“But I want to bathe now!”
“Ah, you want to bathe?” repeated the youth, with wide-open eyes.
“No, you cross-eyed Son of Spigdom,” exploded the ordinarily even-tempered ex-corporal, “I came here and stripped to an undershirt that I might dance in my bare feet on this tile floor in honor of José María de la Santa Trinidad Simón Bolívar! Get up on that roof and fire up or ...”
The youth was already feverishly stoking armsful of wood under the upright boiler, and by the time I left for home Hays was shadow boxing to keep warm, with a fair chance of getting a bath before the day was done.
As is to be expected from its isolation, the Colombian capital is a deeply religious, not to say a fanatical, city. An infernal din of church bells of the tone of suspended pans or broken boilers makes the early morning hours hideous and continues at frequent intervals throughout the day. Here, contrary to the custom in most centers of the Latin race, the men as well as the women go to church. College professors and literary lights of no mean ability seriously contend that the shinbone of some saint in this shrine or that “temple” has miraculous power; but the superstition of isolation hangs particularly heavy over the uneducated masses. Of late years the Liberals and the Masons have grown nearly as powerful as the Conservatives, and do not hesitate to express themselves freely in public, knowing that in case of attack any representative body of the population includes fellow-Liberals who will come to their rescue. Every public gathering is pregnant with possibilities of an outburst between the two divisions of society. The very school-boys talk politics—here inextricably entangled with religion—and the foreigner who wishes to hold the attention of a Colombian for a conversation of any length must have some knowledge, or at least a plausible pretense of knowledge, of interior political questions. It was a bare three years since a Protestant missionary had been stoned by the populace of Bogotá, though he now held his services in peace in what, despite the lack of outward signs, was really a church. Policemen armed with rifles liberally besprinkle every meeting in theater, cathedral, or public square. Shortly before our arrival a dozen officers and citizens had been killed in a religious riot in the bullring.
Were they less hump-shouldered, these policemen of Bogotá might easily be taken for Irishmen, and an absent-minded American fancy himself back in the New York of a decade ago. The uniform of the day force is a copy of that of our own metropolis before the helmets were abolished. At night the scene changes. In every street spring up officers in high caps and long capes who might have stepped directly from the arrondissements of Paris, with even the short sword in place of the daytime “night-stick.” They are a well disciplined body of men, quite unlike the childish, inefficient guardians of law and disorder so familiar from the Rio Grande southward. The bogotano officer would no sooner be seen sitting, lounging, or smoking on duty than would one in our own large cities. As in all Latin-American countries, however, the chief drawback to a really efficient service is the caste system. The policemen are of necessity recruited from the gente del pueblo, and though they have no hesitancy in arresting one of their own class, the sight of a white collar paralyzes them with their ingrown deference to the more powerful rank of society. The result is that a well-dressed person can commit anything short of serious crime under the very eyes of the police. The officer may keep the culprit under surveillance, but rarely summons up courage actually to arrest him until he has definite orders from a white-collared superior.
There are curious local customs in Bogotá. Her small shops, for example, have a system of signs intelligible only to the initiated. A red flag announces meat for sale; a red flag with a yellow star, meat and bones; a white flag, milk; a green one, vegetables and grains. A cabbage or a lettuce-head thrust forth on the end of a stick marks the entrance to a cheap restaurant; a tuft of faded flowers, a chichería. The bogotano sees nothing incongruous in a building that announces itself a “Primary School” above and an “American Bar” below. On week days the pedestrian slinks through many of the chief residential streets apparently unseen; on a gala Sunday afternoon the same stroll is to run an unbroken gauntlet of feminine eyes. For then the señoritas who are seen, if at all, during the week, hurrying to mass all but concealed in their mantos, don their most resplendent garb and, with cushions under their plump elbows, lean in their window embrasures oggling and being oggled through the iron rejas.
A native of Medellín, where envy of the capital and her self-seeking politicians is rife, had assured us as far away as Panama:
“All they do in Bogotá is study and steal.”
We had only to glance out our windows to find basis for the first part of the assertion. The plaza below was always alive with students from the local institutions of higher learning for males marching slowly back and forth conning the day’s lessons. The fireless houses are cold and dungeon-like, particularly in the morning, and the city long ago formed the habit of studying afoot. The racial dislike of solitude and the eagerness to be seen and recognized by their fellows as devotees of learning may also have some part in a practice that many a bogotano continues through life. It is commonplace to pass in almost any street men even past middle age strolling along with an open book in one hand and the inevitable silver-headed cane in the other.