Ñata Tulia, the legendary lover of Arenales, died Other News

At the age of 94, Tulia Rendón Guzmán, known as La Ñata Tulia, died in Armenia, the woman who ran the most famous brothel in the Quindío region for more than fifty years. Through her house, and through her bed, passed the most famous men of politics, the coffee economy, the government, the judiciary and citizens of Armenia. In May 2003, Tulia Rendón told her story to the journalist Miguel Ángel Rojas Arias, a text that we reproduce today in its entirety in El Quindiano

La Ñata Tulia

By Miguel Angel Rojas Arias

That morning, when the bells rang in La Candelaria, while Julio de los Ríos snored in the middle of a vapor of liquor, Tulia was already sitting on a wooden bench of a Socoltran company bus bound for her house in a new town on the windy cliffs of Quindío.

On July 25, 1941, he was turning sixteen. She waited for him all night with her libido rising, savoring an old rum, eager to hear the serenade of love that no one had offered her yet. In the early morning, he began to pack his things in two medium-sized leather suitcases and a bag made of silk threads. The first thing she put away was the flirtatious black pajamas that she wore for almost no one all night. His underwear followed, also black. These garments were sacred, almost a myth in her life as a woman. She packed the colorful dresses she wore close to the body a little above the knees. He organized his luggage slowly, without hassle, without anger and humming the song he wanted to hear that night from the lips of the famous duo from Medellín at the time: El dueo de Antaño. Unsuspectingly, she sang: "...if you stopped loving me, I assure you, my life, I would die of grief/ if you stopped loving me, I swear to heaven, I would be no more comforted/ but no, it cannot be, your love is very great... /”.

Outside, the serenity of the early morning was an accomplice of those who snored in their beds, like those who frolicked with pleasure, sweating liquor to the whisper of love songs. Suddenly, on that quiet night, a taxi stopped in front of her door. She cracked open the shutter of the wooden window and saw her lover reeling, lost from drunkenness. She ran to the relaxed bed, turned off the lamp, and pretended to be asleep.

Julio de los Ríos, zigzagging, opened the door with an iron key, after trying several times for the metal-bitten crack. He entered without saving noise and went to the room where his wife was. As soon as she left the bar, she began to think about Tulia, naked, wiggling her brown tits under the sheets in the middle of a tremulous breath. He undressed standing in front of the bed, dribbling, scattering his suit and all his clothes around the room, and he threw himself on top of her, like a true male, waving his hands, trying to grab her breasts — sometimes — and her pubis, other times. , and looking for his tangerine lips. She dodged him by scampering buttocks across the bed, not saying a word. They struggled for a while until the man gave up and fell asleep. He almost always ended up asleep after making love to her, who never allowed herself to look at her body and never submitted to having sexual relations except under the covers. The living room wall clock gave five soft whistles and then Tulia thought: “Soon they will call for mass at 5:30”.

It was the third time she had run from a man's bed. She couldn't bear the slightest hint of infidelity. With the mere suspicion of a love affair, she would leave frightened, goaded on by a kind of snake that snaked between her throat and stomach. This is how she did it with her first man, José María Cano, whom she left planted in the house in Parque Sucre when she was barely 14 years old and four months pregnant. And then with Rodrigo Tobón, her true love, who got tired of asking her for life and she always said no.

He had arrived in Medellín with Eudoxia Pineda, who brought six girls between the ages of 15 and 20 to work in the city where money poured in from the gold mines, coffee, and the flourishing manufacturing industry. She had gone to Eudoxia's house, in Armenia, because her mother scolded her and she did not allow her to freely attend the dance halls of Calarcá where she was bewitched by the bolero and the fox.

It was in a house rented by Eudoxia Pineda, in the Guayaquil neighborhood of Medellín, where I met Julio de los Ríos says Tulia sitting on a dilapidated living room furniture in her house in the Arenales neighborhood in Armenia, surrounded by more than twenty nephews and great-nephews and besieged by the reckless fantasy of her recently turned 77 years.

He was a beautiful man. And he had money. He liked me from the first day I came to that site. He fell madly in love with me. I went to the brothel every night, and every night we made love.

And every night he paid you? - I ask him.

“Of course he paid me every night,” he replies. "I can love a man very much, but he has to pay for my services," she insinuates, raising her eyebrows as if in triumph.

Her lower jaw is shaking a little. She takes out of a trunk a box framed in black wood where a black and white photo of her appears, when she was 16 years old. She is beautiful, a brunette with wide eyes, bushy eyebrows, almost joined together, eyelashes like a mare's, frizzy, long curly hair, and full, provocative lips, like tangerine husks. His skin was clean, cinnamon-colored, without embers of any kind. “This was me when I flew away from Julio de los Ríos, this photo was taken of me at that time in Medellín,” he says proudly, without the remorse hurting him and without the slight tremor in his jaw ceasing.

“I loved him very much, I thought I had fallen in love with him, that's why I agreed to go live together and leave my friends and Mrs. Eudoxia Pineda who had brought me from Armenia. But life is like that, there is no man for a single woman, that's why I prefer to cheat, put the horns on them to put them on me. I can't stand being in a house waiting for a man who is almost always with another old woman, that's why I decided this life that I've always led," says Tulia Rendón Guzmán, known throughout La Hoya del Quindío as Ñata Tulia, the most famous whore. throughout the history of the region. Now he smiles slightly. Then she lets out a laugh and puts her hand to her mouth like any embarrassed child.

His mother, Elvira Guzmán de Rendón, lived in a peasant house, on the Montecarlo farm, in the Arenales village, where she tried to give him a study and a good example along with his sisters Luisa, Carlina and Olga. His father, Luis Rendón Salazar, lived as a bachelor in an adjoining house and hated the Guzmáns for being liberal. However, he ended up marrying one of the daughters of those who provoked his animosity.

Tulia was born when the city was a small village barely 37 years old and was nothing more than a small grid of four streets and a square where there was a temple made of wood and bamboo. She lived near a small hamlet they knew as Tres Esquinas, where there was also a rural school with the unbearable name of La Inmaculada, where she attended until the third elementary year.

Miss Clara, a tall blonde with curly hair like something out of a movie and honey eyes like a grain of parchment coffee, taught her to read, introduced her to arithmetic, and made her thread needles that she took out of her dress-adorned bodice of colorful flowers. In that transit to the school she met José María Cano, a grown man who lived on the road to the La Tebaida hacienda owned by Don Luis Arango Cardona and his brothers. “He was the son of a rich old man, Don Pedro Cano. I fell madly in love with him. Handsome man, white, pink, of medium height, black hair tossed to one side. He always wore a suit and tie and managed a very famous store of fabrics and household items owned by Don Teodoro Velásquez, located in the framework of the Plaza de Bolívar.

“I was 14 years old and José came to my house. We would chat from a distance, he standing on the road and I at the window, that was the way it was at that time because the parents —and oneself— thought that if the man got too close and kissed you, innocence was practically over, you lost yourself. Virginity. Bullshit! Look, one afternoon, around seven at night, José climbed through the window and gave me a kiss on the mouth. I felt dishonored, like I wasn't a lady anymore, but I really liked the kiss. So we plan to fly away, to go somewhere completely”.

“It was a sunny Sunday in 1939 when I told my mother that I was going for a walk on the sidewalk with some friends and I took the road to Armenia, on the Tres Esquinas side, to get to La calle little eyebrow There I met José who led me to a furnished, distinguished place, a bar with dented seats. The man kissed me intensely and touched me everywhere. And I left because that seemed very tasty to me. (Tullia laughs out loud.) Then, at around half past six in the evening, he took me to a small house, fully furnished, near Parque Sucre, and I stayed there with him.” The furniture was an intense yellow, as were the robes on the two beds. This detail impressed her because she didn't like yellow, and even less intense. They went to bed as early as they arrived. This was for them, for a while, their home.

Her mother didn't look for her. The same day she found out from a neighbor that Tulia had gone to live with Pedro Cano's son. He did not curse her for her sin. He envied her. Only eight days later he found her in the Plaza de Bolívar, sucking on banana ice cream, while she was tracking her man in the store of Don Teodoro Velásquez. They greeted each other as friends and each one asked in her own way about each other's husband. It was a fortuitous and fleeting encounter. Tulia seemed clueless, like a scrawny girl who has lost her toys, her mother would tell her sister Olga months later.

Tullia's womb was pregnant. She was expecting a child, but this did not prevent her from continuing to be the happy, talkative girl with an enormous desire to dance and enjoy life, who passed like a stream through the prosperous coffee city.

Four months later, Tulia lost the baby. It was like a liberation, because she immediately fled from José Cano's house and went to spend her convalescence at her mother's home. “I left him because I found out that he had a girlfriend near the Plaza de Bolívar, a good woman, from society. I don't get the horns, I better get out, I'll get ahead of him, ”he reiterates sarcastically.

With the subtle beauty of her 14 years, Tulia began a joyful life of fun and pleasures. She did it not out of necessity, as many who later visited her brothel supposed, but because she loved it, that was her vocation.

With Rosalba, a neighbor, and her sister Luisa, the days of partying arrived in the La Bella de Calarcá farmhouse. Near the Tres Esquina store, Jahir Mowerman, a Polish citizen of Jewish origin, and Teodoro Velásquez would pick them up to take them to dance boleros, foxes and pasodobles. The gentlemen drank beer and they maltina or Soda Kiss of the Bride.

Some of her friends invited her to a house where they danced every night. She flew away from her mother's side and ended up in the brand new and highly regarded Eudoxia Pineda brothel, where she lived for some time before leaving for Medellín. “I had nothing to lose, because I was no longer a lady, and I adored dancing and music and I loved men. That is why I accepted the invitation of my friends and the proposal of Mrs. Eudoxia”.

Eudoxia's house was in the famous Farallones neighborhood, where men in suits and ties would go, who were received by elegant women, in silk and plush dresses, dressed up as if they were for a gala ball at any posh social club in the country. “Doña Eudoxia's house was a bahareque mansion with an immense room where a musical group played everything: boleros, waltzes, foxes, pasodobles, milongas, tangos, and Caribbean tropical music, especially sones and congas. There were two or three key themes: Noches de Hungría, Norma and Vereda Tropical”.

“There I met the love of my life, Rodrigo Tobón. I fell madly in love with him. We could dance all night on that polished, polished wood floor, without thinking about tiredness or the clock. He was an expert at dancing orchestrated boleros and foxes and waltzes and pasodobles. Those rhythms are danced tight, chip to chip, with great love, loving each other. It was a delight."

“Back then, men were very affectionate and more than sex they went looking for love in the arms of a woman who offered them happy and understandable moments, which made life enjoyable, changed their routine. We sent them home as brand new, rested, as they say now, de-stressed”.

Rodrigo Tobón, a wealthy man from the city, proposed to her. She told him to go live with him, but Tullia flatly refused her even though she loved him. She did not want to tie herself up, she wanted to remain free, especially because she was aware of her youth and her desire to enjoy life. In Armenia, many men of prestige, or who later acquired it, married or joined women from brothels, from the famous eighteen-street cafes, and today they are respected ladies in circles and social clubs.

II

When the Socoltran bus dropped her off in Armenia, Tulia planned to arrive at her mother's farm, near Tres Esquinas. A few days later, and at just sixteen years old, he founded his first brothel. He rented a property from Julia Bernal, in Carrera 18 with Calle 44, known to everyone in the city as the Liberty area. In that neighborhood, the Lola Amaya stop was in charge, driving the men crazy in her house in front of what is now known as Mirador de la 18.

“When we wanted to go to these places, we told our friends: see you at the bookstore, and everyone understood that it was in the tolerance zone of Libertad”, recalls lawyer Jaime Arroyave, who is seventeen years ahead of Tulia old. It was there that Ñata developed her innate vocation as a lover, as a matchmaker and as a whore.

“Jesús Álvarez Maya used to hang out with me a lot, who used the pretext of the Curfew, on the days that Gaitán was killed, to stay and sleep in my bed. That Chucho threatened me saying: 'Careful, I'm deceived that I'm sending her to ride in Juan N. Jaramillo's car' (famous Armenian funeral carriage)”. "The men pressed the pins of jealousy, but I did not listen to them, nothing greater than a drunken beating never happened to me."

At that time he got the urge to go touring the country, to venture to the neighborhoods of other cities. Cali, where the pachanga was permanent. Cartagena, where the party never stops, and Bogotá, where love is made with upscale people. “It was in Bogotá where they gave me the nickname of Chata Tulia, because the rolos with their little conversation asked the landlady of the house: ‘Ala and where is Chata Tulia?’ That Chata Tulia became Ñata, because the mountaineers of Armenia confused the word Chata with Ñata and I stayed forever as La Ñata Tulia”.

De la Libertad moved to Arenales, the newest and most modern zone of tolerance in the city. It was the year of 1950. It only took him a year to buy the house where his brothel operated, which he acquired with the savings of almost 10 years of joyful work. It is in this house on 50th Street, number 17-60, where he lives, and in what way, to this day. Here we find her turned into a mythological matron of sex and the amatory virtues of Quindío, now surrounded by her great-nephews.

The most important men in Quindío society fell into his arms and into those of the girls who rented for one night in that unforgettable house in Arenales. Tulia remembers them as romantic gentlemen and inveterate bohemians: “Jorge Torres came here a lot, a hardware store merchant who was said to have a lot of money. He was good-looking and generous with us. Also the writer and composer Jhon Vélez Uribe, a man from a prestigious family in the city, son or grandson of founders and owners of farms, and his brother Hernando also came.

Politicians were other frequent visitors to the Ñata house, such as Diego Moreno Jaramillo and Rodrigo Gómez Jaramillo. The latter remembers having lost a girlfriend because he accompanied the mayor Hernán Palacio Jaramillo, a prestigious pediatrician, during the day when he was Ombudsman, to attend to a sick child, the son of one of the girls from the Ñata house, and he held in his arms a baby of another of those women, when his girlfriend passed by in a car and saw him at the door making love to the newborn.

“I very much remember the engineer and poet Alberto Gutiérrez Jaramillo, who wrote the most famous sonnet in my name, he was later mayor of the city and, being so, he came to visit us” says Tulia. “In his spontaneity and his culture, Dr. Gutiérrez would suddenly start reciting the sonnet a la Ñata Tulia: '...According to the parishioner she charged / the rate did not work in haste / because it was Tulia who more enjoyed. / All of Armenia remembers his tenderness / since his portal was passed through / by the mayor, the notary and even the priest / ’. There was no politician, professional, merchant or farmer who would refrain from visiting my business. I was friends with everyone. I cannot forget Héctor Gutiérrez, the doctor Gabriel Murillo, Humberto Echeverri, Raúl Botero, Jaime Palacios and Raúl Uribe”.

“At that time the uncorking of the boys when they were sixteen or seventeen years old became very famous. Then they took them to me to initiate them in the arts of lovemaking”. This practice was so famous that throughout the Quindío region, even in the 21st century, when boys are at that age, they are asked a question, which is more of a shameful joke: Have they already taken him to Ñata Tulia? Or do you want me to take you to throw away cap at Ñata Tulia?

His business also housed thugs from the time of the Violence. From the cafes on 18th or downtown, the so-called birds went to brothels and one of them was the famous house of La Ñata in Arenales. “Here in these chairs —he points to the seats in the room— sat men like Chispas, Sangre Negra, Jair Giraldo, Carlos Marín, Efraín González, El Paterrana, and many others who surely came, but I couldn't distinguish them well. I told them, drink and fall in love guys, but don't get me in trouble." Some of the assistants to the house of La Ñata, consulted for this chronicle, assure that many of the murders that were committed in Quindío at the time of the peasant self-defense groups, the liberal guerrillas and banditry were planned there.

Other customary visitors to the Ñata house were the players of the Atlético Quindío professional soccer team. The old man Vargas, but above all Álvaro Laidalga is not erased from his mind. He deeply loved Laidalga, which put an end to the footballer's professional aspirations.

Laidalga was on the roster of the 1956 Quindío Champion, but as a substitute, because despite his talent, the eternal nights and early mornings of love with Ñata took his breath away on the pitch, he would remember after old man Vargas.

La Ñata was a soccer fan. She was at the San José stadium every Sunday. Since the middle of the week, he reserved sixteen places in the preferred gallery to sit in the most favorite part with his fifteen girls. They arrived in rented cars, with a driver in a jacket and bowtie, among whom he remembers Olmedo Rincón, who later became the manager of an important bus company in Armenia. They wore the best suits, bought or trusted in the stores in the center of the city, where La Ñata enjoyed credit without fuss. “All those who went to football, both in the preferred and shadow stands, were dying to be in my business that night. And in fact many came to Arenales”.

Because he loved soccer so much, he loved soccer players. He fell in love with the Paraguayan Benito Galeano. La Ñata smiles: "The coach and one or two other friends would come to my house, in the early hours of Sunday, and they would get him out of the scratch, hours before the game." Galeano dribbled his hangover in the San José stadium, with his gaze fixed on the stands, distributing kisses that everyone knew the spellbound direction they had. Even when he went to play Once Caldas, he came to the Arenales house on Fridays and on Saturdays he returned to Manizales with a hangover on his back. 'I'm going tomorrow ─ he told me on the phone ─ and I, who was swallowed by him, answered him: come on, but bring me money' ”.

His privileged place in the priority gallery of the San José stadium is just one of the places of stratum six that he frequented in the city, always in the company of a dozen beautiful young women. At Holy Week, he was invariably in the front row of the Cathedral, with the same elegance as the ladies of the lofty Club América, and he received communion without blushing.

When the fleets of taxis brought new cars to Armenia, she would rent them all and go for a walk with her girls through the central streets of the city, almost like in a pageant of beauty queens. And, of course, that night 17-60 fiftieth street was full. For this reason, in Quindío, every man who came home late, after twelve o'clock at night, received from his wife a similar refrain in each case: "You come from where that Ñata son of a bitch, no."

And the wonderful years of the sixties arrived for Tulia. Jorge Camacho appeared in her life, a wealthy owner of cargo transportation companies who frequented her for a little over a year. “I liked it a lot, also because I always had money. But in a week of parties in Armenia he always arrived drunk, he came from the Equine Fair, mounted on a white horse. He would get off, look for me and hit me. So I decided not to see him again."

—Were there other men who hit you?—, I ask.

—Yes —, he answers without embarrassment. — The doctor José Gregorio Casas. I met him one night at the hospital when I went to take one of the girls from my house who was expecting a child. He looked at me intensely and asked if he could visit me. I accepted. After a while we were in love. He often took me to a Peláez farm in Montenegro. When he got drunk I would complain to him and fly to him for my business. Then he would look for me and hit me. I also left him for that reason, but we managed to chiviar for about two years. Then I went from Guatemala to Guatemala because I got involved with Lieutenant Alfonso Poveda, who always beat me until, thank God, they transferred him to Cúcuta and I never saw him again.

“At that time I remember two people a lot. One of them was José Antonio Jaramillo, a boy from Calarcá who visited me regularly. When she got married, she didn't wait a single day after she returned from her honeymoon to show up at my house. I told him: 'You really are very stupid, with such a monkey that you married and is still around here.' But he ignored me and kept coming almost every day. And the other is Dr. Alberto Aristizábal Peláez. A tender, kind and very broad man. I remember one night he got drunk and I had a trip. I had to do some shopping and I asked him to pay me for the night. The man was so hung up that he gave me my wallet and told me: 'Take out what you need, go buy what you want and then return my wallet to me' ”

Entering the Ñata house in the 1970s and 1980s was like going back twenty or thirty years, since the atmosphere had not changed, although the female staff was always young. Coffee growers, merchants, professionals and bureaucrats were the most frequent visitors.

At the end of the eighties, those characters began to appear who arrived accompanied with two or three cars, made all the customers leave and closed the business on their behalf. It was the heyday of drug trafficking. “That bothered me a lot because longtime customers started running out of business. Many never returned, out of fear. “In those years I suffered several assaults, robberies at the house, where they searched the clients, took them out of the rooms and took everything from me. It was horrible. Sometimes in this business things are very hard because in addition to dealing with drunks you have to put up with crime.”

“Recently I remember Carlitos Oviedo, a man very dear to all of us because he is the son of a woman like us who also had a brothel, Mrs. Laura Alfaro, sister of La Faraona, the most famous fag in the city ​​that killed his sister and his own mother out of jealousy. Oviedo was a good person, although very hard to pay the bills”.

Tulia looks back at her sixteenth birthday photo. Her eyes fill up. He looks at me and smiles: —And you, what are you going to do with everything I've told you? - he asks me. "I don't know, I want to write a story about his life," I reply. She smiles again. We say goodbye with a see you tomorrow.

I have spent fifteen days visiting this woman in her house in Arenales, which now appears sad on the outside, without the red light bulb that characterized her for many years. The windows are closed and covered with thick curtains the color of guava.

I'll be back the next day. It is my last visit. The house is full of children, the rooms that used to be pleasure shelters are now love nests for couples made up of Tulia's nieces or nephews, with their husbands or wives and their children. Tulia had no children, but instead her sister Olga gave birth to eleven, who came to live with their aunt in this legendary brothel that remains alive in the minds of Quindianos as a place of sin, for some, or a place of love and pleasure, for others.

─Tulia, do you still chivea?

─No, although many men still call me. I am already retired.

(4 May 2003)