At dinner that night I discovered that the past week’s FARC attack had taken place just outside Pasto. As a left leaning, petit bourgeois intellectual I do not know what to feel, someone said. The FARC are excellent guerrillas, we really like them. Usually nothing happens anyway, the boys just come to these mountains to rest. But now they have attacked here, and they have killed a company of conscripts, surely Indian and poor, who had only a week of service left before they could go home.
I will not describe everything that happened, but believe me when I tell you that Bebeto knows how to arrange a symposium and how to give a party. The secret to both is finding people whose eccentricities mesh well. Bebeto is a past master at this, and he had searched the globe for the characters now assembled. Pasto is in fact a rather prim nineteenth century town, graced only by its volcano, Galeras, to which the locals write songs, and an equestrian statue of Nariño, the Independence hero. The regional hymn says, “In History’s triumphal chariot / Nariño responds, ‘Victory!'”
Here the symposium spent four days in an intellectual and creative haze. By the second night we were high on each other and reeling. At one dinner, held in Bebeto’s studio (which is, by the way, filled with signs saying “guichet fermé” and dominated by a painting of his in which the Virgin Mary, wrapped in a Colombian flag, referees a soccer game starring “El Pibe” Valderrama), we invented paper titles for the next symposium. These included “I Have the Honor of Living in the Most Violent Country in the World” and “The Drug Dealers’ Cook Who Spent 1,500,000 Colombian Pesos on a Five-Day Brothel Spree–And Then Did It Again.”
I also kept noticing strange juxtapositions on the streets and in public buildings. That is, I observed events which, given the skills I have, the things I know, I ought to have been able to interpret. Here, though, what I saw often seemed utterly opaque. I reported my observations to Manuel, who smiled again and again and repeated knowingly, ah, yes, you’ve seen another of the various realities. I thought he was teasing until I realized that he, a Bogotá philosophy professor and television journalist, felt no better equipped to read these things than I. A country of apparitions, of illusions, of mirrors as Gabo would say. A place in which reality opens its doors every once in a while, just enough to permit participants to glimpse its many layers. […]
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
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