The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America (16 page)

The one appointment I did make in Cali was for a short tour of the city’s exquisite country club. Thompson had mentioned it while describing the violence encroaching on the city, telling an editor that things were getting “so bad … nobody goes to the big country club on the edge of town after dark.” I thought I’d try to get a look at the place and maybe
hear what it was like back when the
bandoleros
roamed the countryside.

My first move at the Club Campestre de Cali, though, was to embarrass myself with an inadvertent “ugly American” moment of my own. An assistant at the club had written to me earlier in the week, telling me to ask for Sr. Juan Manuel Gonzales, the club’s head groundskeeper. But for weeks I’d had Colombian politics on the brain, and the current president of Colombia (Uribe’s former defense minister and handpicked replacement) is the very similarly named Juan Manuel Santos. Like an idiot, that was the name I had scribbled into my notebook. I was a little edgy when I walked up to the gate, as I always am when I have to be professional in Spanish. So when I started talking to the buttoned-down matron in the booth, I simply read the name straight out of my notebook: Oh, hi there. I have an appointment at noon to see Juan Manuel Santos.

The attendant looked at me, puzzled, like I’d just requested a tee time with Che Guevara and Jesus Christ. She asked me to repeat myself several times, which only flustered me further. “I made the appointment by e-mail earlier this week,” I stammered. “I’m just here to meet for a while with Juan Manuel Santos. I think he’s in charge of golf.”

I sounded not only like an idiot gringo, but probably a rube on top of it. Imagine your stereotypical small-town hayseed who storms up to a country club in Massachusetts and demands to see George W. Bush or Barack Obama—because this is where rich and powerful people hang out, right?

“The only Juan Manuel Santos I know, sir, is the president,” she said to me very, very slowly. But it still wasn’t clicking. I figured she meant the president
of the country club
. OK then, I thought. That was more of a higher-up than
I’d expected to give me a tour, but hey, that was the name in my notebook. So I doubled down on the stupidity and told her yes ma’am, that’s the guy. I’m here to see the president.

Needless to say, the whole thing took a few minutes to sort out, and once I realized my mistake, I was so embarrassed that I lost control of my Spanish altogether. As the exasperated woman finally ushered me inside, it was all I could do to pathetically mutter,
Discúlpame, soy tonto
. I’m very sorry. I am an idiot.

A few minutes later, I climbed into a golf cart with Juan Manuel Gonzales himself, who laughed so hard at the story, he had to pull over. Gonzales turned out to be as gracious a host as I could have asked for. A slight guy with a mustache and an easygoing manner, he’d been working for the club for thirty-one years, and he sent two boys to college doing it. He was obviously proud of the place, and with good reason. It’s stunning—spacious and impeccably landscaped, encircled by a blue-green stream and dotted with perfectly pruned bamboos and palms. Gonzales drove me around for over an hour, showing off bunkers and doglegs, state-of-the-art stables, and even a complex of tennis courts that was right then hosting a televised international tournament. He got particularly excited about the wildlife, urging me to snap pictures of herons and egrets, then scouring the fairways until we found an iguana and a pair of dog-sized tailless squirrels called
guatines
.

“So, what does it take to become a member here?” I asked, after we’d stopped at the ninth green for some lemonade.

“Not much,” Gonzales said. “A form, a background check, and
plata
”—literally, “silver,” a favorite slang term for money
—“mucha plata.”

“And what about gringos? Can they become members?”

“Oh, of course,” he said with a nod. “We have a lot of gringos. Many, many gringos.”

Two men, toting their own bags, walked onto the teeing ground of the neighboring eighth hole. We watched as they lined up their drives.

“And golf is the most popular sport here?”

“No, definitely not.” Gonzales shook his head. “Well, maybe for the gringos. Otherwise it’s
fútbol
, then tennis and
chaza
.”
Chaza
, he said, was a Colombian paddle game like tennis, but played without a net. “Golf, you know—that’s only for the elite.”

I smiled, embarrassed but not surprised to hear him so casually equate the gringos with the elite. We looked over at the eighth green to see one of the men teeing off. He had a good drive, releasing his swing with a graceful swish that sent the ball out low across the fairway.

Thompson’s British golfer probably spent some time out here, I thought. Assuming he was real, anyway. In one of Thompson’s biographies, I’d read a quote from his former editor at the
National Observer
, speculating that the lede to “Anti-Gringo Winds” had, in fact, been embellished. It seemed a bit too perfect, the editor said, the bourgeois Brit launching golf balls into the slums. It’s not as if the paper could have done a lot of fact-checking, and Thompson did eventually acquire a reputation for blending fact with fiction. True or not, though, it is indeed a perfect image.

What is it about a golf swing, I wondered, that implies such casual conquest? Surely we have a whole host of cultural associations with the sport—it’s the game of the elite, as Gonzales said, but there’s more to it than that. While Gonzales and I watched the second golfer tee off, I thought about the way that golf delivers violence in such an elegant and controlled package. Supposing for a minute that
Thompson did make up the incident on the penthouse balcony. He couldn’t have used an American kid batting fly balls or a tennis pro working on her backhand. The first is equally “gringo,” the second very aristocratic, but both actions are too overtly aggressive, too forceful and abrupt. The best golfer can drive a ball three hundred yards with a motion as subtle and fluid as any tai chi maneuver. And Thompson needed that imagery to capture the sort of person who could sow violence so nonchalantly—the detached oppressor in his high-rise tower, dapper in a coat and tie.

What about the more manifest violence, I remembered to ask Gonzales, the banditry toward the end of La Violencia? He was just a child then, but he seemed to have a handle on the country club’s eighty-year history, and the club, he said, had never really been in danger.

“Most of that happened out in the country,” he reminded me. “Things in the city were very different. More
tranquilo
.”

Sure, I said, but Cali was so much smaller back then. Wasn’t the country club sort of on the edge of the city? He thought about that for a while.

“I suppose it was,” he said, and then he paused again. “Well, anyway, inside the club, I’m sure it was always quite safe.”

A few yards away, an iguana clambered up a nearby palm. A scatter of polite applause drifted over from the tennis courts. Gonzales and I finished our lemonade as we watched the golfers make their approach.

The Normandie Exclusivo sits on a steep hill just north of Cali’s downtown, the slope of which is already crowded with elegant and vaguely modernist apartment towers. Or anyway, the Normandie Exclusivo
will
sit on it, once the
construction is completed. On the day that I showed up, the hilltop was a mess of sky-high scaffolding, construction equipment, dirt tracks, and one genuinely stunning model penthouse overlooking the sprawl below.

I saw a flyer for the Normandie Exclusivo the day after visiting the country club while wandering around again, trying to schmooze my way to the top of someone’s apartment tower. It was stapled to a telephone pole in a neighborhood already crowded with new construction.
A Privileged View in Every Room
, it said, with an arrow pointing up the hill.
Model Now Open!

I walked up the hill and into the Normandie Exclusivo’s temporary office, where a steely associate named Maria greeted me with barely concealed skepticism. I can’t blame her. I was wearing a T-shirt and jeans that hadn’t been washed since Bogotá. I couldn’t remember my last shave, and an afternoon of walking had me sweaty and disheveled. She offered me a glass of water. Maria was a pantsuited fifty-something who was more sharp than pretty, with deep facial lines that were actually rather flattering in a town full of creepily Botoxed brows. Right then her features were particularly creased, because she was staring at me dubiously, her hands on her hips. She looked, unfortunately for me, like a woman who did not lightly suffer fools.

But Maria’s attitude brightened considerably when I explained that my retiree parents were considering relocating to Colombia, and that I was certain they would love to see photographs of a potential new condo.

“Mostly, they’ve been looking in Bogotá,” I lied. “But you know how it is there. So dreary, and everyone’s always wearing a coat and tie.”

Maria agreed politely and grabbed some literature from
off her desk. Gesturing at a scale model beneath a glass case, she gave me a brief pitch about all the marvelous amenities the Normandie Exclusivo would include—swimming pools, rooftop terraces, ample parking. Then we walked over to the model penthouse for a room-by-room tour. And that was that. After two sweaty days of supplication, all it took to get access to a Cali penthouse was playing the rich gringo.

For the next half hour, Maria shadowed me around the gorgeous air-conditioned apartment, nodding patiently at my ridiculous observations, which were all the more inane on account of my grade-school Spanish: “These windows have much sun.” “That lamp is very tall.” It was an unquestionably nice place, with vivid white walls, clean angles, plenty of light, and some splashy modern furniture. Kind of like living in an art gallery between exhibits, I thought. When I pictured myself lounging in the living room with my rich and imaginary gringo parents, the grit and noise of downtown Cali felt very far away.

“Our owners are the best people in all of the city,” Maria said. “Business leaders, politicians, even some celebrities.”

“And gringos?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” she assured me, “we have many gringos!”

We walked through some sliding glass doors onto an open-air terrace. It had a three-stool, stainless-steel bar and a wall-mounted wine rack. The view took in the green hills west of town, the largest of which is topped with an open-armed statue of Christ. For a moment, I sensed what the place might have felt like for Thompson, how a wide, elegant veranda like this must have seemed a world away from the shouting students in Bogotá, the coarse crewmen on the Magdalena, and, God knows, the tie-clad Wayuu slugging Scotch and
chirrinchi
back in Guajira. I could definitely see how, on a sunny day up here, with the right company and a
drink in your hand, all the people below might just cease to exist.

Maria and I walked back into the living room, and I turned to face the outside, taking in the whole terrace. “Take a picture of it,” she told me, and I did. Then I tried to envision the golfer, the upward arc of his swing and the long, level trajectory of a ball disappearing into the city.

Looking around at statues in South America, it’s hard not to think that the United States is kind of dropping the ball on statues. In cities like Bogotá and Quito, seemingly every street corner showcases some kind of dramatic granite monument, soaring memorials to middling politicians and battles too obscure to warrant mention on Wikipedia. Neither is this phenomenon limited to the cities. Even your most podunk Andean hamlet has at least two Virgins and a Bolívar. By contrast, I could only think of three public statues back in Missoula, Montana, and two of those were of bears.

No one does complex iconography quite like a Latin American Catholic, and some of the continent’s most beautiful monuments are also masterpieces of esoteric ornamentation. In the center of Quito’s Plaza de la Independencia is a statue honoring the heroes of August 10, 1809, when the city first proclaimed its independence from Spain. Standing atop four pillars is an avenging angel, wielding an ax in one hand and a torch in the other. Halfway down, a perched condor clutches a length of chain. An anchor rests at the statue’s base, partially covered by a drape of cloth, and next to that stands a wounded, roaring lion. The monument is a veritable potpourri of puzzling symbolism. Those bear statues back in Missoula, meanwhile, just represent bears.

I came into Quito on a Sunday morning after a series of three bus rides from Cali. When I walked to the plaza to check out the architecture, I was expecting a quiet afternoon. The Ecuadorian capital is a devoutly Catholic city, and businesses, vendors, and municipal services tend to shut down for the Sabbath. What’s more, Thompson hadn’t exactly prepped me for a lively town. In one
Observer
article, he griped about Quito’s “tomb-like dullness.” In a letter, he
wrote it off with Bogotá as “a pure, dull hell.” Elsewhere, he suggested that all of Ecuador be “dynamited into the sea.” There’s more, but suffice it to say the Ministry of Tourism won’t be citing his assessment anytime soon.

So I was pleasantly surprised when I stumbled into what seemed like a giant, freewheeling street party. Quito’s central plaza, like Bogotá’s, is surrounded by showy cathedrals and grand colonial buildings, and while the streets surrounding it were indeed eerily quiet, the plaza itself was a ragtag carnival of musicians, vendors, dancers, and the occasional shouting evangelist. Families roamed around with ice cream and balloons, and hordes of cyclists whizzed by on a weekend bike route. Jugglers and street performers worked a long line for tours of the presidential palace. On one end of the plaza, a crowd of at least fifty people was dancing and head-bobbing to a white-suited band playing an Ecuadorian folk music called
pasillo
. The songs were catchy and melodic, horse-trot waltzes heavy on guitar and a mandolinlike string instrument called a charango. I joined the crowd and bobbed my head right along, beginning to suspect that Thompson was a hopeless grouch.