“That’s okay,” I heard David say, “that was good. How was it for a first attempt at breathing meditation?”
I stretched my arms out of the water and asked what time it was.
“It doesn’t matter about time,” he said. “What matters is that you forget about it for a while. You breathed. You really breathed. Breathing is life. Don’t you feel like you’ve had a rest?”
Yes, I did. Definitely. I asked him if I had been hypnotized.
“No, just a kind of self-relaxing expanded awareness,” he said. “You can learn to rejuvenate like that instantaneously. Breathing is an involuntary act, and if you can learn to regulate it, you will stay young longer.”
Shit, I thought in a kind of dream, Elizabeth Arden should teach this in her beauty courses. I could hear David talking to me, but I was still spaced out from my own breath. He was talking about animals, and how the ones who lived the longest were the ones that breathed the least. Something about giant tortoises only breathing four times a minute and they live to be three hundred years old. I remember thinking if I had cold blood I’d only breathe four times a minute too. But I had warm blood and I was beginning to feel shivery.
“So, are you interested in living a long time, eh?” he asked.
I shook my head. I felt the champagne bubbles in my brain.
“Living a long time? I don’t know. Are you?”
“Me?” he said.
“No,” I said. “The man standing behind you.”
He smiled. “Am I interested in living a long time?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah,” he answered. “I am, but I don’t think I will.”
There was something in the way he said it that made me shiver. The shiver surprised me.
“Well, nobody could live long in this cold. I’m cold now. What do you say?”
“I say,” he said, “let’s get out of here.”
He turned to face the flickering wall. I stepped slowly out of the water. My teeth clacked together as though they were false and my arms and hands shook so hard I could barely reach for the towel on the nail in the wall. Then as hard as I could I rubbed my arms, legs, feet and torso until I could feel the blood come to the surface and I actually began to tingle with a warm afterglow. My clothes felt cold next to my skin but soon my body heat reflected inside the wool of the sweater and socks.
“I feel wonderful now,” I said. “That water is really something.”
“Take the flashlight out of my pocket and wait for me outside,” said David. “I’ll be there as quick as I can get dry.”
The cold mountain air must have registered somewhere around fifteen degrees, but it was fresh and clear. I walked around the side of the pool shelter and looked out over the river and the dark looming mountains above. Life was a novel, I thought to myself. Two months ago I never could have predicted in my wildest imagination that I would be here doing this. And I was really loving it. I was also learning that trusting the best instincts in myself had its virtues. You could actually space out on them.
I felt suddenly hungry and when those pangs came I knew I should eat immediately or my blood sugar would drop.
“Okay,” said David, fully dressed, rubbing his hands together and smiling. “Let’s go up and get some grub. They’ll have hot milk waiting for us and some Indian stew made of meat and vegetables and mountain herbs.”
He blew out the candle, stuffed it into his pocket and said we’d need it later in our rooms. He also suggested that I use the river for the bathroom now because later it would be much too cold to make the trek.
I squatted behind a rock and used some Kleenex I had stashed in my pocket. Climbing the cold stone stairs, I wondered how the cold would be when I tried to sleep.
“Don’t worry about sleeping,” said David, once again seeming to read my mind. “It’ll all come in its own time.”
If he had said that an hour before I would have assumed he meant something else.
The radio soccer game was on full blast when we walked into the FOOD building on the road above. Runny-nosed children scampered back and forth in between the tables that were set up for tourists who might be exploring the area and want to eat. One younger woman cooking had a child at her skirts and another strapped to her back. She wore the customary white starched hat with the black ribboned brim even though it was night time.
David called for some hot milk and stew and we talked about food. I told him how much I loved “junk food” and he told me how bad it was to eat. I told him I knew that. I loved it anyway. He talked about how important it was to take care of the body because at the same time you’d be taking care of your spirit. He said it was just a question of chemistry. I said I wasn’t very good at that either. He gave me a run down on food-combining and I said, yes, I had heard most of it before. As he talked, I reflected on how he had been all evening. He seemed compelled to teach me everything there was in as fast a time as possible. He was telling me I should relax, yet he himself was driven. He was criticizing my junk-food habits, but he had them too. Sometimes he sounded almost pompous and presumptuous. Sometimes he didn’t seem to really be enjoying the life he said I should relax and enjoy more.
It was funny; I was hacking Gerry about letting himself go so he could know more who he was and David was doing the same thing with me. I wondered what Gerry would think if he could see me now. I thought of my theme song, “If They Could See Me Now.” I wondered what the audience in Vegas would think if I came out and gave them a few jokes about spiritual discovery in the Andes. I really seemed to be two people—or ten people—I didn’t know. Yet was I an actress because I was more closely in touch with some of the roles I had played in other lives?
The woman with the child on her back came to our table. She was carrying hot milk and stew. I scooped it up as though eating might go out of style.
It was delicious, spiced with mountain herbs I had never heard of. I sopped up the natural juices with the thick homemade heavy bread rolls. They reminded me of my happiest time as a child camping out in Virginia when the world and life seemed simple.
“Tomorrow,” said David, “we’ll take a long walk. I’ll show you some of the territory, and you’ll see for yourself why I love this place.”
He led me across the road to our hotel. The stars were so close I felt that I could reach out and pluck them like plums. I could almost hear the surrounding mountains sway under them. The Andes were not like the Bhutanese Himalayas. They felt lower and more spread out. The environment wasn’t as isolated, and because of the pervasive Peruvian Indian culture, I didn’t feel as insignificant as I had high above the world with the Bhutanese lamas.
Our rooms smelled dank and dusty, and I wondered who else had slept there. There was a good five-degree drop in temperature when I walked inside. David handed me the candle, said he had another for himself, and said goodnight.
“By the way,” he said, “just a little tip about sleeping in a cold climate—if you sleep with no clothes on under your poncho, you’ll find it much warmer.”
I couldn’t understand. I was intending to put on everything I brought.
“No,” he said, “the body generates its own aura heat. Try it. You’ll see what I mean.”
I said goodnight. I didn’t want to hear any more from him. I took off my clothes under the poncho. I crawled in under the wool blanket on the cot and prayed (so to speak) that I would get warm. My feet were ice. I waited. Since the alpaca wool was soft, it felt nice. I waited some more. I felt I was watching my own pot boil. I calmed my mind and my chattering teeth as much as I could. I thought of my electric blanket by the ocean and how I had loved to sleep in a cold rainstorm with the windows wide open and the blanket turned up high. Right that minute, as I lay in the wilds of the Andes, that electric blanket was my favorite part of an advanced civilization. I thought of Gerry again. It was nice being without him. I thought of how impossible it would be for me to describe what I was up to, to him. I wondered where he was. I wondered
if he was really seeing it. I thought of my show. Where were my gypsies tonight?—my dancers … at Joe Alien’s having cheeseburgers and gossiping about how the big stars were not nearly so all-around talented as they were? I thought of what it was to be a star when you really weren’t all that sure you deserved it.
Soon I realized my muscles were relaxing from the warmth of the space between my body and the covers. It was the space that was warm, not the covers. I suddenly understood that most of what we didn’t understand in our lives was what we couldn’t see. The invisible truth was the truth that required the most struggle to find. Seeing wasn’t believing—not at all. Looking was what it was more about.
With a kind of relaxed shiver I fell off to sleep, with only the sound of silence. Then somewhere behind the building I heard pigs snorting.
Chapter 21
“No theory of physics that deals only with physics will ever explain physics. I believe that as we go on trying to understand the universe, we are at the same time trying to understand man. Today I think we are beginning to suspect that man is not a tiny cog that doesn’t really make much difference to the running of the huge machine but rather that there is a much more intimate tie between man and the universe than we heretofore suspected.… the physical world is in some deep sense tied to the human being.”
—DR. JOHN A. WHEELER
The sun rose over the mountains about five-thirty A.M. It didn’t stream into my room because there were no windows but the contrast from the cold of the night was so pronounced I could feel the warmth of the first rays even through the walls. My poncho lay comfortably around me. I had been warm all night.
I stood in my bare feet on the cold earth floor and thought what contradictory logic it was getting dressed now when the sun was out, and undressed during the cold night. I knew the mountain air would be fresh and sharp and because of the altitude the sun would burn. I put on my California sun hat and walked outside. I could smell morning smoke from across the road and as I rounded the Plymouth I saw David sitting on a mud wall watching the men from the day before pat their square bricks into what would ultimately be the foundation of a house they were building.
“Good morning,” he said. “How was it last night?”
“Just like you said. Nude meant warmth. I wouldn’t have believed it but there it was.”
“That’s beginning to become a habit with you, isn’t it?”
“What is?”
“You’re finally believing because it is.”
“Yeah, well. What’s for breakfast?”
“They boiled your eggs for you. So all you need now is a bag and some salt. Let’s get some hot milk and rolls.”
We walked into the food room and the woman with the baby on her back smiled openly, with a kind of tacit understanding that the two-room love affair that David and I were conducting was just another strange North American custom.
“They don’t ask personal questions around here,” he said. “Anything we do is anything we do.”
We sat next to a window and I saw the women from the evening before continue to pound their grain.
“They are separating the wheat from the chaff,” said David with a wink. He certainly did wink a lot. “We’ll have bread made from those very wheat kernels in a day or two.”
In the morning light I could see that the tile roof on our adobe hotel was red and around the women were roosters with feathers of the same color.
David leaned back in his chair and watched me. I guess he had decided to grow a beard because he hadn’t shaved and probably couldn’t have if he wanted to. He really did have a handsome face.
“Did you sleep well, did you dream?” he asked.
“I can’t remember. I was mostly pleased with being warm enough.” I didn’t feel like being analyzed.
We munched our rolls and hot milk and I peeled an egg and ate it. In a place like this a person didn’t need much except maybe more of themselves.
“Can we go for a walk?” I asked.
“Sure. Great idea.”
We stepped outside into the sunlight. The air felt thin and crisp against my face. My heart raced slightly with the altitude. I stretched my arms out beside me and breathed and lifted my face into the sun.
I loved mountains more than any other part of the Earth. To me they had been through so much and seemed so patient and resigned and wisely silent. They represented every extreme I could think of—height, depth, bottom, top, grandeur, insignificance, struggle, attainment—everything. And regardless of what adversity befell a mountain it seemed to tower with its steadfast resilience when it was over, even if it erupted from inside itself.
“Let’s walk down by the river,” said David. “Want to brush your teeth?”
I had my toothbrush in my back pocket and as we walked down the stone stairs and passed the mineral pool bathhouse David ran ahead of me, skipping with his arms outstretched almost like a kid from kindergarten during recess. He skipped across the grassy river bank tilting his head from one side to another in sheer childish glee.
“I love it out here!!” I heard him yell to the river. “You river—you are rushing so fast—why? Where are you going that you have to be on time!”
I laughed with a kind of amazement and ran up to him. “I love the water,” he said, “excuse me. Here, over here is another mineral pool for drinking, or tooth-brushing, or washing.” He ran with great leaps to the water and knelt down, put his head under and came up laughing and sputtering in the sunlight. His salt-and-pepper hair dripped like a bowl around his face and he smiled with such playful abandon that I felt like a child too.
I knelt beside the pool and looked into it. Patches of white sulphur film swam on top. A slow current from beneath fed fresh running bubbles into the center.
David cupped his hands and drank. “You have to get used to the taste but it’s sensational for the system; cleans out the impurities and settles your digestion.”
I dug out my toothbrush, dipped it into the water and tasted it on my tongue. It was like medicinal salt.
“You’re not sad today, are you?” I asked him.
“No, I’m never sad when I’m outside. It’s too real here to be sad. Cities make me sad because people care too much about the wrong things. When you’re in touch with this, you’re in touch with people.” He shook his wet hair into the air and sprawled out on his back with his head on his hands looking up at the sky.
I finished brushing my teeth, stood up, stretched in the sunlight and we began to walk.
I opened and shut my eyes blinking into the cloud-puffed brilliant blue sky. God, it was beautiful. And it was even more beautiful when I thought that beauty simply existed for the sake of itself. Beauty didn’t need a reason and couldn’t be explained. It just was. It didn’t have anything to do with anyone else. It didn’t need to be shared to be appreciated. Beauty was beauty. And it was necessary like food and water.
I felt David walking beside me relaxed and unassuming.
“Feel better?” he asked.
“Yeah, I feel good,” I said, partially wondering at the same time what it would feel like to feel totally good, feel totally myself … to feel that I knew myself completely. I felt like a walking cliché. So what else was new? Wasn’t everybody looking for the same feeling—to know themselves? Three blue birds sat on a tree limb looking down at me as we passed under them. They didn’t even blink. Their audacity made me chuckle out loud.
The Mantaro River bubbled and rushed beside us. I picked up a tree branch and began to drag it behind me. I liked the feeling of having nothing to do but drag a tree branch.
“David?” I asked, breaking what I could feel was a reverie of his own, “do you think there is any such thing as human nature?”
He looked up and took a deep breath. “I don’t think so. No,” he said. “I think we humans are taught most everything we feel. I think people can do and be and think anything … it depends on what we learn.”
I dragged the branch behind m
e thinking of the time I had spent in China. It was that trip that had made me come to the same conclusion. The Chinese had acted brutally and cruelly with each other in their bitter past because that was the behavior of the times, the mode of the day, the attitude to be observed in order to sustain the pecking order of the class system.
But Mao had said the Chinese people were a blank piece of paper on which something beautiful could be written. He had believed that human nature was basically a question of education … you could educate people into observing behavior patterns that were more democratic, more fair, more kind. In fact, he had used a kind of militant sledgehammer approach in the education of fairness. People were forced to be fair through education and reeducation. They were all required to participate in the self-criticism sessions on every level. No one was excused from participation. It was a gigantic, monumental effort in group therapy directed toward changing the patterns of the past. And it seemed to work. Privacy and the right not to participate were not respected, but then the country was in such big trouble everyone realized they had to pull together. So to me, the overwhelming characteristic of the New China had been the people working together to change what they believed to be their basic natures.
Modern China now said a handful of chopsticks held together tightly was more unbreakable than one pair. And as they held together, they were allowing themselves to totally reevaluate the value system they had held sacred for centuries. They seemed to understand that they were revolutionizing the priorities that they had thought were immutable. And the big lesson to them seemed to be what they were learning about themselves.
I often thought about what it must be like to find out that you are not necessarily competitive or territorial or jealous or materialistic. Maybe the real human conflict wasn’t about what we really believed we were or were not, but what we actually could be if we allowed ourselves the option of trusting the possibilities of our own spiritual potential. And if our own potential was to be more spiritual, then where did the new Chinese come in? I could find nothing spiritual in the New China. In fact, they seemed to ridicule spiritual concepts, almost afraid that spiritual notions would thwart their revolution.
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