I was thinking about hands today. When I was little I liked to gently gnaw on my mum’s hand. Then again, I would chew on everything: shirts, pencils, nails, you name it. But hands I liked the most, and hers had a good consistency, not too fat nor too bony. She wouldn’t complain either. Actually, she wouldn’t react at all. I would just grab her hand and starting gnawing. She didn’t even acknowledge it, you know? How weird is that?
I liked it though. It’s as if we didn’t need to talk. An implicit contract. A promise that, no matter what, if needed it the hand was always there, no questions asked. In between all the chaos of early childhood—the novelty, the games, the screams—it was a much appreciated constant.
She woke me up today at six in the morning. I had been drinking last night, but I’m a light sleeper, even when drunk. We were meant to go to Pampilla that day. She seemed hesitant, but I reassured her I wanted to go. It’s not every day I’m in Peru after all. So I washed up, put on some clothes, and we left the house.
We took a taxi to Manchay, where my uncle and my grandma were supposed to meet us. Manchay, for those who don’t know, is a collection of dirt hills on which people from the countryside—in their attempt to move to the capital—built primitive houses upon. Very dry and impoverished place. We had to stand on a dirt road for about twenty minutes before my uncle found us. He was to drive us for the rest of the trip.
I was a bit lightheaded so I slept most of the journey. I woke up for brief moments. I remember green valleys with rivers flowing down. Cows and sheeps roaming pastures. Locals selling fruits and vegetables farmed by themselves. Family restaurants with live chickens greeting your arrival.
We eventually reached Antioquía, our first stop. The town had experienced a touristic explosion in recent years, and they dressed up accordingly. All houses were painted white, with the most amazing drawings on top. Flowers and birds of all colours of the rainbow featured in their paintings. And the art had a playfulness to it—many motions, many curves. It was beautiful, if a bit surreal, to see a whole town having such a coherent decoration.
The tourists hadn’t come today, so Antioquía looked unsettlingly empty. As we walked through the ghost town, my grandma pointed out her old school (which was now the town hall) and other notable buildings. The town had built stairs and roads to a few vantage points in the surrounding mountains. Me and my mum climbed a couple. For context, the town was already at two thousand meters above sea level; at this height the effects of altitude sickness begin to show. Despite her complaints and my worries, she managed fine. The views were peaceful and the air smelled of adventure.
I find it hard to describe a day like this. So much happened, and I for once remember so much. I read somewhere that art is about selection: taking the whole world and showing a piece of it through a very small, possibly distorting peephole. I resent having to do that. I wish I could take you there, so you can experience it with me. But I can’t, and my descriptions are a poor substitute. Perhaps one day I will be able to do like the great masters, wielding words like swords, enhancing reality, connecting people. That day… seems very far away from today.
Here is a good example of an experience I can’t quite capture into words. We had lunch at one of the local restaurants (the name is the one thing I can’t recall, sorry). The place was humble but we suspected good food given the amount of parking spots they had available. You see, a lot of truck drivers frequent these towns, and they always eat well. We sat at the plastic table, on some plastic chairs, in a very small dining room. Stray dogs roamed around freely in and out of the restaurant. As it was usual in popular (as in for the general populace) Peruvian restarants, we were offered a lunch deal of entrée, main course, and a refreshment. We all ordered the soup as an entrée.
The soup is called patache and I’d never had it before so I was excited. Me and my mum hadn’t had breakfast but I wasn’t too hungry. We were brought a brown beef-based broth with all sorts of legumes, among them fava beans, and some sort of wheat grains. Some herbs there too, maybe huacatay (Tagetes minuta, also known as Peruvian mint). One spoonful of that dense broth, upon contact with your mouth, sent all sorts very different but pleasant electrical impulses through your face. Sourness from the lime juice, heat from the rocoto (Capsicum pubescens, a spicy pepper) richness from the beef fat, a nice contrast of textures between the beans and the jello-like consistency of the meat. As the liquid moved you could feel its warmth, through the back of your mouth, the throat, even in the esophagus…
One is tempted to cry over such a meal. I’ve paid good money for food
throughout my life. In one very fancy ocasion, I paid over €100 for a
single meal, and I thought the food was really good back then. But this
patache? Blows them all out of the water. Top three
meals I’ve ever had, hands down. The main course was OK, not worth
mentioning. All in all we paid 20 soles or £4 per person. It absolutely
dumbfounds me how a so-called third-world country can produce miracles
like these. As my dad likes to say,
Peru is a country of contradictions
.
I should’ve tipped more but I had no cash and I didn’t feel comfortable asking anyone at the table to do so for me. And I was getting really sleepy, so we left as the truck drivers were coming in. We stopped in some street so I could rest.
I’m going to skip more than a few side quests we pursued throughout the trip. Looking back, I can hardly believe the amount of things we did in the span of one day. Notably, we went to my grandma’s state to gather some fruits. There were a plethora of plants but we were mainly there for quinces (Cydonia oblonga, in Spanish membrillo). There were trees next to trees next to more trees of quinces, going as far as a the eye could see. My grandma, who had probably worked and taken care of these trees since she was a little girl, moved with unnatural agility through the bushes; we had a hard time keeping up with her, much less slowing her down. She’s eighty-something now, and my only living grandparent, yet she’s nothing but energetic. I wonder if I will reach old age with that kind of impetus. We left with a heavy bag full of quinces. People had harvested quinces twice this month and taken many boxes full, yet the plantation seemed endless.
The last thing we did before heading back home was visiting my cousin in Pampilla. I had been excited to see her new house. She is something of a professional runner (high-altitude marathons mainly) and had brought many of her runner friends with her to spend New Year’s Eve. One of them was an ultra-marathonist, who had ran 130km races. They looked very lean with an skin toasted by the Andean sun and dried by unforgivingly cold winds. I remember chasquis, ancient messengers of the Incan empire, famed for their running feats, and with many legends told about them. My favourite is the following. Martín de Murúa, Spanish chronicler living in the 1500s, writes this about the chasqui delivery system:
When the Inca wanted to eat fresh fish from the sea, since it was seventy or eighty leagues [350 to 400 kilometres] (from the coast) to Cuzco, where he lived, they would bring it to him alive, which indeed seems an incredible thing over such a long stretch and distance, and on such roads, rough and intricate.
Keep in mind that Cuzco is from three to six thousand meters above sea level, where air runs thin and oxygen is lacking. One wonders how many chasquis such an enterprise took, and whether any chasqui blood remains among Peruvian runners. I like to think of these things when I talk to my cousin, given that I’m an amateur long-distance runner myself.
On the way back the traffic was horrendous. As in two-hours-without-moving-an-inch horrendous. I had a lot of time to think about today, trying my utmost to remember the details so I could write them down later. My mum and I were sitting in the back and, without saying anything, I grabbed her hand and started to gnaw on it. Even after all these years, she didn’t say anything. I was happy.