ALONG THE CAUCA VALLEY
On the Cauca side, like the French slope of the Pyrenees, the Central
Cordillera of the Andes descends almost abruptly to the valley. As we
emerged from the clouds, a brilliant sun lighted up vast landscapes of
labyrinthian hills and vales mottled with cloud shadows, bits of our
road ahead scratched here and there on salient, sun-polished knobs and
slopes far below. With noon appeared the first broad view of the rolling
Cauca valley, nestled between the central and the western ranges, a bare
thousand feet above sea-level, still deep-blue as some mountain-girdled
lake. The little town of Salento, in the lap of an undulating, bright
green plain, rose slowly up to meet us. We marched to the alcalde’s
office in a weak-kneed building of compacted clay, only to find the
alcalde, like beds for travelers, out of town. A stupid clerk in a room
full of musty papers of varying antiquity admitted it was too bad
Salento was so _atrasado_, but made no move to decrease that
backwardness.
“And strangers who arrive?” I asked.
“Generally bring their beds with them,” he replied, “or, if not, they do
the best they can.”
We took the hint and forcible possession of an empty room opening on the
plaza. When, after a basin bath, I strolled out into the town to mention
our strange exotic desire for sleeping accommodations, a dozen of the
most influential citizens also admitted it was too bad and—and where did
we come from and where were we going? Hays for once had better luck.
Having left the mention of beds to simmer in the mind of one Sanchez,
who amused himself at shopkeeping on a corner of the square, he was
called over at dark and offered the use of several woolly white blankets
that hung for sale from the blackened beams of the shop ceiling. Sanchez
was shocked beyond measure when we started to carry them across the
plaza ourselves. He called for a boy, nine responded, and the winner
expressed great gratitude when we rewarded him with a ragged paper cent.
We improvised seats and sat gazing out through the wooden reja. Far away
on a fuzzy hillside our road of the morning grew dim and faded out, like
an unfixed photograph, and a night lighted only by stars quickly settled
down. Out of its black immensity came, a little later, the jangling of
tiny bells. Across the plaza filed a half hundred boys in column of
twos, weirdly lighted by flickering torches, utterly silent in their
bare feet. From another direction came a similar half-seen procession of
girls; the two columns joined at the door of the little bamboo church,
the pagoda-like twin towers of which stood dimly forth against the
background of darkness, and passed within together. For an hour a weird
infantile chanting in chorus sounded almost unbrokenly, then the
congregation filed forth again and melted away into the humid summer
night. The faint silhouette of the priest showed him leaning over the
reja of his second-story _casa cural_, the fitful glow of his cigarette
the only light in town, until that, too, died out and left only the
brilliant tropical stars above.
Beyond Salento a rolling fertile land lay on every hand. In the great
forests spreading far up the range beside and behind us, the most
conspicuous of the flora was the _yarumo_, a white-leaved tree that
stood forth everywhere like blotches on the green landscape. The slender
wax-palm of the eastern slope had not passed the crest. The dense-green
uplands of the valley were still all but covered with virgin forests. It
set us reflecting what might have been had the “Mayflower” turned
southward and peopled this land of rich soil and unrivalled climate,
instead of that bleak and rigorous country we had left behind. Or would
this peerless climate have made us, too, salentinos?
At the hut where we paid two cents for great bowls of creamy milk, there
was a decision to make. One branch of the trail led to Pereira, the
other to Filandia. We tossed a coin. It fell “tails” and we struck off
to the left by a soft dirt road. Filandia was a quaint old place with a
wonderful gingerbread church, on a hilltop that rolled languidly away on
all sides to far-off mountain ridges. The town seemed never to have seen
a foreigner before. Perhaps travelers hitherto had all gone by way of
Pereira. When I attempted to take a picture, the entire population, men,
women, and the very babies, crowded so close around me that I could not
fight them back to a focal distance.
[Illustration:
Like those of the days of Shakespeare, the theater of Cartago consists
of a stage—of split bamboo, with a tile roof—inside the patio of the
“hotel.” The more expensive seats are chairs in the balcony of the
second story; the populace stands in the barnyard]
[Illustration:
Cartago watching our departure. Two of the doors show no occupants
only because these had dodged inside to call the rest of the family]
By the next afternoon we were in quite a different country,—down in the
tropics again, with coffee-trees, bananas, and endless lanes of bamboo,
that giant fern, as useful as it is beautiful, which nature so unkindly
denied the North. It was not a temperature for the preserving of
undeveloped films and I paused with the tank beside the first clear
stream. The sun gave out before I had more than hung the strips up to
dry, drops of rain began to fall, and night came on apace. I pushed on,
grasping a wet film in either hand. To my dismay the road turned to a
narrow path through thick weeds, thigh-high, and for a long five miles,
with eighteen already in my legs and thirty pounds straining from my
shoulders, I tramped swiftly forward, striving to hold the films out of
reach of the weeds. The natives, blacker and blacker as we descended,
stared with amazement from their little bamboo shelters along the train
to see a strange being scurry by, holding high above his head two black
strips, like Tibetan prayer-sheets. Small wonder they crossed themselves
in superstitious awe.
The night had grown completely in about me, when Hays hailed me from an
unseen doorway. He had already bespoken supper and engaged a room with a
bed of split bamboo and a quilted straw mattress. For me was brought
what a hard-earned candle proved to be a canvas cot, made of a U. S.
mail-sack. In the “dining-room” was a lounging chair of the same
material.
“Where did you get it?” I asked the woolly-haired host.
“What, that fine, strong cloth? Oh, the government always has plenty of
that to sell,” he replied placidly.
The same damp, pulsating jungle fenced us in all the next morning. Far
ahead, across the heat-steaming spread of the Cauca valley, the jagged
blue line of the Western Cordillera, that cuts it off from the Pacific,
stretched to north and south as far as the eye could command, in some
places five ranges visible one behind the other. At noon, suddenly
topping a jungled knoll, we caught sight of the long-sought town of
Cartago, reddish with the hue of its roof-tiles in the center of town,
dying away in whitish and straw-colored lines of outskirt hovels. It was
hours later that we reached the level of the valley floor, and strolled
in heavy grass through a bamboo-built suburb into the weedy central
plaza.
With a populous graveyard before the keel of the “Mayflower” was laid,
Cartago has not yet advanced to what any “mushroom” town of our West can
boast at the age of three months. Negroes were everywhere, though there
was no sharp “color-line,” and pure whites were rare. The Cauca is to
Colombia what our South is to the United States. In colonial times
slaves were imported in large numbers up the Atrato river, and to this
day the shiftless, happy-go-lucky African lolls in his ragged cabins,
speaking a Spanish it was hard to believe was not English, so exactly
did their slovenly, lazy-tongued drawl resemble that of our southern
states.
The hotel advertised “Comodidad, prontitud y esmero”—“Comfort,
promptness, and specklessness,”—the three things above all others a
South American hotel is surest not to have. There is never an office in
these hotels of the Andes. A peanut vendor somewhere up the street is
manager, and all the town “assists” while the traveler makes his
bargain, if, indeed, it does not gather en masse to watch his ablutions.
The rooms are commonly stark empty, and are furnished to order, as one
selects a chicken on the hoof for the evening meal. We had to implore
each and every requisite, from cots to water, separately and
individually several times over before they were supplied. When we
insisted on two towels, the young but toothless landlady, muttering
something about the curious ways of _los gringos_, tore an aged sheet in
two, and as long as we remained made us feel that guests were an
unmitigated nuisance. Among the luxuries of the town was wheat bread.
When we demanded it with our meals, a six-foot “boy” of polished
jet-black skin—and little other covering—was sent wandering down to
market with a bushel basket on his arm, and in the course of the
afternoon came slouching back with three tiny buns lost in the bottom of
it.
But for all the slovenliness of its habits, antiquarians would have
found Cartago’s hotel interesting. The barnyard patio into which we
flung our wash-water formed the parquet, or stalls, of the village
theater. At the back of it was an open, tile-roofed building of split
bamboo floor and sides, violently painted, forming a stage quite similar
to that of Shakespeare’s day. A score of bottles hung by the neck, like
corpses at some medieval wholesale hanging, fringed the outer edge of
the platform, the ends or drippings of what had been tallow candles
showing that they had served as proscenium footlights. The second-story
veranda, our dining-room, was marked with the numbers of “boxes” around
its three sides, from the unspeakable kitchen to the even more
unmentionable servants’ quarters. When plays were given, the masses
stood in the yard below and the well-to-do looked on from their chairs
along the veranda. Unfortunately, histrionic talent seemed to have
completely died out in Cartago. Only the languid tinkling of a _tiple_,
or native guitar, marked the long evenings in which we watched the
golden moon rise over the bit of mossy, old-red roof and the tops of two
lazily swaying palm-trees framed by our balcony window.
If my knowledge of Cartago is meager, it is because I spent most of my
days there in mailing a notebook. The post-office was the lower story of
a compressed-mud building cornering on the plaza. When I first made my
appearance, its heavy wooden doors, studded with immense spike-heads,
were securely bolted.
“Is the _correo_ closed to-day?” I asked a lounger-by.
“Sí, señor, the mails only came in yesterday. But you can knock and
perhaps....”
Knocking brought no result. An hour or more later I tried again, with no
better luck. Early the next afternoon, however, I found my way in by an
inner door of the patio, though the place was still officially closed.
The two rooms looked much like a garret of long standing, but by no
means like a post-office. Scattered everywhere, over floor and baked-mud
window seats, on decrepit chairs and crippled tables, lay fat mail-bags,
all stout and new, from the chief countries of the globe. The outgoing
Colombian correspondence was already packed in aged grain-sacks. Pieces
of mail of all sizes lay tumbled and littered over the entire two rooms.
Fully half of it was from the United States, particularly pamphlets and
packages from patent medicine houses. Four middle-aged men, dressed in
great dignity and in Cartago’s most correct attire, with gloves and
canes on chairs beside them, were seated around a table, smoking
cigarettes. I handed one of them the wrapped notebook. It passed slowly
from hand to hand, each feeling it over, not so much out of curiosity,
though that was by no means lacking, as absent-mindedly striving to
bring his attention down to it. Then all four fell to perusing a Postal
Union rate-sheet, but found everything except the information needed.
Finally one rose and referred the matter respectfully to a man,
evidently a superior, seated in state at a corner table. The rate was
found to be one peso for each fifty grams. The official turned back and
wandered for some time at random about the two rooms, fingering the
parcel over and over and scratching his head in a vain effort to recall
what he had set out to find.
He discovered it at last,—an ancient postal-scales—tried it, found it
too small, tried another, and spent an ample five minutes juggling with
the odds and ends that served as weights before he computed the balance.
Then he drifted languidly back to his companions in inefficiency, opened
his mouth to speak, closed it again, and rambled once more across the
room to the scales. He had forgotten the weight! This time he took no
chances, but announced the figures aloud and wrote them on the
parcel,—“320 grams.” Those who do not know the South American will have
difficulty in believing that the division of this by fifty, without
troubling for fractions, presented a real problem. All four began
pencilling long lines of figures on as many sheets of paper. Several
minutes passed before one of them ventured to show his result. The
others compared, and amid a sage shaking of heads one announced
solemnly, “Seven cents, señor,” while the rest gazed dreamily at me out
of the tops of their eyes, as if wondering whether I should weather the
shock of so great an expense.
“And registered, seventeen cents?” I added; for I did not care to have
the parcel lie a month or two about the earth floor of Cartago’s
post-office, or find its final resting-place in the back yard. When the
suggestion had penetrated, one of the quartet sat down to enter the
grave transaction in a large ledger. I still needed a two-cent stamp.
The oldest of the four shuffled to the opposite side of the table, sat
down, adjusted his legs, and slowly pulled out a drawer stuffed with
every manner of rubbish,—tobacco, rolled cigarettes, half-empty phials
of patent medicine, everything that may come by mail,—and finally dug up
a battered pasteboard box that had once held No. 60 American thread.
From this he fished out a small sheet of two-peso stamps, carefully tore
one off at the perforation, first on one side, then on the other, put
the sheet back in the thread-box, the thread-box back in the drawer,
carefully closed the latter, and handed me the stamp. I tossed before
him a silver ten-cent piece. He opened the drawer again, clawed out of a
far corner a wad of those ragged, germ-infested one-cent bills
indigenous to Colombia, laid out eight of them, counted them a second
time, sat staring at them a long minute while his attention went on
furlough, asked one of his colleagues to count them, which the latter
did twice at the same vertiginous speed, and finally pushed them toward
me with a hesitative movement, as if he were sure he was losing
somewhere in the transaction, but could not exactly figure out where.
Meanwhile, he of the ledger rose from dotting the last “i” of an entry
that stretched in nicely shaded copybook letters entirely across the
double page, begged me to do him the honor to be seated, dipped the
clumsy steel pen into the dusty inkwell, and, with a wealth of
politenesses, requested me to sign. When I had done so, he gazed long
and dreamily at the signature, longer still at space in general, and
finally put the parcel carefully away in a drawer with neither stamp nor
mark of identification upon it.
[Illustration:
Along the Cauca Valley we met not only peasants bound to town with a
load of wood and carrying their prize roosters, but now and then the
corpse of a woman being brought in for Christian burial service,
after which it would be carried back and buried in her native hills]
[Illustration:
In places the Cauca Valley so swarmed with locusts that they rose like
an immense screen before us as we advanced, struck us in the face in
scores, and made a sound like that of a distant waterfall]
“But,” I protested, “Do you give no receipt for registered mail?”
Great excitement arose among the officials and the half-dozen persons
waiting ostensibly to buy a one-cent stamp. A long conference ensued.
“It is, señor,” said the postmaster himself, rising and turning to me
with regal courtesy, “that no blank receipts have been sent from Bogotá
yet this year. However....”
He called aside the custodian of the precious ledger and gave him long
whispered instructions. The latter hunted up a sheet of foolscap,
stamped it carefully with the office seal, and wrote out with long legal
flourishes—for penmanship is still an art in Colombia—a receipt for the
parcel. This he tore off and carried across to the postmaster who,
carefully preparing another pen, signed it with his full name, not
forgetting the elaborate _rúbrica_ beneath it. Then he read it carefully
over once more, seemed dissatisfied with something, and finally called
the attention of the writer to the rough edge he had left in tearing off
the paper, instructing him to lay it under a ruler and trim it with a
sharp knife. The subordinate did so and at last delivered to me a
memento I still have in my possession.
To one unacquainted with Latin-American ways the episode may seem
overdrawn. I have told it, however, without exaggeration. From the
moment I handed over the parcel until I emerged, receipt in hand, there
had elapsed one hour and twenty minutes!
Nor is such a scene unusual. From the Rio Grande southward, government
offices are filled with just such human driftwood, and it is common
experience to see several staid and pompous men in frock-coats spend
more than an hour doing what an average American boy would accomplish in
two minutes.
Swinging due south next morning through the perpetual summer of the
flat, grass-carpeted Cauca valley, we fell in with a straggling band of
nearly a hundred youths. They were conscripts recruited under the new
military law of Colombia, _antioqueños_ chosen by lot to make up the
quota of the Province of Antioquia, bound south from Medellín for six
months compulsory service. The majority were crude-minded countrymen.
Some, dressed in the wrecks of “European” suits, were undeveloped boys
of the towns, hobbling painfully along on bruised and blistered feet,
bare except for their cloth alpargatas. Among the latter was one
Policarpo, a devil-may-care young fellow of high intelligence and
considerable education, who had a very clear notion of the weak spots in
his native land, though no inkling of a workable remedy. Another carried
a _tiple_, as well as a pleasing baritone voice, and struck up at every
opportunity the languidly mournful music of the region.
The highway now was a series of interwoven cross-country paths, fording
the smaller streams, crossing the larger on little bamboo bridges with
faded thatched roofs. It was hot, yet not of the oppressive heat our
most northern states know in mid-summer. All along the way were flowers
of many colors, and broad vistas of greenest grass stretched far across
slightly rolling plains wherever woods and jungle did not choke it out.
Bands of butterflies, often of the most gorgeous hues, flickered here
and there across the face of the landscape. Insects hummed contentedly
and lizards scuttled away through the fallen leaves. Singing birds of
many kinds abounded; flocks of little parrots, brilliant green in color,
flitted in and out of the bamboo groves, shrieking noisily at their
games. Here and there _quinchas_, fences of split bamboo of basket-like
weave, shut in a little cultivated patch; and all day long the
distance-blue Western Cordillera, with its wrinkled folds and
prominences, stretching endlessly north and south, seemed to cut off the
Cauca like a world apart.
Then for a space there were no habitations, except an abandoned hut or
two and the ruins of several razed ones. The recruits murmured something
about an epidemic, but none appeared to know anything definite
concerning it. At length we descended through a shallow valley, and from
then on, locusts called _chapul_ in the Cauca, rose in vast clouds as we
advanced, covering the ground before us and veiling all the landscape as
with a great screen, new myriads rising at every step, until they struck
us incessantly in the face and filled our ears with a sound as of some
great waterfall at a distance. In Bogotá we had wondered to find an
important government department entitled “Comisión para la Extinción de
la Langosta”; now it seemed small, indeed, to cope with the problem. At
intervals cactus hedges bounded the way, and the organ-cactus of desert
lands stretched forth its stiff arms into the brilliant sky. The Cauca
was suffering one of its periodical droughts and the accompanying
scourge of locusts, after which it would bloom again like a tropical
garden.
The recruits so monopolized accommodations at the village of
Naranjo—which had not the remnant of an orange-tree to explain its
name—that we had to share a room with three none-too-white natives who
permitted no ventilation whatever. At four they rose to light candles
and feed their mules, and sat vociferously discussing nothing at all
until daybreak. They spent more time harnessing themselves than their
animals; for the Colombian never dreams of riding in anything less than
the complete outfit demanded by local convention. A wide-brimmed
“Panama” hat—“sombrero de junco,” or the finer “jipijapa,” he calls
it—covers his head. Over his usual clothing, which must include coat,
vest, cravat, gloves, and white collar, no matter how far he may be from
civilization nor what the temperature, he wears a ruana, a garment
similar to the _sarape_ of Mexico, or the poncho. In the vicinity of
Bogotá this is of heavy wool and dark in color; in the Cauca it is the
_ruana de hilo_, of light-colored cotton, generally gay with stripes.
Beneath this the horseman wears _zamarras_, ample false trouser-legs
held together by strips front and back, and legging-like at the bottom.
Sometimes these are of sun-dried cowhide, or goat-skins shaggy with long
white hair, reminiscent of the “chaps” of our cowboys. Far more common
are those of _tela de caucho_, “rubber cloth,” consisting of two
thicknesses of canvas and rubber woven into an impenetrable yet flexible
material nearly an eighth of an inch thick. Then come his _chilenas_,
huge wheel-like spurs; his _rejo_, or lariat of twisted rawhide hanging
from his wrist; his _alforjas_, or leather saddlebags between his legs;
his _cuchugos_, a long soft-leather pouch arched over the cantel of his
saddle like a cavalryman’s blanket-roll; his long, shoe-shaped stirrups;
and usually a parasol or umbrella hanging at his side, if, indeed, it
does not shade him as he rides. No Colombian caballero who aspires to
retain his rank as such would venture to mount a horse while lacking any
item of this equipment. One trembles to think what might happen to a
_caucano_, needing to ride instantly for the doctor, who could not lay
hands on his _zamarras_, or who had mislaid his gloves.
The Cauca was now a broad, dry, treeless region without streams, though
little humped bridges lifted us across the waterless beds of what would
be such at other seasons, and which still retained the name of “river”
in local parlance. Arrieros of this section put red bands about the
brows of their horses and mules, perhaps only for the purpose of
identification, but giving the animals the coy appearance of coquettish
girls. As we advanced, the long drought grew more and more in evidence.
Across the sun-cracked valley floor lay scattered the bleached bones of
scores of cattle that had died of thirst. Policarpo and I, falling
behind, were in danger of suffering the same fate; for the band of
recruits, like another locust horde, drank the world ahead wholly dry.
The rare hovels and amateur shops along the way were prepared to feed
and minister to the thirst of only the customary few daily travelers;
not to the ninety-four of us that suddenly descended upon them out of
the north without warning. Hays and I were forced to stride on past the
sponge-like avalanche of humanity for self-preservation.
Here and there we got huge glasses of _chicha_, the favorite native
beverage, at a cent or two each. So many travelers have pictured the
making of this by toothless old women chewing yuca and spitting it into
a tub to ferment, that the impression should be corrected at the outset.
That custom does exist, but it is found only among the untamed tribes of
the upper reaches of the Amazon, scarcely trodden by one in ten thousand
South American travelers. All down the great Andean chain this nectar of
the Incas is made chiefly of maize, though also of other grains,
berries, and of almost any vegetable matter that will ferment, by just
as agreeable processes as any other cooking operation of the same
region. The notion of cleanliness is, at best, rudimentary among the
country people of South America, yet the brewing of chicha certainly
compares favorably with the ways of our average cider-mill. A well-made
chicha, indeed, resembles somewhat in taste the best cider, and is the
surest thirst-quencher I have yet encountered, distinctly superior in
this respect to beer. Many were the chicha recipes I gathered along the
Andes. For the interest of those who wish to temper a hot summer day
with an excellent heritage from the ancient Inca civilization, let me
translate the most common one.
“Chicha de morocho:
Take hard, ripe corn” (_morocho_ is one of the several excellent species
of maize that, like certain grades of the potato, has never been carried
from its original Andean habitat to the rest of the world) “shell, and
boil for two hours. Let it cool, then grind, or crush under a stone,
sprinkling from time to time with some of the water in which it has been
boiled. Keep this mass in a well-covered jar. As it is needed, mix with
water; one soupspoonful of the prepared mass to one liter of boiling
water; add cloves, a very little vanilla, and as much sugar or
_rapadura_ as is considered necessary. Mix with an equal amount of cold
water and place in jars to ferment. Once fermented, it is ready to
serve.”
[Illustration:
Worse than the locusts was the flock of recruits that, until we
outdistanced them, ate and drank up everything the amateur shops,
tended by leprous old women, afforded along the way]
[Illustration:
The market-place of Tuluá, with the cross that protects it against all
sorts of calamities—except those which befall it]
We reached Zarzal, beyond a blistered, red-hot plain, soon after noon,
with nineteen miles already behind us. It was thus we would always have
arrived; the day’s work done early in the afternoon, to wash, eat, and
loaf awhile on the canvas cots in our cell-bare room; then to loll in
the rawhide chairs on the broad tile-floored veranda before our door,
reading the literature of the country, languidly watching the afternoon
shower, and taking a stroll in the evening for exercise. In the Andes,
however, the itinerary is subjected to a haphazard arrangement of
stopping-places that make so ideal a plan impossible. We gave orders for
dinner and supper upon our arrival. The ignorant, good-hearted old
landlord literally hung over us as we ate, fingering our dishes and even
our food. The place might, with entire justice, have advertised
“personal services.” At two we finished a heavy dinner. At three-thirty
our host waddled in to announce that the “large supper” we had ordered
was ready! We managed to plead off until five, but for that concession
were obliged to eat the meal cold as an abandoned hope.
A heavy rain during the night—our coming seemed to have broken the long
drought—made the going lead-heavy for the first few hours, until the
blazing sun had dried up the “gumbo” mud. A richer region appeared as we
advanced. Once or twice it seemed as if the central and western ranges
were about to join hands and cut us off, but the “unmade” road always
found a way through with, at most, an occasional dip, or a slight
winding climb. During the hot afternoon we picked up a recruit
straggler, complaining of fever. The entire company was scattered for
miles along the valley, as often panting in a patch of shade as hobbling
forward on their blistered, light-shod feet. Magnificent trees stood out
here and there across the rich bottom lands. Often the way led through
dense _gaudales_, bamboo groves that waved their gigantic plumes lazily
in the summer air. Here and there the vegetation vaulted entirely over a
“river” into which filtered only a few rays of sun, as through the roof
of an abandoned ruin. Occasionally we came upon a _chacra_, a little
farm with a tiny thatched hut faded with age, its floor of trampled
earth, surrounded by coffee bushes, _papaya_, _chirimoya_, and other
fruit trees of the tropics, the sometimes recently white-washed dwelling
furnished only with a few crude leather stools, a wooden bench, a lame
table, and a few _cántaros_ and dishes of native pottery. Pigs and
chickens treated the family with perfect equality; under the trees
meditated old donkeys, broken down by a lifetime of toil under heartless
drivers. We were indeed approaching the scene of “María” in all its
photographic detail.
We prepared to leave Tuluá early, but we reckoned without our host, who
was a half-negro of nasty temper and stupid wit, and no faith in gold
coin. Hays offered him a $5 gold piece in payment of our bill, but he
demanded “paper of the country.” We had none left, and a mulatto boy was
sent out to change the scorned yellow metal. An hour elapsed without a
second sight of him. When another had drifted into the past, a search
party was organized. Investigation showed that the emissary had tried to
change the coin in a couple of shops, and had then faded away. It was
nearly noon when he reappeared, the coin still in his clenched hand. He
had fallen into a game with other boys and “forgotten” his errand.
We took the task upon ourselves. One after another drowsy, wondering
shopkeepers looked the coin over as a great curiosity and handed it
back, announcing that the changing would be “muy trabajoso”—“very
laborious”—for the speaker, but that we could get it changed “en to’as
partes”—“anywhere,” which, as usual, meant nowhere. At last a merchant
suggested that it would be changed wherever we bought anything. We
called his bluff by picking out a notebook on his shelves, and had
heaped up before us nearly $500 in ragged “billetes del país” of chiefly
one and five-peso values. The wad was burdensome, but to be caught on
the road in the Andes without small money is often to go hungry, if not,
indeed, thirsty. This particular shopkeeper prided himself on a
knowledge of geography and the affairs of the “exterior,” the outside
world, above the average of his fellow-townsmen. As we turned away, he
called after us:
“By the way, do los señores come from New York, or from the United
States?”
It was a subtle distinction we had not, to that moment, recognized.
The ancient city of Buga, one of the largest in the Cauca valley, was
already familiar to us from the pages of “María.” But seeing is too
often disillusionment in these “cities” of the Andes, particularly those
in which the imagination has already dwelt. To have seen one long,
cobbled, unswept street of Buga was to have seen them all. Checkerboard
in plan, the monotonous line of its continuous house-walls, all standing
close to the street in a strict “right dress,” broken here and there by
a massive _zaguan_, stretched away out of sight in both directions. At
first glimpse, it seemed unduly modest in claiming only ten thousand
inhabitants; when we found that every dwelling had a patio and a garden
of its own within, we realized that a one-story Andean town is by no
means so large as it looks. The place was stagnant as a frog-pond, its
main plaza a splendid study in “still life.” Yet Buga was old before
Boston was founded, and is favored with a soil and climate superior to
the best of New England. In a region where fruit should have been
unlimited, the only shop that offered any for sale was slightly stocked
with a few green samples. The old woman who kept it bestirred herself to
finger over several of her wares, and advised us to come back mañana or
the day after when they had had time to ripen. Perhaps it is unjust to
expect of Buga the energy and movement of a white man’s town. At least
it has unrivalled evenings in which, after the sun has set gloriously
over the western range, the traveler can lean over the parapet of the
massive old Spanish bridge of many arches—how the Spaniards built to
stay, yet stayed not—watching a half-moon rise and listening to the
chatter of the shallow, diamond-clear little Guadalajara de las Piedras
that flanks the town on the south.
Buga is a holy city. Far above all else bulks a modern Gothic church of
real bricks—and bricks transported from overseas are not cheap—called
“De los Milagros,” filled with more religious trophies than any Hindu
temple. We were accosted in the nave by a long-unshaven priest who
inquired our desires with a brusk “Qué se le ofrece?” that plainly
revealed his knowledge that we were not of the “faithful.” His
familiarity with the outside world was on a par with that of most
Colombians. When we answered his question of nationality by announcing
ourselves Americans, he replied complacently, “Ah, yes, Englishmen.”
Finding unheeded his strong hint to leave, he at length led the way up a
ladder to a cell above and back of the altar. Here he lighted a candle
and fell on his knees before the “miraculous” crucifix, the figure of
which was smeared with red paint to simulate blood. Pilgrims flock to
Buga from hundreds of miles around. To the _bugueños_ themselves,
however, their “miracle” seems to offer little more than a means of easy
income, through the hawking of crucifixes and holy lithographs to their
pious visitors.
Like Puree, Benares, or Lourdes, the holy city is more holy at a
distance, than to those who loll through life in its shadows, and it was
only at El Cerrito, a day’s march beyond, that we heard the story of the
Milagroso de Buga in all its details. In a faintly lighted corredor we
sat with three old women, the natural authorities on such subjects, who
told the tale in low, awed voices, their eyes glowing in the night with
the miracle of it, their tongues breaking in frequently with a “Qué le
parece!”—“What do you think of that!”—as the miraculous recital
proceeded.
Long years ago, more than two centuries, when Buga was nothing but a row
of thatched _casitas_ on the bank of the babbling Guadalajara de las
Piedras, a very poor and pious woman used to come every day to wash
clothes at the river brink. The clothes of others, that is, for you must
know that she had long been trying to get together sixty cents to buy a
crucifix to set up in her hut, where she had nothing whatever to pray
to. At last she economized the sixty cents and was toiling away on the
bank of the Guadalajara, dreaming of the joy of setting up the crucifix
in her _casita_ on the morrow, when a poor lame man of Buga came by and
told her he owed sixty cents to a rich caballero, and would be put in
prison for debt if he did not pay it that very night. The poor
washerwoman drew from within her garments the silver she had so
carefully hidden away and gave it to the lame man to pay his debt. The
next day—or three days later; here a great dispute arose among our
informants—as the poor woman was washing and praying that she might some
day gather together another sixty cents, there floated squarely into her
open hands and mixed itself up with the garments—of others—she was
washing, a _cajita_, a little box in which there was....
[Illustration:
A view of the “sacred city” of Buga, with the new church erected in
honor of the miraculous Virgin]
[Illustration:
A horseman of the Cauca in full regalia. In addition to his town garb,
coat and all, he would be a social outcast who did not wear a
“Panama” hat; gloves; a _ruana_, or poncho light in color and
weight; _zamarras_, or false trouser-legs of rubber-canvas, and
_chilenas_, or huge wheel-like spurs. His other possessions he
carries in his _cuchugos_, the long, soft-leather pouch on his
cantel; and inserts his feet in heavy, fancily carved brass
shoe-stirrups]
Only a simple little cross, the spokeswoman said, but she, having at
that moment to step into the shop to sell two corn-and-cheese biscuits,
the others assured us in hoarse whispers that this version was entirely
erroneous; it was not a simple cross, but a crucifix with a Cristo
attached, just exactly the same that you see to-day in El Milagroso de
Buga, only very tiny, _chiquitito_, in fact. This momentous point in
Buga’s history I am forced to leave unsettled, reporting merely what I
heard half-whispered in the dark corredor of El Cerrito. The woman took
this cross—or crucifix—home and set it up on the wall of her _casita_.
To her surprise and alarm, the crucifix—or cross—began to grow. “Qué le
parece!” It grew even during the night! And the noises of its stretching
kept her awake. When it had grown to twice its original size, she became
so alarmed that she went and told the village curate. The padre scoffed
at her story, saying such things were not possible nowadays—O ye of
little faith!—for miracles were no longer done. But when she showed him
the thing, lo, it was even then growing! So the priest took it away with
him—as priests will—and still it grew. It grew until it reached the size
you see it to-day in El Milagroso de Buga. Then the padre had an
intimation from the Blessed Virgin that a church should be built on the
spot where the _cajita_ had been found, and he called all the people
together to build it. They put the miracle behind the altar, and there
it remained more than two hundred years, in the church which is to-day
the carpenter-shop beside El Milagroso. Then, in 1902, the great temple
of bricks was raised, for it had long been that those who would worship
and be cured by the Miraculous One could not get into the old church.
And the Milagroso was moved to the new temple as easily as if it were a
mere image of wood, though all the world well knows that it moves only
when it wishes, and if it does not, all the horses in the Cauca cannot
stir it.
“And is it true that El Milagroso has cured many invalids?” I asked.
All three exploded in the Colombian manner of expressing great
world-wide truths, such as, “Is Buga larger than Tuluá?” “Is it colder
in Zarzal than in El Cerrito?” Why....
But from an embarrassment of proofs of the miraculous power of the
Milagroso of Buga, I have space only for this:
A woman of Sonson had been bed-ridden with rheumatism for twenty years.
At last, when they had grown large enough, her sons carried her to Buga
and placed her in a chair before El Milagroso. As she prayed, she leaned
forward and touched the toe of the Miraculous One, whereupon she at once
rose up from her chair perfectly well and walked home to Sonson, many
miles away. That, every one in the Cauca valley knows, for it happened
only the other year.
“And also,” put in another of the old women, bent on rounding out the
story, “El Milagroso can turn a woman young and beautiful again, back to
the day of her marriage and the age of fifteen.”
“Eh!” began Hays, sitting up, “Then why ... But, no, the question would
be unkind. It is too personal.”
It was in El Cerrito that we first began inquiries about Jorge Isaacs.
Those who have sought information of Carlyle in Chelsea, or of Goethe in
Frankfurt will be surprised to know that the people of El Cerrito had
heard of the author of “María,” though the corner chicha-seller and his
neighbors spoke of him with something of the scorn active men of the
world always feel for mere men of letters, even though they were not
averse to basking in the sunshine of his fame. Some one led us to the
little bridge below which the village gossips and washes its scanty
clothes, and pointed away to the east. Far across the valley, on the
lower skirts of the central range, we could see plainly the “novela
casa”—“the story house,” a mere white speck on the distant mountain
flank.
There were few spots in Colombia to which I had looked forward with more
interest than this scene of South America’s greatest novel, and the
life-long home of its author. With the first graying of the night I was
astir, and we were off by sunrise along a grass-grown trail at right
angles to our route to Ecuador. Several times this seemed to lose its
way, and split up in hopeless indecision. But the “house of my fathers,”
gleaming steadily on the skirt-hem of the central range, piloted us
forward. The only building to be seen, except those on the floor of the
plain, it stood just high enough to gaze out across the great valley, a
single evergreen tree, slender as a church-spire, close beside it. The
sun shot down its rays as if bent on setting on fire all that the
foliage of the trees did not defend from its rage, when we came to the
edge of the plain, broken by ravines in which we separated in an attempt
to keep together. There was nothing left but to strike an unmarked
course for the goal. My own soon plunged down into a gully hundreds of
feet deep, thick in jungle, a stream, the Zabaletas of “María,”
monologuing at its bottom. I wandered long beside it before I could tear
my way across, and longer still before I found the suggestion of a path
by which to climb out again. Beyond were slightly sloping brown fields,
with grazing herds and immense black rocks protruding from the soil, and
behind, the indistinct, prairie-like valley, majestic and silent,
stretched mile upon mile to the deep-blue wall of the Western
Cordillera. Over the crest of the Andes above hung, like an immense
veil, dense masses of fog, from which the winds of the Sierra above
snatched rags of clouds that floated lazily away to the westward. Then,
all at once, the modest little white house appeared close at hand, in a
grove of evergreens backed by the _yarumo_-dotted mountain flank. I
climbed a stone wall and, mounting through another brown field, pushed
open a heavy rustic gate, to find myself at last at the home of “María.”
A woman of olive complexion, with streaming hair—for in this corner of
the Cauca, far from the “royal highway,” travelers, to say nothing of
foreigners, are rare, indeed—watched me in speechless amazement as,
dripping with twelve miles of struggle, I mounted the steps of the
house. On the veranda I was met by a veritable delegation of women and
children, headed by a man who announced himself as Camilo Durán,
hacendado, entirely at my service. The family was of the well-to-do
farmer class of the Cauca, a bit awkward, yet proud of their rank in
society, lightly clad in rural dress, and decidedly excited at the
extraordinary event of a visit by a foreigner from far-off Europe—or
America—who presented a document from the alcalde of Bogotá, signed by
none other than the nephew of that same “Don Jorge” for whom their home
was famous. A wide-eyed negro boy whom one might have taken for “Juan
Angel” in person, his woolly head protruding through the crown of what
had long since been a native straw hat, came running with a chair. As I
sat down in the cool corredor, surrounded by the admiring family, Durán
called for glasses and a bottle, and just then Hays’ head appeared above
the stone fence of the inner corral and his always leisurely legs
brought him up the steps to be introduced as that very “Lay-O-Ice” whom
the valued communication from Bogotá mentioned—when read by natives. The
aguardiente, which was “ardent water” indeed, arrived a moment later,
and when Durán had drunk our health and we his, we turned to look about
us. Would we see _la novela casa_? We would, indeed, and rising, entered
it.
The “story house” was a more modest dwelling than the imagination
pictures during the reading of “María.” But then, all the Cauca and its
ways and people are simple and unassuming to the American point of view.
Typical of the hacienda houses of the region, it was of one story,
arranged with due regard for the natural resources and the needs of the
place and climate. Built of stone and adobe, it gave evidence of being
periodically disguised under a coating of whitewash. The long, deep
veranda was flanked by two corner rooms and, like them, floored with
what the French call _dalles_, dull-red tiles that remained cool even at
Cauca noonday. Its thick walls were shaded by a low, projecting tile
roof. Over the entrance—a genuine Latin-American touch—had been painted
in what Hays referred to as “box-car letters” the information:
“Aquí Cantó y Lloró “Here Sang and Wept
Jorge Isaacs” George Isaacs”
The main hall, or parlor, took up the entire depth of the house from the
front to the back veranda, the “corredor de la montaña” of the novel,
and was fitted with heavy hand-made furniture, of which an immense
dining table of rough-hewn construction formed the center. Flanking this
chief chamber were the half-dozen private rooms of the family. That at
the right-hand corner of the house, encroaching on the front corredor,
had been the room of “Efraín,” the hero, and of the novelist himself.
Back of it came the sewing-room, the writer’s picture of which was so
photographic that we were almost startled not to find “María” and “Emma”
and her mother busy with their sewing. At the back, across the main
hall, stood the _oratorio_, a small chapel with the same simple image of
the Virgin, perhaps, before which “María” had so often prayed in vain
for a happy life. Behind the back veranda stood a wing, barely connected
with the house proper, with a kitchen, hive-shaped clay bake-ovens, and
the staring white eyes of negro servants of all sizes that seemed
gargoyle-like ornaments of the smoke-streaked and blackened place. The
entire dwelling was as densely inhabited as a New York tenement. Besides
the dozen boys and girls of olive tint and several women of the Durán
family, servants and negroes swarmed, and piccaninnies peered from every
opening and corner.
The way led through the sewing-room across the now weedy garden to the
“pila de María,” a crystal-clear pool in the bed of the _arroyo_ that
sprang from rock to rock down the swift, light-wooded gorge at the foot
of which the “story house” is situated. “María” with her unbound
tresses, was no longer here; instead, several dark-skinned boys snatched
their garments as we approached and sought quick shelter. The “pila” was
a rock-walled basin of sandy bottom, some four feet deep and as many
times larger than the less romantic bathtub of civilization, constantly
renewed by the stream that wanders languidly away across the valley of
the Cauca. Because of the dip of the garden, the “pila” is out of sight
from the house, but from his corner room “Efraín” could, even as the
novelist has pictured, see the girls as they returned from their morning
dip, pausing to pick a flower here and there along the way. Durán gave
us leave to take a plunge. But though few things would have been more
welcome after our dripping climb from El Cerrito, it would have seemed
something verging on sacrilege, something like smoking a cigar with our
feet on Juliet’s balcony, to have profaned with our dusty, prosaic,
vagabond forms the pool about which seemed still to flit the spirit of
adorable “María.”
[Illustration:
The scene of “María,” most famous of South American novels, and once
the residence of its author. It lies some distance back from the
_camino real_ against the foothills of the Central Cordillera]
[Illustration:
The home of “María”; and a typical _hacendado_ family of the Cauca.
The lettering over the door reads: “Here sang and wept Jorge Isaacs”]
According to the people of the region, Colombia’s chief novel is little
more than the autobiography of its author, polished into the ideal
love-story in vogue a half-century ago. Isaacs, like the hero “Efraín,”
was the son of an English Jew, born in Jamaica, who came to Colombia as
a young man, married, and embraced Christianity. Like “Efraín,” the
author had a sister Emma, in real life the recently-deceased wife of a
doctor of Popayán. “Carlos,” who first offered his hand to “María,”
still lived on his hacienda a few miles out across the valley. “Juan
Angel,” the slave-boy of “Efraín,” was said to be still living in Cali,
an old, old man. The bear and tiger hunting, the country weddings, the
simple and patriarchal household, the life and scenes of the Cauca, had
all been things of reality, deftly lifted into the realms of the
imagination by the hero-author. Even the evil stroke of fortune that had
befallen the family on that dismal night in the “hacienda of the valley”
was no story-book tale, but a stern fact that had left the novelist
without patrimony and brought into the hands of strangers “the house of
my fathers.”
We took our leave in the early afternoon, drifting down through sloping
meadows past the great black rock to which “María” used to climb to
watch for the return of “Efraín” from the valley, which here spreads out
in all its rich expanse, majestic and silent, to the dim Western
Cordillera. Hays, long lost in meditation, broke it at last to announce
that he had found the end of his wanderings; that he would return to the
Zone to earn a new “stake” and come back to end his days as the owner of
the “novela casa.” He was given to catching such enthusiasms—to have
them die during the succeeding night. It was, indeed, the most splendid
spot in all the magnificent Cauca valley, this simple dwelling set where
it could see and be seen from untold leagues away, from the very crest
of the western range, yet never standing forth boldly and conspicuously.
Framed modestly among its evergreens, just a little way up the first
easy slope of the Andean range that piles into the clouds behind it, it
seemed as unassuming and removed from the hubbub of the modern world as
gentle “María” herself. All the day through our eyes were drawn back to
it at frequent intervals, and as long as the light lasted it stood forth
plainly in this clear air, though it shrunk to a house in miniature,
then to a mere speck on the skirt-hem of the central range.
All the hot afternoon we plodded onward. Some miles after falling in
with the _camino real_ again, we passed “La Manuelita,” the “hacienda of
the valley” where Isaacs’ father had set up a sugar factory while the
son was still a student in Bogotá, and where took place, both in the
novel and real life, that pathetic scene that marked the ruin of the
family. To-day the estate is the property of Russian-Americans, and its
products are known throughout all Colombia. Beyond the little Amaime
river the way led through a forest of bamboo, then across a monotonous
and dusty _despoblado_. The great Cordillera Occidental, now like a
badly wrinkled garment of sepia-brown hue, drew ever nearer, as did a
line of bright-green trees marking the course of the Cauca river. The
central range all but faded away in the east, leaving a broad expanse of
fertile country longing for the plow. Further on, a broken bridge or two
adorned a waterless stream, and an occasional ox-cart, the first thing
on wheels we had seen since crossing the Magdalena, crawled by in the
sand. The after-curse of African slavery was everywhere in evidence. In
little cabins thrown together from jungle rubbish lounged swarms of
ragged humanity, black or half-black in color. Yet somehow they seemed
less lazy than in our own land, perhaps because the activity of their
few lighter neighbors gave less contrast. Swift tropical night was
spreading its cloak over all the Cauca when we sighted the sharp
church-spire of Palmira, where we were soon housed in the well-named
“Hotel Oasis.”
In mid-afternoon of the day following we broke out suddenly on the bank
of the Cauca river. A _barca_, or ferry, moored to wires that sagged
from shore to shore, set us across, and with sunset we plodded into
Cali. Our arrival was well timed. The chief commercial city of the Cauca
valley was en fête. From end to end, on the Sunday morrow of our
entrance, the place was crowded with happy, rather dusky, throngs, and
gay with the chiefly yellow flag of the nation and the bishop’s banner
and mitre. For on that day the ancient church of Cali became a
cathedral, and one of her “sons” a bishop; dividing a territory ruled
over for centuries by the chief ecclesiastic of Popayán. The name of the
“hijo de Cali” about to don the purple blazed forth from the façade of
the church in enormous electric letters, like that of some Broadway
star, and by sunset fully half the visible population was reeling drunk
in honor of the honor that had fallen upon their native town.
“What you don’t look for in Cali, you won’t find,” runs a local proverb;
which is a Colombian way of saying that its shops offer for sale
anything man may desire. In a small and Colombian sense this is true,
except on those frequent occasions when the stock is exhausted.
Connected with the Pacific port of Buenaventura by seven hours muleback
and four hours rail—it was hard to realize that we were again only four
days from a Zone police station—the place is in more or less constant
connection with the outside world. But the transportation facilities of
the country are so lax that the merchants of Cali are accustomed to
announce the receipt of a shipment from Europe or America with a
sarcastic placard:
“POR FIN LLEGARON!” (At last they have arrived.)
The city’s rôle is chiefly that of distributing center for the vast
territory about and behind it, and on the heels of this first
announcement appears on the chief shop fronts the information, of
interest only to arrieros and the owners of mule-trains:
“HAY CARGA PARA—There is a load for” this or that town of the interior.
Life in Cali is largely governed by placards, as if she had but recently
discovered the art of printing and were making the most of it. Hardly an
establishment but is adorned with its set of rules. Among those of our
hotel were two of purely Latin-American tone:
“Correct dress is required of anyone presenting himself in the salons of
this establishment.
“All political or religious discussion is absolutely prohibited.”
Among the orders to the _sepultero_ of the local cemetery were several
that reflected the customs of the place:
“1. Receive no corpse without a ticket from a priest.
2. Keep three or four graves ready dug for bodies that may present
themselves.
3. Make each adult grave 1½ meters deep and one wide. Relatives may,
upon request, have it dug deeper.
4. Remove no bodies without the permission of an inspector or a priest.”
Why was man, whose enjoyment surely would be so much greater, denied the
power of sailing freely out over the earth, as the birds circled away
across the great valley of the Cauca, tinged to sepia in the oblique
rays of the setting sun? When I reached the modest height that stands so
directly over Cali that I could count every dull-red tile of its roofs,
the little river racing over its rocks below was still alive with
bathers and laundresses. A breeze from off the mountains lifted the
drooping leaves of the palm-trees of the city; beyond, lay a view of the
entire Cauca valley, clear across to the now hazy central chain of the
Andes, the dot that to whoever has known “María” will ever remain “the
house of my fathers” plainly in sight, as were many of the scenes back
to Cartago and on over the range toward Bogotá that I should never again
see, except in imagination. If only this magnificent valley, climate and
all, were in our land! Or, no; it is better as it is. For then there
would be spread out here in the sunset a great colorless stretch of
plowed fields, factories sooting the peerless Cauca heavens with their
strident industry; there these velvety hillsides would be covered with
the gaudy villas of the more “successful” of an acquisitive race; a
great, ugly American city of broken and distressing sky-line, without a
single dull-red roof, would cover the most featureless, because the most
“practical,” part of the valley, utterly destroying the beauty of a
landscape which nature is still left to decorate in her own inimitable
fashion.