Fog at Noon

Raúl
The mountain where Raúl’s and Julia’s ranches are located is ever-changing. The climate is chilly rather than mild, and it’s perpetually damp. Throughout the day, periods of rain, fog, and sun follow one after the other. Julia bought hers a long time ago, drawn by the area’s lush vegetation, she said, and by the beauty of those rains and suns. He bought his just four years back, drawn by her. They got married in a picturesque colonial town three hours from Bogotá, and after two and a half years Julia left him, married another man in that same town some time later, and, seven months ago now, disappeared without a trace.
The vegetation is lush there because water abounds. Those who warn of a desertifying world have never visited those parts. There, the world will end in water. It falls everywhere, wells up everywhere, floats. Washed-out roads and mudslides are the biggest concern. Raúl’s third of a hectare contains three springs; a stream known as El Raizal, which rushes noisily past about ten meters from the house; and, some thousand meters away, tumbling over large boulders down the mountainside, the Lapas River, which has been torrential of late. Winter—the rainy season—is hard going everywhere, but especially in this region, which is already so wet. Over the past three months, there’s been as much rain here as usually falls in an entire year.
Sun, not so much.
Sitting out on the porch, Raúl is listening to the stream and the downpour and the river all in a chorus. His chair is made of cowhide with a very straight back. To avoid the tedious labor of building the porch out of bamboo, he instead has installed a railing made of macana palm wood and a ceiling paneled with interlaced bamboo, each stem two centimeters in diameter. Raúl likes what he does. He never studied architecture; he learned from foremen and books and by keeping his eyes open. He graduated with an engineering degree a million years ago, worked in the field for two years, and got bored. He learned to work with bamboo and knows how to use it in his constructions without ruining the view. Bambusa guadua. Books about his work are published in sumptuous coffee-table editions, with spectacular photos and drab texts that nobody reads. Julia wrote four poems for one of them, and Raúl found them just as drab as the texts but told her he liked them. And since she was fairly renowned herself, the editors agreed to include them in the volume—or maybe they actually liked them.
Plenty of people admired her poems. The intellectuals who awarded her the occasional prize deemed them good, of course. Sometimes Raúl goes back and rereads them, trying to understand what everybody saw in them, but García Lorca’s gypsy ballads are more his speed, and César Vallejo’s poems, especially the two or three you can actually make any sense of. He hasn’t read much poetry beyond that and doesn’t consider himself qualified to pass judgments on the subject. When he told Julia how he felt about García Lorca, she’d said, “Only a shit-for-brains could find Poet in New York dull,” and Raúl went ballistic. Afterward, Julia was always talking about his rages this and his rages that. She came to see him as an angry man.
As far as money goes, Raúl has neither too much nor too little, and he isn’t stingy when it comes to investing in his property, which he keeps meticulously maintained. The pickup he uses to haul supplies isn’t new, but it runs well. He doesn’t regret selling the ranch he used to own near Cucununá, which was lovely but very dry, to buy this one. He’s rented out the Bogotá apartment where he lived and worked for so long, and that serves as another source of income. He’d stopped using it after a while, preferring to stay “holed up on his ranch,” as his friends say and as Julia used to say, accusing him of being a recluse. If Raúl ever went to Bogotá, it was for her and her alone. Recluses spend their lives within the hundred-square-meter confines of an apartment, Raúl thinks, or the fifty square centimeters of a car seat, yet it’s him, the one who spends much of his day with no roof but clouds above his head, who’s supposedly the shut-in. His business has one full-time employee, him, and a manager, him. He designed the logo—bamboo sprouting out of the soil like a huge asparagus—and painted it himself.
People invite him to come more than he wants to go, ringing him from all over the country. He also gives lectures on bamboo, and he’s even traveled to Japan. He prefers designing whole houses rather than specific elements, though that has its charms too—ceilings, for example, almost always with a combination of Guadua bamboo and reeds, which look great together if you know what you’re doing. He charges a bundle to ensure that people don’t bother him much. He prefers blue-leafed reeds, which have thicker, shinier stems than regular reeds, which are slender with a strawlike texture that works well in folding screens and room dividers. He also uses papyrus, rushes, and palm fronds. When he gets to thinking about rushes and bamboos and reeds, the hours fly by as he contemplates possible combinations of textures and colors. Colombia is a paradise in terms of materials. Right by the turnoff to Bogotá, there’s a group of artisans who weave dried banana bark to make wicker furniture. The pieces are a little rustic, but the texture has its appeal. Raúl is planning to go by the workshop this week to speak with them.
It was this infatuation with his work—“infatuation” was his sister Raquel’s term—that saved him when Julia left him. Raquel hated her so much by the end! Raúl is still her baby brother, even though he’s in his fifties and she’s only got two years on him. If it hadn’t been for his work, Raúl would have wasted away, or gone mad. He looked a fright.
 
 
Julia
I married five times, and every time I came out of it free and independent and unburdened by a husband complicating my life. No, six. I was never anybody’s shadow. The locals used to say that when I got tired of my husbands, I threw them in the lake with rocks tied to their feet—how ironic—or buried them in the coffee grove, or went out and sold them. Well, that’s what they said about the first four, who, unlike Raúl, went away and never came back. Jorge, the father of my two girls, died of leukemia, and Marcelo bled out in the hands of negligent paramedics after a car accident. I used to talk to the other two on the phone from time to time, or meet up for coffee in Bogotá if I happened to run into them. If a while went by without hearing from them, I’d call to find out how they were doing. But they couldn’t claim I’d buried Raúl in the coffee grove because they used to see him on his ranch, which became increasingly overgrown—I obviously hadn’t sold him off yet, ha. He put all his energy into his bamboo and his other obsessions, and grew more retiring and antisocial than ever.
Since I got a late start in my writing career—after I split up with my first husband—I had to give it my all, and I had no patience for people like Raúl, who demand too much attention with their quirks and obsessions. I love the beauty of simplicity. People probably say I was intolerant, but nothing could be further from the truth. I was more tolerant with him than with any of the others, because Raúl is an extraordinary person—I’m the first to acknowledge it—an artist in his own way, and I was actually really worried when I broke things off with him because I knew how much he loved me and I wasn’t sure he could bear it. When I told him we needed to end it, that my love for him had died, I wrote a poem on my blog where I said that a person isn’t in command of their own heart and that emotions should flow like rainwater, never standing stagnant. I wept as I had few times before. The poem was included in an anthology of Latin American women poets published in Buenos Aires at the end of that year. People appreciated it for the depth of its sensitivity and for my boldness in expressing what I was experiencing, without pussyfooting or hypocrisy. My poems touched my readers’ souls. I was uncensored. People who read or heard them were moved; they felt something of themselves or of the world through my words, and something magical happened. Something unpredictable and powerful.
Rain is so beautiful! It was incredible the way it hammered down on everything. I wrote a poem about precisely that, and there was this metaphor about it drumming on the banana leaves on Raúl’s ranch and about the water flowing to join the larger current of the Lapas River, which never ever stopped noisily rushing.
“Hey, where’s the off switch for that thing so we can get some sleep?” Humberto Fajardo asked me the first time he visited. The guy was a real jokester—who would have guessed he’d turn out to be so violent? And a total city slicker. He was astonished to see so much water everywhere, like in that poem I wrote about trees, how they look like jellyfish. How from my terrace, the mountains looked like the sea. They were the sea. Humberto liked my poems a lot, even if he didn’t really understand them, because the waters I plied were deep and elemental. Above all, I am a lyrical person, a poet. He’s into marketing—business, in other words—and extreme sports.
This place where I am now is like a hammock. So much peace. Lovely.
 
Raúl
Raúl’s bamboo plants are for looking at—he never cuts them. At a lumberyard in Bogotá he buys bamboo from Quindío, already treated for termites, the Castilla biotype, larger in diameter than the varieties that grow in this region. He built columns using the fattest ones, which are nearly thirty centimeters in diameter and strong enough to hold up the Chrysler Building. He also buys reeds and rushes so he doesn’t have to harvest his own. He created a grove of bamboo with a clearing in the middle where he placed two large, lichen-covered boulders that had to be brought in with a backhoe; they later became overgrown with ferns, some of them tiny and absolutely perfect. When it comes to ferns, they’re either perfect or absolutely perfect. Regular bamboo forests are kind of lame compared to the local ones, Raúl thinks. Though he does like the carpet of leaves they form. “More coals for Newcastle, eh, Don Raúl?” the truck drivers tease when they show up to deliver supplies.
It’s stopped raining. When that happens the fog creeps in, as it’s doing now, and, without asking permission, slips into the house and leaves the furniture dripping. Or the sun comes out. Or there’s fog and rain on one part of the mountain and sunshine and rain on another.
Raúl works because he enjoys it. True wealth, he thinks, is not needing much. Julia always insinuated that was false modesty on his part, a cliché, only a pretense of humility or even saintliness—in other words, hypocrisy. Raúl recalls the emerald dealer who offered him a ton of money to design him a house in the village of Pacho, near the Muzo mines. He was short and stout, very affable, and he had no neck. “Everything, absolutely everything of bamboo,” the emerald dealer effused. Floors, walls, doors, stairs, railings, balconies, downspouts, gutters all made of bamboo. The stove and toilet would be the only things made of another material—though, with some effort, those could be bamboo too. The whole idea was a nightmare, so Raúl resisted any temptation to go after the money and turned down the job. The man was nice about it. He loved bamboo even more than Raúl did.
They offer him what he doesn’t want to build; they tear down what he has built. He’d been so fond of the little chapel he erected in a town in Caldas, the most beautiful thing he’d ever made. Seeking to finally purge his grief over Julia, he’d poured his soul into it. Yes, they’d warned him the chapel would be temporary while the real church was being built, but a person doesn’t build things thinking they’re going to be torn down, so he hadn’t asked what they meant by temporary. Bamboo arches and semiarches, walls made of mud and rush mats, sometimes exposed, sometimes plastered with mud and horse dung and painted ochre and colonial red. Palm thatch roof. The pulpit was made of wattle and daub, also painted colonial red, and above it Raúl placed a simple cross made of macana palm wood, thick and practically black. Great richness in the parts and simplicity in the whole. You might almost think Raúl believed in God. Beautiful. Then the first thing a new parish priest did was tear it down, because we are not ants, he said, and should not build the house of the Lord out of manure and garbage. They were already holding mass in the new eyesore, full of hideous concrete columns and spikes, while the church was being built; it remained hideous even after it was finished. Temporary means temporary, the priest told him. Photos were all that was left of it.
Stupid priests.