Back on the road, our bus only took us to the larger city of Chimbote, and we would have to find another way to reach Tortugas. There was a shoddy looking taxi with one open seat and a rumbling engine parked on the corner. We asked where the driver was going and he said Tortugas so Steffi got into the front seat while I climbed in the trunk and scrunched up next to an old man with a bucket of strange orange fruit and what may have been dead fish, and we rode off into dusk. As I watched the purple road unfold out of the back window, I felt like a spark burning right now along a fuse and everything behind me was beautiful ashes and everything before me was complex woven twine that I could not see. I was very happy to be alive and riding down that road. And the old man, with his fruit and his fish, had deep wrinkles on his face and hands but I could see there was once a time when he didn’t. The driver of the taxi would not take us down the road to Tortugas, but let us out on the highway at the crossroad. So we put on our packs and walked down the road past cacti and shells while the sun melted pinkish grey into the islands.
We found Cesarín and his family in their restaurant at the end of the road and he made up a spare room while we had two of the most gigantic plates of food meant to be eaten by one person that I had ever seen in my life. We drank guanábana soda and could not finish our dinners, though we nearly threw up trying. So we’d feel better, we waddled ourselves along the beach in the full moon and flew out over the ocean on the swing set we’d found making moonshadows in the silver light. We meditated for a while and talked of things I don’t remember.
During our stay in Tortugas, we never once saw a turtle (which is what the name means) but we encountered many penguins and pelicans—dark, looming phantoms watching over the anchored rowboats—and thousands upon thousands of crustaceans. The shells were almost as abundant on the shore as the black stones—for there was no sand—and when our backpacks and pockets of sweatshirts and pants had been filled, click-clacking with walking, we stepped over them like wildly beautiful garbage. I could have built a house there in the cove and covered the walls with shells. We slept and the mosquitoes sucked our blood. We dreamed of things, and in the morning were awoken by the howls and chirps of the penguins and parrots.
We wanted to buy some fresh fruit for breakfast and Cesarín’s family all told us we’d need to go to Casma. They did not say that Casma was a city, or a store, or a market and we were unsure about this so we went out searching and only a little way down the road we found a building marked “Casma” and knocked on the door. It turned out to be the elementary school and all fifteen of its students came out of their class to greet the silly gringos. And with the entire school marveling at our strangeness we asked, “Where can we buy fruit?” As we waited for the bus that would take us to Casma—which is a city—a great red mountain caught our eyes and whispered our names and made us abandon our quest for apples and things.
Covering ourselves in sunscreen, we walked along the seaside to a little path that went zigzagueando up the mountain. All of the rocks were a deep burning red of pure elemental iron, and when they slid down the slope after our footsteps they made a cool tinkling noise like shards of glass or secret crystals. Up, up, and up we climbed, cutting the soles of our shoes on the rocks, until the lonely desert opened up before us and we could see across the wind-painted sands to infinity. I followed a lizard over boulders until it slinked into a crevice. We jumped around taking pictures of ourselves that looked like flying and Steffi told me a story about how that lizard lived here high up above the world and when he wanted to go down, his friend pelican would scoop him up and take him, gliding out over the sea.
The two of us slid all the way down the mountain and put our feet in the greenblue water near a barnacled stairway, then had a ridiculously huge dinner of rice and sea creatures before nearly passing out. I had been reading The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley—which I had taken from the book exchange in Huanchaco—and somewhere in that essay he said that humans are one of a very few creatures on earth that are able to see in so many colors. And though we can see these colors, this special power is not entirely necessary to our existence. He says that we would be able to hunt and forage and survive without the evolutionary gift of colors. We have it for the sake of seeing beautiful things. Now, I don’t know that this is actually true, but I very much like the idea. So we decided then until forever that we would appreciate the various colors that we always see but very seldom notice, if only for a few bright seconds of every day. The red-orange bottle of guanábana soda, the turquoise tablecloth, the book, and the shadows among them were suddenly the most brilliant beautiful things in the world.
As night began to fall, Cesarín took us out on his fishing boat to bring in the nets he’d cast. We watched the sun set behind the white island of dreams, and once it was dark, the stars came out but the full moon had disappeared. Cesarín found his net and dragged it in, bringing with it all manner of sea creatures. We caught two flounders, an eel, a great crab, and nearly thirty other fish. Once we’d returned to shore, the moonman came crooning to cast his net of starlight over the crinkling sea. The grandmother and her daughters fried up the fish for dinner that night and we feasted like kings and queens.
PenguinParakeet alarm clock – 7:00am.
Cesarín would be spending the day near the white island diving for clams and he agreed to take us to the rocky isle to explore it while he swam. We clambered into his motorboat—which was covered in pelican shit—and took off. Approaching the shore, we scared away the great birds from their perches and they dove and soared away in a great winged army. It seemed an island that was part of some other world, or that I had dreamed of this island once before. We saw sunflower starfish clinging to the moon-white rocks, along with black and red anemone, and gaudy colorful crabs of red and orange and earthquake yellow, deep blue and green and magic purple.
We soaked our pants and sandals in the epic jump from the boat to the rock, but carried on regardless over the guano-painted cliffs. These rocks were wind carven and sharp as knives. It was hard to imagine that a place like this could exist on this earth, such harsh untouched stonegardens tended only by the wind. Lizards skitted around almost invisible and I wondered how they survived and what they ate, for there was no such thing as plants. In some parts, the ground was carpeted in feathers and bones, which held a strange and eerie beauty. There was a hollow between two rocky peaks where the wind howled wild and so very strong that we spread our arms and leaned into it so that it would carry us away through the air to that sweet little beach we’d been looking at so hungrily in the hot sun.
When Cesarín collected us from the island and took us back, we spent some time on the beach collecting more shells and green stones and then swam in the teal water, though it was polluted somehow by some boat somewhere. We slept. We dreamed. And in the morning waved goodbye to Cesarín and his family that cared for us so well. There was a Green Automobile grumbling past and we hitched a ride to the Casma bus station.
THE GREEN AUTOMOBILE, Allen Ginsberg
I have changed here only some names of places and mountains, not because I think it is better this way, but so you may see more what it means to me.
If I had a Green Automobile
I’d go find my old companion
in his house on the Western ocean.
Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!
I’d honk my horn at his manly gate,
inside his dog and three
friends sprawl naked
on the living room floor.
He’d come running out
to my car full of heroic tea
and jump screaming at the wheel
for he is the greater driver.
We’d pilgrimage to the highest mount
of our earlier Misty Mountain visions
laughing in each others arms,
delight surpassing the highest Andes.
and after old agony, drunk with new years,
bounding toward the rainy horizon
blasting the dashboard with original bop
hot rod on the mountain
we'd batter up the cloudy highway
where angels of anxiety
careen through the trees
and scream out of the engine.
We'd burn all night on the eucalyptus peak
seen from Cusco in the summer dark,
forestlike unnatural radiance
illuminating the mountaintop:
childhood youthtime age & eternity
would open like sweet trees
in the nights of another spring
and dumbfound us with love,
for we can see together
the beauty of souls
hidden like diamonds
in the clock of the world,
like Chinese magicians can
confound the immortals
with our intellectuality
hidden in the mist,
in the Green Automobile
which I have invented
imagined and visioned
on the roads of the world
more real than the engine
on a track in the desert
purer than Cruz and
swifter than physical jetplane.
Cusco! Cusco! we'll return
roaring across the Plaza de Armas lawn
which catches the pure emerald flame
streaming in the wake of our auto.
This time we'll buy up the city!
I cashed a great check in my skull bank
to found a miraculous college of the body
up on the bus terminal roof.
But first we'll drive the stations of downtown,
poolhall flophouse jazzjoint jail
whorehouse down Triunfo
to the darkest alleys of Procuradores
paying respects to Cusco's father
lost on the railroad tracks,
stupor of wine and silence
hallowing the slum of his decades,
salute him and his saintly suitcase
of dark muscatel, drink
and smash the sweet bottles
on taxi cabs in allegiance.
Then we go driving drunk on boulevards
where armies march and still parade
staggering under the invisible
banner of reality--
hurtling through the street
in the auto of our fate
we share an archangelic cigarette
and tell each others’ fortunes:
fames of supernatural illumination,
bleak rainy gaps of time,
great art learned in desolation
and we beat apart after six decades…
and on an asphalt crossroad,
deal with each other in princely
gentleness once more, recalling
famous dead talks of other cities.
The windshield’s full of tears,
rain wets our naked breasts,
we kneel together in the shade
amid the traffic of night in paradise
and now renew the solitary vow
we made each other take
in Lima, once:
I can't inscribe here…
… …
… …
How many Saturday nights will be
made drunken by this legend?
How will Old Cusco come to mourn
her forgotten sexual angel?
How many boys will strike the black piano
in imitation of the excess of a native saint?
Or girls fall wanton under his spectre in the high
schools of melancholy night?
While all the time in Eternity
in the wan light of this poem's radio
we'll sit behind forgotten shades
hearkening the lost jazz of all Saturdays.
Amigos, we'll be real heroes now
in a war between our cocks and time:
let's be the angels of the world's desire
and take the world to bed with us before
we die.
Sleeping alone, or with companion,
girl or fairy sheep or dream,
I'll fail of lacklove, you, satiety:
all men fall, our fathers fell before,
but resurrecting that lost flesh
is but a moment's work of mind:
an ageless monument to love
in the imagination:
memorial built out of our own bodies
consumed by the invisible poem--
We'll shudder in Cusco and endure
though blood and wrinkles blind our eyes.
So this Green Automobile
I give you in flight
a present, a present
from my imagination.
We will go riding
over the Andes,
we'll go on riding
all night long until dawn,
then back to your beach, the boardwalk
your house and your friends
and broken leg destiny
you'll ride down the plains
in the morning: and back
to my visions, my office
and eastern apartment
I'll return to Marquette.
HUARAZ, PERÚ
There came a bus that took us up impossibly high to Huaraz, the capital city of Ancash, on a single-lane dirt road with so deep and profound a precipice to its side that you could die just by looking at it. And oh, how it rocked and wobbled and squeezed past trucks full of fruit and gasoline. I had been on many bus rides over mountains, through deserts, and into the jungle, but never had I feared for my life so much as that ride. I kept telling myself that I could not die while watching that horrible movie they had playing on the tiny screens. But I didn’t watch it anyway, for the view from the road was unbelievable. We arrived just as the sun was celebrating its last wonderful moments, illuminating the entire city and the snow-capped mountains around it with a magnificent golden light.
We ambled through the streets, cozy with smell of fireplace and food and burning lamp kerosene, to a hostel owned by one of Cesarín’s many friends. This friend was a gigantic man who told us in his eastern European accent that he was a native of Huaraz, which made us think he’d escaped some troubled past to live a quiet mountain climber’s life in the Andes. Hungry and cold, we were drawn by woodsmoke and pizzavapours to a little cabin-shaped restaurant with crepes and coca tea and a fireplace. We had some beers and talked to an old man about ignorance, ayahuasca, the Pachamama, and other strange and mystical things, then made friends with two girls from Lima that were staying in the room below us. These girls told us of a tour to Chavín de Huantar they would take in the morning and invited us to go along.
We woke up late and sprinted to the market to have some tamales and tea, then rushed to the station to find that there were no available seats anyway. “Bueno,” we said, “we’ll just go to the hot springs.” We went back to the market and bought some bread, bananas, and bottled water for our lunch and started walking to Wilkawaín, some ruins of a pre-Incan civilization. We knew not where we were going but we asked around and everyone--except the policeman that didn’t know right from left--sent us down our merry path. The city fell away behind us and we emerged in the campo along a river where women sat on rocks in the shade and washed their clothes clean in the current. We said “Buenos días” to them and the dogs and the mud-brick houses and mountains and river and seismically green leaves, and they all waved back, “Good morning! Good morning!”
We had our lunch on a rock in the shade and, upon peeling, realized that our bananas were orange—orange the color of sorbet and cloudy sunsets. We ate them with bread and chocolate, a weird but tasty combination, and then explored the ancient labyrinth of tombs much older than the incas. It was all hallways and secret rooms with tiny doors of stone that led to other doors of stone. I reached my hand into a dark air shaft to see how far it would go and found an apple fresh and cold. I put it in my bag because I was so dangerously broke and it looked so cool and juicy. There were no guided tours of the tomb because the passages were so small and winding so we imagined there was a ghost in one room and frightened some more Limeña girls.
We asked for directions to the hot springs and followed pointing fingers down a tiny trail through a small forest to soccer field where the men were cooking over grills and drinking beer, women were sitting in the sun, and kids were running around, giggling and screaming. It could have been everywhere in the world on a warm summer day. We took our trail up ancient stairways and over mountains to strange circular forgotten ruins and down to the river-carved valleys. And all the while the sun was warm and golden as if we’d imagined and dreamed this. But its beauty was too complex to be dreamed and could not be anything but real.
Remembering our experiences in Máncora, we thought that out here in the wilderness far away from anyone we were the perfect targets for thieves. Steffi said to me, “Hey, let’s try out the pepper spray.” And I said “…uh...” while backing away, and she pushed down on that little danger-orange button. Just then, a gust of wind came and we could see in slow motion the death cloud coming out of the canister and drifting right back into her face. She screamed and flailed and ran but it was no good, and she spend several minutes snorting river water hoping it would wash away.
There was a small stone temple just big enough for the crucifix it guarded. We sat down on its ledge and I ate my apple, so sweet and still cold from the tomb. And continuing down the hills, we met a mountain climbing guide who told us he could get us into Chavín for cheap so we gave him our number and then descended the mountain to the hot springs just before closing time. The water was mineral orange and perfectly warm after a long day of walking. I did underwater ballet in my underwear and talked to some Americans passing through.
We bought some red plums in the morning and got on the bus to Chavín de Huantar. It was the most touristy tour of ancient ruins imaginable, and because of this we could not take the tour guide or anything he said seriously. He made us give ourselves applause for showing up. And like a first grade teacher, he would not let us out of the bus unless we put on our jackets in the higher altitudes. We stopped along the way to look at a part of the passing mountains that looked like a map of Peru. “Everyone, take out your cameras,” he said, “and take nice pictures!” We came to a small cold lake high up the road and we were allowed fifteen minutes to go and explore. The guide actually said to us, “Now everyone pair up and hold hands! And walk slowly, everyone! I don’t want to see any running!” If we were not able to walk around because of the altitude, he told us that we could pay some of the people that lived there to carry us on their backs to and from the lake. We tried our best to ignore him, getting ourselves some tea and sitting on the cool ground to admire the really very beautiful lake. He took most of our tour group to lunch at a very expensive restaurant, but we were not fooled by this and got better and cheaper food at a restaurant for locals.
The ruins were dark and beautiful but were swarming with people like the ant colonies of Máncora. Our guide slapped his bamboo pointing stick at all things ancient and explained everything to us at least three times. Yes, he was very nice and he would have made an excellent school teacher, but the youngest person in his audience today was at least twelve. I said to Steffi, “Listen, he’s repeating everything three times.” And when he challenged himself to say “This is an astronomical map” four different ways, we couldn’t hold back our laughter and had to leave the crowd of eagerly listening tourists. I am quite sure the rest of the group hated us and our rude giggles but we didn’t care and just tried to enjoy the intense beauty of the ruins and the mountains without the kindergarten commentaries of our guide.
Chavín de Huantar is famous for the head sculptures protruding from the walls of the temple, and its great stone decorated Raimondi Stela (the thing he was beating with his bamboo stick), but mostly it is that deep within the subterranean passages there stands a great looming obelisk in a beam of light. We were shuffled through tiny passages in a dense line of people to get a moment’s glimpse of this stone. The guards yelled at us angrily, “Hurry up! Keep moving! Get your cameras ready now!” But when we saw the obelisk we didn’t care too much about taking photos and just looked at this great rock that these ancient people carved lovingly with their hands and treated like a god. It radiated an old secret energy in its darkness and though we only saw it for a second, we felt it see back into us. Maybe it was just a rock. But there were people on this earth that put their absolute love into it, and sent all of their prayers and hopes to it, and gave it brilliant life.
The next day in the real world it was Easter and we did not know it until all of the streets were decorated with colored something and the bus tickets doubled in price. I spent everything but two soles on a bus ticket to Lima where I stayed with Jose for a couple of days. Steffi still had money in the bank and had never seen Arequipa or Bolivia so she stayed in Huaraz another day and then continued on. In Lima we watched movies and talked with friends and ate Mama’s good chicken again. I tried to explore the city a little—which is very hard to do when you have very little money—and spent hours being lost and looking for busses. I walked through Kennedy Park, where all of the city’s cats come to lay in the grass and be fed by the public. I ran into a friend I’d first met in Máncora and talked about the road. I took pictures of graffiti, bought myself some underwear, and had one of the best espressos I’ve tasted in a shop as small as a shoe. But Jose was busy with classes and the business project he was starting, and I had to return to Cusco sometime and get the great check that they’d give me for that whole thing about my host family and my not living with them anymore.
CUSCO, PERÚ
I fell again in love with Old Mother Cusco. The rains had gone and the mountainsides looked just a little more golden as the grasses began to dry. The railway to Machu Picchu had reopened and the tourists had returned to the city, filling the streets with colorful life and bustling taxis. I was homeless the first two nights but soon enough found an apartment with no windows near the ferreterías of Limacpampa, the iron district on the taxi-dense roundabout.
I spent my last month in Cusco eating anticuchos on the street and working in a bar called Kilometro 0. I filled my days with trips to the Baratillo, coffee in Trotamundos with Daniel on the balcony overlooking the plaza, or extravagant $3 lunches in the Jewish restaurant at the end of the drug street where the house fell down. Once, to say goodbye and thank you to beloved Cusco, I bought a two-meter square of white plastic, took it into the center of the Plaza de Armas, and folded it into a giant lotus flower. I left it there to be consumed by the city and within seconds of returning to my coffee on the balcony, I watched a father and daughter take the lotus apart and fold up the plastic to be used as a tent or something. It was everything I had dreamed it would be. I visited my family often for lunch, or went to el Mercado de Ttio with my professor, Viviana to have ceviche. And in those days of wonderful poverty I felt like I’d become a part of the city and had truly given myself to her. I was no longer an American student living in Peru for a short time; I was a person living here in this moment and I loved every second.
Daniel and I planned an extravagant Electric Moonlight Party in The Muse and I painted myself and danced like dreams. I worked until three almost every night with Liz and Miguel in Km. 0 and we became good friends telling great secret jokes that the English borrachos would never understand, and battling the cockroaches that skittered across the ceiling, making them fall to the floor like nightmares. We’d dance to the band and play the Red Hot Chili Peppers when the musicians needed a break. And I smoked hookah with some people from France who offered me a place to stay should I ever find myself in Toulouse. I savored every single moment like the rich little chocolate Trotamundos gave you with your coffee, but I never did anything “for the last time.” I said goodbye to Viviana after a long day of shopping for school supplies and ceviche. I said goodbye to the ceviche women in the market, and my students when I dropped off the posters and dictionaries and maps that I’d gotten for them. I said goodbye to Andrés and Carlitos of the Fallen Angel, and Christian and Kati of Bullfrogs. I said goodbye to Steffi when she returned from her adventure, ready to head back to Germany, and I said goodbye to my family, and to Daniel. I said goodbye to Cusco and told them all that I would see them all again, for the world was huge and small at the same time. And I got on my midnight bus to Lima and my airplane to Michigan, crying and staring out the window to the lights of Cusco glittering quietly in the valley.
More to come...
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