coldhearted scientist وداد

Back to Shahrazad II

Tupac drove us to a gated and heavily guarded compound. Inside the white walls were a lawn, a restaurant, and a number of pavilions. This was the club of the Bank of the Republic, where we were to stay. Official and fancy though it was, its nighttime attendant seemed a bit lost and could not give us two rooms because, as he put it, he had “not been authorized to do so.” Much to the consternation of Tupac, Luiz Eduardo and I accepted the room we were assigned, striking bets on what Bebeto would say when he found out. (I predicted he would be horrified, and Luiz Eduardo predicted he would congratulate us. We both won. Bebeto offered an embarrassed apology to me, and to Luiz Eduardo, a conspiratorial smile.) Fortunately Luiz Eduardo had a bottle of whiskey, and, come to think of it, I wish I had some of that now.

The next day Tupac came back and, after driving us up a mountain so we could enjoy a good view of the city, took us back to the airport. Here we met some more of our Nariño-bound traveling companions. We were quite a festive group by the time we boarded the miniature jet that would take us south.

I will not try to describe what it is to fly through the Andes on a sunny day, but I will say that the airport of San Juan de Pasto, built in a small valley, offers the most spectacular landing I have ever seen. The mountains are high but as lush as a grenhouse, with palm trees at 10,000 feet. The air is so clear that everything looks two or three times as sharp as it would elsewhere. “We are experiencing the world as it appeared when it was much younger,” announced my new friend Manuel. The peaks near Pasto are thin, so you descend through them as if landing among so many moss-green fingers, into the palm of a great hand.

Arriving in Latin America is a shock, no matter how many times you have been. This is not just a foreigner’s attitude; I have heard people from there say the same. The transition from center to periphery, or first to third world, is not always easy to make. The usual shock of arrival in Latin America for me is that it is always poorer and more urban than I had remembered from the last time. Then too I like fantastic stories of foreign lands, Marco Polo, Hans Christian Andersen, the Arabian Nights, and I always remind myself before going anywhere new that it will not be as magical as I hope. But the shock of arrival in the Nariño region was that it looked just like Colombia as evoked in One Hundred Years of Solitude. I had not expected that. García Márquez’ book is a work of fiction. His Edenic inscriptions are ironic, and his foregrounding of illusion is a political comment. Right? I do not know. It seems to me now that in this novel Gabo is just trying to show us what things look like at home. His country is hard to grasp and harder to describe, and my hat is off to Gabo for having managed to reflect a part of it.

Bebeto and his colleagues met us in small SUVs, like light enclosed Jeeps, equipped with altimeters. The town is much higher than the airport, and on the way we stopped at a Macondo-like house that was surrounded by milk cows and advertised RICAS AREPAS. Sitting on a rickety balcony hung out over a deep green arroyo, we looked up and down the mountain face, ate the corn cakes, and toasted the now distant “night of the disturbance” in coffee. Months later I was at the French Market with a friend of ours, who asked what I wanted to eat. I said RICAS AREPAS and he said that sounds symbolic, like a magic spell or a synecdoche of desire. And it is true. The test of the trip was a whole series of RICAS AREPAS. It was also like a pack of cards that kept reshuffling itself. Each card was another illusion, another dream. […]

Axé.