The only reason I’d like to be a child again would be to travel once more by boat up the Magdalena River. Those who didn’t do so back then cannot even imagine what it was like. I had to do it twice a year—once up and once down—during my six years of secondary school and two of university, and every time, I learned more about life than at school, and better than at school. When the water level was high, the upstream voyage took five days from Barranquilla to Puerto Salgar, where we caught the train up to Bogotá. In times of drought, which were more frequent and more fun to travel, it could take up to three weeks.
The train from Puerto Salgar climbed as if crawling up rock cornices for a whole day. In the steepest sections it would back down as if to gather momentum and try the ascent again puffing like a dragon, and on occasion it was necessary for the passengers to get off and walk up to the next cornice, to lighten the load. The villages along the way were freezing and sad, and through the carriage windows, the lifelong peddlers offered big, yellow chickens, cooked whole, and snowy potatoes that tasted like hospital food. The train reached Bogotá at six in the evening, which since then has been the worst hour to live. The city was mournful and bitter, with noisy streetcars that spat out sparks at the corners, and a rain of water mixed with soot that never let up. The men, dressed in black, walked quickly and stumbling as if they were running urgent errands, and there was not a single woman in the street. But there we had to stay all year round, pretending to study, although in reality we were only waiting for it to be December again so we could travel once more down the Magdalena River.
These were the times of three-story boats with two funnels, which passed through the night like an illuminated village, and left a trail of music and fanciful dreams in the sedentary villages on the banks. Unlike the boats on the Mississippi, the drive wheels of ours were not outboards but in the stern, and nowhere in the world have I ever again seen ones like them. They had easy and immediate names: Atlántico, Medellín, Capitán de Caró, David Arango. Their captains, like Conrad’s, were authoritarian and kindhearted, ate like barbarians, and never slept alone in their isolated cabins. The crew members were called mariners, by extension, as if they sailed the sea. But in the canteens and brothels of Barranquilla, where they mixed with the mariners of the sea, they were distinguished by an unmistakable name: vaporinos, steamshippers.
The trips were slow and surprising during the day; we passengers sat on the balconies to watch life go by. We saw alligators that looked like tree trunks at the river’s edge, with their jaws wide open, waiting for something to eat to fall in. You could see throngs of cranes taking off startled by the boat’s wake, flocks of wild ducks from the marshes inland, interminable schools of fish, manatees that nursed their young and cried as if singing on the empty beaches. Sometimes a nauseating stink would interrupt our siesta, and it was the cadaver of an immense drowned cow, floating downstream almost immobile with a solitary vulture standing on its belly. All through the voyage, one would wake up at dawn, bewildered by the racket of the monkeys and the scandal of the parrots.
It’s unusual nowadays to meet someone on an airplane. On the Magdalena riverboats passengers ended up resembling a single family, for we would make arrangements every year to sail on the same voyage. The Eljaches embarked at Calamar, the Peñas and the Del Toros—paisanos of the legendary alligator-man—embarked at Plato; the Estorninos and Viñas, at Magangué; the Villafañes, at Banco. As the trip advanced, the party grew bigger. Our life was linked in an ephemeral, but unforgettable, way, to the stopover villages, and many got tangled up forever in their destiny. Vicente Escudero, who was a medical student, went into a wedding dance without being invited in Gamarra, danced without permission with the most beautiful woman in town, and her husband killed him with one shot. Pedro Pablo Guillén, on the other hand, got married during a Homeric drunken binge to the first girl he fancied in Barrancabermeja, and is still happy with her and their nine children. The irretrievable José Palencia, who was a congenital musician, entered a drumming contest in Tenerife and won a cow, which he sold on the spot for fifty pesos: a fortune back then. Sometimes the boat would get stranded for up to fifteen days on a sandbar. Nobody worried, for the party went on, and a letter from the captain sealed with his friend’s coat of arms was a valid justification for arriving late to school.
One night, on my last voyage in 1948, we were awakened by a heartrending wail coming from the riverbank. Captain Clímaco Conde Abello, who was one of the greats, gave the order for the searchlights to look for whatever was making that distressing sound. It was a female manatee that had gotten trapped in the branches of a fallen tree. The vaporinos dove into the water, tied a winch rope around her, and managed to unstrand her. It was a fascinating and touching animal, almost fourteen feet long, and her pale and smooth skin, and her womanly torso, with big breasts of a very loving mother, and from her enormous and sad eyes sprung human tears. It was also Captain Conde Abello who I first heard say that the world was going to end if people kept killing the animals of the river, and he banned shooting from the boat. “Anyone who wants to kill someone should go kill him at home,” he shouted. “Not on my boat.” But nobody heeded him. Thirteen years later—on January 19, 1961—a friend phoned me at home in Mexico to tell me that the steamship David Arango had been set alight and burned to ashes in the port of Magangué. I hung up the telephone with the horrible impression that my youth had ended that day, and all that was left of our river of nostalgia had just gone to hell.
It had indeed. The Magdalena River is dead, with its waters poisoned and its animals exterminated. The recuperation work that the government has begun to talk about since a concentrated group of journalists made the problem trendy is a distracting farce. The rehabilitation of the Magdalena will only be possible with the continued and intense effort of at least four conscientious generations: an entire century.
People speak too easily of reforestation. This actually means planting 59,110 million trees on the banks of the Magdalena. I’ll repeat that just to be clear: fifty-nine thousand, one hundred and ten million trees. But the biggest problem is not planting them, but where to plant them. Almost all the useful land on the riverbanks is private property, and complete reforestation would have to occupy ninety percent of it. It would be worth asking which property owners would be kind enough to cede ninety percent of their lands for tree planting and renounce ninety percent of their current profits.
The pollution, moreover, does not just affect the Magdalena River, but all its tributaries. They are the sewer systems of the riverside cities and towns that drag and accumulate industrial, agricultural, animal, and human waste and flow into the immense world of national filth called Bocas de Ceniza. In November of last year, in Tocaima, two guerrillas dove into the Bogotá River while fleeing from the armed forces. They managed to escape, but were on the verge of death from infections contracted from the water. So the people who live on the Magdalena, especially in the lower reaches, have not been drinking or using pure water or eating healthy fish for a very long time. They only receive—as the ladies say—pure shit.
The task is enormous, but that is perhaps the best thing about it. The complete project of what must be done is in a study carried out by a joint Dutch and Colombian commission, the thirty volumes of which sleep the sleep of the unjust in the archives of the Institute of Hydrology and Meteorology (IMAT). The deputy director of that monumental study was a young engineer from Antioquia, Jairo Murillo, who dedicated half his life to it, and before it was finished he relinquished what was left of it: he drowned in the river of his dreams. On the other hand, no presidential candidate in recent years has run the risk of drowning in those waters. The inhabitants of riverside towns—which in the coming days are going to be in the front lines of the national intention with the voyage of the Caracola—should be aware of that. And remember that between Honda and Bocas de Ceniza, there are enough votes to elect a president of the republic.
March 25, 1981, El País, Madrid