Meteoro sois

This song commemorates the sad story of the Santa Rosa de Viterbo meteorite, a town in central Colombia where I lived part of my childhood.

In 1810, a countrywoman named Cecilia Corredor witnessed the impact of a large meteor, and for nearly a century the town kept it, mounted on a stone column in the main square, building a small local reverence around it. Legends were told about the rock, my own grandmother used to tell me that if you hit it with a hammer it rang like a bell. Then, in 1910, an American, Levy Appel, arrived and convinced the authorities to hand over the meteorite in exchange for a statue of General Rafael Reyes, the president of the time. And the stone went off to Chicago, cut into pieces, part of it never to return.

I didn’t have to invent the corruption. It’s the general law I kept running into while reading colonial and postcolonial history, that reverence has never been protection enough against someone more powerful deciding an object’s fate.

What stuck with me most from the chronicle is the image of the empty column, still standing in the square a century later, honoring nothing now but the transaction that emptied it. I wanted the song to end there too, at the hollow monument rather than at the theft itself, because that’s the part extraction always leaves behind, a pedestal with nothing sacred left on top.