Yes, and how... After 2 pm, I was meeting a friend at the Juan Valdez's Cafe to talk about my project. At one point I could see darks clouds crawling over the mountain of Monserrate, and I thought "here we go..." - fifteen minutes later, a curtain of water was falling heavily over the Old City Centre of La Candelaria!
It rained and rained...and rained! I recalled the short story of the Colombian writer, Garcia Marquez, Los funerales de Mamá Grande, based in the mythical town of Macondo. I mentioned to my friend that I thought this is supposed to be the dry season in Bogotá and she told me that it had always been but that recently the climate change is also affecting this area of the world as everywhere else.I ran inside a church, San Agustin Church,a Baroque style building near Calle 7. The interior was quiet and other people had walked in to also avoid the rain that was pouring outside. I walked towards the altar and saw the magnificent wooden carved front covered with gold paint. I noticed the three armchairs standing at the bottom and their overwhelming presence. There was one there, yet I could feel the power emanating from that absence.
I continued walking around looking at the statues which were lined up on the walls and suddenly my eyes stopped on a beautiful figure holding a lamp that represented an angel. Oddly, I felt its eyes were directing their gaze towards me like acknowledging my presence.
I stayed there for a few minutes silently...
This angel reminded me of a Paul Klee painting named "Angelus Novus" shows an angel looking at he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating:
His eyes are staring, his mouth is slightly open, his wings spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps pilling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.
The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grow skyward. This storm is what we call progress."
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