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 7th 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 40th and 60th streets
and 7th and 13th avenues. Go anywhere west of
13th 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 7th 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 55th street, where I work, the malignant 7th
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 59th 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 4th street and 72nd 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 7th 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.
