Return to the Dark Valley

by Santiago Gamboa

  I was one more in the stream of gray, yawning zombies expelled from the bowels of the plane, walking now with a traveling bag on my back along the endless corridors lined with advertising, bright images, colors, notices saying: Welcome to Colombia! To nature, to birds and orchids, to the five thermal strata!, “the country where the only thing you risk is wanting to stay,” the condor and the anaconda, the jaguar, the precious hummingbird and the transparent waters of Caño Cristales, the green Amazon forest and the mysterious desert of the Guajira with its indigenous Wayuu people, the fertile coffee-growing area, the birds of Malpelo, “The answer is . . . Colombia!”, the mysteries of San Agustín and Tierradentro, not to mention the Chiribiquete mountains, with the oldest cave paintings and the largest number of successive eras in the world, plus cumbia and joropo and mapalé . . .

  All very happy, ready to greet those who had left expelled by war and poverty—which wasn’t my case—in a fraternal embrace of welcome, since thanks to the peace the country had stopped being what it had been for half a century: an execution yard some 450,000 square miles in area, whose rivers and lagoons had been turned into dumping grounds for dead bodies and from which they were now gradually exhuming the millions of bones buried under the green layer of vegetation, which had turned the country, for decades, into the most beautiful and flower-bedecked mass grave in Latin America.

  The slogans piled up along the corridors of the international arrivals terminal: “Thank you for coming back!” “Your country has never forgotten you!” “Happy to see you again!” “With you we are better!”

  And on we trudged, wearily. Others, who didn’t want to walk, advanced along the moving walkway. Men and women, children. All the returnees.

  That joy was addressed entirely to them, but to tell the truth, they didn’t look very joyful, but rather tense and expectant; they didn’t yet dare lower their guard, perhaps because of that dark sky and the persistent drizzle, which filled them with foreboding.

  The corridor seemed never to end and the tightness in my chest was getting worse. But then we got to the baggage claim, and the waiting, the assembly of the various items, the hiring of porters, all the things we might consider part of the “ontology” of airport life, gradually dispelled the nightmare.

  At last we were outside, in the drizzle.

  Tertullian stepped forward to announce that as of now he was going into “operational mode.” Naturally, he wouldn’t be able to spend the night with us, although he would be in “permanent contact through different means.” Then he said to Juana:

  “While we are here, stop using social networks, all right? And the same goes for you, Manuela. Consul, do you use them?”

  I told him I didn’t. I offered to take him wherever he wanted to go in the city and he looked at me with a twitch of the eye:

  “Do you think I can locate a bandit all the way from Spain and I have nobody to pick me up at the airport? Thanks, I appreciate it. You’re a good man, Consul. But it’s better this way, for everyone’s security. We each go our own way. Get settled in, Juana has given me the details. As soon as I’ve sorted out a couple of things I’ll be in touch. Ciao.”

  We took a taxi to the Nogal Apartments on Seventh and 81st. It was another of the luxurious homes belonging to Juana’s lawyer friend, Alfredo Conde—to tell the truth, by now I was eager to meet him.

  On the way, I looked out at my old hometown, trying to recognize it amid all this institutionalized cheerfulness.

  And of course I saw it.

  There were the congested Avenida Caracas and its dusty urapan trees; the horrible 63rd Street with its seedy park and its church, which struck me as small and pretentious; around it I saw people sleeping on the streets, just like in Delhi, although with less filth and garbage; a number of shaggy characters sucking from plastic bottles and dodging cars, ugly, toothless people who seemed to be indifferent to the ice-cold morning. And at the Transmilenio stops, crowds of disgruntled citizens, huddled in their horrible sweaters and jackets.

  I was starting to feel sick again. My heart was beating rapidly and I thought I should buy an extra dose of Losartan. I hoped and prayed there was coca tea in the lawyer’s apartment, because I was already beginning to feel a throbbing in my temples.

  The heights of Bogotá.

  Crossing the border into the north of the city, everything was so different that I couldn’t believe my eyes. Like day and night. Avenida Chile was the new financial center and its buildings, like fountain pens erect against the gray sky, proclaimed the economic boom and the longed-for growth in GDP spurred by the new era of peace. This was the Colombia of The Economist, the Colombia of sustained growth, but also, by contrast, of the great disparity between salaries and national wealth that made it, in spite of the good news, one of the unfairest countries in Latin America.

  Juana was showing the city to Manuelito, whose face was glued to the window and who seemed to want to swallow it all with his eyes.

  “And are all these people Colombians?” he asked.

  “All of them,” I said.

  The apartment was large and comfortable, decorated with taste, filled with books and antiques. I settled into a room at the back, facing the mountains, from where I could gaze, not only at the dawn, but at the great landscape of the capital’s aristocracy. Manuela occupied the room next to mine, and Juana the one after that, with a double bed for her and the child.

  “Haven’t you been back to Bogotá in all these years?” I asked Juana.

  “No,” she said.

  “But doesn’t your family live here?” Manuela asked. “Aren’t you going to see them?”

  “I have to think about it,” Juana said, somewhat curtly. “Maybe I should go with Manuelito, I don’t know if they’re still living in the same place.”

  “That can easily be found out,” I replied.

  Manuela said the only person she wanted to see was in Cali. The mother of one of her classmates from the convent school. I remembered the story, her name was Gloria Isabel.

  “But I don’t think anyone should know I’m here,” Manuela said. “Don’t forget I came here to settle something, not for a vacation. When it’s all over I’ll leave and never come back to this foul country.”

  The smell of Bogotá was the same as thirty years ago. A cold wind from the mountains, mixed with fuel and gases. The noises, too.

  I walked to Avenida Chile, looking for a drugstore. I took a Losartan right then and there and felt better. People crossed the street without letting go of their telephones, as if to demonstrate how busy and industrious they were. I turned onto Ninth and headed south. The English houses in this neighborhood were the same, although I couldn’t recognize any of the stores. Nor did I remember anything specific, so I went on and when I got to 67th the surroundings changed.

  Crossing the street, I found myself in a middle-class area. There were eateries selling lunches, with plastic tables and chairs out on the sidewalk, laborers drinking soda or beer, students, office workers. Farther on, I saw the Paraíso Turkish Baths, which I’d often frequented in my teenage years. The building was the same as ever. I felt tempted but it was too early. Then I came to Lourdes Park and saw again how deteriorated it was. When I was young, that church had a certain prestige. Now it was in an obvious state of decay. I saw card players, shoeshine boys—yes, they were still there—candy sellers, sellers of minutos, and an incredible number of moochers of all kinds, from strange creatures with blackened skin and rags to displaced people. The forgotten ones of the post-conflict period. There was poverty and need, but people were smiling, even though these smiles didn’t seem to correspond to anything cheerful.

  I went into the church and was surprised by what I saw.

  The Colombian episcopate had abandoned its old concepts and adopted Pope Francis’s idea of a free, modern Church. They too, in a way, were possessed by the spirit of reconciliation and the
new climate of national goodness. In an age of harsh competition with the Evangelical churches, it meant an opportunity to communicate with people by providing spiritual aid. But you had to be bold and imaginative.

  One of the current projects was to install Wi-Fi in all the churches in the country. At the beginning of mass, the priest would give the congregation the access code, so that as they followed the sermon they could use hyperlinks in real time. Another new service was the establishment of a confession hour via Skype through the program Parish Online, which ensured strict confidentiality and the same warm, human treatment as had been available in the old wooden confessional.

  In their adaptation to the changing times, they had also installed toilets in the side aisles, to avoid the congregation having to leave the church to satisfy the call of nature, during which they might have become distracted and not returned. The new training courses for young seminarists in Catholic universities already included subjects like marketing and strategic communication.

  The dark nave of Lourdes incorporated some of these changes.

  On the side walls were screens repeating the last mass with some important passages emphasized between quotation marks and in size 46 Garamond font. I moved into the darkest part of the church, hoping to see the altar, which was shrouded in darkness, at close quarters, and it was only when I got there that I saw a young sacristan tapping away at a computer embedded in the pulpit. He wasn’t at all disturbed by my presence. Passing him, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that he had a Facebook page open and was chatting happily away with someone called Wildwolf. There was a thin thread of music, a melody by Bach. Although the doors were open, there was nobody else in the church apart from that young sacristan and me.

  Suddenly I heard a moan, a very thin voice coming from the darkness of one of the side chapels. I groped my way forward and someone said my name. How strange. I was a little dizzy, so I sat down on a pew. I saw some figures of saints in the shadows, but didn’t recognize any of them. They all looked stern. My temples began throbbing again, and I again heard that distant voice: “Who are you? What are you looking for?”

  I thought about the enthusiasm that was out there and about how uncertainty, any uncertainty, was eventually dispelled by the force of that faith in a near future everyone assumed would be beneficial. Maybe whoever was talking to me was right: this was no longer my country, or even my city, what was I doing here? The arrogant small town of the seventies in which I’d been a teenager only existed in my memory. Return? Where was I to return to?

  I got back in midafternoon to find the two women and the boy asleep in their respective rooms, jetlagged. I devoted myself to reading and correcting my biographical essay on Rimbaud. We would have to wait for Tertullian to give us a signal. That might take a few days.

  The next morning I went with Juana to Santa Ana Baja, in the north of the city, to look for her parents’ house. Everything looked very different. The taxi dropped us on Seventh and she led the way, but when we got to the block she grew nervous.

  “Let’s go slowly,” she said, “I don’t want them to see me.”

  I looked at her in surprise, was she sure she wanted to meet with them?

  “To be honest, I only want to know where my brother is buried, nothing else. When they tell me that, I’ll never see them again. I want to visit his grave, I want Manuelito to pay his respects.”

  We stood across the street from their house and she looked at the windows to see if she could see anyone moving. I offered to go and ring the doorbell. After all, they didn’t know me. She was fine with that, but preferred to wait a while. We sat down on a bench at the end of the street, diagonally across from the house. She was hoping to see them without going inside and confronting her memories.

  “I can introduce myself as a consul and ask them for your brother’s grave,” I insisted.

  “Would you do that for me?”

  I walked up to the door and rang the bell. I waited a moment or two, but nothing happened. I rang again and only then did I hear a very low voice arriving from the back of the house.

  “Yeeees . . . ? Who is it?”

  “A friend of Manuel Manrique.”

  There was a strange silence. I was about to ring the doorbell again when I saw someone open a kind of hatch.

  “Yes? How can I help you?”

  “Good afternoon,” I said, “is this the Manrique family?”

  The woman looked me up and down. Something in her mind must have approved of me, because she replied politely:

  “No, señor. The Manriques moved away two years ago. I can give you their new address if you’d like.”

  “Yes, I would, señora.”

  They had gone to live in a neighborhood called Villa Magdala in the north of the city, near the freeway. We took a taxi, and counted the streets as we went. It was an apartment block. Their apartment was number 308.

  “Would you like me to go again?”

  Juana thought about this for a moment. I remembered the tattoo on her hip, Madame Butterfly.

  “Yes, Consul. You go.”

  I announced myself with my name and said I was consul in India, which was false.

  “Go on up,” the doorman said.

  It was the mother who opened the door to me, a skinny, gray-haired woman. Deep down in her expression, I thought I saw something of Juana’s hardness. Behind her was the father, who invited me in.

  “It’s good of you to remember us, Consul,” he said.

  The living room was a small rectangle with barely enough room for a couch, a coffee table, and a stand for the TV. It was a sad place.

  The mother brought coffee and sat down at the table.

  “I went to your old address, in Santa Ana. The new tenant told me you had moved and gave me your details.”

  “Yes,” the mother said, “she’s a very nice lady.”

  “I still remember your phone call asking about Manuelito,” the father said. “I was very grateful for that. I can imagine what it must have cost you.”

  “I don’t want to disturb you or revive bad memories,” I said, “I just wanted to say hello to you in person and, if you don’t mind, ask you where Manuel is buried. Over the last few years I haven’t been able to forget what happened. I’d like to see his grave.”

  The two old people looked at each other in surprise, but there were no tears. The father was about to say something and then couldn’t, it was as if he was paralyzed. Then the mother said:

  “He’s in the Gardens of Remembrance, not far from here, following the freeway until 207th. It’s plot 839-F. We wanted the Gardens of Peace, but there was no way, the prices were too high. This one we got on an installment plan. We’re still paying for it.”

  The father looked at her uncomfortably. Why say that?

  “Manuel told me you used to work in a bank,” I said, looking at the father.

  “Yes, years ago . . . But with the political unrest in those days, they transferred me to Cedritos, to a horrible place. I asked for early retirement in order not to have to deal with those lowlife customers.”

  The mother offered me some cookies on a plate.

  “Of course that way the pension was halved, wasn’t it?” she said. “Anyway. You have to be optimistic. God knows why he does what he does.”

  The father gave a strange smile that was more like a grimace, although not addressed either to me or to his wife but to something situated outside the window.

  “Now that I’ve seen something of the peace, I’m happy,” he said, “but I’m happy for other people, because the violence took everything from us. It took our two children, can you imagine?”

  I wanted to tell them that their daughter was outside and that they had a grandchild, but I restrained myself. I had to respect Juana’s wishes. As if reading my mind, the mother said:

  “Same with the girl; who
knows where she’s buried, poor thing. Always so hard, so argumentative. She wasn’t like the boy at all, he was sweet and shy.”

  I finished my coffee and stood up.

  “Thank you so much,” I said to them.

  “Thank you for wanting to see Manuelito,” the father said. “You’re probably the only person, apart from us, who remembers him.”

  “No, that’s not true,” I said.

  He looked at me questioningly. I didn’t know what to say.

  “We’re all going to die and be forgotten.”

  I left the apartment and walked quickly downstairs, in the hope that the cold air would dry my tears.

  Juana was waiting for me in a café.

  “Did you get a chance to talk with them?”

  I passed her a piece of paper with the information.

  “That’s where Manuel is. Gardens of Remembrance.”

  “Thank you, Consul,” she said.

  She didn’t ask anything more, she didn’t want to know anything about her parents. I remembered her mother’s words: “Always so hard, so argumentative.”

  It was already after five when we got in a taxi. Getting back to the Nogal Apartments at that hour was a titanic undertaking. The city was dense with traffic, as if shaken by a small tremor caused by the brief displacement of millions of tires on the asphalt. The people, weary, red-eyed, looked around them with resignation. The taxi driver tried to get onto the freeway, but the avenue was blocked. Then he thought to take Ninth, and that’s where we were, unable to move. Juana avoided looking at me, taking refuge in the earphones connected to her cell phone.

  The cell phone networks were the great beneficiaries of the blocked and motionless city. Everyone was chatting and gesticulating in their cars, some on “hands-free,” others with Bluetooth speakers, and the most disobedient with the apparatus in their hands or wedged into their shoulders. The women, statistically more devoted to messages, were all on WhatsApp. Passing 127th Street, I tried to recognize the neighborhood where I’d spent my teenage years, but it had changed a lot. The bakery, the house of the Pintos, my own house on the corner of the park, where had they gone?