Still Life with Guinea Pig

For a month, Miguel conducted a steady teasing campaign to get me to try guinea pig, a delicacy in Peru.

“It is delicious,” he would exclaim any time el cuy came up, which it did regularly. “And it is so healthy, so nutritious. It is a very clean animal. It eats nothing but grasses and it never has any injections.”

The guinea pigs in Chachapoyas and the surrounding department of Amazonas do seem to live pretty happy lives, running freely around local kitchens in little flocks, eating the big bunches of fresh alfalfa people on the street carry home under their arms. Peruvian cuy do seem to be treated well--at least until it’s time for the stew pot. And cuy is comida típica, the kind of traditional local specialty I usually seek out when I travel. I’ve eaten moose and seal and caribou—why not cuy?

Well, because when I think of guinea pigs, I think of specific little critters who have been members of the family—Goldie, Herm, Bianca Castafiore. But slowly it dawned on me that Miguel wanted to share a piece of his own life. He was raised with guinea pigs in the kitchen, and he said several times that no one prepares them as well as his mother does. So when he invited me to go to the village where he grew up and find out for myself, I realized that what he was offering was actually an honor.

“Sí,” I said finally. “Gracias.”

“I think you will like it,” he said, smiling. “And you will leave Amazonas with the taste of cuy in your mouth.”

The trip got postponed a couple times, but finally, two days before I had to leave Chachapoyas, we were in a colectivo heading down the steep, switchbacked road toward the Rio Utcubamba. The road was paved on the Chachapoyas side of the river, but once we crossed the bridge it turned to gravel and climbed steeply up the green mountain on the other side. Agaves clung to the rocky slopes and the other vegetation was shrubby and low to the ground. After a half hour, we got out of the car at a side road that ran across the mountainside. From there, it was an hour and a half walk to Inguilpata.

We were up near the top of the ridge directly opposite Chachapoyas, the deep river valley between us and the town, white clouds hanging over the hilltops and drifting through the valleys. The road was level for long stretches and curved in and out as we worked our way along the mountainside. Not a single vehicle passed, just a man walking with a horse loaded with sacks of potatoes. The occasional adobe house sat silently on a nearby rise, and all we could hear was the calling of the birds.

This road was built about 15 years ago, Miguel said, and before that people used pathways for themselves and their horses. Ten years ago, Inguilpata got electricity and before that, they used kerosene lamps and candles and cooked with firewood. His mother still cooked that way. When he and his brothers were children, they had roamed these hills collecting wood and carrying it home on their backs.

Just before we reached Inguilpata, we stopped at a field that belongs to his father, a prettily situated deep green patch of beans and huacatoy, sloping down a slight hill, with a mare and foal at the boggy lower end. Then we climbed back to the road and up the hill, branching off onto a steepish and rocky path with the occasional adobe building alongside it. I stopped for breath and looked back the way we’d come, at the high hills rising around us, the red cut in the earth where there’d been a landslide and a man (drunk at the time, Miguel said) had lost his life years ago. The simple adobe structures seemed part and parcel of the tilled earth, literally made from it and eroding back into it once their time was past. With the steepsided hills around them and bits of cloud drifting past, they were beautiful.

We went a little further. Miguel opened a door in an adobe wall and we were in a hard clay courtyard onto which tile-roofed adobe rooms opened. Rough wood pillars held the roof beams, and from the pillars hung a line of laundry. His mother came out from a doorway at the far side, and we ducked under the clothesline to say hello. She had a warm, round face, crinkly eyes and black hair pulled back, and she was shorter and rounder than me, dressed in a pink t-shirt with a floral design, a knee-length skirt, thin white socks rolled down to her ankles and muddy flatsoled shoes. Silver earrings dangled from her ears.

She asked us to go into the sala. I wondered if I should take off my muddy boots, but the floor of the sala was also dried clay, so I decided muddy boots probably weren’t much of an issue. It was a large, simple room with wooden beams across the ceiling, thick adobe walls, and two deep windows on the wall that faced the courtyard. Inside, narrow wooden benches lined all the walls, which were covered with diplomas, family pictures, pictures cut from magazines, and black and white headshots of Mexican movie stars along with one of Hank Williams and Patsy Cline. Around the tops of the walls, vinyl records hung at intervals. Miguel said his father had the first record player around here and this had been quite the party room in its day.

His mother came in, spread a cloth on the small table at one end of the room, and put out a snack for us--the rolls Miguel brought from town, a bowl of moté (boiled corn kernels), plates of a porous white cheese made there in Inguilpata, and tin mugs of sweet, thick, incredibly good coffee. Later I learned that Miguel’s family grew both the coffee and the sugarcane right there.

She didn’t sit at the table with us, but on one of the benches along the side of the room. Then she went back to the kitchen and after we finished, we went to find her.

She was peeling potatoes in front of the fire, thin sticks of wood blazing in an adobe enclosure that was open on one side. Over the fire was a grate and on it several black pots. There was a wonderful smell, onions, carrots, and herbs I couldn’t identify.

In the corner on the other side of the door from the stove were the guinea pigs, five or six of them in view, most a mix of gold and white. They had an adobe enclosure, like the stove open on one side, maybe four feet deep and five wide and it too was open in the front so they could come and go as they liked.

“Can I play with them?” I asked Miguel. “Do they bite?”

I crouched down and Miguel’s mother came over, smiling at me. She lifted the edge of one of the broken clay vessels that were lying there. Six or eight more cuy huddled there and they scattered immediately, making me laugh. Under another pot were more.

“How many are there?” I asked.

Neither Miguel nor his mother answered and I thought they didn’t hear me.

“How many guinea pigs do you have?” I asked.

His mom said something and Miguel explained.

“If you count them, they die,” he said.

“Oh, I’m sorry!” I said. “Please forget I asked that!”

Miguel took me out the back door, where there was a small porch with more laundry hanging and over to one side a rounded clay structure with a narrow door.

“A bread oven?” I asked. “¿Por pan?”

It was and he taught me the word, horno. We walked around the side of the house, where there was a cluster of banana trees and a small pig with a rope around its neck rooting in the mud, then through the sloping acre or two his father had planted behind the house. There were many more banana trees and a large stand of sugar cane, corn with bean plants twining up the stalks, the short bushy plant with corn-like leaves they grow to feed the guinea pigs. There were cabbages and sweet potatoes. There were coffee trees growing in the shade of taller trees. There were apple trees bound to the adobe wall that ran along one edge of the property. There was a horse-powered mill for grinding sugar cane and extracting the juice. The variety and abundance were beautiful, and it was all intensely green, orderly and well-cared-for.  

When we went back through the house, I asked about the woven bags hanging on the wall. Miguel’s mother showed me more of her handiwork, thick, intricately woven blankets, mats made from loosely looped wool hooked into burlap, cross-stitched samplers, one of them made by Miguel’s 14-year-old brother in school. She showed me where she sets up her loom by pushing tall thin pegs into holes in the clay floor along one interior wall of the courtyard.

Miguel and I went out again and walked further up the mud road, which still felt like countryside, the adobe houses at some distance from one another, some farmers and horses down on the broad green meadow where Miguel said they played futbol when he was a child. 

The houses stood closer together as we neared the plaza, but many still had sheep lounging near the doorways and chickens ran around the yards and along the road. But there were no people on the street, no sounds of children playing. Miguel had told me that most young people have left Inguilpata, but still it came as a surprise that it seemed so deserted. 

Near the plaza--the house where Miguel was born.

After a turn round the plaza, we walked down a muddy path, heading for the outlying field where his mother had told him his father was working. He waved to a woman in the back yard of a house.

“I know the people here,” he said. “We’ll go in and say hello.”

He opened the wooden door in the adobe wall and went into a hallway, whistling, then stopped before a doorway off the hall and spoke to someone in the room. I sensed I should hang back and did, and a minute or so later a woman came out, just beginning to pull a t-shirt over her naked breasts. This was Miguel’s tia—his mother’s sister. She obviously didn’t know I was there and I felt embarrassed for her when she saw me. But she’d clearly been comfortable chatting with her nephew while naked from the waist up.

We stayed just a moment and went on. And when we didn’t find his father in the potato field, we walked back to his parents’ house, where lunch was ready for us. I asked to use the bathroom first and there was an exchange in Spanish between Miguel and his mother, some consternation in their voices.

“Do you have to do the first one or the second one?” he asked me.

“The first one,” I said, grinning.

“Which one should she use?” he asked his mother and then he directed me around the back of the house to a small red outhouse. In it was the trip’s first squat toilet, a foot-shaped wooden board on either side.

When I came back, Miguel was waiting by the big rectangular cistern with a small white bucket of rainwater and a big blue bar of soap. He had me hold my hands over the concrete slab next to the cistern, poured water over them and passed me the soap. Then he poured more water over my hands so I could rinse them, and I repeated the ritual for him.

Again, his mother laid the table in the sala and again she retreated to the kitchen.

“Won’t she eat with us?” I asked Miguel and he went to talk with her.

“She’s waiting for my father,” he said when he came back.

She brought us a thick soup of potatoes and greens, and then tin plates of rice, potatoes and . . . there it was, the guinea pig, two small haunches all brown and delicious-smelling on top of the rice.

“It’s time,” I said, grinning at Miguel and holding up one piece to his mom. “Mi primero . . .”

It was good. It was very good—moist and tender and flavorful, tasting as healthy as Miguel had promised. And by then it was not too hard to see that the guinea pigs—like the hens and the sheep and the pigs and the bananas and the sugarcane and the coffee and the corn—were something tended to and grown with care, something a person could eat with gratitude and pleasure.

Soon after we ate, his father came in, wearing knee-high rubber boots, a woven shoulder bag and a ball cap, some kind of short-handled, wide-bladed hoe over his shoulder. He was small and wiry, very brown from the sun, with dark observant eyes and an air of humor and quiet charm. He looked at me curiously and when Miguel introduced us said warmly, “Thank you for visiting our home.”

He sat down next to Miguel’s mother and took her hand in his dark hand. They smiled at each other and he patted her knee, affection palpable between them. After eleven children and who knows how many years together, it was affecting to see. Then he went off and came back with two bunches of bananas he’d just cut from a tree, one for me, one for Miguel.

Miguel said we had to go, and I asked if I could take their picture first. His dad went off again.

“To get his hat,” said Miguel, “so he’ll look like a real farmer.”  

Then there were kisses all around and thanks and goodbyes and we were off, the bananas in my backpack, each of us with a stalk of sugar cane in hand. 

We walked for two hours down the steep mountainside to the Utcubamba, where Miguel said we could catch a colectivo headed for Chachapoyas. When we reached the river—full, rushing and brown—we  crossed the bridge and then sat in the shade in front of a locked tienda, waiting for a car to come along.

Miguel broke off pieces of sugar cane for each of us and we peeled off the outer layers with our teeth, chewed the sweet pulp and spat out the fiber. And so I left Amazonas with the taste in my mouth not only of cuy but of sugar cane and homegrown potatoes, and of coffee roasted and brewed on the same land where it was grown.

(KK)

Welcome, Gringa Lady!

Rie and I do stick out a little here. Chachapoyas has a slowly growing tourist trade, but it’s still a small town with relatively few visitors and there’s no escaping the fact that our white faces are a bit of a novelty. Sometimes little kids will stand in front of us and stare open-mouthed. Sometimes older kids or wry-faced teenagers will see us and suddenly start spouting some English: “Good morning!” “How are-ra you?” Once a well-dressed local man leaving what looked like a business meeting in the café glanced over at my table and said in perfect English, “Good to see you. Have a nice day.”

Being easy to recognize around town can have its advantages. Sarita, the smiling young waitress at Café Fusiones, always greets us warmly and asks where we’ve been if we miss a day. People we’ve met only in passing say hello on the street. And when we went out for pizza one night, the young and hugely talented charango player we met early on came over to our table, kissed our cheeks and talked to us for a bit. He was there with his band mates, most of them in jeans and black shirts, and they had no doubt seen us in the small audience at their last show.

“Check us out,” Rie said later, laughing. “We are in with the band.”

But nothing tops the reception we got yesterday when we went with a guide to see Karajía, a group of  ancient clay sarcophagi built into a high cliff ledge near a small town an hour or two away. The tall, solemn-faced figures are pretty iconic around here—photographs of the grouping are displayed in restaurants and wooden reproductions are on sale just about anywhere you go. We were picking our way down the steep trail when we came upon a family group, a grandmother in an embroidered shirt and white cowboy hat, two younger women, and a bunch of kids.

The grandmother waited for us to catch up and then took each of our hands in turn, holding them in both of hers, smiling and pouring forth a torrent of words. When it was my turn, all I could make out was “bienvenida,” “gringa” and “señorita,” but her enthusiasm was unmistakable.

The other foreign teachers had already clued us in that gringa and gringo aren’t pejorative terms around here—they’re just descriptive and you hear them a lot. “Gracias,” I said over and over as she held my hand. “Gracias!”

It did cross my mind that she intended to accompany us to the sarcophagi and maybe expect something in return, but that wasn’t it at all. She and her family were visiting Karajía for the first time themselves and were terribly excited about it, exclaiming and laughing at every turn. The figures arouse plenty of local pride—they’ve just appeared on a new Peruvian coin, for instance—and here we were, these obviously foreign visitors, climbing down this remote hillside to go see them. I think she took our presence as further confirmation that the site is unique and special and worthy of international attention.

And after we made our way along the narrow trail, after we all admired the tall, dignified figures and shivered over the human bones that were lying around, she went around a small wooden fence and picked me a bunch of conical purple flowers, handing them to me with an explanation that I mostly didn’t get. I think it was more or less that these were flowers you didn’t see everywhere but that grew here.

I asked if I could take her picture and much of the family crowded in, then all laughed uproariously when I showed them the picture on the camera’s little screen. Then all the kids and one of the younger women were picking us flowers, tall red gladiolas, little yellow blossoms, delicate orchids they pulled out of the ground roots and all. I thanked them and thanked them and stuck a bouquet into my backpack, and still they picked  more.

The sarcophagi at Karajía were striking, even if their impact was a little diminished by the fact I’d seen so many pictures of them before I saw the things themselves. Meeting that family, though, made my day. (KK)

Local Clamor

A few lines just jumped out at me from the novel I’m reading, Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje: “What surprised Anil [who is from Sri Lanka] . . . was the quietness of the English classroom. In Colombo there was always a racket. Birds, lorries, fighting dogs, a kindergarten’s lessons of rote, street salesmen—all their sounds entered through the open windows. There was no chance of an ivory tower existing in the tropics.” 

It was so accurate a description of the conditions at the school where we’ve been teaching that it made me laugh—though Ondaatje left out the construction noises, the constant banging of mallet on chisel, the unidentifiable random crashes of demolition that seem to accompany us everywhere in Chachapoyas, at home and school alike.

I used to think it was an immutable biological fact that constant loud noise wears on the nerves and exhausts the person exposed to it. I thought that quiet was an obvious prerequisite for reading and writing and learning. But being here has challenged that belief.

A week or so ago, I had my Spanish lesson in an empty classroom at the school and struggled to concentrate as Miguel outlined three ways of expressing future action. The children in Priscilla’s English class were shouting enthusiastically in unison in a classroom nearby: “Good morning!” “How are you!” “Thank you!” Next door, a construction project was underway—either that or someone was passing the time by hitting an iron pipe with a hammer at thuddingly regular intervals.

“Could we have our lesson at the café tomorrow?” I asked Miguel.

“Yes,” he said. “I can see you are not comfortable.” Then he paused and said gently, “But perhaps we can try one more time to tolerate this?”

I could tell that all the noise wasn’t really bothering him at all, and I wondered if my desire for calm and quiet to study in seemed a bit demanding and fussy. More than likely, I realized, his schooldays had taken place in conditions very much like these and he had simply learned to block out all the racket.

It’s an enviable skill. Despite the frequent claim that life in Chachapoyas is muy tranquilo, it’s actually pretty noisy around here most of the time. The church bells start ringing at 6:30 on Sunday mornings—6:30! Early each weekday morning, a garbage truck works its way through the streets, clanging its own distinctly non-melodious bell to alert people to bring out their trash. But no-one is sleeping anyway because by then the roosters have been going at it for hours, the dogs have loudly reasserted control over their little dominions, and the concrete streets ring with footfalls, the occasional clop of horses’ hooves or the roar of a motorcycle starting up.

Few residents of this town own cars and so there are always people in the streets, walking and talking below the windows of whatever building you’re in. The houses have interior courtyards but no lawns and so their front windows hover directly over the sidewalk. And through the ironwork grills of the open windows comes a constant stream of conversation, the beeping of colectivos as they approach intersections that don’t have stop signs, and of course—since no activity here is complete without a festive soundtrack—the thump and blare of amplified music.

Out on the streets, kids yell and laugh and chase each other with the water balloons they use to celebrate Carnival time. Over near the market, men with clipboards who work for competing taxi companies solicit passengers for a nearby town by shouting “Pedro! Pedro!” at anyone who walks by. On Chincha Alta the other day, a couple gutted a two-story adobe house with their bare hands, throwing each rounded beam with a thud into the street, where someone else would pick it up, shoulder it, and trundle it off around the corner.

And then there is the sound that I’ll always associate with this room, this house, this street, this town: The Shriek. Rie and I both heard it our first night in the house we’re living in—it shattered the wee hours with an eerie and penetrating quaver.

“What was that?” we asked each other the next morning. We couldn’t even tell for sure if it was a human sound. Maybe it was a feral cat? Or some enormous and deeply unhappy bird?

Whatever it was, it woke us every night between midnight and 2:00. For a while I would jump up when I heard it, open the window and look out, thinking that if I could identify it I would learn not to hear it anymore. But I could never see where the sound was coming from, just hear it reverberate up the empty street. 

I had almost decided it was a pishtaco, a malevolent Andean creature of legend I’d read about, when one night I noticed it was interacting with what was undeniably a human sound.

“Oooh-weet WOO!” somebody was whistling.

“Oooh we-heet wa-WOO!” came the reply, making up in volume for what it lacked in precision.

It was a parrot and somebody was teaching it to wolf whistle, though I’m not sure why the lesson had to take place at that particular hour.

In any case, its late night practicing of this and other sounds no longer jars me awake like it did at first. I guess that after all a body can get used to the clamor around it. When somebody says that Chachapoyas is such a wonderfully quiet town, I just nod and agree.

“Sí, eso es. Muy tranquilo.”

(KK)

Field Trip to Huancas

Everything went wrong on our outing to Huancas, but by the time I got back to my room Saturday night, I couldn’t help but grin. Against all odds, the day had turned out to be one of the best of the trip so far.

Things started off OK. Miguel, my Spanish teacher, had suggested that Rie and I join him for a trip to Huancas, a tiny town near Chachapoyas that’s famous for its clay pots and beautiful views. We met at the school at 4:00 and walked to the taxi stand, a muddy lot where colectivos sat waiting. A driver called “Huancas?” out his window and we piled into the back seat. Shortly a fourth passenger arrived, a short, bent, wrinkled woman who sat up front and began chattering in a way I couldn’t decipher.

With the car full, we were off, jouncing over the most rutted, uneven track we’ve been on so far, and that’s saying something. We climbed up out of town, rattled past the tiny airport, and bounced along for 10 kilometers or so, looking out over the green hills. (I’ve learned they’re considered hills here, not mountains, however high they seem to me.) The chattering woman got out at a small gate among the agaves, and then the driver took us into town and let us out at the plaza.

It was like stepping into another century. There were no cars and few people, just timeless-looking adobe and wood structures lining the square. Mud streets ran around the plaza and outward in several directions, a few tile-roofed structures on each one. Then the roads ran off into the hills where widely-spaced houses sat on small plots of corn and cane. Mist wafted through the hollows and the clouds hung low.

It started to rain, and Miguel took us down a side street to the pot-making center, which turned out to be empty and locked. We looked through the slatted wooden gate, but there wasn’t much to be seen besides some big flowerpots at the far end. So we stood under the overhanging roof, our backs to the wooden gate, and watched the rain.

Up the street a few buildings away, a Seventh Day Adventist service was underway and we could hear singing out the open door. Otherwise, there were few signs of life, just chickens and a turkey pecking their way along the street, the occasional stooped woman going by in a knee-length skirt and sturdy shoes, a blanket-wrapped bundle on her back. From time to time, an older woman came down the street, lifted a crossrail or two out of the fence opposite, climbed through and tended a wood fire over which was an iron pot of boiling water sending up steam into the wet air. Miguel said she was probably cooking moté, fat kernels of corn, and later it turned out he was right.

I could tell he felt bad about the rain and the locked gate, but he kept his good nature and made an effort to salvage some semblance of a Spanish lesson. “What is the woman doing?” he asked me, grinning as he added “Presente continuado,” the tense we’ve been working on.

I gave it a try: “Ella está cucinando.” That’s about where my Spanish stands at this point.

We reviewed my colors and ran through what’s become our routine in my daily lessons with him—when I got up that day, what I’ve done, what I’ve eaten. He described how to make a local dish called arroz con pato—rice and potatoes cooked with onions, culantro and cumin—and then made a pitch for the healthfulness and deliciousness of el cuy. I asked him where the best cuy was to be found.

"In my mother's kitchen," he replied. She prepares it, he said, in a clay pot like those made at Huancas, boiling it with onions and potatoes and other things.

“Meanwhile,” he said, humor in his eyes, “the other guinea pigs run around the kitchen floor. When the stew is finished and you eat it, they maybe come over and you feed them a little bit and they sniff it to see if it’s somebody they recognize.” He laughed and we did too.

We talked about our childhoods, he quizzed us on the capitals of the South American countries, and he asked about our lives back in the States. How much does it cost to rent a room in Chapel Hill? How much does it cost to stay in a hotel?

At one point he indicated a donkey and asked me,“Como se llama?”

“Burro,” I said.

“Burro,” he repeated slowly, as I hadn’t gotten my double-r quite right. And then again, “Como se llama?”

But my brain was getting tired from the hard work of communicating in Spanish. “Mike,” I said.

He laughed.

The rain went on and on. When it finally let up enough so that we could walk up the road a bit, admiring the ancient-looking adobe houses, it suddenly struck me that I had to teach my English class at 7:00. It was 6:15. We had to go, immediately.

We hurried back to the plaza where the colectivo driver had told Miguel we could get a car back to Chachapoyas. The place was utterly deserted—no cars, no people. Shortly the rain started up again and we took shelter in a small adobe structure. Miguel tried to call Fidel to tell him I wasn’t going to make it back on time for my class, but there was no signal. He tried again and again—nothing.

No colectivos showed up. The light began to go out of the day, the streetlights came on around the plaza, and the quiet town grew even more silent and deserted as night fell. Rie and I started to joke that maybe we should just stay there, that we’d probably get a better night’s sleep in Huancas than we did on our noisy street in Chachapoyas, but the prospect became more disconcerting as more time went by. Was there even anywhere there to stay? There was clearly no hotel on the plaza. Would we have to knock on doors and ask for lodging? Miguel was scarcely more familiar with the place than we were—he’d only been there once before.

We talked and talked to distract ourselves. At one point, Miguel made a comment about how many bowel sounds there were in English, which of course cracked us up.

“We’re even now,” I told him, grinning, and I explained to Rie that in one of my first lessons I’d mispronounced the word años.  

“She told me she had 42 anuses,” Miguel said and we all laughed. (Actually, I’d told him my real age—I guess he knocked off a few years out of courtesy.)

Finally he reached Fidel on the phone, easing my conscience about my class. Then he disappeared, leaving Rie and me to wonder whether this was all an elaborate initiation process on the part of the school—you take new teachers out to Huancas and abandon them. But when he came back he had a packet of crackers for each of us and a bit of information—there were no colectivos in the plaza after 6 p.m. If you wanted one, you had to call and have one come out from Chachapoyas. So he called Fidel again and then reported that Fidel was sending a car.

To pass the time as we waited, I asked Miguel to teach us a song. He was singing short snippets of a wistful and romantic waltz—something about your red lips and your eyes which I will never forget, something else about three things and no more—when a colectivo suddenly appeared on the other side of the square and went around a corner onto a side street.

Was that our car? Didn’t the driver see us? Where had he gone and was he coming back? We were tired and hungry by then and eager to get home. Miguel walked up to the corner of the street down which the taxi had disappeared, but three or four dogs surrounded him, growling and jumping.

The car finally came back, a couple of passengers in the back seat. But by then Miguel had reached Fidel again and learned this wasn’t our car. Or something. I was getting confused about what was going on. In any case, Miguel told the colectivo driver to go on without us. We stood there some more, all of us beginning to shiver.  

More time went by. Once a light shone down the road and we heard the sound of an approaching engine, but it was just a motorcycle. Then another colectivo drove up—a small and very welcome miracle. “Chacha?” the driver asked out his window. Rie and I were ready to jump in but Miguel was hesitating, trying again to reach Fidel. He couldn’t get a signal, and Rie and I opened one of the car doors, seeing as we did that on the shotgun seat, which was fully reclined, was a year-old baby, sound asleep. Then suddenly Miguel was in the front seat and we were off.

Where was the baby? I looked across the back seat past Rie—nothing. Was Miguel holding her? No. The driver hadn’t put her in the back of the station wagon, had he? We were hurtling down the dark hillside, bouncing over the ruts and rocks, and I prayed the baby was secure.

By then it was full night. Every once in a while, a face would appear in the headlights--people walking along the dark road, a couple of kids on horseback, cows coming at us randomly, the odd motorcycle roaring past. At one point, a colt came toward us diagonally across the road and I gasped as we sideswiped it, or seemed to. I felt no impact and heard no sounds of pain, so perhaps we didn’t, but the close shave scared me. At least I’d finally located the baby. Her little feet were hanging over the stick shift—her father had put her across his lap and she was riding that way, still sound asleep, while he shifted gears and ate something or other and carried on a conversation in Spanish with Miguel.

Meanwhile, Miguel was still trying over and over to reach Fidel, who he said was now on his way to Huancas to get us. We passed a colectivo on the road, but it had two passengers in the back and it didn’t stop when our driver honked, so we figured it wasn’t him. And that was the only car we saw. Everything else we passed was a motorcycle, a person or a beast. Soon we were headed down the last hillside towards the city lights of Chachapoyas.

Miguel turned to us. “Should we go to the school?”

“Let’s go eat,” I said. “Let’s go to the plaza.”

His face was troubled and apologetic. “Fidel says the car he’s in will cost 25 soles and that we have to pay for it.”

“Then I guess we should go to the school.” It was the last place I wanted to be just then, but what could we do?

“La escuela Ingles?” the driver asked Miguel, and then we were there. The school door was open and the lights were on. Fidel’s mother was at the secretary’s desk and another of the local teachers came out the door grinning.

“Where have you been?” he asked, laughing at our bedraggled state.

“Huancas,” we said.

“In this weather?”

“It looked fine when we set out,” Miguel said, looking to us for confirmation. We nodded.

The teacher was still laughing. “Why on earth did you go?”

“It was a field trip,” said Miguel, looking at me. We had compared the Spanish and English phrases earlier. “It was Kathleen’s Spanish lesson.”

“Was it at least a good lesson?” the teacher asked me.

“Yes,” I said. “It was.”

Another colectivo pulled up. Fidel got out and with him, unexpectedly, Priscilla, a young, pretty Peruvian teacher. Fidel radiated irritation as he paid the driver and when he came in spoke sternly to Miguel in Spanish. I apologized to him and Priscilla for their trouble and paid him back immediately for the cab fare, but still he was annoyed and mimed strangling Miguel.

“What could we do?” I put in. “We’d already let one car go. There was a colectivo, Miguel couldn’t reach you, and we just got in.”

I was tired and hungry and just wanted to get out of there, but first I asked Fidel about my class. Had any of my students showed up?

“Two of them,” he said. “They went up. I think they’re still there.”

I thought at first he was teasing me but then realized he was serious.

“I was distracted trying to get a car to go get you,” he said, shrugging.

They were still there? Nobody had told them what happened and sent them home? Shit! I went up the stairs to my classroom, saying goodbye to any credibility I may have gained with my students that week. But there was another class in there, no sign of my kids. I went back down, shaking my head at Rie and Miguel. There was nothing to do but wait till Monday and explain to my students then.

The three of us sidled out of the school, Miguel hanging to one side as if about to say good night and go back to his house. He still looked abashed, though we’d told him several times he had nothing to feel bad about.

“Come eat with us,” I said.

“Really?” he said.

“Yes, really. Please come.”

And he did. We walked down to the plaza and ordered a big meal and a jug of Pisco sours. A few bites, a few sips, and the disastrous day shifted into a shared joke, something we could laugh about together. We talked and talked, sometimes in English, sometimes in Spanish, covering Peruvian and American historical figures—we toasted Martin Luther King, whose birthday it was—and where exactly each of us stood with regard to the Catholic religion we were all raised in.

When Miguel first asked about this, Rie said gently that in the United States people didn’t usually talk about religion, that asking about it was almost taboo.

“I like to talk about it,” he said simply. And so we did.

After supper, he walked us to a corner near our house, gave Rie the cheek-to-cheek air kiss we’ve become accustomed to, and then turned to me. I did the air kiss and then just hugged him, wanting him to know there were really and truly no hard feelings and that we’d meant it when we’d said earlier that, in a weird kind of way, it had been a good day.

For me anyway it came down to this: When we set out for Huancas, we were teacher and student. By the time we got back, we had become friends. (KK)

The Warriors of the Clouds—Kuélap Fortress in Pictures

The road to Kuélap is not for the faint of heart. For three hours on Sunday, we rode up a narrow dirt road that clung to a series of mountainsides, wondering at times whether the ruined fortress we were going to see would be worth the moments of sheer terror on the trip. 

It was.

The Chachapoyas, who called themselves the Warriors of the Clouds, were a federation of tribes who apparently fought among themselves most of the time but banded together in the face of common enemies. They built their fortress on a 3000-meter mountaintop over about a thousand years starting in A.D. 500, carrying the stones from a quarry a week's walk away. Kuélap fell first to the Incas and then to the Spanish, but the ruins that remain are the most spectacular either of us have ever seen. 

 

There were eight of us in our tour group, and--probably thanks to that road--we had the place almost to ourselves.

Rie was fascinated by the lichens and bromeliads . . .

 

. . . but I got to see the llama.

Augusto, our guide, showed us the tree he said saved Peru--its bark contains quinine, which cures malaria.

The Chachapoyas' circular stone houses had several holes in their floors--some for food storage, some for the remains of their ancestors.

Kuélap is still a working archeological site, and the locals have high hopes it will someday rival Machu Picchu as a tourist magnet. We haven't been to M.P. yet, but it's got a tough act to follow.

 

(KK. Pictures by MK and KK)

The Office of Provisional Normalization

On Monday morning, a jovial, well-rested Peruvian border agent brought his children to work with him, read them our names, showed them our passports, gave us our entry stamps and wished us a good journey. From that point, the day was a blur of towns and transport, too many people crammed into a series of white station wagons, the windows open, the roads dusty, the mountains, rivers, high desert plains and planted fields rushing by.

We went through hilly, twisted-street towns, past adobe huts painted with political slogans, along wide, business-lined boulevards crammed with cars, trucks and moto-rickshaws. In some rural stretches there were so many rickshaws, palm trees and rice fields that I wondered if this was in fact Peru and not Southeast Asia somewhere.

Then we found ourselves stranded in a hot, metal-roofed adobe shed in Bagua Grande, waiting for a colectivo that was promised but nowhere to be found. The young woman on duty in the shed put her feet up against the door frame and watched her telenovela. The five of us—the same five who had waited for the hostel to open in La Balsa—avoided saying out loud that we seemed to be in for a re-run.

But a driver did eventually come. By 9:00 that evening, after a long, slow ride up into the mountains, we arrived at last in Chachapoyas. In two long days, we’d covered 189 miles as the crow flies.

Our first morning here, still exhausted and disoriented, I saw a sign that said something like The Office of Provisional Normalization. “I should probably stop by,” I thought. “Some provisional normalization sounds like just what I need.”

Except for the gleaming white cathedral, the buildings that lined the plaza all looked identical to me at that point—two-story, white colonial buildings with wooden doors, red-tiled roofs and wooden balconies under the second story windows. The streets too seemed impossible to tell apart—there were no street signs, not even placards at the street corners. (Later we learned to look for the address plates over individual doors, which also give the name of the family that lives there.) Everything was dusty, and the sun was hot and so bright I kept reaching for my sunglasses before realizing I already had them on.

Everything we needed to do involved learning new words and navigating new systems, and that morning it all felt overwhelming. We worried that if we plugged in the computer, the 220-volt current would fry it. Finding a laundry service and dropping off our dirty clothes seemed an almost insurmountable task. Every word of Spanish abandoned me, and I felt like we were staggering around, confused, bumbling and blatantly out of place in our gringa-ness.

It didn’t help that when we met the director of the school the night before, he didn’t seem quite sure who we were. He appeared surprised to learn we hoped to arrange home stays, and he kept alluding to some difficulties the school had been experiencing. It would open, he told us, five days later than scheduled.

The delay has turned out to be a good thing, though. Now, five days after our arrival, we are well settled into big, thick-walled, wood-floored rooms that open onto a courtyard full of flowers and small trees. We look out over tile roofs to the mountains to the west and south, and at night the sky is full of stars and the courtyard full of fireflies. Our landlady, Andrea, has a warm smile, honest eyes and a lot of patience. When we were moving in, she indicated she’d like me to come downstairs and sign a piece of paper summarizing our agreement. I understood what she said, but could not get a reply together for the life of me. She just laughed and gave me a big hug, as if to say, “Oh, you poor thing! You’re in way over your head, aren’t you?”

(KK)

We’re getting there though. Staying in one place and catching up on sleep has helped enormously. The streets have started to take on individual identities, and we’re quickly building our web of local landmarks—the school, the market, the vegetarian restaurant, the café with the decent internet connection, the shop with the really good lemon pie.

And our fellow teachers have taken us in hand. One of the first nights, Gregory, the academic director, sent word he wanted to meet us. He was a bit in his cups when we arrived, but kindly and welcoming. He explained the splatters of blood on his shirt with an involved story about a chicken that got caught in a closing door and subsequently needed comforting.

“Where is that chicken?” he asked Fidel, the director of the school and the owner of the pub we were in.

“In the toilet,” said Fidel. I had to hope he meant the bathroom, and in fact, a little later on, Rie discovered there was a live chicken perched on a red bucket in there. Before long, Fidel brought it out to the bar and they all gave it a cuddle.

(KK)

(KK)

(KK)

Then he made us Pisco sours, and Gregory and Tom, another teacher, insisted we carry them to the roof of their lodgings a few doors down. It was a great place, with a view over the rooftops to the cathedral on the square. In the other direction, you could see the lights of the houses climbing up the hill to the west. Gregory pointed out the South African flag he flew from one corner of the roof, the internet router that hung from a telephone pole inside a plastic bucket to protect it from the rain, the few stalks of corn he has sprouted in a pile of clay apparently intended for repairing the house.

A few days later, they took us off on a strenuous but wonderful hike, delivering bits of teacher-to-teacher advice and local knowledge along the way. (“Only eat the cebiche in the market on Wednesdays—that’s when the fresh fish comes in.”) Next up is the trek to Huancas, which Gregory keeps recommending, though in his South African accent it comes out more like “Wankers.”

(KK)

(MK)

We met more of the teachers at a staff meeting last night, including the two kind souls who will teach us Spanish, and this morning we went by the school to pick up our books. The secretary’s desk and the bookcases that normally lined the walls were all pushed into the middle of the room and the computer screen had a cloth draped over it to protect it from the dust. A radio was playing and a painter was rolling blue paint on the walls. In the midst of all this, the secretary was registering two little girls for school, that is, until Fidel sent her out for glue to repair the teacher’s manuals he wanted to give Rie and me. The CD for my audio-based class is missing, but I’ve been assured it will be in hand by Monday.

A little later, in the copy shop/laundry service where I went to pick up our clothes, I found, next to piles of pantyhose and unidentifiable pieces of hardware, something I’ve been looking for for days:  a notebook! With that and a pen in hand, I’m as ready as I can possibly be to start classes on Monday.

Every day has some kind of mistake in it—Rie asked our landlady’s granddaughter where her birthday was, and I apologetically told a woman we met that unfortunately she didn’t speak Spanish very well. And every day there’s some kind of technological breakdown, whether it’s the electric shower head sending out sparks or the power going out entirely. But bit by bit we are becoming provisionally normalized, even coming close to feeling at home.

(KK)