One of the worst days of my life. . . . I talked with Peter about the future and he was bitter about my decision [to stay in Peru]. He says he wants to study in a sane school in the U.S., have real friends, is tired of Peru and sick and tired of Raul. He doesn’t think Raul can change. He’s exasperated by my vacillation. I replied calmly, but today he found me crying and tried to comfort me, telling me I should do what I wish. I asked him if he regretted his decision [to leave Michigan and come to Peru] and he said no. He bought me a chocolate to take care of my depression. Perhaps the day was not totally bad, thanks to Peter’s comfort and support in the end.
It’s clear from my mother’s diaries that she was sinking deeper and deeper into a depression in Comas, something I didn’t fully grasp at the time. She hated the place and her fights with Raul and couldn’t shake the suicidal thoughts, though at least she kept them from me. Instead, she turned to Joel. “I talked with Joel today about my suicidal tendencies,” my mother wrote in her diary, “and he convinced me that I shouldn’t see suicide as something romantic or heroic—quite the opposite. He’s a saner person than I.”
Animal House
IN ADDITION TO its usual human inhabitants, the house in Comas was filled with all sorts of creatures, large and small, cuddly and creepy, welcome and unwelcome. It was debatable who really ran that house, the humans or the animals, including the thousands of flies, ants, fleas, ticks, spiders, and the winged cockroaches I had first encountered in Guayaquil. There was little point in resisting: we kept killing and the bugs kept coming.
I’m not sure why, but the ticks were only interested in Dingo, the mutt we’d adopted as a puppy when we first moved to Comas. He’d quickly grown into a skinny adolescent in only a couple of months. There was no such thing as “dog food” at the local outdoor market, so we fed him leftovers and sweet potatoes boiled together in a large pot. But no matter how much food he consumed, he was always skinny and hungry, probably due to the fact that, as we later discovered, he had worms. We originally attributed his nightly yelping to fleas, but an even bigger nemesis were the many ticks on his body, mostly congregating under the big flaps of his ears.
Every evening, someone settled on the steps in the courtyard to pick plump ticks out of Dingo’s ears. The rock we crushed them with soon turned red with blood. Joel’s girlfriend, Gabrielle, was particularly skilled at it, and happily spent most evenings helping dislodge the ugly bloodsuckers. When she left, Dingo was devastated. After that, getting him tick-free was a lost cause as long as he was free to roam around Comas with the other dogs in the neighborhood.
No one ever took Dingo for a walk, leash or no leash. In Comas, most dogs ran around on their own, returning home only to sleep and hopefully get some scraps of food. Despite the ticks, Dingo was spoiled by our neighborhood’s standards.
Dingo did manage to coexist with the unnamed kitten that Carlos brought home one night. With her soft, smoky-gray fur, she was perfectly camouflaged in Comas. She took a special liking to my mother and often curled up in her lap while she sat at the table writing in her diary or reading about the life of Lenin.
Perhaps if the kitty had been bigger and more menacing, she would have been of some use in keeping the mouse population under control. But that, too, was a lost cause. As soon as we turned the lights off at night, the mice took over, leaving tiny black pellets as evidence of their nightly rampages. We could hear them squeaking and scurrying about, but we didn’t realize quite how many there were until one day, while cleaning, my mother and Raul lifted their bed frame up and an extended family of mice scattered frantically in every direction. The makeshift bed frame was really just a wooden crate filled, absurdly, with paper—the perfect material and place for a very large mouse nest.
When we first arrived in Comas, the neighbors gave me two little gray-and-white bunnies as pets. They were adorable, with the silkiest fur, and spent all day either nibbling alfalfa and carrots we brought from the local market or cuddling with each other. We dug a wide, deep hole in the backyard to put them in and covered it with wire mesh. But the rabbits soon dug tunnels and sneaked out, hopping around until one of us caught them, at which point, they happily returned to their hole-in-the-ground home. It was as if their halfhearted escape efforts were just temporary fun.
I often took the rabbits out to play. It turned out their favorite playmate was Dingo himself. And he seemed to understand to be gentle with them: he would bark at them, charge at them, chase them around, and even touch them with his teeth, but he would never bite. As soon as he lost interest, they would hop toward him, and the whole game would begin again. It was great entertainment for everyone.
One day, one of the rabbits disappeared. We never figured out what happened, but poor Dingo was never fully above suspicion. In the end, though, the worst threat to the life of my remaining pet bunny turned out to be my own brother. Joel had been a vegetarian since his early teens, but when he arrived in Peru, he discovered how difficult it was to live meat-free in South America. People kept offering him plates of meat, so he decided to embrace his dormant inner carnivore, so much so that within his first few weeks in Peru he had eaten guinea pig, lamb’s head, cow’s heart, and tripe.
Joel liked to say that if you make the decision to eat animals, you should also be willing to kill the animal yourself. One day, to prove his point, he pulled my squirming pet rabbit out of the hole by the ears. We were about to give the rabbit back to the neighbors, since he seemed lonely without his mate, and I had not been diligent about feeding him and cleaning out his pen. But Joel had other plans. As he saw it, the neighbors were going to make a meal out of the rabbit, so we might as well have him for dinner ourselves.
“Hold the legs firmly,” Joel instructed me. “Make sure he can’t move.” He grabbed a big knife and sawed at the throat as the terrified rabbit twisted and strained.
How could I have agreed not only to let Joel kill my bunny but to help him do it? I was too eager to impress my older brother. I felt I had to show him that I could handle it like a big boy. But the truth was I couldn’t handle it, and was immediately nauseated. I just hoped my brother didn’t notice.
Worst of all, after slitting his throat, Joel had no clue what to do with the rabbit. He managed to skin it, but then forgot to gut it, so intestines and feces ended up in the stew. I didn’t eat any, and I don’t think Joel or anyone else did, either. After that, I had a hard time believing my brother had ever actually been a vegetarian—and I’ve never eaten rabbit.
A Dangerous Place
COMAS WASN’T SAFE, especially in the black of night. With too few streetlights, the long trek up the hill from the highway bus stop to our house became treacherous. One night, Raul was walking home late and was mugged just a block from the house.
He was livid. “I’m going to get those sons of bitches,” he declared as he bandaged up his bloodied hand. “Those fuckers don’t realize who they’ve messed with. I’ll show them.”
He rushed back out the front door, taking a kitchen carving knife and his brother Lucho with him to hunt down his attackers. Raul and his brother were looking for vengeance, but when they found the muggers, one pulled out a .38 revolver and shot Lucho in the leg. The police ended up arresting everyone involved—Raul, Lucho, the shooter and his accomplices—and they all spent the night together in a cell.
My mother was disgusted. “Look at the mess your male macho behavior has gotten you into this time,” she yelled at Raul as she bailed him out of jail.
“You have no sympathy! Lucho was shot. We could have been killed!”
“Well, you never asked me about it before stupidly rushing to avenge a crime.”
Raul then got upset at my mother for not allowing him to have a gun. “If we’d had a gun we could have defended ourselves.”
“No, if you’d had a gun you would more likely have used it on me,” she countered.
That shut him up. In the midst of a particularly intense late-night argument a few months earlier, Raul
had said that if he had a gun he’d put a bullet through my mother’s head. She never forgot that threat, and never let him forget it, either.
Then things got messier. The assailants ended up pressing charges of their own against Raul and Lucho, claiming that they were actually the ones who had been attacked that night on the street. Everyone started bribing the police to take their side. When Raul asked her to contribute money to the bribe bidding war, my mother refused. “You got us into this awful mess with your macho crap, and now you want me to help you buy your way out of it? No way.”
Meanwhile, Lucho, who was on crutches and medication and was supposed to be spending his time resting up and healing, snuck out of the house one afternoon. Raul yelled at my mother for not watching over him. “Do you realize he may never walk again if he’s not careful?”
“Well, I’m not his mother,” she shot back.
Lucho did recover from his bullet wound, but he ended up being killed in Lurigancho prison years later when he and hundreds of his fellow Sendero Luminoso guerrilla inmates were gunned down by guards during a prison uprising.
* * *
In the end, the biggest danger in Comas was not the muggers but the cops. General Morales Bermúdez, who had taken power after a bloodless military coup against the nationalist military regime of Juan Velasco the previous summer, imposed harsh new measures to try to keep the economy from continuing its downward spiral. He drastically devalued the currency, and gas prices doubled overnight. This sparked street protests and demonstrations in Comas and across the country. The police cracked down, and tanks and soldiers were deployed to our neighborhood. The government imposed a state of emergency.
At one street demonstration at the local outdoor market, some eight blocks away from our house, Raul and Joel were handing out leaflets protesting high prices and calling for a general work stoppage. The police rushed in to break up the demonstration and went after Raul and my brother. Raul escaped his pursuers by running into the crowd and blending in by removing his glasses and outer shirt.
But Joel, a sandy-haired gringo, stuck out in the crowd. One policeman started running after him. Joel took off as fast as he could, but the policeman kept up. By the time my brother neared the house, his pursuer was less than a block behind him. I happened to be standing at the front door. Not wanting to reveal where we lived, Joel ran right by our house, didn’t even glance at me, and kept going. It was surreal to watch my brother sprinting past, pretending he didn’t know me, with an angry cop in hot pursuit. It happened so fast I didn’t have time to call out to him, luckily. Around the corner, Joel ducked into a small local store, where the owners sheltered him. They shut the door as if the place were closed, and the policeman ran right by.
That close call worried us all. It wasn’t clear what would have happened to my brother and Raul if they had been caught, but certainly they would have been arrested, maybe beaten. There were few civil liberties protections during the state of emergency. After the escape, police helicopters buzzed over the neighborhood for hours; the whirring propellers sounded like they were right above our house. That evening, a policeman told a local shopkeeper that “the gringos are troublemakers” and that the police knew from aerial photos where we lived. “We’re going to get the gringos tonight,” he boasted. As soon as word got back to us, my mother, Raul, my brother, and I quickly packed our bags and moved a few blocks up the street to stay the night with some neighbors. Early the next day, we left Comas entirely and headed to the highlands. We were on the move yet again, but this time I was relieved. I would not miss Comas at all, and neither would my mother.
Huertas
AS GLAD AS we were to get out of Comas, the house in Huertas—a small peasant community on the outskirts of Jauja—wasn’t much of an improvement, but it was free. It was where Raul’s grandparents had lived when they were young. No one had lived in the house for many years until my mother, Raul, Joel, and I showed up. Comas, for all its filth and drabness, had in some ways been luxurious compared to our new home. In Comas, at least we had plumbing and a real toilet, with running water for an hour or so a day, not to mention electricity.
Huertas was more like camping. We used candles and a kerosene lamp at night. We cooked over open flames in the crude fireplace and boiled our water to disinfect it. I slept on the dirt floor in my navy-blue polyester sleeping bag with red-flannel lining until we built a loft space with a eucalyptus ladder right above where my mother and Raul slept. We also made simple furniture out of eucalyptus, using green, freshly cut trees because it was impossible to put nails in the dry wood. The hut had no windows until my mother managed, with great effort, to chip a hole in the hard adobe wall to let some daylight in. Mama Juana gave us two guinea pigs as a housewarming present. Dingo also fled with us to Huertas, and although he was not as besieged by ticks, he was constantly hungry. The hope was that we would grow our own food in two fields nearby, but that would take time. Somehow my mother and Raul thought we could fit in, even though we were the only people in the community who didn’t get up at dawn and go to bed at sunset.
The worst thing about living in Huertas was the toilet—or, more accurately, the shithole. We had neither an outhouse nor an out-of-the-way place to build one behind our single-room adobe hut. So we simply dug a hole in the ground in the front yard, if you could call it a yard; it was more of a grassy pasture surrounded by crumbling mud walls. The shithole wasn’t even discreetly off to the side. No, it was on display, without anything surrounding it for protection, dug only fifteen or so feet from the front door for convenient late-night use. If the wind was blowing in a certain direction, you got a strong whiff of the stench.
Worse, it was in my way. This was the same grassy area on which I kicked my soccer ball around. Somehow I always managed to save the ball from falling into the hole, but one day while I was practicing dribbling with Joel, I moved backward a few feet before realizing where I was and then it was too late. My left leg sank all the way down to my knee. I pulled it out as fast as I could, but not fast enough. Piss and shit flooded my boot.
Watching us from the doorway, Raul burst out laughing. “Oh, I’ll bet you’ll never do that again. You should have seen the look on your face!” He kept laughing as he ran to get a bucket of water to help me wash off my boot and foot.
The primitive living conditions took some getting used to, but at least Huertas was bright and sunny. My mother’s mood picked up immediately. She didn’t seem to mind that we had no plumbing or electricity and no market nearby. All the adobe houses were on little dirt roads lined with eucalyptus trees. The surrounding hills were dry but spectacularly beautiful—yellow, ocher, and speckled with dark green trees. The sky was a brilliant blue, the air cool and fresh. Women were outfitted in bright traditional wool skirts and tall white straw hats with a dark cloth band around the top. Sheep and llamas walked down the lanes and colorful trucks and buses bumped down the narrow roads.
Joel stayed with us in Huertas for a month or so before heading back to the States. He helped us rebuild the red-tile and straw roof of the adobe hut, carrying supplies from town on one of the two rickety old bicycles we all shared. While my mother used our tiny supply of wood to build a fire and cook oatmeal for breakfast, Joel and Raul would sometimes play chess. Eventually, I convinced Joel to teach me the rules. When he decided it was finally time to hitchhike back to Berkeley—it would take him three months to get there, mostly by catching rides with truck drivers—he coaxed me to come wait with him by the side of the road with the promise of a final chess match.
I eagerly followed him out to the road, then crouched and set up all the pieces as fast as I could. But I wasn’t fast enough. A rust-spotted car slowed to a stop and the driver leaned his head out the window and offered Joel a ride.
Joel looked at me and shrugged as he slung his backpack over his shoulder. He could tell I was upset. “Sorry about the chess game. Next time.” He bent down to give me a quick hug and jogged around to the passenger-side door.
Speechless, I watched the car drive away, the exhaust pipe puffing tiny clouds, until my brother disappeared. I had no idea when I’d see him again. My throat ached. Rejected, I looked down at the chessboard. I was still holding the king, hovering it over its square where I’d been about to set it. I placed it carefully next to the queen. Then I drew my arm back and angrily swept the chess pieces off the board, leaving them in the dirt by the side of the road.
I cried all the way home, for several miles. I found my mother sitting at the kitchen table, jotting something down in her diary. She looked up when she heard me sniffling.
“Joel didn’t even start the chess game. I’ll never see my brother again.” I had gotten used to my brother living with us, having another family member around, and now suddenly felt left alone again with my mother and Raul.
“Of course you’ll see him again,” she said, setting her pen down on her notebook. “But you can’t expect him to stay here living with his mother. He’s a grown man now. And you know how hitchhiking works. You take the first ride you get.”
I nodded, knowing she was right, but it didn’t make me feel any better. Joel later sent me a note from Caracas: “I should have played one complete game of chess with you before I even started hitchhiking just to be fair, but when the car stopped, well, I just couldn’t refuse the ride. I owe you a game of chess and we’ll play it next time I see you.”
* * *
The only thing that Raul and my mother hung on the wall in our Huertas home was the large black-and-white cloth portrait of Vladimir Lenin wearing a dark suit and tie—the same one they’d fought so fiercely about before. It seemed rather out of place in our rustic surroundings, where, frankly, not much in the way of revolution was occurring. My mother and Raul were arguing about Lenin and everything else, perhaps exactly because they could not figure out what to do with themselves in Huertas. They handed out political leaflets and at night scribbled revolutionary slogans on the walls of the police station in nearby Jauja—posing as nighttime lovers when anyone passed by—but that was hardly satisfying. While my mother dreamed of working the land and organizing local farmworkers, Raul’s interest in the countryside was halfhearted. He was really a city boy. Doing manual labor in the fields was not his thing. With no audience to perform in front of, he was lost. So it wasn’t surprising that whenever there was a communal workday—when everyone in the community was supposed to work together on a common project every few weeks—Raul always found a way to be at this or that political meeting or event in town, leaving my mother and me on our own to help dig ditches and haul water with the rest of our neighbors.
Rebel Mother Page 18