The Mountain
The mist floated silently down over the mountains, a moody, transparent wall that left the trees diminished, their skeletal branches waving at the clouds.
My shoes squelched over the gravel road, the mud a river between the chunks of rocks and debris from the heavy rains. Birds chittered, their voices echoing throughout the patch of forest, my steps sounding overly loud in the quiet. As I reached the gate I realized I had forgotten my keys, so I climbed up the small hill alongside the stone wall edging the metal gate, hoisted myself up and dropped onto bright green grass on the other side. In the mist, the bright colors of the grass and orange and purple flowers dotting the road shone against the pale grey. Arabian horses grazed in the gloom along the one-track road.
I arrived in Colombia a week earlier, a short flight from Mexico City that had taken the entire day and had finally deposited me in the Medellín airport at 2 AM with my giant hard-shell suitcase, my camera case, and my orange tabby, Cassian, who was perched in a small grey backpack I wore on my shoulders expressing his impatience through a series of howls.
I made my way to the double glass doors where the white airport taxis lined the curb, the asphalt wet with rain, found my driver from the hostel I had booked in the small neighborhood of Manila in Poblado, and within the hour found myself in a tiny room with a double bed filled with the sound of the rushing river next door, the rain, and Cassian — who had become suspiciously quiet after being released from his backpack — relieving himself in his travel litter box in the small bathroom.
***
I didn’t want to be in Colombia.
Years ago, when I first arrived in Medellín, I liked it. The quiet streets, the bouncy music, the lush, green vegetation that interspersed the open air restaurants. After the pandemic, I returned to Medellín again — and despite the problems I faced living there — I bought an apartment in a historic building in the city center. It was a sprawling, worn place, throwing itself in all directions, clearly mistreated but underneath layers of paint there was a gleam of beauty; old wooden pocket doors, a line of balconies that stretched across the entire front of the apartment and facade of the building with original aluminum doors that folded accordion style opening to a view of the mountains in the distance, an inlaid wood floor that was barely visible under layers of grime and cheap, sloppy varnish.
I wanted it immediately. I wanted to design it in the style of a Victorian era explorer apartment, complete with restored wood accents and a fireplace and maps and old brass binoculars. More than this though, I wanted a home base for myself, a place that was entirely my own, filled with my things.
I threw myself into the project, while slowly coming to the understanding the local workers I was trying to employ threw themselves equally into trying to extract as much money they could while doing as little work as possible. The first contractor took 70% of the cost of the job and left me with a gutted bathroom, a pile of concrete and debris that was useless for anything save a decrepit drug den on the outskirts of some populous city. The carpenter who came to help me restore the wood throughout the house made a game of hiding my tools and supplies to steal at some later date, placing them in various plastic bags hidden within more plastic bags, the way a squirrel might hide its stash in the forest, intending to come back for it later.
“Miss! We need to buy more remover!”
At first, it was an inkling of darkness, the edges of a shadow that started to permeate every experience I had in the city. It was anger at first, anger in the moments of being treated badly, but then over time it gave way to something darker, more pervasive and deep and biting — hatred.
***
I researched old maps and prints, downloading a rare collection of recently made available maps from the 16th century. I combed antique shops looking for beautiful, quality pieces. I found a bronze chandelier adorned with dragons, an old brass ship telescope, a rare comino crespo wood table I used for the bathroom sink vanity. I had the bronze bathroom fixtures custom made, and, after another contractor flaked then threatened me, I laid all the tile myself, piecing together the tiny triangle floor tiles at the edges of the door frame by hand. After months of searching, I found two incredible vintage Persian rugs in a nearby city, and had them shipped to Medellín. When they arrived, smelling of mothballs and filth from the last 40 years of use, a carpet cleaner specializing in the cleaning of vintage carpets was recommended to me.
“Yes, we use a special kind of soap, we clean these kinds of carpets all the time.”
They rolled up the carpets, then returned two weeks later, rolling them out on the restored wood floor, their beautiful designs of animals and leaves destroyed, smeared with their own dye that had run after having been improperly cleaned with dishsoap and scrub brush, later to find what the shop actually excelled at was cleaning industrial carpets at the edge of the city. A few weeks later, a neighbor I had paid to take care of the house while I was on a trip would leave a bag of kitchen trash on one of the rugs for a week, and when I came back, small white maggots had infested it, popping up at regular intervals from its dense blue fibers to wave at the chandelier then disappear again.
I started to have health issues.
I found in my absence, the thick, white towels I had carefully selected and paid a small fortune for had been replaced with cheap, thin towels from a discount store. One set of high-thread count sheets had been shredded, as if someone had let their dog chew on the bed. A small sheep rug I’d owned since I was a teenager was covered with what looked like tar and thrown behind the washing machine, which was broken, and the inlaid wood floor I had carefully restored was damaged in front of every balcony door where they had been left open in the rain. Worst of all, pigeons had made a home inside my bedroom, bird poop covering every surface in the bathroom, even the pillows on my bed.
When I confronted the neighbor — a young boy from a responsible family in the building — he stopped responding to my messages.
The seeping, festering hate began to present itself in seemingly innocuous tasks, like ordering take out (if the driver was a young Colombia man, he’d hear my voice on the intercom then refuse to come up, demanding I come down to him) or paying for a meal (if I was with a male friend and I paid a bill, the cashier would take my money, then hand the change directly to the man I was with). I’d go for a run up the tramvía in the early mornings, to have strange, leering men lean into my space as I passed and whisper comments about my body in a thick, Medellín accent. In my house, I would explain to workers what I needed done, and they’d ask for my non-existent husband to explain it to them instead.
It wasn’t one thing, it was a thousand. It was a daily onslaught, so overwhelming and intrusive and degrading I started to dread going outside. It made me question my value as a human being in a place where I wasn’t treated like one. It was raw and damaging, and while recognizing the statistics surrounding women living in extremely misogynist countries and at the same time, in part, refusing to see that applied to me too. I understood the collective human experience, but I equally understood the dangers in communities that treat certain people as ‘less than’, and that was the struggle I needed to reckon with — the idealist and the realist within me who needed to make some hard decisions for her own peace and safety.
That winter, just a few days before Christmas, I was waiting in line at a small shop around the corner when someone put their hands on my back and shoved me from behind. When I turned around, it was a middle-aged Colombian woman, shaking her head, demanding I move closer to the register.
Only a few weeks later, I went out with a new group of female friends to a posh jazz bar in a hotel for a concert, to blow off steam and take a rare evening off from research and design and restoration. At a small, quiet corner table with a group of women, listening to jazz and chatting, someone working at the bar that night spiked my drink. I collapsed on the sidewalk on the way to the taxi, barely getting myself home.
I have to get out of here, I thought.
It started to become a panic, an overall feeling of anxiety that persisted throughout the day, that the world I had thought I existed in wasn’t real, but this one, this world of Medellín that was not my own was either going to change who I fundamentally was, or would kill me. I didn’t know whether it would be a stranger or a contractor or a random man in the mountains while I went for a hike, but the visceral feeling of how unsafe it was in that city for me permeated every thought, every experience, every choice.
***
In Medellín, it’s easy to forget amidst the lush, tall buildings and cafes with tea lights strung sparkling while cocktails are sipped, the domestic violence rates are one of the highest in the world. Last year, femicide —the murder of women and girls because of their gender — reached a seven year high in the country.
The normalization of male dominance and set gender roles that see women as property create a climate where femicide and aggression and violence against women are more likely to, and do, happen. Colombia’s violent past has not been left behind, no matter how many new restaurants and hotels spring to life in the city. It is embedded in the cultural fabric at the most basic levels of society. This excerpt from an article exploring the connection between Colombia’s violent past and violence against women said it best:
“The connection between hyper-masculinity and femicide has been studied for some time now. According to Professor James W. Messerschmidt from the University of Southern Maine, intimate partner femicides occur when a man feels threatened because he can no longer dominate and control who he sees as his possession.
In Colombia, conflict has been masculinized through the designation of arms-bearing and politics to men, and caregiving to women, according to Svallfors. This process has led to an increased acceptance of violence, the adoption of aggression as a pathological adaptation among men, the proliferation of women staying in violent relationships, and the reinforcement of traditional gender roles, according to the researcher.
“Femicides happen in an ecosystem that is tolerant of violence against women,” said Roncancio Alfonso. “Colombia’s patriarchal society has normalized these behaviors.”
—Excerpt from The connection between Colombia’s femicide crisis and its hyper-masculinized conflict by Salome Beyer Velez.
It’s wonderful to experience a city or a country through the lens of a tourist, admire the beautiful landscapes and food and coffee, visit a farm or ride in a Willy’s jeep, and it’s equally important to be realistic and informed about the cultural landscape, and the universal truths shared and propagated, such as Colombia being an ideal retirement location for progressive retirees — for men, maybe. Worse still, if these societal norms aren’t addressed, Colombia will continue to attract the kind of expats and tourists who not only share similar views, but partake in the all too common underage sex tourism, and contribute to the culture of exploiting and abusing Colombian women (and refugees). Until these inequities are addressed, Colombia will remain a provincial and unsafe place where women cannot thrive and succeed.
***
After a year and a half of restoring and owning my beautiful historic home, I made the decision to leave the country. The house was beautiful and I loved it, but I quietly and frantically packed my bicycle in its long cardboard box, arranged two big plastic suitcases of my things, coaxed Cassian into his travel backpack, and left. I closed the front door, descended in the tiny, ancient elevator to the ground floor, took a taxi to the airport, and made my escape.
I found out later that year because of the stress, my gums had started to recede. I thought I had an autoimmune disease, but after extensive bloodwork, every test came back negative. Then, after just 6 months living outside Colombia, miraculously, my gums began to grow back. The swelling in my face went down.
Almost two years later, here I was again, in the city that had caused so much stress and struggle, in a place I didn’t want to be but had placed myself. I planned on staying no more than two months — I had found a buyer for my house, and would stay in a small cabin in the mountains avoiding the city altogether, descending to Medellín no more than once a week. Over the next two months, my things would soon be packed up into neat little boxes, the final paperwork signed, and I would leave the country never to return. This is what I had planned for myself.
***
I woke in the dark from a deep sleep that left the edges of a sound in my consciousness but no recollection of the dream. I sat up in bed in a cabin in Colombia, the edges of the forest visible with large lush plants lined by a wide plank deck in front, and the sound of birds in the trees. Cassian crept up from the thick white blankets to give me a quick lick on my forearm.
The cabin was situated in the mountains in an area called Santa Elena, a municipality perched on a mountain chain overlooking the city, full of dense old-growth forest, twisted roots and beautifully colored birds, and orchids growing on the limbs of big, dark trees. The garden had a string of tea lights around a fire pit, a semi-circle of wood stumps for sitting, and at night, the lights of the city in the valley below reflected on the billowing clouds to give the cabin an ethereal glow.
The road to the town was a lush one-track paved road, edged with square gutters set deep into the concrete on either side which constantly ran with little waterfalls after the heavy rains, so the walk was cool and pleasant with the sound of running water under a canopy of dense trees with fields of cabbages and fresh furrows in the distance. As the town became closer, the dense forest gave way to gated homes, front porches lined with flowers and sometimes small cats sitting in the yards. The fences around the homes were either hedges or stone, overgrown with small green vines filled with golden flowers. One home was filled with sunflowers, another, the front yard was entirely neat rows of strawberry plants, parallel with the road. The walk to the town was almost entirely downhill, a descent from the mountains two miles away from the cabin that took 25 minutes to walk.
The town was a cluster of shops at a ‘Y’ intersection; a bakery, a mercados campesinos (a farmers market) in a small barn-type building, a tiendita with a narrow hallway lined by a counter which sold just about everything — tiny packs of spices, individual chocolates, packs of cookies, flour, milk, eggs, tins of condensed milk, popcorn, beer, soda, crates of fresh produce. There was a small restaurant illuminated by a bright blue neon sign ‘Happy Food’ and, oddly enough, a dog training center.
A few times a week I would walk down from the mountains into town to buy a small bottle of dark beer, or a loaf of bread, or cheese, then begin the walk back up into the mountains which left me breathless at the top, and sweaty, and feeling more alive than when I started the descent.
The sounds of birds and frogs, insects and trees accompanied me on my walk back to the cabin, the sounds of life slowly returning as the country became wild again.
Sometimes, an Andean motmot would greet me at the start of the little gravel road to the cabin, flying overhead from the farm on the right to the mossy forest on my left, perching in a tree alongside the fence. It was a brilliant green and blue, its long tailfeathers ending in two round discs. When it shifted, it looked like its tail was dancing.
I wondered if we ourselves become more wild when we are able to sit among wild things, or if we take that bit of wild inside us when we go back to the towns and cities and shops and buzzing cars and buses that belch smoke, the constant hum or mechanical and electrical things, the toss of ice cubes from the fridge or the chime of a wash machine, the clang of a notification on a phone or the flash of cars through the window. I felt more alive here, in the quiet sway of the grass, waking to the dim light of morning, seeing the mist or clouds or rain outside the window and feeling the weather on my skin. Possums and small rodents scurried across the small deck at night, and I slept directly facing the Milky Way, the foot of the bed looking out to the rest of the Universe, the stars and planets sparkling in the distance in the dark cavern of space.
It was a long walk to the cabin, it took awhile, and it was hard. I sit with a book in the sunshine, watching a lizard dart across the wide planks of the deck, and think about how I arrived.
Sources:
https://www.qualitativesociologyreview.org/ENG/Volume42/QSR_13_3_Messerschmidt.pdf
