Ubi Boni Ibi Patria: Santa Cruz de Mompox, Colombia (Part 2)

Continues from here.

Arrived at the hotel - closed like all the others, but aware of the arrival of my travelmate - we had a surprise. The double room was undergoing some renovation works, so he was offered the single room instead.

Considering that having a place to stay was more than enough to consider myself lucky, I was going for my pocket to pay another single room, when I was stopped. F (let's call him like that) told me there's no need to pay. The single room costs half of the double room, which is already covered by his company. No difference in paying for a double room or two single rooms, then. Cool, wind keeps blowing in the right direction... and I don't even have to share the room or leave in the early morning!

This latest point proved to be particularly important when I woke up the day after at 9am after just 5 hours sleep. According to the "Let's share the room plan", I should have left the hotel at around 8am and one more hours sleep makes a lot when you're a lone-low cost traveler.

After one day of wandering around, I went back home. I took no pics the first day. It's not weird for me to use the first day in a new place just to walk around adopting the lowest profile possible to the situation. I prefer to absorb a bit of the spirit of the village, walk through the city and study wich parts of it would potentially make for good shoots.

Plus, if you walk around alone without a camera usually people notice you in a curious way, trying to figure out why you're there, who you are and start to imagine the weirdest possible solutions to these questions. They hardly think of you as a lonely tourist without a camera. Useless to say, this changes a lot the way you approach (and the way locals approach you in the first place) and allows some very interesting meetings.

Anyway, I went back home after a day of walking around the village, as I was saying.

As I slipped in the key into the door's locker, F door's opened. He was waiting for me to come back and have a chat. I realized only later on in the evening he didn't leave the hotel for the whole day not to be recognized, and he was bored to death.

We decided to go eating something. Problem is, in most part of the world you can't possibly expect to find a restaurant open out of tourist season after 8pm (sometimes during tourist season, too). However, I remembered of a small restaurant with terrazza on the rio Magdalena. I passed in front of it on my way back home and it was still open, only customers a couple of elder momposinos drinking beer one next to the other, without saying a word.

Luckily enough, it was open and the "manager" of this lovely family-led business sent hastily all his family (wife, sons and daughters) to the kitchen to make something out of what they had in the larder. The two old men were gone, their chairs still gloomily set as if they shall come back anytime from now.

We sat and drank our Polar - a venezuelan beer imported from the closeby border. Neither of us spoke for some minutes, enjoying the silence and the smooth lapping of this immense river.

I don't remember how he started, or which words he chose to begin telling his story. what I know, is that he started telling me how he was a child living in a village near Mompox. How he left, still young, job seeking in the north of Colombia, where the cities are bigger and people know what to do with more than 20 computers per town. He told me of a girlfriend, who later became his wife, whom he started dating to move on after the end of a childood romance. He told me of his all-life love, a young girl of his age and of his village. They broke up when he left to look for a job, but they never forgot each other. She never got married, as she couldn't marry him.

First time he went back to Mompox it was for (real) business. They met by chance, and discovered they still love each other. He went back to his house, to his family, to his girlfriend in the north, to leave her. She refused, she argued, she screamed, she tried - failing - to commit suicide. Peer pressure - and family pressure - did the rest of the trick. They got married one year later, and his ancient love told him she would have just disappeared from his life, now that he was married.

But this could not be. They finally got in touch again, and again they fell in love. they didn't see each other for years, but they kept on loving the ghost of their romance. They decided to meet up in Mompox, officially to say the last goodbye. They made love. The whole day, everyday he spent in Mompox. When he left, he thought he wouldn't have seen her anymore, but in his heart he knew the truth was different.

Since that day, they see once a year - twice a year if possible - in an hotel in Mompox. For two days, they enjoy what their life could have been like. They don't dream of an happy end. She doesn't wan't to crash a wedding "blessed" by God, and he's too afraid of his family and wife reaction to take control of his own life.

Now his wife is pregnant. He didn't want a baby, not with her at least. He used all precautions and he suspect she could have had something to do with the "accident". Since he told his lover, she refused to talk to him again. This could not go on anymore, now there's a children (or a bit less, for the time being) involved.

The same day I walked the streets of Mompox for the very first time, they met for the first time since he knew he's going to be the father of a child he didn't wanted, by a mother he didn't choose. They tried to accept the sad truth and move on with their life, forgetting each other. Again, they ended one in the arms of the other.

He stayed silent.

I understood later on, he saw in my lonely trip something he must have lived thousands and thousands of times in his head, without daring doing it or maybe even admitting it. Leaving his house, his family, his job, his wife, his whole life. Leaving all behind to follow a dream... or maybe not to follow anything, just for the sake of going. Honestly, I would have judged it a quite banal dream - Hollywood alone made enough comedies about Main Street men's frustrations of this kind not to be contained in the whole Encyclopedia Britannica - if it wasn't for the sad story of him.

The day after, he invited me for lunch - at the hotel, of course - to meet his "could have been" wife.

Believe me, they're a lovely couple.