by Steve Hely
The ParkLife Hostel Popayán is a sleepy-making place. Wonderful light comes through the windows, it’s in the loft and attic of one of the tallest buildings in town, five stories up the wooden stairs. There are pillows everywhere. You can look out the window and see, as I did, the gentlest kind of afternoon rain falling on the red tiles and the cupola of the white Catedral Basílica de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción, and up the streets of the town to the green rolls of hill that rose beyond, and say drowsily to yourself, Yes, I am come here to some magical valley as if from the dream of a child. Tomorrow I will explore but now I will nap. In the nooks of the cathedral roof cooing pigeons roosted themselves out of the rain.
Two English girls (I think they were English) whispered and giggled to each other, cradling each other under a blanket. They watched the movie 27 Dresses on a DVD in the airy attic and when it ended, they didn’t get up, they just let it start all over again as they cuddled.
In the kitchen a female gym teacher from Belgium danced around as she chopped and prepared all sorts of fresh fruits and vegetables. I bet she was a good gym teacher. At no time did her improvised squats and aerobics let up as she described to me a relationship with a Costa Rican man that perhaps had come to an end. She was sad, she said, but she shrugged and danced on.
Slumped down on a pile of pillows in the common room, I read the obituaries of Gabriel García Márquez. Top dog and number one by a mile, most famous Colombian writer of all time, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Love in the Time of Cholera, One Hundred Years of Solitude, News of a Kidnapping, Chronicle of a Death Foretold—he wins for all time on titles alone. News of his death had reached me by Twitter on my phone in an enormous supermarket in Medellín, where I was exploring the section devoted to little frosted cakes while James from the A-Team studied the grill workers of the burger bar across the floor with absorption that stemmed from his career as a mechanical engineer and his passion as a burger enthusiast.
“Hello. Excuse me.”
I and the few others lounging on pillows and benches looked up to see a striking German woman with a practical but elegant cut of short black hair, six feet tall at least, and trim.
“Who would like to climb the volcano tomorrow? I’m looking to form a group, three or more, and hiring a guide. Sixty thousand each.”
An amount of money, I knew, but dispensed with the idea of doing the conversion math. The command with which she said it made clear this was a fair price for a climb up the volcano.
Lifetime, I’d already climbed two full and several fractions of volcanoes. I’m for it, generally, but it’s hot and dusty work, very dry climbing unless it’s raining, in which case it’s cold and soaking. If the volcano’s alive enough to be worth climbing at all, your shoes will be covered with black soot and your clothes heavy with sweat and dusted with gray ash before you’re done. There are destination restaurants in Popayán. To stroll to one of those and have a boozed-up lunch, poking my head into a cathedral or something for cultural credit beforehand, that’d been my plan. Honestly, unless I was gonna see fire beasts swimming in a spuming lake of lava, fuck climbing the volcano.
I didn’t use those words to the German woman, who now looked to me, the others in the room having either stared back at her in stupefied bafflement or muttered declines. I smiled a shade and shook my head.
“Why didn’t you climb the volcano with her?!” was my mom’s appalled reaction some months later, when I absently mentioned this story (we were on the topic of volcanoes or Germans or something). Her shock was so real and so full of true disappointment in my character that it threw me. She was right. Lesson learned, and I set it down for myself as at least one solid rule for life:
If a striking German woman wants to climb the volcano, go with her.
Well, anyway, here I was, might as well enjoy it. Not hard at all. On Friday night was the opening procession of the weekend. The streets of Popayán were packed with families, some in from the country, kids and parents and grandparents crammed into doorways and pressed to the old white walls along the narrow sidewalk of Calle 4. The kids try desperately to contain themselves somehow, because the Good Friday procession is slow. Almost like they’re entering it in a contest for slowest parade in the world. The military marching band plays very slow.
The stars of the parade, the equivalent of floats, are wooden platforms carrying painted statues. Jesus, Judas, the Virgin Mary, a skeleton—all the heroes of Easter. They’re compelling statues. The processions of Holy Week in Popayán are not on UNESCO’s list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity for no reason. But I did get bored before it was over.
The next morning the air and the sky were clear, people were feeling festive, just a great Saturday in Popayán. There was a llama tied to a scooter in Parque Caldas.
“It is very nice, your llama,” I said in Spanish to a man in a beret who appeared to be its guardian. He nodded with dignity but gave me no further information about it.
“Why is it, this llama?” I inquired further.
“Oh, it is not my llama,” said the man. “I’m only watching it for a friend.”
“Of course,” I said, “claro.” We stood there for a moment, and then I walked on.
A few hours later, when I was walking back into town from a hike up to the statue of Simón Bolívar, two university students, one chubby and with glasses and the other skinny with eyes that just hinted serial killer, stopped me in the parque and asked me in English where I was from.
California, I told them, and they got excited and asked me if I could help them with their assignment. They were students studying tourism and business at the University of Cauca and for a class they needed to interview three foreigners.
This sounded suspicious, an all-too-clean setup for a twisted con game, but sure, I said. They debated with each other whether they could each count me as one of their three foreigners, and then they took worn folders and pens and Xeroxed assignment sheets out of their backpacks.
If they were con artists, their commitment to mundane detail was impressive. The questions were things like asking me to rate Popayán on a scale of one to five in various categories such as historical interest (four) and beauty (five, really a four, four and a half, but I said five) and cleanliness (three and a half, but I said four).
“Would you consider returning to Popayán?”
“I don’t know, sure—I mean, I’m still in the first time.”
That wasn’t an option. “Mmm, just put yes,” I said, which they did, relieved.
We finished the survey, and then we kept talking for a bit.
“Hell,” I said, “why don’t we go drink a beer?” With this I hoped to project a kind of Steve McQueen swagger, the best of confident American manhood. The Colombian students—Freddie and Cristian—looked almost startled. Really I was desperate for company, and drinking with Colombian students would count as cultural experience, whereas it’d be hard to justify drinking alone in midafternoon.
To them, drinking just then was a curious idea, and they still had to find two more tourists, but could they meet me at seven?
“Sure,” I said. “By the way, how did you know I was a foreigner?”
“Height,” Cristian, the chubby one, said. “Also you are almost at the door of the hostel.”
“Ah,” I said. “Well, stick around, and you can probably interview a German woman as tall as me who sooner or later will be getting back from the volcano.”
Saturday Night at El Sotareño
Magical realism, that is the name for a movement or idea or style that runs through the literature of Latin America. Stories where people live in cities or villages very much like real cities or villages in Colombia or Mexico, but where a beautiful girl ascends to the sun at four p.m. one afternoon or a Gypsy alchemist dies twice.
The most clichéd observation a visitor to South America can make is that these places
do really feel as if they have a magical quality. Baffling sights appear before you, bizarre conversations take form then disappear, you encounter puzzles and moments in your travels that feel somehow enchanted or cursed or called up from some unconscious imagining. You find you soon accept and glide along with events or experiences that defy any logic.
Clichéd. But: It’s true, that’s how it feels.
For example, El Sotareño, a bar on a street off another street no one can quite give you directions to. Somewhere, that way, you’ll find it. Step inside and you are in a small, dark, wood-ceilinged room lit by just a few antique lamps. The walls are covered with posters and photographs and paintings from who knows what decade of players of tango and bolero music. In the corner behind the tiny bar are shelves crammed with a worn library of vinyl records, some of them fifty years old. The bartender/owner, an antique of a man, eyes hidden under the brim of his hat, plays selections of scratched and distant and haunted music. This is a bar worth traveling a thousand miles to get to. Even sitting in it, for hours, drinking and listening, it was hard to accept that a place this fantastic could be real, that it had been sitting on a street somewhere in Popayán my whole lifetime, and long before I was born.
* * *
“Gabriel García Márquez was a dick,” said Freddie, the more serial-killery of my Colombian student drinking companions. It was maybe nine or ten at night now, we’d been drinking for three hours, pushing through lulls and awkwardness to get to the realness. If these two were con men or kidnappers, by now I wasn’t too worried about it. Freddie joked twice about kidnapping me, which could’ve been a sign either way, but the truth was he couldn’t really pull it off. He had a darkness to him for sure, but it seemed more goth-emo than murderous. He was involved somehow with a dramatic girl then in the hospital for jumping off the Puente Del Humilladero, an old bridge I’d walked under that afternoon.
Cristian, the chubbier friend, was much more gentle, a counselor kind of guy. Accurately named, too, he referenced some kind of Bible study or church group that mattered to him. We had talked for a while about Colombia. For let’s say the past twenty years, Colombia’s biggest political problem was FARC, a guerrilla army or movement that at times controlled a quarter of the country. Popayán was on the edge of FARC country. At the airport out, I’d seen a military flight of eighty soldiers leaving, tired and relieved after protecting the Easter processions. According to one newspaper, there’d been three bomb threats.
Now we were talking about the just-died king of magical realism, and sometime negotiator or facilitator of negotiations with FARC, “Gabbo.”
“Look at Márquez’s town, Aracataca. The whole town he got famous from. It’s totally poor. Márquez fucked off and went to Mexico City. Once he got famous and rich, he didn’t do anything for Aracataca.”
I looked to Cristian: “Do you agree with this?” He held up his hands and half shrugged like “I wouldn’t put it exactly that way but yeah.”
The story goes that Márquez, living with his wife and kids in Mexico City, was driving to Acapulco for a vacation, when suddenly he got the idea for One Hundred Years of Solitude in his head. He turned the car around and drove back home and started writing. While, presumably, his wife had an interesting time explaining to the kids why they weren’t going to the beach.
One Hundred Years of Solitude is about a village called Macondo and the generations of the Buendía family that lives there. It’s incredible. But reading the book by the beach in El Salvador, I can’t say I found it totally absorbing. Book lovers and literary types do a disservice to the great masterpieces when they won’t admit that some of them are boring. OHYOS was, to me, kinda boring. Fully prepared to admit that’s my fault. Like I said, I was reading it on the beach. No one would call it a beach read. Márquez was more than Colombia’s most famous writer, he was a diplomat, a statesman, a conscience for Colombia. But if these guys wanted to take him down a few pegs, I was happy to let them.
Like a lot of twenty-year-olds, Freddie and Cristian liked to say brash stuff and test outrageous arguments. Fair enough, but then Freddie mentioned, like it was an obvious fact we could all agree on, that Bush and Cheney did 9/11.
“Wait a second,” I said, “come on.” I looked to Cristian for backup. He put his hands up and half shrugged again and said, “Well . . .”
This got me heated, I admit. Disappointed, too.
The best argument against conspiracy theories, to me, is competence. Pulling off a huge conspiracy would be really hard. Bush and Cheney fucked up everything else—how could they have faked or staged or controlled or whatever 9/11, and gotten away with it? Cheney couldn’t even go hunting without shooting his friend in the face. A conspiracy theory is flattering to the conspirators.
For the conspiracy theorist, though, this argument falls apart because he thinks the conspirators did get caught, by him, the theorist. Claro.
This happy evening looked about to go afoul. But with a bit of easing on all sides, we agreed to change the topic. Freddie and Cristian asked me if I wanted to go to a party.
Regardless of what they thought of 9/11, the party they described, a birthday cookout, sounded spectacular. With visions of delicious grilled meats and Colombian women dancing in the sweaty night, I said yes and we all got into a cab.
My vision proved very wrong.
Oooooooo, I realized, when we arrived, it’s so clear now. This party is for losers. Freddie and Cristian are nice guys but they are nerds, and they have taken me to the party of their even nerdier friend. It was a birthday for an obnoxious dweeb who was watching a soccer game while his mother slaved over a tiny grill, thrilled that her son at least had some friends. That I was there seemed to revive in her some spark of a nearly extinguished dream that maybe her son was a special boy, beloved all over the world.
I did my best to be kind to her in Spanish while also telling her that I did, soon, very soon, unfortunately quite soon, have to get back to town. At midnight was the Easter procession, after all.
Back to town was, what, three miles?
“Hey, Freddie,” I said, “I can walk back to town, right?”
“Oh, no,” he said. He shook his head. “If you walk back to town, there is a ninety-five percent chance you will get stabbed.”
“Stabbed?”
“Yes. I have been stabbed three times. But stay, we are texting a girl, maybe a girl will come.”
“Wait, really? Stabbed? I gotta get back to town.” We were on a dark neighborhood street somewhere. I had no idea how I’d get a cab here, even how to explain where I was.
“If you walk back to town, someone will come up to you with a knife and make you give them your money, your phone. Even if you do, they will stab you like this.”
He pantomimed a light but still forceful stabbing.
I went over to Cristian, who was eating some chips. “Hey, Cristian, Freddie says if I walk back to town, there’s a ninety-five percent chance I’ll get stabbed. Is that true?”
Cristian held up his hands and half shrugged. Like: “Well, maybe . . . ninety percent.”
“Freddie says he’s been stabbed three times.”
“Yes,” said Cristian, “but that’s because he always fights or he says something.”
Hmm.
With much gratitude and blessings on her son’s birthday, I beseeched the wonderful mother to help me sort out how to get a cab. She couldn’t really help me. I was stuck eating chips for a while and considering if I’d really, really get stabbed. Surely the stabbers were enjoying the Easter procession, too, no? When a miraculous cab appeared down the street, I chased after it.
That was the last I saw of Freddie or Cristian, but we’re Facebook friends.
Easter in Popayán
On the midnight of Easter in the streets of Popayán, they run another procession. But this one is joyous and wild and jubilant. The uniformed men and women
from the social clubs or orders charged with carrying the heavy platforms with the statues try to go as fast as they can. Kids are setting off firecrackers and there’re meaty and sugary treats. Then at last comes the statue of Jesus, crown on his head, holding demons on chains like captured slaves.
He is RISEN, bitches is the message. A powerful one.
The Amazon and Peru
Amazonia
You can read in some places that the Amazon is the widest river in the world, and it is, but what does that mean? The Amazon, like the Nile, floods. When it swells, it can cover with water an area three or four times the dry-season size. Everything within fifty miles of the “banks” of the Amazon, whatever those are, is built to be in a perpetual state of half land, half river. Hills become islands, trails go underwater, whole villages and towns are on stilts where in September there’s a ladder and May—when I was there—you step from your canoe into the doorway of your home and hope it doesn’t rain much more.
The Amazon disgorges 209,000 cubic meters of water a second. That’s something like twelve times what the Mississippi puts out. A journey up the Amazon would be maybe four thousand miles, a thousand miles more than a trip from Los Angeles to Boston, but the Amazon’s dozens of tributaries thread out from it like legs from an octopus, so tallying its length is ridiculous anyway.
To call the Amazon a river is too small. The Charles is a river. The Amazon dominates a continent, breathing in and out like an animal of water. A whole half of South America apparently rises and sinks by inches as the Amazon rises and falls. The stretch I would see of it was a hundred kilometers or so, one and a half percent of it. Someday I’d love to go up the whole thing on a boat. But on this trip, I figured, Hey, it’s a river. If I stay in one place, it’ll flow past me.
