ALONG THE CAUCA RIVER     by Jaime Jaramillo Escobar (Colombia)
translated from the Spanish by Judith Rodriguez

We used to go down – me and my horse – twice a year to the Cauca River.
Down out of the high mountains we’d go and at daybreak we’d catch sight of the
river among black rocks and clumps of palms, and it was great to see the river.
We’d be travelling at night in August, by moonlight, or else in winter, one January or
another,
But my horse knew the track by heart or just made it up anyway.
He was the one who traced it – I couldn’t see a thing.
I was thirteen, my horse was five years old; we were very young to be taking that road
by ourselves.
What a mate my horse was, cleverer and better trained than I was,
And yet it was I who held the reins,
Simply because I was the son of the horse’s owner, that’s the way things are.
I’d give him lumps of sugar in my hand, facing him, gazing at him,
And I never played him the dirty trick of emptying beer over his head, crowned with
the two twitching ears.
I’d call him by his full name and he’d come to me at a sweet, gentle trot,
And pick his way down into the gully of the riverbed where the mist hadn’t yet lifted, but
lay in the thickets of reeds, grey and shining with dew at six in the morning.
As we went along, I’d do all the poems of Porfirio Barba-Jacob for my horse, the ones
that mooch around wild mountain country.
I don’t remember my horse having anything to say about the poems, but if I stopped
declaiming, he stopped. 
Of course, before we started I’d have washed him down,
I’d have walked him out in the yard behind the house, feeding him sugar-cane, honey and
bran, peeled bananas,
Combed him, and stroked him, and slapped his rump,
Groomed him thoroughly and combed his mane and tail with care
And looked to the gear: the red saddle-rug for his back, the polished bridle, the
smooth firm girth, the saddle all decorated with carving and silver, the stirrups of worked copper, the leather jacket, my felt hat. Right up till the moment I jammed the hat on my head, the horse simply wouldn’t let us start.
My father would be keeping an eye on everything, very quietly and seriously,
And if every detail was right he approved with a nod.

I know that this horse died way back and for me to be still living is unfair.
He was a white horse with a long mane, called Don Palomo Jaramillo.
The Cauca River knows nothing of all that because it comes from far, far away, from the
great plains of grass,
So calm, full of really big fish – back then –
The river that had flowed between banks where the blacks drank in their palm shelters,
Where they lived in huts, worked, or didn’t work, fought one another with huge forks of
galvanised steel, showed off on trumpet,
Blacks who’d poured their blood into the river, their sweat, their tears,
Who feted Sunday in the ports, each port with its railway-station and those green Pilsener
bottles for their thirst, for their drinking-bouts, for their fighting spirit. 
At Anza, you had to cross the wild river in a canoe, holding up the horse’s head with the
bridle so he wouldn’t drown.
The horse would labour along, but still, he’d keep going against the rush of the water.
My horse watched me throwing back rotgut, and said nothing.
He took me home drunk, he caressed me with his muzzle, with the side of his head.
He’d stand steady, look hard at me, and say: Come on.
He galloped with mane straining the wind to delight me,
Or carried me carefully over bad tracks, those winters.
Now I have no horse and have to go by car, I live inside it completely out of touch.
Landscapes moving at a hundred ks an hour have neither head nor tail and no-one can tell
why it makes them feel sick,
But my horse knew about landscapes, he was a horse for landscapes,
A horse born just of a horse, but grander than the Queen’s Rolls Royce.

The best river in the world is the first river, the one where we went in naked,
And the rest are just other rivers, like other women, and other friends.
If the Magdalena River didn’t speak to me when I was a boy, why should it speak now;
might as well not try.
I talked long with the Cauca River and it told me everything,
The same things as the Magadalena River could have told me,
But the Cauca put a hand on my shoulder and spoke in my ear
And I didn’t like the other so much because its talk was shouting.
I went down with friends to the Cauca and we swam across, at Anza, at Cangrejo, Tulio
Ospina, La Pintada, Cali,
But I never swam across the Magdalena anywhere.
The Magdalena tried to drown me, raise up waves and pull me under; when I waved an
arm it shoved me down. Yes, I’m frightened of the Magdalena.
On the banks of the Cauca I used to go back and forth like a king among his people.
On the Bolombolo Bridge I could just talk with passers-by, with a friend, with the lonely
night.
The Bolombolo Bridge disappeared under the waters of a dam,
And with it the houses and the big iron-roofed pubs.
The name Bolombolo will last for ever in the poems of Leon de Grieff,
Who actually saw the port begin, when they built the railway.
The smell of coal is gone, it disappeared with the trains, all that’s left is whores
Who’ll soon disappear under the dam waters, as well as billiard tables with their feet in
the air, the restaurants that served hot soup, and my police-inspector’s revolver.
Over the Bolombolo Bridge one night I chased a bandit, the bandit jumped in the river,
I shot a round in the air so I could get talking about it over beers with the
lieutenant.

Water of the Cauca,
Water I’m drinking right now, from fine crystal glasses; yellowish, discoloured,
pretty dirty really -
If my horse were here to drink you, maybe he’d drop down dead.

Jaime Jaramillo Escobar   Selecta, Tercer Mundo Editores, Bogotá, 1987.