This next post is a continuation (or more accurately, a prequel) to that rant I made about all the fear driving through me at the start of the trip. It shows the foundation of where these feelings erupted and the beginning of what would become a slight epiphany. It is a really long entry from a red spiral journal, written in very messy, sometimes impossible to read, thin black ink. I have tried to edit as little as possible of it.
One last thing: I don't want you to think I am so melodramatic as this next post would indicate. I was reading a lot of Malcom Lowry at the time, and I think this entry was kind of an exercise in detailing the psychotic, crazy little experiences perceived when traveling through mysterious, awful and beautiful worlds.
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Sun/March 8/ 2009/ 10:15 p.m.
(Night bus to Puno and Copacabana)
"What am I looking for?" This is the question that bluntly kills me.
It looks like lightning is erupting, in soft tiny patches, above the Cuzco horizon of the dark Andes. Yes, it is lightning. It is getting larger now, and shooting out horizontally; looks as if light of a passing car momentarily strikes against a giant curtain, descending down toward old Inca valleys and lost empires.
How! Now each time I look up the light is becoming more fierce. But there is still no thunder. You can see the mountains only by their silhouettes against these eruptions in the sky. The forgotten mountains, or the invisible. Tonight there are no stars and only the street lights throughout the valleys and plateaux of Cuzco city make its land visible. Twinkling symbols of a desire to consume, either ourselves or this place.
Leaving town on this bus, now that we’re out of the city centre, the restaurants and hostels and tourists have disintegrated. Left behind are the insoluble inhabitants of this colonial scandal — pariah dogs, crying dirty children, women in bowler hats and rainbow ponchos — More lightning! No strikes, none audible, not yet. Two children hang like monkeys on the locked gate of a cement-block bodega, looking in. Driving past, we cross an outdoor party; it descends into an open field some distance away, where a band plays Quechan folk on a green wooden stage.
Near the road, just before the slight grassy slope approaching the stage, three young teen boys seem to be robbing — or molesting — a girl their own age. She screams and swings at them with a glass bottle, they laugh and tug at her clothes. Drivers sit in their taxis with bright lit signs, smoking or chewing coca leaf, and maybe forty other locals nearby, just watch. Or seem not to notice. A bottle smashes, a horn squeals in the distance, like a greasy finger rubbing against glass. Driving, still further, more vagrants have set up shop on the sidewalk: selling maiz, seeds, fruit, cigarettes. “Mate! Mate! Sandwich de pollo, Sandwich de pollo!” yells a woman, a dirty beige cylindrical bowler, with a wide ribbon the same colour. It has started to rain. The cement and mud brick houses don’t melt; a gas station is empty except for two attendants, one pissing into the road, facing our bus, the other tosses a cigarette. It’s raining, it’s pouring. The lightning, now flashes closer, brilliant neon purple. Still, no thunder… but maybe there is; it’s perhaps that distant roar. The sound of hundreds of revving engines, buried beneath the rock and mud of the great Andes. The mountains, in the mountains! And now, not even the Cusquenian sky or city or anything are visible. We have left the city.
Briefly, I pray to St. Christopher. The rain, the storm: As I’m leaving Peru! (I am always afraid of dramatic deaths, well timed, and symbolic.) The bus skids and drunkenly resumes it’s way. Ah, but here, more city, more buildings. Another empty gas station. And then another.
- No thunder, but the voices of the city haunt me, bother me.
- Mate! Mate! Sandwich de Pollo
- llamada, llamada
- massages! Massages!
- Puno Puno! Arequiiiiiipa, Arre aree are are-queeeeeeeepa. Ica ica, iiiica, La paz.
Earlier: The California girls trying to take pictures with the Peruvian woman on the street: ‘un foyo parami? Para mi para mi.. un foto…no? no!” The lady, shaking her head, her sad eyes, begging to understand; why a photo? Why me? A smarter tramp might have ask for a Sol or two. But maybe there’s dignity here. In it’s tiniest shred. The starving, the bitter, the inability to even want or know how to deal with the ignorance of a Catholic Supermodel Gringa. (Soon after this, I ate fries and pollo brasa with the girl and her friends. We said grace and prayed before eating.)
The bus slips, we are on a dirt path. Another gas station. We have stopped. Peddlers come on board the bus. A woman selling giant round rolls of flat bread – bigger than accordions. “pan solo un sol, pansolounsol.” The same whiney, nasal pitched scream as them all, as the bus station yodlers (Ica icaaaaa, arerrearrerarrequiiiiiiiiiiipa!) or the cellphone street vendors (yaaaamadas yaaamadas), these voices haunt me! Lightning and rain, pouring, filling up in rapid puddles on the blackened cement at the GRIFO gas station. Two men buy their tickets here, to Puno. They board soaked and sit far ahead. They own several plastic bags full of whatever, and stuff them in the rafters above and in the aisle before the stairway down to the first level of the bus. No one can manage to get by without tripping or barely tripping. Aha! More bread for sale. One of the passengers takes out a bag of flat loaves and makes his way to the back. “pan pan.” A man begins to snore. Two Scandinavian girls behind me laugh and talk. The snoring, the snoring. Driving through my thoughts. It seems to have stopped shooting lightning. The rain has slowed. A woman loads blankets and hats, and more bread, into the trunk of a hatchback taxi parked next to us. Still: no thunder, only from the phlegm filled snorer.
We have left the station, the snoring appears to have stopped for now, and I am the only one with a reading light on. Soon I shall turn it off and there will be no light, and no sound but of the road the splashing rain water. I will sit and wonder: “What is it I am looking for?” More truly, I am sure, since I know what it is, but “Why? Why am I here?” Why have I come to witness my own hell, human hells . . . Why alone? Dante takes with him Virgil, a ghost. Jacob is alone, without humanity, when he faces God, in his journey across the deserts of redemption. Where’s my angel, my anti-body, where’s the hell guide? It is here: the thunder. The bursts of fear and the longing — for love (indecipherable) happiness — the dreadful solitude and the blissful peace, alone. It is my words, my sickness, St. Christopher. Pachamama! It is fear that asks questions, which only get answered through gods or fate or whichever. Fear can be my only true conquest and amigo. It will be fear and mystery that keep me alive and kill me.
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