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my senses were not in focus

I'm in the UK, and I'm too jetlagged to formulate sentences, or even answer accurately when asked my name.  So in lieu of one of my posts, I blatantly reprint a private email from an american chap I know, who was motorbiking alone around South America.  He's in Brazil right now, and is looking for a way out.  Here's his story.

PS He's right - Brazil is nothing like anywhere else in SA, mark you.

I´m Alive!!!!!!!!  I´m OK. Not harmed.
 
Many people have warned me. In fact, everyone that I have met that has traveled to or lives in Brazil has told me that Brazil is a very dangerous place. Guns, thieves, drugs are abundant in a country that has a very high poverty rate. The cost of living is by any means not cheap. It is the most expensive country in all of Central or South America. So there are many people with less, and want more. Many of which are not good people and will do anything to enrich there ways.
 
Yesterday morning, around 8:30, I left Rio, on my motorcycle. heading north towards Bahia, the coast of northern Brazil. About three hours later or 220 kilometers (150 miles) a car with a police style red light on the roof, pulled up along side of me, and pointed to the side of the road as if wanting me to pull over. So I did. That was a mistake.
 
All my senses were not in focus. I did not notice that there license plate was a normal Rio De Janeiro license plate, and wonder what a police car from Rio would be doing in another state (Brazil has 26 states just like the USA has 50) wanting me for whatever reason. I wasn´t speeding, or doing anything to warrant such a stop. But, I am in another country with different customs. so I pulled over.
 
I did notice that there red light on the top of the car was one that had an electronic cord that went inside the passenger window that would maybe hook up to the cigarret lighter. Something did not feel right. Two guys came out and asked me for my documents.  As I was try to produce them, they forcedly pulled me to there car, put a gun to me and pushed me inside.
 
There was four of them in the car. One took of on my motorcycle, and the rest of us followed in the car. We went off on to a side pave road, then a dirt road that was surrounded by sugar cane. Then, we turned on a narrow little road that went over weeds 1 meter (3 feet) high. It was obvious that no one else had been on this road in months. They were taking me were no one else would see us. I knew I was F%$ked. Is this it? Is it time to meet the maker. I  thought about jumping out of the car, but the driver had locked all the doors.
 
We came to a little clearing were another guy with a full face ski mask was waiting. He also had a motorcycle. They pulled me out of the car and forced me down on the ground, pointing there guns, demanding things in non understating words. They wanted my money. Unfortunately, I had just been to the bank before leaving Rio and loaded up with cash.
 
Fve of them, one of me, I tried to remain calm. Thinking to myself not to do anything stupid, like try to grab one of there guns. I thought about trying to make a dash in the thickness of the sugar cane, but that soon became impossible for they had bound my legs with duct tape.
 
One of the guys (the leader) just sat there next to me, as if to make sure I would not do anything foolish. The others were like children opening up Christmas presents. The ripped apart all my personal belongings, putting things they wanted into the trunk of the car (Ipods, phones, camera,) or anything else they thought they might want. The things they did not want were tossed into the shrubbery.
 
They kept trying to talk and ask questions in Brazilian Portuguese, of which I understood little. After the charade of present opening´s was over, we just sat around. By this time I did not feel that my life was being threatened any more, for if it was there wish to kill me, they would have already done that. They did not want my passport or wallet, just the money.
 
So we just sat there, waiting, for what? I had no idea. a couple of them took off and came back with some bread, cheese, and sandwich meat. They ate, and tried to get me to eat. I wasn´t hungry. If they were going to kill me, why feed me. I felt safer. After all the blind words, all I can say was `English or Espanol`. There leader also speaks a little spanish.
 
At around three o'clock, they told me I could undo the duct tape that was binding my legs. And the leader asked me if there was anything personal I wanted to keep from the pile of unwanted things they left in the shrubs. I started to look through and asked if I could keep some of my clothes. they saids yes. So I started gathering up what they did not want. And they were even kind enough to give me back my backpack. These guys aren´t so bad after all.
 
I had no clue why we were sitting around all day. They would not tell me. I thought they were just going to leave me there. So I asked them if they could give me 20 reils back (US $12.00) so I had some money to catch a bus.
 
At about 4:30 pm, as darkness approached, they put me back in the car, put a ski mask over my face so I could not see. We left. One guy on my motorcycle, another on the other and four of us in the car. Three hours later, they pulled up to the Rio bus staion, gave me 20 reils, and let me go.
 
I feel no hatred, want no revenge. These are people who will do whatever they have to impove there life. I definately do not condone there action, for it viloates all what is good, it breaks at least one of the ten comandments. But most importantely, I´m alive!!!!! I´m OK. I get to live.
 
So I have made my way back to Vera´s place in Rio who has been so helpful and understanding. Thank you Vera.
 
I am drained, I no longer crave, no desire, to see the world. I am humbled. This may change in the future. I hope it does. So my travels are coming to an end. After sleeping last night wondering how I should now direct my life. I feel like I have been led by the Good Lord from above. It´s time to return home.
 
Now I have other problems. When I entered Brazil I had to sign an agreement that I could not leave the country without my motorcycle. That is no longer possible. So I seeking the wisdom of those who could help.
 
Soon. i will walk on familar soils again.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 5:01 pm ~ There are shitloads - 5 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

England. Jesus.

And then, everything snowballed.

I had to move house - everything in a rusty camioneta, taking two weeks and five moves, to complete: my stuff, tenant one and stuff, tenant two and stuff, the shared stuff, the business, the rest.

That was accompanied by rabid arguments held not in my mother tongue, on a twice daily basis, until tenant two decided to live somewhere else.  Turned out what I thought was offering her a good deal was not at all perceived that way, not even when it was making a loss for me, in her favour, because a good deal for La Princesa is a deal where she lives for free.  When I realised the extent of the arrogance, it was easier, because her petulance (again, not in my mother tongue) began to make more sense.

Then: the new house had four rooms,  I wanted eight.  We had only three weeks to start middle and end this construction.  The occurrence of builders, electricians, plumbers, etc, turning up pissed as a fart is a little higher in this country - when you have money, you enjoy it.  So micro managing that construction project, while living in situ has been just a little draining.  One week till it's finished.

I can't work after the 17th, so I need to fit a month's activity into about two weeks.  Forgotten what a day off looks like.

Beyond that, it's carnival.  Of course, we have Carneval, in February, like most of the rest of South America.  But then there are two city carnivals, lasting about a week each.  They're all consuming.  They're, I mean, really, really big.  So a day is not a day, a day is suddenly going to the fiesta del barrio, because there's so much music your bedroom windows are throbbing, and there's no way you will sleep.

But there's more.  We had to interview, choose, employ new staff for the business, because as of 18th June, we'll be 15000km away.
Yep, we're going to England.

That's a big thing.

My partner has never travelled.  I mean, in Peru, yes, but outside?  Never.  It's taken me two years of solid work to get this trip to happen, and it involves leaving the still fledgling business in capable hands.  Capable hands which don't exist. 
Good point in time for two or three of the staff to try blackmail as a new career move.  Again, still unresolved, but hey, there's eight days, a lot can happen.

And then, there's going home.  I didn't mention it here, because I'm afraid to jinx it.  Like, maybe if I mention it, maybe if I even think about it, it will somehow never happen. 

Six weeks in England.  With my own car.  Fuck.  I'm more than scared.

There's more, you know.  Even more.  But - sorry - time's time right now, not a void to be filled.  I'll tell you when I can. 

England.  Jesus.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 6:57 pm ~ There are shitloads - 13 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

Lizard Soul

Written in April.

I’m in a café.  I'm in a café because I don't want to go to work, and I don't want to go home.  There’s nowhere else I can go.  The racist stares and abuse are milder than the squalor, sarcasm and outbursts from my ‘family’ and ‘friends’.

I say ‘friends’, but that’s an appellation derived solely from their relative ability to speak more English than Peruvians can.  They’re not friends, they’re staff.

Welcome to immigration, welcome to the world uprooted, welcome to life with nowhere to hide.

God this world is lonely.  God, these people are cold.

Correction:  I am European (Not British – where’s that?  Is it in Estados Unidos?), so I am cold.  I am incapable of love or even warmth of response.  I am more honest than godfearing Peruvians, but that’s an advantage conferred by an upbringing in paradise, where there’s no poverty, no problems, we’re all awash with plenty, there’s no such thing as a gaol cell, because there’s no such thing as crime, and we’re all cold.  However, I am also a whore who will sleep with anyone (though an innocent whore, who’s probably been duped – unless of course I’m a brunette European, when I’m more likely just a sex-hungry bitch), and I’ll do anything for drugs. 

I have no maners, no sensibility of feeling, and a dark, lizard soul.  I have trillions of dollars, which I refuse to help good Peruvian folk with, purely because destiny has placed them under my foot.  I am arrogant, and I am stupid – I can’t even speak Spanish properly, when most of the warm, honest, godfearing world managed to master is by the age of two.

I have an alien constitution – I can eat things and survive dire shaman curses that would kill a good Peruvian, but I can’t dance, and I’ll never feel passion like they can.

The colour of my skin determines my soul – I will never be as they are.  I’m too fucking narrow, too fucking subhuman, too fucking other.

And I’m cold.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 1:04 pm ~ There are shitloads - 8 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

He Loves Me. We Fight.

Written in February 08, in conversation with somebody who never heard the replies.

* You once said that while you were travelling the prospect of immediate security was very attractive.  What other aspects motivated you to marry?

Security in love, security in family, security in belonging somewhere.  Not: security of social status, not of economic rank, nor of social control.  I'm not a saint, these things are nice, but what attracted me is that he loves me.

I wanted to slowdown, to stay still, to make a life somewhere new.  He offered me all of these, with a liberal layering of true love on the top.  What other aspect than love need there be?

Faux naivete, of course.  It's not like I never in my life loved anyone before.  But in his arms, all feels right with the world, and if everything else doesn't fall into shape, I reasoned, either I could beat it to fit, or at worst, I'd be no worse off than in London, dating misogynists or being broken on the wheel of my job each day.
I underestimated: the isolation of moving to BumFuck, Peru, without speaking the lingo.
I underestimated: the endless daily struggle to communicate clearly in a mixed culture marriage.
I underestimated: the rootlessness, the grinding sense of Always Being In The Wrong, when I live 20,000 miles from all the things and the people who grounded me.
How often I would feel like a cornered dog, snapping frenziedly at all hands in misguided terror.

But there are bad things everywhere.  He loves me.  I have a life that brims with irritating things, but he loves me.  I haven't doubted that yet.  I wasn't running from my life, I just didn't have a life to go back to.  I wanted to stay because here is someone who really loves me.  Isn't that worth the risk?

* What aspects of the marriage are you happy with?

That I can read him better.  He'll do this, or that, and I can read it through the glass of his culture, instead of always misinterpreting, of always viewing it through the grimy dark porthole of mine.

And, I like my life here in several respects.  I work four or five hours a day, not fourteen.  I don't mind working my ass off, because I'm building something, it's my business.  I'm not a chimp in somebody else's circus.

I like that through me, he has achieved and will achieve more.  So far.  Of course, I can easily and petulantly, and self righteously fuck all that up by insisting we live in my country - but that's futuresin, I'm not guilty of it yet.

I like that we have great sex.  I like that we can laugh.

A lot of the cultural attitudes I complain of, are the selfsame things I'm happy with.  Ejemplo - the machismo, the whole madonna / whore peruvian thing - in his eyes I'm the former.  Most people I ever dated regarded me as more or less an entertainment, someone who would always eventually betray them.  With him, I'm unquestionably the good guy, and I've never been that for someone before.  The occasionally inexplicable, crazy, difficult, unpredictable and temperamental good guy, for sure - he has to live with me, how could it not be so? - but the good guy all the same.  When a movie shows tenderness, loyalty, or true faith, he will squeeze and kiss me, because that's what I represent to him, that's where I am in his heart.

And he's in it for the long haul. I was unquestionably with many of my exes because they were waiting for something better to come along.  Once I'd split, they to a man / woman, bleated to others that I was the one, that they'd been holding out for something longer - but for whatever reasons, they chose never to represent that to me.  To him, I'm not hors d'oeuvres, I'm the main course.  It feels good, to be loved like that.
It feels, too, undeserved.  (I look for cracks, see.  Seek them out.  Will them into life.)

* What aspects are you unhappy with?

The situational aspects that form the backdrop of Immigration.  Family.  Rows.  Stupidity.  How I instinctively respond with The Aggressive.  Isolation.  The way that when I speak nobody hears.  The nagging knowledge that the culture diff is wide, that he will never really understand me.  (But I've been understood, the ones who understand don't bring anything to the table but the ability to cut that much deeper when they leave.)

I'm not overawed amazed and fascinated by tourists, for example.  I don't think racism is logical and right.  I don't think all women are bitches who cheat, or control freaks, and I don't think all men should take the lead in life, or are doomed to stray.  These attitudes are commonplace here.  I want him to help me live here and be happy, and it secretly suits him if I can't speak or don't have friends.  I don't believe in the superiority of either his culture or mine, and I have so little tolerance left for listening to explanations of why germans are the master race, or south americans use their hearts more than the rest of the world.

I'm unhappy that when I speak, nobody listens.  That the skull numbing lack of opportunity or diversion here is accepted as normal.  I'm unhappy that I'm unhappy - it feels like my face forgot who I am, and lost how to smile along the way - and that he's never seen me not like this.

(Who am I kidding?  It's two years.  Here, now, this is me.  Not shadow-me.  Not américan-me.  Just me.  I lost how to smile.)

I want to have a day where not everything I do, touch, say, or look like is culturally offensive.  Where old women don't clutch their children and cross the street in case I curse them by looking at them with my alien eyesight.  I'm unhappy that I'm so often so bloody tired of this square peg status, that almost anything can ignite  my blue touchpaper, and a rage of goliath-proportions races out of me.  I'm unhappy that he responds more to rages, sulks and petulance than to me trying hard.

I'm unhappy that he thinks of white skin / blonde hair as morally better.  I'm unhappy that I've failed to squash my paranoiac suspicion that he's still looking for something.  That I can't accept the logical truth that action (not desire, not temptation) constitutes infidelity.  I'm unhappy, and I'm frustrated, and I'm cornered, and I'm angry.  And I can't understand why someone would love me like that, so I push it away.

* These problems - can they be separated from your problems in living in Amazonas?

No.  No, they can't.  I married a peruvian, and he married a european, and however individual we each claim to be, we each have to deal with that, have to accept that there are differences in the way we compute the world.

A guy here from Europe, marrying a peruvian, once said to me, "so, is that it?  If there's a difference, you just default to the peruvian way?"  By and large, I do, y'see.  I have changed almost everything I ever knew, and why?  Because I can't fight a country, and because I did choose this.
There are more differences than you could imagine, and so I have to save my strength for the fights that are important to me.  I have to decide what is more precious - my values, my perception of how one conducts oneself in an argument; or that I win?  I want to not be screamed at by in-laws.  I want to be able to visit my family.  I want liberty over the clothes I wear.  These are fights I choose to win.  My marriage, you see, is a battle, and the flag of victory is his compromise.  And why?  Because my marriage is also emigration, my marriage is the status of outsider, my marriage is the possibility of total, annihilating exile from everything I ever was or knew.

No, my marriage cannot be separated from the issues raised by living in BumFuck, Peru.  It is dominated by these things.  Sometimes it feels as though, maybe, it is these things.

Of course, in his opinion, someone has cursed us, paid three shamans to crouch in a graveyard and throw our names to the buzzards, and the only way out of it is to shapeshift at midnight into panther form to fight the evil spirits that beset us.
You think that basic difference of how we each view the world would melt away if we left this city?  No.  It's the reason we're together, and it's the thing that pulls us apart, and I've had this struggle up the yinyang since the moment that we started.
None of that will melt for lack of geography.

* But can you identify some themes?  For example, do you have financial stresses?  If so, how do you each respond to those?

Of course we have regular financial stresses, we're small business owners in a third world country.  In a bad month, I earn twenty pounds sterling.  I've been sleeping on the floor of a windowless closet in a corner of a classroom and washing out of a bucket for eighteen months now.  I try to paint it as practical, as some sort of an anti-western pura vida, but it's grinding and stressful. 
Our response is to fight, spectacularly, or to spend too much in making up.

The sheer, visible hatred of much of the city for the foreigner in their midst is a regular stress.  And, remember, in the remote sierra, a 'foreigner' is anyone from another peruvian city.  I've been barefacedly told that I qualify much as a martian species here more times than I care to count. 
Our response is to unite against the opposition.  Or sometimes relieve the stress with a spectacular row.

The fucking tourists are a regular stress.  Every single one is 'his very good friend' while they're using him, and an unanticipated disappointment when they (always) leave.  I resent wasting hours and hours building friendships that will ever be temporary, when I need a permanent confidante so badly. 
Our response is to ignore this difference, then fight spectacularly.

Can you see the pattern?  It's a pointless recitation.  He loves me.  We fight.  Spectacularly.  Welcome to Perú.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 4:49 pm ~ There are shitloads - 7 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

Bus from the jungle

Let’s add a little rationality.  I’m underemployed.  That’s great.  That’s what I want – enough job to feed myself, and enough time – much more time – to feed my mind well.  I have autonomy in a job that’s not difficult.  It ties me to one place, a remote place, but it’s eminently manageable, it doesn’t consume me.  I’m in Perú – as I write this, I’m travelling through jungle in the Amazonian Basin – I can travel, and easily, to places most of my friends only dream about.  The climate is temperate, the people here are temperate.  I’m not dying of frighteningly grey cold for nine months of the year, and nor am I subject to the more corrosive parts of English culture (the need to complain constantly, nor the need to absolutely define myself by stupid lifestyle details – to fit in by ostentatiously not quite fitting in).  I’m learning a new language.  How wonderful to learn a whole new language, a whole new way of being - and this is me, someone utterly shit at languages, too.  I’m learning patience, and to rid myself of arrogance, which is something extremely difficult for either a European or a South American to do.  I’m learning how to have a little pride.
I’m learning compromise – many relationships I’ve had have been with people very different in character to me, but from a similar culture.  Now, I can’t rely on any shared assumption of justice, or of Being in the Right, or of other’s opinions.  I’m alone with my own beliefs and customs, and have to pick and choose which ones are worth the battle of maintaining.  I have a family, a husband: someone who is impossible, great-hearted, selfish, loving, bad tempered, loyal, difficult, who wakes up every morning and tells me that he loves me, who is the bloody bane of my existence, and whom I love to pieces right back.  He can be obstinate, egotistic, pig-headed and stubborn, and he can also show me one of the warmest hearts I ever encountered in life.
I live in the Andes, a five hour hop from the Amazon, amidst ancient tribal ruins without number.  Whenever I remember to lift my face from the grindstone of daily living, it stuns me with its complexity and beauty.  I live in the Andes.  The fucking Andes, for god’s sakes.  Life is life, and I forget that, too much.  People come here once in a lifetime.
I live far away from magazines and TV adverts, and trying to look fashionable.  Nobody’s ever going to tell me, with the weight of cultural rejection, that I’m not good enough, here, because I’m too skinny, too old, too young, too fat.  Of course what I am is too white, too foreign, too other for them to accept, but you don’t grab at the sweeter honey without getting stung a little. 
Yo me siento la falta de mis patas, de mis libros, de los platos típicos, de mi familia.  Falta algo.  Pero no es una cosa en lo que me falto todo.  Es el Perú.  En muchas formas, vivo una vida mas rica que antes. Eso me recordaría.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 5:13 pm ~ There are shitloads - 7 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

Avoidance

Written in April 08

The owl on the cover of my diary winks at me, in frozen, old, Singaporean merriment. My back's to the café, the staff avoid my eye. I try to believe that the stunted, bloated, younger child of the owner, shuffling and screaming in the shop, aged somewhere between 12 and 32, is a good person.

It’s a thing I practise. It’s not fun to be ugly, you have to allow the ugly certain character defects – it was society, not instinct that put them there. But she disappoints so often – truculent sighs in place of responses, slamming goods onto the glass, eye-rolling and loud no-one-in-particular style complaints about bloody foreigners; that I have to admit defeat, the girl is ugly on the inside.

She has a crush on my partner, and, man, she could lose weight, she could dress better, but it’s going to be harder to grow two feet, convert from black hair to blonde, hazel to blue eyes, and change the colour of skin. She has a lot of stuff to be angry about. Don’t we all.

But it’s depressing, you know – why the nastiness, why the aggression, why all born of self-hate? Is that my problem, too, am I not happy here because I’m too full of self loathing to be happy, geography be damned? I don’t think so. I ask if they’ll switch the TV on. The kid ignores me and walks away. I ask another worker. Same response. Scatter.

I victimise the new girl; she knits her brow as she doesn’t listen, as she hears only skin colour and not the formation of words. As she decides before I’ve really spoken that she won’t understand me.

God, I’m tired of this mountain ignorance. I’m tired of no words, no glances, no gestures reflected, no smiles. No social connections whatsoever, when you disregard the lamers who hope two words per month could one day convert into a fuck.

And – surprise. The new girl answered me, the usual, abrupt, Peruvian “no,” but this time she gave an explanation. A stupid explanation, yes, but that it exists acknowledges that I am human. Not just invisible. Not just Despised.

It won’t last. She’ll learn.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 4:14 pm ~ There are shitloads - 5 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

Grillo

I found a three or four inch cricket on my bedsheets on Monday.  A grillo. It ran just like a spider with cat DNA might do, when I flicked it into the sunshine.  It ran up a drainpipe.  (isn't that a drainpipe just behind you?)

Drainpipe to another world.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 4:51 pm ~ There are shitloads - 5 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

On thoughts of suicide

Written in April 2008

I spent half of my first wedding anniversary crying uncontrollably.  Only the hours where I was alone.  It wasn't related to the date, only mere all pervading isolation and sadness.

I'm sure that's not an alien concept for you.

When my husband came home and held me, asked me later what I was thinking, I was even surprised at myself, noting that my passing thoughts had been of which pillar would hold firmest if I hanged myself from it.

It's not my way to think suicidal thoughts.  And I don't feel sympathy for the suicidal thinker.  I'm sorry if it offends you, but the long distant suicide of a friend left me with the conviction that this is a dark, perverse, selfish desire, founded on a well hidden need to cause deep and lasting pain.  I am the type who would bury a suicide at the crossroads, and refuse to mourn them.  And when someone you care about has hanged themselves in an empty garage, knowing that a child will find them, knowing that they have coruscated and abandoned four children under the age of seven, knowing that their life is far from unrecognised, unappreciated, or lost in the noise of humanity, then you may stand and point a finger at me for that.

It's not in my character to be this person.  But to be so inexplicably unequal to the world as to want to lash out and hurt it, to be so beneath what is needed as to fold, defeated, into myself - that very much is in my character.  This is chemical imbalance rearing its ugly head.  This is not response, this is depression.

And I spent last week trying to tell someone that she's depressed, that she needs help, that to cut off and hide at this point only feels the best response, but would actually bury her.  Even I couldn't be so stupid as to assume the symptoms I described weren't equally symptoms of my own black dolorousness.

So, I lie there, crying, thinking about oblivion, and it occurs to me that this is the Big D again.  Hello, black dogs, my old friends.  I'd hoped them to be isolated responses in my life, to difficult circumstances, but life shows me the lie.  By repetition life shows me the lie.  Even this way of speaking, this repetitive, ruthless (not ruthless enough) self-analysis is a symptom.  The fault lies not in the stars.  The fault lies in me.

Three times I could explain it away. The knocks.  The blows of rough fate: a logical response.  Four times, now, that the black dogs have greeted me.  Four times is not reaction.  Four times is tendency, syndrome, instigation.  This is chemical depression.  This is what darkens my skies, makes me unerringly the painted victim of my own moody refusal to lift my eyes.  This is depression.  This, then, is what I am, what I probably have always tended to be.

And I cry myself to sleep, thinking about how the writing and writing and writing doesn't help.  It both magnifies and hides, and then you reread and see what a false hypocritical bitch you can be, and of course, that realisation is always helpful, isn't it.

My husband holds me, and whispers "it's okay, it's just two months till you see your family again, all your friends, they'll be so pleased to see you."  It's not even an eye-blink space of thought that dismisses him - more a supposition of assumed negative force in the world, as memory registers that it ain't that way, that, usually, they're not pleased to see me at all, and disallows the possibility of light in the world.  And I spider my mind out, above the sadness - reflecting that this ability, too, is manic - to present itself to the problem of what to do about it.  This is Perú, I can buy prozac from a pharmacist without any enquiry - but wouldn't I rather see a pysch?  Do I really want to mask my problems with a drug that will just make me go away?  The only other time I took it, it brought order to my life, by eliminating the manic energy, the hyperreal super processes, reducing my days to automaton eat-drink-sleep.  A blessed release.  The most blessed being my prompt escape from this jelly-humanity, from life as a lower-evolved being, six months later.  If I do it again, if I take the blood pills and their promises, could I escape so fast the next time?  Is it possible they aggravate this tendency?  That I'm underwater and treading here because my response is to hide behind drugs?

And my visit home: would that be easier or harder if I floated through the whole thing without feeling anything?  Would I maybe be nicer, less disappointed, easier for the folks over there?  Would the absence of the catalyst alcohol, the absence of the catalyst character, the absence of the catalyst fear, be a factor in that?

My mind, even racing, can't find a solution.  If I find a psych, I can't talk.  Sleep is a healer.  I close wet lashes, dream that I take my own five year old self on my knee, tell her that I love her.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 4:25 pm ~ There are shitloads - 12 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

Rosy

I don't want good publicity.  I don't need this place to render my life here in rosier detail.  Some bits of my life are good, a fair bit is bad, and I'm not interested in hiding it.  When something is solid, I don't need to talk it up.  This is not paradise, it's real life.  Real, messy, tormented, unpredictable, bitter, and arcane.

Fact.  Solid.  Perú is beautiful.

Fact. Solid.  My husband loves me.

Fact.  Solid.  My career is fulfilling, here.

I don't need to make out it's better than it is, I dont even need to say the good bits.  That's not my particular fight.  That's not what this place is for.

This place is to articulate the struggle to contain and control my traitor, negating soul.  If it sounds a little too much of the black paint for you, then there's a million happier places you could read.  A million happier people.

But don't pressure me to keep quiet about the dark bits.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 4:20 pm ~ There are shitloads - 3 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

Revival

Written in April 08

I'm watching an evangelical meeting.  Live band, nuns doing the conga around a fountain, stacks of locals shuffling, headwagging, mouthing the words.  Latin americans are reputed to be warm, open, music loving, impetuous types, never more so than when being described by themselves.  "Europeans die of overwork of the head, you know," Alicia once confided, in a dark room in Cuenca, "and south americans die of overwork of the heart."

However, on the pacific coast, it doesn't ring true.  Ecuadorean and Peruvian society are repressed and conservative to the point of teeth gritting, and social control achieved through exhausting degrees of formalities, to be submitted to on every occasion.

Self consciously, the local citizens clap hands, stare nervously at each other, and try to secure good opinion from nuns.  People are snubbed, courted or approved of, through a limited, limiting code of gestures.  No one wants to bring censure on home and family by appearing, acting, or dressing out of place.

And then.  A fat woman, short haired, breaks from the conga line.  She's dressed in an alpaca sweater and grey slacks, not the conventional black leather jacket, black shirt, indigo jeans, black stilettos of peruvian women (of a certain age and status).  She wears the sweater because it's cold, and because its made of llama fur, and because she loves Perú.  On her feet are flip flops, dusty ones.  She congas alone across the patio, dancing with arms wide, like a fat scout-mistress demonstrating a good time.  She dances to the low wall opposite, pulls a rigid skinny nun from her perch, drags her protesting to the conga line.  Nervous titters from the nuns, who are girls, kind hearted girls dressed in old women's bodies.  Short dumpy nuns from Japan, goofy, stick-limbed nuns from Africa, moustachioed, illiterate and curvy, small nuns from Perú.  With a push and a shove and a wild ducking of the head, fat woman forces grey nun into the line, and she's dancing.  Knees swooping upwards in a barnyard gait, shes back off to the crowd and sequestering yet another pallid, nervous nun.

And, of all the world she has to be European, I realise.  That lack of self-consciousness, the desire to express squashing and killing the desire to conform.  Not giving a flying fuck what people with a stick up their arse think of her.  It's so unperuvian.  I've seen it so often (in the US, in Asia) that it shocks me how I'd forgotten.  The disjunct of witnessing physical liberty.  It's so European.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 4:04 pm ~ Nobody Likes Us and We Don't Care [ Add ]

nevernevernever

Written in April 08

"But you can never go back," he says, sipping coffee in pyjamas, in the doorway of my kitchen, this man I've never met before.  Last night I'd wept my way to sleep, resolving not to spend another Christmas in Perú, resolving to move out to an apartment with a bed, with a table, with a hanger and a space with a door I can shut on the world as soon as I awoke.

"It's not that it's changed," he sipped at the imported beans, pink slippers on his feet, "it's you.  You know different things, now, and you'll never be able to go back to how it was."

Like a lone funereal toll, pealing out across a lake, somewhere.  My jaw drops, at the presumption, and at the accuracy, of him.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 3:56 pm ~ Nobody Likes Us and We Don't Care [ Add ]

Sierra

My friends and family have visited Perú, you know.  But what they saw was the coast.  The coast is different.  On the coast, women are now permitted to go to university, to begin (if not yet fully execute) a career.  They can smoke in public, delay marriage and children, travel independently (even though they don't, they can), see something different on the street and tolerate it.  The banks used to only employ beautiful girls, but nowadays quite a few banks will employ ugly women, too, if they are good at their jobs.
The coast is much more advanced than where I live.

Sure, maybe in comparison to back home, it seems shabby, dirty and limited.  Bit like Hull thirty years ago.  Women are not yet emancipated enough to have short hair, or to want to sacrifice family for the sake of their new careers.  And if they see a facial piercing, a boy in eyeliner, their jaws drop in shock.  But in the contest of Peru, of costa, sierra, selva (coast, mountain, jungle, the three separate cultures of any Andean country), they're worldly, liberal, cosmopolitan.  Tolerant.
My partner's from the coast.  But that's not My Perú. 

I live in the high sierra.  Coastal people use serrano (someone from the sierra is a serrano) as an insult.  It means backward, insular, unevolved. (believe me, you don't want to know what they think of selva culture...)

... and they have a bit of a point, there, see.

In the sierra, women still walk three paces behind their husband.  (who, incidentally, has never boiled water, but expects a three course meal for lunch, waiting on the table as he steps in the door.)  Women can run a family business, but nothing else - a woman is for the cleaning, the cooking, the breeding, the carrying.  Women don't even pay for things here.  Many's the night I've watched three knockout girls in a bar yawning around a man so inebriated that his face is in his navel, because if they don't dance attendance , who would pay for the drinks and the food?
[Explaining the concept of 'going dutch' to C----, coastal chica, she says, "yes, but on a date it'd be different, no?"  then gapes as I explain, no, that is a date.]

It's not unusual to see a halfcut fat rolling feller slouching down the street at one pm while his wife and his mother carry two stones of potatoes and three kids on their backs, behind him.  Women are treated as donkeys, here.

For that matter, so's everybody.  Treated like a donkey, I mean.
If you call an electrician he'll like as not arrive three days late and pissed for the first month of appointments.  There's a national ban on sale of alcohol two days before any election, to ensure people use the time off correctly.  In a restaurant, maybe you'll get served, and maybe you won't.    Maybe half of what you ordered will do.  Taxis are Toyota estates, and they carry between 12 and 18 people, a goat on the roof and a bag of chickens in the boot with the children, and yes, they do offroad.  What road?
An average taxi ride is four hours.  The handbrake is space for another passenger, there's a horn for that purpose.  If you enter a clothes shop in the sierra, they're quite likely to throw you out again.  Certainly you have little chance of trying on any clothes.  Workers in the sierra often work for three months, then disappear, having tired of it.  And yes, it's true, the manual workers outside of the cities will chew coca all day.

It's a bit like living in cave somewhere.  And slowly, slowly, the cave walls creep closer, and you begin to find it normal, to think that everywhere is always like this.  'Perú is advancing,' goes the national slogan, and yes, it is.  There's little terrorism now, educational standards are improving, even if alfabetismo doesn't yet hit every community, we have KFC, Starbucks, and a corrupt premier league just like you.
But that's one thousand kilometres south west of here, on the coast. 

Yesterday I saw a young calf walking through the regional capital city, with 'I'm yours for $11' tacked onto its belly.  (even in the godfearing sierra, a woman is cheaper.) 
Here, where I live, is the sierra.  And we're different.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 9:08 pm ~ There are shitloads - 4 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

Snippets from real conversations

In the street, in the city square, in the market ...

• "I love you because your skin is white."
• "Is your country perfect?  Have peruvians ever existed in your country?"
• "Little white girl!  Little white girl!  Buy from me!"
• "Oh my god, look how fat you are.  Are you pregnent?  No?  You're just very, very fat, then.  It's because you're in love!"
• "When you people enter a room, somehow, we peruvians, we feel less."
• "You're too tall, but your eyes are nice."
• "White girl!"  [multiply this one by a million, and repeat it ad nauseum]
• "That food is poisonous.  You people can eat it only because your stomachs are different, because you are from Mars."
• "Oh my god, you're white.  You're so white.  How pretty.  How, how pretyyou are."
• "What's your problem, why are you buying vegetables so late?  It's one o'clock, did you get up late?" [other woman interjects] "Don't be stupid, she'ws the white girl rom the institute.  She works all the night, so she sleeps all day.  That's why she cooks at stupid times*.   How come you don't know this?"           [*30 minutes past the national lunchtime, fact fans]
• "I know about you.  You're the exploited white girl that guy keeps, no?"
• "I wish I was slim and beautiful like you, but I am black*."   [* from latin women who'd certainly be considered white in my country]
• "You have beautiful eyes but you like to hide them."
• "White giant.  You people eat only old food, many years old, isn't that true.  That's why peruvians will always be healthier than you."
• "Britain?  What part of the US is that, then?"
• "You are getting fatter, aren't you?"
• "Look, look! Look at that white girl!  Oh, she's pretty."
• "You tourists, you all behave like you are God.  You're nothing in your country."
• "Give me your eyes.  I like your eyes."
• "Can you see that?! It's a white girl!  Incredible."
• "White whore, go home.  American whore."
• "I would eat your eyes.  And then I want my daughter to have the same eyes."
• "I cannot go to your country.  I am not spoilt like you.  They would kill me because I am black*."       [* olive skin, inca cheekbones, or chinese features are considered 'black' in Perú]
• "Look, it's a prostitute!"
• "White girl, I have an uncle in the United States.  Do you know him?"
• "White bitch, what can he give you that I can't?"

For the record, I am not fat, beautiful, pretty, or possessed of unusually tempting eyes.  Listening to this all the time fucks with your sense of self.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 4:49 pm ~ There are shitloads - 8 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

Blind to it

I was having a hard time with the silence, the lack of friends, the machismo, the racism, thepoverty, the language barrier, and got pretty depressed a couple of times (in the 'I give up, gimme drugs and get me through this' kind of sense - dicey in a country where access to powerful anti-depressants is utterly unregulated), but A--- pointed out to me that seeing things as black and white is itself a symptom of depression, and that gave me enough patience to ride it out a little longer.

"A person who is depressed doesn't see things as they are.  They see things in black and white.  And all the black is my fault."

Isolation doesn't compete well when set against rosy memories.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 11:40 pm ~ There are shitloads - 3 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

No matter how many times you take the road to Pittsburgh

No matter how many times you take the road to Pittsburgh, it's not going to get you to Philadelphia

Drunken posts we have known.  And man, it's harder to be pissed in an internet cafe.

Desperation.

The internet tells me this: "tell your friends and family.  But you may have to be specific about what you want them to do".

I want you to do this:

• don't imagine that I don't exist until I'm in Europe.  Speak to me, communicate with me.  If you have some vague, comforting idea that I have friends here, that I have anyone who will even reply to an enquiry, I don't.  If you communicate with me, it will be one of the few human voices I hear this month;
• telephone me.  I know most people send your their numbers in case you lose your mobile. Actually I sent you my number, because in three years, only looby (internet friend), eroica (internet friend), my mum, russell, caroline, my best friend and my sister ever sent a call.  And that was one each.
• or, say yes when I ask if it's okay that I stay with you on my first lentgthy UK visit since July2005.  Even if it's for two hours, just don't blank the email.
• send me a letter.  It takes a month, more while we still have avalanches but no gas or food, but it will get there.
• remember I'm alive. Sincerely, that's my biggest fear.
• try really hard to stop saying 'no' to me.  Really.  If you say 'yes', I'll make hardly any demands at all, and the bounty to my immortal soul will be considerable just not to live in a world where everyone in a first world country says 'no'.  Or, 'what have you done for me lately?'

Posted by Sarsparilla at 12:17 am ~ There are shitloads - 7 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]