Updated Jan. 6, 2024 at 5:10 p.m.
-OpEd-
BOGOTÁ — On a local street which I know too well, the façade of one building touches its neighbor’s back wall form a sharp angle. The result is a corner that makes a perfect little urinal for drunkards at night.
Like dogs marking their territory and no doubt after first taking in the city’s riot of odors, they will bathe, or shower, that corner with successive, serial coats of pee. My friend Carlos Gaviria used to tell me the joke of a neighbor peering out of the window to shout at some culprit, “Hey, you can’t do that there!” only to hear back, “I’m managing just fine.”
Every day, anyone stepping out of the building for their morning coffee must contemplate the half-dried ‘splash’ graffiti which the piss artists have left us. Just on these occasions — so, most early mornings — I thank the gods of Olympus for depriving me of my sense of smell.
But that’s not the problem. The problem is when the residents of both buildings get into disputes about which block is in charge of cleaning that corner. The thing is, sometimes the loiterers do more than pee.
Thinking of the Roman Empire
After one meeting, residents came to the unanimous agreement that it was in fact the city that should clean up the pee and other, less-liquid human emissions. A letter was written to the mayor, asking him to send a cleaner every dawn (and especially early on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays) with a hose, to restore this hapless public urinal — and informal vomitorium, clearly for vomit here, not spectators — into the clean little corner it should be.
Caesar ordered all Romans to sweep and clean outside their homes, starting Monday.
I say vomitorium thinking of the Roman empire. We usually only think of the Roman emperors’ conquests or of Julius Caesar and his famous Commentaries on the Gallic War. We used to have to memorize its opening at school, as a perfect example of a clear and concise introduction: “Gaul is divided into three parts: One, inhabited by the Belgians, another, by the Aquitanians and a third, by those who call themselves Celts in their language, and are, in ours, Gauls.”
Yet Caesar was not just concerned with lofty affairs of state. One of the dictator-for-life’s best known and most controversial edicts was simple: he ordered all Romans to sweep and clean outside their homes, starting Monday. It did resolve an enormous problem of the mountains of trash, filth and the stench of men and animals engulfing the city and its imperial pretensions.
Who’s to blame for public pee?
Decades later, the emperor Vespasian is remembered, particularly in Turin where I went to university, for ordering public urinals built. Their very name — vespasiano in Italian, or vespasienne in French — honors the emperor’s name, and these were soon spotted around Augusta Taurinorum, the city built to honor bulls and another emperor, Augustus.
Who should clean the streets?
We get no such luck or attention to detail from the rulers of our time. Our imperial presidents are only concerned with saving the world from burning up soon, or bringing total peace to this country — so total, in fact, as to include every little gang of thieves and village hoodlums. Our government wants a UK firm (or should it be French, or German?) to make our passports now, hoping the juicy contract will leave a pretty dime for the new coterie of patricians and nobiles loitering around our princeps.
Down here at street level in Bogotá, we’re left with some very basic, and malodorous problems. Who should clean the streets? Where should drunkards and revelers relieve themselves — whichever the spouting orifice?
Some say the state must do it all, like a benign emperor, and build thousands of urinals. Others favor personal responsibility, like Julius Caesar. Sweep your own doorstep, they might say, before picking a fight with the neighbors.
