The metro they will never build

I agree: those of us who live in this city (Bogotá) and adore it because it opened its doors to us and embraced us, or those who were born here and honor it with their diverse and picturesque range of accents and intonations –"do Bogotanos have an accent?" someone once asked me– should treat anyone who talks about the Bogota metro like the madman they are: go along with it for a couple of minutes and then change the subject, that's it.

There are cities that don't have a sea and never will; there are cities that don't have a mighty river and never will; there are cities that don't have a space center for shuttle launches and never will.

The same goes for Bogota's perpetually unborn and failed metro: it will never be built, let's finally accept that and get on with our lives, as we have done throughout these hundred years of solitude.

Would it have been much better to have a real metro here, ideally with multiple lines? Please, that's what almost everyone would have wanted, a dream that, of course, turned into a nightmare over time.

And with metros, I believe, I don't know much about the subject, the more a city needs them and the more it grows, the harder they are to build. Or they won't be built, as in Bogota's tragic case.

Bogota could have had a metro a long time ago, the sooner, the better. It would have been an immense effort, undoubtedly titanic.

But with political will and vision, it could have been achieved, as equivalent cities and even poorer and more complex ones have done. However, pettiness and spiritual poverty of our leaders, their vanity, their incompetence, their uncontrollable passion for improvisation, ad hoc solutions, and bungling prevailed here.

All of them, of course, posing as enlightened and statesmen; all with that gaze into the infinite of a wise person who says, "I do have the magical formula that others don't have, I do know how it should be...".

And always superimposing their theoretical delusions on reality, sacrificing the possible in the name of the perfect, which will never come. The famous "air republics" that Bolivar spoke of (the Liberator, not the writer and librettist): the utopia of failure and backwardness, that's what utopias are.

f, while digging one of the holes for the first line of the Bogota metro, a hole that will remain there forever, we have no doubt that workers found remnants of a railway that could have been either a tram or the northeast railroad.

That is the perfect symbol and metaphor of progress in this country: the archaeology of all the futures we did not become or that were buried by our indifference and stupidity.

A book could be made by Villegas Editores, one of those beautiful large-format books, with photos and very scholarly essays, solely based on the pages of this newspaper throughout the decades announcing the imminent arrival of the metro.

October 3, 1978, for example: "Excavations for the Bogota metro will begin...". Or April 22, 1988: "The Bogota metro will be awarded in May...". It sounds like a horror movie or a Kafkaesque tale, but it is our reality.

And we have to comply with it, that's how we've already gone. Let the politicians continue with their macabre and sadistic fiction.

Let only they delude themselves about the metro they will never build.