said. She was reading a booklet called Horóscopo: Sagitario and did not look up. I remember walking across Plaza Bolívar, the great square from which all Colombian power emanates, at midafternoon when men in dark European suits stood talking on the steps of the Capitol and the mountains floated all around, their perspective made fluid by sun and shadow; I remember the way the mountains dwarfed a deserted Ferris wheel in the Parque Nacional in late afternoon.

  In fact the mountains loom behind every image I remember, and perhaps are themselves the connection. Some afternoons I would drive out along their talus slopes through the Chico district, out Carrera 7 where the grounds of the great houses were immaculately clipped and the gates bore brass plaques with the names of European embassies and American foundations and Argentinian neurologists. I recall stopping in El Chico to make a telephone call one day, from a small shopping center off Carrera 7; the shopping center adjoined a church where a funeral mass had just taken place. The mourners were leaving the church, talking on the street, the women, most of them, in black pantsuits and violet-tinted glasses and pleated silk dresses and Givenchy coats that had not been bought in Bogotá. In El Chico it did not seem so far to Paris or New York, but there remained the mountains, and beyond the mountains that dense world described by Gabriel García Márquez as so recent that many things lacked names.

  And even just a little farther, out where Carrera 7 became the Carretera Central del Norte, the rutted road that plunged through the mountains to Tunja and eventually to Caracas, it was in many ways a perpetual frontier, vertiginous in its extremes. Rickety buses hurtled dizzyingly down the center of the road, swerving now and then to pick up a laborer, to avoid a pothole or a pack of children. Back from the road stretched large haciendas, their immense main houses barely visible in the folds of the slopes, their stone walls splashed occasionally with red paint, crude representations of the hammer and sickle and admonitions to vote communista. One day when I was out there a cloud burst, and because my rented car with 110,000 miles on it had no windshield wipers, I stopped by the side of the road. Rain streamed over the MESA ARIZONA WESTWOOD WARRIORS and GO TIDE decals on the car windows. Gullies formed on the road. Up in the high gravel quarries men worked on, picking with shovels at the Andes for twelve and a half pesos a load.

  Through another of our cities without a center, as hideous

  as Los Angeles, and with as many cars

  per head, and past the 20-foot neon sign

  for Coppertone on a church, past the population

  earning $700 per capita

  in jerry skyscraper living-slabs, and on to the White House

  of El Presidente Leoni, his small men with 18-

  inch repeating pistols, firing 45 bullets a minute,

  the two armed guards petrified beside us, while we had champagne,

  and someone bugging the President: “Where are the girls?”

  And the enclosed leader, quite a fellow, saying,

  “I don’t know where yours are, but I know where to find mine.”…

  This house, this pioneer democracy, built

  on foundations, not of rock, but blood as hard as rock.

  —Robert Lowell, “Caracas”

  There is one more image I remember, and it comes in two parts. First there was the mine. Tunneled into a mountain in Zipaquirá, fifty kilometers north of Bogotá, is a salt mine. This single mine produces, each year, enough salt for all of South America, and has done so since before Europeans knew the continent existed: salt, not gold, was the economic basis of the Chibcha Empire, and Zipaquirá one of its capitals. The mine is vast, its air oppressive. I happened to be inside the mine because inside the mine there is, carved into the mountain 450 feet below the surface, a cathedral in which 10,000 people can hear mass at the same time. Fourteen massive stone pilasters support the vault. Recessed fluorescent tubes illuminate the Stations of the Cross, the dense air absorbing and dimming the light unsteadily. One could think of Chibcha sacrifices here, of the conquistador priests struggling to superimpose the European mass on the screams of the slaughtered children.

  But one would be wrong. The building of this enigmatic excavation in the salt mountain was undertaken not by the Chibcha but by the Banco de la República, in 1954. In 1954 General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla and his colonels were running Colombia, and the country was wrenched by La Violencia, the fifteen years of anarchy that followed the assassination of Jorge Gaitán in Bogotá in 1948. In 1954 people were fleeing the terrorized countryside to squat in shacks in the comparative safety of Bogotá. In 1954 Colombia still had few public works projects, no transportation to speak of: Bogotá would not be connected by rail with the Caribbean until 1961. As I stood in the dim mountain reading the Banco de la República’s dedicatory plaque, 1954 seemed to me an extraordinary year to have hit on the notion of building a cathedral of salt, but the Colombians to whom I mentioned it only shrugged.

  The second part of the image. I had come up from the mine and was having lunch on the side of the salt mountain, in the chilly dining room of the Hostería del Libertador. There were heavy draperies that gave off a faint muskiness when touched. There were white brocade tablecloths, carefully darned. For every stalk of blanched asparagus served, there appeared another battery of silverplated flatware and platters and vinaigrette sauceboats, and also another battery of “waiters”: little boys, twelve or thirteen years old, dressed in tailcoats and white gloves and taught to serve as if this small inn on an Andean precipice were Vienna under the Hapsburgs.

  I sat there for a long time. All around us the wind was sweeping the clouds off the Andes and across the savannah. Four hundred and fifty feet beneath us was the cathedral built of salt in the year 1954. This house, this pioneer democracy, built on foundations, not of rock, but blood as hard as rock. One of the little boys in white gloves picked up an empty wine bottle from a table, fitted it precisely into a wine holder, and marched toward the kitchen holding it stiffly before him, glancing covertly at the mâitre d’hôtel for approval. It seemed to me later that I had never before seen and would perhaps never again see the residuum of European custom so movingly and pointlessly observed.

  SARAH HOBSON


  (1947–)

  Dressed in men’s clothing, Sarah Hobson sets off for Iran to see the forbidden shrine at Qum, a place barred to women. She accomplishes her goal traveling as “John,” complete with an elastic girdle around her chest and cropped hair. Iranian men she meets are suspicious of her and do not take her into their confidence. Rather, it is the Iranian wife Malake, in the excerpt that follows, who opens up to Hobson when she is told by her husband that “John” is indeed female. Woman to woman, Malake quickly sheds formality; she is not alarmed or disgusted, but relieved, clearly relishing the opportunity to confide in the stranger. Hobson’s witty narrative of her encounters with pilgrims of the Islamic faith was followed by a second book, about living with an Indian family. She now works on travel films and documentaries and lives in Yorkshire, England.

  from THROUGH PERSIA IN DISGUISE

  The south was to be a holiday, an exploration of the remote province of Fars, which gives its name to Persia and the language farsi, and whose history provides a galaxy of names in buildings and people: Persepolis, Cyrus, Alexander the Great, as well as Sassanians and Shirazi poets. My primary interest, however, was the Qashqai tribe who migrate across Fars each spring, and I hoped to study their designs. But it could be that I might not reach them, for they were bound in the mountains for the summer, and access was difficult without government passes.

  I decided to take a bus to Shiraz, for I was told that not even champion motorbike riders used that stretch of road, so great was the risk of brigands.

  The bus was leaving at seven in the morning, so I arrived early for my bike to be strapped to the roof. At half-past seven, the driver called:

  “Come on, bring that motorbike here.”

  I wheeled it over and stood helplessly wondering if I had to heave it up myself. The driver examined the petrol tank.

  “But it’s still full of petrol. It can’t go like that. Empty it please.”

  I turned Mephistopheles on his side, but only a trickle came out.

  “Could you help?” I asked.

  Cursing, the driver swung the bike over and I caught some of the flow in my petrol can. Then he yelled for a porter. An old man, his back bent permanently from the loads he had carried, came from behind the bus. Flinging a rope around it, he hoisted the bike on his back, and mounted the ladder at the side of the bus. Halfway up, he swayed with the weight, and I felt sure he was going to fall: I was ashamed I could do nothing to help. But he reached the top and tied it insecurely to the front.

  The land we passed through was uncompromising in its bleakness and grandeur where the Zagros foothills swarmed to jagged peaks. Sunlight and paths prised themselves between outcrops of rock and then disappeared in the tiers of hills. The road sped through miles of scrubland and brown dust, passing small villages whose tea-houses competed for transient visitors. Towards evening, only silhouettes showed, defined against a whitening sky.

  It was dark when we reached Shiraz and as soon as my moped was unloaded, I went to find a hotel. I felt uneasy without the protection of daylight to reconnoitre and to assess the mood of the town: at night, people seemed hostile, the buildings withdrawn, so I could not deduce what type of quarter it was. By chance, I found a Travellers’ Rest House with cold running water and a bed in the garden by a non-flowering rose-tree. An electric bulb in the corner was too dim to read by, so I stretched out on my bed. Suddenly the shutters of a room upstairs banged open. A man and a woman leaned out. She was unveiled, and her white shirt stretched over ample breasts. She looked down, her greasy hair flopping against her red mouth. I smiled. Then the man looked down, and pushing the woman back into the room, he closed the shutters firmly.

  Half an hour later, she came into the garden with a transistor and a plate of biscuits.

  “You American?” she asked in broken yet twanging English.

  “No, English.”

  “You have money?”

  “Not much.”

  “You good?” She placed the biscuits and wireless on the bed, touching my thigh as she did so. “You how old?”

  “Twenty-three.”

  She seemed puzzled.

  “I’m no good,” I said. “Khajeh, eunuch.”

  Immediately she let her breasts drop from their thrusting position and turned to go into the house.

  “You’ve left your wireless and biscuits,” I called.

  She shrugged. “Use them.” And she tightened her body again as a man came out to meet her.

  I turned on the wireless. Iranian music coiled the air; a mellifluous voice listed the number of children at school; a rhetorical voice announced:

  “Good evening. This is the British Overseas Broadcasting Corporation. We are now relaying the fourth and final part of a dramatised version of Wuthering Heights.”

  A wind ensemble transported me to nineteenth-century Yorkshire. Catherine and Linton were ejected by Earnshaw and a voice croaked:

  “Aw were sur he’d sarve ye eht! He’s a grand lad! He’s gotten t’raight sperrit in him! He knaws—aye, he knaws, as weel as Aw do, who aud be t’maister yonder.—Ech, ech, ech! He mad ye skift properly! Ech, ech, ech!”

  A man of about thirty-three came and sat on my bed. I looked up and he inclined his head.

  “May God give you good health.”

  I had to adjust myself quickly from the moors.

  “To your kindness, I am well.”

  “Do you understand?” he asked, pointing to the wireless. I nodded and we sat listening, the man moving his hand like a pendulum, his eyes closed. Some twenty minutes later the programme ended, and I turned off the knob.

  “That was good,” I said.

  “Yes, very good,” said the man, though he had not understood a word.

  The following morning I saw little of Shiraz for I left for Persepolis early in order to avoid the midday sun. I had been riding for several hours, and was growing hot and stiff when I turned a corner in an avenue of trees to see an edifice like the Wailing Wall. This was Persepolis. Huge blocks of stone five feet square formed the base of a platform and above rose stark columns like factory chimneys. A pair of staircases indented one wall in the shape of a hexagon, and leaving Mephistopheles, I climbed one side. Four winged bulls, carved onto massive doorposts, guarded the top, their biceps swelling to a thick-set body. Their heads were human, surmounted by crowns, and each wore a beard like a nose-bag. I walked on through rectangular halls, past corinthian-type capitals and deeply fluted columns. Crenellated stairways led to different-levelled platforms—the King’s apartments, the palace of audience, the Hall of a Hundred Columns. And blocks of hewn stone formed doorways whose lintels were carved in lines of stripes.

  For this was pre-Islam, pre-Illahs and Allahs, a palace which was built in the early fifth century, B.C. It was classicism, not mysticism, and I found it impressive and straightforward, yet somehow more solid. Perhaps it was the lack of colour, for with so much stone, it presented a monotone of dull sandy brown.

  Throughout, the activities of the court were depicted on the doorways and walls: the king swept by beneath an umbrella; the courtiers chatted, holding hands and lotus flowers; the Immortals lined up, an army whose number was always kept at 10,000, regardless of losses. On the staircases, representatives of the subject nations queued to pay obeisance at the New Year festival; they led rams, bullocks, dromedaries, and bore cloth, precious metals, tanned skins and vessels. There were Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Abyssinians, plus Indians, Armenians, Phoenicians. Some had cloaks which hung to their calves and some short rustic tunics; many wore hats, including the Sogdians who were redolent of Tolkien’s hobbits in pointed funnel caps.

  I trudged up and down the steps; but the overhead sun deadened the friezes by flattening their shadows, and by the end of the day I had only two queries. Why were no women shown, and what happened about sewage and water?

  Of the harem only the foundations remain, but it surprised me that the queen was not depicted in the activities of the court.
Sir Percy Sykes in his History of Persia comments with assurance on the position of Achaemenian women: