Margarita García Robayo (trans. Carolina Orloff)

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Dear Bogotá

Margarita García Robayo was born in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, but from a very early age, she began to leave. One of the cities she lived in was Bogotá because in Colombia – a centralist, fragmented country – if you want to do something ‘meaning- ful’ with your life, you have to settle in the capital city. In this text, the author describes her failed love affair with her country’s capital. Dear Bogotá is the letter of an impossible love, of uprootedness and of the continuous quest to belong, themes that appear in a great part of her work.

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Buenos Aires, any old March

Dear Bogotá:

.……..I am writing from a place that looks almost nothing like you. I walk on a bed of wilted flowers because, at this point, summer has already killed off everything that spring bore. The truth is that there is little left of the summer. Autumn is approaching and this is why, perhaps, I’ve decided to write to you. We are at the hinge of the seasons, one of those parentheses – brief but intense – out of which a certain kind of melancholy effortlessly springs.
.……..Sometimes it seems to me that this state of melancholy, more than a frame of mind, is rather a tonality (although today we would call it a ‘filter’). The tonality created when the day is about to be extinguished and people begin to turn on the lights in their homes, and radios begin to broadcast songs instead of news. That same tonality is the one carried by autumn, bringing new hues to the windows. With its arrival, autumn brings back memories of when I abandoned you years ago, camouflaged among your hills with my books in boxes, my unattended job, my newly made friends. I recall it was hard to say goodbye but when from the plane I saw you getting further away, I felt relieved. I felt bold and assertive. I remember thinking: our affair could never have gone far. And I sighed, misting up the window. I wiped it only to find it had filled with cloud. You were gone.
.……..Now, I left you three months or so ago. Do you remember? If I hadn’t written until today it was because I didn’t quite know what to say. That’s nothing new: in fact, I’ve never known what to say to you and that’s why our relationship has been trapped for so many years inside a balloon that bumps against the ceiling like an insect that stares and thinks and stares, until finally it falls asleep exhausted.
.……..Every time I came to visit you, I thought the same, but I kept adding tails to my tale, like that never-ending story from Pamplona:

In Pamplona there’s a plaza, on the plaza there’s a corner, in the corner there’s a house, in the house there’s a room, in the room there’s a cage, in the cage there’s a parrot…

With each return, I construct and deconstruct you and, in the end, I always stumble back to the same starting point.

The parrot in the cage, the cage in the room, the room in the house…

I’m trying to tell you that my relationship with you is redundant and confusing like a tongue-twister, but I also want to tell you, as Calamaro would sing, that I love you all the same. Because love also grows in the void left by what’s missing. I feel that losing you was key for whatever there is between us to ferment.
.……..Coming back is like rediscovering you from a landscape that, familiar as it is, never fails to knock me over: those exhausted faces, the bristly ponchos over hunched shoulders, children yawning on their way to school, the smell of midday soup, and so many people scattered across your hillsides, staring into the abyss. Everything is hard: moving forward, getting around, reaching the end of the day with your awareness numbed to avoid collisions with the harshness of your surroundings. What I find hardest is how quickly it gets dark. The night eats up the day like an out-of- control Pacman and you’re just there, witness to the inevitable darkness.
.……..Every now and then I think of you as a difficult love. Though in reality you were a shy and compassionate lover. While I was there, you took my hands and agreed to my vague plans, without stopping to ask where my mind actually was: whether in the exuberant Caribbean that I had left behind, or in the pretentious plains that awaited me. It was an elegant gesture, I give you that, a gesture for which I am grateful.
.……..There are many things about the people who inhabit you that I’ve never understood, such as the need to please indiscriminately, which in turn means they are constantly tying you up in petty lies (‘we’ll be in town in twenty minutes, Madam’), and always smiling as they talk, even when they get cross (‘no, that is certainly not the case, Madam’). But it’s also true that I didn’t give you enough time.
.……..The first time I set foot in you I was so young and skinny that the cold air quickly seeped into my bones. At first, I just wanted to go back home, to my shorts, to my guayaba tree where I had built a hideout to be alone in. You were too different to everything I knew and that was fascinating but insidious. To me the streets of the city centre were a perfect mutiny of grey, but driving through the city at night, around the ring road, was like travelling inside a mountain colonised by bright fireflies. As with new girlfriends, I’d jump from devotion to disdain in a matter of seconds. On that occasion, when it was time to leave, devotion was victorious and I swore then that I’d return to stay. But once back at the guayaba tree, my pledge crumbled. I became distracted by other skylines. I was busy looking outward – the open, deceitful, shifting horizon – and I avoided looking inward – the motionless mountain.

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I came back to see you as an adult when, like most people who were close to me then, I thought that if I wanted to do something serious with my life, then I could not stay in the Caribbean; rather, I had to come and settle in your skirts. I bought myself a jacket, a pair of boots and a grey suitcase which broke during the journey. I carried a cherry-flavoured chapstick in the pocket of my jeans and some tablets to help with the altitude sickness. I landed alone. When I stepped out to hail a taxi, two forgotten sensations came over me. The first one was fateful: the horizon had shrunk in size. The second, happy: the clouds seemed closer.
.……..I made local friends who, to please me I suppose, took me to parties with vallenato music where I saw silver trays come and go filled with pork cracklings with yuca, refried beans and chorizo, ajiaco and whisky. I managed to find work in a magazine, I managed to get a flat through someone I knew, I managed not to get sick with the weather; however, I was still unable to understand the meaning of the words that kept emerging from that constellation of smiling faces.
.……..One morning, I ran into a German guy on Carrera Séptima. It was the third time we’d met. The first time, it’d happened in a different city, and the second time, in a different country. We had never been introduced, but the triple coincidence was enough for us both to share a taxi into town. After that, we shared some dinners and even a strange dance in a nightclub where the lights were in sync with the music. The German would jump up and down, hitting his chest with his knees and screaming things that I wasn’t able to hear. Then we’d go to his house and talk about you. He loved you. He thought you were the real deal, modern in your rusticity. ‘Bogotá trapped me’, he’d say, with that accent that makes you think of a shower of rocks. I said good for you and told him that as for myself, I didn’t really get you, though back then I really didn’t get much at all. Much of what? Much of nothing. I told him I wanted to be a writer, that I worked as a journalist but that I liked poetry, even though I hadn’t read much. And he, who didn’t even kiss me once, gave three ostrich strides until he reached a book from the shelf. The author was Hinde Domin:

Look at the clouds go by
Be discreet, don’t cling to them
They will dissolve.

Through his window, up high, you looked radiant and magnificent. Something happens to you at night. You know it. You look good at night. You are lucky the nights last so long.
.……..A few days later I quit my job at the magazine and stayed for another month to decide what to do with my life. I sat looking at my empty hands for the first time, thinking about what I wanted to do with them. You were an unexpected oasis, a small privilege: yes, you were also that.

.……..I bid farewell to my friends and they all claimed to be very sad too quickly. I left a complete library packed in brown boxes marked with my initials. I asked a good soul to look after them until I could recover the books. And that’s exactly what they did until they also decided to leave you. The boxes were then passed on to another good soul who, finally, opened them and displayed my books on long, white, reinforced shelves. Afterwards, I was sent a photo to reassure me that they – my books – were in good company.

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The city where I now live has an open vista. Beyond the blocks of flats and the electricity cables that pass through the empty air, the horizon is all you see. When I arrived, one sepia-colour March like today’s, the first thing I noticed was that the sky lasted too long. No matter if I travel by car, train or boat, I always feel covered and discovered by the same light- blue blanket that changes its ‘filter’ depending on the time of year. Initially, I paid attention to these variations. I liked to think that each season would bring new élan, new verses. Yet it was not the case. With the passing of time, I lost my grandiloquence, I forgot about poetry and about the open views and now, if I am lucky, my eyes reach as far as the top of the trees. But in my neighbourhood there are a lot of trees, you know? And on the pavements (you would call them aceras rather than veredas) there are beds of leaves that renew themselves day in, day out. The street cleaner sweeps them up every morning but as soon as he moves on to the next street, they fall again, slowly and resolute. Once I offered him a coffee and he said: ‘My task is futile but necessary.’ I thought it was the definition of a genuine artist.
.……..It was not hard for me to get used to this place. Not even a month had passed before I knew that I could stay forever. Something convinced me I’d have the freedom here that I was lacking with you. I am not sure why I speak of freedom, if you never held me hostage. The only poem I ever finished, however, was written while gazing upon your mountains, from a window, longing to get out, to not be a captive. It’s my gift to you today, even if it’s so late:

Outside there’s a mountain covering the sky
and a horse that died of thirst
in front of a deep well
full of rocks.
Inside there are ghosts
breathing against
the window pane,
fogging the landscape
and scratching the misty curtain
of their own breath.

Do you see it now, my dear Bogotá? Do you realise? Had I stayed with you forever, I would have also become a dubious poet.

Yours always,
Margarita.

The Colombian Edition of The London Magazine is out now and available from our online shop. Published in anticipation of next month’s Hay Festival in Cartagena de Indias, this issue will be followed by a Spanish language version, out in January 2022, in Colombia and the UK.
Cover image: Ritual (Pescadores), oil on canvas, 100x150cm (Pedro Ruiz, 2010)

 

Margarita García Robayo (Cartagena, Colombia, 1980) is the author of three novels, a book of autobiographical essays and several collections of short stories, including Worse Things, which obtained the prestigious Casa de las Américas Prize in 2014. Her work has appeared in several anthologies such as Región: cuento político latinoamericano (Political Latin American Short Stories, 2011) and Childless Parents (2014). Her books have been praised in Latin America as well as in Spain, and have been translated into French, Portuguese, Italian, Hebrew and Chinese. Holiday Heart was her second book to appear in English after the very successful Fish Soup.

Carolina Orloff, originally from Buenos Aires, is now based in Edinburgh. She is an experienced translator and researcher in Latin American literature, who has published extensively on Julio Cortázar as well as on literature, cinema, politics and translation theory. In 2016, after obtaining her PhD from the University of Edinburgh and working in the academic sector, Carolina co-founded Charco Press where she acts as publishing director. She is also the co-translator of Ariana Harwicz’s Die, My Love, which was longlisted for the Booker International Prize 2018. In its short life, Charco Press has received several awards and nominations, including Creative Edinburgh Start-Up of the Year (2018), the British Book Award – Scottish Regional Prize (2019 & 2020), and the shortlisting of Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s The Adventures of China Iron to the 2020 Booker International Prize. Carolina herself was named Emerging Publisher of the Year (2018) by the Saltire Society.

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