II. PIECES FOR A DROP CURTAIN

Concepts about Santander Department and Santandereanos, Jaime Barrera Parra, Manuel Serrano Blanco, Jose Camacho Carrentilde, Ismael Enrique Arciniegas, and Toms Vargas Osorio. The executor of valor. Man more interesting than landscape. From the precision rifle to the civil code. The hypothec virtue. The land of understanding. History made on crosses, females, and daggers. Santandereanos descend from Asturians, Aragoneses, and Cordobans. There were no slaves in Santander. Vocation to death.
Santander, the Colombian Department bordering the oil fields of Catatumbo, the Boyacenses Paramos jumbled together in fog, and the great yellow river, Magdalena, is by national geographic determinism, a churlish and individualist island. San Gil, as the prototype of these qualities, is a Colombian sociological axiom. To begin this “long gossip” about San Gil, her people and places which have been a reason for the conglomerate existence, I have wanted to place a drop curtain which presented before the nations’ face some of the great men in reference to Santander. Let the brilliant penmanship of a fellow citizen describe the usual landscape when an ambient is presented to the public light. The exquisite Sangileno writer Jaime Barrea Parra said once that: “Santander, our homeland, has been throughout history the safe deposit box of the great virtues which made the republic possible, the revolution and the culture. While her men fought for democracy, her women represented the diamond light of the home, the ideal spark of purity and dreams that justify all toils and create throughout the years the traditions of the cradle, and the songs from which a pure race come forth with prowess and heroic deeds”. “Santander, our homeland”, continues the aforementioned writer, “ represents the executor of valor, of hospitality and of insolence. Her virtues are confounded with her defects. Everywhere, sun and blood are above the quotidian living surrounded by expensive dramatism of the inciting adventures of existence. Above the sierra died men with their guitars because of the lone window which presided over the hecatomb”.
“The Santander civil wars were a kind of most exalted piety. Warriors died while women sang and wove the white sheet which closed the red wounds. Santander, our homeland is brunette and ardent as the Sulamita. Sun and wind beat her mountains. Old revolutions can be guessed at each bivouac bonre over which there were always smiles and women’s eyes which illuminated like lanterns the dreaded darkness”, ended saying the notable writer.
Our race is austere because the ground is stern. If the word “race” has in our sociologist’s feeling a rhetoric meaning, not in Santander, because, there has existed a centenary community between war and history. There, man is more interesting than landscape. Santander is everything epic and brutal. The past reminiscence boils in her people’s blood and gushes out, under equal conditions, a defect and a virtue. To mention the expression “Toca”(touch), with the honors given by quotation marks, I mean, as someone said referring to Santander, that there are terms and phrases which dene a people.
As the Antioquentilde “Pues”(because), the Boyacense “Su merced”(your grace) and the Bogotano “Ala”(hello), the first of these expressions is a pet word, a spirit of loquacity link of the mountaineers. The second one, I take the fancy too, is the melancholic and sickening impregnation of the resident’s stiff submissive crest. And the third one, is like the voice of of the ne Sabanero wheedler. The man from the Santander cliffs and dales is like a militia. He confronts the situations without calculations or apologies, especially when the most sublimized concept of honor is concerned. “Toco vivir”(touch to live) is as affirmative as “Toco morir”(touch to die), all under the same stoic and bohemian imperative. Aratoca, Zapatoca are Guane Indian voices that indicate the ancestry of a well used term. Another Santander formidable aesthete, the eloquent orator and penalist Manuel Serrano Blanco, wrote sometime ago about his homeland the following, which I use as a frame for the landscape I allude: “The traveler who goes over Colombia admires her landscape of various tonalities. But in none of her territories has the landscape the ample severity and luminous austerity than the Santandereano country fields. It is not the prolix softness of the Boyacense lands, nor the Valle del Cauca chromatic happiness, nor the crying ashes of the Bogota savanna, nor the Tolima dry plains, nor the slow softness of the Narintilde fields, nor the Quindio perspective smile, nor the sea, the wide sea beaches of the Caribbean or the Pacific. It is the ample and severe horizon of the Santander lands, where in each road a war epic is remembered, a love incident, a gest of courage and gallantry. The wide horizon opens without stain, without noise, without feminine tenderness of the sweet, lovable, to suddenly lay down the zenith line with the black or reddish lofty mountain illuminated by the sunset candles, or crowned by the blue lights of dawn. It is a grandiose and austere landscape, strong and rough where colors are more energetic, the tonalities more intense, the undulating more aggressive”.
Truly, temperament matches the landscape. That is why Santandereano’s temperament appears in the Republic’s annals, as the most proud, individualist and laborious warrior of the country. The peasant of good stock keeps under his pillow the civil code and the precision rifle, with the same security with which face is looked at, because the master does not exist, nor the sneaky Indian who lowers sad eyes to the ground because of “chicha”(a popular fermented beverage variously made from maize, pineapple, etc.). His maximum sins are the excess of valor and frankness. There was in Santander a giant of the Colombian oratory. His contemporaries chaffed him paganishly “God of word”. His name was Jose Camacho Carrentilde. Talking about his fellow citizens, he said “It happens that we, Santandereanos, elusive and mountaineer people, do not court fame, and prefer to philosophize alone to the contemplative rapture of the publicity and wyclifsm, as a Kempis’ admonition. This eulogized, as pledging virtue in eternity, is in this life, costly, proud and haughty. And there you have us Colombia, sirs. Unknown to you who only talk about our shotguns and revolvers to repute us as bandits of the Sierra Morena, ignoring instead the ancestry and gift of our cities, the progress of our industry, the arduous preeminence of our agriculture, the patriotic enterprise of our history and above everything, the artistic, vocational, and spiritual refinement of the race. I named my land ‘understanding’, because there is no parish. Even if she is proscribed by cliffs and surrounded by mountains with her heroic workers and warriors, she does not boast of any learned in rule or genuine artist. Without roads, without fortune, without schools, it seems that my people should have been brutalized in their geographic cloister, and in the abandonment and negligence kept by their Republic for many years. But open providential skylights in the jungle vault enlightened the primitive soil and hitting illuminated temples gilded a fagot of spirits! Oh my Santander, how sad to be unknown to the public of territories which good luck could not equal your epic predestination. And to witness speculators excelled your intellectual sons, who even coin art. Do you think that war and its ambers do not forge spectral and romantic souls who unclasp their flesh as they would a borrowed greatcoat? Do you think that to witness death and to listen to the dying, and to know grandparents by a gravestone named in a bellicose cemetery do not form a spiritual race for heroic continuity? And, don’t you concede that if we have habituated flesh as ephemeral, we snatch it in sensual combustion of instants, ration of flesh in flight - and for the mystic communion of what remains? Certainly, promiscuity of sensual with romantic double meaning is communicated by death, inalienable and violent sign of our history made by crosses, females and poniards!” Ismael Enrique Arciniegas, our excellent bard, lord of dream and romance, once sculptured in the vortex of his prose the following concept of his fellow countrymen “The Santandereanos, descendants of Asturians and Aragoneses, are men of great energies, indefatigable for work, honest, brave, as few, when the clarion sounds. Fortunately, it will not be heard in our mountains”. “Galeano and his companions exterminated the Guanes, the Chanchones and the Macareguas. All, or almost all, fell ruined on the rough sierra banks divided by the Chicamocha, as the last protest of the defeated race, shooting as Guanent, their last arrow. This boldness was left in the air. It seems that the souls of the dead fused with the invaders’ souls, and the boldness was transmitted from generation to generation. There were no slaves. If some rich fuller brought them from Santa Fe or Merida, when they stepped on these lands of Surat, Fonce, Seravita or Pienta, they were loyal servants to the kind landlord, loving him with open heart, and defending him with open arms. The high mountains where the wind flows without obstacles, inculcated to all born in these lands the feeling of liberty. Galan’s anger cry, when they put the rope on his neck, found echo through the years in Pamplona, Mogotes, San Gil, Socorro and Charal. This cry resounded on Llorente’s cheek on July 20, 1810 in Santa Fe Royal Street”. And nally, that other great Santandereano writer, Toms Vargas Osorio, in his work El Paisaje y el Hombre
, (The Landscape and the Man) consigns his concept on the aforementioned theme, the following way: “The death vocation of the Santandereano man has been an insoluble problem for our sociologists. Some have tried to explain it economically, because today’s economy supplies accommodating explanations of all the phenomenons which demand meditation and sorrowful efforts. Others, perhaps, closer to the truth, have tried to explain the problem by politics. But in reality, at the root of this vocation, there is an aesthetic pruritus. Extra life looks for an escape in the hastened completion of the biological laws, death. The excessive, what does not fulfill the measure and the regulation, is not aesthetic. It is precise for life to be harmonic, that extra life dies to filter through the porosity of negative en route to reintegration to dignified deportment. Because, the death vocation in the Santandereano man is only a strong desire of harmony with himself and with the surrounding world”.