Colombia, its rivers and hours
by Jaime Panqueva
While looking at the running river, I notice its water movingswiftly, the same as the eternal and indifferent time flows facing the human impatience. The unstoppable torrent, the stream of time will not ever return and it will only be kept inour memory, in such afragile, absurdly ductile reservoir.An ephemeral comfort for all who raise the pen and pour out the signs and words; for those who like to trace the course of hours and recognize that in their perennial flow signs and words invite us to transhumance, to leave the paternal house, ourhome garden or our neighborhood street.
Chinese and Colombian people, I firstly thought at the beginning of these lines, are separatedby thousands of kilometers, a vast ocean, and two languages that have very little in common. However, we share our common ancestors who populated America. The Muiscas, assuredly descendants of Asian tribes that moved through the Bering Strait, granted us a culture of preservation and respect for our environment we just started to assess as Colombians. Their cosmogony linked to water and rivers so as our literary and cultural wealth seems to be an excellent issue to be shared with you today.
If I comparedBogota with Shanghai, my hometown would seem a city deprived of rivers. Those who want to satisfy their curiosityshould look up into Google Maps or into the traditional printed maps and would immediately feel that I am lying because they will find that Bogotá is filled with weak blue threads that either flowthrough theemerald green savanna from the North or descend timidly from the Eastern hills to become sewers, channels of debris when going through the cityWestwards. Many of these creeksmake tens of kilometers of tubing routes and pourtheir rot on abigger river that, as penance, has the same name of my city, the Bogotá River.
The ancient Bacatá Town, which hosted three Conquerors -two Spaniards and a German-, was officially founded next to a modest stream called Vicacháby the Muiscasindian tribe, which meant nightglowin their native dialect. By then, all the rivers and lakes of the highlandswere living waters that shone over the Andesrange, and they wereabundantly populated by endemic species of fish, such as the guapucha and the Captain fish. Alexander von Humboldt,during his unexpected visit to Colombia in the early 19th century,named the Captain fish, as a sneak preview of GarcíaMárquez, as EremophilusMutisii or "solitude lover".Its last name, Mutisii, was given in honor to the Spanish scientist José CelestinoMutis, leader of the Royal Botanical Expedition. Either alone or escorted, the Captain fish was an importantnurturing source forthe Muiscas tribe, who alternated it with deer and other mammals.After the Spanish conquest, Captain fish was cooked in Bogotá with milk and onions, a meal named Captain’s stew.Its consumption continued until the early twentieth century. However, the rampant growth of the city, water pollution and the irresponsible introduction of other species such as the Rainbow trout, made the Captain fish become almost extinct in the Savanna. The mealdisappeared from the daily diet, and nowadays it is a protected species. It is said that in the remote areas of the rivers or lakes they are to be found, but to date I have not tasted the first specimen.
In Bogota we have forgotten that our ancient traditions are tied to water; the Muiscas maternal deity, named Bachué, emerged from the Iguaquelakeaccompanied by his baby son.She nurtured and raisedQhuzha,and several years later, in a remarkable incest,BachuémarriedQhuzhain order to beget the Muisca nation. Mother and son would also civilize the Earth by teaching their sons the rules of coexistence, the preservation of natural resourcesand the benefits of agriculture.Some decades later, the elderly couple was transformed intogiant snakes and returnedto the same water mirror theyhad emerged. The Muisca mythology has remained closely linked to water resources; pilgrimages and magic rituals were performed in Guatavita, Fúquene and Iguaque Lakes. For preserving good fishing, the Muiscas used to celebrate rituals by throwing golden objects and offerings in the junction between the Bogotá River and the Vicachá River, lately named San Francisco after the Spaniards. This junction was placed in Bosa, one of the current districts of Bogotácity. Nowadays, it is impossible to stand the bad smell, the stinky water, shed byacitywhich hates fishand loves underground conduits to hide the shame of pouring all their waste in so innocent brooks. The Bogotá river is a place where it is already impossible to make the journey suggested by H.G. Wells in his short story The country of the blind, at least in the terms stated by its author:
“He thought of the river journey, day by day, from great Bogota to the still vaster world beyond, through towns and villages, forest and desert places, the rushing river day by day, until its banks receded, and the big steamers came splashing by and one had reached the sea--the limitless sea...”
I have always been captivated by this topic. Despite being surrounded by waterways and crossed by akey river affluent of the Magdalena River, which empties into the Caribbean, it is impossible to sail from Bogota to the sea. Perhaps HG Wells ignored that, or he just did not care as he wrote thatshort story.
Well into the Twentieth Century, all the merchandisesbrought from Europe or imported in the Caribbean harborshad to travel almost a thousand kilometers upstream to the feet of the Eastern range, and then were carried by mule to the 2.600mts over sea level isolated capital of Colombia. Many of the stories of this eraruled by the mule trains, almost lost in the fog along vegetation paved roads are still untold. Although it seems incredible, Colombia lacks a great novel that honors the muleteer’s world.
Bogotá, thanks to geography and zeal of the Spaniards by founding it so inaccessible, grew away from the outside world.Although its current inhabitants want to boast cosmopolitan,the city wasthe last to notice what was happening in the rest of the worldfor Centuries. Communications with our Coasts have always been a difficult issue in Colombia, to the Atlantic and even further into the Pacific, since reaching them implies to go up through three mountain ranges whose heights together exceed the height of Mount Everest. The lush and rugged geography of my country is one of the reasons that has favored the survival of the oldest guerrilla in the American continent.
Back to the Bogota River, its dark filthy water rushes to the end of its savanna until the Tequendama Cascadeor Salto de Tequendama. Pre-Hispanic traditions says that Bochica, the civilizer, opened that 157-meter-high cataract with hiscrook to save the savanna from a flood. The Muisca legend is similar to the version of thebiblical Flood. Incidentally, Bochicacreated animpassable barrier to navigation.From this scenic jewel,the Bogotá river runs downhill until almost the sea level 100 kilometers ahead, when it flows with its contamination into the Magdalena river.
The Río Grande de la Magdalena, as the Yangtze, was the river that allowed communication with the outside. Neruda in his Canto General evokes the Spanish conquest in his poem to Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, founder of Bogotá:
Gonzalo Jiménez ships
arrive, the ships arrive already,
stop them River, close
your devouring margins,
immersethem in your heartbeat,
snatchtheir greed,
hurl them your fire trunk,
your bloodthirsty vertebrates,
your eyes eating eels
lay across the thick alligator
with its silt colored teeth
and its primitive armor,
extend it as a bridge
over yoursandy waters,
shoot the fire of the jaguar
from your trees, born
fromyour seed, mother River.
Neruda’s request came too late and many hours passed by then. The river and its floods in rainy weather and its exceptionally fertile shoalswitnessedthe steps of Conquerors, Crown officers, scientists of the Botanical Expedition. It saw the hours of glory of Simón Bolívar in the victorious campaigns against the invading army and years later it cooed himwhenhe was anembittered spectrum en route to exile, as CruzKronfly and GarcíaMárquezwrote it in Ashes of the Liberator and The general in his labyrinth.
When Neruda sings to the Magdalena,the flourishing years were faraway, the river was not anymore the essential structure of our troubled Republic, shocked by insurgent warlords and civil wars, furrowed of vapors with well-paidgoods in international markets: coffee, tobacco, indigo, cotton and cinchona. Its banks had already been victims of the Colombian predatory hubris, as GarcíaMárquezdescribes towards the end of Love in the time of cholera, when agedFerminaDaza and FlorentinoArizasail upriver aboard the New Fidelity:
the boilers of the river-boats had consumed thethick forest of colossal trees......the hunters for skins from thetanneries in New Orleans had exterminated the alligators that, with yawning mouths, hadplayed dead for hours on end in the gullies along the shore as they lay in wait forbutterflies, the parrots with their shrieking and the monkeys with their lunatic screamshad died out as the foliage was destroyed, the manatees with their great breasts that hadnursed their young and wept on the banks in a forlorn woman’s voice were an extinctspecies, annihilated by the armored bullets of hunters for sport.
Not only had the destruction of nature come to the banks of the Magdalena, but the war of extermination between political opponents. By the same years Neruda finished composing the Canto General, Magdalena waters were dyed blood. Firstly from conservatives and liberals, then the killings between communists and landowners, finally a crossfire between drug traffickers, paramilitaries, guerrillas and the national army which decimated the peasants and turned the peripheries of major Colombian cities into refugee camps. Not in vain Juan Manuel Roca, after visiting the place of birth of the Magdalena River, would throw us these verses:
And thus this babbling tongue
as small scimitar
is the Magdalena river?
Cautious, without dead men
navigating between two nothingness
and a high crown of black birds
flying over them as sad halos.
And so from this secret
is born the Magdalena river?
Poor river away from towns and cities:
Does not know what awaits him.
Though, by the times I remember, in the hours that I lived in my home country, along the Magdalena Riverthere were no monkeys to romp, nor manatees to swim.However, in the Hacienda Nápoles, owned by Pablo Escobar, African buffalos, giraffes and elephants wandered. An hippopotamus that escaped from his zoo not too manyyears ago and, just as its owner, spread terror and desolation until it was hunted down by the army in an episode described byJuan Gabriel Vásquezat the beginning of his novel The Sound of Things Falling.
Colombia is rich in life, in hours and in rivers. I could also speak of the Amazon basin and the great rivers of the Eastern plains of the Orinoco River, those related in the chronicles of Germán Castro Caicedo or in the telluric novel by José Eustasio Rivera, The Vortex. I also leave out the impetuous flow of the Pacific basin or the idyllic landscapes of the Cauca River, referred in the romantic literature of Jorge Isaacs, also the thousands of springs that flow hill down from our three mountain ranges and the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta.
In recent years, Colombians have realized that nature still has the power to destroy us through extreme rainy seasons. I think that the generation I belong and the younger ones are more aware of the urgent need to protect our resources; we recognize that the Muisca traditions of respect for the water and rivers are not a dead song, but the best way to safeguard this world for our descendants. "Here we have ancient wisdoms. There has been love for this land ever", says the poet William Ospina.
It is paradoxical:among so much life, I have only spoken about death, destruction and violence. The hours that I have shared, the stories that colombianstellthrough narrative, theatre, poetry and other disciplines help us to rescue the human feelings in the midst of barbarism, have helped us to survive amid the gunfire and devastation, have allowed us to know each other better, to look inside us with renewed eyes.Thanks to the narrative of Fernando Soto Aparicio, Eduardo Caballero Calderón, Jairo Aníbal Niño, Rafael Humberto Moreno-Durán, Gustavo ÁlvarezGardeazábal, Héctor Abad Faciolince, EvelioRosero, Tomás González, among others, colombians keep learning that the waste of life has its limits, they have weighed the size of our national tragedy, and have realized our ability to change what might seem inevitable.You could say that we are a young nation if we compare with China, but we know that national history does not begin in the Spanish conquest and the subsequent independence. It may seem that we have been condemned to one hundred years of solitude; however,we, the slaughter survivors have the ability and will to take a much better control of our country.
Colombia has been transformedin the latest quarter century, after having spent a season deep in hell. The city ofMedellin described as a hitmen’s sanctuaryin Fernando Vallejo or Jorge Franco novels, is today a modern, better educated and well-managedcity; even amodel for other big cities in the world. Unlike Bogotá, Medellíncity has made greater efforts to rescue its river without hiding it under the urban surface. Bogotá, meanwhile, thanks to several administrations free from the old-fashioned politics, has improved its massive transport and promoted non-polluting alternative means of transport and a new civic culture.Colombia is today a more inclusive, tolerant and democratic country than when I was born, and its achievements have only been possible through the changes implemented in our political system during the last 25 years.
Our country faces a great challenge. The peace dialogues in Havana between the Colombian Government and the FARC guerrilla take place on the corpses of more than 220,000 Colombians and lean on the shoulders of almost five million people displacedfrom their homes over the past 20 years. And now, to share the last seconds of thesehours comprising nature, literature and history, I want to finish with some encouraging words from the essay writer William Ospina: “Colombia is at a crucial moment, what was war will learn to be dialogue, violence will learn to be request, the silence will become story". Our duty as writers of this new Colombia is to give life to these stories.