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.