| Losing Yourself in Cartagena |
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| Written by Editor |
| Friday, 07 May 2010 14:31 |
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As a child I used to have a fascination with trapping non-aviary insects inside Tupperware containers then releasing them into small maze-like courses I’d construct in the garage. I’d use maybe a shoebox and a cookbook, anything that had a flat edge to act as a barrier and prevent escape. There was a pleasure back then, unfortunately one that’s become sadistic with time, in being the master of confusion. It’d be a gecko or a beetle wandering around on the breezy patio and next thing you know, mystified by a labyrinth of manmade buildings several times their size. “What the fuck is this?” I imagined them saying. At age seven, I imagined it something like being kidnapped, a semi-legitimate fear where we lived in California. Here you were going about your daily routine, when someone covers you in plastic, takes you for a ride (presumably to their torture chamber) and unloads you into a network of dead ends, watching from above and giggling with joy. A famous writer once described hell as nothing but endless hopelessness. This, I imagine, is close to what he was getting at. My hobby never grew to larger animals like cats or rabbits and I always released my subjects to the wild once thoroughly dizzied. There was just something about peeking into the thought process of a caterpillar, for example, that excited me. He’d go up to a wall, realize it was a wall, test both sides to assure they were also walls, then shrug as if to say “oh well,” and go in another direction. The method was not that different from what I would have done had I been placed in a maze: the caterpillar’s sluggishness though. It just seemed cruelly entertaining. If you want to experience what it feels like to get lost, to lose all sense of direction and bearing of the world around you as we know it, you could I am generally very good with directions but my success rate in Cartagena is about as good as the insects of my experiments: the equivalent of a dizzy bat race or an obstacle course wearing beer goggles. I’d wander down one street optimistically just to find that it led to a gravel pit. I’d look over to the right of the gravel pit, then to the left, then shrug telling myself one down, several thousand more outlets to go. El Casco of Cartagena first has very few landmarks other than plazas and churches, of which there seem to be millions. Because the cobblestone streets are so narrow, there’s no trying to look up and over any buildings, trying to identify tall towers (the only thing quasi-identifiable is the ocean which surrounds the walled city on several sides). Further, and perhaps the worst to a newcomer, the majority of Cartagena’s buildings look identical. You may think to yourself, oh, my building is the orange one with the wooden bars and the twisty ornamental tree, until, that is, you realize that every freaking building is orange and has those bars and that tree. The best solution to getting lost in the streets of Cartagena is to ask locals. Not only do the streets have names (which surprisingly, for Latin America, most people actually know), but people really seem to enjoy helping out tourists. It’s as if, during one of my trials, I decided, you know what, I’m going to move the line of bricks and give this lizard a clear path to the garden. There may not be any locals in Cartagena able to move buildings or make entire cities disappear, but there certainly is fantasy within its walls.
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