Colombia

Funny, how even six empty beds in a dorm room, filled the night before with people who said hello and meant it, can leave one with a deep sense of hollowness, loss. Across the globe—and across the heart that dwells on the globe, beating in rooms and with people— there are myriad forms of pain. Empty beds are but one.

One of Japan’s greatest novelists is Shusaku Endo (1923-1996).  A Christian in a country where less than one percent of the population is Christian, Endo’s search for identity shaped much of his writing. He felt rejected in both his homeland (because of his faith) and then in France during the three years he studied there (because of his race). He was intimate with confusion and depression. Those who travel, whether spiritually or geographically, may relate to this man.

On his return to Japan in the 1950s, he made a stop in Palestine and discovered a Jesus who, rather than triumphant and ensconced in cathedrals, knew rejection and betrayal.  Here he saw what he had been unable to see in either Japan or France, and the experience transformed him.

In 1966, Endo published Silence, a historical novel many consider his best work. Set in Japan circa 1600 (during one of the worst persecutions of Christians in history), it tells the story of a Portuguese priest journeying from Europe via Macao to Japan, where the Christian faith has been outlawed. Eventually imprisoned—and thus given a unique perspective from which to see the world—the priest observes things, including:

"These guards, too, were men; they were indifferent to the fate of others. This was the feeling that their laughing and talking stirred up in his heart. Sin, he reflected, is not what it is usually thought to be; it is not to steal and tell lies. Sin is for one man to walk brutally over the life of another and to be quite oblivious of the wounds he has left behind."

Near the novel’s end, the weary priest has a new way of looking at the world and theology, for he has seen torture and execution and has withered under the silence of God. He has not lost his faith, however; he has only lost the faith he once had in a comfortable environment, and he now burns with a righteous anger toward a Church that judges the actions of people who live in a context that those who live in a better place simply cannot comprehend:

“What do you understand?  You Superiors in Macao, you in Europe!” He wanted to stand face to face with them in the darkness and speak in his own defence. “You live a carefree life in tranquility and security, in a place where there is no storm and no torture—it is there that you carry on your apostolate. There you are esteemed as great ministers of God.”

Silence isn’t found in any bookstore travel section as far as I know (it’s usually categorized as literature or religion/spirituality), but it addresses themes found in good travel writing: dislocation, surprise, evolution of thought. It teaches us about a place, and it shows us the new eyes with which a traveler sees home.

___

My thanks to a security guard in Girón, Colombia for posing for this photo.

In the quote above, the priest offers one definition of sin.  For a definiton by a character in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, click on “There is Only One Sin”.

On most days of the year in the Colombian city of Bucaramanga, you can spot paragliders in the distance sailing along the valley’s edge.  Or, if you take a bus up from the city to the mountainside itself, you can sit and watch folks gallop off the grassy slope right in front of your eyes.  You’ll see them suspended, swooping and rising, steering their way through sky.  You’ll see them rushing forward into what suddenly seems a giant world of open air.

The paraglider in this picture is Dimitry, an ethnic Russian from Latvia with whom I shared a room for three nights.  He was nearing the end of a year-long journey around the world and had begun this last leg in South America with a few weeks of language learning in Chile—he clearly mastered basic conversational skills—and then found his way north to Colombia, where he was now devoting himself to galloping off mountainsides.  Dimitry was the sort of guy who might enjoy a good view from an armchair, but he was not content to just be in the armchair.

Recently my mom asked for an enlargement of this photograph for their living room, attracted to its themes of liberation and transcendence as well as the contrast between transience (paraglider) and permanence (chairs).  For me, partly because I know the guy in the air, the picture brought to mind something Paul Theroux once wrote.  Describing the objective behind his book The Old Patagonian Express, Theroux says that he wanted to “take the train that everyone took to work [in Massachusetts], and then to keep going, changing trains, to the end of the line [in South America].”  Later he writes:

As you read it, you should be able to see the people and places, to hear them and smell them.  Of course, some of it is painful, but travel—its very motion—ought to suggest hope.  Despair is the armchair; it is indifference and glazed, incurious eyes.  I think travelers are essentially optimists, or else they would never go anywhere.

For a lighthearted self-portrait while on my own tandem parasail an hour earlier, click HERE

The Colombian city of Medellín is still shaking off its bad reputation.  In the 1980s, while serving as global capital to the cocaine trade, it had one of the highest homicide rates in the world and was also home to one of the most notorious (and richest) men, Pablo Escobar.  The ubiquitous nature of brutality helped give it the nickname “City of Eternal Violence”.   But a series of positive turns—including the death of Escobar in 1993 and the demobilization of urban militias between 2003 and 2006—has helped return Medellín to stability and even vibrance.  Today Medellín is better known by another (and older) nickname, "City of Eternal Spring," which reflects its mild climate and beautiful natural setting.

Few visitors to Medellín these days will witness violence during their stay.  Some, however, may wish to see the Cementerio de San Pedro, where this photo was taken.  Established in 1842, it’s statuary and tombstones are elaborate and often provocative.  High walls muffle the noise of city traffic and foster a sense of serenity.  Death itself even seems far away, at least its violent forms.

In the quote I used last week from A Tale of Two Cities, the following, more somber lines came immediately afterwards:

Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this.  No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all.  No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged.  It was appointed that the book should shut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page.  It was appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on its shore.  My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life’s end.  In any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?

Stretched out at an elevation of 8600 feet and home to some eight million people, Colombia's capital Bogotá is best seen in its entirety from Monserrate, a 10,300-foot peak located on the city’s east side.  I use the word “entirety” loosely however, because I’m not sure we see anything—including Bogotá from a mountaintop—in its entirety.

I arrived at Monserrate at 4:00 p.m. and would stay till after six so that I could watch night fall on the city.  This would also give me the opportunity to descend, through darkness, back into Bogotá aboard a cable car, peering through a glass window at the city drawing nearer.  If I recall correctly, this was the first time I’d been on a cable car at night.  Suspended in darkness you see clearly how many things about the world are actually hidden.  Even the handful of passengers in the cable car were but whispering shadows and silhouettes to one another.

In Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, a character makes an observation that one could also make as he descends toward a city in an unlit cable car:

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.  A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!

We err in assuming that we know all there is to know about someone.  Sometimes we err even in assuming we know half of what there is to know.  I often think this when I watch news pundits speak with false authority about people who live in and are shaped by places that the pundit has never been.  But sometimes I think it about myself too, not least when I'm gliding through darkness surrounded by silhouettes, approaching a city whose language I do not speak and in which I'll spend so little time.

In my book Thirty Reasons to Travel, one of the reasons I offer is "graveyards."  Here you meet people, some of them absolutely fascinating, you’ll never get to know in hotels and cafes because they are dead.  In addition to introducing us to individuals from the past, cemeteries also assist us in putting our own present lives—their brevity, fragility, and perhaps meaning—into perspective.

Not all my visits to cemeteries have been easy experiences.  Hearing strangers weep beside a headstone is troubling, as is carrying the coffin of a cherished college friend who, only weeks before a car accident and on the afternoon you went together to hear James Baker speak, taught you how to tie a tie.  Nor is it serene when, swept up in a funeral procession on the streets of the Palestinian town of Jenin (this was in 2003), you peer into the ashen face of a 14-year-old boy killed by an Israeli tank.  Five minutes later, as you stand beside a hole in the earth and watch men lower him into the ground, the man beside you thrusts his M-16 into the heavens and blasts several rounds into an innocent blue sky.  The sound of each shot punches you—angers you.   Something is boiling in your veins at this moment; it is the hatred of violent death, whether from smashed cars, gargantuan tanks, or tiny bullets.  It is that thousands of mangled people fill the earth each day, including this boy.

The above photograph was taken last week in Mompós, Colombia.  Though it shows a grave being readied for a person who I suspect died a natural death, it was still unsettling to peer into the hole (but also comforting to see two good-spirited, sweaty men chatting inside).  Later that evening I was reading Stephen Crane’s classic The Red Badge of Courage and came upon the following passage, appreciating how it captured both the horror of violence and the emotions elicited by it.  In the scene a mortally wounded soldier has been walking for several minutes to the rear of the battlefield and now enters the final throes of death:

His tall figure stretched itself to its full height.  There was a slight rending sound.  Then it began to swing forward, slow and straight, in the manner of a falling tree.  A swift muscular contortion made the left shoulder strike the ground first.

The body seemed to bounce a little way from the earth.  “God!” said the tattered soldier.

The youth had watched, spellbound, this ceremony at the place of meeting.  His face had been twisted into an expression of every agony he had imagined for his friend.

He now sprang to his feet and, going closer, gazed upon the pastelike face.  The mouth was open and the teeth showed in a laugh.

As the flap of the blue jacket fell away from the body, he could see that the side looked as if it had been chewed by wolves.

The youth turned, with sudden livid rage, toward the battlefield.  He shook his fist.  He seemed about to deliver a philippic.

“Hell—“

The red sun was pasted in the sky like a wafer.