The White Album (26 page)

In fact the mountains loom behind every image I remember, and perhaps are themselves the connection
.
Some afternoons I would drive out along their talus slopes through the Chico district, out Carrera 7 where the grounds of the great houses were immaculately clipped and the gates bore bras
s plaques
with the names of European embassies and American foundations and Argentinian neurologists
.
I recall stopping in El Chico to make a telephone call one day, from a small shopping center off
Carrera 7; the shopping center adjoined a church where a funeral mass had just taken place
.
The mourners were leaving the church, talking on the street, the women, most of them, in black pantsuits and violet-tinted glasses and pleated silk dresses and Givenchy coats that had not been bought in
Bogotá
.
In El Chico it did not seem so far to Paris or New York, but there remained the mountains, and beyond the mountains that dense world described by Gabriel Garcia Marquez as so recent that many things lacked names
.

And even just a little farther, out where Carrera 7 became the Carretera Central del Norte, the rutted road that plunged through the mountains to Tunja and eventually to Caracas, it was in many ways a perpetual frontier, vertiginous in its extremes
.
Rickety buses hurded dizzyingly down the center of the road, swerving now and then to pick up a laborer, to avoid a pothole or a pack of children
.
Back from the road stretched large
haciendas,
their immense main houses barely visible in the folds of the slopes, their stone walls splashed occasionally with red paint, crude representations of the hammer and sickle and admonitions to vote
comunista
.
One day when I was out there a cloud burst, and because my rented car with 110,000 miles on it had no windshield wipers, I stopped by the side of the road
.
Rain streamed over the
mesa Arizona westwood warriors
and
go tide
decals on the car windows
.
Gullies formed on the road
.
Up in the high gravel quarries men worked on, picking with shovels at the Andes for twelve and a half pesos a load
.

Through another of our cities without a center, as hideous

as Los Angeles, and with as many cars

per head, and past the 20-foot neon sign

for
Coppertone
on a church, past the population

earning
$700
per capita

in jerry skyscraper living-slabs, and on to the White House

of El Presidente Leoni, his small men with
18-

inch repeating pistols, firing
45
bullets a minute,

the two armed guards petrified beside us, while we had

champagne,

and someone bugging the President: “Where are the girls?”

And the enclosed leader, quite a fellow, saying,

“I don’t know where yours are, but I know where to find
mine.”
...

This house, this pioneer democracy, built

on foundations, not of rock, but blood as hard as rock
.

—Robert Lowell, “Caracas”

There is one more image I remember, and it comes in two parts
.
First there was the mine
.
Tunneled into a mountain in Zipaquir
á
, fifty kilometers north of
Bogotá
, is a salt mine
.
This single mine produces, each year, enough salt for all of South America, and has done so since before Europeans knew the continent existed: salt, not gold, was the economic basis of the Chibcha Empire, and
Zipaquir
á
one of its capitals
.
The mine is vast, its air oppressive
.
I happened to be inside the mine because inside the mine there is, carved into the mountain 450 feet below the surface, a cathedral in which 10,000 people can hear mass at the same time
.
Fourteen massive stone pilasters support the vault
.
Recessed fluorescent tubes illuminate the Stations of the Cross, the dense air absorbing and dimming the light unsteadily
.
One could think of Chibcha sacrifices here, of the
conquistador
priests struggling to superimpose the European mass on the screams of the slaughtered children
.

But one would be wrong
.
The building of this enigmatic excavation in the salt mountain was undertaken not by the Chibcha but by the Banco de la Republica, in 1954
.
In 1954 General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla and his colonels were running Colombia, and the country was wrenched by
La Violencia,
the fifteen years of anarchy that followed the assassination of Jorge Gaitan in
Bogotá
in 1948
.
In 1954 people were fleeing the terrorized countryside to squat in shacks in the comparative safety of Bogot
á
.
In 1954 Colombia still had few public works projects, no transportation to speak of:
Bogotá
would not be connected by rail with the Caribbean until 1961
.
As I stood in the dim mountain reading the Banco de la Republica
’s
dedicatory plaque, 1954 seemed to me an extraordinary year to have hit on the notion of building a cathedral of salt, but the Colombians to whom I mentioned it only shrugged
.

* * *

The second part of the image
.
I had come up from the mine and was having lunch on the side of the salt mountain, in the chilly dining room of the Hosteria del Libertador
.
There were heavy draperies that gave off a faint muskiness when touched
.
There were white brocade tablecloths, carefully darned
.
For every stalk of blanched asparagus served, there appeared another battery of silverplated flatware and platters and
vinaigrette
sauceboats, and also another battery of “waiters”: httle boys, twelve or thirteen years old, dressed in tailcoats and white gloves and taught to serve as if this small inn on an Andean precipice were Vienna under the Hapsburgs
.

I sat there for a long time
.
All around us the wind was sweeping the clouds off the Andes and across the savannah
.
Four hundred and fifty feet beneath us was the cathedral built of salt in the year 1954
.
This house, this pioneer democracy, built on foundations, not of rock, but blood as hard as rock
.
One of the little boys in white gloves picked up an empty wine bottle from a table, fitted it precisely into a wine holder, and marched toward the kitchen holding it stiffly before him, glancing covertly at the
mitre d’hotel
for approval
.
It seemed to me later that I had never before seen and would perhaps never again see the residuum of European custom so movingly and pointlessly observed
.

1974

since the afternoon
in 1967 when I first saw Hoover Dam, its image has never been entirely absent from my inner eye
.
I will be talking to someone in Los Angeles, say, or New York, and suddenly the dam will materialize, its pristine concave face gleaming white against the harsh rusts and taupes and mauves of that rock canyon hundreds or thousands of miles from where I am
.
I will be driving down Sunset Boulevard, or about to enter a freeway, and abruptly those power transmission towers will appear before me, canted vertiginously over the tailrace
.
Sometimes I am confronted by the intakes and sometimes by the shadow of the heavy cable that spans the canyon and sometimes by the ominous outlets to unused spillways, black in the lunar clarity of the desert light
.
Quite often I hear the turbines
.
Frequently I wonder what is happening at the dam this instant, at this precise intersection of time and space, how much water is being released to fill downstream orders and what lights are flashing and which generators are in full use and which just spinning free
.

I used to wonder what it was about the dam that made me think of it at times and in places where I once thought of the Mindanao Trench, or of the stars wheeling in their courses, or of the words
As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, amen
.
Dams, after all, are commonplace: we have all seen one
.
This particular dam had existed as an idea in the world
’s
mind for almost forty years before I saw it
.
Hoover Dam, showpiece of the Boulder Canyon project, the several million tons of concrete that made the Southwest plausible, the
fait accompli
that was to convey, in the innocent time of its construction, the notion that mankind’s brightest promise lay in American engineering
.

Of course the dam derives some of its emotional effect from precisely that aspect, that sense of being a monument to a faith since misplaced
.
“They died to make the desert bloom,” reads a plaque dedicated to the 96 men who died building this first of the great high dams, and in context th
e worn phrase touches, suggests
all of that trust in harnessing resources, in the meliorative power of the dynamo, so central to the early Thirties
.
Boulder City, built in 1931 as the construction town for the dam, retains the ambience of a model city, a new town, a toy triangular grid of green lawns and trim bungalows, all fanning out from the Reclamation building
.
The bronze sculptures at the dam itself evoke muscular citizens of a tomorrow that never came, sheaves of wheat clutched heavenward, thunderbolts defied
.
Winged Victories guard the flagpole
.
The flag whips in the canyon wind
.
An empty Pepsi-Cola can clatters across the terrazzo
.
The place is perfec
tly
frozen in time
.

But history does not explain it all, does not entirely suggest what makes that dam so affecting
.
Nor, even, does energy, the massive involvement with power and pressure and the transparent sexual overtones to that involvement
.
Once when I revisited the dam I walked through it with a man from the Bureau of Reclamation
.
For a while we trailed behind a guided tour, and then we went on, went into parts of the dam where visitors do not generally go
.
Once in a while he would explain something, usually in that recondite language having to do with “peaking power,” with “outages” and “dewatering,” but on the whole we spent the afternoon in a world so alien, so complete and so beautiful unto itself that it was scarcely necessary to speak at all
.
We saw almost no one
.
Cranes moved above us as if under their own volition
.
Generators roared
.
Transformers hummed
.
The gratings on which we stood vibrated
.
We watched a hundred-ton steel shaft plunging down to that place where the water was
.
And finally we got down to that place where the water was, where the water sucked out of Lake Mead roared through thirty-foot penstocks and then into thirteen-foot penstocks and finally into the turbines themselves
.
“Touch it,” the Reclamation said, and I did, and for a long time I just stood there with my hands on the turbine
.
It was a peculiar moment, but so explicit as to suggest nothing beyond itself
.

There was something beyond all that, something beyond energy, beyond history, something I could not fix in my mind
.
When I came up from the dam that day the wind was blowing harder, through the canyon and all across the Mojave
.
Later, toward Henderson and Las Vegas, there would be dust blowing, blowing past the Country-Western Casino
fri
sat nites
and blowing past the Shrine of Our Lady of Safe Journey
stop
pray,
but out at the dam there was no dust, only the rock and the dam and a Uttle greasewood and a few garbage cans, their tops chained, banging against a fence
.
I walked across the marble star map that traces a sidereal revolution of the equinox and fixes forever, the Reclamation man had told me, for all time and for all people who can read the stars, the date the dam was dedicated
.
The star map was, he had said, for when we were all gone and the dam was left
.
I had not thought much of it when he said it, but I thought of it then, with the wind whining and the sun dropping behind a mesa with the finality of a sunset in space
.
Of course that was the image I had seen always, seen it without quite realizing what I saw, a dynamo finally free of man, splendid at last in its absolute isolation, transmitting power and releasing water to a
world where no one is
.