Torture in the cheap seats
In old city of Cartagena in Colombia sits the Parque de Bolivar, a peaceful back-street garden where tropical hummingbirds and parakeets dart between high palms and locals gather in the shade below, sipping sugary tinto coffee and playing chess beside water fountains that cool the hot dry air that blows in off the Caribbean.
Running alongside the square is a beautiful Spanish colonial building with bright pink bougainvillea staining its walls and a dark history: it was once a prison used by the Catholic Church to extract confessions from the faithless, and is now open to the public as a "torture museum".
If you want to be reminded of the depths of human cruelty, you've come to the right place. Cough up a few pesos and you're confronted by an array of fearsome implements used to inflict death, injury and the fear of God during the Spanish Inquisition.
An assortment of wooden neck braces with brutal iron spikes sits just inside the entrance door, objects so alarming to behold, I imagine the intended wearer might take one look and say, "Oh, yes, alright then- you got me. I AM a witch!"
There's a leather collar with a double-headed metal fork attached, the prongs angled between chin and Adam's apple. If a suspected heretic nods off between interrogations and their head slumps forward, they're a goner.
Guillotines and nooses, axes and thumbscrews. A witch's ducking stool, and for "ducking", read "drowning". There are beautifully engineered metal presses whose names translate from the Spanish as "finger smasher" and "head crusher". It's a gruesome business.
There's a rack-like expanding bench to which unbelievers could be strapped and made slowly and painfully taller. There's a charming device called the "strappado", where the pagan punter was suspended in the air then had weights added one by one until they were having a very bad time indeed.
It's all very Game Of Thrones, but with a Latin twist. But in the end, all these devices struck me as small potatoes. I had found myself in this beautiful city after four epic economy class flights, arriving in Colombia with a sore neck, a buggered back and a death wish of my own.
At this famous torture museum, among all the other human constructions designed to inflict intense and prolonged pain, there was clearly something missing. As I strolled toward the exit, I half expected to turn the last corner and find an unbolted economy class airline seat, spotlit in a glass display case.
Just thinking about all the hours I've spent strapped into these things fills me with dread. The endlessly recycled air with faint taints of aviation fuel, BO and cheap perfume. The badly-angled seat-back slowly knotting your back muscles like macrame.
The short periods of fitful sleep while sitting upright, interrupted by howling children, gruesome turbulence or the prattling of a nearby bore who never sleeps. The permanent sense of adrenalised "fight or flight" anxiety brought on by such unnatural distance from Mother Earth.
But what can be done? Despite our selfless devotion to truth, justice and higher knowledge, journalists must subsist on puny wages, so economy class air travel is the only kind I'm ever likely to experience.
I thought I'd struck the jackpot one time when I flew from Chile to Peru on a South American airline. They'd cocked up my booking, and offered to put me in "First Class" to compensate. At the check-in counter, I was ecstatic. But when I got to the plane… not so much.
The jet was an old, tired workhorse, as care-worn as a a carpenter's work van, and the first class seats were identical to every other seat in the plane, albeit a few feet closer to the pilot.
To provide an illusion of exclusivity, the stewardess pulled across a green canvas curtain just before takeoff, blocking the three front rows from the rest of the cabin. We were served the same food as the other passengers, but a slightly better class of wine.
Ah, well. I long ago resigned myself to the fact that flying economy was my lifelong destiny. Then I got a call last week suggesting a business class trip might be in my future. Whether it happens or not is still, as they say, up in the air. I'll let you know next week how I get on.
Incidentally, in over 800 trials of suspected witches and heretics that took place at that torture museum in Colombia, not a single person was found to be innocent. Once you went through the doors, it was a one way trip, baby.
On the wall of the room where the witch trials took place, there was a list of questions the inquisitors asked the accused, each of them cunningly framed to pre-suppose guilt.
"What evils have you caused, and to whom?" went one question. "Why does the devil visit you at night?" went another. But after four torturous economy class flights halfway across the world, the question that made me laugh out loud was this one: "What words do you pronounce when you fly?".
Weapons of mass destruction aside, few human inventions have caused more distress to a greater number of innocent souls than long haul cattle class seats, which are clearly the result of an unholy alliance between penny-pinching accountants and sadistic industrial designers.
Written by Grant Smithies. First appeared on Stuff.co.nz.
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