That night, settled into the comfortably furnished fifth-floor apartment rented for me by the embassy in an upscale neighbourhood, I couldn’t fall sleep, unable to forget the pitiless howls of the enraged rabble chasing the gamine along the sidewalk. Nor could I forget the sight of the terrorized little boy attempting to defend himself against what he must have believed was another big person trying to do him harm before getting up and fleeing, injured and wailing in fear, to seek a refuge wherever he could find it. I must be suffering from cultural shock, I told myself. Law-abiding citizens here apparently deal with petty thieves in ways we would never tolerate in Canada. They must have their reasons. Who am I to judge? I’m a foreigner, a diplomat, and visitor in their country.
But I knew nothing could justify the beating and killing of children, whatever their offense. I was just making excuses for my cowardly behaviour when confronted with absolute evil. I had lacked the compassion and courage to help the gamine and had allowed Alfonso to convince me that brutality against gamines was an acceptable way to deal with homeless children. Eventually, I grew drowsy, fell asleep, and began to dream. I was a boy of six again, swinging on a rope attached to a high branch of an apple tree in the front yard of my home back in Penetang.
A soft warm spring breeze was blowing out of the West off Georgian Bay, filling the air with the perfume of apple and lilac blossoms. Robins, gulls, crows, and red-wing blackbirds were calling to each other in their secret languages, and in the distance I could hear the familiar sounds of a locomotive shunting boxcars in a railway yard, the hammering of steel on steel somewhere, mothers calling to their children, and further away a tugboat blowing its horn as it shepherded a freighter into its berth in the harbour. I swung higher and higher, crying out in pure animal pleasure at the joy of existence. I had never felt so alive, never been so happy, never so secure in the love of my parents, my uncles, aunts, and cousins, and of my devoted grandpapa, especially my devoted grandpapa, who had attached the rope to the branch of the apple tree.
Suddenly, within my dream, I heard the roar of the mob and saw the gamine staring at me again with frightened eyes. “Why you and not me?” the gamine was whispering. “Why you and not me?” Still within my dream, I realized the gamine’s question had only one terrible answer. Life was a game of chance. I could have been born as that gamine. Even worse, the gamine was warning me that my life, with all its bourgeois comforts and petty First World concerns, could change in an instant, and I could become him. I woke up in a start, filled with the most profound pity for the gamine and all the people like him in Colombia and full of fear for myself.
I had taken a first-year course in psychology at university and was aware that social scientists thought dreams were often attempts by the unconscious mind to come to terms with problems encountered by people in their waking hours — no more than that. But I had always believed in the power of dreams to let you see into your soul, to unearth secret truths about your being, to provide glimpses into the future and to provide insight into the human condition. Throughout my life, things I had seen in dreams had come to pass — the death of a dog I had loved to distraction, the visit of a distant cousin who had moved out west with his family years ago when he was small, a banal injury suffered by my dad in an accident on the docks.
Consumed with dread that something was about to happen that would drag me down into the depths, I spent the rest of the night sitting up in bed on high alert, staring out the window into the dark until pitch black gave way to faint light. When the first rays of sunlight came creeping over the mountain, I heard Hortensia, the silent maid hired by the embassy to look after my daily needs, come out of the kitchen to set a place for me at the dining room table. A few minutes later, she padded to my bedroom door, knocked, and in a soft voice— she knew I was awake — told me it was time to get up and have breakfast. To avoid giving offense, I thanked her profusely for the toast, scrambled eggs, and coffee she served me, but ate little. After getting dressed and picking up my briefcase, I went out the door and down the stairs to the driveway where Alfonso was waiting for me.
I said good morning, got into the back seat and he eased his way into the heavy traffic. At each red light, crowds of gamines awaited, thrusting in my face newspapers, shoelaces, shoe polish, bars of soap, religious icons, firecrackers, cheap plastic dishes and cutlery, cigarettes, matches, and tourist maps of Bogota, imploring me to buy them. Each wore a filthy suit jacket hanging down to his knees, and each seemed to me to be the gamine beaten the day before outside the embassy. Each locked his eyes on mine and whispered in a voice only I could hear, “Why you and not me? Why you and not me?” From time to time I heard Alfonso say, “Señor, señor, I have something important to tell you,” but I was incapable of responding.
At the embassy, I went directly to my office, closed the door and sat down, only to hear once again the howl of the enraged mob chasing another gamine along the sidewalk. But this time, I didn’t dare get up to look, afraid I would break down in tears. A few minutes later, Alfonso knocked timidly on my door and came in to see me leaning forward, my elbows on my desk and holding my head in my hands in despair.
“Con permisso, Señor, I didn’t mean to disturb you.”
“That’s alright, Alfonso,” I said looking up. “I was just resting”
“I was trying to tell you on the way to the office that I know a woman, a former nun, who runs a small shelter for gamines near a barrio. She receives no money from the government but keeps it going with handouts from people like me. Could I take you to see her, señor? She’s an educated person and would do a better job in telling you about the gamines than I could. ”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Yesterday you warned me about the dangers of helping gamines, but today you want to take me to meet someone who does just that.”
“Dealing with gamines in the street is one thing, señor,” Alfonso replied, “Visiting a shelter to see happy children is less risky.”
I accepted the offer, but didn’t do it because such a visit would provide fodder for a report back to Longshaft or because it might lead to other contacts and be good for my career. No, I accepted it because I needed to talk to someone like a former nun who spent her days working with children in need, someone who might be able to help me come to terms with the question raised in my dream — “Why you, and not me?” I sensed the reason O’Connor remained paralyzed by cultural shock was because he had asked himself the same question when he arrived in Bogota, and hadn’t been able to answer it. I didn’t want that happening to me.
Busy settling into my new position, it wasn’t until the next week that I was able to take Alfonso up on his offer. “I’m going to show you a part of Bogota that tourists never see,” he said as we started our journey. “Hundreds of thousands of people come to Bogota every year to escape the fighting in the countryside,” he said. “There’s nowhere for them to live. The government doesn’t have the money to help them and so they scrounge building materials from building sites and garbage heaps, find ways of hooking themselves up to the city electrical grid without killing themselves to get free power, and walk miles to get water from wherever they can. The men work for next to nothing as gardeners, cleaners, carpenters — anything to earn a little money. Some join criminal gangs and steal cars and sell drugs — others are recruited into paramilitary groups and are sent into the countryside to protect the big landowners and fight the guerrillas. The women look for jobs as maids and cooks. When there’s no money coming in, they work in the brothels and streets to feed their families. The children are left to fend for themselves and often leave the barrios for good to beg and steal — anything to survive.”
Before long, we left the business and residential sections with their well-paved roads and elegantly uniformed traffic police and took our place in a slow moving procession of trucks and buses, spewing black smoke from their exhausts as they proceeded over a series of ridges towards the southern outskirts of the city. I saw and smelled the
barrios of Bogota. They were packed with hovels made of scraps of lumber for walls and rusty sheets of galvanized tin for roofs, open sewers for sanitation, and snarls of dirt alleys for passageways. Worn-out women and pot-bellied children carrying plastic canisters of water stopped and stared at us with blank eyes as we went by. Burning garbage and the rotting corpses of dead dogs and cats littered the road.
Men ran toward us when they saw our car approaching with its diplomatic licence plates. Alfonso shook his head and shrugged his shoulders at them. He told me they were desperate, hoping to be offered a day’s work by a rich gringo visiting their neighbourhood. Others stared at us with undisguised hostility, as if to say they didn’t want outsiders coming to gawk.
Alfonso parked in front of a partially completed house on the edge of the barrio and turned to me with a nervous smile. “Excuse me for being so bold, Señor Cadotte, but do you think the embassy could find some money to put an addition on the shelter? It wouldn’t cost much. It’s only got two bedrooms to house a dozen gamines. If we added two more bedrooms, we could take another dozen children off the streets. I ask you because Señora Lopez would be too shy to do so.”
“Now I know why you invited me here,” I said as we got out of the car, laughing at how easily I had been taken in. Suddenly a group of children burst out of the door, ran up and threw their arms around his waist, crying out his name and hugging him.
“As you can see,” he said, “I’m known here.”
“You certainly are, Don Alfonso,” said a soberly dressed woman in her mid-thirties wearing a small silver cross, who pushed her way through the throng to embrace him. “And who have you brought to see me today,” she said looking at me.
“This is a Canadian diplomat, Señor Cadotte,” Alfonso said. “He’s new to Colombia and wants to know about the gamines. And this is my friend, Señora Lopez, the person in charge of the shelter,” he said to me.
“Come sit with me and tell why you’re interested in our gamines,” Señora Lopez said, leading the way into her office and taking her seat behind her desk.
While anxious to talk to her, I wondered what had made me think I could appear on her doorstep — someone she didn’t know — to seek her guidance on how to handle the biggest moral issue I had ever faced. When I hesitated, she went out and came back with two cups of black coffee, handed me one, and joined me on my side of the desk.
“I wouldn’t have disturbed you if it hadn’t been important,” I said and fell silent again, thinking about how best to express my need. “I just arrived and am having some problems adjusting to a place so different from Canada,” I finally said.
“Take all the time you want,” she said. “Getting used to a new country is never easy.”
“It’s not just that,” I said. “Last week, on the sidewalk outside the Canadian embassy, I saw a mob beat senseless a child no more than six years old. I thought at first it was a gang of criminals, but it was a crowd of people taking out their anger on a gamine who had picked somebody’s pocket. My ambassador said these things go on all the time. The people in the mobs are always different, the gamines are always different, but the results are always the same — ordinary, presumably good people do appalling things to children doing bad things to survive. You’re a Colombian. You work with the gamines. Alfonso told me you were once a nun. Can you help me understand what’s going on?”
“Only a saint could answer such a question. Mobs chasing gamines aren’t the worst of it. Death squads of off-duty policemen, paid by store-owners who think the presence of gamines on the streets is bad for business, kill dozens of them every week and dump their bodies in the gutters. The authorities do nothing about it.”
“How can people deal with the sight of so much suffering? How can they sleep knowing what’s happening on the streets?”
“Frankly, I think the Devil has taken up residence in Colombia. He’s the one who makes good people do evil things. And when good people like you come to Colombia, you place yourself at his mercy.”
“You must be joking.”
“I don’t joke about things like that.”
“Isn’t that contrary to church doctrine?”
“No. The church believes in the existence of the Devil, and is certain he’s always searching for ways to tempt and corrupt mankind. He’s just more active in Colombia than elsewhere.”
“I don’t want to be rude,” I said, suddenly afraid she might be right, “but isn’t that sort of thinking just an excuse for doing nothing? For justifying the behaviour of mobs and policemen who beat and kill gamines?”
“No, I don’t,” she said. “And I’d like to ask if Canada is a country the Devil has never visited? Is it a country where good people never do evil things?”
She was smiling and I thought she was just making the point that I was being sanctimonious and wasn’t expecting a serious answer.
“In Canada,” I said, smiling back to show her I got the joke, “people don’t believe in the Devil any more. In the old days they did. The French Jesuits, for example, who came to convert the Indians in the seventeenth century, thought they had come to a land controlled by the Devil. They sent reports back to Paris saying the Indians who tortured and killed their fellow missionaries were agents of the Devil. But nobody I know believes that sort of thing today. Many don’t even believe in God. I’m in the group that believes in God but not in the Devil. Maybe because I find the Devil so frightening. But we have never been short of evil in Canada. Plenty of evil down through the centuries.”
“Excuse me for asking, but you are brown-skinned and have the eyes of an Indian. Are you an Indian — a Canadian Indian?”
“No, I’m a Métis — a French-speaking Métis — a descendant of an Indian mother and white father sometime in the past.”
“Like the mestizos?”
“Something like that.”
“And how are your people treated by the other Canadians and the government?”
“The Métis have the same rights as other Canadians.”
“And how about the Indians?”
“You knew the answer to that question before you asked it. Yes, the Indians are Canada’s gamines, the people whose children are taken away from their parents at the age of six and sent to residential schools where more often than not they are harshly treated and indoctrinated in the ways of the white man. But are you saying that injustice to Indians in Canada means I shouldn’t be shocked at the treatment of the gamines in Colombia — that there should be some sort of moral equivalence?”
“I’m just one person doing my best to look after a few of the little ones. But I’m also a Colombian and don’t want you to judge us without putting matters into context, without recognizing that things are not ideal in other countries as well.”
“I accept your point, but how did you become so involved?”
“I’ve always been concerned about the poor. After I finished my university studies, I joined a religious order that worked with the poor in the barrios. But the government was convinced we were somehow involved in promoting revolution and put pressure on the archbishop who shut us down. I did as I was told, but I was so angry I left the order and began working here on my own.”
“Are there many nuns who feel the way you do and leave their orders?”
“Many, and not just nuns. Priests do the same thing. Have you ever heard of Liberation Theology?”
“I have, but don’t fully understand it.”
“If you want to understand Colombia, you have to study its teachings. Better yet, maybe I could introduce you to Diego Rojas, the person who knows more about the subject than anyone else. He was chaplain at the National University, but angered the oligarchy for telling the students they should dedicate their lives to promoting social justice. The archbishop excommunicated him and drove him from the church and told the secret police he wouldn’t object if they arrested Rojas. He left Bogota to join the ELN — that’s the National Liberation Army — one of the guerrilla groups fighting
government troops in the countryside. I would have done the same if I hadn’t been looking after gamines.”
“You would really do that?” I said. “Introduce Diego Rojas to a stranger?”
“I can’t commit Rojas to meeting you, but he’s often told me that the outside world gets its information on the revolutionary struggle from the government and the big oligarch-controlled newspapers. He’s even mentioned he would like an opportunity to give his side of the story to objective observers. Maybe he’d like to start with you. You’re not a stranger. We’ve drunk coffee together and exchanged confidences on great moral issues. You’re a good man with a sensitive soul, a rare person that Diego would want to know. Besides, diplomats from countries like Canada are honourable people, not like American diplomats who are in league with the CIA and the secret police. Diego comes back on recruiting missions, and always comes to see me. If you want, I’ll ask him, and if he agrees — and I can’t guarantee that he will — I’ll call you.”
“Aren’t you afraid the secret police will listen in?” I said, trying not to be melodramatic but concerned just the same.
“There’s ways around that. If I say ‘the package has arrived’ when I call, that means you should come that same night to meet him at the shelter at eleven o’clock. But come alone, and wait in your car until we come to join you. But if I say ‘the package hasn’t arrived,’ that means Diego doesn’t want to see you.”
I left the shelter to return to embassy well aware the meeting with Rojas might well not take place. I had also come to the conclusion that the questions I had been asking had no answers. My choices were limited. I could give up, overwhelmed by culture shock, and go home. I could stumble on ineffectively like Ambassador O’Connor, besieged by the scenes of misery around me, putting in time until my posting was up. Or I could get a grip, harden my heart, and get on with the job Longshaft sent me to do.
Exceptional Circumstances Page 7