Each night, Samuel led the group—seven broken souls—on a pilgrimage through the forgotten city. They walked the alleys of La Perseverancia, climbed the hills of Egipto, and descended into the abandoned stations of the TransMilenio. They collected discarded rosaries, page fragments from Bibles left in dumpsters, and once, a small wooden Christ without arms.
Samuel was their prophet, or their madman—the difference was irrelevant at four in the morning, when the city’s sewers exhaled ghosts. He had been a professor of medieval theology at the Javeriana. Now he wore a cassock made of trash bags and spoke to pigeons as if they were cherubim.
Instead, I can offer you an inspired by the themes and tone typical of Mario Mendoza’s work (urban decay, mysticism, madness, and the search for meaning on the fringes of society). The Wanderers of God Inspired by the atmosphere of Mario Mendoza
They called themselves Los Vagabundos de Dios , but no one knew if that was a prayer or a curse. They slept in the tunnels beneath the 26th Street bridge, where the Bogotá rain never stopped falling, only changed its echo. Los vagabundos de Dios - Mario Mendoza.epub
That night, they built a bonfire in the tunnel using a stolen shopping cart and pages from a discarded encyclopedia. The fire illuminated faces that had seen too much: a former nun who had lost her faith in a brothel, a veteran who still heard mortar shells in the hum of the city, a child who had never learned to speak but could draw angels with charcoal on walls.
The man in the gray suit wept. He had been a judge. He had sentenced a cartel leader’s son. His family was dead. Now he was dead too, but his legs hadn’t realized it.
“He lost his arms carrying our violence,” said La Loca Teresa, a woman who claimed she could hear the prayers of rats. “Now he asks us to be his hands.” Each night, Samuel led the group—seven broken souls—on
As they led him away, Samuel looked at Elías. “Do you see? We are not running from the world. We are the world’s memory. We carry what it buries.”
“We are not homeless,” Samuel whispered to a new arrival, a boy of sixteen named Elías who had escaped from a home in Suba. “We are vagabonds of God . That means we walk because the static world—the world of offices, schedules, mortgages—is the true madness. God is a moving target.”
Elías didn’t understand. He only knew that his stepfather’s fists had a rhythm, and the tunnel’s dripping water had another. He preferred the water. Samuel was their prophet, or their madman—the difference
Samuel raised a plastic cup of stolen wine. “We are the residue of a world that prays to money. But God, the real God, lives in the residue. The Eucharist is not bread. It is shared hunger.”
At dawn, the police came with flashlights and orders to disperse. But when the officers saw the circle—seven skeletons smiling at a dying flame—they hesitated. One officer crossed himself. Another whispered, “Los vagabundos de Dios.”
