Piendamó: The geography of a childhood

Piendamó was one of my holes. It was also one of my roots

Historical-Literary overview

Piendamó, Cauca. The 1970s. Before it became memory, Piendamó was a stage. Its streets, houses,church, school, slaughterhouse, bus station, Tunía River, and small businesses silently witnessed a family learning to survive with very little—and children turning necessity into work, fear into endurance, and poverty into an involuntary school of life.

This is not the Piendamó of a perfect postcard. It is the Piendamó that remains in my memory: the Piendamó of empanadas sold to help at home; of cheese bread; of newspapers; of running after buses; of games invented from almost nothing; of endless walks; of fear, laughter, and Doña Stella struggling to hold her children together when life seemed to demand more than any human being
should have to give.

Many years later, I returned to these places. Some had changed. Others seemed to have been waiting for me. And I understood that a photograph may show a street, a facade, or a bridge, but behind every image there is another invisible geography: the geography of everything we felt, suffered, dreamed, and vowed to overcome there. These photographs are not intended as a literal reconstruction of Piendamó in the 1970s; they are present-day doorways into the memory of that town and into the childhood that remains planted there.

OUR LADY OF THE ROSARY CHURCH

The church was much more than a building standing in the middle of town. In a world where so much was uncertain, there was a doorway there toward the invisible. Through bells, sacred images, prayers, and silence, a spirituality began to take shape—one that I would understand many years later as one of the great inheritances of my childhood. Poverty could narrow the walls of a home. Faith had the mysterious ability to make the world larger.

CAMILO TORRES SCHOOL

Here another battle began: the battle to learn. Classrooms, notebooks, classmates, and rules belonged to a different universe from the one waiting at home. At school, even if only for a few hours, a child could imagine that the future had not yet been completely written. It was also the territory where Doña Stella defended her cubs. Whenever her children were involved, that apparently fragile woman discovered a strength no authority could measure. There were moments when rules fell silent and only a mother defending her children remained.

THE SECOND HOUSE

The houses of our childhood were never merely addresses. They were borrowed shelters, shared rooms, walls that heard arguments, hunger, dreams, illness, prayers, and laughter. One of those homes also became the place of the deep sleep that would remain buried in the boy’s memory for years. A facade may appear insignificant to someone passing by. For the person who lived behind those walls, it can contain an entire universe.

THE BUS STATION

Here survival followed a schedule. The buses arrived, and with them came the possibility of selling. Empanadas. Arepas. Cheese bread. Newspapers. We had to run, offer, insist, calculate, and return home with something. We were children, but necessity does not always ask your age before giving you responsibilities. That station became our small school of economics. There we learned far too early that a handful of coins could mean food.

PIENDAMÓ’S MAIN STREET

This street was one of the great arteries of our childhood. The town moved through it, but so did our dreams and our needs. Here the warriors sold empanadas, cheese bread, newspapers, and whatever else might help us survive. Sometimes it felt as though we were selling even our souls. But there was one thing that was never for sale: our dignity.

WHERE THE WARRIORS LEARNED TO FIGHT FOR EXISTENCE

The streets taught lessons no schoolbook could explain. How to stand up again. How to bargain. How to recognize hunger in someone else’s eyes. How to laugh when there seemed to be no reason to. How to return home after defeat and begin again the following morning. These warriors carried no weapons. They carried bags, trays, newspapers, errands, and dreams. And they learned how to battle through existence.

THE PIENDAMÓ SLAUGHTERHOUSE

Some places remain in memory because of their beauty. Others remain because they once terrified us. The slaughterhouse belongs to the second kind. Here we collected blood to prepare pericos. For a child, the experience was brutal, incomprehensible, and unforgettable. I remember returning home and begging my mother never to send me there again. My childhood declaration was absolute: “Over my dead body.” Today I can smile at the drama of those words. But behind the humor, the fear of the child who spoke them remains real.

THE TUNÍA RIVER BRIDGE

Every town has places where memory mixes events together until they become family legend. This bridge leads to one of them. The swimming hole. The famous sancocho. The fly that decided to join the meal. The unmentionable aunt. And finally, the journey home that became one of the great scares of our childhood story. In childhood, the distance between adventure and tragedy can sometimes be only a moment. Years later, survival allows us to tell the story. And sometimes even laugh about it.

PIENDAMÓ IN THE 1970s

My Piendamó of the 1970s had dust, rain, mountains, busy streets, and lives constructed with very little. I do not wish to romanticize poverty. Poverty hurts. It limits. It often humiliates. It forces children to understand certain truths about the world far too early. But it would be equally unfair to remember those years only through sadness. Because there was also humor. There were neighbors. Animals. Friends. Impossible adventures. Imagination. Faith. And there was a woman named Doña Stella, capable of taking scarcity into her hands and somehow turning it into a home.

THE BOY AND THE HOLE

On these streets, the boy who would one day write this story began to take shape. I do not know exactly when the vow was born. Perhaps while walking one of these streets. Perhaps after feeling hunger. Perhaps after some humiliation. Perhaps it simply grew slowly, as the decisions that eventually change a life often do. But one day that boy understood: “I have to get out of here.” Many years later, he would understand something even more important. Escaping did not mean denying Piendamó. It did not mean being ashamed of where he came from. It did not mean destroying the road behind him. Escaping meant being able to return without allowing the hole to swallow him again.

EPILOGUE

Today I look at these photographs and no longer see only buildings, roads, or bridges. I see voices. Footsteps. Vendors. Brothers and sisters. Doña Stella. And I see a boy running somewhere through Piendamó, never imagining that decades later he would return in search of those streets and turn them into literature.

Time changed many things. But some geographies remain untouched because they do not exist only upon the earth. They exist within us. And perhaps that is one of the deepest truths of The Boy Who Vowed to Escape the Hole: we can leave the place where we suffered without tearing it out of our story.

Because sometimes returning does not mean going backward. It means understanding. It means reconciliation. It means gratitude. And ultimately, it means remembering without falling back in.
— Juan Carlos Mazuera