Isthmiana/Parita

by Theodore Winthrop

Parita

The ride thither was dullish. There must be prose among the poetry of travel. We have high authority for thinking that there is happiness even d’aimer une bête after the tension of an exciting passion. The quiet and matter-of-fact among women are charming after the deeply intellectual and inquisitive. Our road was up and down over a dry, uninteresting, partially wooded country. We crossed one or two coffee-colored rivers flowing between alluvial canal banks. Flocks of brilliant macaws flew screaming along. Occasionally a deer dashed across our path. Parita was rustier than any town thus far. Nothing can be more distinct than the contrast between these places and those of Yankee land. Go even into some most retired and insignificant country village of New England: it will have its broad avenue, beautifully overshadowed by drooping elms, with which every respectable and well-kept old house is shrouded; its little knot of lively shops, where farmers have come to sell butter and buy hoes, the village belles to match half a yard of ribbon, and flirt with the store keeper’s “gentlemanly attachés,” and the lawyer, a legislator in intention, to propitiate the electors; every one has a motive; every one, therefore, lives calculat ergo est, as Descartes would have said. On a high, breezy hill the church and school-house dominate the town, whose nucleus and type they are. Below, on a level, is a tall obelisk of brick, consecrate to industry; around its base, less incongruously than about the Washington Monument, are clustered the fanes and shrines where a devoted band of priests and priestesses are perpetually offering their willing oblations to this goddess, protector and preserver of the land. A perpetual hum is heard, not less voiceful to the appreciative than the chants and clanging cymbals of the Parthenon. Occasionally, a rush and a roar and a rattle and a scream and a hurrying locomotive tell that a scene at once so busy and so beautiful is not isolated from metropolitan influence. Everything is new, neat, and orderly, — too much so, you will say,— but not in contrast with the Spanish town.

There, though the land is of no value, the main avenue of the village is a mean, narrow, crooked lane, destitute of picturesqueness, because it meanders not between green hedges or noble trees, but is suggested rather than marked by rusty, decayed hut-houses guiltless of repair or refreshment. The street is dusty, dry, dull. Not a soul ventures out except the ill-omened presence of a rusty, black-robed priest, rejoiced to be rid of his thankless soliloquy in the church, itself also a fitting type of the place it has collected around it. A few sad donkeys are eating up the cocoa-nut-rinds at the foot of the cocoanut-tree in the centre of the square, the only verdant thing that the ardent sun has spared. Travellers arrive, not hurriedly arriving, or to depart, but as if an hour or a day more or less in a lifetime was not worth the effort of a thought. A droning sound is heard from the house where was the fandango last night; one of the musicians, compelled by the force of inertia, is drumming still upon his sheep-skin stretched over the top of a hollow log. But a noise more animating strikes the ear; two old women are shrilly slanging each other as only hag crones can abuse. The stranger is excited. Will they clapperclaw? He approaches, and finds that this stormy warfare, is of words alone; the two old ladies sit tilted back against the wall, their countenances are unmoved, the Billingsgate flows spontaneously from their calm lips.

Whenever I desire stagnation, total, absolute, and perpetual, I shall seek it in some village of New Granada!