(This is an email I wrote to friends after my second trip to the Mercado in Cartagena. The postscript was added now)
on thurs i went into the mercado in cartagena again – the dirtiest, most horribly foul smelling place in which i have ever set foot, open muddy lanes with potholes full of green water, fish scales, bustling with people and dirt, young men with bare feet sharpening knives on telephone poles to peel oranges… to find records of course. i go there every time i get to cartagena.
as on my last trip, i went accompanied by my man willington, a local of these parts, skinny and hindu looking, with a great slow smile. a lover of reggae. he knows the alleys and the people, and i go tranquilo with him. when he was 15 he used to wander cartagena with revolvers in his waistband, hard to believe because he is so mellow. i am teaching him to tell boogaloo era covers from 80s crap, and to tell an original label from a later release. dudes that pass us hanging out of bus windows wave at him.
we went to meet a guy named jaime or jimmy, who i had met the day before in the market. he looks at me with a suspicious eye, but says he has the records i am looking for. when we entered his little bodega inside the mercado’s catacombs, which remind me only of the videogame doom, i had the sensation of being in an ancient monastery no one had entered in 400 years. there were two floors and little lighting, all i could see was the outline of stacks and stacks of lps. a voice from the upper floor was informing jimmy that the shelves holding records had all fallen down and needed to be rebuilt. the voice belongs to “cantinflas”, a short and amiable black man in shorts and flipflops who works for jimmy. to my right i saw a narrow, empty open area that was filled at least 10 feet deep with discarded records and covers. of course, everything in the bodega is dusty and nasty.
me and willington set to work, pulling out stacks into the light and flipping through them… hoping, wishing for the rare colombian stuff i have come so far (and so often) to find, when all i have heard is, as in the store of a friend yesterday when i mentioned the titles i was looking for… ” que va, hombre (no way, man)… the guys who have those records, theyll give you their woman before they give you those LPs”
very soon i recognized that this was yet another ridiculously strange collection of records, even in this quantity — little colombian material, much 80s material, and much african material, highlife from the early 80s… it seems that the colombian costa is very afro descended, including a number of maroon palenques that held out against the spanish, and get this – when they started hearing highlife in the late 70s, they invented their own music called terapia and champeta, which is like spanish highlife, complete with wandering guitar (and which is now assimilating bits of reggaeton), and is hugely popular here. its like the cumbia and porro of this generation.
but back to the dirty bodega, where workers are stomping in to climb the stairs and fix the shelves, unleashing clouds of dust and who knows what else into our hair as we dig. and its humid in there. hot. i start to see some new york stuff from the 60s, some original cotiques (what they hell are they doing here?) and some venezuela issues of rare fania records. then i start to see some venezuelan stuff, los dementes, later stuff but nice. meanwhile, jimmy is coming in and out saying things to me like “if you dont have enough money on you, dont worry, you can come back” and “lend me two bucks, i will pay you later”. his character seems to have changed. i am focused and laugh him off, but after he comes in twice willington makes a gesture of someone who’s been drinking and points to jimmy.
uh oh.
after three hours we go into another alley to eat lunch, and get into a big argument with a reggae singer who has turned evangelical and is babbling about how jesus was the perfect human and onlyhecansaveyou etc… thanks to my boy will h’s example i have the safe meal – beans and rice and platano. all this cooked on hot wood coals packed in small round stoves made of car wheel rims soldered onto metal poles. a man is laying on the ground about ten feet in front of us, he has yellow white hair, and it looks like he has small white bandages all over his face. when he turns my way i see he has smeared white paint markings on his face. his pants are rotting off his body, and something jumps near his waist as a younger man laughs loudly at him and points in his face. the man is urinating on himself.
back to the bodega, we get disheartened by the tons of shit we have to go through to get just one good record. jimmy keeps wandering in, and his voice is more more shrill and slurred. i had not noticed how old he looks, his face has become screwed up, as if he was really, really unhappy, or as if he had dentures but had removed them. but the good ones we find are good, so we keep at it. finally we give up and go through those selected, weeding out about half. i am left with 76 records. its now 5 in the afternoon.
we take the box out into the alley, and jimmy is visibly hammered. a cigarette hangs from the corner of his mouth, and he starts to pull out the records brusquely, throwing some on the ground in piles. i look around at his minions, and they shake their head at him. he is barely making sense, and is drunk-whining a lot. what happens is bad. he asks ridiculous sums for the records as he paws each one, claiming deep knowledge as an old school collector, but throwing the records on the muck coated floor. the cigarette burns down to the filter, still in his mouth. i ask nicely for a figure for the whole lot, starting somewhere reasonable, but he wont budge, actually his price goes up. his minions start to argue with him, tell him to be reasonable, make a deal… he wants to fight and argue with them. he pulls out the records, bending and abusing them. “he knows”, he says, pointing at me. then waving the records, “this is good stuff. i can sell these in medellin for $20.” he is gloating, holding the records we have selected. later willington makes me aware that because he asked me for $2 and i gave it to him, he thought i was rich and could stick it to me. i thought because it was $2 i was showing i had meager resources. just the opposite actually. in the end he is so unreasonable, yelling and whining, that i negotiate to buy ten records that are worth it for what is a high price in the mercado in cartagena. he crows and tells me to come back tomorrow if i want the rest at the same price. canti and the others laugh at him. “he’s not coming back,” they say. “like a bird, he’s gone!” i tell him in respectful spanish full of “usteds” that with all respect, after all the work we did to weed through his records for him and the way he was being unreasonable, i was not coming back. his minions all try to argue with him, but he just yelled and moaned and stomped off with the box under his arm.
ok. me and willington beat it, shaking our heads. we had fun though overall, and the few lps i got are real interesting. plus it was satisfying that everyone else there was struck by his poor conduct. cantinflas ran up to us as we walked out. ” where can i reach you guys” he asked conspiratorily, “i am going to talk to him when he sobers up and see if he will make a deal.” me and willington get to a bakery and eat some cookies. a kid walks by barefoot with a shirt full of holes and transparent spots onto which he has drawn the body of a naked woman with a blue marker. alongside are the stylized words “hip hop” and “king”.
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two days later we are back near the market, where we meet a friend named mario who works at the airport. mario is earnest, strong, chocolate colored, and stutters. at his house we meet his wife and parents. his wife, a tall, dark skinned indian woman, is lovely and sharp, and his beautiful 3 year old son delver andres is a perfect mix of both his parents’ colors and features. delver romps around in shiny black pirate pants his mother has sewed for him, making menacing bruce lee poses at us with totally convincing facial expressions. on the patio to the sound of blaring vallenato we talk about how in the US a big mac meal costs $6 but workers at mcdonalds get $7.25 an hour, while in colombia a big mac meal costs 8000 pesos and a worker gets 1500 an hour. by the way, 2500 pesos equal one dollar. earlier during this trip i asked the stupid question “don’t you have labor unions?” of one of my informants. “not really”, she replied. “if someone starts a union, they kill them.” they kill student leaders too, apparently. two were shot in the head and killed while i was in cali in the span of three weeks, both attributed to right wing paramilitaries. all i asked acknowledged that the government had to have approved of the actions.
mario is explaing something to me about his work unloading baggage at the airport and i am not understanding. he says every year, after one year of service, they call and fire him, and five days later call him again and hire him for another year. i don’t get it. why do they do that, i ask. so they dont have to pay him a pension, says his wife. if he works for more than one year, they have to contribute to a pension fund for him. if not, they dont.
i wonder if young and strong mario will be like those grey haired older men i see at the mercado, visibly their wiry frames straining to push a load of chinese-made goods through the muck in a plastic shopping cart fitted with wooden slats to drive aside the mud… men that look 65, 68 years old… or the man i saw crawling on the ground right outside the market, face first, his one good leg pushing the other which had a crushed can underneath the knee he was dragging.
two things occur to me as i write this. that someone might think i am just some run of the mill reality show type voyeur, and that it might seem i am exaggerating details, making them more lurid than they really are…
in fact, i am leaving out things i have seen with my own eyes that you might not believe even if i had the words to describe them, open wounds that scarred my soul just to look at for a split second… as to being a voyeur, i admit i look with interest down crazy ass alleys and it all somehow reminds me of how i felt reading an old dime copy of irving shulman’s “amboy dukes” for the first time… but in fact, i have not watched tv for more than four years, and if life is so comfortable in the US that people want to pretend no one else is living, anywhere, right now at this precise moment – that’s their problem, y no el mio, papa.
me and willington are talking to some other youngsters in the mercado next to a man cutting a customer’s hair with a razor blade. they all have heard about what happened, and all agree it was not right. i feel better, i had tossed and turned a little the night before, not for the records, they come and go. for the principle. i stay awake thinking about shit like that, always have.
i call my friend william hincapie’s store, he says cantinflas is looking for us, and has gone to bachir’s. we call bachir (both he and william were big “pickup” djs in the 60s, spinning the hot boogaloo and latin soul records (with blacked out labels, so rivals couldnt steal the tune) on huge, cobbled together sound systems), and en fin hook up with canti. he says he talked to jaime’s son, that jaime is a dumbass, and that his son wants to sell us the records we picked out for a fair price. a few minutes later the son comes up with the box on his shoulder. its all there, minus four records jaime apparently passed out clutching. it feels strange. in the end, i have the records. i cant wait to get back to costa rica to hear anibal velasquez’s cumbia-boogaloo-descargas, or the strange primitivo santos LP i found on patty records from the dominican republic. i also got joey pastrana’s first LP, with “rumbon melon”. on record! no more listening to it on mp3. i couldnt care less that its a venezuelan repress.
and i think willington is more satisfied than me. when we were talking about what had happened with jaime later the first night, he said “we have a name for that here, in the mercado. its called injusticia.”
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postscript: on my next trip to cartagena willington’s number didn’t work. he had asked me to record him some cds of dread reggae, and i wanted to get them to him. finally a couple years later i was near the mercado with another guy i met and saw willington passing in a bus. i raised my hand to him and he did the same, but it was just a second and he was gone. the guy i was with said “you know that guy??” I said yeah, he took me in the mercado the first time i went, such a cool dude. i’ve been trying to get back in touch with him. “ese es maton” he said. “that dude is a killer.”
also, some of the 80s crap I wasn’t even looking for turns out to have been amazing =(