Short Walks from Bogotá: Journeys in the new Colombia

by Feiling, Tom

  However, the free-trading idyll described by Dalfinger’s man is flatly contradicted by the account of a Captain Salguero, who wrote that ‘Dalfinger came through the Upar valley, destroying and ravaging with bloodthirsty fury, and even burning chiefs … After ranging across the lands of Upar and collecting a small mountain of gold, he moved on to the savannahs of Guatapurí and Garupare, putting many Indians to the sword. He annihilated the Pacabueyes.’*

  2010 saw the 200th anniversary of Colombian independence, one that prompted many to stoke the old debate over the motives of the priests and soldiers of Imperial Spain. The contradiction inherent in missions led by men who held a Bible in one hand and a sword of Toledan steel in the other was no less apparent to the conquistadores than it is to their descendants. In 1536 Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, the man who would found Bogotá six months later, also passed through the Valle de Upar on his way south from Santa Marta. The governor of Santa Marta had told him to ‘take every care to make the peoples by which you pass peaceful, giving good treatment to the Indians. As soon as you are at peace you will ask them for gold.’ But if the tribe refused to part with its treasure, Jiménez was to read them ‘the Requirement’ – and if that failed, ‘wage a war of fire and blood on them’.

  The Chimilas soon learned to be wary of these strange new arrivals. Near the Valle de Upar, Jiménez’ men were attacked by Chimilas carrying the only native weapon that the Europeans had cause to fear: poison arrows. One of those on the receiving end of that attack wrote that if the arrow drew blood ‘it causes trembling and convulsions of the body, and loss of reason that makes men say bold, terrible things of dubious faith for dying men.’ Some soldiers tried to protect themselves from the Chimilas’ arrows by covering their bodies and their horses in quilted cotton padding. ‘A man seated on a horse, protected by such armour, looks like the most deformed and monstrous thing you could imagine,’ a Spaniard wrote. ‘It turns a trooper into a tower, a misshapen object that fills Indians with great terror.’*

  The Chimilas were eventually defeated, and the Spanish went on to found some of their first American settlements in the Valle de Upar. The early resistance and eventual capitulation of the Chimilas became part of their tribal lore, which they would sing to the sound of two sticks being hit together, as a way of teaching the tribe’s history to people who couldn’t read or write. It was only after the arrival of enslaved Africans that the Chimilas learnt to compose music for two flutes, drums and the guacharaca, the friction instrument that looks like a cheese grater, which is still a key part of the vallenato sound. They also took to playing a ‘female’ flute, which was in time supplanted by the accordion, and a ‘male’ flute, which supplied the bass line. The Spanish settlers contributed their tradition of organizing verses into quartets and choruses. Over the years, the hybrid genre became something like a travelling newspaper, carrying news from village to village along the Caribbean coast. Therein, said Tomás with a flourish, lie the true origins of vallenato music.

  The accordion, the instrument synonymous with vallenato, only arrived later. Some say that it was a copy of the sheng, a kind of panpipe brought to Panama from Hong Kong by a Chinese sailor at the end of the nineteenth century. But when I put this idea to Tomás, he scowled and shook his head vigorously. ‘The first accordion was brought to Valledupar by a German called Kildemian in 1929.’

  That year the businessmen of Bogotá and Medellín were celebrating a boom in world prices for coffee and bananas, building textile factories and railways on the proceeds and enjoying an era of prosperity that they called ‘the Dance of the Millions’. Colombia’s cities were being swept into the modern era, but as ever, these outward signs of progress were only apparent to a lucky few. The countryside, home to isolated communities that hadn’t changed in centuries, still abounded with all kinds of legendary monsters and fabulous creatures, strange hybrids of indigenous, Spanish and African beliefs.

  ‘People were very credulous back then,’ said Tomás. ‘The best drummers used to carry the head of a woodpecker in their pockets as a charm to help them play better. Some of them would make their drums from the hide of a black dog because they thought it had magical powers.’

  Such was the world that the most famous of all vallenato accordionists, Francisco Moscote, later known as Francisco el Hombre, was born into. It was a name I had heard before, since he makes several appearances in One Hundred Years of Solitude. ‘They say that one dark night, Francisco el Hombre was riding his donkey home, playing his accordion, when, from under a big tree at the side of the road, he heard the sound of another accordion. As Francisco got closer, he saw that it was the Devil himself, playing like a virtuoso. The Devil challenged Francisco to a duel and they set to playing. After a while, the Devil looked like winning. Afraid of what the Devil might do to him if he won, Francisco had no choice but to get down on his knees and pray. Hearing the Lord’s Prayer, the Devil fled back down to Hell.

  Anyone from the developed world unconsciously guards the boundary between fact and fiction, myth and reality. But Tomás, an educated and erudite costeño, was more circumspect. ‘My father knew Francisco el Hombre,’ he said. ‘He met him in Atanques in about 1925. People were still telling the story of his duel with the Devil even after he died in 1945, by which time he was over one hundred years of age.’

  Robert Johnson, the Mississippi guitarist credited with pioneering the blues, is also said to have duelled with the Devil. But when Johnson realized that he was being outplayed, he didn’t recite the Lord’s Prayer. He sold his soul in exchange for the Devil’s talent. Blues was the music of lost souls: the Devil’s music. But vallenato’s best-known practitioners never claimed to have sold out to the Devil. They admitted defeat, kept their souls intact and contented themselves with their less than diabolical talents.

  Given the choice between the Devil’s music and that of the good Christians of Valledupar, I preferred the blues. It might have been wretched, but it was also raw, whereas vallenato – or at least its modern incarnation – had always struck me as being worryingly wholesome, like the music played on American radio stations before people cottoned on to the dirty rhythms of rock ’n’ roll. It was upstanding, defiantly old-fashioned, and reassuringly Colombian.

  But just when I was ready to write off Francisco el Hombre as a chicken-hearted goody-two-shoes, I stumbled on a second, less upstanding version of his story. By this account, Francisco wasn’t just a master of the accordion, but also its discoverer, having found a squeezebox in the treasure chest of a ship that had sunk off the Caribbean coast. This accordion gave him the power to bring the dead back to life. Every man wanted to drink with him and every woman was driven mad with longing by his songs. When Francisco moved on to the next village, those left behind would swear that they had seen him at the crossroads at midnight, exchanging his soul with the Devil.

  My favourite version of the story however was an amalgam of the good and bad Franciscos, according to which no deal was ever struck. The Devil had indeed tried to drag Francisco to Hell, but he had saved himself by offering Old Nick a swig from the bottle of rum he was carrying. The Devil knocked off the bottle in one go, and staggered back to Hell, drunk and alone, never to return.

  Aside from the remnants of magic and myth, something else that had struck me about vallenato was the absence of female voices. It wasn’t just that women were barred from taking to the microphone. Having commandeered the stage, the man on vocals seemed to spend much of his time singing about the treachery of women and the stoic resignation of the men they left behind. Vallenato delighted in the expression of male heartbreak. When I first heard them, vallenato lyrics had seemed the epitome of noble selflessness, but in time, they came to seem a front for self-pity, and even faintly menacing.

  ‘Vallenato is pretty masculine,’ Tomás said with a sagacious nod of the head. ‘Men have always dominated Latino culture. Traditionally, women were for bearing and raising children, and they were expected to be submissive. But there h
ave been some good female accordionists. Rita Fernández played the accordion well. And of course, at the turn of the twentieth century Armina Vásquez was up there with the best of them.’

  Tomás caught himself and smiled. We had finished the rum and he was getting lost in lore. It was time for bed. I’ll say one thing for vallenato, though. While it was often sad and always sentimental, it had no room for existential angst. The juglares del vallenato didn’t allow their despair to stray from the province of love. Colombia’s music, like its people, was never hopeless, which was a sentiment that had quickly come to seem a western luxury.

  Recalling the exploits of the conquistadores, as well as those who resisted them, it seems fair to say that resilience has always been a Colombian trait. For sheer endurance, miles walked, and tribes, hills and rivers discovered, the feats of those early pioneers far exceed the more famous travels of the nineteenth-century explorers of Africa. The men who chose to join the first transatlantic ventures were not mercenaries and received no pay from the expedition’s leaders. Nor did they have the wives, families and religious convictions that sustained the English Pilgrims who boarded the Mayflower in 1620, bound for the Thirteen Colonies of North America. Most of those who headed for South America were simply adventurers, who took passage in the hope of making their fortunes.

  Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, who settled on Santo Domingo, the Caribbean island that is today divided between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, watched many of the early adventurers set sail for the Spanish Main. ‘They are the sort of men who have no intention of converting the Indians to Christianity or of settling and remaining in this land. They come only until they have some gold or wealth in whatever form they can obtain it. They subordinate honour, morality and honesty to this end, and apply themselves to any fraud or homicide and commit innumerable crimes.’ Oviedo also noted that although most of their leaders were Spanish, ‘no language from any part of the Christian world is lacking here. They come from Italy, Germany, Scotland and England, and include Frenchmen, Hungarians, Poles, Greeks and Portuguese.’

  The first Europeans to explore the New World were driven by desperation as much as by greed. In 1492, when Christopher Columbus ‘discovered’ America, parts of Spain were among the most densely populated in Europe. Castile alone had a population of 7 million. Seville, with 150,000 people, was one of the biggest cities in the world. So there was considerable demographic pressure for colonial expansion, which was only heightened by the extreme aridity of much of Spain and the country’s appalling social inequality. The aristocracy, nobility and knightly classes made up just 2 per cent of the population, but they and the Church owned 98 per cent of the land. It was said that the Marquis of Villena enjoyed annual rents of 100,000 ducats, while the average day labourer got by on just 17 ducats a year. To anyone accustomed to such hardship and with so little to lose, the Americas must have been a potent lure.

  The Crown contributed nothing to the costs of these trips. Everything had to be raised or borrowed, and loans for trips to the Americas were expensive. To make matters worse, the King decreed that adventurers could only voyage west under the command of a governor, who had to apply for a licence to conquer and settle the lands of the New World. In return for this licence, the Crown demanded that a fifth of any riches brought back to Spain be delivered to the royal coffers. Many licence holders were impoverished noblemen, desperate to keep up appearances even if they owned little more than their cape and sword. To be a gambler, visionary or tyrant was probably a bonus.

  Arrogance and cruelty weren’t confined to the nobility. The anti-colonial campaigner Bartolomé de las Casas complained that even men born into servility shunned any manual labour as soon as they set foot in the Americas and expected to be ‘elevated with a staff in their hands, to be persecutors of the tame and humble Indians, and to command!’*

  Whatever the humble origins of the men who ventured into the New World, they suffered no lack of ambition. Spaniards of their generation had already made discoveries beyond the dreams of their fathers. They had encountered and then defeated the Incas, Aztecs and Mayas. Nothing in history rivalled the sheer tonnage of silver, gold and jewels looted from those civilizations.

  To desperation, arrogance and greed was added credulity. Most of the conquistadores were ignorant, uneducated men. Intoxicated by dreams of wealth, they nourished themselves on rumours, which flourished until, ‘by repetition and wishful thinking, they gained the stature of truth’. When Walter Raleigh, who did more than anyone to popularize the myth of El Dorado, described his encounter with the Ewaipanoma, a tribe in Guiana ‘whose heads appeare not above their shoulders’, who would have doubted him? In a continent of armadillos, sloths, tapirs, manatees, peccaries and llamas, who was to say that the fantastic creatures of medieval and classical legend would not also be found in South America? Perhaps the Ewaipanoma really did ‘have their eyes in their shoulders and their mouthes in the middle of their breasts’.*

  Before flying back to Bogotá, I wanted to visit Cabo de la Vela, a fishing village at the tip of La Guajira, the desert peninsula that juts out into the Caribbean. La Guajira is the northernmost point of the Latin American continent and its desert sunsets are said to be among the most beautiful sights in Colombia. Cabo de la Vela was also the first landing point for those who crossed the Atlantic from Europe at the close of the fifteenth century. A trip to where it all began seemed a fitting way to bring my travels around the Colombian countryside to an end.

  On Sunday morning I got up at five, ready to catch a northbound bus at six. The bus turned out to be a shared car; with my arrival it was full, so off we went, skirting the eastern foothills of the Sierra Nevada, heading north towards the desert. Since none of the passengers seemed in the mood to chat and the driver seemed allergic to silence, he played the same vallenato CD endlessly. We drove about sixty miles per loop, along empty roads that led through rich cattle pastures dotted with oak trees.

  After a couple of hours, we came to El Cerrejón – South America’s biggest coalmine. From the entrance to the mine, the road ran parallel with the railway tracks that carried the coal to the wharf at the tip of La Guajira. Being Sunday, there wasn’t much traffic on the rails. A single convoy of black wagons rumbled past us on its way north, each filled to a uniform line with coal. Thanks to the mine, Colombia is the fifth biggest coal exporter in the world, and many of Britain’s power stations run on fuel hewn from El Cerrejón.

  It was close to midday by the time the driver dropped me off at Cuatro Vías. There was nothing there bar what the name suggested: a crossroads, where the road between Riochacha and Maicao crossed the one running north from Valledupar into the desert. I waited in the shade of a thorn tree for the next car to fill up. Someone had left a goat, minus its innards, at the side of the road, like the forgotten victim of a ‘chupacabra’. The goatsucker has become a modern-day legend in the Caribbean: from Mexico to Puerto Rico, farmers speak of finding their goats and sheep sucked dry of flesh, blood and bone, yet with their skins unbroken. Some say that the culprit is a man with the head of a coyote; others, that the chupacabra comes from outer space.

  It was very hot, so I wandered over to a battered roadside kiosk for a drink. The woman inside was talking to a friend about the langosta. One night, while waiting for a bus to Maicao in the summer of 1999, I had watched a man do battle with one of these flying lobsters with a baseball bat. I say lobster, as the locals did, but in fact, this langosta was more akin to a giant locust, which some evolutionary quirk had swollen to the size of a seagull. Luckily, it was the wrong time of year for langosta.

  After half an hour, a pick-up truck pulled into Cuatro Vías. I squeezed onto one of the wooden benches in the back, with twelve Wayúu men and women, plus a couple of little kids who sat on the bags of cement in the middle. Bags of rice and cut chicken were squeezed under the benches; drums of petrol were strapped onto the roof, and off we went. There are 200,000 Wayúu, making them the biggest indigenous tribe in Co
lombia. It was comforting to hear them speak their own language. It meant that I was under no pressure to understand anything and could drift away with my own thoughts for a while.

  I wasn’t adrift for long. No sooner had we crossed the coal company’s railway tracks than we faced the worst mud bath I had ever seen. The road was at least two feet deep in yellow clay. An articulated lorry, carrying who knew what to who knew where, was stranded in the mire, its length blocking what would have been both carriageways, if the road had had such things. Ahead of us, two more lorries were revving furiously, their back wheels spinning in the mud. Several passenger loads had gathered on the bank to watch this traffic jam in the desert, so we joined them under the blazing sun. A boy passed us with a goat on his back. Its legs were tied together and it bleated with a sound I’d last heard when I was playing bola in Villanueva with Carlos: that of a goat that knows what it has coming.

  After a while, a bulldozer showed up and we watched a security guard and a man from the coal company argue about whether they were allowed to use it to clear mud. They each spoke to Don Manuel at HQ, and then carried on arguing, the company man issuing more hijos de puta (‘son of a bitch’) as his powerlessness became clear. When he’d run out of curses, he turned on his heel and walked into the desert. The bulldozer issued a slow, deep roar and pulled itself up onto the road, where it began pushing the mud to one side, leaving a dry and relatively smooth road in its train. We clambered aboard our pick-up and set off again.