by Andrés Felipe Solano
SoHo proposed to the essayist Andrés Felipe Solano to leave
aside all his schedule, to desert what he was composing and to go a long way
from Bogota, the city where he lives and where he has every one of the solaces
to take up the journalistic exercise of living for a half year with the lowest
pay permitted by law.
He acknowledged, left for Medellin without family or
companions, leased a room and worked in a dress organization as one more
worker. Account that mirrors the truth of thousands of Colombians who must
subsist with 484,500 pesos for every month.
Part I
1
As I leave on this adventure, my pledges are those of a
priest: neediness and modesty. I have chosen to live a half year in Medellín
with the lowest pay permitted by law and I don't comprehend what my home will
be, in the event that I will have companions, in the event that I will one day
go to bed with a woman.My just surenesses are a phone number and a position as
a winemaker, which I have acquired through a colleague in a kids' apparel
organization called Tutto Colore. I rehash the name out loud and with a false
Italian inflection: Tu-tto Co-lo-re, an incongruity on the off chance that I
think about the monochromatic life that anticipates me as an assembly line
laborer. Notwithstanding my garments, in the bag I convey a few containers of
toothpaste and cleanser, three antiperspirants and two toothbrushes. It's the
main trap I will make. Toiletries are the most costly of the family wicker
container: I have spent around seventy thousand pesos in them, very nearly
one-6th of what I am will gain every month. In the wallet I have a pocket
timetable to cross out the days in which I will live as a fair impostor: it
will be a half year of being what I am not and realizing what I can move toward
becoming.
I've been in Medellin for a day. Sitting in a bar in the focal
point of the city, I look through the classifieds of the every day El
Colombiano to discover a space to rest. I have orbited a couple of rooms in
places that I perceive for books and aides that I read before coming here. The
spring climate declared by the leaflets is a lie: a thermometer on the divider
marks 32 degrees, however I'm happy I didn't need to wear a coat. It might
sound gullible, yet I picked Medellin since I trust that passing needs in a
friendlier atmosphere will be less muddled. I have for the longest time been
itching to live in Buenos Aires and maybe now my fantasy is at long last
satisfied: there are a few benefits for single men situated in the area named
after the capital of Argentina. I pick another combine in Aranjuez and Manrique,
working neighborhoods established in the principal half of the most recent
century, that phase of quality of the material industry.It resembles tossing
dice on the daily paper.
I don't realize what will happen to my decision. In any
case, the cash orders and my standard is basic: I will procure 484,500 pesos,
including the vehicle appropriation, so as indicated by my records I can not
spend more than 150,000 every month on the rent. Whatever remains of my
compensation will be distributed for transports and sustenance. Will I have
enough cash? Around 120,000 pesos to give me tastes on the ends of the week?
Some frozen yogurt, brews, a motion picture, a disco, life. The advantage of
being a childless lone ranger who gains the lowest pay permitted by law and has
no commitment to send cash to his mom.
There is no real way to pick a shabby room in Medellín. I
was near moving to a room of seven square meters and shelled dividers in the
Manrique Central neighborhood. It had a half-completed kitchenette and a lavatory
without a window ornament. The old inhabitant had taken the globules, however
consequently left an explicit magazine and a smoked pot. At the front of the
room, in an inward yard, was a bond clothing where the retired people, single
men, would wash their filthy garments and hang them on a wound wire. On the
yard there was a shade of a really old man, in light of the vines that secured
him. The tree was the main thing I didn't discover undermining. The man who
demonstrated to me the room, a thin person who got me in flip-flops and
shirtless, revealed to me that the general population phone in the foyer was
not valuable since he was harmed on the grounds that he needed to get the coins
out: "It's that individuals don't regard. leave the garments hanging amid
the night. All of a sudden can not discover it a few days ago, "he
demanded.
I was not excited to need to thump way to entryway
requesting my underpants. His truthfulness was sufficient for me to choose to
utilize the telephone number I had recorded on paper. I had been told by a
columnist I had informed him concerning this move. I called and that is the way
a lady who worked in the chairman's office of Envigado showed up in my life. In
under two hours she got me a room in the place of her closest companion, in the
Santa Ines neighborhood, toward the upper east of the city. Until 2000,
cooperative three, where I would stay, had concentrated the lion's share of
Medellín groups in their bloodiest stage, among them La Terraza, which got the
opportunity to utilize around three thousand hired gunmen. I don't know why,
yet something disclosed to me that there, in that mainstream neighborhood that
was a front line, I would discover what I was searching for. Without
reconsidering, the following day I moved to that place.
2
I have begun living with three outsiders in a house where
the rooms have no entryway. A shroud of fabric isolates my room from the lounge
area and a kitchen that has stunned me: it is made of metal, glass and wood and
appears to have been tore out of a six-level loft to insert it in a place that,
as per an administration receipt which I saw on the icebox, is from level two.
I asked the amount it had cost and one of the still obscure, a lady of one
meter fifty and cajole, revealed to me two million pesos.The rooms of the house
don't have entryways, however the Carrasquilla, my hosts, claim a standout
amongst the most costly kitchens of this area that bears the name of a holy
person.
You need to see the names, some of the time the mystery is
in them. Who immersed the area realized that the holy person had been a saint?
They say that Ines was striven for dismissing a honorable suitor and condemned
to live in a house of ill-repute, where she stayed virgin on account of a few
marvels. As per the Acts of her suffering, in spite of the fact that she was
uncovered exposed, her hair developed with the goal that they secured her body.
The main man who endeavored to defuse her was visually impaired. Be that as it
may, Santa Ines cured him through his supplications. She was then condemned to
death and guillotined.
The primary night I struck a guide of Medellin on one of the
dividers of my room. Before I had checked there how a TV handle and checked the
hardness of my bed. The two things would have been complete in my new life.
Basic spots like a TV and a bed infer further realities than one just learns
through the progression of time and experience. I would affirm it days after
the fact when I felt what it intended to work ten hours per day in a dress production
line. Who knows whether, when I come back to that house, my lone wish will be
to diffuse myself on the sleeping pad to watch a network show about nation
houses in Wales.
Wear Guillermo Carrasquilla, the proprietor of the house,
had made the wooden wardrobe where I hung up the four shirts and three pants I
had brought from Bogota. That first night I set up my two sets of shoes and
flip-flounders in a corner and sat for a couple of minutes on the bed to see
the correct spot on the guide where my new house was. I had called attention to
out with a star while Dona Lucero Carrasquilla, that cajole lady who is Don
Guillermo's significant other, inquired as to whether I had any exceptional
culinary taste. "Beans, I like beans," I answered grinning. I didn't
anticipate that anybody will stress such a great amount over my nourishment.
For some odd reason, my room has turned into an awful sort
of geology. The guide on the divider demonstrates the about 250 authority urban
areas that the city has. By their names I can state that I like Moscow No 2, La
Frontera, La Avanzada, Caribe, La Pilarica, La Mansion, Ferrini, Castropol and
El Corazón. As indicated by the cartographers, the city closes around twenty
pieces east of where I am. Past there is a huge green surface, the pinnacle of
the mountain on which Santa Inés was worked amid the 1970s, similarly as a code
of development declared social separation in the city. In this way, El Poblado,
the area where the well off individuals of Medellin settled, would be a
low-thickness neighborhood, with parcels for lodging of 1,200 square meters;
while here, in the nororiente, the houses would have just 90 meters. I went up
to the porch of this house once had the dividers of uncovered block and the
bond floor - the one in front still has them - to check if the green of the
guide is in locate, however from that point is not seen. Or, then again is far
away. Before you can see a line of ranchos made of wood and zinc, similar to
the fifteen that this year were covered by a mudslide on account of the winter.
Truth be told they could have been thirty thousand devastated homes, which is
the quantity of houses situated in zones of high danger of avalanche in
Medellín and, obviously, don't show up on my guide.
Coming back from the porch, frustrated by the disparities
amongst cartographers and reality, I proceeded onward to the math lesson. I
make figurings on my telephone, a prepaid wireless that I brought with the goal
that my family can discover me. I'm lying on my new bed, where my feet remain
around five centimeters. For the piece I consented to pay 250,000 pesos, around
100 more than initially planned. In any case, this cost incorporates three
dinners every day and the washing and pressing of garments. It truly is a deal.
I should take four transports a day to go and come back from work, at 1,100
pesos every, which implies that I will burn through 88,000 pesos on
transportation. I would need to live nearer to the processing plant to take
just a single transport, yet it is past the point of no return for this sort of
consideration. The rebates of my compensation for wellbeing will be 8,674 pesos
and per benefits 8,414. God, the numbers give up me. I've generally favored
letters. I start to press the minor keys on my telephone with shaking. In the
event that I expel all that from the 484,500 that I am qualified for work right
around fifty hours per week, I have 129,412 pesos left finished. My underlying
calculati
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