by Feiling, Tom
The men sauntered back to their fields. One of them pulled at the rope that tethered his goat, which threw itself into the air, bleating hopelessly, as if it knew its end was coming that afternoon. Two young boys dragged the marker halfway down the pitch and set to practising with the iron bola. Carlos and I chatted with the ref, a kindly farmer who regarded me with infinite curiosity. I don’t think he’d met a foreigner before. When the pick-up truck pulled into the yard to take us to San Gil, he touched my arm absent-mindedly, his eyes still searching mine, as if he were struggling to put his thoughts into words.
Until Álvaro Uribe came to power in 2002, many of the villages around San Gil had been too dangerous for Colombians, let alone foreigners, to visit. Now they, like hundreds of others, had seen the benefits of Uribe’s much vaunted ‘democratic security’ policies, which had put a police station in every village and sent the Army out to patrol the surrounding hills. The guerrillas had been pushed out, the paramilitaries had been demobilized and the roads were safe to travel for the first time in a generation. Gradually, Colombians began to venture onto the country roads, to marvel at the beauty of a country many of them only knew from photographs.
But Carlos wasn’t happy with the way his home department was changing. On the way to San Gil, the pick-up passed through Barichara, which every Colombian knows and loves as the country’s archetypal colonial-era town. The boutique hotels and up-market restaurants might have employed a few locals, but as more rich Colombians bought second homes in the town, rising house prices had driven plenty of local people out. The neighbouring town of Villanueva, as the name suggested, had no colonial charm to trade in and its people made their living from farming, as the people of Barichara once had. Carlos told me that despite appearances, Villanueva was more prosperous than Barichara.
As word got out of the novel peace that had settled on Colombia, its colonial towns were soon back on the gringo trail. San Gil was one of the Colombian towns highlighted in the Lonely Planet guidebook, billed as the country’s adventure sports capital, offering world-class white water rafting, kayaking, caving and paragliding.
Carlos and I checked in at the Hostel Macondo, a single-storey colonial house set on the side of a steep hill overlooking the River Suárez. Despite (or perhaps because of) its decrepitude, its dormitories were full of British, Irish, Australian, German and French backpackers – it seemed the Americans, who until 9/11 regarded this country as the most dangerous on the planet, had yet to hear the good news. Carlos sat at the hostel’s dining table, quietly regarding the foreigners, a wry smile playing around his mouth. They were all very young and very well travelled. They swapped tips on catching boats to Panama, extending their tourist visas, and the best cure for the hangover brought on by a night spent drinking aguardiente. Twice, I met twenty-something Irishmen who compared the rafting on the Suárez with the rafting to be had on the Zambezi.
Yet no one was reading One Hundred Years of Solitude in the Hostel Macondo – or anything else for that matter. Most of my fellow travellers seemed markedly uninterested in what Colombia had been through. Those who weren’t swapping travellers’ stories were silently peering into their laptops. Thanks to Facebook, their friends were always close at hand, shielding them from the isolation that used to give such journeys much of their meaning. I couldn’t help but wonder if they would have gone travelling for so many months in such strange places in the days when the only news from home came in letters written on onionskin paper picked up from postes restantes.
The young travellers at the Hostel Macondo seemed to be a hybrid of three distinct traditions. Victorian travellers saw their journeys into distant lands as a way of toughening up their minds and bodies. Such men – and the occasional woman – threw themselves into foreign cultures, partly to better understand them, but mainly to deprive themselves of the comforts of home and thereby strengthen their inner resolve. For them, travel was akin to a military exercise. In the 1960s, a new generation of more peaceable westerners returned to those remote places. They too sought spiritual renewal, but they wanted softening up, not toughening up.
Holidaymakers, on the other hand, were only looking for a chance to rest mind and body, to enjoy the sensory pleasures offered by the sea, the sun and the sand between their toes. Holidays were for workers and holidaymakers had limited ambitions. They didn’t want to discover or conquer anything, least of all themselves. They wanted to rest for the couple of weeks they had off work.
It was nice to spend an evening speaking English again, but something irked me about these young backpackers, flitting over South America like butterflies darting between exotic flowers. After so many years of intensive education and self-discipline, they were doubtless looking for a rest and an escape from routine. I’m sure that they were also looking for meaningful experiences, as they rappelled down waterfalls and threw themselves into canyons from bungee ropes. But I couldn’t help thinking that they treated travelling as another homework task. All those maps and guidebooks and itineraries looked more like a tribute to organization than imagination, as they granted themselves a week or two to ‘do’ Colombia. Perhaps it was because the country they found themselves wandering was so labyrinthine that they ended up engaging not with the strange but the familiar. They spent their time with others from the same hostel, as if they were on a school trip without their teachers.
Carlos and I had dinner at a sandwich shop down the hill from the Hostel Macondo that an English girl and her American boyfriend had just opened. It was one of a clutch of foreign-owned start-ups in the tourist towns, and an encouraging sign of how far the country had come since 2002. When I told the proprietor that I was planning to catch a boat downriver to the coast, she asked if I meant the Amazon. When I asked about the guerrillas who only a few short years ago had patrolled the hills around us, she had no idea that they had ever been present in Santander. Perhaps it was to the good that the tourists knew nothing about the combatants still fighting it out in the remoter parts of the country. But some of them barely knew which country they were in. Presumably that was what the Colombian tourist board was hoping.
Carlos and I spent our last day at a riverside spot called Pescaderito, which was a short bus ride from San Gil. It was crowded with day-trippers who had come into the mountains from Bucaramanga to enjoy the bank holiday. They swam and sunbathed in front of the tents that they had pitched along the banks of the river. Kids splashed their feet in the rock pools from inflated sun beds, while their mothers barbecued great slabs of beef and their dads blasted out the sounds of reggaeton and vallenato, the accordion-led country music I had heard in every town and village I passed through. We rock-hopped our way up the river, hoping to find Carlos’ favourite perch, which he felt sure would be quieter, but that too was crowded with what he called ‘esa mierda de colombianos’. In the end, he gave up, found some shade under a tree that leaned out over the river and prepared his pipe.
Carlos was still thinking about the tourists at the Hostel Macondo. He told me that he’d spent eight months in Reading back in 1992, while his then-girlfriend was studying for a master’s degree at the city’s university. I didn’t know that he had been to the UK. I thought of the platforms at Reading station; the masses of people on the trains, with their newspapers, iPods and attempts at privacy in public. No, he’d not liked Reading much, he said. His attempts to learn English, which he’d never had much interest in by the sounds, had stopped there. ‘But no matter – your Spanish is perfect,’ he said with a beaming smile.
In the days when his country was renowned and feared, Carlos said, the only travellers who came to Colombia were journalists, botanists and anthropologists. They came to learn about, and from, what he liked to call ‘Locombia’ – the crazy country. But it seemed that those days were gone: the colonial district of Bogotá now had twelve backpacker hostels, he said incredulously, all full of tourists whose interest extended no further than cheap cocaine and the local girls. ‘Flashpackers,’ Carlos said indigna
ntly. ‘They show up and the first thing they do is open their laptops. They don’t talk to anyone else in the hostel, let alone visit the Gold Museum!’
To my mind, Colombia needed more tourists. For years, foreigners have been too scared to come here; now that they are braving its fearsome reputation, Colombians should do their part in opening up to the rest of the world. I felt sure that their insularity, though rarely acknowledged, was responsible for much of the political intolerance that fuelled the conflict. Carlos nodded along when I said this, but like many Colombians, he had grown up with a pervasive – if rarely expressed – mistrust of the outside world, which to him invariably meant los yanquis. Despite its wealth of natural marvels, Colombia was a demonized country. Its people struggled to reconcile their national pride with the fear and loathing they inspired in the colossus to the north. So outsiders, whether gringos or not, were periodically made the butt of resentful griping.
Not only were foreigners driving property prices up and locals out, Carlos said, they had also created a market for child prostitutes in Cartagena. And yet the government still kowtowed to them, which was why the Ministry of Tourism sold the country under the slogan that ‘Colombia es Pasión’. To me it seemed an effective, albeit predictable, way to appeal to those commuters at Reading station. The word ‘passion’ was the perfect bait for those who chose to swim in that sea of greys, dark blues and blacks. To Carlos, however, it was a clear-cut case of inciting lustful Anglo-Saxons to treat his country as a whorehouse.
It was time to change the subject. We started to talk books. Carlos mentioned some of his favourites: Robert Louis Stephenson’s Treasure Island; Herman Melville’s Moby Dick; the ghost stories of Edgar Allan Poe: all Gothic, moody and distinctly Anglo-Saxon. His literary tastes seemed to jar with the easy recourse he made to gringo-baiting, but I didn’t say a word. Beneath the educated small talk, I could feel an undercurrent of suspicion building. Perhaps some of it was personal: as an outsider, I could afford to be more placatory and less critical than Carlos could. Perhaps he attributed my mildness to my being just another cosseted foreigner, wilfully blind to the true savagery of a world created by and for the likes of me.
Unthinkingly, I asked him how he made his money. He didn’t need money, he told me. When he wasn’t hiking, he lived with his eighty-year-old mother in the family home in Bucaramanga, where he spent his days watching black-and-white films. Long before I had first met him, he’d tried to build a conventional career for himself. He had worked as a journalist – and then spent ten years trying to forget everything he’d been taught about Colombia in the newsroom.
From what I’d seen of the Colombian press, this was understandable. There is no shortage of sophisticated analysis and commentary in El Tiempo and the weekly news magazine Semana. But their writers struggle with the same one-way mirror that divides rich from poor and city from countryside. This is partly down to the comparatively privileged, city-dwelling lives that they and many of their readers lead. While the editorial line remains conservative in the extreme, it is left to columnists, not reporters, to uncover the scandalous levels of corruption, collusion and impunity in the country.* The columnists at El Tiempo and Semana are the escape valves for self-censoring journalists who know just how much truth-seeking their editors will tolerate. The columnists are invariably from the same class as the country’s rulers – indeed, many are from the same families – and have the good fortune to be able to speak out without incurring the risks run by less well-connected scribes.
This evasiveness stems from fear too. Colombia is still one of the most dangerous countries in the world to work as a journalist. Sometimes the threat comes from cocaine traffickers, but any journalist probing the nefarious ties between the Army and the paramilitary death squads, or local politicians and traffickers, is at risk of being killed.
For less privileged journalists, exposé journalism can lead to reprimands from editors, or worse: death threats from hired goons.
So Carlos turned his back on the newsroom and started working as a photographer. But he soon tired of photography too. ‘It teaches you to see the world in a certain way, but it blinds you to other ways of seeing,’ he told me. So he’d become ‘a photographer who doesn’t take photographs’. He had no need of a camera – and little time for mine. In a lull in the conversation, I started scrolling through the photos I’d taken so far. ‘Going to post them on Facebook, are you?’ he asked me dismissively. I was, as it happened.
He repeated what was once an almost funny line about ‘the famous Tom Feeling’, which had grated on its third telling, particularly because I’d already told him that people have been mispronouncing my surname for as long as I can remember (it’s pronounced ‘Feiling’, as in ‘filing cabinet’, by the way). Then he cracked a joke about tom-terias, tontería being the word for stupidity. Maybe he was jealous of the book I had had published – though not speaking a word of English, he’d have known nothing about it or what anyone else thought of it.
It was time to go home. When we had arrived in Los Santos on the first day of our hiking trip, Carlos had a hearty greeting for anyone we passed. But on the way back from Pescaderito, he had nothing to say to the holidaymakers, despite a beautiful walk up from the river and then down a dusty track that overlooked the rolling hillside opposite. We found a table at a crowded rustic eating spot, where we wolfed down bowls of mute, a local stew. On the way out we grabbed a couple of patas – fresh marshmallows made from the gelatine found in horses feet, which were delicious – and headed for the pool hall on the other side of the road to kill some time while Carlos waited for the bus that would take him back to Bucaramanga.
The young owner kept the tables scrupulously clean, brushing them down and polishing the balls incessantly. We wore three-fingered gloves to play a game with only three balls. The object of the Colombian version of pool is to score points by making your designated ball hit first one colour, and then the other. It was completely novel to have to calculate not just the initial impact of the ball, but also the second and third repercussions. A game that asked you to consider the consequences of your actions seemed a fitting way to end my time with Carlos. Desde Aquellos Días was a great book, the first I had come across that suggested that Colombia’s conflict was being perpetuated not just by ‘narco-guerrillas’, but by warlords from all sides with a vested interest in keeping peace and democracy off the negotiating table. I felt for him; he seemed to have cut himself adrift from the prevailing narrative, yet had no viable alternative to hand. So he’d fallen back on his defiant intelligence, which veered from charming and insightful to ambivalent and scornful.
He was quite a shark on the pool table too, and we walked out to the bus stop with victory very much his. In the village square, a boy of eight or so and his little sister came by hawking empanadas – small, deep-fried meat pasties. ‘How many of them does your mum say you have to sell a day?’ Carlos asked the boy. ‘Thirty,’ he said. Carlos cooed in admiration. He cupped his hands and blew them like a horn. He made farting noises with his armpit. By the time the bus arrived, he had a real rapport with the boy and his little sister. The kids, at least, loved him.
5. The Armed Strugglers
Carlos might have missed the watchful respect that Colombia inspired in its foreign visitors when this was a war zone. But I needed a break and was happy to join the backpackers in San Gil for a few days. I went horse riding in the hills. I went white-water rafting down the River Suárez with the young Irishmen from the Hostel Macondo. I hung from a glider over the Canyon Chicamocha and abseiled down waterfalls. And all the while, I thought about the story of Colombia, the ending that everybody knew, and the beginning that nobody could agree on.
One day, on my way back to San Gil from a day trip, I saw signs for Mogotes. I recognized the name: my friend Ricardo had told me that he had been there in 2001, as part of a convoy of volunteers from an NGO called Red de Paz. By his reckoning, Mogotes was the most democratic village in all Colombia. It
was a peace community, one of a handful scattered across the country. The name sounds cosy, but their very existence is an indictment of all the warring parties. The guerrillas and paramilitaries were not welcome in Mogotes, and neither were the police or the Army. The villagers had even thrown out their mayor and the town councillors. They were sick of the lot of them and had decided to rule themselves.
Ricardo told me that the first he had seen of the people of Mogotes was the human chain they had formed to encircle the village. They hadn’t recognized the minibus that was trundling towards them and were braced for a confrontation. Only when the leader of the volunteers stepped forward to explain the purpose of their visit did the villagers relax for a moment. They listened, nodded and pulled their visitors into the chain.
Ricardo turned to face the surrounding hills. He saw that they weren’t alone – he could make out a row of figures in the distance. It was a detachment of guerrillas from the ELN. ‘Those villagers held my hands so tight that it hurt,’ Ricardo told me. ‘Their defiance brought tears to my eyes.’ Eventually, the guerrillas retreated from view, the villagers relaxed their grip, and the people of Mogotes accompanied their visitors to the village square. In the mayor’s office, which they had renamed the Palacio de la Democracia, the people of Mogotes gathered weekly to debate how best to spend the municipal budget. Everyone in the village had a right to join the working groups, including all children over the age of thirteen. Participatory, inclusive and supremely democratic, the people of Mogotes seemed to have come up with a real alternative to the left–right schism dividing their country.