Chapter 1: The Mompós Project

I did not see it of course. In fact, I only learnt of the event several weeks later when asking after the origins of a stubborn blemish on the top stair.

The brick had sailed up over the terrace wall, mercifully only glancing the Canadian girl. Not a direct hit. Blood, bright and aqueous, perverse in its contrast to the clammy nighttime heat, poured out of her fresh head wound and down the stairwell from the roof terrace. The perpetrator made off down the Coco Solo alley running alongside the Casa Amarilla.

The police were called. As usual, they arrived with the accustomed alacrity in a Colombian Caribbean town.

Despite having seen the guilty party, despite being in a town where everyone knows everybody and gossip is as punctual as the daily news and taken for gospel, the police were reluctant to pursue the man in question. They preferred to log the incident as a sort of “turf war” between rival hotels.

The stain remains to this day however, and no amount of varnish has washed this away.

Life in Mompós continued.

***

The greatest effort one makes in Mompós is of course not to sweat too heavily and therefore suffer the indignity of enormous and telling armpit maps. At a daily 30 degrees plus, this is challenging. The next effort is that of…