THE CLOISTERED CITY
Our entrance into Bogotá was not exactly what we had planned or
anticipated. The crowd that filled the station and its adjacent streets
in honor of the thrice-weekly linking with the outside world was dressed
like an American city in February, except that here black was more
general and choking high collars and foppish canes far more in evidence.
Wherefore, seeing two men of foreign aspect, visibly shivering in their
strange feather-weight uniforms, descending upon them, the pulsating
throng could be dispersed only with difficulty, and excited urchins
raced beside the horse car that set us down at last before a recommended
hotel. Hays, who was nothing if not self-conscious, as well as tropical
blooded, lost no time in putting on every wool garment his baggage
contained and dived under four blankets vowing never to be seen again in
public.
We seemed to have reached the very center of this incongruous
civilization of the isolated fastnesses of the Andes. Our suite took up
an entire second-story corner of the hotel. There were carpets in which
our feet sank half out of sight, capacious upholstered chairs, divans in
every corner, tables that might have graced a French château, pier glass
mirrors, gleaming chandeliers, lamps with double burners, in addition to
electric lights. Our parlor, its huge windows resplendent with lace
curtains, opened on a balcony overhanging the street, as did also the
adjoining bedroom, as richly furnished and with two old-fashioned
colonial bedsteads heaped high with mattresses, their many blankets
covered with glossy vicuña hides. We were far indeed from the
frontiersman steamers of the Magdalena. When the hunger of the highlands
asserted itself, we sneaked down to a luxurious dining-room to find the
menu and service equal to that of some travelers’ palace on the Champs
Elysées. The sumptuous breakfast that a maid placed beside our beds next
morning was a humorous contrast to those we had endured on the “Alicia.”
Yet all these luxuries, borne to this lofty isolation by methods the
most primitive known to modern days, were ours at the paltry rate of
$1.50 a day. Truly, the cost of high living had not yet reached the
altitude of Bogotá.
It was evident, however, that if we were to live here as anything but
public curiosities we must patronize a clothing store. The Zone costume,
so splendidly adapted to our future plans, was, unfortunately, original
for _bogotanos_; and nowhere does originality of garb cause greater
furore than in the mountain-cloistered capital of Colombia. When we
summoned up courage to venture forth, Hays dodged into the first tailor
shop that crossed his path, and instantly agreed to take whatever
happened to be offered him, at any price the tailor chose to inflict—and
returned to remain in hiding for the ensuing twenty-four hours until the
articles were altered. Meanwhile I sallied forth from a ready-made
establishment, inconspicuous in a native shirt that came perilously near
being born a pajama and a heavy, temporarily black, suit of “cashmere”
with a misgiving tightness across the trousers.
On second thought it was not surprising that this far away city of the
Andes should be so exacting in dress. Virtually cut off from the world,
it was supremely eager to appear cosmopolitan. The result is a tailor’s
paradise. No one who aspires to be ranked among the _gente decente_ ever
dreams of permitting himself to be seen in public lacking any detail of
the equipment, from derby to patent leathers, that makes up the
_bogotano’s_ mental picture of a Parisian boulevardier. At first we took
this multitude of faultlessly dressed men to mean that the city rolled
in wealth. As time went on many a dandy of fashion we had fancied a bank
president, or the son of some prince of finance, turned out to be a
side-street barber, or the keeper of a four-by-six book-stall, if not
indeed without even so legitimate a source of income. It is due, no
doubt, to some misinterpretation of the European fashion sheets that the
main street corners were habitually blocked long before noon by men and
youths in Prince Alberts, who spent the greater part of the day leaning
with Parisian nonchalance on silver-headed canes.
The women of the better class, on the other hand, are never seen
disguised as Parisians except on rare gala occasions. At morning mass,
or in their circumspect tours of shopping, they appear swathed from head
to foot in the black _manto_, a shawl-like thing of thin texture wound
about head and body to the hips and leaving only a bit of the face and a
bare glimpse of their blue-black hair visible. To us the costume was
pleasing in its simplicity. Bogotanos, however, complain that it is
_triste_—sad, and in time we too came to have that impression, as if the
sex had gone perpetually into mourning for the ways of its male
relatives.
The great underlying mass of the population has no requirements in the
matter of dress. In general the _gente del pueblo_—the “men of the
people”—wear shoddy trousers of indeterminate hue, _alpargatas_,—hemp
soles held in place by strips of canvas—without socks, a soiled “panama”
always very much out of place in this climate, and, covering all else, a
_ruana_, or native-woven blanket with a hole in the center through which
to thrust the head. Their women rarely wear black, but simple gowns of
some light color, at least on Sundays, after which its whiteness
decreases. They go commonly bareheaded, often barefooted, and always
stockingless. Every scene from street to Cathedral shrine is enlivened
by the bare legs of women and girls often decidedly attractive in
appearance—to those who have no great prejudice for the bath.
To be nearer the center of activities we had taken a room in the third
story of the municipal building, on the site of the palace of the
viceroys. Down below lay the main plaza of Colombia, Tenerani’s
celebrated statue of Bolívar in its center, the still unfinished capitol
building cutting it off on the right. Across the square we could look in
at the door of the ancient Cathedral—and shake our fists at its
constantly clanging bells. Beyond, much of the city spread out before
us, the thatched huts of misery spilling a little way up the foot of the
dismal black range that filled in the rest of the picture.
The altitude of Bogotá—it stands 8630 feet above the level of the
sea—seldom fails to impress itself upon the newcomer. Many travelers do
not risk the sudden ascent from Jirardot to the capital in a single day,
but stop over between trains at a halfway town. During the first days I
was content to march slowly a few blocks up and down her slightly
inclined streets, and even then found myself with the faint third cousin
of a headache, several mild attacks of nose bleed, and a soreness of all
the body as if from undue pressure of the blood. Until the first effects
wear away, energy is at its lowest ebb and time passes on leaden wings.
The change in mood is as marked as in the character of the permanent
inhabitants. From the moment of his arrival the traveler feels again
that foresighted, looking-to-the-future attitude toward life common to
the temperate zone. All the light, airy, gay and wasteful ways of Panama
and the tropics fade away like the memory of some former existence, and
it is easy to understand why the bogotano is quite different in
temperament from the languid inhabitants along the Magdalena. Unlike
many regions of high altitude, however, Bogotá is not a “nervous” city.
There are lower places in Mexico, for instance, where the nerves seem
always at a tension. Here we felt serene and unexcited all day long as
in the first hours of waking from long refreshing sleep.
Except in the actual sunshine, the air was raw even at noon. The wind
from off the backing range or across the sabana cut through our garments
as if they were of cheesecloth. The thermometer falls much lower in
other climes, but here artificial heat is unknown, and a more
penetrating cold is inconceivable. By night the bogotano wears an
overcoat of the greatest obtainable thickness, he dines and goes to the
theater in a temperature that would make outdoor New York in early
November seem cozy and hospitable. Well dressed men in gloves and
overcoats and women in furs walking briskly across the square below our
window on their way from the electric street cars to the theater or the
“Circo Keller,” gave the scene quite the appearance of a similar one in
an American town in the first days of winter. Yet this was July and we
were barely five degrees from the equator. Beside us lay the latest
newspapers from New York, half way to the north pole, bristling with
such items as: “Wanted—Cool rooms for the summer months.” “Four Dead of
Heat Prostration.” It is a peculiar climate. Flowers—of some Arctic
species—bloom perennially, and the poorer people, inured to it from
birth, seem to thrive in bare legs and summer garb. Frost is virtually
unknown, not because the temperature does not warrant it, but because
what would be frost elsewhere evaporates in the thin air. Once the sun
has set, nothing seems quite so attractive, whatever the plans made by
day, as to read for an hour huddled in all spare clothing, then to throw
open the windows and dive under as many blankets as a Minnesota farmer
in January. The bogotano does not, of course, believe in open windows.
Though he scorns a fire—or has never thought to build one—he has a
quaking fear of the night air, against which he charges a score of
diseases headed by the dreaded pneumonia of high altitudes. Those who
venture out at night habitually hold a handkerchief over mouth and
nostrils. Yet at least this can be said, that nowhere is sleep, if
properly tucked in, more sound and refreshing.
Within a week we found ourselves acclimated—or should I say
altitudinated—and took to exploring the city more thoroughly. The air
was still noticeably thin, but there was enough of it to furnish the
lung-fuel even for the five mile stroll up to the natural stone gateway
where the highway to the east clambers away through a notch and begins
the descent to Venezuela. Looking down upon it from here, the
misinformed traveler might easily fancy the broad sabana the sea-level
plains of some northern clime, never guessing that forty miles to the
west the world falls abruptly away into the torrid zone. For Bogotá is
chiefly remarkable for its location. Taken somewhere else it would be
like many another city of Spanish ancestry. Its streets are singularly
alike, wide, straight, a few paved in macadam, more in rough cobbles,
many grass-grown and all with a central line of flagstones worn smooth
by the feet of generations of carriers. The chiefly two-story houses toe
sidewalks so narrow that two can seldom pass abreast, and for those who
know Spain or her former colonies there is nothing unusual in the
architecture. The streets cross each other at solemn right angles, and
those which do not fade away on the plain fetch sharply up against the
rusty black range that backs the city. The system of street numbering is
excellent, that of the houses clumsy, and the former is marred by the
habit of the volatile government in changing familiar names as often as
some new or forgotten patriot is called to its attention. Thus the Plaza
San Augustín had been the Plaza Ayacucho up to a short time before our
arrival, yet before we left it had become the Plaza Sucre in honor of a
new statue of that general unveiled on Colombia’s Independence Day, July
twentieth. In like manner the Plaza de Egipto was transformed before our
very eyes into the Plaza de Maza. This weakness for honoring new heroes
is characteristic of the whole country. Not only are its provinces
frequently renamed, but in the short century since its independence, the
nation itself has basked under a half dozen titles,—to wit: “La Gran
Colombia”; “Nueva Granada”; “Confederación Granadina”; “Estados Unidos
de Nueva Granada”; “Estados Unidos de Colombia”; and, since 1885,
“República de Colombia”—and there are evidences that it is not yet
entirely satisfied.
It is less in its material aspects than in the ways of its population
that the traveler finds Bogotá interesting. About every inhabitant
hovers a glamour of romance. Either he has always lived in this
miniature world, or he has at least once made the laborious journey up
to it. The vast majority are born, live, and die here in their lofty
isolation. Shut away by weeks of wilderness from the outside world,
alone with its own little trials and triumphs, it seems something long
ago left behind up here under the chilly stars by a receding wave of
civilization. Small wonder its people consider their city the center of
the universe. Those who travel a little way out into the world see
nothing to compare with it; the scant minority that reach Paris are
credited with fervid imaginations, if indeed the picture of what they
have seen is not effaced during the long toilsome journey back to their
own beloved capital. Perhaps no other city of to-day is more nearly what
a newly discovered one must have been to the happy explorers of earlier
times. Now and then there comes upon the traveler the regret that it is
not entirely cut off instead of nine-tenths so. A region fitted for the
development of its own customs, had it been left to its aboriginal
Chibchas it might have evolved a civilization entirely its own,
altogether different, and not this rather crumpled copy of familiar
world capitals.
Bogotá is decidedly a white man’s city. Indeed there is hardly another
of its size south of the Canadian border in which the percentage of pure
white complexions is higher. On rare occasions a negro who had drifted
up from the hot lands below sat huddled in the main plaza in all the
blankets and ruanas he could borrow, but his face was sure soon to be
numbered among the missing. Brunettes predominate, of course, but blonds
are by no means rare. The bootblack who served us now and then was a
decided towhead. Red cheeks are almost the rule. Slight atmospheric
pressure, bringing the blood nearer the surface, no doubt largely
accounts for this, but there are many other evidences of general good
health. At this altitude the violation of most of the rules of
sanitation are lightly punished. The temperature, cold enough to be
invigorating yet not so cold as to require our health-menacing
artificial heat, combined with its simple, placid life, makes Bogotá a
town of plump, robust figures, particularly among the women, unmarked by
the dissipation common to the males. Many of the former may frankly be
termed beautiful, in spite of a wide-spread tendency of the sex to wear
distinctly noticeable black mustaches. Unfortunately the men of the
well-to-do class are not believers in exercise, or the systematic caring
for the body. Scorning every unnecessary physical exertion, letting
themselves grow up haphazard, they are noticeably round-shouldered and
hollow-chested. An American long resident in the city seriously advised
us to “get a hump into your shoulders so you won’t attract so much
attention.”
Even the descendants of the Chibchas, that make up much of the
population of the outskirts and the surrounding country, have a tinge of
russet in their cheeks, and are by no means so dark as our
copper-skinned aborigines. Daily they swarm into the city that was once
theirs. Short, yet sturdy, muscular carriers and arrieros, as often
female as male, pass noiselessly through the streets with the produce of
their country patches. Girls barely ten, to old women, many of comely
features in spite of the encrusted dirt of years, more often so
brutalized by toil as to seem hardly human, dressed in matted rags,
their feet and legs bare almost to the knees, plod past under burdens an
American workman could not carry a hundred yards. Early in the wintry
plateau mornings they set out from their _chozas_, cobblestone or mud
hovels thatched with the tough yellow-brown grass of the uplands, that
are huddled in the mountain passes or strewn out along the wind-swept
sabana, driving a bull—rarely a steer, since the former animal loses
much of his belligerency at this altitude—on its back a load little
larger than that which the female driver, with a strap about her brow,
carries herself. They are all but indistinguishable from the men who
tramp beside them. A patchwork skirt instead of tattered trousers is
almost the only difference in dress, and their manner is utterly devoid
of any feminine touch. Brawny as the men, they march through all the
hardships of life as sturdily and uncomplainingly as our early pioneers,
asking sympathy neither by word nor look. It is a commonplace sight in
Bogotá to see a mere girl in years grasp the nose-ring rope of a bull
and throw him to his knees, or lay hold of a cinch-strap in her
calloused hands and, with one foot against the animal’s ribs, tighten
the girth with the skill of an experienced arriero. Girls and boys alike
are trained from their earliest years to this life of bovine toil, never
looking forward to any other. Of the existence of schools they have
hardly an inkling. To them life is bounded by their cheerless hovels and
the _chicherías_ of the city, numerous as the _pulquerías_ of Mexico. In
every corner of the capital these low drinking shops abound,
masquerading under such misnomers as “El Nido de Amor”—“The Love
Nest,”—and overrun by their besotted votaries of both sexes. Yet the
bogotano Indian drunk is quiet and peaceful compared with the Mexican,
for _chicha_ seems chiefly to bring drowsiness and contentment with life
as it is.
[Illustration:
Bogotá and its _sabana_ from the summit of Guadalupe]
[Illustration:
The central plaza of Bogotá from the window of our room. In the center
is the famous statue of Bolívar by Tenarani; on the right, the new
_capitolio_; in the middle foreground the Cathedral, backed by the
peaks of Guadalupe and Monserrate]
Ever since our arrival Hays and I had been threatening to patronize one
of the two public bath houses with a first-class bogotano reputation
rumor had it existed in the capital. But in a land where the temperature
rarely reaches fifty, and the floors are tiled, it takes courage, and we
had been satisfying ourselves and our duty to humanity by bravely
splashing a basin of icy water over our manly forms each morning on
arising. By dint of strong resolutions often repeated to be up at six
and visit one of the _casas de baños_, we did finally manage one morning
to find ourselves wandering the streets by eight, with towel and soap
under our arms, and stared at by all we met. We discovered “La Violeta”
at last, next door to a blacksmith shop. The keeper we woke up told us
we might have a cold bath, but that the sign on the front wall: “Hot
Baths at all Hours,” was to be taken with a bogotano meaning.
A few mornings later we did actually find the other establishment open.
We entered a large patio, the most striking of several buildings within
which was a round, or, more exactly, an eight-sided house, and in time
succeeded in arousing the place to the extent of bringing down upon us a
youth hugely excited at the appearance of a crowd of two whole bathers
all at one time. It turned out that each of the eight sides of the
strange building was—theoretically—a bathroom of the shape of a slice of
cake, with a frigid tile floor and an aged porcelain tub in which a bath
cost only $10. At the back was a larger, though none the less dreary,
chamber with a _regadera_, or shower-bath. The youth assured us there
was plenty of hot water. I won the toss and was soon stripped. But the
shower was colder than the ice-fields bounding the pole. When I had
caught my breath I bawled my repertory of profane Spanish at the youth,
who could be seen through a hole above pottering with some sort of
upright boiler and firebox and now and then peering down upon me.
Suddenly the water grew warm, hot, boiling, then, just when I had soaped
myself from crown to toe in the steam, it turned as suddenly cold again,
and an instant later stopped entirely. My eyes tight closed, I shouted
at the youth above.
“Es que el agua caliente se acabó,” he droned. “It is that the hot water
has finished itself.”
There being no deadly weapon at hand, I turned on a tap of ice-cold
water and raced to the dressing-room still half soaped. Hays, scantily
clad, was gazing fiercely at the youth through a hole in the door.
“Then there isn’t any more hot water?” he demanded.
“Not now, señor, but there will be soon.”
“Good. How soon?”
“Early to-morrow morning, señor.”
“But I want to bathe now!”
“Ah, you want to bathe?” repeated the youth, with wide-open eyes.
“No, you cross-eyed Son of Spigdom,” exploded the ordinarily
even-tempered ex-corporal, “I came here and stripped to an undershirt
that I might dance in my bare feet on this tile floor in honor of José
María de la Santa Trinidad Simón Bolívar! Get up on that roof and fire
up or ...”
The youth was already feverishly stoking armsful of wood under the
upright boiler, and by the time I left for home Hays was shadow boxing
to keep warm, with a fair chance of getting a bath before the day was
done.
As is to be expected from its isolation, the Colombian capital is a
deeply religious, not to say a fanatical, city. An infernal din of
church bells of the tone of suspended pans or broken boilers makes the
early morning hours hideous and continues at frequent intervals
throughout the day. Here, contrary to the custom in most centers of the
Latin race, the men as well as the women go to church. College
professors and literary lights of no mean ability seriously contend that
the shinbone of some saint in this shrine or that “temple” has
miraculous power; but the superstition of isolation hangs particularly
heavy over the uneducated masses. Of late years the Liberals and the
Masons have grown nearly as powerful as the Conservatives, and do not
hesitate to express themselves freely in public, knowing that in case of
attack any representative body of the population includes
fellow-Liberals who will come to their rescue. Every public gathering is
pregnant with possibilities of an outburst between the two divisions of
society. The very school-boys talk politics—here inextricably entangled
with religion—and the foreigner who wishes to hold the attention of a
Colombian for a conversation of any length must have some knowledge, or
at least a plausible pretense of knowledge, of interior political
questions. It was a bare three years since a Protestant missionary had
been stoned by the populace of Bogotá, though he now held his services
in peace in what, despite the lack of outward signs, was really a
church. Policemen armed with rifles liberally besprinkle every meeting
in theater, cathedral, or public square. Shortly before our arrival a
dozen officers and citizens had been killed in a religious riot in the
bullring.
Were they less hump-shouldered, these policemen of Bogotá might easily
be taken for Irishmen, and an absent-minded American fancy himself back
in the New York of a decade ago. The uniform of the day force is a copy
of that of our own metropolis before the helmets were abolished. At
night the scene changes. In every street spring up officers in high caps
and long capes who might have stepped directly from the arrondissements
of Paris, with even the short sword in place of the daytime
“night-stick.” They are a well disciplined body of men, quite unlike the
childish, inefficient guardians of law and disorder so familiar from the
Rio Grande southward. The bogotano officer would no sooner be seen
sitting, lounging, or smoking on duty than would one in our own large
cities. As in all Latin-American countries, however, the chief drawback
to a really efficient service is the caste system. The policemen are of
necessity recruited from the gente del pueblo, and though they have no
hesitancy in arresting one of their own class, the sight of a white
collar paralyzes them with their ingrown deference to the more powerful
rank of society. The result is that a well-dressed person can commit
anything short of serious crime under the very eyes of the police. The
officer may keep the culprit under surveillance, but rarely summons up
courage actually to arrest him until he has definite orders from a
white-collared superior.
There are curious local customs in Bogotá. Her small shops, for example,
have a system of signs intelligible only to the initiated. A red flag
announces meat for sale; a red flag with a yellow star, meat and bones;
a white flag, milk; a green one, vegetables and grains. A cabbage or a
lettuce-head thrust forth on the end of a stick marks the entrance to a
cheap restaurant; a tuft of faded flowers, a chichería. The bogotano
sees nothing incongruous in a building that announces itself a “Primary
School” above and an “American Bar” below. On week days the pedestrian
slinks through many of the chief residential streets apparently unseen;
on a gala Sunday afternoon the same stroll is to run an unbroken
gauntlet of feminine eyes. For then the señoritas who are seen, if at
all, during the week, hurrying to mass all but concealed in their
mantos, don their most resplendent garb and, with cushions under their
plump elbows, lean in their window embrasures oggling and being oggled
through the iron _rejas_.
A native of Medellín, where envy of the capital and her self-seeking
politicians is rife, had assured us as far away as Panama:
“All they do in Bogotá is study and steal.”
We had only to glance out our windows to find basis for the first part
of the assertion. The plaza below was always alive with students from
the local institutions of higher learning for males marching slowly back
and forth conning the day’s lessons. The fireless houses are cold and
dungeon-like, particularly in the morning, and the city long ago formed
the habit of studying afoot. The racial dislike of solitude and the
eagerness to be seen and recognized by their fellows as devotees of
learning may also have some part in a practice that many a bogotano
continues through life. It is commonplace to pass in almost any street
men even past middle age strolling along with an open book in one hand
and the inevitable silver-headed cane in the other.
In colonial times Bogotá won the reputation, if not the actual position,
of “literary capital of South America.” Her speech is still the best
Castilian of America, with little of that slovenliness of pronunciation
so general from the Rio Grande southward. To this day the city has a
considerable intellectual life, wider perhaps than it is deep.
“Everyone” writes. He is a rare public man who has not published at
least a handful of “versos” in his youth. Poets, writers, painters, and
musical composers are more numerous than in many a far larger center of
civilization. The placid isolation of life in Bogotá, almost completely
severed from the feverish distractions of the modern world, makes this
natural. There is nothing else to do. Then, too, lack of opportunity to
compare their work with that of a wider world no doubt gives the
“literatos” of Bogotá a self-complacency that might otherwise be
slighter. The cheap local printing-presses pour out a constant flood of
five-cent volumes of the local “poets,” those same “cachacos” and
“filipichines” in frock-tailed coats who lean with such Parisian grace
on their canes at the principal street corners. The youth who sees his
smudged likeness appear on the tissue-paper cover of the weekly pamphlet
seethes with ill-suppressed joy at his entrance into the glorious, if
crowded, ranks of the “intelectuales.” It is chiefly a dilettante
literature, rarely of material reward and of no visible connection with
life. But a considerable stream of flowery verse, languidly melancholy
in its temperament and not overburdened with deep thought, flows
constantly, and the boiling down by time has left Bogotá credited with a
few works of genuine worth.
[Illustration:
A _chola_, or half-Indian girl of Bogotá, backed by an outcast of the
“gente decente” class]
[Illustration:
A street of Bogotá. The line of flaggings in the center is for the use
of Indians and four-footed burden-bearers]
A lecture was given one evening at the Jurisprudence Club on the
momentous subject of “The Necessity of a Legal Revolution in Colombia.”
Hays reneged at the last moment, but I accepted the invitation issued to
the “general public.” I was the only foreigner among the hundred
present, yet no American audience could have been more universally white
of complexion. Indeed, the gathering was strikingly like a similar one
in our own country—on a March evening when the furnace had broken down
or the janitor gone on strike. All wore overcoats and kept constantly
bundled up. The solemn whispering of the audience as it gathered, the
unattractiveness of the women, all of whom had long since left youth
behind, the staid mien of the men in their frock coats, gave the scene
the atmosphere of a meeting of “highbrows” in a corner of far-away New
England. But there was superimposed a pompous solemnity and a funereal
tone peculiar to the Latin-American, to a race that lays more stress on
the correctness of its manner than the weight of its matter. A
misstatement or a palpably erroneous fact or conclusion, one felt, might
pass muster, but not a slip in the “urbanities” of society or the
incorrect knotting of a cravat.
It was a “lecture” in the French sense. When the president had taken his
place and all was arranged in faultless Parisian order, the speaker
removed his neck-scarf and began solemnly to read from typewritten
manuscript. He was a man of forty, wearing glasses, with the
perpendicular wrinkles of close study on his brow. A score of countries
could have reproduced him ad libitum. He read drearily, monotonously,
with constant care never to spill over into the merely human. The
discourse based itself on the narrow national patriotism common to
Latin-America. Yet at times the speaker talked plainly, admitting that
Colombia is 88% illiterate and that half the remainder can barely read
and write. The Church he assailed bitterly for its shortcomings, yet
never mentioned it directly. In time, as is bound to happen sooner or
later in any public meeting in Colombia, he drifted into the great
national grievance and whined through several pages on “the wickedness
of taking the rebel province of Panama away from us, a weak and helpless
people”—here I caught several of the audience gazing fixedly at me, as
if they fancied I had taken some active part in that debateable action.
Through all the latter part of the lecture the church bells across the
way kept up a constant jangling that completely swallowed up whatever
conclusions he had gained from his laborious dissertation. It was
strangely as if the voice of religion and superstition were trying by
din and hubbub to drown out that of reason and reflection, as it has
since the first medicine-man danced howling into the circle of elders in
conference in the Stone Age.
On the “Panama question” the attitude of the Colombian man in the street
is not exactly that of the Government. A well-educated native holding a
small post, though clinging to the same convictions on the “taking” of
the “rebel province” as the bulk of his countrymen, expressed himself to
me as follows:
“We ordinary citizens feel that our country should be paid for the loss
of Panama, and the slight to our national honor. But we hope very much
that your United States will not pay our government a large sum of money
in cash, as contemplated by the proposed treaty. For almost all of it
would go into the pockets of the dozen politicians who hold the reins of
government. Give us _obras hechas_,—finished works,—a railway from the
coast to Bogotá, or a perfected harbor with docks and modern
facilities.”
One day soon after our arrival we strolled over to the _Biblioteca
Nacional_ to begin the Colombian reading we had planned. It was wasted
effort. We brought up against a heavy colonial door bearing the
announcement: “Suspended until further notice, by order of the Ministry
of Public Instruction.”
An American resident interpreted it to mean, “Oh, some of the readers
have been stealing books again”—and we recalled the cynical native of
Medellín. Days later, however, when we gained unofficial admission for a
few moments, we found that the 5000 volumes bequeathed by a Colombian
“literato” not unknown to a wider world—Rafael Pombo, who had recently
died in Paris—were being catalogued. Several frock-coated pedants were
smoking innumerable cigarettes and deceiving themselves into the notion
that they were at work arranging the books. But the National Library
remained hermetically sealed to the public as long as we remained in the
capital. It was by no means the first nor the last time we met a similar
disappointment in South America.
We had put it off a long while before we gathered courage and all our
woolen garments and hurried through the wintry night to Bogotá’s main
theater. As in other restricted societies, entertainments are frequently
“got up” here, chiefly with local talent. It is a long way to any other
talent in Bogotá. This one was a _velada_ in honor of that same Rafael
Pombo. Fortunately the audience was large enough to keep the place
moderately warm. Every detail, every movement, the very _toilettes_ of
the distinctly good looking, if mustached, ladies in boxes and stalls
were as exact a copy as was humanly possible of similar scenes at the
opera in Paris, a copy in miniature bearing the earmarks of having been
taken from some novel of the boulevards. Señora la bogotana used her
lorgnette exactly as she had read of her Parisian counterpart doing; the
men, in faultless evening dress down to the last white eyeglass ribbon
about the neck, strove to act precisely as they conceived men did on
like occasions in the wider world. Again all was burdened by the solemn
artificiality of the race. One after another six men burst genteelly
upon the stage and declaimed something or other in that painful,
flamboyant ranting so beloved of the Latin. All the cut and dried forms
of “cultured” society were solemnly carried out. Flowers, some one had
read, were always presented to the performers, and even the podgy,
pompous old fellow who forgot his “piece” several times had solemnly
thrust upon him by a stage lackey in gorgeous livery two immense wreaths
of blossoms.
In one matter at least these bogotanos were at an advantage over
amateurs of other lands. Natural declaimers and reciters from babyhood,
their tongues always eager for utterance, almost devoid of that
bashfulness that works the undoing of the less fluent but perhaps deeper
thinking races, they seemed seasoned actors in those points which called
for strictly histrionic ability. In another theater a few nights later
we saw several Spanish comedies presented by a company of local
amateurs, and were astonished at the excellence of the work. That of a
few of the principals would have won praise on any stage.
Three railways leave Bogotá, though none of them gets very far away.
First in importance, of course, is that to Facatativá, connecting with
Jirardot. Another runs through the flower-decked suburb of Chapinero,
past Caro, with its cream-colored castle on a hill above a cluster of
thatched mud huts, to Nemecón, a sooty adobe town of surface coal mines
where the sabana is cut off on the north. Back along it to Zapiquirá the
excursionist tramps ten miles in autumn coolness, hardly realizing he is
near the equator, between fields of half-grown maize, broad grassy
pastures dotted with white clover, with dandelions, daisies, cowslips,
and brilliant yellow “smart-weed.” Blackberry bushes here and there edge
a field in which scamper plump cattle and horses; others are confined by
fence posts of stone with four holes carefully drilled in each through
which to pass the _alambre de púas_,—barbed wire from our own land.
Zapiquirá is remarkable only for the bulking hill beside it, almost
solid rock salt. The mouths of a score of small tunnels lie in plain
sight somewhat up the slope. The salt rocks are beaten fine, dissolved
in water, evaporated, pressed, and packed into two-bushel bags that are
carried away by toil-stupefied women and girls with a band across their
foreheads.
But the excursion par excellence is that to the falls of Tequendama, the
theme of at least one poem by every bogotano writer. The unholy clatter
of church-bells helped me arouse Hays one morning in time to catch the
early train on the “Ferrocarril del Sur.” Some twenty miles out we
descended at the isolated little station of Tequendama and struck off
through a region wholly unwooded and almost desert dry. As the road
mounted a bit from the bare sabana a hardy vegetation appeared, here and
there a small grove of eucalypti, and a bushy natural growth thinly
covering the sides of the low mountains among which we were soon
winding. Before long we fell in with the narrow Bogotá river, idling
placidly along, little guessing what a tremendous tumble it was due to
get a bit later. Tradition has it that a god or an Inca, desiring to
drain the lake that once covered the sabana, opened the gap through
which the stream drops. By and by there appeared ahead a whirling mist
cloud which grew until we found ourselves completely enveloped in a
great fog out of which rose a dull, never-ending roar of indistinct
location. Directed by a peasant, we descended through a rustic gate and
for some yards down a field of heather and deep-green grass speckled
with white clover blossoms and scattered with massive protruding rocks.
The face of the one of these a Bogotá merchant had disfigured in
impertinent American fashion with an advertisement of his “superior
coffee.” We had reached the “Niagara of Colombia.”
Yet so far as seeing went we might as well have been in our cozy beds
back in the capital. An ordinary brown stream some forty feet wide
flowed down through bulging rocks, pitched over in a short fall on to a
stony ledge at our feet, then off into the mist-blinded unknown. A mere
country brook in which we could dip our fingers here, a foot beyond it
was forever gone. It was as if a whole world of mystery lay below and
about us, yet the curtain of swirling gray mist into which the river
plunged to be seen no more hid all from view.
[Illustration:
Celebrating Colombia’s Independence Day (July 20th) by unveiling a new
statue of Sucre and renaming a plaza in his honor]
[Illustration:
Meanwhile in another square the populace marvels at the feats of
“maroma nacional” of an amateur circus. Note the line of policemen
in holiday attire]
We had shivered through our lunch, finding it difficult to believe that
we were five degrees from the equator in the month of July, when
suddenly the wind rose, and for a moment the mist thinned until we
caught a hint of an immense chasm untold depths below; then closed in
again. The excursion seemed to have been a failure. We strolled on down
the highway in the fog and loafed awhile on a bushy hillside. But as we
turned homeward, the mist was wiped away as suddenly as a curtain drawn
aside and all Tequendama lay before us. I slid down a steep bank to the
edge of the bottomless chasm and sat down where I could remain, as long
as I kept my feet braced in the sod, before one of the finest sights in
the world—or let them slip and drop to sudden death. From the upper
ledge the stream fell a sheer unbroken thousand feet in which the entire
river seemed to turn to spray and whatever was left when it struck was
beaten into mist which, rising like steam from the yawning gorge as from
some immense caldron, hid all the face of the adjacent country.
Immeasurably below, a much smaller stream could be seen picking itself
together again and winding its way dizzily off through a vast rock-faced
cañon on the perpendicular walls of which clung a few hardy plants; and
while we remained in the cold autumn world above, the river flowed away
into the tropics, into the coffee country, the land of bananas, and the
perpetual summer of the Magdalena, to help float Colombia down to the
outer world.
Of the many views of Bogotá the best is that we had at the end of our
stay, from the summit of Guadalupe. A bit of the backing range juts
forth in two peaks, each with a little white church on its top, that
seem almost sheer above the city. We climbed to the higher in something
more than an hour, massed clouds breaking away now and then to flood
with sunshine the ever widening sabana and the hazy, far-away mountains
that seemed to cut off the world completely, and came out at last on a
grassy platform where we could look down, like the astonished
Conquistadores, on all the vast plain, and, unlike them, on the city
they founded. North and south, as far as we could see, stretched the
bleak, treeless range on which we stood. At our feet this fell abruptly
away to the suburban huts of the city and her encircling Paséo de
Bolívar. Every plaza and patio, many green with a clump of eucalypti,
every window and roof-tile, was plainly visible. The people were so tiny
we had to look for them carefully, as for insects on a carpet, before we
could make them out by hundreds crawling along the light-brown streets
and specking the squares. Near the brick-walled cemetery the disk of the
bullring, filled now with the tents of the “Circo Keller,” seemed a
canvas cover on a small squat pail. Factories, as we understand the
word, being unknown, not a fleck of smoke smudged the dull-red expanse
of the stoveless city. Its noises came up to us very faintly, at times
borne wholly away on the wind, and from this height even the diabolic
din of church-bells sounded soft and almost musical.
A recent census sets the population at 122,000. Looking down upon the
City from Guadalupe, this seems at first an underestimation. But
gradually one realizes that not only are its houses low, often of a
single story, but largely taken up by interior patios. Then there are
more than a score of churches, innumerable chapels, eight large
monasteries, several seminaries, and many residences of the Church
authorities. Add to this the many government buildings, and bit by bit
the traveler grown skeptical from experience with Latin-American
figures, begins to wonder if these are not inflated. There is not a
wooden building in town. Treelessness governs the architecture, for the
surrounding country is above the timber line, though the imported
eucalyptus rises in groves here and there and flanks roads and railways.
A distinct line divides the city from the sabana, spread out like a rich
brown carpet, cut up into irregular fields by adobe wall-fences often
roofed, like the houses, with aged red tiles. In many places the sheen
of shallow lakes recalled that the Zipa of the Chibchas built his
Teusaquilla here on the lower skirts of the range to escape the winter
floods of the plain. Off across it were dimly seen several flat towns,
and here and there a farm-house or a cluster of them in a grove of the
slender Australian gum-trees which merely accentuated the treelessness
of the vast expanse of world. Six highways sally forth from the city, to
march waveringly across the plain, mere threads lost at last in the
enclosing range, broken, gnarled, pitched and tumbled into every manner
of shape, bright peaks and valleys standing sharply forth where the sun
strikes, great purple-black patches marking the shadows of the clouds.
Beyond all else, at times lost in clouds, at others plainly visible, lay
the central range of the Cordillera over which we must pass on our
journey southward. Though more than a hundred miles away, it bulked into
the sky like some vast supernatural wall, the broad snow-capped cone of
Tolima piercing the heavens in the center of the picture.