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Published: March 18th 2009
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The red eye out of Santiago stopped in Lima, continued to Bogota, and finally arrived in Cartagena de los Indios on the Caribbean Sea. Cartagena is an old Spanish port city with a history of violence. After the overtures of peaceful cohabitation, the natives had to go. Shortly thereafter, it became the Spanish port for transporting the wealth sucked out of South America. Given that Spain is much closer to the Caribbean than the Pacific, this was logistically a sound idea. However, galleons loaded with gold and silver tended to attract attention; specifically, the piratical kind that hid out in the Caribbean, drank rum, sacked cities, and in all likelihood lacked the charismatic appeal of Harold Flynn and Johnny Depp. And then there were the navys of England and France, which were probably worse. The result was that Cartagena was sieged, sacked, and burned to the ground a couple of times before fortification of the city began. For 200 years, construction continued! Twenty forts within and around the walled city made Cartagena virtually impregnable. Ironically, twenty-five years later, the Spanish colonial empire collapsed.
Then Cartagena and Colombia got on with the business of history. The liberator Bolivar fits in there
somewhere. In the early 1900s, T Roosevelt exploits a weak central government and a separatist movement in the north of Colombia so that the US can build a canal. The separatists get a country, Panama, and the US gets its canal. More history happens. Colombia resurfaces in North American consciousness in the late 70s when Americans decide they really really really like cocaine. There is a war on drugs, The Marxist Leninist People’s Army FARC, kidnappings, covert ops, Bill and Black Hawks, Betancourt and Uribe. All of which culminates in the sound parental advice about not getting kidnapped.
Out of the flow of history and back in Cartagena, a rampart switch backs down from the fortress walls and descends into the neighborhood of Getsemani, the outer city. The narrow twisting streets are filled with tightly packed houses that crowd the edge of the street like books on a shelf. From Getsemani, the inner walled city is reached through a massive archway. A drawbridge once spanned a moat separating the old and new parts of the city, but unfortunately, modern life has replaced moats and draw bridges with pavement and cars. Luckily, visionary city planners of old only managed to
destroy some of the old fortifications in their attempts to physically integrate the two cities. The old city retains its ‘colonial charm’ and is filled with picturesque façades, ornate wooden balconies, massive iron studded wooden doors, tree-shaded plazas, cafes, and a half dozen cathedrals. Such a setting clearly demanded a few rainbow clad black ladies with bowls of fruit on their heads, drummers, and dancers. Equally necessary were the throngs of bewildered tourists and the hoards of vulturous vendors swarming about the carcasses freshly disgorged from tour buses. Whereas in Santiago, you can more or less bumble about in relative anonymity, the old city of Cartagena had been designated a ‘colonial gem’. Everywhere an angle, a product, and a sliding economic scale based on how much of the funny colored money you could be convinces to part with. Think Tijuana without the Tequila.
Sensibly, beer for breakfast was in order. We drank our cold Aguilas and ate our toasted cheese sandwiches amongst a horrific swarm of vendors. Then after pointing out to the waiter his clumsy attempt to short change us, fled. As directed by the almighty guide book, we wandered amongst the twisting streets “savoring the local architecture”
before deciding the Palacio de la Inquisition would expunge us from any further cultural appreciation responsibilities. The upstairs rooms of the museum recounted the history of the city in excruciating detail. Alas, interesting things like pirates were glossed over in favor of expansive description of the mundane, a few ‘relics’ donated from a country in Africa, miniature dioramas of Indian villages, and the predictable portraits of the old dead male Europeans that litter the history books of colonial countries. Luckily, these were mostly in Spanish and could be largely ignored. Reading a museum is overwhelming in one’s native tongue. In another, it is just masochistic.
Downstairs, words were largely unnecessary. This was the Camara de Tormentos, the working room of the Spanish Inquisition. On the wall of the first sunny room was a list of the 33 questions put to the witches. These ranged from the mundane, what did you eat at your wedding, who was there, was there dancing, to the more practical, how can you fly through the air? Although it is unclear if one’s witchiness was often discerned from clever inquiry, weighing and waterboarding were apparently effective unveilers of iniquity. The ‘how much does a witch
weigh’ human scale hung from the box beam ceiling. Across the room, artfully displayed, was a replica of your average witch table: dried up frog, very dead sparrow, skull, candles, potion vials, and a bowl of worm casings. A couple of Hieronymous Bosch like pastorals of the damned cavorting with the devil spruced up the white washed walls. In the adjoining room, various ‘truth divining tools’ were artfully displayed: ingenious devices specifically designed by the medieval mind to screw, pinch, pull, poke, tear, and produce excruciating pain; presumably to help jog your memory in regards to the aforementioned questions. Though I suspect once you went in, you didn’t come out, there was a boringly efficient hangman’s scaffold and a guillotine in the palm shaded courtyard beyond. All of which begs a review of question 25: “Why does the devil strike you blows at night?” Why indeed when the church can do it so much more effectively?
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i don't need another hero
not with you and harold flynn. jajaja. beso, c