January 30
Hotel Niza, Pasto

Dear Al,
I took a bus to Cali because the autoferro was booked solid for days. Several times the cops shook down the bus and everybody on it. I had a gun in my luggage stashed under the medicines but they only searched my person at these stops. Obviously anyone carrying guns would bypass the
stops or pack his guns where these sloppy laws wouldn’t search. All they accomplish with the present system is to annoy the citizens. I never met anyone in Colombia who has a good word for the Policia Nacional.
The Policia Nacional is the Palace Guard of the Conservative Party (the army contains a good percentage of Liberals and is not fully trusted). This (the P.N.) is the most unanimously hideous body of young men I ever laid eyes on, my dear. They look like the end result of atomic radiation. There are thousands of these strange loutish young men in Colombia and I only saw one I would consider eligible and he looked ill at ease in his office.
If there is anything to say for the Conservatives I didn’t hear it. They are an unpopular minority of ugly looking shits.
The road led over mountain passes down into the curious middle region of Tolima on the edge of the war zone. Trees and plains and rivers and more and more Policia Nacional. The population contains some of the best looking and the ugliest people I ever saw. Most of them seemed to have nothing better to do than stare at the bus and the passengers and especially at the gringo. They would stare at me until I smiled or waved, then smile back the predatory toothless smile that greets the American all through South America.
‘Hello Mister, One cigarette?
In a hot dusty coffee stop town I saw a boy with delicate copper features, beautiful soft mouth and teeth far apart in bright red gums. Fine black hair fell in front of his face. His whole person exuded a sweet masculine innocence.
At one custom stop I met a nacional law who had fought in Korea. He pulled open his shirt to show me the scars on his unappetizing person.
‘I like you guys,’ he said.
I never feel flattered by this promiscuous liking for Americans. It is insulting to individual dignity, and no good ever comes from these America lovers.
In the late afternoon I bought a bottle of brandy and got drunk with the bus driver. Stopped over in Armenia and went on to Cali next day with the autoferro.
Vegetation semitropical with bamboo and bananas and papayas, Cali is a relatively pleasant town with a nice climate. You do not feel tension here. Cali has a high rate of straight no political crime. Even safe crackers. (Big operators in the crime are rare in South America). ‘They hate the sight of a foreigner down here. You know why? It’s all this Point four and good labor crap and financial aid. If you give these people anything they think “oh so he needs me “. And the more you give the bastards the nastier they get.’
I heard this line from old timers all over S.A. It does not occur to them that something more basic is involved here than the activities of Point four. Like the U.S. Peeler fans say, ‘The trouble is Unions.’ They would still say it spitting blood from radiation sickness. Or in process of turning into crustaceans.
On to Popayan by autoferro. This is a quiet university town. Some one told me the place was full of intellectuals but I did not see any. A curious, negativistic hostility pervades the place. Walking in the main square a man bumped into me with no apology, his face blank, catatonic.
I was drinking coffee in a cafe where a young man with an archaic Jewish-Assyrian face approached me and went into a long spiel about how much he liked foreigners and how he wanted to buy me a drink or at least pay for my coffee. As he talked it became obvious that he did not like foreigners
and had no intention of buying me a drink. I paid for my coffee and left.
In another cafe some gambling game like bingo was in progress. A man came in emitting curious yelps of imbecile hostility. Nobody looked up from their bingo.
In front of the post office were Conservative posters. One of them read: ‘Farmers the army is fighting for your welfare. Crime degrades a man and he can’t live with himself. Work elevates him towards God. Cooperate with the police and the military. They only need your information.’ (Italics mine).
It’s your duty to turn in the guerillas and work and know your place and listen to the priest. What an old con! Like trying to sell the Brooklyn Bridge. Not many people are buying it. The majority of Colombians are Liberals.
The Policia Nacional slouch on every corner, awkward and self-conscious, waiting to shoot somebody or do anything but stand there under hostile eyes. They have a huge gray wagon that rides around and around the town with no prisoners in it.
I walked out along a dusty road. Rolling country with green grass, cattle and sheep and small farms. A horribly diseased cow was standing in the road covered with dust. A roadside shrine with a glass front. The ghastly pinks and blues and yellows of religious art.
Saw a movie short about a priest in Bogota, runs a brick factory and makes homes for the workers. The short shows the priest fondling the bricks and patting the workers on the back and generally putting down the old Catholic con. A thin man with distraught neurotic eyes. Finally he gave a speech to the effect: Wherever you find social progress or good works or anything good there you will find the church.
His speech had nothing to do with what he was really saying. There was no mistaking the neurotic hostility in his eyes, the fear and hate of life. He sat there in his black uniform nakedly revealed as the advocate of death. A business man without the motivation of avarice, cancerous activity sterile and blighting. Fanaticism without fire or energy exuding a musty odor of spiritual decay. He looked sick and dirty - though I guess he was clean enough actually - with a suggestion of yellow teeth, unwashed underwear and psychosomatic liver trouble. I wonder what his sex life could be.
Another short showed a get together of the Conservative party. They all looked congealed, a frozen crust on the country. The audience sat there in complete silence. Not a murmur of approval or dissent. Nothing. Naked propaganda falling flat in dead silence.
Next day took a bus for Pasto. Driving in the place hit me in the stomach with a physical impact of depression and horror. High mountains all around. High thin air. The inhabitants peering out of sod roofed huts, their eyes red with smoke. The hotel was Swiss run and excellent. I walked around the town. Ugly crummy looking populace. The higher you got the uglier the citizens. This is a leprosy area. (Leprosy in Colombia is more prevalent in high mountains, T.B. on the coast). It seemed like every second person had a hairlip or one leg shorter than the other or a blind festering eye.
I went into a cantina and drank aguardiente and played the mountain music on the jukebox. There is something archaic in this music strangely familiar, very old and very sad. Decidedly not Spanish in origin, nor is it oriental. Shepherd music played on a bamboo instrument like a panpipe, pre-classic, Etruscan perhaps. I have heard similar music in the mountains of Albania where pre-Greek, Ilyrian racial strains linger. A phylogenetic nostalgia conveyed by this music - Atlantean?
I saw working behind the bar what looked at first like an attractive boy of 14 or so (the place was dimly lit owing to a partial power failure). Going over by the bar for a closer look, I saw his face was old, his body swollen with pith and water like a rotten melon.
An Indian was sitting at the next table fumbling in his pockets, his fingers numb with alcohol. It took him several minutes to pull out some crumpled bills - what my grandmother, a violent prohibitionist, used to describe as ‘dirty money’ - he caught my eye and smiled a twisted broken smile. ‘What else can I do?’
In one corner a young Indian was pawing a whore, an ugly woman with a bestial ill natured face and the dirty light pink dress of the calling. Finally she disengaged herself and walked out. The young Indian looked after her in silence without anger. She was gone and that was that. He walked over to the drunk and helped him up and together they staggered out with the sad sweet resignation of the mountain Indian.
I had an introduction from Schindler to a German who runs a wine factory in Pasto. I found him in a room full of books warmed by two electric heaters. The first heat I had seen in Colombia. He had a thin ravaged face, sharp nose, downcurving mouth, a junkie mouth. He was very sick. Heart bad, kidneys bad, high blood pressure.
‘And I used to be tough as nails,’ he said plaintively, ‘What I want to do is go to the Mayo Clinic. A doctor here gave me an injection of iodine which upset my whole metabolism. If I eat anything with salt my feet swell up like that.
Yes he knew the Putumayo well. I asked about Yage.
‘Yes, I sent some to Berlin. They made tests and reported the effect is identical to the effect of hashish . . . there is a bug in the Putumayo, I forget what they call it, like a big grasshopper, such a powerful aphrodisiac, if it flies on you and you can’t get a woman right away you will die. I have seen them running around jacking off from contact with this animal . . I have one in alcohol around some place . . . no, come to think it was lost when I moved here after the war . . . another thing I have been trying to get information on it. . . a vine you chew and all your teeth fall out.’
‘Just the thing for practical jokes on your friends,’ I said. The maid brought in tea and pumpernickel and sweet butter on a tray.
‘I hate this place but what is a fellow to do? I have my business here. My wife. I’m stuck.’
Will leave here in next few days for Macoa and the Putumayo. Won’t write from there since mail service beyond Pasto is extremely unreliable depending on volunteer carrier-bus and truck drivers mostly. More letters are lost than delivered. These people do not have even the concept of responsibility.

As Ever,
Willy Lee

February 28, 1953
Hotel Niza, Pasto

Dear Allen:
On my way back to Bogota with nothing accomplished. I have been conned by medicine men (the most inveterate drunk, liar and loafer in the village is invariably the medicine man), incarcerated by the law, rolled by a local hustler (I thought I was getting that innocent back woods ass, but the kid had been to bed with six American oil men, a Swedish Botanist, a Dutch Ethnographer, a Capuchin father known locally as The Mother Superior, a Bolivian Trotskyite on the lam, and jointly fucked by the Cocoa Commission and Point Four). Finally I was prostrated by malaria. I will relate events more or less chronologically.
I took a bus to Macoa which is the capital of the Putumayo and end of the road. From there on you go by mule or canoe. For some reason these end of road towns are always God awful. Anyone expecting to outfit himself there will find they have nothing he needs in the stores. Not even citronella -and no one in these end of the road towns knows anything about the jungle.
I arrived in Macoa late at night and consumed a ghastly Colombian soft drink under the dubious eyes of a national cop who could not make up his mind whether to question me or not. Finally he got up and left and I went to bed. The night was cool, about like Puyo, another awful end of the road town.
When I woke up next morning I began to get bum kicks still in bed. I looked out the window. Cobble stone, muddy streets, one story buildings mostly shops. Nothing out of the ordinary but in all my experience as a traveler - and I have seen some God awful places - no place ever brought me down like Macoa. And I don’t know exactly why. I went on to Puerto Limon which is about 30 miles from Macoa. This town can be reached by truck. Here I located an intelligent Indian and ten minutes later I had a Yage vine. But the Indian would not prepare it since this is the monopoly of the Brujo (medicine man).
This old drunken fraud was crooning over a man evidently down with malaria. (Maybe he was chasing the evil spirit out of his patient and into the gringo. Anyway I came down with malaria two weeks to the day later.) The Brujo told me he had to be half lushed up to work his witchcraft and cure people. The high cost of liquor was working a hardship on the sick, he was only hitting two cylinders on a short count of lush. I bought him a pint of aguardiente and he agreed to prepare the Yage for another quart. He did in fact prepare a pint of cold water infusion after misappropriating half the vine so that I did not notice any effect.
That night I had a vivid dream in color of the green jungle and a red sunset I had seen during the afternoon. A composite city familiar to me but I could not quite place it. Part New York, part Mexico City and part Lima which I had not seen at this time. I was standing on a corner by a wide street with cars going by and a vast open park down the street in the distance. I can not say whether these dreams had any connection with Yage. Incidentally you are supposed to see a city when you take Yage.
I spent a day in the jungle with an Indian guide to dig the jungle and collect some Yoka, a vine the Indians use to prevent hunger and fatigue during long trips in the jungle. In fact, some of them use it because they are too lazy to eat.
The Upper Amazon jungle has fewer disagreeable features than the Mid-West stateside woods in the summer. Sand flies and jungle mosquitoes are the only outstanding pests and you can keep them off with insect repellent. I didn’t have any at this time. I never got any ticks or chiggers in the Putumayo. The trees are tremendous, some of them 200 feet tall. Walking under these trees I felt a special silence, a vibrating soundless hum. We waded through clear streams of water (who started this story you can’t drink jungle water? Why not?) After a week in Puerto Limon I went to Puerto Umbria by truck and down to Puerto Assis by canoe. These canoes are about 30 feet long with an outboard motor. This is standard method of travel on the Putumayo. The motors are out of commission about half the time. This is because people take them apart and leave out the pieces they consider non-essential. Also they economize on grease so the motors burn out.
I arrived in Puerto Assis at 10 p.m. and as soon as I stepped out of the canoe a federal cop wanted to see my papers. There is more check on papers in the quiet zones like Putumayo than in Villvicencio which is edge of the war zone. In the Putumayo you won’t be five minutes whistle stop before they check your papers. They expect trouble to come from outside in the form of a foreigner - gods knows why.
Next day the governor, who looked like a degenerate strain of monkey, found an error in my tourist card. The consul in Panama had put down 52 instead of 53 in the date. I tried to explain this was an error, clear enough in view of the dates on my plane tickets, passport, receipts, but the man was bone stupid. I don’t think he understands yet. So the cop gave my luggage a shake missing the gun but decided to impound the medicine gun and all. The sanitary inspector put in his two cents suggesting they go through the medicines.
‘For God’s sake,’ I thought, ‘Go inspect an outhouse.’
They informed me I was under town arrest pending a decision from Macoa. So I was stuck in Puerto Assis with nothing to do but sit around all day and get drunk every night. I had planned to take a canoe trip up the Rio Quaymes to contact the Kofan Indians who are known Yage artists, but the governor would not let me leave Puerto Assis.
Puerto Assis is a typical Putumayo River town. A mud street along the river, a few shops, one cantina, a mission where Capuchin fathers lead the life of Riley, a hotel called the Putumayo where I was housed.
The hotel was run by a whorish looking landlady. Her husband was a man of about 40, powerful and vigorous, but there was a beat look in his eyes. They had seven daughters and you could tell by looking at him that he would never have a son. At least not by that woman. This giggling brood of daughters kept coming into my room (there was no door, only a thin curtain) to watch me dress and shave and brush my teeth. It was a bum kick. And I was the victim of idiotic pilfering - a catheter tube from my medical kit, a jock strap, vitamin B tablets.
There was a boy in town who had once acted as a guide to an American naturalist. This boy was the local Mister Specialist. You find one of these pests all over South America. They can say, ‘Hello Joe’ or ‘O.K.’ or ‘Fucky fucky.’ Many of them refuse to speak Spanish thus limiting conversation to sign language.
I was sitting on a worn out inverted canoe that serves as a bench in the main drag of Puerto Assis. The boy came and sat with me and began talking about the Mister who collected animals, ‘He collected spiders, and scorpions and snakes.’ I was half asleep lulled by this litany when I heard, ‘And he was going to take me back to the states with him,’ and woke up. Oh God, I thought, that old line. The boy smiled at me showing gaps in his front teeth. He moved a little closer on the bench. I could feel my stomach tighten.
‘I have a good canoe,’ he said, ‘why don’t you let me take you up the Guayrnes? I know all the Indians up there.’
He looked like the most inefficient guide in the Upper Amazon but I said, ‘Yes.’
That night I saw the boy in front of the cantina. He put his arms around my shoulders and said, ‘Come in and have a drink, Mister,’ letting his hand slip down my back and off my ass.
We went in and got drunk under the weary wise eyes of the bartender and took a walk out along the jungle trail. We sat down in the moonlight by the side of the trail and he let his elbow fall into my crotch and said, ‘Mister,’ next thing I heard was, ‘How much you gonna give me?’
He wanted $30 evidently figuring he was a rare commodity in the Upper Amazon. I beat him down to $10 bargaining under increasingly disadvantageous conditions. Somehow he managed to roll me for $20 and my underwear shorts (when he told me to take my underwear all the way off I thought, a passionate type, my dear, but it was only a maneuver to steal my skivies).
After five days in Puerto Assis I was well on the way to establish myself as a citizen in the capacity of village wastrel. Meanwhile sepulchral telegrams issued periodically from Macoa. ‘The case of the foreigner from Ohio will be resolved.’ And finally, ‘Let the foreigner from Ohio be returned to Macoa.’
So I went back up the river with the cop (I was technically under arrest). In Puerto Umbria I came down with chills and fever. Arriving in Macoa on a Sunday, the Commandante was not there so the second in command had me locked up in a wood cubicle without even a bucket to piss in. They put all my gear unsearched in with me. A typical South American touch. I could have had a machine gun concealed in my luggage. I took some aralen and lay down shivering under the blanket. The man in the next cell was confined for lack of some document. I never did understand the details of his case. Next morning the Commandante showed up and I was summoned to his office. He shook hands pleasantly, looked at my papers, and listened to my explanation.
‘Clearly an error,’ he said, ‘This man is free.’ What a pleasure it is to encounter an intelligent man in such circumstances.
I went back to the hotel and went to bed and called a doctor. He took my temperature and said, ‘Carramba!’ and gave me an injection of quinine and liver extract to offsetsecondary anemia. I continued the aralen. I had some codeine tablets to control malaria headache so I lay there sleeping most of the time for three days.
I will go to Bogota, have my tourist card reassembled and return here. Travel in Colombia is difficult even with the soundest credentials. I have never seen such ubiquitous and annoying police. You are supposed to register with the police wherever you go. This is unpardonable stupidity. If I was an active Liberal what could I do in Puerto Assis aside from taking the place over at gun point?

As Ever,
William

March 3
Hotel Nueva Regis, Bogota

Dear Al:
Bogota horrible as ever. I had my papers corrected with the aid of U.S. Embassy. Figure to sue the truss off PAA for fucking up the tourist card. I have attached myself to an expedition - in a somewhat vague capacity to be sure - consisting of Doc Schindler, two Colombian Botanists, two English Broom Rot specialists from the Cocoa Commission, and will return to the Putumayo in convoy. Will write full account of trip when I get back to this town for the third time.

As Ever,
Bill