Toot Sweet

If a business in America tried using this Peruvian poster to sell candy I suspect his shop would be destroyed by white college students pretty quick.

Here, it sells candy, as if that's hard to do.

Lima faire bande à part

I've spent some time with French folks here, trying to cope with the back and forth of three languages in a strange city while I speak to people from the Caribbean about foreign places we've been to. Speaking a polyglot of words, I want something, but who can say what that would be. In what language?

This evening, on my own, a Peruana approached me and spoke so unexpectedly and so rapidly that I had no time to grasp what she had said. I looked at her and spoke English, at a loss for other, authentic, words. She stared at me in confusion. I told her I don't speak Spanish well and ... "Sigo siendo humano." She understood the words, but she was afraid. I could see it. A man who doesn't speak Spanish here might as well be a stone in a field. And then to speak Spanish, to say "I'm still human" was to strike her as too strange. One must speak the language to make oneself human. One must, and yet I find I can't speak to many these days, meaning my own people. I can speak enough Spanish to get by here, and it comes back daily, as well as what I learn anew. But I cannot understand America any more. I don't know if I will ever go back. There, I'm often enough no humanos. I wanted to do something apart from the group. I took a walk to the church.

 I heard music. I heard a brass band. I saw thousands of people in front of the church, and I stood among them, almost like one of them.

There was a military drill on the church landing. A group of young men drilled in elaborate formations, a team, a group with a single purpose, to be as one. They followed the music of a brass band.

I was swept away by the music and the drill, by the joy of the crowd, few of them, being so young, having had to live through the tough times of repression and violence here. Couples would suddenly and dramatically make out, children would grab their mothers, fathers would stand taller. We all cheered as the drill team did fancy manoeuvres.

Back home I find that pig hippies living in parks have lice, that they shit on police cars and on bank floors and rape underage girls and homosexuals. I speak the language, but I don't understand what people are saying oft times.

Maybe the Peruvians have trouble understanding my Spanish sometimes, but obviously they were reading my mind. So I thought about how these less than well-off Peruvians live their lives.

This we can understand. They do not camp out in parks and demand the government forgive the student loans they racked up getting degrees in Angry Victims Studies.

Maybe the Peruvians are crazy. Maybe they should camp out in parks and be pigs. This is what they do instead.

They watch marching men and listen to military bands and go to church, they have children and go to work, just like Americans do, that one percent who don't camp out in filth and demand from others. Sometimes these poor people just go for a walk.

All these languages floating around in my head. I went home for dinner and in the midst of it I heard a band outside my window, thousands of people milling about, the Church again having a procession, and people together for a purpose, whatever it might be.

There are some of us who are a band apart. I wonder about it. I like this country, and I fear for the fate of my own. What language makes sense in this confusion. I leaned out the window and I found myself almost yelling out in my finest Spanish: "Kyrie, eleison!"

No reason to believe in God

I had a late dinner this evening. I still have some white cheese, and to make a meal I got dinner rolls from Jimmy's bakery, then I went to the supermarket for fresh boneless chicken breasts, mixed vegetables, salad dressing, bananas, and two litres of drinkable yoghurt (coconut and peach). It cost me about ten dollars, and I have about $7.50 left for the next few days or so. I cooked everything on a hotplate at the little kitchen on the rooftop of my place. I sat down and dined, if not in style, then in lovely comfort. I found myself saying that there must be a god, for how else could I have such a wonderful dinner in the warm air with the lights of Lima showing off my meal. I was almost swooning as I ate. It was a fine meal. But, as happy as I was, it doesn't prove the existence of God. If my heavenly meal depended on God, then as soon as I don't have any food, and there have been many times when there is famine and I have been as starving as others, then without food, where is God? My meal was the best I've had in a long time, and as much as I like it, it proves and disproves nothing about God. It only proves that when I have money and access to good food I can make a fine meal. A genuine believer would believe in God even if he were starving. I don't see myself believing in anything during a famine but in the basic mindlessness of nature and the folly of men and their oft times evil ways. This evening, if not a belief in God, I do have a piece of heaven. I am blessed.

A slow day in Lima

I stop briefly in the mornings at the marketplace back behind the Congress building in downtown Lima, Peru where I go have breakfast before heading off to do whatever silly stuff occupies my day thereafter. It's a good way to start my day, having custard in a cup, often times two. I get a stool outside a little stall, inside of which are a couple of ladies serving through the window. I get a glass cup filled with custard, smooth and sweet and creamy, the yellow reminding me of the sun that has recently begun to appear in the sky here, the cream and the sweetness, the silky texture of the custard reminding me of home. There are a dozen shops all selling the same custards there, and yet this one shop is my favourite because the girl who hands me the custard is so beautiful. I'll say she's thirty because she might be twenty or she might be forty. I know for certain that she is beautiful, and that is because I can see her smile, right now, in my memory. She has a smile that reminds me of love.

[Market photo to come]

I'm not a love kind of guy, as a rule. Not a custard kind of guy. I like coffee. The best coffee I have found in the city so far, and no coffee would be better, only as good, which is about perfect, is at Cafe Victor, close to the market. Who'd know? This place doesn't inspire confidence from the outside, like so much of Lima's exteriours. But a cup of cafe american is as close to heaven as I am going to get. A cup of coffee...

I came down to earth during that final black coffee. Then I knew who I was, where I was, and what I was doing. Or trying to do. Caffeine restored my anxieties; I was my usual paranoiac self.*

This place isn't all wonderful coffee and beautiful women with heavenly smiles. It takes a bit of experience to come up with this idea, and not of it is based on smiling women.

I haven't had any problems here, and I don't expect I will have. My life here is good and easy, a matter of shopping for small things daily, like food and odds and ends I might need during the day. Most of my day is about walking around and speaking to strangers and noticing things different from me and places I have been where normal is not what it might be here. I have some time to sit and watch a lovely young woman take a bit of time to have her boots polished.

Sometimes I encounter things that I can't immediately identify.

I had no idea on first walking past Tottus that I was missing a store the size of Walmart. Among other things, Tottus is as supermarket, which I noticed from across the street, not as I walked past and looked into the front where all I saw were plastic tables and chairs with some office workers having lunch. It's a good find for me given that they sell mixed salads and vegetables for two, meaning I can have it twice. The custard girl does smile at me, and she makes my heart melt; but she smiles at everyone, and that is why I am so taken with her; and she's not coming to my place to split a salad. Tottus, unsmiling, stands imposing on the sidewalk an doesn't inspire much love, I think, till one goes inside and finds a supermarket at least as good as my current favourite, MiMetro, once again a store one can walk past without realising it's a food store.  I don't know this city or the country or the people well, but I assume that they are family oriented and withdrawn, leading even major retailers to hunch and turn quietly inward.  I'm sure something terrible has happened to these people, some massive horror that tops all others, and now they live in relative quiet and peace. I see almost everyone smiling, just a little, a hint of happiness. And sometimes, like the custard girl, a real joy in the smile.

I too find joy, though I am no part of Lima or Peru or South America or any place or anything at all. I find joy in a sewing machine at the front of a shop on a busy street.

And if you look closely in the background here at the owner standing back in the shadow you will see he too is smiling. (Or was until I took his picture.)

Peruvians smiling. That has nothing to do with dentistry, I can assure you. I came across, on Emancipacion Street, a block of store-fronts and meandering malls given over to dental supplies and workshops making dentures and plates and selling equipment and so on; and in one I found a girl working some minor detail in clay or plastic, and when she noticed me she smiled too, the light of heaven all around her, like the custard girl. One might guess that I like this city, if only because I like being around these people who can barely understand my Spanish, who have no reason to like me, who have no reason to smile at the sight of me. And yet, they smile at me and seem happy in themselves.  I sit and drink coffee and worry about this. Maybe I'm all wrong about this place and these people. They seem happy. How can such a thing be real?

*Lawrence Sanders, The Sixth Commandment.  1979.

Curbed his enthusiasm

I have word today of an attempted assault on a cathedral in Vancouver, Canada by leftards protesting against what comes down to their idiot lack of understanding of religion; and another report of presumed Occupy Wall Street imitators having fire-bombed a Mercedes dealer a mile south in the city.

But there is also good news, if not from Vancouver.

Gotta love Marines.