And Then He Said, “Go to India With Your Sister”
How a brusque reply from my husband took me back to a Barranquilla street I thought I’d had enough of when I left Colombia.
My husband, Barry, was plopped on the couch, scrolling through an article on his cell phone. With his other index finger, he twirled a lock of hair behind his ear — the very lock of hair that I know, after years of marriage, he always fidgets with when he wishes to concentrate.
For my part, I was seated on the other end of the couch, swiping through a photo article on India’s top landmarks.
“Do you want to go to India next summer?” I asked him, and then realized I had spoken out loud.
“Go to India with your sister,” he replied without delay, and also without lifting his gaze from the article. “You can count me out.”
I raised my eyebrows and looked at him. I was perplexed, and a little offended, by his answer.
A moment later — whether because he noticed my bafflement or because he was already getting ready to elaborate — Barry added: “After driving back and forth on Calle 30 every day for fifteen years, it’s like I’ve already been to India.” He sighed. “You can go with your sister.” It was more so a suggestion now.
The conversation ended there, but my thoughts did not. Barry’s casual reference to Calle 30 spiraled me into the other-worldliness of that notorious Barranquilla street. Sensations now awakened within me. I could see the traffic, hear the noise, feel the congestion, and even smell that street. The images coming to my mind, it struck me then, were not unlike those I had just seen of the streets of New Delhi.
But that world existed only in my memories. Years prior, Barry and I had left Barranquilla for Miami. We now lived in a quiet suburban neighborhood, far from Calle 30’s turmoil. We spent our days in a somewhat more orderly and aseptic setting.
Barry’s comment recalled me to a street that I had traveled up and down, day in and day out, for many years. Over time, its hectic and convoluted nature had become almost invisible to me. I began to wonder if someone who spent every day around the Taj Mahal also eventually became numb to its grandiosity.
It was a Tuesday evening in 1995, or maybe it was 1996, and the sun was setting in magnificent shades of orange over Barranquilla. I waited in my office building for Jorge, our family’s driver, to pick me up and take me home, just as he did every day. Having a driver was a privilege my family didn’t take lightly. In my case, Jorge’s support made it easier for me to simultaneously be a mother and work a full-time job.
My office was on Calle 30 — that boulevard which, among the many infamous Barranquilla streets, stood out for its chaos and mind-boggling scenes.
This afternoon felt in every way like the end of the workday. Looking out the windows, I could see a street filled with people and cars, all heading home.
If you were a driver or even a pedestrian, you avoided Calle 30 as fiercely as you could. Jorge and I, however, never had a choice. We could have taken side streets, but those were riddled with potholes. Steering clear of them would have added an extra half-hour to our commute. So, we usually settled on following a straight-line down Calle 30 heading north — even if it meant subjecting ourselves on a daily basis to that street’s chaos.
On this particular day, the whole city was more frantic than usual. It was the eve of Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, which meant that everyone was hurrying to wrap up their errands prior to the holiday.
Early the next day, the festivities would commence. Every family celebrated the holiday in their own way. But in the most traditional homes, relatives of the deceased would welcome their dearly departed with altars concocted out of candles, pictures, toys, and their loved ones’ favorite foods. These grand displays were meant to guide the deceased back home for their yearly and much anticipated visits.
Later in the afternoon, other rituals would begin. Devotees would fill cemeteries with religious offerings for the saints and the virgins — offerings meant to thank these heavenly beings for having stewarded the dead to the afterlife.
Every one of these rituals was impregnated with a perfect mix of grief and enthusiasm. It was exactly what one would expect of a town where people mock death and enjoy life to the fullest.
In this part of the world, every celebration, be it somber or euphoric, featured music. So, at six o’clock that afternoon, on the eve of one of the most cherished holidays on the calendar, already you could feel the festive spirit. From my office building, where I waited for Jorge to pick me up, I could hear the vallenatos blasting from the enormous speakers in the gas station across the street. On days like this one — Friday afternoons, or holidays, or whenever the gas station’s manager simply felt like it — the music blared so loud that I could hear it from deep inside the building.
Jorge arrived, and I went out onto the street to meet him. On the sidewalk, the music stung my ears even more intensely. When Jorge opened the car door for me and said hello, I could barely hear him.
I settled myself comfortably in the front seat and exhaled. “Here we go, Jorge,” I said. “Are you ready?” I was asking both of us.
“Absolutely,” he said, apparently oblivious to the music literally pounding on the car’s windows. (I will never understand the calm with which that man operated on those streets.)
“We need to pick up the kids at baseball practice,” he said once the car was moving. His eyes were on the road, and I glanced at his profile. His prominent chin and angular nose lent an air of toughness and distinction to his demeanor. This aplomb — together with his attention to detail and his seeming power to be in two or three places at once — led my family to trust Jorge with our busy and often overlapping schedules.
The kids adored him. He taught them how to drive (way too early) and counseled them on some of the trademarks of how to be a Don Juan, Barranquilla-style. They called him MacGyver because he could just as easily fix a dripping faucet as he could fish out tickets for an upcoming soccer game that everyone knew had sold out weeks ago.
He had other nicknames, too — because we were in Barranquilla, where you often forgot people’s names from so often referring to them by their pet names. Everybody had a nickname, or seven. Jorge was Jorge to me, MacGyver to my kids, and “Mandi” to my kids’ friends — a diminutive of the Spanish word “mandibula,” or jaw.
My musings on Jorge’s nicknames and chin ceased when we stopped at a traffic light. My attention turned to the sidewalk on my right, where next to a group of peddlers stood a young girl. Around her tiny frame, she hung the dozens of intricately woven baskets that she was hawking up and down the streets. She had long spirals of dark curly hair. Her cinnamon skin appeared scorched from many a day under the unforgiving sun, struggling to sell her craft. I began to open my window so I could call her over to check out her baskets.
But I would never get the chance to.
As soon as I lowered my window just a few inches, a mass of peddlers ran to the side of the car. They pressed against my window and shoved each other to the front. Each peddler, intent on attracting my attention, was proclaiming the wonders of whatever they were selling. Within seconds, the young girl had disappeared completely from my view.
“Take it home, doñita,” a tall and bearded man implored. He was referring to the big fish that he shoved against the window, which had by now completely opened. “Help me,” he said, “so I can buy the medicine for my sick mother-in-law.” With the fish practically in front of my face, as an afterthought, he added, “God forbid she leave us precisely on the Día de los Muertos!”
At that moment, I was overwhelmed by the sight and smell of the fish, coupled with the stench of the essentially open sewer that ran parallel to the sidewalk.
“OK, OK, I’ll buy it,” I blurted out, in part because I feared having a hand in any mother-in-law’s death. “Just please get that thing out of my face.”
I scavenged in the cupboard for some change. The fish kept staring at me with the same frightened look that he probably acquired that fateful morning when he met the hook. I handed the money to the man, who then wrapped the fish in one bag, and then in another. When the light turned green, the cars behind us began beeping frantically. I quickly placed the fish on the floor behind me, just below the back seat, and we continued on our voyage. All at once, the beeping behind us subsided.
Loud and obnoxious as they were, car horns were also an indispensable tool for navigating these roads, which were filled with endless and bizarre obstacles: pedestrians jaywalking everywhere but at the crosswalks, bicitaxis that complemented the scarce public transit options, and motorcycles that could carry a family of five and still manage to easily zigzag through traffic.
There were donkeys balancing heavy loads on their shoulders, exceptionally slow-moving cows that appeared completely oblivious to the mayhem they caused, and to top it off, a mess of frenzied pedestrians and crazed drivers just trying to get home.
Cows and donkeys were not the only animals that hung around Calle 30. Further down the boulevard, on our right, Jorge and I drove along the outer edge of the mercado, or flea market. By this point in the evening, it was empty and dark, free of the hundreds of people and animals that hours before had clogged its arteries. Still, driving along the market’s edge and looking in, I could almost recreate the scene from earlier in the day: I could visualize the vendors starting already at dawn to fill the long corridors, and being joined throughout the morning by more and more buyers.
I could see stray dogs stretched lazily under the shade, swaying away with sudden twitches of their ears the clusters of flies that overran their space. I could see the chickens clocking with soft peeps to express their delight at having survived one more day. Hours after the buyers and sellers and their animals had left, the echoes of all their bustle still lingered in the air.
The mercado served as a principal purveyor for supermarkets throughout the city. Butchers displayed with pride the carcasses that lined their stalls. They stood with their cleavers in hand, ready to render for their customers their desired cuts.
All-day long thousands of buyers scurried through the market’s many aisles like a colony of ants. They carefully inspected each product before purchasing. By and by, they piled up their goods in crates and pallets and packed them into old trucks.
At the end of the day, after everybody left the market, all that remained was the smell of blood, as well as the garbage that had accumulated across the hours. These foul smells attracted the wild pigs and rats that in these later hours of the day munched on whatever they could find strewn about the empty, murky corridors.
If you wanted to avoid these dismal sights, you gazed up. And there, instead of a serene blue sky, you would encounter a myriad of high-voltage electric cables that hung across the street in a tangled mess. They formed a gigantic net that was well-known around town, and which many referred to simply as “the spiderweb.”
As I followed with my eyes the knotting and winding cables, I spotted an old pair of sneakers tied together and suspended high above. I remembered a friend sharing with me that shoes like these often indicated clandestine spots where drugs were sold throughout Barranquilla.
Not long after passing the market, we reached the end of Calle 30. There, the street merged onto Vía 40, a relatively quieter avenue. Jorge and I could now relax.
We tuned the radio to the station that played classical Cuban salsa. I knew Jorge to be an excellent salsa dancer, and we shared a taste for the timbales and the penetrating click-click of the claves.
About a mile into Vía 40, Jorge turned left onto a side street to avoid the next big intersection. As soon as we merged onto the narrow street, a giant black bundle came upon us. Jorge slammed the brakes and the two of us flung forward forcefully in our seats. We were safe, but neither of us knew what we had just averted.
When we came to, we encountered an old black hearse — so old that it could have belonged to the owners of the cows that, as legend has it, founded Barranquilla hundreds of years before. It quickly became clear what had occurred: Moments ago, the hearse’s special passenger, who was wrapped in a heavy-duty black body bag, had flown out the back door. He now rested peacefully in the street, inches from our tires. The dry and boisterous thump his body had made when it hit the cement, seemed to linger through time and space.
The driver’s door opened, and a thin, petite man ran out towards the corpse. I saw his face and thought it was probably as petrified as his runaway passengers.
“I’m so sorry, bro,” he said to the corpse. Then he turned and stretched his arms to the sky. “Please, Oh Merciful One, help me, come to my aid,” he exclaimed. “What am I going to do now?” His question was issued to the heavens. “He is going to haunt me at night. Why must this happen precisely on the Día de los Muertos?”
Maybe that is precisely why he flew out the door, I thought to myself. Why go anywhere if you must come back the next day?
I wasn’t done reasoning when now the passenger door opened. Before the occupant emerged, the driver turned to Jorge and me and said, “His wife is going to kill me.”
A few seconds later a heavy older woman exited the car and rushed towards the bundle. The deceased man’s wife had saucer eyes and bloated red skin, and she held her head in desperation and disbelief. When she reached the large body bag, she knelt beside it and cried out: “Mijo, mijo, are you OK?” When she realized he wasn’t answering, she yelled angrily: “Answer me, God damn you!”
Jorge and I stood aimlessly beside the driver and the widow. It felt like we were supporting characters in a bizarre play. Jorge helped the driver return the man to the hearse, while I assured the lady that her husband was OK.
A minute later, everyone was back in their cars. Our heartbeats had not yet returned to their normal range. I looked at my feet and noticed that the bag with the fish had slid forward. It was now under my seat. Somehow, the bag had opened, and the fish was now staring at me with a slightly arrogant smile. His frightened look had been replaced by one of defiance.
I made three haphazard knots on the bag and handed it to Jorge. “Take it home with you,” I said. Jorge took the bag but didn’t look at me. I don’t think he knew what he was grabbing. His eyes were fixed on the hearse in front of us, which was now getting on its way.
“Shit!” I heard him murmur softly to himself. “If that dead guy wasn’t fully done for, now he certainly is.”
As I sit here today, in a city where the music in the streets must go quiet by precisely ten p.m., and where the fish have already been filleted away, such that you never get to look them in the eye…
As I sit here today, where highways are not shared with pedestrians, and cows are confined to industrial farms…
As I sit here today, where tractors and not donkeys transport the heavy loads…
As I sit here today, I wonder: Living here, in this sterilized society — in this culture so strongly reigned upon by individuality, such that loneliness becomes the prevalent milieu — living in such a well-organized place, where buses have their dedicated lanes, tourists (and only tourists) ride bicitaxis, and hearses are secured with electronic locking systems — a good thing, no doubt — living here, in a setting so tidy, do I crave a hint of that disorder? Do I crave that chaos that serves as the perfect backdrop for the unexpected, for the bizarre, for the other-worldly stories to emerge? Do I wish to visit a place where things are not as clear-cut, where the magic of the irrational can unfold?
I think I know my answer. And I think my sister would make a fantastic partner for a drive through India.
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