Creative Non-Fiction From Peru

photo by: Jackie Cantwell

An Open Window

And the bus ascends from the Sacred Valley leaving the green waters of the Urubamba and the desert mountains of the red-rocked Andes behind. You look out the window and the bus takes a sharp turn and you feel your knuckles turn white as your hand grips the handle on the seat in front of you.

The bus had all the amenities of western culture—running water, neon lights, overhead storage, polyester seats, air conditioning, and a DVD player. You feel the rumble of the tires beneath your feet as the bus rolls through the third world and periodically you can hear the hiss of the transmission when the driver lets out the clutch and changes gears. Vrummmmm sssss Vrummmmm sssss…the noise is comforting to your ears, because it reminds you that you are behind the mirrored glass of the bus. You feel at ease in the world behind your glass, in the little “mobile United States”, traveling through a foreign land of ancient rituals and tongues.

The bus smells of disinfectant and it makes you feel clean. With a smile you go rummaging through your backpack looking for what is now your fifth bottle of hand sanitizer. You squirt some of the clear jelly in your hands and rub it in and cup your hands to your nose and inhale deeply letting the alcoholic fumes clear your sinuses.

The road ends for a moment at each turn around the mountain, only to reappear and you strain to see around the head in front of you to see if maybe, maybe the road will end at this next turn, but it doesn’t—it keeps on going on in its ascent. The girl next to you doesn’t notice, and she has her head in a sketchbook, the sway of the bus guiding her maniacal scribbling of brightly colored lines.

You wonder how she can draw with the bus an inch away from careening down the side of the mountain and finally exploding in a bloody fireball like cars in James Bond movies

“How can you draw with this bus on the brink of careening down the side of the mountain and finally exploding in a bloody fireball like cars in James Bond movies?”

“The chaos adds to the creativity.”

“Right.”

But the bus goes on. Your knuckles are still white and you close your eyes and nod your head to take you away. You want to let go but you can’t.

But then the road straightens and the bus follows through a blasted hill and is born into a golden Andean plateau. Fields of wheat sway in the golden magic hour wind and you want to stretch your arm out the window and grab a handful of the grain and let it crumple in your hand and take a deep breath of the tangy aroma and let the flakes slip through your fingers and float away with the breeze but the window stays closed. In the infinite yellow sea appears a ruined clay house, so comfortable in the fields that it appears not manmade but born of the earth, as if it just sprouted up from the ground like a tree.

Photo By: Ryan Hechler

Snow-capped mountains surround the plateau—their divine presence; the Apus, watching over its children mountains and rivers and towns and fields and mines and ruins. You think of their eternal quality—their infinite grandeur with the heavenly white glaciers shining in the late afternoon sun.

You feel the bus slow beneath your seat as it approaches a town you can’t pronounce the name of and you see the people of this land for the first time. They stand watching your bus of gringos, or herding cattle and sheep and donkeys out of the road. Their eyes stare at the ground and their straw hat hides their face and the swing a branch back and forth in front of their steps, like they are feeling their way home. You don’t know why they do this but his pendulumesque motion hypnotizes you for just a moment till the livestock clear the road, and the bus goes on. You turn to catch one last glimpse but all you see is the fading silhouette of their figures set against a dust cloud kicked up from the bus rumbling down the dirt road.

The window is your viewing glass—a comfortable separation between the amenities and conveniences of western culture and the third world. Outside the glass you see the town. You see dirty faces and dogs so skinny their ribcages cast striped shadows across their bodies in the fading sun. The buildings are of mud and straw and clay and the white smoke of fire rises into the sky and on one corner sits an Indian woman in a top hat. She looks up at the glass but only sees wrinkles, like spider webs spread across the eyes, lips, nose, ears, and brow of her own face. And you wonder. You wonder if she is wondering like you are wondering—wondering of the separation of humanity, of the fundamental differences of culture, of the false of the ubiquitous unity of mankind.

Before this trip, you believed in humanity—humanity as a universal ideal. You believed that race, religion, sexuality, or other cultural barriers that work to divide us are false, and that we, as humans, are all brothers and sisters on the same earth.

But the impoverished third world surrounded you, and you see the dirty faces and toothless grins and the worn feet and the glossy eyes by the hundreds and you walk around them with

your North Face backpack and Gap Jeans and you realize that the difference between everyone on this planet is very real. And so your assumptions were shattered into a million pieces and molded into the mirrored glass of the window you hide behind. The third world, like the face of the woman, reflects of the glass, and the bus becomes something completely different—a caravan of western culture or some sort of twisted United States mobile, with its own set of borders and authority and luxuries. And you whisper in your head…we are so different…to the woman and she spits coca saturated saliva between her rough feet and licks her lips. You wonder if she heard you, but the bus rolls on.

You remember letting go in Europe a year ago. Five months seeing the treasures of the western world and you thought you could handle the poverty of South America. You remember playing that image of cultured youth very well, preaching a gospel of cultural superiority in foreign lands, and how American society was juvenile compared to these nations of old. You thought you were a hardened traveler—rugged, enduring, tenacious, and ambitious. You skid the Swiss Alps, dropped acid in Paris, circumnavigated the Greek islands on a scooter, got chased by a bull in Spain, rioted in Sicily over a soccer match, and pissed off the London Bridge. In Europe, you found life, but in Peru, you found fear. So you hold onto the handlebar, and don’t let go. But the bus rolls on and the window stays closed.

This crank attitude died the moment you left, the moment you stepped off of the airplane and into the city, the moment you saw miles of city blocks filled with crumbling buildings and little kids, no older than eight, coming up to you trying to sell old gum for a few centimos. They come up to you by the half dozen, with their hands extended, patting your jacket. Dirt clogged the pores of their faces, and you swear you saw tears building in the corners of their eyes.

At first you gave them money to try and suppress the guilt. When you ran out of money you gave them leftover food, or half a coca-cola and the kids smiled and thanked you and you watched them stuff their face and lick the box when they finished and then with a smile and a wave they leave, happy to have just eaten someone’s leftovers. The food you couldn’t eat was their meal for the night. But they kept coming at you with their dirty hands and you started to hate them and you ignored them. They looked at you with their glazed eyes and cheerless faces and you didn’t see a kid on the street but a scam to get your money. In your mind, these people who needed help became parasites, and the dissonance boiled inside you till you feared them. The window stayed closed.

The bus leaves the town in a cloud of dust. The girl next do you stops drawing but keeps her eyes on the page.

“We are almost there.”

“How do you know?”

She doesn’t answer.

She closes her sketchbook with care and leans her head back against the headrest as the bus comes to a stop. Her dark eyes are framed by horn-rimmed glasses, white on the inside and black on the outside. They match her hair. You turn to her and open your mouth.

“Do you ever feel like this pressure in your chest like the world is coming down on you and you just cant stop fucking thinking so much till you think you are loosing your fucking mind?”

“Hmmm. Sounds like you had one hell of a ride?”

“Yeah you could say that.”

You follow her off the bus and she waits for you.

“Well to answer your question. Sometimes, yeah I do. And there is nothing I can say to make it better, you know. I think its just human nature to question. But look around you. Now is not the time to be thinking like that.”

“Yeah I know but its just like is there even one set human nature? Because I think the human nature could be different depending on the environment. I mean look at the people and their impoverished surroundings. I bet you they have a dif…”

“Shut up or I’m not walking down to the bottom with you”

“The bottom?”

And you look around and see a painted blue sign with white letters reading “Moray” and you look down and find centric terraces dug hundreds of feet into the earth. At the bottom you see

the yellow, blue, and orange of unknown crops.

Photo By Jackie Cantwell

And the girl is off and you follow.

She looks back at you, “The Incans used these ruins to grow different types of crops each layer is exposed to different amounts of sunlight and different temperatures they were great experimenters those Incans the temperature gradient between the top layers and the bottom layers can be as much as 15 degrees Celsius they bring the water from that glacier over there through a complex system of irrigation canals and did you know that there are 400 different types of corn and 3,500 different types of potatoes here in Peru? No bullshit.”

“Was that all one breath? You should start leading the tours.”

She laughs and you walk next to her, climbing down each ancient stone terrace till you stand next to her at the bottom. You both lie down and looking up at the terraces and your racing thoughts calm and for the first time on the trip you feel centered, spiritually and mentally centered. Its quiet, only the sound of the wind blowing through the corn stalks reaches your ears and just as you think you are going to fall asleep she gets up and gives you a gentle kick in the side.

“Get up. I saw some people playing soccer on one of the other terraces, I want to go watch.”

You groan and she helps you up. You climb back up the terraces and from a distance you can hear rapid Spanish and scattered cheering. After one last wall the field comes into sight and you sit with her at a comfortable distance to watch. The players are Indian and small in stature. They wear stained sweatpants and jeans and dirty shirts and sweaters but their faces glow in the fading light as they chase around the ball. During the game they joke and laugh in Spanish and you think you hear some scattered Quechua from the people on the sidelines. To you ears it sounds ancient but its age is soothing and pure.

She shifts in her grassy seat and looks at you, “Do you play soccer?”

“I played in High School”

“Cool, I played in college. Let’s join the game”

“No, absolutely not.”

But she was gone.

"Wait!”

She approached the four men on the sideline and engaged them in Spanish. You think about running but you stay. You think that the game is for a league and they defiantly won’t let two gringos in on their game. And its probably men only anyways, you think. Because this is a male dominated society, yeah they definitely wouldn’t let a woman on the field. She waves you over and before you can stop yourself you find your legs carrying you to her and her new friends.

“Ok, we are good to go. I’m on this team and you are that team. Good luck, man.”

The men laugh and your stomach drops a little but you run onto the field and join the game. The first ball comes to you and you promptly kick it out of bounds and hang your head and curse this stupid fucking game but the Andean man playing behind you walks up and says something in Spanish you don’t understand and smiles and pats you on the back. And the game goes on. The ball comes to you in midfield, you make a move and beat two. As you run by the sideline they chant Go gringo go! and Look at that gringo go! and they give you an endearing laugh after you play a ball across the goal. Every time you get the ball the cheers come and they laugh at you, the giant foreign white man running amongst the small Andean men. After a few minutes you are ready to have a heart attack from lack of oxygen at 12,000 fucking feet above sea level and you leave the game. As you go they come and shake your hand and wave goodbye and you wave back and thank them and sit with the men on the sideline.

She comes up a few minutes later and gasping for breath, takes a seat.

“You played well, man. Holy shit my lungs are going to explode.”

“C’mon lets walk, I think the bus is leaving soon.”

Eventually you make your way back to the bus and sit on the curb. A few kids on beat up bikes ride up and sit next to you. You brace yourself for the begs and the dirty hands and the sadness but it never comes. They simply sit and chat in Spanish and try to engage you in conversation but you don’t understand. So you take out your camera and snap a photo and show it to them. They laugh and fight and joke, over who they think looks the best. So through a slew of hand jesters and repetition they turn to you to judge and you pick the short chubby one. The other kids throw up their hands in outrage and cry Dios Mio! But the chubby kid crosses his arms and smiles and nods his head.

You have to leave them behind and get on the bus. Back at your window seat you see the kids on their bikes looking up at the mirrored bus windows waiting for something with a confused look. You open the window and they wave and you wave back. And then you see it—you see that they don’t want your money, only a new friend. Friendliness like this lives in these kids, and in their parents playing soccer in the field below. Friendliness like this is lost in the modern rush of the west, but in the plateau of the Andes, it is life.

Photo By Ryan Hechler