I have
never seen a dead person. Whatever our childish claims to worldliness, we
haven’t seen the half of it. Or even an eighth. One can spend years in the most
“interesting” places without once seeing the inside of a hospital, a prison, an
old folks’ home, a factory or a dairy farm. I have no idea where candy or
Tupperware come from.
Nor, I
suspect, do you. Most of us (reading this) live blindingly sheltered lives,
where death and production have long since been removed from view. They only
things I can make are pasta and conversation. And I’m not really making the
pasta. Or the conversation: the wine is.
Last week I
saw a beggar on the other side of the street. I was in a posh neighborhood not
far from my apartment and mistakenly made eye contact with him as the light turned red. When the bulletproofed SUVs came to a halt, he rapidly hobbled across the street on stilted wooden crutches, hustling over
to get our full attention. He certainly did. Catching a glimpse of his leg,
I was hit by a surge of guilt and disgust: his right foot had been hacked off
just above the ankle and was dripping with blood and cartilage. The wound could
not have been more than a day old.
Who was
this man and why had his foot been bloodily severed? Gangrene? Debt? Landmine? Sadism? Why was he panning for coins in a broad
daylight and not at the hospital? I hadn’t the courage or compassion to pursue
either question to its rightful conclusion. Instead, I walked away as quickly as I could without running,
as if pretending not to flee the
scene of a heinous crime already committed would somehow lessen my complicity
in doing absolutely nothing about it.
This is the
closest I have come to seeing Colombia’s low-scale, fifty-year war. Yet in all
likelihood there was nothing political about the man’s predicament: from the
point of view of the passerby, he was little more than a minor environmental
hazard, an aesthetic blight on the way to brunch. (For the record: we were on
our way back). But from the
privileged corners of Bogotá, this is what the rest of the low-scale war raging
– or buzzing – in the rest of the country looks and feels like: at best, an
uncomfortable nuisance; at worst, nothing. Some brown, unfortunate soul
bleeding to death in the curb. All I have to do is put my foot on the gas and
it disappears.
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It was a
beautiful Saturday morning. We’d had a little dinner party the night before: curry,
friends and conversation; peanuts and cold beer; youtubing old George W
speeches: the happy, frivolous times of the young and relatively privileged. The
next morning we were so proud of ourselves for having such remarkably good
lives we decided to splurge and have breakfast in the posh end of the
neighborhood. Warm croissants and freshly squeezed orange juice. Strong black
Italian coffee. Waiters with little vests who smiled. Fellow patrons of only
the lightest complexion – each of who was sporting the latest yoga garb or
Harvard alumni gear. Scrambled eggs with corn, feta and mushrooms. Surely this is what civilization smells like in 21st
century Colombia.
_________________________________________________________
I hurried
back home – as if the faster I walked, the quicker the memory of dripping blood
and mangled flesh would fade from mind. We were going to a concert that
afternoon and one shouldn’t dwell upon the undercurrents of history and depridation before
enjoying a good performance of Maurice Ravel’s Bolero. Yet I couldn’t rid the image from my mind. I wonder if he has died by
now.
It was our
first time heading to the National University of Colombia, in whose majestically
run-down Auditorio León de Greiff, Bogotá’s outstanding Philharmonic plays once a
week.
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The three
best universities in Colombia follow three separate trajectories. The National,
as it is referred to, is considered by many the foremost: it has the smartest
students, is the hardest to get into and boasts some of the country’s most
prolific professors. That being said, it is also famously radical, hugely
underfunded and very rundown (depsite the fact that it charges a progressive tuition rate: very expensive for those who can pay, nearly free for those who can't). It's riddled facade and Leninist propaganda was par for the course for any public university in
Latin America (outside Brazil, where the best schools are public and heavily
subsidized by the state but reserved for those who attended private high
schools).
The campus
of the “National” is a predictable shambles: a smattering of late 1960s,
plaster-of-Paris-white tower-blocks spread across a mass of swampy lands carved
out of the grey, browns and blues of central Bogotá. Like an ageing actress, it
is ugly but not without a certain charm. Next, but not necessarily in that
order, is the Jesuit-run Javeriana University, a very stellar institute and the
bastion of the country’s clever, urbane and Catholic bourgeoisie. It is just
down the road from me and produced the majority of researchers at my current
place of employment. (All of whom are very smart and lovely people, something I
should have made clearer months ago; this blog is admittedly too harsh on
Bogotá and its wonderful inhabitants).
Finally,
the Universidad de los Andes, the only private non-sectarian university in the
country and the (un)official home of the country’s ultra-elite. If your father
is a senator, a warlord or the head of corporate development for a major
multinational, you go to Los Andes. Though a very fine school, it also has a reputation
for champagne socialism: an odd trait when you consider that members of the
Left have a penchant for getting killed in Colombia. Then again, if it’s best to
know your enemy, why not study him in undergrad? If Yale and USC had a
one-night stand in the Adirondacks, their lovechild would resemble the
Universidad de los Andes.
_________________________________________________________
To get to
the National, you head west from the plush green neighborhoods that hug the
city’s eastern mountain range. (Or, if you’re not an overprivileged twat such
as myself, you head north from the southern slums, east from the sprawling
exurbs or south from the blocks of nicer, newer suburbs to the north). If I did
not make this clear enough in previous posts, going west is not a pleasant
experience. Not that it’s dangerous; it’s just very unfortunate for the eyes,
ears, lungs and soul. As if the city’s planning commission were a mule, a
prostitute and a malarial child, the dusty parts of central Bogotá that have sprung
up in the past 3-4 decades are crass, grey, shoddy, shortsighted, uninspired,
chaotic and tacky. That in no way reflects my opinion of the people that
inhabit these quarters: I am sure they are much nicer than many of those in my
neighborhood. Just that their architectural forebears did them no favors
whatsoever.
The
National is surrounded by bizarre and middling neighborhoods of this sort, such
that when you find it, you’re in something of a green oasis. The taxi lets us
out where the highway runs perpendicular to the campus’ eastern entrance. Just
before the unassuming gates – closer to metal detectors than lions or tigers in
stone – are two hotdog stands and a mural voicing its firm support for the
Union Patriótica (UP), a left-wing coalition led by demobilized
members of the FARC. Encouraged to enter electoral politics by the conservative
government of President Belisario Betancourt in the 1980s, over 4,000 of the UP’s members
would be murdered for their political affiliation in the next 6-7 years. A
great many of them were shot in broad daylight with the tacit support of the
state and military; their assassins enjoy almost perfect impunity to this day.
It’s
unfortunately a Saturday, so we don’t get to see the brainy little hordes of radical
lefties marching about chain-smoking, generally sporting long and mangy hair
and overgrown, elbow-patchy jackets (mind you: this is pure speculation). Visiting
college campuses anywhere is an extremely insightful glimpse into a country,
city or society’s psyche – all the more so when you’re abroad. Though it’s not
a representative sample of any country’s population, it gives you some idea of what
the people who will be running much of their polity's educational system, government,
non-profit and cultural scene will look like over the next quarter century. But
I degress.
_________________________________________________________
It was
chilly that day: over the empty campus lingered a grey and menacing green – the
kind that speaks as much to failure as it does to fertility. Once through the
rusted metal gates that protect our citadel of learning, there are kiosks of
varying delight: candy, used books and pirated films to last entire semesters
without stepping inside a library. Inside, we are not the only ones: a certain
kind of literati – the good, impecunious one – has also slipped through the
gates to attend the show.
The line is
long and the crowd is placid. People look thoughtful, modest, intelligent and
interested: the kind that cities should naturally produce – and be produced by.
Little Andean girls are dressed up in white gowns, accompanied by their
fathers; an old incapacitated man in tweed is wheeled around by his doting
friends. The university bookstore is just to my left; in its windows are old,
yellow tomes on biophysics, agricultural methods and comparative politics by
varying faculty from the National.
We get to
the front of the line and I produce my barely legible student ID card (nyungkas
is broke). I ask for one adult ticket and one student: shameless,
you’ll say – but would you rather I spend the money on skittles or beer? The
kind woman gives us two student tickets, smiles and tells us to enjoy the show.
They are $5 a piece.
We leave
the outdoor ticket booth and walk around the corner toward the entrance to the
auditorium. Now we are in a Latin American public university. The heart of
campus is a grand open plaza: on one side the library (top picture), named after Camilo
Torres, the Marxist priest turned guerrilla who died fighting in the Colombian
jungle in the 1960s. The massive wall of the library is empty save for the bearded
smile of his reassuring face. Of course, the priest is also brandishing an
automatic weapon. To the left of the library is the nursing tower, a
monstrosity that would make the French public university system proud. Finally,
facing the library is our Auditorio León de Greiff (lower picture). Again, a single image flanks
its off-white walls: that of Che, vindictive as ever and glaring into Camilo’s
eyes. “Why are you enjoying yourself? We both wind up dead, you know – our
causes as lost now as they will be 50 years from now.”
_________________________________________________________
I have no
idea how to write about music, so very soon I shall let you go. Suffice to say
that what had on the outside been a sad, gray and disheartening scene – whatever
my deep admiration for leftist iconography – soon turned into something
beautiful. Outside the theatre, it was cold, raining, rundown and revanchist.
Whatever the moral high-ground may be, murals of Lenin Square depicting
“victims of police, gringo and imperialist brutality” do not always conjure
warm and fuzzy feelings of studious indifference. Inside the auditorium,
however, is a completely different world – a warm and majestic place with soft,
thoughtful lighting, striking angles and patterned wooden panels dancing up and
down the horizon of the auditorium at different heights, a skyline of sliding
Japanese doors. The kind of ambiance that makes you want to do your homework,
honor your parents, drink Earl Grey and smoke strong cigarettes.
By the time
the first movement began, the theatre was nearly sold-out. For the cost of a
sandwich, we were sitting twenty rows from the stage, front and center. It was
International Woman’s Day (I’m not sure if this is celebrated in other parts of
the world or just in machista countries), so the emphasis was on, you guessed
it, cosmetic patterns of galactic stardust. Seriously: just what about women
would they praise? After all, the current conductor of the Bogotá Philharmonic
is a woman, in addition to the lead pianist. Must we spell everything out?
In perfect
National University fashion, the first presenter opened with a speech on the resilience
of Colombian women in the countryside: their strength, resolve and
determination in the face of paramilitary violence, land grabs and economic
ruin. It was profoundly political and very moving. In a country that by and
large does not read, it is also too easy to assume that people are somehow less
informed or politically engaged; in the case of the symphony-going crowd that
is simply not the case.
_________________________________________________________
At intermission,
people mingled and went for a coffee. A tinto, as black gold is called in
Colombia, was fifty cents. People of all ages, tastes and styles mingled in the
lobby: everyone seemed to know one another and get along as old chums. Old and young;
well-dressed and in rags; the hyper-educated and the self-taught worker;
Spaniard, mestizo and indian: they were all there. Like a Mister Rogers
block party for Colombians between the age of 10 and 90, everyone seemed
content and solidaire. It was the
People’s Philharmonic in every sense of the term.
Since I
cannot put into writing how beautifully they played, I cannot convey the
feeling of rapture that came over me as I sipped my dirty, weak coffee in the
rain. This is why people live in cities, pay taxes, ride buses and work in
cubicles – five days a week for decades on end. For afternoons such as this, it
is worth every minute.
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