Growing Up
Adriana Uribe
(In Transadaptation Collection 6: Meaning)
The National Library was no longer quiet. Camilo, Jose and Nena walked toward the exit, herded by nervous staff who were told to get people out immediately, noquestionsasked. The rule of absolute silence throughout the corridors filled with books from floor to ceiling was broken by loud voices speculating about what was going on. The general consensus was that guerrillas and drug cartels were jointly attacking the Palacio de Justicia. Everyone moved quickly towards the glass doors, opening wide into the sunny afternoon.
The massive marble building of the Palacio de Justicia was on Plaza de Bolivar, just a few blocks away from the equally massive marble building of the National Library. El centro de Bogota was now off-limits for anyone who wasn’t wearing a uniform affiliated with those involved. For Camilo, Jose and Nena this evacuation felt mostly like being in a movie.
It was difficult to separate the badguys from the goodguys. Guerrillas, armed forces or cartels haven’t changed much throughout Colombian history. The armed forces were known for acting like criminals, and the alleged criminals had proven their talent at organizing themselves with military precision. They shared their cruelty and thirst for blood; they continued displacing the farmers who weren’t killed for opposing orders from the left, the right or the rich.
This event in the eyes of the three teenagers, wasn’t far from what they knew happened on a daily basis: random car bombs, petty and notsopetty crime, rich criminals buying their way around the country. This early afternoon was maybe just an escalation of a forever brewing conflict.
Camilo, Jose and Nena didn’t spend much time watching the news except when they were waiting for another TV series more compatible with their daydreams. At their age (in Colombia), the transition from innocence to reality could be a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time to experience events they would otherwise watch on the news before changing channels.
If it wasn’t for that stupid assignment due next week, the three of them wouldn’t have come to the National Library in the first place. Their school didn’t have a library. It actually didn’t have anything. Escuelasdegaraje were popular these days. Like most of them, theirs was a high school inside an old big house where the garage served as the social area, while the other rooms were converted into classrooms to accommodate students. An illusion for parents who couldn’t afford expensive private schools but didn’t want their children joining public schools because all social classes mixed carelessly and poorly paid teachers were regularly on strike.
The three teenagers began to walk south behind the many adults evacuated from neighboring shops and offices. Everyone was as clueless as them, but being part of a bigger group gave them a subtle sense of protection.
Random military blockades on city streets were not unusual. They were cordoned off to give priority to bulletproof cars taking senatordruglords around the city, but this time, in addition to blockades, army trucks and tanks were invading all the public spaces. They moved slowly through the historical center of Bogota, their monstrous dimensions reaching up to the delicate wooden balconies of colonial houses filled with geraniums and bougainvillea.
“NO HAY PASO”
The same sign with big red capital letters instructed pedestrians to continue their march away from the city center and inevitably toward the slums. The distance to public transportation was becoming larger, as the usual routes to stops for busetas y automoviles were rendered off-limits.
The slums didn’t count for public transportation. The inhabitants were too poor for it. The city assumed they wouldn’t be able to pay for the rides and would end up robbing the bus drivers and passengers.
Nena was afraid of going into these poor barrios, but she had Jose and Camilo for company. As teenagers trying to fit in, and rebels at the same time, they had adopted the attire of ragged clothes for their generation, the plastic ornaments and threaded bracelets crafted during slow history classes. They didn’t have anything that could be attractive for thievessurvivors, not even for the homeless, who slept during the day waiting for night to do their rounds of collecting recyclables to trade for their crack fix.
Night protected the homeless against the gangs from the extreme right camouflaged under Tradicion, Familia y Propiedad, a group of fervent Catholics who fought poverty mostly by killing the poor.
Some people began to leave the group walk – adults looking for alternative roads in their attempt to avoid the slums. They walked through alleys and passageways built during colonial times, but these didn’t get them anywhere. Meanwhile, others gravitated towards smaller groups to quell their individual fears.
Nena began to feel more reassured in the company of her friends. Together they cursed the biology teacher for his complicated assignments. More importantly, that hatred (she thought) would make them look tough and discourage sicarios from making the effort to quickly kidnap and hold them for ransom. Their risk in the slums, compared to other “normal” people, should be less. The three teenagers continued walking towards the heart of these settlements, thinking the effort would be greater if they retraced their steps and faced new blockades in other streets. The noises from guns, shouts and army vehicles were still close and loud.
Paved roads began to turn into dust paths. Colonial white houses morphed into naked brick walls with glassless window frames. Plastic sheets or tin roofs replaced the bright terracotta roof tiles. Bogota was an urban Cinderella under the scorching sun – no prince charming or genie or magician able to change the course of events in this country. This was part of something happening beyond the capital.
Hollywood stories had happy endings like Cinderella, thought Nena. Maybe happiness, wellness, comfort, whateveritwascalled only existed in other countries where white people spoke softer languages, and everyone drove a car, and lived in houses with big gardens.
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.
Nena suggested that they find a public phone to call home, but Camilo and Jose thought that was stupid. “Aquí no hay teléfonos,” said Jose half laughing at her naïve suggestion. It was true. There were no public phones in poor barrios. It was assumed that poor people would vandalise them, so none were installed.
Slums and poor barrios were illegal because poverty was illegal.
The government’s priority was to discourage people from living in what was considered random urban settlements. An eyesore for Bogotanos who took pride in modern architecture and any new wealth brought by money laundering.
Each new politician elected in Colombia swore to remove slums from the big cities, finding new ways to invalidate the struggle of those who had no choice but to become urban slaves. The displaced were meant to feel unwelcomed and return to rural homes they no longer had.
Camilo, Jose y Nena were meanwhile discovering a vital force in the slums they hadn’t known to exist. These barrios survived and continued growing, perhaps to be validated eventually.
Survival relied on the rediscovery of problem-solving: electricity was stolen from cables running in random directions and at different heights, sometimes running next to washing lines or propped up by dead tree trunks before disappearing into the dark brick caves. The water coming from natural springs in the nearby mountains arrived through colourful hoses like rubber veins settled under overgrown grass, feeding cement containers that also collected rain and served as natural refrigerators for bottles of beer, coca-cola or milk.
The displaced had no choice but to join an endless circle of underpaid and often illegal jobs, but they quickly adopted the urban attitude of indifference toward others’ misery, and learned to avoid more danger than they could handle. Survival also relies on fear.
Nena was afraid that her friends might abandon her if they found a way to any road out of the slums and toward street buses they could ride home. Don Hugo drove her to school every morning because she was a girl. Boys like Camilo and Jose were taught independence by enduring the dangers of the city and the country from a very young age. She wasn’t that confident, and walking through these barrios would be even more dangerous if she were on her own.
“Sigamos caminando derecho,” said Nena, hopelessly looking at a distant corner that could mean they were near Los Mártires. Unable to phone home, she couldn’t ask her father to pick her up, and the prospect of the red-light district seemed inevitable and worse than the slums – even during the day. She thought of the girls she knew who had been abused or raped, or those pregnant teenagers who brought shame on their families. They were all “ruined” according to the males of the family; they were just prostitutes. Men said girls were raped and abused because of how they dressed, how they acted, how they smiled. If they were pregnant, it was their fault, and they would have to face the consequences on their own. Ever since she had started high school, she had tried to look and behave like a boy. She wasn’t taking any chances. No make-up, no pretty dresses. No boyfriends. She would find one when she left, maybe in Paris, surely somewhere in France. She would buy a ticket when she had saved enough money.
The red-light district could be avoided if streets were no longer blocked off. People living under the illusion of being middle class were, in reality, very close to the slums, but they hid dirty secrets behind corners and alleys to maintain a façade of comfort and imaginary social success. Thanks to this, politiciandrugtraffickers could continue claiming that drugs, crime and prostitution were under control in Bogota, and that the capital of the Country of the Sacred Heart, was made of a God-fearing Catholic population that respected the government and the church.
Hope was the most visible border between the slums and the “middle class” barrios. Those who believed themselves to be middle class, clung to their aspirations of wealth, buying their lives in instalments, borrowing money, selling trinkets and joining newly introduced credit clubs to believe they had more than they really did. They were the biggest fans of outdated TV series bought from American channels with Mexican dubbing, promising Spanish success with a different accent.
“Aquí si hay paso,” said Jose, looking down from a street corner connected to what looked like a passage away from the slums and into the city again, with painted houses, pavement and parked cars in the distance. Nena recognised Avenida 10 at the end of that street. They should be able to find a public phone there, even though it looked deserted.
They walked through the passageway in silence, relieved at the sight of a big avenue a few blocks away. House doors, wide open, revealed dark long corridors decorated with veils and paintings in golden frames. This was the edge of the red-light district. Services were camouflaged for a more distinguished clientele. Counting the women they could see inside these houses was morbid and interesting. Waiting for the heat of the afternoon to calm down, the women relaxed, cleaning their nails, their hair in rollers, taking naps and sitting by the windows, letting life pass. Like any other day, they were open for business and in fact, they expected additional clients that night: army men or scared public officials who had stayed behind the roadblocks. The political conflict is to be thanked for the additional cash the night would bring.
Nena thought about her grandfather, he probably knew many of these places. He met his drinking buddies in Los Mártires, the threshold barrio that hid the red-light district. Los Mártires was a neighbourhood of truck drivers and merchants living in small apartments and trading the produce arriving daily from the other side of the cordillera.
She would hear her drunk grandfather arriving home in the middle of the night, often beaten or robbed. His drinking buddies were maybe responsible for that, but they could also be the only reason he had not been kill when he went into those brothels and bars to feel like a macho. Leo claimed his buddies were loyal and worthy of all his trust. They were liberals, like him. Nena didn’t believe political alliances had any meaning.
There were more dangerous places too: the fancy cinemas in the north where the last car bomb exploded two days ago, or the National Library, by now probably a pile of rocks.
They reached Avenida 10. A mental count suggested 15 to 20 real prostitutes: an exotic sight not easy to witness anywhere else. They started to feel safer and somehow welcomed the sense of known dangers to the unknown ones in the slums. They needed to talk, to reach conclusions, after returning to this familiar territory.
Camilo: I promised my mother that when I become a soldier, I will avenge my brother’s death. I will ask the army to send me to the military base in Tolima, like him. I’m going to kill those guerrillos.
Jose always thought that Camilo was dumb. That comment was just confirmation.
“Don’t be stupid, the guerrillas are not the problem,” Jose said. “They are the ones kicking out terratenientes and paramilitaries who steal the land from the farmers. They want to teach people to read and stop them from being exploited.”
Nena: “Yeah, but guerrillas get money from the drug cartels to grow coca and marijuana and then they make the farmers fight for them.”
Jose: “Maybe, but the narcos aren’t bad. They give houses and jobs to the farmers, and the guns are to defend themselves. The military are the ones abusing the farmers and killing them because they are friends with the paramilitary.”
Camilo: “No man, that’s propaganda from the left. Don’t believe that. Communists are nasty.”
Jose remained quiet. Propaganda from the left and communism were the end of any argument, particularly when they didn’t give a shit. They knew they couldn’t change anything.
Nena: “Narcos pay the politicians. And then, they also take government money for themselves.”
Jose: “Corrupt bastards.”
Nena: “Yeah.”
Camilo: “Yeah, politicians are shit.”
They only listened or watched the news as distant background noise. The complexities of violence were beyond their understanding and interest, but their agreement felt right. The surrounding reality proved that it was other people’s fault even if danger did not seem like something happening only in distant and isolated regions of Colombia.
A louder bang from behind made them turn in surprise. The largest smoke cloud they had seen rose quickly. It had a solid shape against the blue sky, like a black hole with edges that refused to dissolve. A long silence ensued. It took a few seconds for the dogs to start barking in the distance, protesting the car alarms triggered by the explosion. Avenida 10 did not look open or closed, but it was certainly deserted.
“Shit, this is getting worse,” said Nena with a sense of urgency that made her renew her march with quicker and longer steps. The two boys followed. There was a municipal bus station nearby and maybe buses going to other villages would be taking passengers needing to get to suburban areas.
The more rapid pace was disappointing. They weren’t safe yet. Their homes were still far away, and the loud bang unambiguously declared that the problem wasn’t going away. Instead, it had started to feel like the start of a civil war.
“Me and my brother will be leaving for the States next year,” said Jose, breaking the silence of the fast pace they’d assumed after the shock of the explosion.
“A friend went through El Hueco and he’s now living in Miami. He even got a car. We’re going to try. Once we get out of here, we’ll find work and then send for mum and my sis. Mi mamá doesn’t know we are going through El Hueco but once we’re there, we can get papers.” Nena was slightly jealous to know Jose might leave Colombia before her. She was far from knowing how to get to Paris.
Camilo: “A friend of ours said there’s a travel agency in Medellín that takes care of everything.”
Jose: “There’s more than one. But we’re planning everything ourselves. No need for agencies. It’s cheaper that way… you get to Guatemala and then in Mexico you pay, so someone helps you cross the border at night. When you get to the other side, you can go anywhere… Arizona, California, New York…”
Jose stopped. He couldn’t think of the names of other cities there. The most important part was not to be in Colombia.
“It’s a very dangerous trip,” said Nena, thinking of the horrendous stories she had heard, the documentaries she had watched about Los Mojados crossing the river.
“You could be attacked or die,” she said with honest concern for her friend.
“As if that’s not going to happen here,” said Jose.
They looked at each other and paused before laughing out loud together.