OUT ON a LIMB
Page 30
Past the small streams that emptied into the Mantaro, we skipped and walked and skipped again. Blue birds and sparrows darted in and out of tree branches. A hand-woven swinging bridge swayed under us when we crossed back and forth across the river. Time passed but time stood still. I could honestly say I felt happy. Now I could honestly say I didn’t care what time it was. Time wasn’t feeling. It wasn’t action. It was only time. If only I could keep the negative thoughts of my other world—my real world—out of my head.
We raced into Llocllapampa perspiring and exhausted, put our knapsacks in our rooms and in the afternoon light we sat in the “eating” hall and had warm milk and cold rolls. Outside, the woman with the child on her back pounded wheat from chaff while three men from the village chewed coca leaves and packed dirt and straw into square blocks for what would be their new home.
Chapter 22
“I cannot believe for a moment that life in the first instance originated on this insignificant little ball which we call the earth.… The particles which combined to evolve living creatures on this planet of ours probably came from some other body elsewhere in the universe.”
—THOMAS A. EDISON
The Diary and Sundry Observations
Next day the morning was crisp and for some reason seemed hopeful and new. I looked at my ring watch. It was my favorite piece of jewelry. I had been around the world with that ring watch. It said 9:00 A.M., July tenth. I wondered how the weather was in London. I visualized it somehow. I saw rain and murky streets and people dripping with umbrellas. I saw Gerry coming out of a subway walking toward Parliament. I wondered if my visualization was real or fantasy.
I put on my combat boots, slacks, blouse and sweater and walked outside.
Across the street David was sitting on the stone wall.
“I thought we’d go into Ataura,” he said, “but first let’s get you some more eggs. Not much of a gourmet menu up here, is it?” He winked and did a hitch step as he disappeared into the restaurant.
The lady with no teeth and the baby came out with a basket of vegetables which she took to our car.
“Were taking her too,” said David, handing me some hot milk and two peeled eggs. “She needs to sell her vegetables and doesn’t often get a lift.”
She smiled with toothless delight and got into the back seat. I wished I could get her fitted for some real-world dentures.
The morning light across the Andes was different from the Himalayas. The shadows fell with broader strokes and were more horizontal because the mountains were more spread out. The mountains looked more like humped plains.
Golden slashes of wheat waved gently in the morning breeze. Sheep and cows and llamas ambled lazily together on the roadside interspersed every so often with toddling babies whose mothers carried other children in orange-pink pouches on their backs.
I ate my eggs. David spoke in Spanish to the woman who sat in the back seat. He translated for me. She was talking about wild flowers that could be ground up into a paste, heated and placed on the sinuses to relieve pressure. She said there was a medical use for every herb in the hills and we could buy them all in Ataura. Her baby slept so soundly it looked like dead weight in her lap.
I lifted my arm and hand across the back of the seat. The woman saw my ring watch. She touched it and her hands were warm. She said something in Spanish. David said, “She wants your ring. She thinks it’s beautiful and wants it.”
Immediately I felt my mind clutch. Would I give my favorite piece of jewelry and my connection to the real world (because it was a watch) to this lady that I didn’t know? I watched David watch me.
The woman took my finger in her hand and removed the ring watch. I didn’t resist. She clutched it in her hand, then looked up at the sun.
“What would make her happy?” I asked David. “Ask her, would you please? What would make her really happy?”
He did. She answered, “Rings and things.”
I said, “That would make you happier than happiness?”
“Oh, yes,” she said with conviction, “because it would mean my family was comfortable.” She turned the ring over on her finger posing her hand out in front of her and smiling. “What is that?” she asked next, pointing to our box of Kleenex. “Is it like toilet paper?”
I handed it to her, first demonstrating how the pop-up box worked. She seized the box and turned it over and over examining each edge. Then slowly she pulled out the first tissue. When the tissue under it replaced it she seemed startled. But she didn’t make a game out of it; she conserved the tissues. She folded her hands across her baby on her lap and looked at the ring watch. I didn’t say anything. I watched the scenery, feeling ashamed that I was afraid she would keep it. Why couldn’t I just sweepingly say, “It’s yours. I can get another one later.” But I couldn’t. It represented personal attachments and memories. But it wasn’t just the ring watch. It was any “thing” that I had had a personal experience with. The monetary value of the “thing” had nothing to do with it. It was the emotional attachment. It was almost as though “the things” were extensions of an investment in love. Those “things” were always there when I wanted them. They never went away. They were permanent. All I had to do was reach out and touch them and they were there. I could depend on them. They made me feel safe because behind them were the people whose love I wanted the most. Was that then the basis for greed? Was it mostly a manifestation of the need for human love that we somehow never got enough of? Was a security blanket or a teddy bear the beginning of the acquisitionary replacement of love? I gazed out at the morning feeling David feel me thinking. Up ahead of us, looming into the white clouds, were high mountains covered with ice and snow.
“Those are the Huaytapallana Ice Peaks,” said David.
I looked out at them. They seemed above the real world—white and graceful and stark. I wondered what the weather was like on the mountains. I wondered if Shangri-La lay beyond. I wondered what it would be like to try to get there on foot.
“Have you been to the Ice Peaks?” asked the woman.
“No,” I answered. “Have you?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “But many people have seen the flying discs that come from behind the peaks. Do you have flying discs in your mountains in the United States?”
I turned around in my seat and looked into her eyes. They were innocent and casual.
“Yes,” I said. “I guess so. But I’ve never seen one.”
“They leave marks when they land,” she said. “And if you come too close they get frightened and go away. They come out at night, when it’s too cold for us to watch them. Lots of them go back and forth across the sky.”
I took a piece of Kleenex out of the box and blew my nose.
“What are they, do you think?” I asked.
“I have no opinion. I only listen,” she said.
“Well, what are they doing?”
“Scientists come here to look at them. And they say we are nothing compared to those discs.”
“What do you think the discs are doing?”
“They come from Venus.”
“From Venus?”
“Yes, the scientists told us. They said they were studying our planet.”
“Are you afraid of them?” I asked.
“No. A friend of mine saw one land and he walked over to it. But just when he got up to it it flew away. He thought the people were afraid of him.”
“Why?”
“Because he is bigger than they are.”
I waited for her to say more. She didn’t. She just looked out of the window. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to talk. She just wasn’t much interested in the subject and had apparently exhausted its possibilities. Or perhaps she was just being polite in satisfying a stranger’s curiosity. In any case, she held the baby’s head and embarked on an animated conversation about the sale of her vegetables and how prices were getting so high. She said she had heard that we used some chemical medicine to grow our vegetables bigg
er and wondered how she could get some.
We drove on over the spreading terrain. I tried to absorb what the woman had said. The sun was directly above the Ice Peaks now, making them glisten.
At an intersection three policemen stopped us and asked David where we were going and why. They peered in at us. Seeing that foreigners were driving they cautioned us about the riots in Huancayo (where we were not going) and waved us on.
More people appeared along the roadside the closer we got to town. Every now and then we’d see a man dressed in a black western suit.
“They are in mourning when they’re dressed like that,” said David.
The woman talked about her children. She said she had five of them. She said she didn’t want any more so she and her husband stopped having sex. When I mentioned birth control methods she had trouble understanding and had no knowledge at all about her own body. She was young, in her thirties, and so were her friends, who were all having the same problem. None of her friends had sex anymore either, in an effort to keep their families from expanding.
More women with magenta-striped pouches on their backs appeared walking toward Ataura. They wore their customary white wide-brimmed hats and skirts with white piqúe petticoats, looking as though they were costumed extras in a movie being shot on location. There were dogs everywhere, and as we entered the town the first thing I heard was a Neil Sedaka record playing on a juke box. We parked the car and got out to walk. The woman walked away with my ring watch and her baby. I stared after her. David watched me.
The street bazaars sold everything from bedding to freshly ground coffee and old records. The sun was hot now but in the shade of the buildings it was cool.
Pictures of Christ with a candle underneath hung in every shop. People sipped a sweet corn cola called Maiz as they ambled about. Dogs scampered through the fresh fruits and vegetables. Laid out on the streets in the sun for sale were rope, shoes, plastic tubs, beans, peas, and colored materials. Young boys rented comic books to read. A woman braided rope she had just bought.
An old man dressed in a pair of beat-up slacks, sneakers, a brown felt hat with a flower over his left ear and a gray tattered sweater stood next to a restaurant juke box. He moved gently, but out of rhythm, trying to keep time to an Elvis Presley record. An empty Inca Cola bottle protruded from his back pocket as he shuffled over to someone in the restaurant and begged for food which he immediately dumped into his brown felt hat. Eating soup at a table across from him sat a man who was clearly drunk, shouting obscenities at the wall.
Down the street young people waited for a movie theater to open. The Ten Commandments was on the bill and a turquoise wrought-iron gate separated the people from the box office.
Our lady caught up with us and directed us to the herb stall. Laid out on a blanket were small piles of herbs which she said would cure most any ailment a person could have. Tara for asthma, valeriana for the nervous system, Hircampuri for the liver, digestion, diabetes, bile and heartburn. I took some of that to make tea and there was a tree bark called Sangrednada which was good for ulcers. I should have bought that too.
Three women sat on a curb. One was nursing a baby with her hand in the lap of a friend, while the third petted a dog gnawing on a bone between them. A man rubbed powdered sulphur on the brim of his white hat to make it stiff. Beside him was some cheese made of boiled milk called quesillo.
Inside a flower market, a fairyland display of gladiolas, daisies, Spanish carnations, rooster’s crests, chrysanthemums and jonquils dazzled my eyes. Children, eating Peruvian popcorn made with sugar, walked among the flowers.
Our lady took her vegetables off to sell. She still had my ring watch. I tried not to notice. I knew I would see her later. David and I walked until we were hungry. We sat in an indoor-outdoor restaurant having rice and beans topped with onions and a hot sauce called rocoto which must be the spiciest condiment devised by man.
“Do you like it here?” I asked David.
“Yes,” he said, “it’s real. The people have no pretensions. They are what they are. They’re simple.”
“Maybe when people are comfortable,” I said, “they hurt each other more. Maybe we should all stay poor and struggling.”
“No,” he said, “I don’t think so. That would negate progress and the drive for a better life. No, the answer is something like my credo. Do you want to hear it?”
“Sure.”
He cleared his throat and, as though he was reciting at graduation class, he said, “Work hard. Don’t lie. And try not to hurt anyone. That’s it. That’s how I live. I remind myself of that three-pronged philosophy every day. I’ve educated myself not to forget it.”
“Do you get depressed and lonely?”
Sure.
“How do you keep going?”
“I guess you could say that happiness is knowing what you believe in.”
“But the lack of self-doubt is what makes some people self-righteous and dangerous,”
“Yes, but a person who is self-righteous wants everyone else to think as they do.”
I thought about that for a moment.
“Do you think I do that?”
“What?”
“Want things my way?”
David put down his fork. “From what I pick up about you, I would have to say yes.”
I felt as though he had slapped me. My eyes welled with tears.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
I tried to hold the tears back, but I couldn’t. I could feel them run down my cheeks and David’s soft blue eyes looking through to my insides. And at the same time, I was flooded with insight.
David reached over and mashed a tear on my chin. “That one traveled a long way down,” he said. “It’s the same journey we all have to travel before we realize who we are.” He paused. “Is that what’s going wrong with you and your friend?” he asked.
I tried to talk clearly. “My friend?”
“Yes,” said David, “there must be some man you’re involved with that you’re going off to meet in strange places all the time.”
“You mean like I’m doing with you?”
“Well, yes,” he said.
“I guess what you said about me is fair, and I guess our problems are inevitable. I want him to look at what he’s doing and he won’t. Not really. I guess I do want him to see things my way. If only he would really look, he’d find his own way. But he won’t. It’s frightening to him. And I guess I have to accept that. If he wants to ignore the truth of himself, I guess I must allow him that privilege, mustn’t I? He has the right, I guess.”
David reached across the table and took my hand.
“You, on the other hand,” he said, “have a mind like an oil drill. You’re one of those people who may hassle others but you’ll also get to yourself. You have the self-courage or whatever you want to call it to take a good honest look and you will be ruthless with yourself once you see what you’re doing. In fact you shouldn’t be too ruthless. As I’ve said before—be patient with yourself.”
Why did gentleness make me cry?
“C’mon,” said David. “I went through the same thing, you know. You have to, to get to where you want to be.”
“Where do I want to be?” I spluttered.
“Where you live, don’t you? Where you deeply and basically live is what you are trying to reach, isn’t it? Isn’t that how it feels?”
“It feels like everything I’ve lived has been a sham, a glossy eight-by-ten. And it turns out that most everything I lived and believed was a myth.”
“Like what?”
“Well, I thought when I died that was the end. I believed that what I saw was what there was. I believed there was nothing more and nothing less than here and now and that was all I had to deal with. I believed that the life the human race led was real and physical. Now I find we’ve been playing parts in some spiritual play, with an ongoing script. So when I start thinking about how I’ve played my part, I’m not too happy.”
I laughed and sputtered and ate some more beans and hot sauce.
“This hot sauce is the worst,” I said. “It makes me cry.”
“Well, life is like hot sauce. As soon as you start enjoying it, it makes you cry. It’s accepting the combinations that is the key. And you can’t accept any of that stuff until you accept yourself. And to accept yourself you have to know yourself. To know yourself is the deepest knowledge of all. Christ said it: ‘Know thyself.’ And then be true to it. Because you are a microcosm of the cosmos.”
I leaned back and sighed. My legs were stiff from sitting. I needed to stand up and stretch and walk.
David paid the check and we went outside. People were packing up their wares to be ready for sundown. In the mountains the sun dictated all commerce, activity and behavior.
We walked around for a while. David had some Inca Cola at a candy stand and I had a tangerine. The lady with the vegetables and my ring watch had disappeared, either hitching a ride from someone else or staying in town.
David and I got in the car and started back to Llocllapampa. The early evening light was clear and purplish blue. The stretched plains outside of Ataura were dotted with people trudging home for the night. Dogs barked in the distance and a baby or two cried. David was quiet as he drove. I thought about the truth of what he had said. That I wanted life my way, and on my terms. That whoever I was involved with should look as closely at themselves as I was trying to look at myself. He hadn’t said it as an accusation, but more that I would have to admit it if I wanted to move on. He had implied also that my strident compulsion to insist that others analyze themselves was not altogether unfair because it forced a degree of progress in them, but I should respect their inability or reluctance to do that if they didn’t want to.