Feel Something

            Oh, how I would love to be sprinkled with gold dust. And I’m not using gold to describe dust that resembles the glistening yellow embers that resembles it. I mean gold. Like Mariah Carey who gets real gold crushed into a mixture of a skin tone that will later be spray tanned onto her flesh.

            Like that.

            But you know what? I know where I could accomplish said deed. Santa Marta, of course. I mean, Paternostro said, “Everyone got sprinkled with Santa Marta gold dust.”

            So we’re just going to have to trust her.

            Nah, I actually really liked that phrase. Yes, by gold she means money in duffel bags transported via boats, but that doesn’t take away the beauty it signifies. Almost as if Santa Marta in all its paradise wonder will leave a footprint in your mind and memory forever. Like gold dug in the deep confines of the earth’s soil, it will be stuck forever in your conscience. I just loved it.

            But speaking of gold, Silvana describes a scene in which “Ruben was pouring out $150, 000 in cash that had been left in a duffel bag outside their hotel room.” This takes place in la Guajira. This bag, along with many others, would later be stuffed into boats to be sailed away. What got to me was that the duffel bag was left there by a screaming guy shouting, “bathe in it, let it touch you.” Almost as if money could caress the soul. Almost as if money can rule your life.

            It can.

            And that is a factor of Colombia’s violence today. People who need to survive and barely make a living who are offered money in return for trafficking drugs, joining las FARC, etc. It happens.

            I was actually pondering the man and the suitcase outside his hotel room and I remembered when I was in Santa Marta, in front of a sailing port as well, when I found twenty books (I counted) lying on the public bathroom sink. Perfcetly stacked up and in english.  I waited until after the boat trip to check if their presence wasn’t due to a person’s forgetfulness, and when I saw them again, beckoning to me, I took four of them.

            I should go to jail.

            Ah, but they were forsaken, isolated in the unhygienic confines of a public bathroom?

            What would Jesus do?

            Any who, besides that interesting fact, Paternostro later talks about La Violencia and las FARC’s documents on the era, when she came upon texts that spoke of the details of that history. “ The rebels history lesson reads like a gory film: “pregnant stomachs were opened with knives,” “men skinned alive and tied to ant colonies”; “others with their genitals inside their mouths”; “or with their tongues hanging from their chest.” I can’t read anymore. I do not know where to file this information, in my brain or in my heart.”

            I can imagine a fetus being ripped with all other insides that a woman’s body has to offer. Intestines, liver. How beautiful. Then I think of the killer ant documentaries I see of crawling creatures that kill whole babies. Don’t ask me how. And while those thoughts line up in my head I find that I myself can’t bear to keep on reading that information. And that’s when I now that the pathos is just right in the nauseating and yet sad feeling washing me.

            Finally she manages to make me feel something.

            They weren’t even her own words.