Backland

A Trip to Candelaria

Public transportation won’t work for me—I would have to stay the night there the night before an all-night flight, and I normally don’t sleep that well in Candelaria (a small town of ninety-six families about ninety minutes from Sucre)—so I hire a taxi. The driver was a race-car driver for twenty-four years and turns out to be the best driver I’ve been with in Bolivia. When I arrive, Carlos (a young man who used to live with us in Sucre) introduces me to a friend of his, Rosario, a professional photographer and web designer. Together they are starting the first website devoted to selling weavings and other traditional arts of the area, and they are shooting photos of hundreds of weavings. After I take a walk around the village, I go with Damien (Carlos’s father) to take the cows halfway up a mountain and into a valley; he exerts his control by pelting them with rocks when they go too slow or wander away from the path. During lunch—a stew made of beef, carrots, onions, peppers, and tomato sauce, served with tagliatelle, potatoes, and freshly made bread—Damien asks me to invite the driver to share lunch with us, but he turns me down, saying he already ate. So Damien gets up and invites him in himself and serves him a huge plate of food, which he finishes with relish. After lunch we hike up a hill and Rosario takes some pictures of Damien weaving up there, wearing traditional clothing (the male weavers make entirely different weavings than the female ones). On the way down we run into a neighbor who, Carlos tells me, lives on the other side of the mountains and owns a hundred cows and sheep and also thirteen dogs to keep the wildcats at bay. When we come back to the house, Santusa (Carlos’s mother) and her mother, who is eighty-eight years old, set up a frame for a new weaving and roll balls of yarn back and forth to set up the warp; when her mother gets tired, Damien takes her place.

The driver told me on the way there that the Chuquisaqueños (the people who live in the region of which Sucre is the capital) are gentle and kind and love to talk to strangers, while the Aymaras (who live in the areas of La Paz and Oruro) are “mal,” not answering strangers’ questions and fighting among themselves. Indeed, there’s something ideal about the Chuquisaqueños and their traditional way of life. I hope that comes across in the photos I took there.

Shakespeare’s Rulers and Ours

In some ways The Second Part of King Henry IV is a less comprehensible and weirder rehash of the First Part. The rebellion has lost its star (Hotspur), the verbal jousting between Falstaff and Prince Hal is diminished, and Falstaff and friends are cruder. The play is less funny—and crueler, with Lancaster’s betrayal of the Archbishop, Hal’s “I know thee not, old man,” and the King’s attack on his son. It’s a bitter and untidy play, as befits a bitter and untidy time.

But the sequel, The Life of Henry V, is even crueler. Henry essentially kills Falstaff here, as is made plain by Fluellen’s Alexander the Great analogy; Henry’s sole monologue displays a complete lack of understanding of the lives of the poor and enslaved; the tricks he plays are unfeeling; he orders the killing of all of his French prisoners for no good reason; and his wooing of Katherine is self-obsessed. In many ways he is presented as a stalwart hero, England’s greatest king; but read between the lines and he’s just another politician.

While reading Shakespeare’s plays about the British kings, I’ve been thinking about the Trump (or should I say Putin’s ersatz?) administration in a Shakespearean light. Trump is one of the most Shakespearean of presidents in that he wears his tragic flaws on his sleeve while most presidents keep them under wrap, and also in his autocratic nature. He swaggers and rules like a king, issuing edicts right and left, countermanding them, and not listening to his ministers. The way Putin has pulled his strings reminds me of the string-pulling by Prospero in The Tempest, and his sudden reversals remind me of those of Richard II. When all is said and done—when Trump has left his throne and is indicted for his illegal actions—a Shakespearean play in two or three parts ought to be written about his rise and fall.

More Photos from Bolivia

Las Alasitas (see my previous post) is full of booths like this one.

Fortune-telling near Las Alasitas in Sucre. Notice the pieces of tin in the lower left corner.

If you want to get a sense of how tiny these boxes, cans, and bags are, look at the light blue plastic cup holding the brooms in the lower right.

The courtyard in Cayara. The opening scene of Werner Herzog's Salt and Fire was filmed here. Paola took this photo.

I don’t remember the name of the church in Potosí to which this door leads. It was built in the seventeenth century.

Only three friars are left in the monastery of San Francisco in Potosí. Here’s one of them.

From left to right: yours truly, Ryan, Karen, and Paola on the Torre de la Compañía in Potosí. It's the tower of a seventeenth-century Jesuit church; when the Jesuit order was disbanded in the eighteenth century because the Jesuits were against Portuguese efforts to enslave the indigenous people, the church was burned down. But the tower remained. Cerro Rico is in the background.

Typical Bolivian architecture, Sucre.

Wall art in Sucre.

On Saturday we go hiking in Bramadero, about an hour from Sucre.

Wild agaves in Bramadero.

A wild fuschia in Bramadero.

Las Alesitas and Potosí

Las Alesitas is a street fair/market that stretches for about half a mile on Sucre’s Avenida Manuel Molina. On Monday we go there with Carlos, the young man from the campo who lived with us four years ago, and a Colombian friend of his. Most of the vendors sell miniatures: houses, pets, food, drinks, cars, trucks, people, money—almost anything you desire can be bought. The idea is to buy something that you desire, place it in your home, and it will grow into the real, full-size equivalent within a year. The origins of the custom derive from an ancient Andean tradition in which miniature animal figures were buried with the expectation that they would grow into real animals.

Downhill from the market fortune tellers sit in a row. Besides cards, they use two other methods. One fills a glass half full of beer, tears a hole in the top of an egg, pours the egg white in the beer, and reads the shapes that emerge among the bubbles. Another pours molten tin from a hot pan into a bucket of cold water, then takes out the resulting mass, which looks a bit like a gondola, and reads the bumps and forms on the strange, glistening sculpture.

On Tuesday, Ryan, Paola, Karen, and I visit Cayara, a 16th-century hacienda not far from Potosí. (Ryan and Paola are close friends: Ryan is an American potter, bodybuilder, and former Peace Corps administrator who has been in Bolivia for twenty-eight years and lives alone in an extraordinary house he has built overlooking Sucre, and Paola is a young Bolivian who was born in Potosí, works as a tour guide, and loves to travel.) Two relatives of the owner, Arturo and Yvette, whom we had met in Sucre on Monday night, serve us a lunch made mostly of food grown on the grounds or nearby and spend a few hours showing us the rooms, books, paintings, furniture, and implements there. The most outstanding for me were the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books bound in vellum, the pre-Columbian pottery and artifacts, and the ornate furniture and paintings. It’s astonishing to consider that all this work, all museum-worthy, is still in private hands—and in good ones.

Potosí is a puzzle. It was once the largest city in the Western Hemisphere, with two-and-a-half times the population of Paris; now it has only about three hundred thousand residents. It is the most labyrinthine city I’ve ever been in, with narrow and winding streets and few thoroughfares. Overlooking it is a mountain, Cerro Rico, which was once the world’s primary source of silver; now there are so many mines in the mountain—some six thousand, with over twenty thousand miners working there—that the mountain has begun to collapse. The highest major city in the world, it is the historical site of almost unbelievable misery, with countless miners losing their health and their lives. This history lends it a kind of tension and excitement similar to that of Rome, Jerusalem, and Berlin.

Of the several foods that are characteristic of Potosí, perhaps the two best known are salteñas and k’allapurka. Salteñas are a lot like empanadas: round pieces of dough filled with meat, vegetables, potatoes, and eggs, folded and crimped on top, then baked in a wood-fired oven. They’re common in Sucre and La Paz too, but the most traditional ones in Potosí have thinner, unsweetened dough, slightly burnt, while the ones I’ve had elsewhere are too sweet for my taste. In the salteñeria we go to in Potosí, they bring them out of outdoor ovens on huge trays and customers take from one to a half-dozen. K’allapurka is a porridge-like soup made of corn meal, meat, potatoes, and spices; a black rock that has been heated in a fire is put in the middle so that the soup bubbles like a volcano. You have to use special igneous rocks, since river rocks, for example, will explode when heated.

On Wednesday we visit the sixteenth-century church of San Francisco, home to the oldest sculpture in Bolivia (a striking 1550 Christ on the cross made of cactus wood and human hair) and an extensive crypt; the tour takes us to the roof, with its dozens of tile-shingled domes. And we climb up the Torre de la Compañía, an eighteenth-century tower in the characteristic mestizo style, with spiral columns and sculptured arches.

Here are a few photos; I will post more soon.

Manhattan, as seen from Bushwick

Jacky in Brooklyn Heights

Thalia in Brooklyn Heights

Ryan's house in Sucre

The roof of the church of San Francisco in Potosí (Paola's photo)

A street in Potosí, as seen from the roof of the church

The Torre de Compañía and surrounding buildings, Potosí

The church of Santo Domingo in Potosí

A house in Potosí

 

Three Cities, Three Homes

If a home is a place you’ve lived for more than a year, I’ve had five of them: Bloomington, Indiana; Princeton, New Jersey; Brooklyn; Chicago; and Sucre, Bolivia. I’m in the latter city now and left Brooklyn three days ago, so I’ve been reflecting on cities and home.

We rented an apartment in Ridgewood, Queens, two blocks from the Brooklyn border; the block of row houses was in Bushwick, Brooklyn, until the 1970s, and we only slept there, so we were essentially in Brooklyn for four days, spending some time in Manhattan too. Bushwick is home to a mix of Hispanic immigrants and young artistic types, a far cry from what it was twenty-five years ago: dangerous and poverty-stricken (a friend who lived there got stabbed in the chest outside his front door, if memory serves; he survived, but the knife got pretty close to his heart). The best meal we had there was at a restaurant called Balcon de Quito, an Ecuadorian place in which we were the only gringos. We also spent time elsewhere in Brooklyn: Park Slope, where we visited my cousin and her family; Dumbo, where we attended a wedding; downtown, where we ate cheesecake at Junior’s; and my son Jacky and I also bicycled across the Brooklyn Bridge and through Fort Greene and Bedford-Stuyvesant to Bushwick.

But could I live in Brooklyn now? I don’t know. For a long time Brooklyn was the only place I ever really felt at home. The people were so friendly, so diverse. Brooklyn was a refuge for people from all over the country and the world; now it feels more like a destination, a place one aspires to. Karen says that Park Slope is like the Upper West Side now. The two communities who live in Bushwick probably barely mix. The best places in Brooklyn are now some of the most inconvenient to get to: while it takes half an hour to bicycle from our part of Bushwick to Brooklyn Heights, it takes close to an hour by train or bus. And the amount of money we spent in New York was astronomical.

As for Sucre, things haven’t changed much since I lived here four years ago (for a year). Bolivia is still quite close to paradise in many ways: safe and beautiful with perfect weather and the warmest, gentlest, kindest people I’ve ever met, with fantastic traditions, excellent food, and a large number of jaw-dropping places to visit. There are some drawbacks, though: no postal service or English-language bookstores, few city parks, occasional water shortages and general strikes, dangerous roads—it’s hard to bicycle here because of the road conditions, the drivers, and the hills. In addition, I always get sick here, no matter how carefully I eat and drink: when I lived here I got sick about once a month. I was sick last night, trembling like a broken washing machine.

As for Chicago, I’ve become attached to the city, despite its horrors. I love our neighborhood, Hyde Park: Jackson Park and the lakeshore are splendid, as is the Victorian architecture. I like the diversity there, and it’s a great place to bicycle and, in the summer, swim. And I love the Oriental Institute and the bookstores.

Yet I still don’t feel quite at home, even though we’ve lived there for over twenty years. The University of Chicago dominates the neighborhood, and it’s an institution I’ve never felt the least fondness for. Racial tensions may be lower in Hyde Park than in other neighborhoods, but they’re still there, because the power structure in Chicago is so racist at its core. The social, political, and economic splintering in Chicago—and all over the US—makes me want to flee.

In The Book of Questions, Pablo Neruda wrote,

A quién le puedo preguntar
qué vine hacer en este mundo?

Por qué me muevo sin querer,
por qué no puedo estar inmóvil?

Por qué voy rodando sin ruedas,
volando sin alas ni plumas,

y qué me dio por transmigrar
si viven en Chile mis huesos?

(Whom can I ask what I came to do in this world? Why do I move without wanting to, why can’t I sit still? Why do I go rolling without wheels, flying without wings or feathers, and what moved me to emigrate when my bones live in Chile?)

Where do my bones live? I’ve been asking myself that for years, and I haven’t been able to answer.