Backland

My Bolivian diary, entry #15

August 18, 2013

The road to Tarabuco (two hours by slow bus, eighty minutes by a fast one) is paved, but the road from there to Icla (another hour or so) is cobblestoned; Saturday we see two workers meticulously fitting the rocks in. We don’t go the whole way Friday evening, stopping instead at a tiny village called Candelaria, about five miles short of Icla. Accompanying us are Zannah, Carlos, and Paula, who will get her advanced degree in psychology in four months, and is now interning with Biblioworks. The road winds around sparse, steep hills; we arrive after dark.

Santusa, Carlos’s mother, is a weaver, and while Zannah, Paula, and Carlos are preparing dinner, we ask her about a small weaving she has made. She tells us this story, animatedly pointing to the scenes:

The condor and the fox are friends, so the condor invites the fox to a party in heaven. The fox asks how he can get there—“I have no wings”—so the condor offers to carry him on his back. They attend mass up there together; but before they go to the party, the condor warns the fox not to eat too much—it’s impolite. The condor gets drunk, dancing with the stars; the fox sits under the table, eating as much as he can. Night falls; amid the bright stars, the fox is embarrassed and afraid to tell the condor how much he ate, so he decides to go down on his own by constructing a rope out of leaves. On his way down, he makes fun of some parrots, calling them “cacaverde” (green poop). So the parrots chew through the rope. Knowing he’ll soon fall, the fox poops out of fright and calls out, “God is coming down! Bring a bed to cushion God’s fall!” But nobody does. When the fox reaches the earth, his stomach bursts open, and all the seeds from the food he ate fall out. And that’s why the earth produces such wonderful food—from the seeds from the party in heaven.

Santusa, ebullient and transfixing, tells us three more tales, with the fox the brunt of the joke in each. In one, a female fox asks a partridge how her children became so pretty, and the partridge responds that she puts them in the oven so they get nice and brown. Of course, the fox’s children get roasted.

Have I ever met a woman as warm as Santusa? When we tell Carlos that he can live in our extra room in November (Zannah is leaving Bolivia then, so he’ll be alone), she clucks with joy, hugs us all, and says that Carlos and Jacky are “hermanitos” (little brothers). Her loving nature is contagious.

The two major ethnic groups near Sucre are the Jalq’a and the Tarabuco (or Yampara), and the Flores family—Santusa, her husband Damien and his mother, and their three sons, Daniel, Edgar, and Carlos—are the latter. Unlike Jalq’a weavings, which depict a disordered underworld, those of the Tarabuco are multicolored, bright, and tell stories about heaven and earth. Another of Santusa’s weavings tells the complex history of a marriage. Damien, like most Tarabuco men, wears a woven black helmet-like hat with earflaps and a pointed top, leather sandals, baggy white shorts, and a huge poncho striped in black, maroon, and other colors. Santusa wears a simpler black outfit.

During dinner, Carlos tells us that in Quechua there are five completely different k and three t sounds. There are three Quechua words (meaning “together,” “bread,” and “old clothes”) that to us sound like “tanta,” the pronunciation differing only in the sound of the initial t. Then Carlos beats Jacky at chess, and Jacky seems very happy about it.

Carlos’s grandmother, who is around ninety and speaks only Quechua, can name all the constellations and tell time from them. But not tonight—the temperature has dipped into the thirties. It’s no joy visiting the unlit outhouse after midnight.

In the morning we walk past a colonial-era hacienda gone to seed and up a mountain. Thalia feels sick, so she and Karen turn back early; the rest of us spend two hours climbing. The landscape is rocky with various cactii and thorn bushes. We meet nobody on our hike. Jacky and Carlos clamber up like mountain goats while we try to catch our breath; thus exactly how breathtaking the vistas are can’t be determined.

On the way down we cross a tiny canyon whose walls have been burnished into curves by a diminished river. Carlos tells us that after the rainy season (December and January), the landscape is all green rather than desert-like and the water in the canyon is ten feet deep; all the children swim there.

The men of the Flores family built their house themselves about three years ago. They have nine cows, share a flock of sheep and goats with their neighbors (taking turns to take them to pasture), two cats, two or three adult dogs and eight very small puppies, an orphan piglet, an orphan kid (baby goat), and a field for potatoes and corn. Jacky is in heaven, playing with the animals, giving the kid milk in a baby bottle, giving grain to the piglet, horsing around with and helping Carlos. Thalia is still awfully sick, though, which breaks Karen's and my hearts.

The afternoon is largely devoted to baking bread. A big vat of flour (half of it milled from wheat they grow themselves) that has been mixed with water, lard, and yeast is brought into the main (living, dining, weaving) room and large spoonfuls of the mixture are literally thrown onto a sheet on the floor. These lumps dry a little, and then Carlos and Santosa quickly and deftly shape them into balls (I try, but the dough just sticks to my hands). The balls are then flattened into disks and stretched with the fingers like little pizzas. Then masses of branches, many with thorns, are lit and stuffed into the outdoor oven, which is shaped like an igloo. Whenever the fire gets low, more wood is brought, but not big pieces. This keeps up for over an hour. Then Carlos and Jacky go down the street with a machete and cut down a couple of armfuls of fragrant willow branches. These are wrapped around a very long stick with wire to form a kind of giant broom. A wheelbarrow is filled with water, and the broom is soaked. Then, very quickly, Carlos sticks the wet broom in the oven and brushes all the embers to one side. He wets the broom again and repeats the process twice. Meanwhile, the disks of dough have been placed on long boards; we bring these to the oven and Carlos and Santusa place them, two at a time, on a long paddle and then on the hot floor of the oven. Then they close the door; about ten minutes later, they shove all the baked breads into a basket and brush off any embers that have stuck to them. The oven is then reheated with more branches and the process begins again. The result is perhaps the best bread I’ve ever had (they made a small batch without lard for me since I don’t eat pork).

Jacky and I agree: if it weren’t for Thalia’s illness, this would be our best day in Bolivia so far.

My Bolivian diary, entry #14

August 11, 2013

On Wednesday Jacky and Thalia enter the seventh and tenth grades at Colegio Pestalozzi. Despite understanding very little and being the youngest of thirty-seven kids, Jacky thrives there. Thalia, though, gets quite sick after one day and misses the next two. She admits that it’s a pattern: she always gets sick after the first day of a new school; but that doesn’t make her sickness any less real.

Friday night Jack goes to a girl’s thirteenth birthday party at the Hostal Libertad; the entire third floor is devoted to the forty or so kids invited, including the entire seventh grade. The girls are dressed in the latest style, with low-rise jeans and shirts off one shoulder; a DJ is blaring pop music from high-quality speakers, and people keep asking Jacky to dance (he says he doesn’t know how). “We don’t dance at parties in the US,” he tells them, but has no answer to the logical response—“What do you do, then?” He is very happy talking with the boys, but when I come at 9:30 to see if he wants to leave (the party lasts until eleven), he comes right home.

Philly is hosting a barbeque Saturday night and I promise to buy some lomo (tenderloin/filet). I ask seven different sellers at the mercado central, but none of them have any; I finally find one who does—it’s a four-kilo (nine-pound) chunk of meat hanging from a hook. I ask if I can just buy three kilos—no; I ask if she can cut it for me—no. So I bring it home and spend an hour or two washing it, drying it, removing fat and tissue, cutting it with far too dull a knife into barbeque-size chunks (to call them steaks would be unfair to real steaks), and peppering it.

At Philly’s, Randall, an Australian who runs Café Condor and Condor Trekkers, and Carlos, a university student who works at the Café, are preparing the grill, and I hang out with them. Unfortunately Carlos, a real sweetheart, keeps telling me the meat’s not ready to turn, and I listen to him; he, like most Bolivians, likes his meat well-done, and about a third of the lomo turns out quite dry and tough. We finally convince him that it should be grilled “a la inglesa”—red in the middle—and the rest is very tasty, especially with the sauces—Roxana brings a picante and I bring a French sauce I made from the beef fat, onions, red wine, and butter.

It’s a great group. Randall spends three months a year in Berlin giving bicycle tours to tourists to earn enough money to live here for the other nine; the café and trekking operation is non-profit and benefits poor Bolivians, so he makes nothing here. He wants to establish a similar operation in Australia to benefit Aborigine communities, and then one in Africa. His Swiss girlfriend, Remina, is lovely and makes a very good salad. Carlos is fluent in Quechua and tells me that it has forty-five letters in its alphabet and that it’s full of prefixes and suffixes; he’s learning English and is Zannah’s boyfriend; his mother is a Tarabuceña weaver in Candelaria whom we hope to visit soon. Zannah is there too, and wants us to come to Biblioworks soon to begin volunteering. Roxana brings Tonio, who is enchanted by Jacky’s chess set, with half the pieces representing the Incas and half the Spaniards. Alex, a Quebecois who works for Oxfam and lives in La Paz (he used to live in Sucre), comes with his wife and two children; the older, Luca, plays soccer with Jack and Tonio. The Chilean wine is fruity—not just the red but even the Chardonnay—and delicious. I wake up with a hangover in the morning.

I discover that the little shop that sells gallinas criollos (small hens from small farms) also sells fresh cold milk; I buy a liter and it’s delicious, the first time I’ve had fresh milk since leaving the States, but how safe it is I can’t tell (the lady in the shop just dips a measuring cup into a large bucket of it and pours it into a plastic bag)—it’s unlikely to have been pasteurized.

Philly comes to pick us up at 10:15 and we take a bus to the outskirts of town. We cross a river whose banks are littered with trash and populated by pigs and stray dogs; it smells nauseating. At the end of a dirt road is an unfinished brick building built into a hill, with steep crumbling stone steps leading up to the entrance; in it lives Josefina, a Jalq'a weaver of astonishing imagination and skill. In an unfinished, unroofed room, she shows us her work and how she creates it—all woven without plan, creatures appearing on the fabric as they occur to her, yet all fitting together geometrically; we buy two pieces depicting about fifty different animals and demons—one large, red and black, and fine; the other smaller, black and white, made from undyed wool she spun herself, and coarser; and also a very different and much more abstract piece that her mother made about sixty years ago. The most expensive piece, which took her two months to complete, is the red-and-black one, and it costs us about $115. She is obviously very poor, surviving on corn and potatoes, both of which she offers us; her husband, a truck driver, also weaves (in a very different style), but hasn’t been able to afford the materials lately. To see such a brilliant artist living like this would be heartbreaking if she didn’t seem so strong, healthy, and happy.

My Bolivian diary, entry #13

August 6, 2013

August 6 is Bolivia’s Independence Day. The practice parades start a week or two in advance: high school bands marching down the streets, baton-twirlers first, then drummers, then brass, mostly playing “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” Then, on the fourth, the kindergartners march, neatly militarily dressed in single bright colors, with sharply rectangular backpacks and wooden guns. On the fifth, the colegios (grade schools) march in spiffy uniforms; it’s hard to get around downtown with all the bands. I still haven’t been able to figure out why an American Civil War song has become the Bolivian marching band song. Then, on the sixth, the adults march, mostly in suits and ties—the supreme court, the other government officials, the university staff, the police, the blind.

Sunday we go with Philly to La Palma, a village about a half-hour away, and wander through orchards fed by a wide, rocky, and mostly dry river, in which families wash their clothes. We walk through a picturesque village, Tejahuasi, built on a hill, with a former Dominican monastery, cotton bushes growing over walls, papaya trees hung with heavy fruit, and goatherders leading their flocks down the roads. We roll up our pants to cross the river, then eat lunch in La Palma by the main road. The restaurant’s owner is probably in her seventies; she dances with a joyous boy of three, and tells us she used to be a dancer. She has the prettiest smile. We eat sopa de mani (peanut soup): a flavorful chicken broth with penne, french fries, garbanzo beans, beef, herbs, and, of course, peanuts. It’s one of the three best meals I’ve had here (the other two being at Sabor de Criollo and the Condor Café, a nonprofit vegetarian restaurant near our house). View this photo

Huari is the good Bolivian beer, but they don’t have any, so I drink Paceña, a bland pilsner, and so much of it that my altitude sickness gets worse, and on the minibus ride back up to Sucre I feel pretty bad. I’ve been feeling breathless on occasion for weeks now, especially when I drink too much alcohol or don’t eat enough carbs. My belt is tighter than it’s ever been, despite eating three large meals a day.

Monday is a day of missed connections. Karen and I go to the university to get Mariel’s help with the police, to whom we’ve applied for our domicilio, proof that we live here, but Mariel (who has been so good to us, bringing us to all the offices, even once to the clinic, which we had to visit five times in order to get our blood sampled for HIV and chargas) has to help Anita, her boss, who is leaving on a trip. So another person from the Office of International Relations, Jaime, accompanies us to the police (his brother-in-law works there, but turns out to be absent) and there we discover that we need to photocopy a form we hadn’t photocopied, we need a voucher to show we’ve paid (at the bank, to avoid corruption) our two dollars for the form that the police have to fill out when they come to visit us (on the back of which we had to draw a map showing the location of the apartment), and we need testimony from neighbor witnesses that we live at our address, along with signed photocopies of their identification cards. I go home while Karen hunts down the witnesses at UNICEF (where they work) and I tell the kids to take the laundry to the laundromat; when they come home and give me the receipt I realize that they haven’t asked for the laundry to be dried, so I ask them to go back, but by the time Jacky manages to get through all the parades, the laundromat (by the way, not the one I told them to go to) has closed for lunch. Karen comes back with the witness testimonies and we go to the police station again but we have to wait for nineteen German students to each apply for their background checks. Finally we turn in the multitude of forms—the signed and notarized lease, the handwritten testimony of the landlady (who lives in La Paz—it had to be couriered here), the electricity and water bills, the receipt of taxes paid, the aforementioned voucher, the signed photocopy of the landlady’s ID, the testigos, etc., etc., two copies of everything since they need to check on both of us—and the policewoman tells us she can’t visit our apartment to make sure we really live there until next Wednesday, a week after our visa expires. We go home frustrated. In the afternoon Karen goes to the university, but they've closed early; the kids climb up to the Recoleta while Karen tries to get access to JSTOR via the NYU alumni e-library; after a couple of Skype calls—to NYU alumni services and the reference desk at the NYU library—she finally gives up and goes to join the kids, but the kids come back via a different street, so I send them back up to join her. I go to my Spanish class, but the director asks me if it’s all right if it’s postponed until Wednesday; I tell her I’d prefer to have it tonight, but she argues that she forgot that the office would be closed on Tuesday for el día de la patria and there’s nobody to lock up after my lesson, so I give in and go look for Karen and the kids at La Recoleta. Karen had mentioned they might have dinner up at Casa Kolping, very close by, but there’s no one there, nor at the Café Mirador, so I go back down to Napoli, a pizza place Karen mentioned, but they’re not there either. I wait at home and they come back with the laundry, having taken a different street down and eaten at Café Florin; I have leftover quinoa and black-eyed peas and fried eggs and raw green peas while Karen goes to bed. Then I start writing this, but am unhappy with it; finally I turn in. It’s almost midnight, and I can’t count the connections we’ve missed, the trivial things gone wrong.

Today we take a bus with Philly, her lovely friend Roxana, and Roxana’s son Tonio, who is Jacky’s age, to the Mercado San Antonio on the outskirts of town for lunch. There about a dozen outdoor eateries are grilling fish; we choose one and sit down at plastic tables on plastic chairs. We each get half a hot, grilled, and well-seasoned fish, complete with head and tail and bones, on a plate, with no forks or knives; on another smaller plate are a couple of handfuls of boiled corn kernels (white, tough, and about four times the size of the yellow kernels of US corn) topped by a large boiled potato, all cold, unsalted, unbuttered, bare. We eat with our fingers, putting the bones in a plastic dish; the fish is divine; the corn and potatoes we douse with salsa; and then there is cold Inca beer, a bi-cervezita, a dark, sweet, and only slightly alcoholic malt beverage. Philly has been helping indigent children here for years, and one of them got married young and had a baby and moved to Chile to earn money, leaving the child with her parents, who live nearby, so we go see them and bring them mandarins; the infant, eighteen months old with a name none of us can quite get right (Rosariedne, I think), is wandering around eating from a bag of potato chips, saucy and happy. Philly is relieved that none of the men are in the house, since last time she came they were all falling-down drunk; the grandmother and cousin insist on giving us cups of Fanta. Then we all go back to the mercado with its wandering pigs and men selling bags of charcoal to take a taxi home.