A lot of Colombians were leaving the country these days. She dreamed of leaving and finding those happy endings from imported movies. In the meantime, like everyone else, she and her friends opted to ignore their reality without happy endings and concentrate on their march uphill.
The improvised homes in the slums looked almost inviting: dark and cool inside, like caves to hide from hunters. To be safe, to become invisible. Radios played the news inside many of those caves, the carefully gauged volume producing a uniform murmur, like an incantation to distract death and confuse bad spirits. Today there were no loud vallenatos, rancheras or radionovelas – the usual music of lamenting accordions and love grievances inviting more grief.
No one was outside, except for a few feral dogs enjoying a sun bath and a nap occasionally interrupted by machine guns and exploding grenades that had begun to sound more distant. The usual motorcycles and battered cars were not doing their rounds to sell drugs and stolen goods. The chain of uncertainties that nurtured life in this part of Bogota was suspended. Today felt like the eye of a storm. New chaos was expected after this uneasy stillness. The victims of unpredictable violence who lived in this area could recognize the process. They chose to hide until the establishment of a new order when they could openly identify both allies and enemies.
Camilo, Jose y Nena followed the dry mud roads that looked like sand snakes descending into the barricaded city behind them. These started at remote points high up in the hills. When they turned around to see how far they were from the Palacio de Justicia, they realized that the distant bangs became floating clouds of dark smoke between tall modern buildings. They were now in the high lands: below lay a wide valley of concrete and brick against a perfect blue sky. They seldom noticed blue skies in their daily routines because they learned to walk looking for signs of explosives in parked cars or making mental maps of where to run for shelter if they were ever to face a stampede or a random machine gun in the street.
Bogota looked big from here: horizons fenced by light blue mountains far away, dark green ones nearby. A visible border separating human chaos from undisturbed nature. The mountains closer to the teenagers evoked a sleeping beast – the cool fragrance of humid vegetation.
The few people still walking on the same path had a new expression of fear that Camilo, Jose y Nena were unable to see as anything other than normal. They had grown up seeing fear in the faces of their families, avoiding eye contact to hide their own.
The reality of the drug cartels, rural and urban violence, taught everyone to ignore the misery of others and to find ways in which personal misery could be mitigated. It was normal to witness robberies and physical attacks while people pretended to be blind, walking away as if they were changing a TV channel to stop watching repeated images of mass graves and tragedy. But this new fear was a sign that adults were realizing that no one was safe. This was no longer the story of someone else in the evening news.
“Esto es lo mismo que una guerra,” said Camilo absentmindedly, thinking of the smoke clouds. He wanted to keep the conversation going during what had turned out to be a very boring, long and uneventful walk.
He had heard similar words from his big brother when he last saw him. He was killed during his mandatory military service. Camilo and Jose would have to join once they graduated from high school, unless they came up with a good excuse or enough money to buy their free pass.
Camilo’s brother had enjoyed telling him about the missions he had survived, making him feel like he was the hero of a war movie. During visiting days, they ate chicken stew and potatoes their mother prepared and brought to the army camp in a heavy aluminium pot. She saw that her son, training for combat, was losing weight quickly due to the long journeys by foot in the heat of the jungle. His mother had been a victim of displacement herself, and whenever children began to lose weight, she feared death would follow. Families displaced into the city had seen their children die of hunger when they couldn’t grow food to feed them. She wasn’t considering her son’s physical changes: she fed him as much as she could during those visits and thought that would keep death at bay.
Don Hugo used to talk about young men in military service as “carne de cañon” – clueless young men recruited by the army to feed their endless brutal game. Nena never mentioned ‘carne de cañon’ to her school friends, since the reality of victimsoldiers would touch them sooner or later. She had seen it happening to her older cousin, shot dead three weeks short of finishing his mandatory “Service to the Country.” He almost made it.
The difference between urban and rural war seemed to have disappeared. Doña Perla like many other adults around Nena, spoke of La Violencia. Everyone saw it as a dark period in history, full of cruelty and abuse, but it seemed to be something in the past that Nena felt had not gone away. She heard and witnessed the same stories every day. La Violencia just changed characters, like those movies where she could anticipate the end because it was the same story with different actors. Happy endings for the beautiful white, blond, blue-eyed characters. The victims disappeared with their stories, no happy ending in sight.
Everyone was an extra in this warmovie.
(…to be continued…)
Transadaptation Volume 6 – Meaning? – Uncertainty, Instability and Extremes Transadapted
January: A Regular Train Trip – Mateusz Tymoszewski (Poland)
February: Growing Up – Adriana Uribe (Columbia)
March: Mess – Veronika Groke (Austria)
April: The Roads We Take – Svetlana Molchanova (Russia)
May: Need – Nadia Silva Castro (Brazil)
June: “Next Sunshine” – Jonay Quintero Hernandez (Spain)
July: Pandemic Love – Xiakun Li (China)
August: Planet Kyiv – Anastasiia Leonova (Ukraine)
September: Feeling like a Fool – Ulrike Bergmeister (Germany)
October: Stories of Outcast Souls – Armine Asryan (Armenia)
November: Ronaldinha – Alejandra Baccino (Uruguay)
December: Aimlessly – Krisztina Janosi (Hungary)
Background – Context
Transadaptation Volume 5: Of Flowing Vicissitudes – Life Transadapted, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2024)
Transadaptation Volume 4: Material Dissent – Adulthood Transadapted, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2023)
Transadaptation Volume 3: Evanescent – Young Adulthood Transadapted, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2022)
Transadaptation Volume 2: Conceived – Childhood Transadapted, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2021)
Transadaptation Volume 1: In the Middle – Prelude to a Contemporary Transadaptation, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2020)
Peripatetic Alterity: A Philosophical Treatise on the Spectrum of Being – Romantics and Pragmatists by Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2019)
La Syncrétion of Polarization and Extremes Transposée, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2019)
The Codex of Uncertainty Transposed, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2018)
L’anthologie of Global Instability Transpuesta, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2017)
From Wahnsinnig to the Loony Bin: German and Russian Stories Transposed to Modern-day America, (eds.) Angelika Friedrich, Yuri Smirnov and Henry Whittlesey (2013)
Emblems and stories on the international community
Perception by country – Transposing emblems, articles, short stories and reports from around the world
Credits
Left column (top to bottom): Bogota, Columbia – In Fontibon – David Gabric (Unsplash); Bogota, Columbia – The road through – Michael Schmid (Unsplash)
Top center: Bogota, Columbia – Downtown – Richardo Gomez Angel (Unsplash)
Bottom: Bogota, Columbia – Palacio de Justicia – Gabriel Leonardo Guerrero (Shutterstock)
Right column (top to bottom): Bogota, Columbia – Pare – Andres Gomez (Unsplash); Bogota, Columbia – Mountainside houses – Random Institute (Unsplash)
Source: The Codex of Uncertainty Transposed