Alma Guillermoprieto and the Pandemic

Alma Guillermoprieto wrote a brief response to what life is like in Bogota, Colombia. You'll remember that she was the author of our first reading of the semester, "A Reporting Life in Latin America." Enjoy!

BOGOTÁ, COLOMBIA, March 24—These are the quietest days anyone can remember in Bogotá, ever. More than Christmas or New Year’s Day, more than Easter week, when the city empties out. No car alarms, no motorcycles, no buses panting and screeching to a halt. The criers are gone, too: the one whom I hear punctually, midmorning and midafternoon, offering very sweet rice pudding, still hot; the one who comes by once or twice a week, announcing through a megaphone that he “buys literature, every type of literature.” There’s a weekly ragman who uses a recording to remind us that he will recycle anything and everything—from dead refrigerators to soaked mattresses to spent batteries—that we might care to place in his little beaten-up truck.

Our smart mayor, Claudia López, faced with a sharp escalation of confirmed patients in the city and a tardy and inadequate reaction to the coronavirus crisis by the country’s president, Iván Duque, announced last Tuesday, March 17, that a four-day trial lockdown would begin on March 20. Access roads to the city have been closed to traffic except for trucks bringing in food and other essential supplies. No one is allowed to leave their apartment or house other than to purchase food or seek medical treatment, and people over seventy are expected to stay indoors until the end of the crisis. Following in her steps, Duque declared a similar nationwide lockdown Friday evening from now through Easter, though who knows what will happen after that, or how that will be implemented in the rural districts. Colombia might not be in such straits if a cruise ship had not been allowed to dock in the seaside tourist trap of Cartagena in late February, which then disembarked its passengers, including 120 party-hungry Italians and an unknown, but significant, number of virus-carriers.

What with substantial fines for anyone caught outdoors, and the dawning realization in a sizable portion of the population that this danger is for real, Mayor López’s seclusion orders have been obeyed to a remarkable degree, at least in my neighborhood. Last week, though, I went to buy some toothpaste to add to the stock of supplies I’ve been laying in over the last three or four weeks, and stood in line for half an hour, waiting to be admitted to my local supermarket: stores were trying to avoid the overcrowding of the previous day, when the mayor’s announcement of the lockdown rules led to a surge of panic-buying and, quite possibly, contagion. But as far as Colombians were concerned, the lines were just one more opportunity to socialize.

Partly, this cheerful sociability has to do with a great capacity for self-serving denial, perfected over centuries in the face of this country’s unending violence. But partly, there is also a cultural dependence on closeness and communication. I staged a ridiculous dance with a man who lives in my building as we moved around the building’s garage, him stepping closer and me skipping backward as I tried to achieve what was (for both of us) an uncomfortable but now prescribed distance for conversation. “Oh, I see you’re taking this thing seriously,” he said, arching an eyebrow.

One indication of the impact on those living in extreme poverty or confinement came on the weekend, when prisoners in the nighmarish Modelo jail rioted, leaving at least twenty-three dead. In another incident that same day, we saw on the news a security camera video of a group of skinny young men bursting into a supermarket and grabbing what they could off the shelves. (They were Venezuelans, it turned out, who, caught by the neighbors, were subsequently deported.)

One source of comfort—and paradoxical disquiet—has been the videos showing shoals of tiny fish repopulating the Venice canals; curious foxes and peccaries trotting through empty streets in unidentified cities, dolphins patroling the docks of an Italian seaside town, trying to understand where all the traffic and people and noise went. It looks good, the world without us!

I live on the edge of a park traversed by a tiny trickle of water that turns into a proper stream when it rains, as it has been doing nearly every day for the past few weeks. Even with the windows shut tightly, I can still make out the sound of rushing water. Today, I turned the radio on—and turned it off again almost immediately, because the sound of water coursing through all that clean silence is more beautiful, even though it bodes disaster.

—Alma Guillermoprieto