Singing in the Rain

It’s an old truism that people in Latin American countries will give you directions even if they haven’t the slightest idea what they’re talking about. I am sure this rule applies to much of the Anglo-Saxon, Romantic, Buddhist and Confucian worlds as well, but given that most of us are too proud – or local – to ask for directions at home, don’t care if we get lost in Umbria and wouldn’t bother learning Thai or Canto, we’ll never know if the rule applies to them as well.

(An aside: as adolescents we would routinely send suburbanites and out-of-towners as far in the wrong direction as possible, though less out of malice than the guilty but undeniable pleasure of seeing one’s snot-nosed fib taken as truth, by an adult no less!)

To be sure, getting lost is one of the central “joys” of traveling – granted you’re not in Honduras or Harare – so you should relish the opportunity to wander about in circles when seeking counsel in strange locales. The worst that can happen is chancing upon a freeway, running into a classmate from dentistry school or undergoing an unexpected kidney transplant. You may never find your restaurant or hotel, but neither would you have witnessed the scruffy, opinionated gentleman pleasuring himself in the alley if you’d stuck strictly to your map. Asking for directions abroad is like unprotected sex in East St Louis: you win some, you lose many more. But like a workaholic in a custody battle, it’s one you’re happy to concede.

On the other hand, I often ask for directions even when I know where I’m going. Like a Stasi with fifty vain and underfed informants, it’s fun to see if Citizen #17564 will voluntarily confirm what you already know. It legitimizes your day job and sense of direction – though it’s even better when you ask directions in a language other than your own: “Herein lies a strange and bearded babble-talker who seconds my good sense!” On the other hand, when the man at the fried banana-peel stand sends you in the wrong direction, you simply chuckle, complement your superior intellect and keep on walking, fat and happy with the satisfaction of being ever so tolerant of simple-minded folk.      

At other times, however, you need directions: it’s raining acid; that odorous fellow is still following you; you’ve drunken one too many mid-morning coffees and urgently have to take little Hans to his swimming lesson. This is where things get tricky. There is an art to asking random passers-by for geographical advice – it’s a request that hangs in a delicate cosmological balance; it’s the very heart of Public Trust, the forum of Saving Face – the literal public sphere in all its nitty-gritty splendor. Ask too few people how to reach the emergency room, and your sample size won’t be large enough to take the standard deviation into account. Ask too many people and the street will soon smell blood; it always does. If they sense for a moment you’ve already been rebuffed several times, any source of local knowledge will start texting or dry heaving as you approach. People have a sixth sense for desperation: they avoid it like the plague. Why else are we perfectly willing to spend $100 on truffles and get-rich novellas while refusing to contribute 25¢ to the Naked Antarctican Children’s Fund at the checkout? Contra Zizek, some causes are too lost to care.

By now you’re wondering, quite reasonably, what we’re hammering on about. Now I recall. Getting directions to the post office. Whenever aimlessly abroad, one is perpetually in search of one of three things: a post-office, a bookstore or a toilet. Depending on how intrepid you are, the latter two can be found in many unsuspecting places. (Though for fear of future job prospects, I needn’t go into detail). On the other hand, convincing someone to take your chicken scratch across the oceans on the sly is no small feat. Sending a handwritten note across thousands of miles of jungle, swamp, desert, plain and ocean is still a divinely cheap and charitable service for just $1. That post offices still exist is one of the understated wonders of the current century.   

For fully three weeks I’d been bopping around town with a Botero naked-lady postcard I wanted to send to Harry. Wandering the city streets in vain, I thought of what my grandfather used to say of otherwise abundant things: “If you’re looking, you’ll never find it.” Sadly, it’s a line that rings true through much of modern life: a 711 in Bangkok or a job in the United States; best not to seek if you’ve any hope of finding. On the other hand my father, child of the postwar decades, had always implored us to “Ask and thou shall receive.” Though he never specified whether this referred to redemption, rigatoni or property rights, I asked directions to the post office from a trusted work acquaintance and made for 7^th avenue.

To sound an almost tiresome note, the center of Bogotá is famously ugly and confused. Were Walmart, postwar Poland and a pockmarked Mexican sailor to have a baby, it would look like Bogotá between 40^th and 60^th streets and 7^th and 13^th avenues. Go anywhere west of 13^th avenue and, like a bull terrier, it’s so ugly it’s endearing. The entrepreneurial spirit of working class, inner-city Latin America is ripe with the same stunted optimism and aesthetic indifference that ravages America’s exurbs. The only difference is that the latter’s strip-malls have stripped our hoods of brick; Bogotá’s commercial underbelly must rely on corrugated metal and plaster. Yet architectural abominations aside, the graffiti’s as grandiose as ever and, rain or shine, the smell of melted butter dances around the corner of every bakery. Whatever the faults of this confused metropolis, more often than not it smells good.

The post office address I was given was nine blocks away. I turn right out of my quaint and quiescent workplace nestled between three-story modernist homes and sleek six-story brick apartment buildings and amble down the tree-lined hill. My workplace, like my apartment, is in a funky, fly, fresh and fiendish little neighborhood that hugs the foothills just west of 7^th avenue. Go up the hill and you’ve a cataract of cutesy cafés, bars, antique furniture stores and boutique Argie steakhouses. Both are green, spritely and delightful, lined with universities, organic grocery stores and bodegas that turn into makeshift bars at night. One of them in particular only plays Natalia Imbruglia; no I will not tire of the neighborhood anytime soon. Go down the hill, however, and you’ve another story. At the bottom of 55^th street, where I work, the malignant 7^th avenue lays perpendicular like a drunken, indigestive alligator: harmless to the nimble, but threatening all the same. I frog my way to the median, pause to inhale the fumes, and hop to the other side once the second wave of suicidal cabbies have collided at the red light thirty yards to the left. The worst should be behind us.  

I cut up to 59^th street through a barren plaza ringed with gas stations, tattoo parlors and faded parillas. Normally the benches are full of men in cheap suits sucking down Pall Malls, eyeing the Second Sex in no unambiguous manner. Yet today they’re nowhere to be seen. Even the usual sprinkling of chip-and-Chiclet peddlers had taken shelter from the storm; above, a vindictive shade of grey was forming.

As if on cue, the skies open up: first with the clamor of a frustrated adolescent, steady and vexing but scattered. I was only five blocks from my chosen destination but decided to take shelter in a half-covered food-court. A man in a cowboy hat was leafing through a magazine of socially questionable content. The temperature dropped precipitously. Two minutes went by, then ten: it finally dawned on me there was no out-waiting the storm. The heavens were spilling into the city’s gutters like a wave of refugees into Cyprus – sad, wet, relentless and grey. I pulled out my pocket-sized umbrella and started at a sprint.

Giant puddles blossomed at the speed of Russia’s mortality rate: there was no getting around them. I darted the last five blocks toward an address once scribbled on my hand but now quickly disappearing. Cold and dripping with resentment, I was almost there. All I had to do was cross Caracas Avenue, mighty thoroughfare of up-and-downtown buses, Bogotá’s equivalent of the 2,3,4 & 6 trains compressed into one long, ugly tribute to human disappointment.

It was raining so hard I couldn’t make out the “walk” sign on the other side of the street. All the same, there was a momentary lull in traffic. Lining out from where I stood in all four directions were endless rows of sullen yellow headlights, staking out their place in line as cattle to the slaughter. I began my madhat hopscotch across the 200-foot intersection, trying to avoid the larger puddles and potholes along the way. The light turned green as I was halfway across.  

The dim yellow headlights lunged at me from every angle. I stopped looking where I was skipping and sprinted for the curb: the tailpipe of a pinstriped pickup skirt past me, leaving a broken levee of cold and wet November in its wake. I was practically at the corner – precious, coveted corner, home to the washed-off address on my hand, dead-mustachioed-president-studded-stamps, moldy boxes, free stickers and festering packages, a customs house for all my heart’s content. I would buy all the postage that 10,000 Colombian pesos could afford.

When I peered up through the rain, however, all I saw was a boarded-up shoe store; there was no plastic bald-headed eagle in sight. Had I heard wrong? Not gone far enough? I stopped off in the cornerstore to gather my thoughts, debating between anger and despair in equal measure. I asked the man next to me if he believed in postcards or jelly belly-bearing storks. It could only be a few blocks further. 

Barely a block west of one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares and the neighborhood had already turned to stone. Frumpy brown apartment buildings had given way to one-story factories, abandoned workshops and boarded up underwear outlets. I was back in Saint Louis quicker than you could say Judy Garland was a closest caper. I paused and peered into the distance – a landscape unchanged as far as the eye could see. An even less fortunate fellow traveler looked up at me from his curbside flask, a giddy toothless grin: “Getting wet?” I thought about kicking him but decided to pretend I didn’t understand.

I went back to the corner to ask directions. “Correo?” (Some combination of mail or post office, depending on the dictionary) – and was met with blank stares. “Oficina de correo?” (‘Letter-office’ – another butchered variant I’d found in desperation on the Internet) Again nothing. “The box where you insert messages to send to dweller-men in other lands?” Not a hint of human understanding. I clearly wasn’t speaking a word of audible Spanish, and my hand gestures of airplanes and happy grandmothers by the fireside weren’t getting me any closer to the truth.

Don’t get me wrong – people were quite friendly each time I stopped to interrogate them in the rain. Some were simply curious while others wanted to help. A man in turquoise even rang his brother on the phone, yet none had the faintest idea of what I was talking about. Finally a little old man emerged at the end of a five-side game of telephone as the rain was letting up. “Ahh! You are looking for 4-7-2!” I asked him to repeat it again, flustered at the code-tongue he was speaking. Yet I had heard correctly. Was 472 an address? A postal code? A collect-call number? We were nowhere near the corner of 4^th street and 72^nd avenue, but I would find this brotherhood of letter-mongers if it were the last thing I did on earth that day.

I stopped at the first cigarette-stand en route for a second opinion. “Good sire, are you familiar with 472? Sending message to person in different nation?” It’s almost cutesy how rapidly you lose confidence in a different language once you’ve met with even moderate failure. “You are very wet, young man! Go to the place with the green awning, they will show you how to send your letter.” My second opinion was giving me a third, but try I must. I set out around the bend in search of the green awning.  

To spare my patient readers another agonizing chain of missed connections, I will (try to) skip to the end. When the friendly woman underneath the green awning quoted me $40 USD to send a postcard express (presumably it would arrive in Yekaterinburg that evening), I asked the gun-toting security guard next me how he would go about sending a letter, should the need arise. He graciously set down his shotgun to get on his smartphone. Ten minutes later, he suggested I go back to my original corner in the rain. I thanked him and set off once again for 472, whatever and wherever that may be.

Eight blocks later, I was around the corner from my apartment and chatting with the man with the chip-and-Chiclet stand. “Yes, once upon a time – not here, but not far…. I do recall. Perhaps you could walk up that hill,” and he pointed toward the mountain in the east. A moment later a well-dressed man stopped to buy a spare cigarette. Seeing me and politely frowning, he asked if I needed help. “I am looking for the four seven four – I mean two four seven… no four seven two!” He looked at me ponderously and started to reach in his pocket. I thanked him before he could pull out his smartphone and turned to leave.

I moped the twelve blocks back to work with a stack of dripping postcards in my hand, my only shoes seven-times soaked, my ridiculous skinny maroon jeans now drenched to the knees. The rain had let up but the monstrous puddles on 7^th avenue were to be avoided: the buses still came careening down the avenue at breakneck speeds; if they caught you in the median of the street trying to cross between lights, you were as good as unemployed. I returned to work further awash in street sauce.

That evening I went out for a pack of skittles. In a fairly adventurous mood, I decided to take a different route, cutting up the alley rather than taking the main road to the candyman. The 472, Bogotá’s code-name for post office, was on the corner, a hundred yards from my apartment; it had been closed for fifteen minutes. 

Preliminary Impressions of Bogotá

If briskly done, work is a fifteen walk from my new apartment. A seven-story orange brick building at the end of a quiet makeshift courtyard, my new home is two blocks east of the bustling and polluted 7^th Avenue, a dusty, grey python that snakes its way from the historic colonial district in the south to the tip of the affluent northern suburbs. Though hideous, un-commanding and horribly traffic-ridden, it is Bogotá’s most famous thoroughfare – the road the rebels consider necessary (if not sufficient) to taking en route to seizing power.

Though an ugly, unplanned and unforgiving city, Bogotá has pockets of charm and wealth that pop up at unexpected places. Ok, not really. You know where the boogie bits are and how to find them – they´re in the hills and hugging the mountain range, anywhere east of 7^th avenue and north of 70^th street. Moreover, for that matter, even the boogie spots have relatively little charm. Wealthy or newly minted Latin Americans, at least en masse, are some of the most unimaginative elites outside of the Persian Gulf and mainland China. From the southernmost tip of Argentina to the northern jungles of Colombia, they like, eat, wear and drive the exact same thing. Car: Toyota 4-Runner; attire: Polo button-down with pink sweater draped across the neck; food: steak; demeanor: always and ever thrilled to be white. Whether it’s the coif or the gait, boogie Latinos seem to signal from hundreds of meters away one thing and one thing only: I am white. Acknowledge this first, young pleb, and then we can talk about sex, popcorn and outer space. In Latin America, establishing racial ‘affiliation’ is more important than creed, profession, political and sexual orientation combined.
   

The horrors of chattering about class aside, we can move onto more compelling topics like traffic, glue-sniffing and transvestites in the lesser parts of town. I shall start with the first neighborhood I inhabited, La Candelaria – the old colonial heart of the city that’s carved into the eastern mountain-range overlooking the city’s grey, expansive sprawl.  Like a successful second round of plastic surgery, from this view the cityscape is gorgeous at night and almost convincing by day.

The makeup and layout of La Candelaria follows a somewhat traditional pan-American pattern. In the beginning, it was the governmental, cultural and residential hub of a small but beautiful capital city that could only pretend to run a stream of provinces hundreds of miles away. Consisting of churches, ministerial palaces and piazzas, it had the pretensions of a theologian but the training of a priest; it would never be ready for the population explosions and political calumnies of the 20^th century. When the rural and unemployed underclass moved in from the war-ravaged countryside from the 1940s and 1950s onward, the moneyed elements fled to the north – then still a beacon of fincas (country estates) and late-19^th century country-style English homes (to this day, in the nicer northern commercial districts, there will be an English manor on one corner and some combination of retail banks and upscale chain-eateries on the other three). Capital departed, the original neighborhood fell into disrepair, and malaria and prostitution stepped in to stabilize rents.

This second stage – overpopulation and grinding decay of once beautiful city centers – can last for much longer than it would in the States. North of the Caribbean, cities tend to have an endless capacity to expand, which empties out the ghettos (usually beginning in the 1970s and 1980s) and paves the way for gentrification a generation later. In Latin America, the cultural core of city centers merely festers under the weight of their former beauty.

Then come the gringos. Whereas American cities must rely upon Albanians and well-meaning suburban software designers to inhabit its crumbling, rustbelt core, South America’s urban gems just wait for the Swiss, Krauts, Frogs and Israelis to arrive. Once the Franco-Swiss bakeries, cafés and Kosher pizza joints appear, you know it’s almost safe to walk around at night. Hence the curious amalgam that is currently La Candelaria: at the bottom of the hill a majestic, crumbling core full of baroque, colonial architecture, high-quality graffiti, snack-peddlers, hurried suits, baby-faced conscripts from the hinterland and generally well-mannered beggars. Inching up the hill, you’ve a younger and less depressing set: local college kids, foreigners, slightly savvier small-scale entrepreneurs, all losing their breath up and down the meandering cobble-stoned backstreets of cafés, bakeries, hostels, dirty bars and burgeoning boutique hotels.

They also say that La Candelaria is one of the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods – a threat that shouldn’t be taken lightly in a city historically – and a country presently – racked by violence. That said, after several weeks in Bogotá you are warned that every street corner, bus route, back alley, coffee shop, tea parlor, tennis court, hair salon and salmon wholesaler is dripping with the blood of innocent, hair-parted, Pokemon-playing 15-year olds. For being an abundantly friendly, warm and generally welcoming people, Bogotanos, as the city´s inhabitants are known, are incredibly mistrusting of their compatriots.

Not, however, that one should take security measures lightly. Of the able-bodied foreigners I’ve met thus far, all of them have been robbed at knife or gunpoint at some point. One buddy even had his phone snatched from his hand on two occasions – though managed to chase down and retrieve his device each time. Then agian, he was aided by an anonymous local bystander on at least one of those occasions; while one Colombian robs you, another helps you track down and murk the perpetrator – a fitting analogy for a famously friendly if iniquitous land. 

Such is the curious security pathos that reigns in Bogotá: the locals, none of whom seem to have ever been robbed, mugged or carted off to have their organs harvested, are infinitely more concerned with security matters (not hailing cabs on the street, avoiding certain streets, neighborhoods and popular pastimes, etc) than the foreigners who, once made to separate with their valuables by threat of death or at least dismemberment, seem to accept the odd stick-up with ease and something close to humor.

On the other hand, it’s rather easy to spout such truisms when I’ve had a perfectly safe and sane experience; I’m sure that after being shortchanged at the newspaper stand I’ll be clamoring to join a paramilitary death squad. Such is the beauty of second-hand narrative and privileged hypocrisy. Indeed, the only time we came even relatively close to a “security situation” was a pedestrian game of chicken I played with 5 or 6 yoots, which ended when I pulled out and clutched my silver thermos – still full of ginger tea – and mustered my best Groznian grimace. They didn’t quite scatter, but we got back to the hostel without a scuffle.  

At the time there was a beautiful fireplace in our drafty room, and I’d inquired about firewood the night before. (Remember it’s autumn and nighttime at 9,000 feet). Not understanding the response I was given, I had smiled and gone back to my frigid quarters, empty handed and ill at ease. Though I hadn’t smoked a cigarette or touched the devil-juice since Chicago, my health was still in tatters. A week of pre-departure festivities combined with the cold and elevation had been taking their toll. Somehow we had to get warm.

As we approached the entrance to the hostel that evening, a scruffy, ragged man was leaning against the door. Beneath him was a large and tattered bag of unidentified shrapnel. As he looked at me, a glint shot across his saddened eye. He mumbled something and reached into his pocket; I began to reach for my thermos. I paused 7-8 feet in front of him and listened again: “I’ve brought you the firewood, señor,” he mumbled again. It was dark and almost cold – and had been for an hour; there was no telling how long he’d been waiting. I gave him a $5 note, perhaps a tad too much, and hauled the bag inside. Twenty minutes later we sat mesmerized before the cackling flames, sipping ginger tea and savoring every frost-hardened skittle.  

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To wake up at the top of the hill in La Candelaria on a beaming, brisk and sunny morning is to sip from the shiny can of contentment. As you leave the courtyard of Alegria’s hostel, stepping over two giant, slumbering hounds perched in the doorway – one a snow-white husky with fire-blue eyes, the other an enormous, lazy brown Labrador – you emerge into a sea of yellow, blue and green crossed with shards of red and purple. On the corner across the street is a struggling French bakery where a young man dressed as a gendarme pretends to direct traffic into his patron’s eatery. To the right, the narrow cobbled-stoned 9^th Avenue plunges down a hill toward one of the neighborhood’s many universities. In the distance, the same small street creeps back up again, completing a momentous U and scattering in the stark-green hills overlooking the neighborhood. For the first few blocks, the declivitous row is flanked by freshly painted, newly restored blue, orange, yellow and turquoise colonial homes en route. Money – enough at least for paint and trim – seems in abundance these days, and every crumbling, gutted old glory in La Candelaria is perched next to a beautifully refurbished building. It’s enough to want to sneak your savings and loan officer a bag of croissants and a bottle of middling aguardiente.   

If you look to the left you’re also met with an equally precipitous decline – this time, however, with a view toward the entire western horizon of the city. Since your glasses are old, chipped and need checking, you cannot make out the smokestacks and psychiatric hospitals in the distance that give the town its particularly dystopian flavor; instead all you can see is a cascading series of terra cotta-tiled roofs and the outline of 17^th century cathedrals cast against an immaculate blue and fluffy-white sky.  To the right and up the hill, 3-4 blocks at most, is the end of the city and the beginning of the world of make-shift favelas. But before you can focus your gaze upon the orange and yellow cracker-stacked houses that dot the notorious heights, your attention is stolen by a group of youths careening down the pothole-riddled hill on two-bit skateboards, guys and girls alike, at maternal fear-inducing speeds. Oh but to be young and poor and give not one half of two shiites! But I am young and poor - and oddly enough am beginning to care. 

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Though a poor and reputedly dangerous neighborhood, La Candelaria is still the center of Bogotá’s daytime cultural life. Half the museums – including the spectacular Museo del Banco de la República that houses the Botero collection – grace its stone and stucco-laden streets, along with one of only two fine (academic) bookstores in a city of 10 million. Many of the major foreign cultural outfits (Alliance Francaise, International House) have also set up shop, not to mention ambitious hometown initiatives such as the Centro Cultural Gabriel García Márquez.

Yet other cultural elements are also omnipresent. In good ‘South American’ fashion, cracked-out, dreaded trans-Latin hippies – the kind we aspired to being at the age of 18 – line the backstreets peddling bracelets and dubious stimulants. Dirty, dark and dusty colectivos sputter up and down the streets, spewing sulfur into the eyes of pedestrian passers-by. Indigenous camouflaged conscripts pretend to stand guard on chiseled-down corner pavements, the edges of which are worn from years of pointless lingering, window-shopping, lip-smacking, shit-talking, ciggie-slurping woman-gawking. Every day – in the First and Third worlds alike – billions of public-service salaried hours are squandered doing fuck-all; the only reason we associate wasted time with the developing world is that we’re far more accustomed to better hiding it in the First. (Though not always).

Yet soldiers, wandering sages and moldy 25-cent empanada stands are not the only thing that make La Candelaria Bogotá’s most compelling neighborhood. Even the angry, poetic and often political graffiti and the missing sidewalk manhole-covers exposing all manner of urban indignities are not sufficient. What truly gives the neighborhood its timeless charm are the rambunctious hordes of youngsters that flock each day to visit the neighborhood’s national museums.  

It’s long been known, if not admitted, that some countries have much cuter children than others. Colombia is one of them – though no doubt it’s also an Andean trend. Adult Bolivians, for example, do not generally turn heads in Milan, but their children are far more adorable than any blond devil you’re likely to see in South Ken or Central Park West. The same could be said for Colombia’s young, although their later selves also garner positive feedback from the international community – a platitude my readers can rest assured I needn't dwell upon.  The single biggest joy of living in La Candelaria, then, was to spend the first fifteen minutes of one’s morning stroll down the hill invariably surrounded by shrieking, chirping, laughing children.

Rebelliously obedient, disciplined but disorderly, schoolchildren from the global hood are a light unto the heavens. Before the crime, corruption and crass inequality of their respective societies have taken hold upon their little, unshaped and unremitting lives,  they exhibit a joy that’s simple and uninhibited. Such, perhaps, is the eternal promise of the global hood: its youth and good humor – up until a certain age; a historical knack for not taking oneself too seriously – until it’s too late.

But eventually the children file into the museum, and the juggling gypsies recede behind the shadows. I reach the bus station at the bottom of the hill; the Spanish colonial, neoclassical and faux-beaux arts have already morphed into an abusive, pseudo-modernist nightmare. To look up and down 10^th Avenue is to witness an urban death-scape of bubblegum, cheap lingerie and stolen cell-phone shops. The people are markedly shorter, uglier, sadder. Nearly everyone is stunted and dispossessed.

Each morning that first week, at the bottom of the hill, I would board the Transmilenio and head northward to wander in search of more permanent lodging. A sleek and shiny new network of cross-town busses, the Transmilenio is the perfect embodiment of what one American artist once called the “multicultural slave-ship,” a sparkling red capsule locked and loaded with hundreds of thousands of discontented souls hastily crammed together, sailing past a crumbling grey miasma of ruined neighborhoods and ravaged visions. 

After sixty blocks of urban gangrene, the bus eventually drops you off on Avenida Caracas. To the left, facing north, is a pet store with flashing neon lights encouraging you, as everything in Latin America does, to “feel the passion” and buy that set of goldfish. To the right, a block of dilapidated gothic-ware outlets that might have garnered my attention were it not for the 20-30 mariachi men, in full costume but without instruments, mulling about the corner, sipping mango juice and smoking Reds. No matter what time of day or day of week, the same jumble of mariachi men can always be found at this intersection, waiting for something funny to happen or someone to die. I checked to make sure my wallet was still there, consulted my tattered map and headed east toward the hills.