Huancavelica, Peru May 19-21, 1979

Sue and I spent a quiet morning in Huancayo until it was time for our train to Huancavelica.  It was another long ride through interesting, and very different, territory.  We passed through a narrow valley, bounded on either side by a craggy mixture of mixture grey and red – and something very black – rock.  Thin spines of rock divided the green and golden fields of hard-working peasants into irregularly-shaped little pieces – a crazy, creative patch-work quilt.  We saw several herds of llamas, some small flocks of sheep, and a few horses, free-roaming and nibbling on the well-cropped grass.  Slim pickings indeed.

 

We passed by about a half-a-dozen villages, collections of once white adobe houses with red-tiled roofs and wooden doors and window sashes. The picturesque quaintness of these villages belied the grinding poverty of the people who lived within them, almost all indigenous.  In a couple of the villages the train slowed just enough to enable some very enterprising – and very fast – vendadores – women, girls, and young boys – with baskets filled with empanadas, mandarinas, and coca – to jump aboard, cruise the aisles hawking their goods, and jump off the next time the train slowed.  I wondered if they walked back home, or waited for another train, or maybe hitched a ride.  We bought a couple of vegetable empanadas – still hot! – and a couple of manarinas – very sweet and juicy.  And much better than our usual bread-tomato-cheese sandwich.

 

We rolled into Huancavelica just before nightfall.  The town is in a dramatic setting – nestled in a small bowl-shaped basin, surrounded by high walls of craggy, forboding, almost menacing looking rocks, and especially so in the last light of day.  We were ‘welcomed’ by a group of drunken guardias: ‘how beautiful – ‘bootiful’ – gringas!’  Although they were keen to help us find a hotel, we eschewed their offers of ‘assistance’ and went in search of one recommended in our guidebooks: the Hotel San Francisco.  It’s very cheap, and reasonably clean.  Just fine for a night or two.  We met a couple of French Canadians at the hotel who were infatuated with both the town of Huancavelica and countryside around it.  They’ve been here for several days.  They said it seemed like a safe and friendly place and encouraged us to walk around.  

 

So the next morning we checked out the town, and wandered into a couple of shops selling alpaca ponchos and leather bags.  In one of the leather working shops I pulled out my calculator and started toting up the prices of various items and what they were worth in Canadian dollars.  The old guy in the shop was totally enamoured with the ‘caculadora’ and wanted to buy it.  But he couldn’t make it work for the life of him – he just kept punching more numbers out and watching them light up in the read-out.  But that didn’t dissuade him.  He asked how much I would sell it to him for, and I said 5000 soles – around $15 Canadian.  He smiled and shook his head, and I figured that was the end of that.

 

We continued on into the market and and admired the wonderful old-style woven mantas of the women here, with their more subdued colours, the hand-woven pants of some of the men, and the woven wool dresses of some of the younger children, and the fine old balconied buildings – broken-down colonial, suggesting a grandeur long gone by, the public square, flowered and tranquillo, and the pleasant greetings of almost all we met.  We didn’t buy anything except some wonderful bread – some coffee, and some delicious jugos.  Then found the bus station and bought our tickets for Ayacucho, tomorrow. 

 

We hiked on up the hill behind town, past women washing in a little stream, kids playing, sheep grazing.  Everyone we passed greeted us with a friendly ‘A donde va? Passeando? Muy bien, muy bien. Hasta luego!’  (“Where are you going?  Just walking?  Very good, very good.  See you later!”)  Some of them stopped what they were doing to chat a while longer.  All of them wished us well – “que lo vaya bien” or “vaya con dios’.  

 

            I didn't take a picture until we were well beyond where the women were washing...

We decided to follow one of the small streams into what looked like a pleasant valley.  As we hopped from rock to rock over and through the stream, the steep sides of the valley walls suddenly loomed closer, casting our path into deep shadow.  But then, just as suddenly, the valley would open up into a grassy glade, or a delightful juvenile ‘forest’ of recently planted eucalyptus, where rays of sun filtered through the silvery blue-green leaves, in shimmers of light and dark – and the wind played whispered tunes.  

 

After a time we clamboured up the steep rocky bank, puffing and panting (still short of breath from altitude) until we reached our first resting spot, a patch of grass and lichen, wild-flower dotted, overlooking the stream now several meters below.  We sat and dreamed our separate dreams – drifting in the peaceful quiet of the place – until we both ‘awoke’, and agreed it was time to attack the slope behind us.  

                                                Sue, at our first resting spot

It was a challenging climb.  But we managed – step by step, breath by breath – to get to the top, where we came across a pretty substantial dirt road – perhaps the road to the mine?  We walked along it for a while, past campesinos working away in their almost vertically-sloping fields on either side of the road.  Then the valley opened up a little into a U-shaped blanket of wheat and potato fields.  Campesinos – mostly men – were harvesting and threshing wheat, their machetes flashing and slashing rhythmically, without interruption.   Women were planting potatoes, and harvesting those long yellow tubers that look potato-ish, but are starchier, and here are called ‘ocas’ – perhaps related to, or the same as, taro root or poi.  

 

Everyone we passed – the machete-wielding men, the potato-planting women, their backs permanently bend from their work, and from carrying loads too heavy for too long, and the ragged children with their weather-reddened, almost blackened cheeks – everyone greeted us with big smiles, and friendly expressions of ‘hello’ and well-wishes.  The children called out “tome photo gringa!”– “take my picture”.  Whether this was prompted by hopes of receiving some candy or money in return, who knows.  The French, in particular, tend to give ‘bon-bons’ to kids, and kids will often greet us with ‘bon-bon, bon-bon’.  But I don’t carry candy, and don’t give money.  I do carry small toys – balloons, whistles, crayons – and toothbrushes.  But this time we didn’t stop, and didn’t take photos.  Sometimes I prefer to rely on my brain – and my heart – to record the sights.  Sometimes it is all just too overwhelming – and snapping a picture seems too trite, too banal.  Perhaps I will regret it later....

       Some photos taken as we walked.  This is the highest we got - plenty high enough!

 

On our way home we had a bite to eat at a local eatery got back to the hotel as night fell.  Our duena served us a lovely hot tea with milk.  Two young local lads – one of them an accountant for a mining company here and the other a local guardia – joined us for awhile.  We talked about Peru, politics, archaeology and our travels.  It wasn’t until the end of our conversation that they asked us how old we were and if we were married… .  

 

The next morning we went to the market for some bread, cheese, tomatoes and fruit for the bus ride.  The leather-work man from yesterday had followed me there, wanting to speak to me about the calculadora.  He asked me to come by his shop in the afternoon when he would have 5000 soles to pay me for it.  But when I got there it turned out he had only 2000 soles, but was willing to give me one of his beautiful hand-made and creatively tooled leather brief-cases.  Although I liked it very much, I told him I still had too far to go, and couldn’t carry something that big, so I had, regretfully, to decline his offer.  Again, as yesterday, he just smiled, and then promised to come by tomorrow morning at 5:30 am! – before our bus left – with the 5000 soles!

 

Back in the room later that evening I was busy repairing sweaters and crocheting by the poor light of our one miserable light bulb, when who appears but the leather man – WITH the 5000 soles!  So I gave him the calculator.  He then told me it was not for himself, but for his son, an engineering student in Lima.  And even though he couldn’t himself make it work, he was sure his son could.  I hoped his son would appreciate the thoughtfulness and the obvious sacrifice, his father had made to buy this gift for him.

 

Now, after dinner, I find myself thinking not just about the leather man, but about so many of the people of Peru that I have met or spent time with – the gourd-carving papa in Cochas Grande with the ragged and hungry children; the infertile woman with the pet pig who wondered if I wasn’t afraid of the cold; the woman who baked such wonderful little loaves of brown bread in an outdoor clay oven rather than her new indoor electric range; the cowboy who loved horses and plants and painted beautiful pictures; the writer who took me to Puebla and gave me a book of his stories.  And all the people I see every day – the campesinos working in their steep-slope patchwork fields, the heavily-laden women planting potatoes, washing clothes, all eking out a living, one day at a time, who consistently smile and wish us well; all the ragged, dirty red-cheeked children, with the brilliant radiant smiles; and so many more, so many, many more…. .  Sometimes it is all just too much.

 

Wild high-altitude dreams… 

In my listless nights here in the mountains (a sign of altitude sickness), I have had two quite strange dreams.  Both of my father.  The first one is of him and me, and a woman, his wife, and at times my ‘mother’, but not my mother, and assorted other children, all in a rough wooden cabin somewhere in ‘el campo’.  My dad has apparently gone mad, and is sitting with a shot-gun over his knee, threatening to shoot himself, or us, or…?  I kept trying to talk to him, and to this other ‘mother’ – pleading, reasoning.  I was trying to convince him to come with me to some secret special place, a place known to us all, but neither he nor this ‘mother’ would come.  Finally I left them there, saying I was going to this place, and started running through a kind of Esperanza landscape – close-built houses, dirt roads, trees and mist – hiding behind walls and hedges so that dad and ‘mother’ couldn’t see where I was going.  I was going to get the police, to get help… .  I woke up several times and tried to stop the dream, but it carried on again once I fell asleep.

 

I had the second dream last night.  Dad and I were driving down the highway, in separate cars, but talking to each other as though we were in the same one: which way should be turn, how to keep right together as we drove.  Then suddenly I was on a bike and we were going uphill.  I had to get down and walk the bike as dad drove along beside me.  Then, on our right, a platform like a high school auditorium stage, where a group of young boys were playing musical instruments – rock.  We stopped and chatted with them and suddenly were all playing ping-pong, except that I had lost my bat, and the pool cue the boys lent me was broken.  But by this time my sister Mary-Jo had joined us, with a good bat and a big beautiful smile and very long legs and very blond hair, and I was walking into oblivion looking for my bat, which I somehow felt Mary-Jo had… .  Dad called out something to me, like good luck finding it, or see you later, and added the name ‘Potatoes’.  The boys asked what he had called me, and when he said it again ‘Potatoes’, ‘I call her Potatoes’, they all laughed, and I looked down at my green double-knit sweater (which I am still, of course, wearing), and felt like the true little-fat-girl, and cringed as I walked away, listening to their laughter fading in the background…

 

Strange and disturbing high altitude dreams.  I’ll be glad to get to lower altitudes.

 

Note:  My father died, of cancer, when I was 18.  He never owned a gun.