Sucre, Bolivia June 19-23, 1979
We took a German-made ferrobus from La Paz to Sucre – all plastic and chrome, slick and clean, smooth, fairly quiet, with great service. But… it was not really the right kind of transport for the kind of service they were running. It was more like a commuter train – narrow bench seats with no leg-room, even for a shorty like me, very hard and straight seat-backs that ended at the shoulder, so no way to rest your travel-weary head. Add to that the discomfort of a heating system on overdrive, and folkloric music being played beyond distortion levels, the same tape, over and over, until well after midnight. There was no way to get comfortable (and I tried every position known to long-distance travellers). Finally, in desperation, I got up and went to the front of the car, where the bathroom was, and lay down on the floor in front of the door to the next car, where at least it was cooler. Still, I passed a totally sleepless night….
However… Sucre looks like quite a nice little town. A clean, colonial capital, fairly quiet, with all sorts of churches and quite a few parks. Also good looking restaurants and street food! The market was full of lovely looking fruits and vegetables – apples, oranges, bananas, tomatoes, lettuce, beans, cauliflower, beets and baby carrots – an old campesina dressed in black filled my bolsa with them for just one peso. Great looking bread and all sorts of saltenas, triangular-shaped bread pastries filled with cheese and onion or a meat mixture. Cheese, great blocks of cream-coloured hard and many-holed cheeses; olives, and plenty of picante peppers, red and green. We were the only gringos in the market, yet hardly anyone took any notice of us. A few of the vendadores called us over to buy their lettuces or mandarinas. The people here seem much friendlier than in La Paz. Perhaps best of all, it’s not freezing cold here like it was in La Paz.
This morning I went to an alojamiento (lodging) where Dona Maxima (indeed an ample lady with a perpetual kerchief around her head) who had implored us yesterday to come back and look at her mantas, here called awayus. She wasn’t there when we arrived, but another woman, clearly someone who in previous times would have been called a simpleton, was crouching in the doorway of the one-room hotel, capitalizing on the only light source in the room to chop some onions for soup. She called to a man, who was sitting outside the door, little mirror in hand, tweezing hairs out of his chinny-chin-chin. This feels like a more and more familiar sight: women working, men preening… He insisted that I come in: ‘siga y saca’. Trying hard not to step on the dinner preparations, which were scattered all over the floor, and stepping around the various mantas, which appeared to be serving as beds for quite a number of people, I began to search through walls stacked right up to the ceiling with mantas. I pulled out a couple that interested me, more intrigued with the scene around me (the smiling simple-minded woman still busily preparing the day’s meal, squatting in the door’s light, humming to herself; the beard-plucker now pulling mantas, bolsitas, and belts out of boxes and handing them to me.
Dona Maxima returned and began pulling even more mantas out of the stacks on the walls – “linda, pura alpaca linda, anamalitos, linda fina es – y barito!” In fact her starting prices were well above what I’d encountered elsewhere, but it was clear she was a seasoned saleswoman, so I offered her less than half of her price, and started walking towards the door. I’d only just reached it when she agreed to my price. In fact, as usual, I felt like a criminal paying only 300 pesos - $15 – for weavings as beautiful as these, and the scene we left behind us – the three of them huddled in their dark, dirty hovel, a bed in one corner and a gas stove in the other, mantas covering every nook and cranny – didn’t, and doesn’t, make it any easier. And makes me wonder, even more, what the living conditions of the manta weavers are like. What does Dona Maxima pay them for these? Leaving, as coming, we noticed the cat, napping in the sun, curled up amidst a mountain of coca leaves, also being sold by Dona Maxima.
I realize that I now take scenes like this so casually – all of these raggedly dressed people, mostly women, skirt zippers broken, buttons missing, pinned together nylon and dacron people, living their lives on the street, selling their bales of coca leaves, the matches and elastics. Pavement people, the ‘life’ of the market. And now comes back to me in particular the image of one woman, a youngish campesina, siting in the white-white doorway of a colonial building near the centre of town, away from the dirt and confusion of the market, with a little plastic clear-topped box on her knees. In the box several beautiful little roosters made of marzipan(?), and some other more conventionally shaped home-made sweets. Lovely, clean, and beautifully made. I first saw her at 10 am. When we passed her again, around 4 pm she was still there, seemingly not having moved, and so were all her roosters. I wondered if she sold anything at all, or if she is still there now, plastic box on her knees, hoping to sell enough to buy food for her family. ‘A hard life’ hardly says it.
I walked on into the town centre, filled with tea-shops and tiendas – a very alive, with-it place. There is a large population of young people here, who seem more with-it, better dressed, more sophisticated, more casual and less inhibited, more ‘American’ than their counterparts in Ecuador and Peru. Quite a few of them have motorcycles, and even new cars. But more surprising to me is how many of them look more Indian than Latino. For the first time I am seeing truly ‘together’ Indian urbanites – girls in white lab coats, girls and guys studying as they walk along, or sitting on a bench in the park; slightly older folks in suits or nice skirts and sweaters, obviously engaged in some sort of business; waiters and waitresses in smart restaurants; shop attendants very well dressed and well spoken.
On the other hand, the campesinos I have seen in the city, the ones identifiable by their beautiful coarse woven wool clothing and their almost always bare feet, are ragged and dirty. They look very poor indeed. Some of the women sell produce and artesenia items in the market or on the street; the men act as porters, carrying great sacks of cement, or try to sell mantas to tourists, or stand on street corners chewing coca. The men are all thin, and quite reserved. They barely look up as we pass, and usually look away, but if we happen to catch their eye, they do not smile.
Last night Sue and I went to the plaza which was once again filled with strollers engaging in ‘la pasada’. This is a Spanish tradition whereby men parade clock-wise around the plaza, and women counter-clockwise, while couples new and old sit on benches around and within the plaza. We hadn’t even done a ‘round’ before we noticed two young black boys chatting, as they strolled, in French. We asked where they were from – Haiti, they said. It turned out they were medical students here in Bolivia, almost finished their MDs. One of them decided he needed sleep, so took off, but the other, Antoine, strolled around with us for quite a while, sharing his impressions of Bolivia. He says he’s ‘bored’ here as there is nothing to do. He thinks the communists will get in again in the upcoming elections, that Bolivia will come more under the influence of Cuba and Castro-ism, but that for now the heaviest influence now exerted is by the USA. No surprises there…
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