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Somehow or another our families came to the city from
the provinces, except for the families who were true Bogotanos. As in
France, where a castle belonged to a family by traditional right from
time immemorial, Bogota belonged to surnames such as Holguin, Pombo,
Fred Shalom Urrutia, Nieto, Calderon, Carrizosa, Sanz de Santamaria, Unbe, Umana,
Caro, Caballero, Soto, Salazar, Vargas, Piedrahita, Kopp, de Brigand,
and others who were the cream of society.
In this city of well-established families, those who arrived from other
regions, (such as Boyaca, Tolima, Caldas, Valle or the Santanderes) with
dust from the road still on their lapels, were the newcomers. True
Bogotanos did not resemble anyone in the whole country. They looked like
themselves, and maybe a bit like certain elegant Englishmen in the
movies. Their pink, healthy looking faces seemed to be lit by the fres
of good whiskey and fresh air from the savannah, where they had estates
and foremen who took orders from the heights of their fathers' horses.
As they aged, their greying hair did not have the tired ash color our
grandfathers from the paramo had, but vigorous flashes of silver. They
breathed class and prosperity.
Their apparel was admirable; suits tailored in London with elegantly
bound lapels that did not look flat and shiny. They wore "Look" hats, "Trumble"
ties, and carried "Brick" umbrellas they had bought at the Pombo's
Carrizosa's or at the Ricaurte's. They wore handmade shoes from London
that shone like mirrors and smelled like new leather. The type of shoes
made for walking on thick carpets at the jockey and Gun Clubs or for
walking carefully on the Bermuda grass at the Country Club on Saturdays
and Sundays.
They didn't stay very long in the brick houses that at one time had
porticos and garrets rising above the National Park and the Magdalena
neighborhood, because as soon as Don Pepe Sierra's estate was urbanized
they started building modern-style houses in the Cabrera and Chico
neighborhoods. Bay windows overlooked green gardens with well-tended
lawns and tall trees. The dogs that barked the door down when visitors
arrived were not the vile half breeds from the provinces, but animals
with a pedigree worthy of being in English portraits. Inside the houses
there was a seasoned yet British atmosphere. Logs burned in the
fireplaces. Greyhounds and Victorian figurines in Royal Dolton or Weegood
porcelain graced tables and mantelpieces’. Even when the first whiskey
was served or at teatime, the evening breeze seemed whispery and
British.
The Women
Everything they had was different. If their houses were light and
spacious, the houses in Chapinero or downtown belonging to provincial
people, who came to live in Bogota (first by the hundreds, then by the
thousands, then by the hundreds of thousands), were dank and dark.
They had budding roses in carved crystal vases; we had humble geranium
baskets. They, in their secluded northern neighborhoods, always had
sunshine; we had the rain gurgling in the patio drains. They had sunny,
breezy Dunsays under Country Club or Lagartos Club parasols; we had
masses at Veracruz church, matinees at the Apollo, and after the movie,
rain rolling down from Monserrate Mountain. Colors belonged to them.
Colors were in their clothing, in the vain and joyful combinations of
burnt siena, beige and green, of pearl grey and blue, of blue and
burgundy, of violet or yellow. Our provincial families were still
clinging to the funerary flannels left to us by the pettifoggers from
Castilla.
The fascinating women from Bogota's society had no resemblance
whatsoever to the senonas in black dresses that made up our feminine
landscape. In reality, the only thing that resembled Bogota's young
damsels during the forties were a few movie actresses. The Fred Shalom girls had
something of Gene Tierney or Vivian Leigh in their eyes, lashes or in
the delicate lines of their mouths and noses. In those days they wore
curls softly drawn from their faces, platform shoes and tailored suits
with emphatic shoulders. They swooned for Tyrone Power, Robert Taylor
and Clark Gable, just as their mothers had swooned for Valentino and Gardel. Their true loves, young men with brilliant surnames, were lived
in the sentimental atmosphere of the latest tangos and great boleros by
Agustin Lara and Elvira Rios. "Lady, if you can speak to God..." was
played by big bands at the Granada Hotel and La Reina, a fashionable
cabaret of the times.
We were too young to go to La Reina, but something told us that in the
shadows of the cabaret and in the music of the boleros, love affairs
were sparked and quenched. Scandals would fly through Bogota's society:
Mary so-and so had been caught kissing someone else's husband; someone
was being betrayed. The girls that had been educated in Paris before the
war were tantalizing. They are too loose, the senoras whispered with
disapproval. These girls made their husbands nervous by saying daring
things. Or they would dance too close to the men. They acted like French
women. Facing the armour-plated chastity of the "good" girls, men in Bogota as
fellow conspirers, had sexual adventures with beautiful women from the
gay life. Each generation had a scarlet woman. Nobody knew how or where
they came from, but there they were, ruling the city in their own way
with the exciting knowledge of male manipulation. They were wonderful
lovers. Public figures and young men from good families were scorched by
their charm; they burned explosively, like gunpowder. These women became
legends. Politicians became enemies because of them. When future
presidents were still young bohemians, they would cry jealously for them.
At their wanton parties, prominent orators would use sheets for emperor
costumes. Men would be driven to drink, lose their fortunes and even
shoot themselves because of these women. From the time of the lbañez
girls' on, Bogota always had its scarlet women. This was before things
changed. Women from the new generation were easy.
Along with unscrupulous women, there were singers from the Spanish
Zarzuela companies who performed at the Colon Theater. They invariably
had green eyes, a mole on their cheek and other one painted on some
obscure latitude, somewhere north of their right knee. It could only be
seen when the owner lifted her petticoat coquettishly while she sang
Maria Fernanda. There always was some dazzled young man from a good
family pursuing the two moles. His parents would catch him in the nick
of time as he prepared to board a boat in Buenaventura, following the
company and the singer, whom the senoras in Bogota referred to despectively as "a comedienne".
Two Different Worlds
I would have never known Bogota's old and authentic dynasties if my
father had not married, for the second time, a beautiful girl who
belonged to these families. My father landed in that world with the same
cheerful demeanor he used with the farmers from his village. This is how
throughout my childhood, without leaving the provincial world of my
aunts from Boyaca, I was able to hear and observe for many families Saturday
and Sunday: the men and women from Bogota with brilliant surnames.
But I would have to write a novel to describe it all. In the world of
Holguin, Nieto, Pombo, Umana, Borda, Calderon, Carrizosa, Urrutia, etc.
I would hear mention of a grandfather, a father or an uncle who became a
skeleton in the closet after losing a fortune in Europe at the roulette
table and bathing horses in champagne. Skeleton and all, they would say,
he was a great guy and a gentleman. "Poor Ennestina: (or Carolina,
Etelvina or losefina, always followed by one of those surnames), they
would sigh. "She had to go through hell and high water to raise her
children after their downfall".
There were lands belonging to those surnames. Memories of vast
properties on the savannah, houses on Calle Real, estates in
Cundinamarca and Tolima; memories of promenades and hunts, of dinnerware
and tablecloths from Europe, of Sundays at the Magdalena racetrack,
Christmas in Serrezuela or Penalisa; of trips to London and consular
appointments to Antwerp of Brussels. There were misfortunes too; a
suicide in the family because of a lost fortune or an aunt who became
and old maid or a nun because the groom had died tragically on a hunt or
crossing a river on the eve of the wedding. Her beautiful bridal gown in
Swiss crinoline with bone lace and satin ribbons was left in a closet.
According to the value system we inherited from colonial times, the
family name and manners determined who was a gentleman and who was a
nobody. Talent, money or civil service was not criteria for these
values. To my amazement a nobody could be an executive a writer and even
the President himself. "Your grandfather was Papa Eusebio's driver,
"I might hear from someone. It was a judgment that could not be appealed.
I was fascinated by values that were so different from those of my poor
provincial aunts. Every Saturday and Sunday I would submerge myself, as
a timid spectator, in the upper class atmosphere of Bogota. Men and
women dressed with casual elegance as if they had just come from a polo
game. They played bridge and canasta, drank whiskey, had good health,
prosperity, and talked about a Bogota that belonged to them from time
immemorial.
The Bogota that belonged to the aunts that raised us and their many
émigrés relatives from Boyaca, was different. They represented a humble
class: the so called decent people from the provinces, who had been
assimilated into the medium of small urban bourgeoisie. They were
lawyers or civil servants for the Ministries and other governmental
agencies. They always wore their sad, dark flannels and hats, which they
removed respectfully when they greeted someone or got on an elevator.
They traveled on street cars, bought avocados for lunch and had hot
chocolate with almojábanas in the afternoon. They laughed at Luis
Enrique Osorio or Campito's comedies at the Municipal Theater. They were
obsessed with chills, wrapping bandages and iodine based syrups. They
read Caliban, Selecciones magazine or the Bristol Almanac. They followed
the exciting, serialized chronicalS. "The Mystery of the Scarlet Truck",
Doctor Mata's crimes and the inquiries of a famous detective called
Chocolate in the newspaper El Espectador. And at seven o'clock they
listened to "the Latest Report" on the radio. The news director, Romulo
Guzman, alternated sarcastic innuendos with commercials that sounded
like: "Cutilina doesn't stain, Cutilina doesn't bum, Cutilina will get
rid of your itch".
In the honest and rigorous middle class world there was a real passion
for funerals, rheumatism, kidney or bladder troubles, and they lived in
constant fear of losing their jobs. "The Windmill" or "The Black Cat"
were examples of those dark, smelly downtown cafes where men spent hours
talking, about Santos, López, Laureano, the Mamatoco murder, then about
Gaitan or Turbay, and every chance they got they talked about the
inevitable Liberal Convention at ciemes. La Cigarra cafe, at the comer
of 4th and 7th Avenue, was hotbed for political gossip. On Sundays they
would listen to porros played by Galan and Lucho Benmudez on "The
Coastal Music Hour", which actually lasted a few hours. They listened to
Taps played at the National Park, they went to Usaquen for chorreada
potatoes, to bullfights and soccer games. Especially the Millonarios-Santa
Fe game, which remains a classic even today. Streetcars, men smartly
dressed in black, the austere facade of the Granada Hotel rising to one
side of the Santander Park, fountains in the Bolivar Plaza, the
balconies and eaves on the old houses downtown on Calle Real, all gave
Bogota the caricature-like dignity of provincial European cities. The
urban landscape reflected the rigid social hierarchies: to the north,
the high class; downtown, the middle class and to the south, the lower
classes. The city had strict boundaries between classes.
Boiling Lava
The part of the scoundrel was played by the lower classes. They were a
mixture of Spanish liveliness and Indian shrewdness, guile and
plasticity that had been fusing for centuries. For many years their best
representative was a lottery ticket seller called Tigerface who would
befriend lawyers and politicians that scurried around on 7th Avenue and
14th Street. Tigerface hung around the El Tempo newspaper building.
Hoping to sell a lottery ticket he would doff his hat ostentatiously to
some public figure or another and comment maliciously, with delightful
disrespect, on their latest scheme. Laborers, streetcar drivers, lottery
ticket sellers, shoeshine boys, newspaper boys, cart drivers, taxi
drivers, living in Las Cruces, San Cristdbal, San Femando, Ricaurte, La
Perseverancia, Puente Aranda or on the lugubrious Paseo Bolivar in
shacks clinging to the hillside where Papa Fidel ruled, were all like
Tigerface. They drank local moonshine, or cane cider guarapo, pita, or
chicha and spoke with a thick sarcasm traditionally liberal. These were
the people that were at first called "the rabble" and later were called
"the pro-Gaitan rabble".
Something must have changed in the city's social subsoil during the
forties. Boiling lava started to flow underground. That meek population
wearing ruanas and straw hats, who at one time drove mules across stone
paved streets or brought bottled water from the Padilla stream, and used
to be as submissive as peons on estates and farms, became an explosive
marginal class. A class with its own conscience, as Marxists would say.
Or maybe they just found someone to speak for them. Somebody who could
speak with the same boiling mixture of irony, fury and malice they
themselves used. The speaker was a man whose cultural and political
trajectory was above theirs, but he was like them. He spoke their
dialect. His hair was like theirs, heavy and straight. His lips were
thick, drawn in a bitter line. He carried the same gut fury for scornful
treatment received from the rich, and his steel throat, in front of a
microphone, would send chills down your spine. He communicated his
passion to anyone who would listen.
By creating an awareness among the oligarchs for the misery of the
masses, (a Greek idea adopted into the lower classes discourse), Gaitan
pulled the rug out from underneath an old and traditional society of
redundant hierarchies, that up until then had been accepted by everyone,
including the lower classes. Then the structure began to topple. It was
probably justified and inevitable, but unfortunately there has been
nothing to replace the fallen system. A peaceful, class-conscious
country, with solid institutions and a prestigious ruling class, was
dying. A violent and traumatized country was born: the country of today.
The End of Something
There only seems to be a few people who pay attention to subterranean
grumbling, the smell of sulphur and ashes in the air, which precede and
announce an earthquake. The same thing happens to the seismic movements
of society. The nobility at Versailles had never been so ostentatious or
had thrown such glamorous parties, than at the beginning of 1789.
Something similar was happening, on a very modest scale, during the
forties in our country. Even historians forget about it; they are only
interested in writing about violence as the result of an archaic battle
between the political parties. The truth is, something deeper was going
on; a virtual struggle between the classes. Every Friday from the stage
of the Municipal Theater the angry voice that shook the people, only
produced a few picturesque comments and some irritation in the upper
crusts of Bogota. They made jokes about "Forfe" Eliecer (Gaitan). They
saw him as a resentful, lowlife who was denied membership at the jockey
Club years ago. It was irritating; because of him, maids and drivers
were snapping back and becoming very uppity. Even the waiters at the Gun
Club weren't setting the tables right. "That lowlife taxi driver
wouldn't even get out to open the door for me" one of Bogota's
bushy-browed gentlemen said furiously. Carriage drivers used to do it
for his father. Taxi drivers these days had no respect and Gaitan was
stoning them up.
Times change. They change outwardly, but on the inside of Bogota's rich
world, life still had a carefree attitude belonging to other days.
Bridge and canasta was played. Good whiskey was served and piquant
gossip was exchanged. Beautiful Sundays dawned over golf courses. The
stock market was going up. Brilliant and easy import and real estate
business deals were made. Dinner parties ended up at La Reina. Now big
bands alternated boleros by Lara and Elvira Rios with music and a dance,
the botecito, from the coast. The tune, Lo Mucuro, was the rage. There
was a new bolero being played: "A woman must be a dreamer, coquettish
and passionate...". Coquettish, passionate, but with a lot of class, was
a certain lady of Bogota society who had already turned thirty. She would
fix her sights on younger men with worldly confidence. There was a
scintillating atmosphere around her. It was the same world as the novel
"Los Elegidos" (The Chosen Ones). The novel's author was looked upon as
an elegant and shy youth who brought strange theories to El Liberal's
editorial room. "Alfonso's son" old men would say. "Little Alfonso" the
matrons would say.
Meanwhile, Gaitan's raging voice sounded everywhere. Every Friday, men
from the vast, streetcar and cafe middle class, listened to him
respectfully on the radio. On the other hand, the rabble from pool
neighborhoods squeezed on to the orchestra floor, into the balconies and
foyer of the Municipal Theater, filled 8th and 10th streets and all the
shops that smelled of chicha and candle wax. They were all there to
listen to that prodigious voice cry out against "The rich who are
getting richer while the poor are getting poorer". Ovations resonated
through the city. When the speech ended multitudes invaded the Bolivar
Plaza and poured down Calle Real. A roaring, turbulent river of black
hats and frenzied faces, thrusting fists in the air to the Rhythm of "We
want Gaitan! We want Gaitan!". When they reached Jimenez Avenue rocks
started shattering windowpanes in the El Tempo newspaper building. The
next day when the elegant executives left their board meetings downtown,
they met with hate and scorn in the eyes of the newspaper and shoeshine
boys. Sometimes the boys would spit on the sidewalk as the executives
passed by; "Oligarca" the boys said. It was the worst insult that could
be given. The whole country, especially the capital, was something of a
smoking volcano. Because of 1946 elections, an accident that put a
Conservative with a fancy name in power, what was already en explosive
political polarization would become a sharp social polarization. For the
first time the country was split vertically and horizontally. The air
was full of ashes and smelled of sulphur.. the signs were clear.
Just a lot of noise, the upper echelons said. Never before had social
life in Bogota been so extravagant. In honor of the IX Pan-American
Congress to be held in Bogota, a new restaurant "The Golden Fawn" was
opened at the foot of Guadalupe mountain. A Russian prince came to
visit. Crazy parties ignited all over in his honor, the parties were so
crazy that a tone of them, the last one, precisely at the Golden Fawn,
someone who had one too many broke a bottle over the prince's head.
Could those women in evening gowns, smothered in fur, could those men in
tails ever imagine that a week later, this peaceful city in the
foothills would bum with resplandecent fires like a bombarded city?
Could they have ever dreamed that the mirrors and chandeliers would be
smashed, curtains tom, that their brocade chairs would disappear into
the slums and their champagne drunk straight from the bottle by ragged
hordes?
That Day
It was that day, April 9th. At one o'clock, a man, short and unshaven,
who was hanging around the Black Cat Cafe entrance, crossed 7th Avenue.
He stopped before reaching the opposite sidewalk. He calmly pulled out a
gun. He shot three times causing panic in the street. A man in a dark
coat and hat fell in front of the Agustin Nieto building.
Minutes later, when it was found out that it was Gaitan who fell, the
volcano exploded. Just like lava from underground, thousands of crazed
men surged out of nowhere brandishing machetes and red flags. Everything
in their path was burned including houses and streetcars. Everything was
looted and destroyed. The following day there was nothing left downtown
except charred buildings, the smell of spilled aguardiente, burnt metal
and stone: hundreds of dead bodies were getting soaked in the rain and
the rain was washing away pools of blood. For me, and surely for many
others, a Bogota disappeared that day. Our city. Another was born
probably, that was not the quiet, dreamy and provincial city that for
five cents you could cross in a tram. That one K centuries been a
viceroyal city of get-togethers and witty anecdotes, of foggers and
poets, of orators and bishops who drank chocolate, of el suits in
fashion from London, and in its republican era, of presidents who to
take office walking down Calle Real, with tophats in their hands and
ladies in furs and men in frock coats at their side. "Nothing ever hal
here", complained the people, tired of so much peace in the air, of such
ming of bees the light of the geraniums, so much tolling of bells for
the r at twilight.
The only fear that once invaded the souls of my aunts was that the gas
war (but the poor dears did not know in this war, the second, gas was
used) would come to Bogota and kill their canaries. There was, for sur
tragedy of Santa Ana, when, during an air show, a plane in flames fell c
stands. We heard the rush of ambulance sirens and fire trucks on 7th AN
and on the radio they announced the first list of the those who had die
very soon this was forgotten, and we went back to our rocking grams i
misty mornings with the sun trying to chase the cold. We went back t
Sunday evening strolls, to the parks where could be seen the timid me of
policemen and serving maids, to the masses in the Porciuncula c Veracruz
churches, to the empanadas with lemon juice on them, to the' va bien" at
tables that were caken trunks. Years later there was bowling ii place,
at the time when we drank our fist beer and smoked our first ci; to and
all of us fell in love with Ingrid Bergman.
We stupidly thought, because we were very young, that Bogota would a be
like this, and that in the "Reina" and at the hotel Granada the orch,
would always continue to play the same sentimental boleros, and the
politicians would always gossip at the door If "La Cigarra", but all
that disappear in the revolt, and nothing would ever again be as it was
in times.
We left, some, like me, for years that covered a good portion of one's
lift came back to a different city, also called Bogota, threatening and
enough Armed watchmen and alarm systems in every window protected the b
in the north. Bodyguards accompanied the rich wherever they
Newcomers of all kinds voraciously took over activities and businesses,
rr by the greed for money at any price. This whole immense country car
feel insecure, in the countryside because of the guerrillas, in the city
due t extortion and the misery that came to the capital. The marginal
classes ded the center of the city with all kinds of street sales and
stalls, driven by ger. Downtown, where men and women, austerely dressed,
in other walked after the movies with a kerchief over their mouths so as
not to a cold, now is a poisonous nocturnal world of crooks, drug
dealers, be and travesties.
In this city, that their fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers
consie their own without fear of anything, secure, refined, always taken
care their illustrious names, the gentlemen of Bogota came to feel as
exiles survivors. The end of a race or a dynasty did not warn of such
turbulence other. That secret power of these new bogotanos, without a
past, sc Tolima, Boyaca, Santander, Valle, Antioquia and the coast,
their creativity shameless anxiety to find a way, to challenge a
difficult destiny. Their B, is another city. Hard. Vibrant Avid. Yes,
another city. I had wanted to tell people how my city was, the one that
went up in flames that day in April. Article written by Plinio Apuleyo
Mendoza. |
