July, 2012

Cutting across Plaza Lourdes, one of Bogota’s many pigeon-dotted hubs where shoe-shiners huddle and whisper, policeman drift, and idlers stand and stare, I notice two features of the plaza that proudly stick out from these other ordinaries.

First, there is a large, ornate Gothic-Moorish church, Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de Lourdés, which seems to maintain a straightforward, blunt posture toward me no matter which direction I face. Second, on the front doors of the church there is a gigantic, equally sincere dollar-sign spray-painted, fresh and white, into the defeated wooden doors.

The front doors are shut tight.

Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de Lourdés was constructed in 1875. Designed by Julián Lombana, the church, which is under what appears to be a forgotten moment of construction, sits in the center of Bogotá’s Chapinero district, where a strong proportion of the city’s lively commercial activity flourishes by day.

Up until 1991 Roman Catholicism was the official state religion in Colombia. Then, a wave of constitutional reform granted equal treatment to Colombians no matter what their spiritual choices. It is estimated that some 90% of the population identifies as Catholic. Only roughly 25%, however, practice their faith each Sunday inside dim, quiet cathedral walls like the ones that face me as I pass.

Moving swiftly through the plaza with a dossier of documents clutched under my arm, I head for home, where Yudbeny waits to put something on my plate and quiz my mood.

But something prohibits my cut across the plaza.

In the middle of the flat brick space, there is a large crowd. A circle of shoe-shiners, elderly women, young boys and old men, idlers and passers-by gravitate around someone who has decided to growl and yell something important at the top of his lungs. Everyone is watching intently.

I decide to take a look, and what I find is a hefty man with his shirt and shoes absent. The soles of his feet are black. He is yelling passionately. In front of him there is a raggedy blanket, and on top of it, there is a small mountain of shards of broken glass bottles. Next to him, there are more instruments that could only be the utensils owned by a soul of strange habits: a board laden with nails, and a knife whose tip is stuck into the board, as if a cut frozen in time.

The crowd watches as the man shakes the glass on the towel and waits for him to perform his act.

I, instead of becoming enchanted by the charm of the performer and distracted by the blur of the crowd, decide to take a moment to scan my surroundings.

I see no police. That is odd, I register.

And then my eyes seize upon it. It is the sort of thing that should send chills through any spine.

It runs from somewhere near the top of the left side of his head straight down toward the collar-bone. The cut is deep. It appears freshly stitched and still moist. It runs directly behind his ear. The image is not startling at first, but it grows increasingly grotesque as I hold my stare.  Feigning an aware calm, I am totally transfixed on the gash belonging to the head of a young boy that bobs in the quiet crowd one foot in front of me.

The young boy is standing close to an old man. Both listening patiently to the yelling voice harmonize with the rattle of broken glass.

Surely, it appears that the young boy was the victim of some heinous crime. That is what I think of first. My conscience tells me it was not an accident, but I am in no position to know, and I feel as though I am in a precarious position to ask.

So I don’t.

For all of the beauty that Colombia owns, today its Plaza Lourdes wears another ugly liability. For a country that tries desperately to dress its wounds, cuts still appear.

Later I cross through the plaza again. This time the man with black soles who screams with the sound of shards of glass is gone. The plaza is nearly empty.

It is a morning on a Sunday.

Then, further toward the church, I notice an old man. He is standing almost directly in front of the front doors. The doors are still shut. The man possesses a wide stance. He wears dark shoes, a suit coat and peppery hair. He appears comfortable and dignified with his hands tucked calmly inside his pockets. And the only thing he does is stare. The old man stares at the doors of the Church of Our Lady of Lourdes and the gigantic dollar sign seared into the mouth of the church – like stitches holding together a once beautiful face, now knotted and ugly.

The old man’s stare is fixed and intent.

But it is difficult to know why he stares so hard. It is difficult to know if he is watching the doors, saying a prayer to his beautiful church and cursing the scar, or if he is cursing the ugly church and praising those who gave it the scar it wears. Or maybe he has his eyes closed tight, not watching anything at all, thinking instead of how the politics of fighting for the church against the politics of fighting for the dollar have plunged his country into decades of civil war – cutting his sweet Colombia right in two – and how when he opens his eyes, he hopes both the church and the dollar sign will vanish before him. Maybe this is what he wishes.

The next day I pass again. The man has vanished. The church and the dollar sign are still there.

June 21st, 2012

The world around me in a large room located at the back of an old house is barely changing.

The room is cold. It is some time after noon. Across the room, a black maid wears a blue apron and chops potatoes into long slender shapes. As her wet hands let the starchy shapes hit the pan, a radio voice singing in Spanish cries out in between violent crackles of oil on hot iron. The potatoes fry and the music doesn’t stop.

Somewhere in between the maid and I is a rotund woman who wears not an apron, but a sleeveless shirt. Her red frizzy hair is tied back behind her head in an old-fashioned bun. As she moves toward me, she sings to the music and wiggles her wide hips playfully.

In her hands she is balancing a piping hot bowl of white broth. She sets it down. I start eat. Lunch begins in the old house.

Yudbeny Gonzalez, the eccentric proprietor of the house where I now stay, turns, still singing, and sways back toward the sizzling oil. Yudbeny came from Huila, a department south of Bogotá where security issues are still prevalent, six or seven years ago. She is one of many Bogotanos who have moved to the city to escape minimum opportunity and the dangers of more rural parts of Colombia.

Now Yudbeny, along with her Mexican husband Alfredo, whose mornings are normally occupied by reading one of the national newspapers, El Tiempo, through a magnifying glass the size of an orange, own an historic faux-tudor style house in a neighborhood called Palermo.

Yudbeny and her husband own a handful of these old beauties in the Palermo and their primary profession is renting rooms to students, young professionals, and expatriates like myself.

Yudbeny pauses in the middle of her feast-making and plops down in the chair across from me. I have begun the daily chore of slurping my ajiaco, a thick Andean soup made with potatoes, corn, and cilantro.

The menu at Yudbeny’s house, much like the tired peeling paint on its walls, its faulty drainage system (whose being neglected causes dripping in several of its rooms during the wet season rains), and the stubborn, sticky keyholes on the locks that protect it, does not change.

The things that Yudbeny says and does, however, do.

Today, Yudbeny calls me niño (or little boy) and by doing so she exalts herself to a location far above me, where the Colombian mother is almost a goddess watching over the banalities of my youthful, masculine, yet ultimately boyish ways. It gives Yudbeny the power to ask. Yudbeny asks me about my love life, and about my work-life, and about when I will become the next President of the United States, and why it is so hard for Colombians to get a visa to the US, and how I like the women here, and whether or not I like her food, and which fruits I’ve tasted recently and why haven’t I tried this exotic new fruit that Yudbeny says I must try. Everyday it seems like there is a new fruit to try.

Today it is the Cherimoya.

I correct her about being a boy. “I am a man,” I say. She ignores me.

The broth of my soup is nearly gone. What is left is a large, unwieldy bone with a single morsel of beef dangling off the edge. Being the well-mannered man I am I lift the bone carefully out of the bowl and position it on a plate near by. Fork in one hand, knife in the other, I begin the final butchering of my meal.

Yudbeny protests and gestures with her hands and mouth to grab up the bone in my hands and tear the meat off with my teeth.

I do not follow her rule.

She probes for details about mature topics – love and money and politics – topics that seem to appear out of thin air like demons for me. I am the tongue-tied informant, who must capture and tame her probing questions before moving on to the next puzzle inside Yudbeny’s labyrinth.

Her questions are like temptations. And as the questions unroll I know, like always, that soon Yudbeny and her labyrinthine alphabet will find some way to ensnare me. No matter my seriousness, Yudbeny finds a way to disarm it with comedy.

Yudbeny has a way about her.

It seems that she has the uncanny ability to fix the young men who occupy her rooms and quarters into niños – little boys – and keep our becoming serious from growing up into men – from becoming dealers of love and money and politics. Us men, well, we are just boys waiting at Yudbeny’s table – not just for her food, but her alphabet too. Yudbeny is the eternal mother for men who wish to be boys for a quiet hour.

“Be careful,” she says to me. She always smiles after she says this, as if she knows more about what comes next than I do.

Mothering, more than money, I think, is Yudbeny’s plot. Every day there is a masterful trial designed to entangle me in a linguistic bind, to entwine me in her idioms, to corner me in a place where my forthright explanations about serious things often come across as juvenile, plain, and ultimately innocent. Yudbeny just laughs.

Often I feel like Don Quixote de la Mancha (a serious man tirelessly striving to demonstrate serious action, but where my granter of judgments lets only comedy precipitate). Except in Yudbeny’s kitchen there is no Sancho Panza to remind me what it feels like to be sane in this house that does not let one change. There is only Yudbeny – temptress, enchantress – to lead me away from my seriousness and into a distraction of theatrical fits and tricks and laughter. I am sure of my conclusions. Yudbeny wants me to slip, to fall, to come crashing down from my seriousness and formalities – in a sense, my being a young man. She wants me to break the rules of her alphabet so that she can laugh at me, and so that I can make confessions to her without being so serious, so that we might be distracted from the hard truths that come pouring out of her questions, and so that she might be able to put life against the mundane chaos of the sizzling and the clinking and the scratchy singing radio noises of her old, decaying, unchanging house.

Learning a language is uncomfortable, but it is a whimsical thing in the company of Yudbeny and her house.

Yudbeny, despite daily theatrics, teaches me her language. In a sense Yudbeny teaches me how to be.

But there is a rule in Spanish that makes being difficult for an English-speaker.

The rule is that there are two kinds of being. There is the verb ser. Ser means to be. Then there is the verb estar. Estar also means to be.

“What sort of grand trickery is this?!” I ask myself.

Growing up in Spanish (indeed in other Latin languages as well) you live through two modes of existence – you live inside two ideas of what it means to be.

The first, ser, is used when you want to declare that something is normal, unchanging, and fixed. A normalized type of being could be the meaning of where someone is from, the time of day, or the beauty or ugliness of an old empty church crumbling in the middle of a city.

The second is estar. Using estar is for declaring the being of states or conditions of emotion, feeling, location, and a long list of other things that have lives of a more transient sort. Estar is used when you want to declare whether or not someone is feeling blue, or to say whether someone is standing inside or outside that crumbling church at some precise moment in time.

Like choosing whether to act like a man or a boy at Yudbeny’s table, I must choose my way of being at each step along the way in Yudbeny’s maze of questions.

Sometimes I feel like a shepherd, and these two essential words are my mischievous sheep. Playing with them is fun. Yet my livelihood depends on them and that is a serious business.These days I feel as though I must always choose: to be a boy or to be a man.

Yudbeny performs a string of examples to help me out:

“Estoy aqui. Estoy contenta. Soy una mujer. Soy Colombiana. Soy mágica. Soy divina.”

I am here. I am happy. I am a woman. I am Colombian. I am magic. I am divine.

“I’m divine,” is the last thing Yudbeny says. She shoots me an enchanting smile as she says it, again, showing on her face a message that says that she will know more about being, in some ways, than I ever will. Then she laughs.

Trying to draw the line between these two ways of being, I watch Yudbeny turn and move toward the stove. Janet, the black maid from the Chocó, attends to a patacón frying on top of the the hot iron. The room is cold. On the walls, I can see the paint peeling on the old house. The room feels decadent. It feels as though it cannot change no matter how much it wants to. It is too old.

Yudbeny explains that the house falls under a certain class of housing called patrimonio cultural where the owners of the property are legally forbidden to make changes to the house. In other words the laws governing the old house say that the house is and it always will be the way it is.

Other things, however, are changing fast around us. In less than one week, I will leave Yudbeny and her old house. She does not know this. I slurp the last bit of my soup and push the bowl and the bone aside. I am done. Lunch is finished.

No matter how much Yudbeny wants a young man to seem like a boy forever, young men want to grow up. They are done being boys. Boys, I realize, have a tendency to run away from their mothers in order to become men. But the best of them remember that the seriousness and pain that comes out of realizing maturity and the responsibilities of masculinity are best buried deep within the secretive vaults and chambers of memory of a comical muse like Yudbeny Gonzalez.

Contemplating my linguistic maturity inside the realm of Yudbeny’s alphabet, I escape from the noise and try to find some presence and assemble what I have just learned.

“Let’s practice,” I tell myself.

Estoy aqui. Estoy feliz. Soy Americano. Yo era un niño. Ya soy un hombre.

I am here. I am happy. I am American. I used to be a boy. Now I am a man.

Yudbeny looks at me. She knows I am reciting words in my head. She can see it on my face. “What is it?” she says. “Nothing, I tell her.” The reason I don’t tell her is because, well, too much could change, and this is a house where things are not supposed to change.

Some time much later, another white bowl hits the surface of Yudbeny’s table. Like yesterday it is piping hot. Not cold. It is in front of me. I do not slurp. I quietly eat like a man. I eat like a man against a house and a woman that tell me, “Niño, do not change.”

Forgive me. But some things must.

A reciclador paws through the trash as he scavenges for valuable material in a residential neighborhood, Bogotá

Gods of Dog

June 20th, 2012

The word dirty is graffiti-ed onto the side of the cart in purple letters. It is written in English, as if a silent scream – a message that wants to be heard by more than just passive eyes.

Inside the cart there is a mess of used appliances, black bags concealing used auto parts, pieces of wood, plastic, beer bottles, and coils of wire coated in rust. The cart is stopped on the side of Avenida Caracas, one of Bogotá’s main commercial avenues. It’s raining. Tied up and wet, a dog jumps out of the cart and onto one of the planks of wood. Tugging against the weight of the cart, the dog points its head toward the sky and howls.

I can hear it, just barely, from inside the eerie confines of my clean, modern bus, which roars down the road, past the cart, away from the ugliness.

At first I think that the dog and the cart are abandoned. In fact, this is how the recicladores’ (recyclers) carts usually appear: like lost piles of junk. But then, further down the road, I spot three bodies huddled together. All of the storefronts on Avenida Caracas are closed and the streets are deserted. At night, the Caracas is where the homeless live and work while their dogs scrape and paw and pull on their chains and howl.

 These bodies, these Gods of Dog are the impoverished, the addicted, the homeless, the destitute of Bogotá. In the most dignified case, they are hustling, hard-working recicladores who scavenge the city streets by night and day using horse-drawn carriages for materials that can be sold to one of several bodegas sprinkled along the Caracas where someone promises to buy their loot in exchange for barely enough pesos to scrape by until the next day. In the most tragic of cases, the reciclador is a bent man standing in the middle of the road causing buses to swerve and honk, huffing a worn out black bag most likely containing some sort of aerosol. He is drugged and delirious and stumbling.

Bogotá, a city of 8.9 million people, is bulging at the seams in large part due to a massive wave of internal migration where land-holding people have been ousted by guerrilla and paramilitary groups and therefore have been forced to find refuge in Bogotá. Some, like the three I see huddled together on the street, have evidently resorted to scavenging recyclable material in order to make ends meet. An estimated 70 thousand families claim life of a reciclador. Those who choose it make roughly $1 to $10 per day.

A recent act introduced by Juan Manuel Santos called the Victims and Land Restitution Act promises to compensate roughly 4 million victims who have suffered forced displacement from Colombia’s conflict and to a lesser extent environmental degradation, according to the International Organization for Migration.

Until then, Bogotá’s displaced will have to settle for being recicladores. At least they can be Gods of Dog.

Tuesday June 5th, 2012

Altogether there are seven of us now. Pacho. Quiet, patient, caution of a surgeon. Pedro. Forthright, engaging, owner of a politician’s opinion. Grandmother Beatríz. Gentle, kind, suffers from arthritis. Señora Alvarez. Ecstatic, vain, exhales breathes of an alcoholic. Señor Alvarez. Firm hand shake. Absent. Like a ghost.

And then there is Cindy.

Cindy. Venezuelan. Seventeen. Wide, glorious smiles pouring from her face. Strangely, I later learn that Cindy is the lifeblood of the Alvarez family, even though she is not even part of it.

Pacho explains that Cindy will clean my room daily, make my bed, and prepare meals. Meals are as follows: breakfast at 8am, lunch at 1pm, and dinner somewhere in the later parts of the evening. Dinner is taken alone, in our rooms. Lunch on Saturday is the last meal. Then Cindy finishes cleaning. Sunday, she is free. Do not expect Cindy to be here for you on Sundays, Pacho explains. And so I feel like a king.

Finally, Sunday comes. The Alvarez house is full, but silent. I am alone in my room. Then I hear footsteps. They are Cindy’s footsteps. However, who enters is not the diligent, youthful girl who cooked my meals over the last several days. Instead, today she is dressed to kill.“I’m going out,” she informs me. She says it in this dignified way as if it is a curated message that she has carefully decided to give to me at that precise, perfect moment. She says it like a diplomat. She stands in front of me, arms crossed, eyes staring into mine and says it.“Ok,” I reply. It is Sunday and Cindy is free. This morning, she appears like a lady. She appears astonishingly beautiful and mature for a maid of seventeen. Cindy might spend her Sunday with her sisters and her Mother and lament the cleaning of bathrooms and other domestic foes, politely toil over the intimate perplexities of a family to whom she does not belong, and conclude the day with a plot for navigating a week of the Alvarez family again. Six days of smile and laughter bravely crushing the habits of silence between brothers, father and son, mother and son, mother and Beatriz, sons and Grandmother. Six days of desperately trying to defeat the weariness of a dying conversation at the table she tirelessly governs so that she can make it to the seventh day intact, and express her disappointments to her sisters and her mother, and finally, maybe, feel like something of a lady again.