“Sí, señor, the mails only came in yesterday. But you can knock and perhaps....”
Knocking brought no result. An hour or more later I tried again, with no better luck. Early the next afternoon, however, I found my way in by an inner door of the patio, though the place was still officially closed.
The two rooms looked much like a garret of long standing, but by no means like a post-office. Scattered everywhere, over floor and baked-mud window seats, on decrepit chairs and crippled tables, lay fat mail-bags, all stout and new, from the chief countries of the globe. The outgoing Colombian correspondence was already packed in aged grain-sacks. Pieces of mail of all sizes lay tumbled and littered over the entire two rooms. Fully half of it was from the United States, particularly pamphlets and packages from patent medicine houses. Four middle-aged men, dressed in great dignity and in Cartago’s most correct attire, with gloves and canes on chairs beside them, were seated around a table, smoking cigarettes. I handed one of them the wrapped notebook. It passed slowly from hand to hand, each feeling it over, not so much out of curiosity, though that was by no means lacking, as absent-mindedly striving to bring his attention down to it. Then all four fell to perusing a Postal Union rate-sheet, but found everything except the information needed. Finally one rose and referred the matter respectfully to a man, evidently a superior, seated in state at a corner table. The rate was found to be one peso for each fifty grams. The official turned back and wandered for some time at random about the two rooms, fingering the parcel over and over and scratching his head in a vain effort to recall what he had set out to find.
He discovered it at last,—an ancient postal-scales—tried it, found it too small, tried another, and spent an ample five minutes juggling with the odds and ends that served as weights before he computed the balance. Then he drifted languidly back to his companions in inefficiency, opened his mouth to speak, closed it again, and rambled once more across the room to the scales. He had forgotten the weight! This time he took no chances, but announced the figures aloud and wrote them on the parcel,—“320 grams.” Those who do not know the South American will have difficulty in believing that the division of this by fifty, without troubling for fractions, presented a real problem. All four began pencilling long lines of figures on as many sheets of paper. Several minutes passed before one of them ventured to show his result. The others compared, and amid a sage shaking of heads one announced solemnly, “Seven cents, señor,” while the rest gazed dreamily at me out of the tops of their eyes, as if wondering whether I should weather the shock of so great an expense.
“And registered, seventeen cents?” I added; for I did not care to have the parcel lie a month or two about the earth floor of Cartago’s post-office, or find its final resting-place in the back yard. When the suggestion had penetrated, one of the quartet sat down to enter the grave transaction in a large ledger. I still needed a two-cent stamp. The oldest of the four shuffled to the opposite side of the table, sat down, adjusted his legs, and slowly pulled out a drawer stuffed with every manner of rubbish,—tobacco, rolled cigarettes, half-empty phials of patent medicine, everything that may come by mail,—and finally dug up a battered pasteboard box that had once held No. 60 American thread. From this he fished out a small sheet of two-peso stamps, carefully tore one off at the perforation, first on one side, then on the other, put the sheet back in the thread-box, the thread-box back in the drawer, carefully closed the latter, and handed me the stamp. I tossed before him a silver ten-cent piece. He opened the drawer again, clawed out of a far corner a wad of those ragged, germ-infested one-cent bills indigenous to Colombia, laid out eight of them, counted them a second time, sat staring at them a long minute while his attention went on furlough, asked one of his colleagues to count them, which the latter did twice at the same vertiginous speed, and finally pushed them toward me with a hesitative movement, as if he were sure he was losing somewhere in the transaction, but could not exactly figure out where.
Meanwhile, he of the ledger rose from dotting the last “i” of an entry that stretched in nicely shaded copybook letters entirely across the double page, begged me to do him the honor to be seated, dipped the clumsy steel pen into the dusty inkwell, and, with a wealth of politenesses, requested me to sign. When I had done so, he gazed long and dreamily at the signature, longer still at space in general, and finally put the parcel carefully away in a drawer with neither stamp nor mark of identification upon it.
Along the Cauca Valley we met not only peasants bound to town with a load of wood and carrying their prize roosters, but now and then the corpse of a woman being brought in for Christian burial service, after which it would be carried back and buried in her native hills
In places the Cauca Valley so swarmed with locusts that they rose like an immense screen before us as we advanced, struck us in the face in scores, and made a sound like that of a distant waterfall