Return to the Dark Valley

by Santiago Gamboa

  When Manuela finished telling us her story, I asked:

  “Do you feel better now?”

  “No, Consul,” she said. “I have to let a little more time pass. I look through the window and feel scared.”

  Two days later, on the Sunday, I went with Juana and the boy to visit her brother’s grave. Juana kept her promise and paid her parents a visit, but she insisted on going to the cemetery first. I assumed we would meet them there, by Manuel’s grave, and I wasn’t wrong. I had the boy by the hand when I saw them from a distance. Juana also saw them.

  “Wait for me here a moment, Consul, stay with Manuelito. Let me go first.”

  I took the boy over to some vases of flowers, where a hummingbird was flying, and watched her approach them. She didn’t slow down until she was very close to them. The two old people were facing the stone, and the mother was trimming the grass that had grown around the grave with a pair of garden scissors.

  The mother was the first to see her. She dropped the scissors and raised a hand to her mouth. Then the father saw her. He gave her a hug and looked at her and again hugged her and the mother also joined in the hug. My heart skipped a beat. I followed them with my eyes while the boy imitated the hummingbird with his fingers. What were they saying to each other? The scene was too intimate for me to get any closer, but that was fine. Suddenly Juana turned and looked for her son. I pointed to his mother and said:

  “You see your mother over there? Run very quickly, she has a surprise for you.”

  The boy ran off like a shot, jumping over rows of flowers and stone paths. He ran and ran with pure, unpolluted joy. In that movement of the child toward her and his new grandparents I thought I finally recognized something lasting, something fundamental.

  It was rather more than I had been looking for, so I walked away toward the avenue. Before leaving, I turned to look at them from a distance. From where I stood, they looked happy. When I hailed a taxi, it was starting to rain.

  That night she got back to the house quite late.

  “Thank you, Consul,” she said. “I’ll never forget all you’ve done for me.”

  Manuela remained glued to the news, hungry to hear the outcome. She thought Freddy might die of his wounds, but that news didn’t come.

  From that day on, Juana started going to see her parents every afternoon, with the boy. On the fourth day, though, she said to me:

  “Tertullian says we should be on the alert, there might be security problems.”

  I thought we should go, postpone once more the final return, although again I wondered where. I wasn’t Ulysses, returning to a woman’s side. There were no islands for me in the world. The only return possible, I told myself, would be to a place devoid of uncomfortable and obsolete experiences. To return where I had dreamed of going and couldn’t. But what place was that? I thought about Manuela’s words and about Teresa, the Mexican woman: perhaps the same place Rimbaud had wanted to return to.

  EPILOGUE

  RETURNING WHERE RIMBAUD

  WANTED TO RETURN

  Seen from the plane, Addis Ababa looks like a sloping table. A green table that rises and disappears into the Entoto Mountains, whose peaks can be seen in the distance. In Amharic, the principal language of the country, Addis Ababa means “new flower,” a flower in a land that slopes. These are the highlands of Africa, no mosquitos, no malaria. The sun is bright but harmless and the wind dries the skin. What does this “new flower” smell of? Early in the morning, apart from the dense aroma of coffee, it smells of the cold wind from the mountains and of motor fuel without much oil, the smell of bonfires and carbon monoxide: the exhaust fumes from taxis and buses laboriously climbing Bole Avenue to Meskel Square.

  *

  It had been a long flight, and we were tired when we arrived at Bole International Airport.

  Teresa was waiting for us with two officials from her embassy. As a diplomat, she was able to come right up to the door of the plane. We gave each other a big hug. She looked exactly the same, not a single white hair.

  “Welcome!” she said.

  We were helped to fill out the forms and get through the immigration formalities. Teresa gave Juana a big hug and lifted the boy.

  “And this cutie pie?”

  She had brought a box of Lego as a gift for him.

  I introduced her to Manuela and we went straight to her residence. It was a beautiful day.

  The diplomats in Addis live in the Turkish Compound, which is near the airport, an elegant area of mansions and bungalows surrounded by gardens. Uniformed servants cut the grass and take care of the plants, and others collect dead leaves from the ground. There are palms, shady trees. At the far end is a river whose waters, strangely, accumulate foam.

  When we got there, Teresa showed us around the house, including the three rooms she had prepared for us: Juana and the boy in one, another for Manuela, and the third for me.

  *

  I looked through the window of my room: on the other side of the wooden fences and the gardens are the Brazilian and Portuguese residences. In the sky fly a dozen marabou storks, those huge ugly birds that look like frock coats, with curved beaks that sink into carrion like scalpels. They circle, waiting to home in on garbage dumps or the rib cages of dead animals. There are also falcons and eagles, perhaps the true masters of the city.

  Teresa was impatient to hear our story, but said:

  “I have to go to the office, but you all make yourselves comfortable and relax. This Mexican house is yours.”

  And she added, for my sake:

  “If you want to have a look around the city, Tibabu will take you. We can catch up tonight.”

  Tibabu was her driver.

  *

  The women and the boy decided to stay. I needed to be alone and lose myself a little, try to forget what we had left behind. That’s what traveling is, too: starting over again, purifying yourself amid the anonymous crowd.

  The driver left me near a place called Africa Hall, on Avenue Menelik II. The air pollution made my eyes water. The headquarters of the African Union was there. I kept going, toward the center, and soon afterwards the sidewalks stopped. People walked on the edges of the roadway, but the drivers were friendly. After a while I came to something that, from what I could see, was the central point of the city. They call it Piazza. Despite the grime on the walls and the powdery air it still had a kind of nobility, especially in the high doorways and balconies. Farther on, I saw the Hotel Taitu, the oldest in Addis. The sun was already going down and there was a great deal of bustle.

  On the street there was a small flea market that didn’t seem improvised. What were they selling? Old illustrated Bibles in Amharic, silver Orthodox crosses, icons, amber beads, horn spoons, wooden animals. At the end of the street I saw a pharmacy. Farther on, an auto repair shop. A pair of legs stuck out from beneath the engine of a Peugeot 404.

  *

  I observed the people. Ethiopians are physically beautiful. Very dark eyes, fine features. They are tall and thin, like the Masai. The women smile and their teeth glisten. In the café of the hotel I asked for a beer and chatted with the manager, a man in a white shirt and tie who strolled back and forth between the tables and the reception desk.

  “There are three kinds of people in the world,” he said, “the faranyis, the negroes, and the abeshás (Abyssinians).”

  I remembered children on the street calling me: “Faranyi, faranyi, faranyi!” which means “white foreigner.” That word is an old acquaintance. In Thailand they pronounce it farang and in Malaysia, feringui. It’s a corruption of the word “Frank” that, since the crusades of the twelfth century, has traveled with Islam from North Africa to Asia and is used, by extension, for every white Westerner.

  *

  After a while I decide to go back to the residence. Night is falling, and I don’t know the city. The streets o
f Addis are dark and full of half-constructed buildings, some just raw shells. The scaffolding is made of long bamboo poles and looks fragile. It makes you dizzy just imagining the workers up there, swaying in the wind.

  I take a taxi from the Taitu. On the ride back, I see stores with merchandise in the doorway, kiosks, and dusty stands, but also, farther on, shopping malls with lavish neon lighting. I write down in my notebook the name of one of them, the most extravagant: Bole Dembel Shopping Center.

  *

  “Where have you been, Consul?” Juana asked me when I got back.

  “I had a look around Addis.”

  “Is it nice?”

  “Yes.”

  “What I saw from the car looked sad and poor,” Manuela said.

  “It’s Africa,” I said.

  None of the three wanted to look in the online papers for the latest developments from Cali. The last thing I’d heard, at the airport in Rome—we came to Addis on Ethiopian—was a description of Freddy Otálora’s body, “disfigured by acid and with extraordinary macabre amputations.” That was what a newspaper said. Everything was still being blamed on a rival gang.

  *

  When Teresa arrived, we sat down to a delicious dinner. The calm, orderly atmosphere of that luxurious residence was in marked contrast to our devastating memories, but nobody said anything. I still felt as if my soul was dirty. After dinner, we went out on the terrace and Teresa opened the bar. Tequila, gin and tonic, whiskey. For the first time, Juana talked about her life.

  “I was in Paris for a while with a Colombian friend,” she said in response to Teresa, who had no problem asking her questions, something I hadn’t dared to do. “I learned French, worked with political exiles, traveled a little. The boy started school and we led a normal life. I started working with an NGO investigating human rights violations in Colombia, but I kept away from the country. Then I went to Madrid, still working for that same French NGO. I spent a long time looking at the windows of the houses. A simple life, the life that so many other people led. Nothing heroic.”

  *

  Three days went by and Teresa took us to see some of the sights of the city, such as the Merkato, the great open-air market, with alleys of spices, baskets and vegetables, fabrics and leather, workshops of wood and ironwork. In the antiquarians’ area we saw Orthodox crosses, reliquaries, rosaries, amber, and the curious funerary images of the Konso people, which depict their dead on posts with penises carved in the front. I took notes, reviving the travel writer who had lain dormant in me in the past few years, but I never forgot that our true destination was Harar, Rimbaud’s home. I didn’t want to tell Teresa yet.

  *

  Another day, she took us to the Memorial of the Red Terror, dedicated to Mengistu’s great repression of 1974.1 We saw photographs of massacred students, lists of names, and something particularly shocking: life-size dolls in strange positions, illustrating the torture methods. Manuela started to feel bad and I hurried us on. Another of the rooms was filled with skulls and bones taken from mass graves. I copied the names of two young people: Walelegne Mebratu and Marta Mebratu, two siblings who were students, brutally tortured and murdered. Suddenly Manuela ran to the exit. I saw that she was crying.

  We left.

  *

  Tibabu is a retired teacher from the National University in Addis and decided to lecture us about his culture:

  “We have our own alphabet, our own languages, which nobody understands anymore, and even our own system of hours and a calendar that’s four years behind the Gregorian. Amharic is a Semitic language, and is the most widely spoken, but there are also Oromo, Tigrinya, and Harari.”

  *

  When we get back to the house I tell Teresa that we want to go to Harar and of course she offers to arrange everything and find us a van. I tell her no: I feel we have to travel alone, under our own steam. Get there in the simplest possible way.

  *

  The next day I went to buy tickets from the Salam bus company and we prepared for an eleven-hour journey. The old French railroad line that joins Addis with Dire Dawa and the Red Sea, on the coast of Djibouti, has been abandoned. There was no choice. We could go in a ramshackle Canadair plane of Ethiopian Airlines, but we wanted to approach it more slowly, see the mountains and the rivers.

  So now, off to Harar.

  *

  It’s still dark when we get to Meskel Square to take the bus. It’s cold. A woman drags a cart filled with thermos flasks. We have coffee and wait. Manuelito Sayeq is sleepy, and seems very quiet. I realize that he’s used to the company of adults and to strange situations. He plays with a doll and carries a bag of Lego pieces in his hand. We are a strange quartet, but the faces watching us from the darkness are friendly.

  At last the bus appears, a modern lime-green vehicle, and a silent group of travelers, frozen stiff, starts to board. The dawn rises behind the roofs of the outskirts of Addis until, ahead of our bus, the highway appears: two wide lanes, with asphalt that looks to have been renovated not long ago. “The Chinese did that,” someone tells me. Harar is in the east, near the border with Somalia. We exit on the eastern side of the sloping table.

  I’m nervous.

  *

  The vegetation continues to be green, although it’s mostly dry, prickly shrubs. And the ground is as black as volcanic clay. Everything is very dry in spite of the altitude. “It’s because of the wind,” says one of the people sitting near us. Strange hillocks appear, looking like huge tortoiseshells that have fallen on the plain. The bus driver toots his horn to disperse flocks of goats. On the sides of the road donkeys appear, with loads of wood tied to their backs, barefoot children urging on cows with wooden rattles, a few camels. We see small villages of circular huts with straw roofs. The temperature rises. With the animals are peasants, young girls carry their younger brothers on their shoulders. A little farther on—it’s almost noon—I see a child sitting beside a brown puddle. God above, he’s drinking the water! In the background, between the dunes and the prickly brambles, a woman walks very upright, carrying a huge teapot on her head. It’s like a painting by Dalí.

  My three companions are asleep. I can’t stop looking through the window and writing in my notebook. I feel that we are leaving one world behind and advancing into another, a new one, only recently discovered.

  *

  As the road descends, cultivated fields appear and the earth becomes more fertile, this is the red earth of Africa. I see fields of corn, small vegetable gardens, banana shoots. The conditions of the peasants improve: the temperate climate makes poverty more bearable. In the villages there are square shacks with zinc roofs, mixed with the circular ones of straw. The walls are of beaten earth and wood.

  All life is on the road. Children approach the bus, asking for empty packaging, plastic bottles. They’re recyclers. Some stare longingly at the vehicle. Maybe they dream of leaving, some day, on one of those buses. The women sell bundles of fruit. Mandarins and bananas. Inside, a television is showing a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie. The people are supportive of each other. Someone behind me opens a pack of potato chips and offers it to his neighbors. Another shares the mandarins he has just bought.

  Soon afterwards we stop in a village, it’s lunchtime. We sit down in a kind of canteen and Juana takes out a bag with fruit and sandwiches prepared by Teresa’s cooks. I ask for a beer. One of our neighbors orders inyera with spicy chicken sauce. We have half an hour.

  *

  The journey continues. The road rolls on along a steep precipice. These are the highlands. On our left are endless plains, a horizon that could be hundreds of miles away. It is a majestic sight, dotted with falcons and marabou storks. Now Manuelito is beside me and together we look at the landscape. We see some trees that look like birds with their arms bent, like the ashok in India. What is it? he asks. “It’s called a ziqba,” someone says, “and the one o
ver there is a wanza, it has brighter leaves.”

  Many hours later we reach Dira Dawa, the poor one-horse town where the airport is. “From here to Harar it’s only fifty minutes,” they tell us. And again the bus ascends to the mountains.

  *

  How long have I been dreaming of going to Harar? Is this the final return? Manuela sits with me on the terrace of the Ras Hotel and from there we look down at the old walled city. We recover from the journey with a Harari beer. When Juana and Manuelito are ready we leave for the encounter.

  “At dawn, armed with a burning patience, we shall enter the splendid Cities,” wrote Rimbaud.

  We, too, were about to enter this old city. Passing through the wall, I felt a strange, inexplicable nostalgia.

  *

  Rimbaud came through that arch just over a hundred and thirty years ago, but the walls and the stones massed on the sides seem to be the same. The city within the walls is called the Jegol.

  *

  We enter the Jegol through the eastern arch, the Asmaddin Beri. In this section the walls have Arab-style minarets, the wall is of earth and dry stone. The gate is a brick turret with a pointed arch, decorated with a brief piece of Islamic calligraphy and two lines of yellow tiles. There is a poor market in which people display their offerings on rags or mats. Everything looks quite dusty. There are beggars and lepers. “Faranyi, faranyi!” the children yell at us. A crazy-looking woman approaches Manuelito and he isn’t scared, he just looks at her with curiosity.