On returning to Cali in the midst of the national strike that is already a month old and which has had the capital of the Valley as its epicenter.
I recently finished “Los abismos”, the novel by Pilar Quintana that won the Alfaguara Prize this year. What most caught my attention was the description of the floors and plants in the houses in Cali. The jungle, as Pilar writes. The floors of the houses in Cali, which look cold just by looking at them and make you want to take off your shoes to go barefoot. And the plants of the houses of Cali that, it is true, are put everywhere and, if one is not careful, they end up entering through the windows as believing themselves to be the owners of all the spaces and the entire city. In Cali I learned that as a child: to walk without shoes all the time. And to take care of plants. In Cali, where I learned to be almost everything I am.
I learned to swim, to eat biche mango with salt, pepper and lemon, currants, chontaduros, aborrajado, empanadas, shampoos and the marranitas that my father prepares. Also pandebono with a little sugar on top, as my grandmother ate it. In Cali I learned that on godchildren’s day they gave you a flowerpot decorated with a fringe, sweets and little flags of the city (blue, red, white, red, green). In Cali I gave my first kisses, I had my first boyfriends and I went to my first parties. In Cali I learned that the wind doesn’t get in the way, because at five there is always wind. In Cali I learned to bathe in the Pance River, the perfect synonym for happiness, with its ice-cold water, capable of removing all demons and cleansing all souls. “It gives me a bit of freshness to open my eye more or less far from Cali and close to Pance …”, as Andrés Caicedo wrote.
In Cali I learned to worship the sun. To go out into the sun like a snake, every time it made a ray and to walk everywhere with the bathing suit underneath. It is because of Cali that I am looking for the sun in every corner of the world where I have lived. In Cali I heard stories of vampires, witches and devils and I heard, for the first time, talk about the goblin that braids the horses’ tails, and about the patasola that is crying among the ravine. In Cali I became a fan of América and I learned to love that team with all my soul, and in Cali, because of that team, when I was a child, I thought that the fire engine was only used to get the players on it. to walk all over town when there were champions left. In Cali I learned to love soccer and the Pascual Guerrero Olympic Stadium.
In Cali I learned (very half) to dance salsa and to enjoy the flare of the fair. Also, in Cali, I became friends with the people of the Pacific with whom I went to party many times to the street of sin to finish off the Petronio Álvarez concerts with their liquors and their meals to understand where I come from. In Cali I discovered the music of the Litoral, the sea, the rivers and the jungle and danced through its streets, happy and sweaty, a thousand nights with friends of the soul. Definitely in Cali is where I have been happiest.
Follow the news of El Espectador on Google NewsCali is weird, mystical, almost bipolar. A mixture of that jungle that gets into the houses, of that climate that makes everyone irreverent, of those people who come from the Pacific who sing almost all the time, of those who believe in witches and vampires, of salsa , of the seven rivers, of the cliffs that surround it, of the yellow light at three in the morning, the smell of flowers and wet earth, the noise of crickets, cicadas and birds. That mix that, at least I, have no words to describe. That is Cali. That and all the people who inhabit it. Identical people to your city. Sweet and tangy and also spicy, like those Mexican chocolates that explode on the tongue and that one, for sure, does not really know what they taste like.
From Cali I left many times and every time I have returned. I left as a child at the time of the Cartel. I studied school in Popayán, close to my maternal grandparents and there I grew up in a house of about 200 years old, that one, really, full of ghosts. At night you could hear the footsteps of someone with bare feet dragging chains and sometimes the ghost of an old woman would appear smoking on the curb. When things got very hard, Zeus, my grandparents’ German shepherd, ran like crazy from the hall to the wall of the solar and when one was about to go to the Father of the Church of Santo Domingo to ask him to did an exorcism, the holidays came to Cali. The ghosts of the house in Popayán disappeared and in their place came, again, the bathing suits and the pool from my aunt’s house.
This is how life passed. Away from Cali for a long time, living in many places and looking for Cali in all of them. Always wanting to return. With an idealized city in my memory. Until after asking so much, the universe finally listened to me and a year ago I came back. I arrived at the beginning of the time of the pandemic. Leaving behind more than 20 years. Loves, memories, friends. I landed in Cali without suitcases, thinking that this would only last 15 days. Then came the moves and the fiddling. Detachment. And as if by magic or fate, or simply the things that arrive when one lets others go, the little house on the river arrived, which has become my place and my most sacred space, next to the Quebrada del Indio and a kilometer from town Pance.
Pance, the place of all Caleños. Because we’ve all gone to the river at some time, to La Vorágine, La Chorrera del Indio or Pico de Loro. The little house on the river has been the reunion with myself and with this city. With my Cali spirit and with everything I am and what I believe. It is a place where the jungle enters through the door, leaves through the window and re-enters through the balcony and all objects, things and thoughts are filled with peace. At night the river sounds and when it rains, it grows and you feel like you are going to go to bed to sleep. There are lots of animals that come to visit day and night and I just pray that the fear of snakes will go away. Sleeping in that place is one of those miracles that only Cali does. The miracle of feeling that we are all part of the same cosmos.
A year ago I returned to Cali with a certainty: I cannot be a mother. That confrontation that sooner or later women have with motherhood. It was my return to Cali that gave me strength and light to make the decision to adopt a baby. A boy or girl from Cali (or from somewhere in Valle del Cauca or the Pacific) who is waiting for me at this moment. The decision to be a mother, undoubtedly the most important in the life of any woman. I took it when I got back and it hasn’t changed. Now “Cali is a time bomb”, as many say. And I had to see it explode. The eyes of the world are here today, the moment I return. As if the city and I were the same essence. The exploding city gets up in a rage when I’m in the process of adopting a human being, a revolutionary act in itself, and just when I see the helicopters flying over Cali by day, at night and at dawn. There are military in the streets. But the sound of sirens and helicopters that vibrate the glass of the windows, does not stop. And the anger, the hunger and the desolation of the people in the street, either.
Nothing that is happening changes how I feel. None of the images from the television newscasts, or the messages broadcast on social media and in newspapers. Nothing is going to replace the images I have. Those of us who love Cali will continue here. Those of us who have returned will not leave anymore. Disarmed and ready to go. Surrounded by plants that get everywhere and with the same permanent feeling of living in a jungle, as Pilar Quintana writes. A lively and powerful jungle with many clearings of light where the sun will surely enter again.
