We prepared to leave Tuluá early, but we reckoned without our host, who was a half-negro of nasty temper and stupid wit, and no faith in gold coin. Hays offered him a $5 gold piece in payment of our bill, but he demanded “paper of the country.” We had none left, and a mulatto boy was sent out to change the scorned yellow metal. An hour elapsed without a second sight of him. When another had drifted into the past, a search party was organized. Investigation showed that the emissary had tried to change the coin in a couple of shops, and had then faded away. It was nearly noon when he reappeared, the coin still in his clenched hand. He had fallen into a game with other boys and “forgotten” his errand.
We took the task upon ourselves. One after another drowsy, wondering shopkeepers looked the coin over as a great curiosity and handed it back, announcing that the changing would be “muy trabajoso”—“very laborious”—for the speaker, but that we could get it changed “en to’as partes”—“anywhere,” which, as usual, meant nowhere. At last a merchant suggested that it would be changed wherever we bought anything. We called his bluff by picking out a notebook on his shelves, and had heaped up before us nearly $500 in ragged “billetes del país” of chiefly one and five-peso values. The wad was burdensome, but to be caught on the road in the Andes without small money is often to go hungry, if not, indeed, thirsty. This particular shopkeeper prided himself on a knowledge of geography and the affairs of the “exterior,” the outside world, above the average of his fellow-townsmen. As we turned away, he called after us:
“By the way, do los señores come from New York, or from the United States?”
It was a subtle distinction we had not, to that moment, recognized.
The ancient city of Buga, one of the largest in the Cauca valley, was already familiar to us from the pages of “María.” But seeing is too often disillusionment in these “cities” of the Andes, particularly those in which the imagination has already dwelt. To have seen one long, cobbled, unswept street of Buga was to have seen them all. Checkerboard in plan, the monotonous line of its continuous house-walls, all standing close to the street in a strict “right dress,” broken here and there by a massive zaguan, stretched away out of sight in both directions. At first glimpse, it seemed unduly modest in claiming only ten thousand inhabitants; when we found that every dwelling had a patio and a garden of its own within, we realized that a one-story Andean town is by no means so large as it looks. The place was stagnant as a frog-pond, its main plaza a splendid study in “still life.” Yet Buga was old before Boston was founded, and is favored with a soil and climate superior to the best of New England. In a region where fruit should have been unlimited, the only shop that offered any for sale was slightly stocked with a few green samples. The old woman who kept it bestirred herself to finger over several of her wares, and advised us to come back mañana or the day after when they had had time to ripen. Perhaps it is unjust to expect of Buga the energy and movement of a white man’s town. At least it has unrivalled evenings in which, after the sun has set gloriously over the western range, the traveler can lean over the parapet of the massive old Spanish bridge of many arches—how the Spaniards built to stay, yet stayed not—watching a half-moon rise and listening to the chatter of the shallow, diamond-clear little Guadalajara de las Piedras that flanks the town on the south.
Buga is a holy city. Far above all else bulks a modern Gothic church of real bricks—and bricks transported from overseas are not cheap—called “De los Milagros,” filled with more religious trophies than any Hindu temple. We were accosted in the nave by a long-unshaven priest who inquired our desires with a brusk “Qué se le ofrece?” that plainly revealed his knowledge that we were not of the “faithful.” His familiarity with the outside world was on a par with that of most Colombians. When we answered his question of nationality by announcing ourselves Americans, he replied complacently, “Ah, yes, Englishmen.” Finding unheeded his strong hint to leave, he at length led the way up a ladder to a cell above and back of the altar. Here he lighted a candle and fell on his knees before the “miraculous” crucifix, the figure of which was smeared with red paint to simulate blood. Pilgrims flock to Buga from hundreds of miles around. To the bugueños themselves, however, their “miracle” seems to offer little more than a means of easy income, through the hawking of crucifixes and holy lithographs to their pious visitors.
Like Puree, Benares, or Lourdes, the holy city is more holy at a distance, than to those who loll through life in its shadows, and it was only at El Cerrito, a day’s march beyond, that we heard the story of the Milagroso de Buga in all its details. In a faintly lighted corredor we sat with three old women, the natural authorities on such subjects, who told the tale in low, awed voices, their eyes glowing in the night with the miracle of it, their tongues breaking in frequently with a “Qué le parece!”—“What do you think of that!”—as the miraculous recital proceeded.
Long years ago, more than two centuries, when Buga was nothing but a row of thatched casitas on the bank of the babbling Guadalajara de las Piedras, a very poor and pious woman used to come every day to wash clothes at the river brink. The clothes of others, that is, for you must know that she had long been trying to get together sixty cents to buy a crucifix to set up in her hut, where she had nothing whatever to pray to. At last she economized the sixty cents and was toiling away on the bank of the Guadalajara, dreaming of the joy of setting up the crucifix in her casita on the morrow, when a poor lame man of Buga came by and told her he owed sixty cents to a rich caballero, and would be put in prison for debt if he did not pay it that very night. The poor washerwoman drew from within her garments the silver she had so carefully hidden away and gave it to the lame man to pay his debt. The next day—or three days later; here a great dispute arose among our informants—as the poor woman was washing and praying that she might some day gather together another sixty cents, there floated squarely into her open hands and mixed itself up with the garments—of others—she was washing, a cajita, a little box in which there was....
A view of the “sacred city” of Buga, with the new church erected in honor of the miraculous Virgin