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Truth Talk

It is true, you know. What I said. I do love Fidel.

I love Fidel.
I love Fidel.
I love Fidel.

And every day he tells me I'm going to leave him when he has no money. (what? he's kept mein poverty for three years, and I'm 'with himfor his money'?) That I'm having an affair. (when he knows there's nothing to find there; yet I can name six people he's tried to get with. The ones I can't name are a number not worth worrying about.)

I don't know the hell why, but I love Fidel.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 10:51 pm ~ Love Letters Straight from One Heart [ View ~ Add ]

Atomic Realignment

"At the deepest level, there is no giver, no gift, no recipient. There is only the universe rearranging itself."

Ten days to go, and I don't want my final moments here to be dominated by fear. The fight to suppress fear is leading to raised stress levels. I don't know if those were what triggered the sickness.

I don't want all the progress that the business has made to fall apart (I'm quelling the urge to use more dramatic language.) A punishing schedule isn't, thank god, a peruvian concept, but I was feeling the pinch enough to make a list. Also not peruvian. Stymied by the sickness of the last month, I'm forced to confront my nascent fear that perhaps I'm the only one here who knows anything; learn to bite my tongue, and trust people.

I'll have no job, no home, and no money, soon,in a continent that has become foreign to me. The sickness lately has forced me to look at my plans - rewrite ten brilliant CVs,until they're infallible? Good impulse, but it's not as if I won't have time on my hands, nor people to help.
The plan to disappear again after six weeks? Running away from things much? Why not make a concerted effort, see what I can do, rather than fling forward obstacles and excuses that allow me to rest on what I can't?

And the wild plan to tour northern Spain, looking for a job? It seemed great while it was a romantic irreality, then later appeared just plain stupid when it became a tangible, near reality. People who try, sometimes succeed. Why not allow myself that small brown opportunity to believe in myself?

The plan to lean on further education as a structure, to deflect the awful, numbing fear of being cut loose, with no ties, goals, or structures at all? Stymied by bureaucracy. And I begin to see there are more possibilities than just those which were the first to sparkle that morning.

And my determination to regard this total, heaving life change as a cataclysmic failure to thrive, a disaster of eternity-sized proportions, my refusal to see the upside of the absolute failure of everything I've been trying to achieve for five years? Perhaps it is. And perhaps it's the invigorating challenge I could never bring myself to see it as, too. Perhaps it's the worst thing I ever did,and perhaps it's also the smartest move on the board. I don't actually need to decide - I can just take each day as it happens and learn to look for opportunities with it.

If you had a plan to disappear. To run away and abandon everything and everyone you know and love. You'd think hard, you'd plan hard, you'd worry hard, in that last month before day zero.

And this is what has not happened. This is the gift that a month of sickness, of three days a week enforced bed rest, slap bang in the middle of this 'crucial', 'important' time has given me. The inability to work, to write, to plan, or to move has distanced me from ... well, feeling culpable.
From trying to put everything into a list from which it won't escape. You can't write a CV when you cant's keep your meals down. You can't write 13 job descriptions and an industrial rule book when you wake up for four hours a day.
And you can't be worried, stressed and frightened every minute if you have insomnia.

I'm going to move from one continent to another one. These atoms are going to rearrange. It's neither good, nor is it bad. It'll be hard, but it'll also be an opportunity that any one of my peruvian countrymen wouldn't dare waste. I'm open to it, because it will happen. Without a month of sickness, I may never have gotten to realising that.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 10:43 pm ~ There are shitloads - 2 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

Tick Tock

It's about ten two days till I immigrate.

I can't believe it.

I've done nothing. Prepared nothing. Thought about nothing.

Head in the sand. This is seriously scaring me.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 10:40 pm ~ There are shitloads - 4 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

My Foxy Life

I need to tell you what my life is like, because soon I'm going to leave it. Nobody here in this city knows it (though my peruvian family do), but in 19 days, I'll be boarding a flight to a different continent, and it isn't a return ticket.

It's 3am. I'm in a big,empty, tiled house, watching FoxLife. The house is built for the desert - large rooms, stone walls, spaces where in northern Europe, windows might be. As this isn't the desert, but the windswept cloudforest of the low sierra, on the lee side of the Andes, falling away to the hotter jungle below, it's freezing. When it rains (and it rains 4-6 months at a time), it rains directly into my living room. Sometimes we're ankle deep in muddy landslide two times a year, with rainwater shooting in through electric light switches and power points, and spending any time indoors in this four storey stone house built for the desert involves adding a thick sweater and a winter coat. (outside, in the yard, the high altitude sunshine is more suited to flip flops,shorts and sunblock. Indoors, you better get your jacket, 'cos you'll be shivering soon.)

I'm watching FoxLife, a US cable channel. I'm British, and I never would have watched anything like that in my home country (I did have a TV, but I never switched it on). But here, hearing English spoken aloud is a rarity, and I use it to be tired without having to think about communication, or concentrate on what people are saying. Of course, TV is not communication. But in a monolingual culture, as soon as you're tired, you stop being able to use Language Two anyway, so it's way more communicative than sitting underwater watching people mouth things I don't understand.

I'm drinking chamomile tea. I'd prefer a cold glass of water, but there's cholera, hepatitis, and typhus in the water systems, so it has to be boiled. Once heated, it's kind of yellowish, though a lot paler than the rusty liquid further down the Rim, so you don't complain, but stick a yellow teabag in it. Or some chopped up limes. I need to drink a lot of the tea and to stay up late because working evenings means I don't often get to eat till 11:30ish. You learn from experience that you don't digest well lying in bed, so you need to stay upright, move around, and drink a lot of tea till the unnatural tightness in your gut starts to settle.

My living room is extraordinarily uncomfortable. For a start, the only pieces of furniture are those study chairs you see in movies of american high schools. You can't really slouch in a study chair, or balance a snack on the sloping table. You drop a lot of food on the floor, usually - and you leave it there, often as not, because the maid comes in at 7am, four hours from now, to bleach every surface. Yeah, my home is my business. There's no line between the two (many folk in Amazonas live on a mattress in the cupboard at work, pretending to all and sundry to have a proper house 'somewhere else') and it can be difficult to remember not to stumble out of my room in PJs or eating breakfast.

The TV's up on a rack by the ceiling. You need to be in the study chairs by the far wall to watch it, or get a crick in your too chilly neck trying. Never watch from the corner seats, though. That's where the poisonous spiders tend to hang out.

The many cockerels in the barrio (and one confused donkey) are crowing dawn, even though it's only 3:£0am. They pretty much start around three, and keep going straight through to five,to be certain they catch the dawn. It can be quite a lurch if one's sleeping on your window ledge.

Read More?

Posted by Sarsparilla at 10:40 pm ~ Nobody Likes Us and We Don't Care [ Add ]

Mounting Panic

When I put it in black and white, I see how concerned I am about this relationship. How out of control it has become. When I put it in black and white, it emerges so starkly that I'm lost, in this, that I really don't know what I'm doing, that I've already fucked it up so deeply I may never even want to unravel it. It's so bad that when I look at him and I still want to be with him (and that tug of commitment is still as strong as ever): instead of deciding that it's what makes it all worthwhile, I make hurried, worried side-thoughts about what might have happened to my sanity, that I'm still able to feel that way.

This relationship is out of control. It's toxic, and it's careening, while outwardly seeming to be strong and functional.

I really don't know what to do.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 10:29 pm ~ Love Letters Straight from One Heart [ View ~ Add ]

Food Shock

I used to be this permanent irritating exclamation mark in the comments of Will's Blog. You have bookshops! You have cinemas! You have a car! (actually, no, a car in Mexico sounds like quite a stressful thing.) I mean, in cold hard fact, I knew that although he, too, had emigrated to a latin country, he was near enough to the USA to pop over after lunch. But .... video blogging has really brought it home to me. I mean, it's about thirty minutes to download anything from YouTube, so there's some frustration factor anyway, but it's been food blogging week over at Will 's place, and I love cooking (and Mexican food is so different to Peruvian food, even though it does not contain donkey meat), so it was going to be worth the wait.

And I could barely contain myself. A kitchen! With cupboards! (my kitchen is a sink, a gas container, and an oven I packed into the stow hold of a bus to the Andes with my own fair hands.) A hi-fi! A living room! (I have workspaces, filled with lecture chairs.) Tortillas! (tortillas come from Lima, one thousand miles away, and they usually go mouldy before they get here.) (no, I don't know how to make them. Nobody in Peru knows how to make them.) (hint, hint, Maria ?) Lea and Perrins! Proper kitchen knives! (we cut everything with the same butcher's stabbing blade we use to open tins of whitewash paint, or the paring knife someone smuggled over from the UK in March.) Pepper in a jar! (not spices in a tiny plastic bag, wrapped that way before your gaze, by Spice Hag in the market).

... you get the idea (it's probably very irritating for them.)
The thing is, when I read Maria , whose blog is very pictorial, and arty, I feel like I kind of recognise Tijuana. Okay, I'm filtering it through ideas of relatively wealthy Andean cities north of here, but it's an idea of latin culture that even from the boondocks, I think I can recognise.
Will 's blog ... I have to give up trying to find parallels in our journeys (and not just cos it forms an irritatingly samey comment.) Nobody tweets in Peru. There aren't any English bars. You can't buy vinaigrette here. No one's got enough to be worth a kidnap attempt. The drug barons are our pillars of the community, they run the primary school, they're not hoodlums with guns outside the gate. I don't recognise anything in his world.

Sorry, guys. I'm finally over it. I'll try to put only wise, thoughtful comments, from now on.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 9:41 pm ~ Love Letters Straight from One Heart [ View ~ Add ]

Moments II - The Amazon

Woken by five phone calls a night. Panicked, jealous.
The heat so enervating, my toes burned.
'What do you think of Belen?' Unable to lie.'It makes my heart hurt.'
Prehistoric turtles with diamond heads. With leaf heads, floating. Ayahuasca. A capuchin tied by the penis.
The attention Is gets, and that I've grown too old for; and the pleasant feeling of not resenting it.
The tiny frogs in the rain outside a sushi restaurant.
Slipping through black silt faeces in the floating village,dry season on the orillas of the Itayo river.
Everyone looks like Josue - delicate noses - when the Iquito tribe were wide-nosed.
Wanting desperately to do something to help lift them out of this poverty.
A piranha kissed my finger in the mercado, as it died, as the old women laughed at its romantic gesture.
The purgative relief of getting off the riverboat steamer.
Old men, Texans, expats, who live in the jungle. Rarely old women.
No hotels, two days searching, confronting the money changers who'd robbed us.
Buying an embroidered ayahuasca dream.
The crass stupidity of Gustave Eiffel's Casa de Fierro - a two floor building made of solid iron plates and bolts, in the middle of the jungle.
The heat so baking you take five showers a night, and stand wet in the tiled corridor to cool down.
The constant, aggressive phone calls.
The monkeys grooming me, and clucking their teeth possessively.
The old turtle, waiting to be butchered, moving when his throat is stroked. Uselessly.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 9:34 pm ~ Nobody Likes Us and We Don't Care [ Add ]

Countdown

It's beginning to hurt him more than it's hurting me.

Partly, that's because raw terror is making me block all thoughts of future, or of change, out. (it's a coping mechanism, leave me be).

Partly it's because running away is always the easier role than being run from.

I can't help him much with that. He's the one who made me choose. I could have managed half my life not choosing.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 9:30 pm ~ Nobody Likes Us and We Don't Care [ Add ]

Advice to a Western Girl*

* Advice to a Western Girl* Thinking of Marrying a Latino Man and Living Very Far From Anywhere in his Country With Him

* You listening, E?

* You need to know the stereotypes, because at least the salt on them is real.
The stereotype is that while he's chasing her, he's perfect; but when he has her, she's in purdah, and he will smack her around to get her to be quiet while he goes out and chases chicas. Not because he's a weasel, but because he's a guy, and that's what guys do.

* The other stereotype is: I beat you because I love you; if I didn't love you I wouldn't beat you so much.
Try to remember that spousal abuse isn't always physical.

* That said, never ever be in his country for one minute without access to enough money to get yourself out of there. That money is sacrosanct. And he must never ever knowabout it. You need it, because you will have no access to womens' rights,to the police, to the rule of law, to the justice system, or even to anyone human who thinks your point of view is any less than criminally irresponsible. Thismoney is your lawyer, it's your neighbour, it's your elected MP, it's your family, your friends, it's your own private Amnesty International. Never, evertouch it.

Read More?

Posted by Sarsparilla at 9:20 pm ~ There are shitloads - 4 - of notes [ View ~ Add ]

The Last Few Grains of Sand are Falling

I'm leaving this country very soon.And if I think this is stressful, I know it's kiddie stuff compared to the fucked up world I originally fled from. I have nojob, nohome, noplans, and the step back scares me to the point I even fear thinking about it.

I know it's doomed to failure. I can't live on two sides of the world at once. I hated the emotional carnage of my old job there - and here in the arse end of nowhere, I had finally found the first job in my life that I totally, totally loved. I don't know if this move is for a few years or forever. And right now, I'm daring myself to let that be, to allow it to be no more than that simplistic 'I dont know'.

My partner and my business are staying here. I've been plotting this - no, planning this, because there have been no secrets, not from anybody important, not at any point - for eight months, now. And my primary concern is that neither of them will fall to pieces in my absence. That I can't be anyone's big, greasy excuse for failure.

I had anticipated that these last few weeks would be bittersweet, heartrending. Agonising as I realise what I'm leaving behind. Actually, so much has happened, so much has been happening that I just haven't had time to think about it at all.

But you know what? I found my niche, while I was here.
I found what I'm good at, I found what I love. Other, critical aspects proved insupportable, and I responded to that. But I found in myself someone I admire, doing something I can be proud of. I might end up a greyfaced divorcee doing filing in Surbiton,but I did find that. And there was every chance that I never would do.

I like myself now. I like the decisions I've made. Stupid as they might be, I can forgive myself for them. I was doing the best I could with what I had. That's a bloody gift, y'know.
A prize.

Even if I did walk away.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 10:30 pm ~ Nobody Likes Us and We Don't Care [ Add ]

Soon, There'll Be A Moment

Posts on this blog are out of order, time-delayed, misted by being deliberately disordered, usually written up a few months after the fact. This next post is from September, having written basically nothing for almost two months.

Soon, There'll Be A Moment

I haven't written a word since Rachael died. And finally, there's a moment when I don't have flu,when I'm not pulling 14 hour days (that might be normal in YOUR country,it's NOT normal here), when the twice weekly disasters that keep coming were things I couldn't reasonably respond to this week week in any other way (an assault, two robberies, and a stalker), when my flock (the people here who are 15000 miles away from home and family because I asked them to be, the people who I absolutely have to be sure are doing OK) have done their crying jags, illnesses or tantrums for the week, when the builders who mix cement next to my head at 7am every morning, even though they know I work nights, have agreed to do it ten yards further away, when there's no book (posted from the US) to read, and lack of funds got the cable TV cut off, and the moment on the edge where we stared into the dark hanging maw of bankruptcy was last week, and all the usual shit is so steadily recurring that, sick as it may be, I can turn partly away and call it 'usual shit', and so finally, finally, finally, there's a moment where I can look up and see the roof, and allow myself a g a p where I think.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 10:19 pm ~ Nobody Likes Us and We Don't Care [ Add ]

Permissive

You assume that actions have a context. And that the context is the culture you know. In a cross-cultural relationship, I long assumed that the phone call saying he was going out for a jar with a mate was a courtesy call. Part of the extra formality of the latin region.

Now I discover, three years too late, he's asking permission.

Worse, he expects me to ask his permission.

Worse still, that permission isn't courteous, an empty ritual. It is literally that - permission. That he can deny me freedom. And that if I laugh at the idea and go out anyway,I'm - culturally speaking - throwing a ring in his face.

And who knew?

Posted by Sarsparilla at 10:16 pm ~ Nobody Likes Us and We Don't Care [ Add ]

Moments I: The Amazon

On this trip - lilies floating on the Amazon river.
A colectivo swerving to avoid a tarantula the size of my hand.
Eating beef jerky from a Tarapoto rather than river steamer meals.
Dragging two over enthusiastic mototaxi drivers to the police commissioner. ("If he says there really is a second steamer dock that's not on the map, I'll believe you.")
The nude gecko in the toilet.
Learning to check a hotel room for proper squalor, instead of just seeing if there's a bed.
Peruvian smiles and friendliness and laughter, even when something is just plain awful.
Suspiro Limeno on my birthday, during a jungle monsoon.
The trannies, the fat coughing grannies, the nursing mothers, the cochino children, some smart, others just children.
Hippies singing quechua music and people asking me if it's English.
Lightning bugs across the bed.
Seeing galaxies, whirlpools moving, and bufeos jumping out of the river (pink dolphins) while being invaded by night insects.
Teaching steamer ship sweeper guy how to sweep.
Kids' hands - being grubbily palmed constantly.
'Go To War' - the worst card game in the world.
Bowel crushing pressure, and fear of the latrine.
Rumours of pirates and gang rapes.
Phone lost in the pile of rucksacks between the hammock sentinels, unable to answer it.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 10:14 pm ~ Nobody Likes Us and We Don't Care [ Add ]

Regalado

August 2009

Thing is, now I know I’m going, it‘s a gift. A total gift. Instead of loafing about the Amazon, thinking I’m trapped here, I’m acutely aware I may never see this again. I take a bit more time to value what I’m doing, where I am, and in doing so, I take time out to go upriver and cuddle the manatees. That’s not what I did in London.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 10:11 pm ~ Nobody Likes Us and We Don't Care [ Add ]

Stoneface

Lying by a too loud electric fan one night in Yurimaguas, the last city accessible by road as you enter the Amazon jungle, I hear karaoke in a far off bar, Stevie Wonder in a nearby restaurant, the sound of a football match with its drawn-out, two minute 'GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL!' and a forest full of crickets, frogs, parrots that imitate chickens, roosters waking to gurgle a scream, and the batch-batch-batch of the fan rotor nearest.

Then I turn my head to the other side, and it all goes silent.

I knew there was a problem - you try learning a new language in a sink or swim environment with an undiagnosed hearing problem, you'll notice how it's taking a while. But I'd never noticed the stark degree.

I could hear a far-off rooster. And a phut-phut-phut.

Turn back. Stevie Wonder's still playing.

I'm not having problems with one ear - this is deaf. Stone deaf. Ouch.

Posted by Sarsparilla at 10:01 pm ~ Nobody Likes Us and We Don't Care [ Add ]