Nosotros hablamos la lengua de Fatherhood

Here are the latest notes taken from my journal concerning our monthlong stay in Cali, Colombia:

2:28 p.m. June 26: This morning I learned a Colombian saying. We were in a minibus, bound for central Cali, when the discussion turned to male-female relations both in Colombia and the United States.

After the point was made that many men (in both countries but especially Colombia) have extramarital relations, one of our Colombiana handlers, with a smile, said that women did, too – but secretly instead of openly.

Ah, so telenovelas do represent some semblance of the truth.

Anyway, the discussion – again, primarily in Spanish – turned to whether it was OK to look at the attractions of the opposite sex if you did nothing else. And our handler repeated the following dicho Colombiano:

“Ver y no tocar se llama respetar.” Or, in English, to look and not touch is called respect. And those, certainly, are words to live by.

We ended up going to two museums. First up was the Museo del Oro Calima, a natural history museum focusing on artifacts from the early existence of the Calima tribe.

Our guide, a little guy dressed police/military style, gave us the grand tour, telling jokes and acting out certain rituals – for example, shamans dreaming after having ingested hallucinogens – all in Spanish. We saw gold fishhooks, which were plentiful because gold, to a certain extent, was just another kind of metal to the Calima.

No wonder the Spanish explorers thought the streets of the Nuevo Mundo were paved with the stuff.

My favorite part was when the guide showed the figurines that blended several types of creatures, then explained their genesis by pantomiming a shaman making one of the figures after having suffered a drug-induced nightmare. As a survivor of the early ’70s, I’ve had a few such vision quests and know what the poor guys went through.

But that’s just between us, OK?

We took a break, which allowed some of us to eat some pandebono (their spelling of pan de buono) and gaseosas de Cali called Popular. Then we headed for another museum, called – I still have my ticket here – Museo Arqueologico la Merced, whose origins as a church date back nearly five centuries.

We strolled though the various rooms, full of more artifacts, and our guide, a women this time, recited – in clearly pronounced and perfect, at least to my uneducated ears, Spanish – the significance of everything we see.

But what remains with me these hours later? One, the tattoo on her backside that her jeans couldn’t quite hide and, two, the coca plant growing in the museum’s courtyard that some of us insisted on photographing. Ver y no tocar, remember? Se llama respetar.

Oh, and one other thing remains memorable. Standing in line at an ATM, I watched an unsmiling young Colombiano wearing a baseball cap, waiting behind us. What made him stand out was that he was with the cutest little girl that I had so far seen.

Like many young men, he projected an attitude of toughness. But when I asked him, in Spanish, if the little girl was his daughter, he smiled. “Si,” he replied.

“¿Como se llama?” I asked.

“Angie,” he said.

“Ella es muy linda,” I said, noticing her red and white sun dress and baby Adidas sneakers. “¿Cuantos años tiene?” I asked.

“Tres,” he said.

And then, despite our many differences in terms of age and culture, we stood there in silence, like proud fathers tend to do, reveling in, even marveling at, the beauty of the innocence we’ve brought into the world.

We were one in … well, let’s just call it the brotherhood of padres del mundo.