The Passport

A light rain had passed away perhaps a half hour before but the clouds remained, obscuring the dying light of the early evening in Bogotá. It rains or drizzles most days in Bogotá and when it isn’t raining we have the protection of somber gray clouds. On this night, darkness seemed to descend quietly, gently, earlier than usual and I was left with an unsettling feeling of emptiness. It was not only emptiness, but the sensation that something meaningful was coming to an end. I absentmindedly ran my fingers over my knife, clipped to my pocket, a hole in the blade for my thumb to snap it open in an instant. The rough ridges along its edge reminded me of the bloody violence I had done with it. They reminded me of its potential. I felt hollow again. The flea market is full of color and life in the morning. But later it dies a slow death. Endings: On Sundays the street people congregate around several of the plazas to sell the garbage that they find or steal during the week. This is where tonight’s story begins, on the edge of this zone of desperate poverty.

I wandered slowly through what passes here for a flea market (though the term is perhaps more appropriate here than elsewhere) running my eyes over the worthless detritus swept from the city by this wave of scavengers. Earlier in the day, it is a real market and there are items for sale that have value. But by the end, everyone who has someplace better to be has left, anything worthwhile has been sold and all that is left is an odd assortment of broken, forgotten, mismatched junk. There was a computer keyboard from the 1980s, a broken piece of a telephone, hundreds of tiny porcelain figurines, cables and connectors that may have been torn from an abandoned building, and tattered and mismatched clothing of all descriptions. Certain scavengers seemed to specialize in just cell phone accessories and their dirty and mismatched wares were laid neatly on blankets. There were no tables. Everything was arrayed on blankets that could be rolled up when night fell and would later serve to keep the vendors warm while huddled against some building.

To me, everything I saw by this time held negative value. It was utterly useless to me, would take up space in my life and carried the risk of disease as an additional danger in some cases. At least those were the calculations that ran through my head. The people peddling these trinkets and pieces of refuse were dirty and listless, no doubt enduring years of invisibility or outright disgust at the hands of the rest of Bogotá. Curiously, I sensed no feeling of community or comradeship among these people who shunned each other, or just gazed silently and who on other days seemed to wander the streets alone.

It was dusk when I passed through and most of vendors were in the process of rolling up their blankets and moving off throughout the city. Many had already left. On the edge of this curious gathering I glanced over yet another blanket filled with small electronics, porcelain figures, old records, tattered paperbacks and one item that caught my eye. It stood out from the rest immediately. It was rectangular, red and about the size of a paperback but thinner. The official seal of Colombia was embossed on the cover.

It was a Colombian passport. I stopped. Perhaps it was the “officialness” that caught my eye and held my attention. Or maybe it was just something about the mood that hung in the air. I reached down and thumbed it open. A man with short, neatly trimmed curly hair stared back at me. He was born in 1969. In the photo, he didn’t look so different from me. I read his name and forgot it. I glanced at the man selling the passport but he wasn’t interested enough to even pay attention to me. It was not his passport. Had he stolen it? Had he found it? Impossible to say, but it seemed to hold as little value for him as all of the other odds and ends held for me.

At one time, this document had been valuable to someone. This was a representation of someone’s identity. With this document the man in the photo was permitted to travel the world. With this photo a man could prove that he was a person, a citizen of a nation, and not a nameless and dislocated vagabond. Perhaps this is why the street scavenger didn’t value the passport. He had no identity. The concept of identity, of belonging, had slipped away from him.

I did not move. I did not release the passport. I was captivated. First, it was the fantasy of buying it and assuming that other identity. Becoming someone else would be leaving behind who I am or it could be just stepping into that other skin. It would be like being invisible. What would you do if you were invisible? What did these invisible people on the street do? The comparison is not adequate though. The identity of this man on the passport represented freedom to me in that brief instant but the very concept of government issued identification is one of bondage. Colombia has a system of national identification cards, la cédula, that is far more rigid and inclusive than the United States. To name someone, to identity them, to force them to produce this name and personal data on demand: is a manner of control. In the most basic sense, we assert our control over the world by naming, by applying language and labels to everything around us. It is no accident that this was the power ceded by God to Adam in Hebrew myth, because by naming all the creatures of the Earth he could assert his dominion over them. Likewise, in many cultures the true name of a demon or other evil spirit is the means to defeat it.

With that passport I would be Colombian. It offered me protection. It offered me escape. The red faux leather cover was different than my American passport. Would the red hide the blood? The passport was undamaged and untarnished, and the paper was only slightly aged by the years. It felt light in my hand. Endings. Beginnings. I was at the seashore and the ocean lapped at my feet. It was cold and reminded me of the vastness of the ocean. The seaweed had been brought up by the tide and lay stinking all around me. From within the tangled mess of rotting plant matter, I saw a conch shell, untouched by the action of the waves. I plucked it from the knotted cords of green and brown and held it to my ear. I looked into the endless ocean and the crashing waves as I listened to the conch. It whispered in my ear, “Colombia… Colombia… Colombia…” as softly as if it were the amplified sound of my own inner ear. As I held the conch to my ear, blood began to slowly drip from it. Threw its twists and turns there came a trickle of warm red liquid. This is what it offered me. The blood began to spill onto my hand and run down my arm. Right then I made the decision to be rid of the conch. I didn’t throw it back to the depths but instead dropped it at the edge of the water, among the seaweed. Perhaps the next wanderer would see the value as I had.

The passport now out of my hand, I felt its pull. It could grant me my darkest wishes. Fear and desire seemed to hang over it. I looked back at its current owner but he seemed to not comprehend the value of the object between us. He looked absently at the few scattered people passing or maybe a stray dog in the distance. I straightened back up and returned to my world. If I wasn’t careful, I could drown in those dark waters. I headed back home in the dying light of a Sunday evening. I absently ran my fingers over the black metal of my knife, folded neatly in my pocket. The hollow man was there on the ground behind me. Between the potency and the existence, between the essence and the descent: fell the shadow. Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act: fell the shadow. This is the way it all ends. This is the way it all…

The House on Uku Pacha Street

The following text is something I recorded in my journal while I was in Colombia and I typed it up upon returning to the US (and redacted the names of people I know who are in it). Needless to say, I didn't sleep well that night after writing down what you are about to read. I enjoyed Colombia immensely and look forward to returning, but this narrative shows some of the darker side of my move to Colombia. Nothing in this experience is without meaning (though much of it is buried) and it is true on a level that most nonfiction stories are not. If you understand what happened to me here in this story, you will understand my move to Colombia and my feelings about it.

The accompanying graphic is a photo that I took of a painting that hangs in the Botero museum in Bogotá. The title of the piece is Conversation and the painter is the German George Grosz. The version here is rather small, but the detail in the original photo shows some very sinister looking characters onto whom the viewer may project any manner of nefarious conversation. When I thought back to that night, this was the photo that best captured the sense of sinister designs buried beneath the surface and figures protruding from an inner (psychological) darkness. Well, without further ado, here is the text I have been introducing:

Tonight Sr. M. wasn’t available to drive me back to the apartment here, so I left my camera and wallet in A’s room and began to walk back. It was sometime after eleven when I left her house. This is a good neighborhood though, and I feel quite safe here. But something happened tonight that changes that opinion, though I do feel safe, in the conventional sense, I feel a profound sense of the uncanny when I think back over what happened to me between A’s house and here (as I write these words in my apartment). When I first arrived, about two weeks ago, I felt as if I were in a dream. Whether I was the dreamer or just a character in the dream of another, I couldn’t tell, but the sensation of unreality was overwhelming. I can’t quite explain why, because I have felt tropical weather before, I had already been in Bogotá for several says, and small-town Costa Rica or the suburbs of San José aren’t so terribly different from what I have seen of Santa Marta. But actually being here, in Santa Marta, was a singular and incomprehensible sense of being in a dream state, like I had never felt before—until tonight, that is—and which compels me to record tonight’s “events”, if I can even call them that.

I had been walking back to the apartment when I decided to take an extra turn. I can’t say why, beyond just the simple fact that I felt compelled to wander. I carried nothing of value to interest thieves though and I’m not an easy target for any lightly armed thief (or group of them). I’ve come out on top of several muggings and “knife fights” and though I don’t want to lose any more blood, the thought doesn’t scare me nearly as much as it should. I feel confident in most places, and more so here. So when the urge struck me, I turned to the right and then turned again and again, until I had begun to take random turns and wander the streets in the warm night air. There was no chill in the air tonight (as I’m sure there isn’t now, as I write this) and that fact only added to the dreamlike unreality of what happened to me next.

The first shock that I had was when I noticed two animals on the sidewalk in front of me, exposed to the light while the rest of the street seemed to be in shadow. It was a cat and a dog and the dog, a small breed (I don’t know much about dog breeds) was furiously copulating with the cat. I could hear the dog panting and the sound seemed almost as if it were amplified. It thrust itself into the cat with a rhythmic violence that trapped my eye for several seconds longer than was necessary. I was startled from my voyeuristic trance by a yowl from the cat that sounded frighteningly like that of a small child crying out in pain and anguish. My flesh crawled and my breath caught in my throat, as it is again now, on this warm tropical night. A chill ran down my spine as the cat’s eyes suddenly shined in the light and it let out another cry. I was suddenly aware of how deserted the streets were at that moment and how alone I felt. The streets seemed darker there than on my normal route home. I crossed the street to avoid the cat and dog that sounded, for all the world, like a child being tortured and crying out in pain.

No more than ten meters farther down the street and I began to hear voices coming from one of the houses. That fact was nothing remarkable by itself but the fact that the voices were in unaccented English was astonishing. I have not heard any such English since I bumped into the English teacher in Bogotá, almost two weeks ago. It was difficult to make out what exactly was being said, but I could discern maybe half a dozen voices inside the house. The other gate was open, as was the door to the house. Were they having a party? Why were there Americans here, in the middle of this quiet neighborhood in Santa Marta? I stopped walking and just listened in the street to those eerily familiar tones and snatches of phrases from my native tongue. I stood in the street and strained to understand what was being said, but it was impossible and I could only pick up words or phrases here and there. I moved closer to the gate, hoping I could hear better and understand what was happening. I can remember thinking, strangely enough, about the differences between the sound of English and the sound of Spanish. It is as though each language, and each dialect and subdialect of each language, has its own flavor. Yes, I thought of it as a flavor in that moment, and the metaphor seems just as appropriate now, hours later. In this case, it was the flavor of home and just as we never forget our mother’s cooking and will always long for a few dishes she made, so too I was caught by my desire to hear these English words. But also like a flavor, the effect of this conversation was intoxicating, almost like a narcotic. When I heard a voice inside the house call me by name and ask me inside, also in perfect and neutral English, I responded by walking into the shadowed interior, still unable to see who had spoken.

The house had high ceilings that were hidden in a shadow, as were the interiors of several rooms that I passed on my way deeper into the house. I turned several times as I tried to follow the source of the English words that grew almost imperceptibly louder as I moved deeper into the house, winding my way through its maze of corridors. I was no longer sure that I could find my way out again, and I wasn’t sure of which of the doors behind me I had passed through originally. It was at that moment that I found myself in a room bathed in deep shadow into which my eyes strained to see figures seated in a loose arrangement around the edge, near what must have been the walls. The sense of being in a dream intensified yet more. I honestly could not believe that what I was experiencing was real and I felt almost certain that I had walked into a dream, somehow, and that I was already home in my apartment. That belief is in doubt now though as I lie here recording my memory of the events of earlier tonight. How could it have been a dream if I am here now, awake, writing all this down?

There were multiple conversations occurring all at once, intersecting, overlapping, breaking apart and crashing into one another again, like the ripples from stones dropped into still water. I was at a disadvantage for having arrived late and not having been previously acquainted with the characters. To my right, two young men and a young woman talked about hiring a sicario to kill someone in Bogotá and this somehow intermingled with a discussion of the indigent population of Medellín. The financial consequences of the political rift with Venezuela washed over me from the front and this broke upon the shores of a disagreement between a young woman who thought that the Chávez, though a petty dictator in his own right, had value as a South American antipode to US influence while a young man thought that this opposition was counter to the interests of Colombia and that any project for unity was bound to fail if it was based, as its core principle, on opposing the US. From the left came a long and complicated explanation of a Catholic ritual, the veneration of saints, the counting of rosary beads and the eating of the flesh of a god then mixed with voices on the right who were again talking about a murder. Had it happened already? Was it someone they knew or were they describing a news story? The descriptions seemed somehow too vivid for the account to be secondhand and the bodily mutilation of the victim crossed and mixed with the bizarre Catholic ritual that now seemed more pagan than Christian and from the deep shadow in front of me in the room came a thread of the conversation that seemed to suggest that the natives who lived in Santa Marta before the Spanish arrived knew of a secret that is carried in the blood. The blood is the inspiration of the red that Chávez has taken for his coat of arms, as it was of the Communists of Lenin’s era and it is the blood that runs in the jungle in the “Red Zone” in the south of Colombia and it is the wine that becomes blood at the Catholic mass and the mutilated man in Bogotá bleeds into the street, his perforated body bleeding from deep within. The shadows are suffocating, but I imagine that I can smell blood. At first it is more like the faint suggestion of blood but soon I am overcome by the smell of blood, as if there were rivers of it running around my feet and clouds were floating in the air around me, loaded with red droplets of liquid life.

There was a woman standing behind me and she pressed herself lightly against me as she grasped my forearm from behind. She was tall, very tall, and I had the impression that she was unnaturally thin. She leaned in close to me and whispered into my ear from behind. She told me that I was very lost, very lost indeed, and that I would not make it out of this labyrinth alive. I remained perfectly still. I was not certain if she was referring to the house or some other labyrinth. I asked simply, “Where am I?” and she again whispered into my ear from behind. She told me I had made this place. She told me that there was only one way out. I turned to face her. She was taller than any Colombian I had seen in Santa Marta and incredibly thin, like a vision of starvation. Her face was hidden partially in shadow. She took my hand and I let her. She pulled my hand to her and I touched her hips. There was no flesh there, only bone. Just dry, rough bone where flesh should have been. At that moment, I imagined that her face, still hidden in shadow was that of a skull. I looked for her eyes but found only empty blackness.

The voices behind me in the darkened room were no longer conversing and I could hear just short, clipped phrases and single words, each more unsettling than the last. Profanities, curses, vulgarities, mutilated genitals, viscera, eyes gouged out, maggots, shit covered wounds, a sharp blade across the throat, poison in the brain. The air was suddenly colder and I quickly pulled my hand back from the boney hips of the tall woman, just as one might pull back from a hot stove. The room was cold now. So cold. I knew I had to get out but I didn’t know how. I rushed past the woman and through the first open door. I hurried down a corridor and took another door which was open and the air was warmer. I followed the warm air closer to the exit, turning again and again and choosing again the warmer of the doorways until at last I was outside in the warm night air, but the gate was closed. Running to it, I found the key still in the lock. It turned and I frantically opened the locking mechanism and the gate. I didn’t look back until I had shut the gate behind me, but when I did I saw only a darkened house, like any other on the street. The feeling of dreaming, of the unreal, was beginning to fade but much of it still remains even now as I pen my recollections of the events of tonight.

Did I really experience what I remember so vividly or was it some trick of the mind? Did I stumble into some strange gathering that I simply misinterpreted and misunderstood or was it something else entirely? I can only assert that I have no idea what the truth of the matter is and can only record the events as accurately as I remember them, no matter how unreal they may appear.