coldhearted scientist وداد

Back to Shahrazad IV

One such event – one of the few I understand well enough to describe, if not explain – took place in the Bank of Antioquia, where I was waiting to buy dollars. On the first day of the symposium, a secretary had ushered me into her office to sign some papers. I thought these would be papers certifying, for bureaucratic reasons, that I was actually there. In fact they were payroll documents. As I discovered at that moment, we had not only received an all expenses paid trip – we were also drawing salaries. This money had to be converted to dollars instantly, as the Colombian peso was losing value by the hour and was worthless outside Colombia. So the Spaniard Patricio and I telephoned banks. We wanted to buy less than five hundred dollars each, but it was hard to find an official bank with that much foreign currency available. We were not to trade informally because the only reliable black marketeer had been killed for some reason a few weeks before. In any case, the Bank of Antioquia offered a decent rate and had enough cash to cover us. On the way there we joked about our new careers as money launderers, since Antioquia was a major drug stronghold.

At first the teller did not want to sell us the dollars, saying a man had called and reserved them. Once we realized that man was Patricio, things were all right. It still took a couple of hours to do the paperwork. While we were waiting, a soldier rushed in and ran upstairs. I do not know whether I can put across how out of place this looked, because ist sounds normal enough. But in this mestizo highland town where even I seemed tall, the soldier was Black and easily twice as big as anyone else I had seen. He was dressed in tropical combat gear with no coat and no stripes or insignias. The final detail was his hat, the brim turned up in baroque style, an item of dress that seemed to belong to another century. He was very heavily armed, and his weapons were, to say the least, modern. Where had he come from? What did his arrival mean?

The door of the manager’s office opened, and the soldier went in. They clearly knew each other, and the soldier had been anxioiusly expected. The manager made a phone call, and more men in suits came in through another door. I watched through the Venetian blinds as everyone shook hands and sat down. Documents were brought out, and after glancing at them the soldier began to speak. Animated by his story, he was making dramatic gestures. The suits listened with serious mien and took notes. A woman in cap and apron brought in coffee and, oddly I thought for this formal meeting, a whole branch of fresh bananas – of which some of the men pocketed a few. I do not know what to make of that detail, but this looked like a high-level meeting. Something was happening and it might be important. It was not in the news, yet we were being allowed to see some signs of it.

There was also the night we ate guinea pigs, accompanied by popcorn and anisestte, in a barn outside town. There was the seriousness of the symposium audience, who had come from miles around, had much of interest to say, and presented the poems they had written for us at the closing ceremony. The university president and the dean of the college were actual intellectuals and did admirable jobs as respondents in the symposium – and as conversationalists, and dancers. (Such talent in administrators was for me one of the more fantastic occurrences of the entire week.) There was Bebeto’s charming old father, a follower of Gramsci in Luiz Eduardo’s fantasy, but of Mussolini in fact. That was why the family had had to leave Italy after the war, as it turned out, and this is, by the way, more evidence to support my theory that behind every Derridean lurks a repressive past.

Bebeto burst into tears as we boarded the miniature jet to go back to Bogotá – which looked dazzlingly modern to us when we got there. We had not wanted to leave Pasto yet either, not least because we were still seeking adequate prisms through which to read events there. Dumer, a local, had taken Walter Benjamin. Bebeto already had Derrida, and Patricio stuck to his usual favorite, Samuel Lévinas. Manuel took Eugène Ionesco. Laura Lee took Julio Jaramillo, el ruiseñor de América, and Luiz Eduardo tried on various Spanish American theorists, only to discard each as inadequate to the current situation. My own custom in the Andes is to try and think through Arguedas or Vallejo, but this time I could not fight Gabo’s daguerrotypes – they had already taken me.

FIN.

Axé.