Last Dance in Arequipa, Part One
On the first day of the year, around eleven thirty at night, I made it back to Soul Guest House in the Yanahuara district of Arequipa, after five days away at Lake Titicaca. My winter break from teaching was almost over, except that this is South America, so it’s not winter at all. Yet summer in southern Peru means the rainy season, and is supposedly the coldest time of the year, though it is late in coming. It’s all very disorienting. In the hours just before my return, it had rained, the first significant rain since I’d lived there, and everything was wet when I got back. I hadn’t truly accepted there was a rainy season at all — looking out at the bone dry mountains surrounding the city, bereft of any vegetation, it was unbelievable that it could ever rain here. But I’d left and come back, and now it was rainy season.
First thing upon my return, seeing a light still on in Ms. Sharon’s room, I stopped in to say hello, to find her cozied up under covers reading a book. I apologized but she was happy to see me and I sat down and we quietly shared stories. When you see someone multiple times a day for months and months, the passage of even a day apart can seem to require extensive debriefing; five days felt like weeks. But it was late, so I made it brief about the Lake and its magical islands, the unimpressive city of Puno, about Cynthia, the Colombian woman from Medellín I’d spent all day talking to. Sharon told me about her two day trips, both with Peter, a South African man in his 70s who has taken a liking to her — she humors him. One to Sogay, my favorite hike in the vicinity of Arequipa, just outside of town but requiring an hour and a half of buses each way. She loved it but didn’t make it all the way to the waterfalls. The other was to Mollendo, a beach town on the coast where many of my students go to vacation: the younger and older ones with their families, those of university age, to party. It wasn’t to her liking and she didn’t think she’d go back.
Around midnight, we said goodnight, agreeing to meet up in mid-morning to go down and get our books and materials from the school. I finally walked through the back courtyard, the whole casona quiet and dark, to arrive at my room. Dropped my bags and sat down at my desk to take stock of the moment, looking at the peeling blue walls. A closet with my own clothes hanging. My classical guitar leaning up in the corner. A purple leafed plant on the window sill, that I discovered some time after bringing it home is called the Wandering Jew.
Coming back I am glad that I’ve extended my stay in this city for another two months. Feels like home, the closest thing I have to one at this point. I feel very little draw to go back to the states, besides missing friends and family. For awhile when I was traveling, I would find myself considering “…just going back”. Craving some kind of normalcy, the sense of not being always an outsider. A stranger…extranjero. A gringo. But when I went back to the U.S. in September it didn’t feel normal at all.
I’d been gone long enough that the unknown, the new, had become normal. Whatever can be said about the people of Latin America, they are comparatively much more present to their immediate realities and connected to the people around them than North Americans, for bad or good. And what I found in the U.S.A in September 2018 was so surreal in a horrific way: forced family separations at the border, mass shootings — that I had to keep reminding people: This Is Not Normal.
✦✦
The next morning when I woke up, I would have a day to get ready for teaching classes, and then dive into a month of teaching, what I expect to be my easiest month so far. Classes I’ve already taught, and no kids on the weekends. Perhaps the most exciting thing in my life is that I have a music gig coming up at the end of the month. It’s the first I’ll have played in four years, since before I broke my finger on a sailboat in California.
The show: one Saturday night in early December, my housemate Elise from Kansas and I, along with Maxim, a teacher colleague of ours from Australia, were having a singalong in the back courtyard of Soul. There were a bunch of other people hanging around, but not only were they not singing along, it didn’t seem like they were even paying any attention. We were playing songs over loud talking, occasional yelling and sometimes people singing to other music on their cellphones, a joyless and just barely tenable coexistence. It seemed to be a perfectly ordinary, unexceptional backyard jam, the kind that don’t lead to anything else.
Then on Christmas Eve we had a little party here, and a friend of Jack’s, a Peruvian guy named Rony who had been there partying the aforementioned night, said that he worked at a bar in town called Chaqchao that has live music, and we should come play. That’s too bad, I said, because Elise was leaving, moving to Costa Rica in a few days. Well, you were good, too, he said. You can play by yourself. I sighed, told him that I didn’t really have a set together.
A couple hours later, I realized my stupidity, that here was the universe reaching out, and it was damn well time to get a set together. I found Rony and told him I’d love to play a show. Wonder of wonders, it appears to have all come together. I’ve recruited my colleague Clint, who used to play drums in an emo-pop band, to come out of musical retirement to play the cajon (a wooden percussion box) tambourine and maracas; Emily, my former housemate and colleague is coming back in a few days after a month away. She is blessed with a fine singing voice and is one of the two women I often sang with last fall, and has expressed interest in playing, too. I have my doubts: Clint is incredibly busy — teaching a full schedule at our school plus running a sustainability consulting business and wading through layer upon layer of Peruvian bureaucracy. The last I heard from Emily was that she was going to a lengthy Ayahuasca retreat in the jungle, so who knows when or if she’ll really come back.
But despite any and all of the unknowns, we are supposedly booked for January 26th at the Chaqchao Bar in downtown Arequipa. Payment is a large pizza and beer. I’ll take it.
✦✦
On the second day of the year I slept in late. When I got up it was sunny and all the rain had dissipated like it never happened. I cooked scratch pecan pancakes in the little kitchen two courtyards away and fed Ms. Sharon and Karolayn too. Two women, 74 and 20. Karolayn had politely said no thank you, but when she saw and smelled the golden brown and I asked if she was sure, apparently she wasn’t.
In late morning, Sharon and I walked down to the school to pick up our materials for the coming month. Go down with empty bags and walk back up with textbooks and teacher’s books and folders. Sharon of course said hello to four people on the way down, security guards and shop owners she’s gotten onto a cómo estás basis with.
I only had two classes open (three is a full schedule) and both were the same class, which I’d taught before. What’s more, there were no kids weekend classes in January. This was the summer break for Perú, so for the the next two months there would be all-week-long kids’ classes. As I was now, six months in, one of the most veteran teachers at my school, and was extending my time there, I’d used my sense of entitlement to ask out of any and all kids’ classes.
The idea of a class full of elementary age kids, who likely don’t particularly want to learn English anyway, in summer school no less, dropped off so their parents could get rid of them for a few hours each day, was not appealing. My gracious Academic Directors had let me off the hook, and this promised to be a plush schedule. The only worry was whether I could pay my bills at twenty hours vs. the previous thirty-four.
All afternoon I looked through my old lesson plans, just needing to update and improve things. I was scheduled to teach Intermediate 2 (which wasn’t open yet) and Advanced 1, the tenth and eighteenth levels, respectively, in our twenty one month program, both repeat classes for me. Advanced 1 in particular I had taught five times previously, and had some ideas about changing the curriculum a bit. My biggest critique was that it all seemed very piecemeal- the material didn’t build. There was a grammar lesson in there I liked about Narratives and the way we use different past tenses to give additional information about a story. An example from the textbook, two sentences which use three past tenses:
“This happened when I was about five years old. My father had gone away on business for a few days, and my brother and I were sleeping in my parents’ bedroom.”
Being a language teacher has only affirmed the power of stories in our psyche. When my students are telling a story, their pronunciation and comfortability speaking — their fluency — is much improved. I thought I’d first establish us in the world of storytelling and then bring in the grammar as a way of enriching stories. I cut out a couple of extraneous vocabulary lessons and created a multi day unit with speaking, reading, and writing aspects, all based around telling stories. We’d start out reading a couple stories and talking about how they work, then add in the grammar, and finally writing stories ourselves, then reading them aloud. Picked out a couple fun short stories to read and modified a lesson plan on essay writing into more of a creative writing, storytelling one. Preparing for my seventh month teaching was incomparably more enjoyable than my first.
Around six Sharon and I convened in the little kitchen to make our customary burritos. This would be our first burrito night without Elise, who at this point was doing a trek in the Sacred Valley with her boyfriend Dylan, a last burst of peak Perú travel before moving to Costa Rica. It felt a little quiet without her youthful energy and big heart. We missed her already.
I sautéed up an onion and added a half cup of chicken broth and a couple cans of small white beans. Beans have long been one of the staples of my diet but are simply not easy here. Canned beans are not a common part of a Peruvian diet, and therefore expensive; dried beans don’t cook well at 7500 feet unless you have a pressure cooker. I’ve tried just cooking them for the better part of a day, but they still never come out right. Lots of my housemates cook dry beans and say they’re fine, though every time I taste their beans there is a grit to them. So I’ve resigned myself to paying the equivalent of two dollars for a skimpy can of beans.
Started in on my Mexican rice, sautéing the rice in hot oil, ten interminable minutes of stirring constantly; while Sharon shucked the peas and cut up carrots into little cubes that would go in later. She pulled a rotisserie chicken from the Metro supermarket, and grated up quite a lot of queso andino.
While we were cooking I got a text from Karem, my young Venezolana friend and (not-that) secret crush. Ya estas en Arequipa? She asked if I wanted to take a walk: Quieres caminar un rato conmigo? This was music to my ears, and sounded like a lovely idea, despite the school night, but I had four pots currently going on the stove. I asked if we could go on a walk later that night, which brought on a lengthy series of indecisive texts lasting almost two hours, until it was full night. All the burritos were cooked and eaten or wrapped up in the nevera, the kitchen cleaned up and there was Karem at the door on the street. She didn’t want to come in because she was wearing pantalones blancos and Empanada the dog would certainly jump all over her, and also I secretly hoped, because we were starting on a discreet romantic affair and she didn’t want her cousins to know. /Sigh.
We didn’t really have anywhere to go, but we barely even talked about it, just let gravity pull us downhill towards the river and surrendered to the rush of conversation. We walked across the Puente Grau with the cold Rio Chili rushing beneath, faint stars in an overcast sky, sliver of waning moon. On a Sunday night the chaos of buses jockeying on the far side of the bridge was lessened, and there was barely any traffic. A few blocks up I told her I had a place for us to go, and rather than walking right — to the heart of the Cercado, the old walled city — we turned left into barrio San Lazaro, and cut back down towards the river into the very oldest part of Arequipa, where the streets turn to cobblestone and become narrow and curvy. Everything is made of old sillar, white volcanic stone which over time has become a slightly yellowed cream, and the whole place has a bit of a medieval feel.
Here was the Plaza Campo Redondo, or round field, the oldest one in the city. Apparently this was the center of the indigenous town that pre-dated the arrival of the Spanish, and a much smaller square than the epic Plaza de Armas half a mile away. This quiet plaza is tucked away amidst little streets that don’t encourage car traffic, and is not on the way to anywhere. In a year and a half in Arequipa, Karem had never been there.
There is a café and a couple bars and a restaurant, but none of them ever seem crowded, and they’re all closed now on this Sunday night. It’s a bit of a forgotten plaza. We found a bench under a gnarled old grandfather tree and sat down. For our walk so far we’d been switching back from English to Spanish; we decided at this point that each of us would speak in the other’s native language, and the conversation became much more “my turn, your turn”, though each of us were liable to interrupt at any time.
There was a group of young people sitting on the base of the monument in the center of the plaza — probably university students — with some kind of liquor they were passing around and chasing with coke, and seemed to be having a very good time. I wished I had brought the rum from my kitchen cabinet, and told Karem that next time we should bring some. She agreed. We sat on our bench and talked about all kinds of things.
She talked wistfully about Venezuela, showed me pictures on her phone of her university in Caracas that she misses terribly. She has been feeling depressed lately, and finally started to tell me why. Many of her classmates that had stayed in school had just graduated in December, including her ex-boyfriend, and here she was working as a secretary in a little real estate office, not going to school, feeling out of place in Perú. She felt like Peruvians looked down on her as soon as they heard her accent.
She talked of her family’s lost pets, mostly about their pericos. Her favorite was Lola, in her words: “a showgirl, just like the song” who just appeared out of the blue one day. Lola loved her and would perch on her hair for hours. The second was Loreto, with a much fancier color than Lola’s plain green. He was a singer and talker who would compose songs all day, and hated Karem. Lizzy was their beautiful Dalmatian who her sister had baptized. When her Mom left Venezuela, Lizzy went to live with her aunt, and the parrots went to live with the sister of their neighbor who lived at the beach.
My only answer to her longing for a lost life is to try to make a home wherever you are. Like Ms. Sharon, she says. Exactly. I tell her for about the fifth time that I need to take her to the spot at the river that people call Chilina, that it will bring her some good medicine. We make a plan to go that coming Saturday, but I’ll believe it when I see it. Most Saturday afternoon plans with Karem fall victim to her overwhelming need for a long nap after work.
As the night goes on the young people become messy and drunken, starting to make out and yell and sing, which makes us comparatively respectable and dignified, maybe even a little tame. Yet somehow they are a charming kind of drunk, and I am happy to be sitting with a girl I like in this quiet corner of the plaza. For a year and a half I’d been seeing boys and girls, men and women sitting on benches in darkened plazas, courting or kissing or holding each other, whispering sweet nothings. It felt like I had finally gotten inside that movie.
In the end we long outlast the youth and get fairly cold, but just sit there talking and talking, not wanting to even look at our phones to know how late it is. Finally she did and it was 1 am and we both had work in the morning. We walk back through completely deserted streets — she says it feels like we are the only people in the world, that we own this city. I walk her up to her street and say buenos noches and walk home late at night feeling happy, that sweet feeling of finding a woman who I can talk all night to, of mysterious enchanted night.
✦✦
On the fifth day of the year, and the five hundredth of my journey in Latin America, Karem and I meet up in mid afternoon at her house, for our oft discussed walk down to Chilina. I am fairly surprised that she hasn’t asked out to nap or go shopping with her mom but I arrive and she’s energetic and ready to go and I am delighted. She is amazed by the fact that you can just walk down the next street opposite her urbanizacíon, and in a few minutes you are in the country, reminding her of Venezuela, flowering crop fields and cows and all the smells of el campo.
At the river she is even more enchanted, and we take off our shoes to wade through shallow pools, the frigid water eliminating any chance of swimming on this overcast day. After she has scrambled around and explored the area to her heart’s content, we sit on a rock right over the current, the sound of the rio and cold snowmelt air rising up medicine to our spirits. We sit there and talk and talk. I am happy that she knows this place now, can come here when I’m gone to find her own medicine. I never want to take selfies, but in this case I can’t help myself. Something about our bare feet just seemed poetic.
✦✦
On the ninth day of the year and the fifth day of classes, I finally got a third class. In general, my students are better this month. Whatever language level they are at, they don’t feel burned out, as opposed to last month when getting them to focus on English before the holidays and summer breaks was like pulling teeth or trying to get blood from a stone; pick your idiom for something unpleasant and perhaps impossible. My students are generally a little older this time, maybe college age to late 20s, with a few high schoolers mixed in.
I am teaching Advanced 1 at 9 am, to fifteen mostly university students trying to fulfill their language requirements during summer break. Some of them have very good English; others struggle with the material and shouldn’t be at this level. But they’re a decent group, willing to participate, and for a teacher who lives by asking questions, this makes for a much more pleasant experience.
Then at eleven I have six hours off, often centered around a good lunch featuring a tomato, avocado and cheese sandwich, reading my book in the front courtyard. If your tomato and avocado and bread and cheese are good enough, this can stand up to any of the best sandwiches. At the Yanahuara Mercado just up the hill, there are always good tomatoes if you look enough, excellent queso andino cheese and the avocados — paltas as they call them — are uniformly fantastic. I know if I keep saying that the paltas are always good here that I will get a bad one sooner or later, but it hasn’t happened yet. Not one bad avocado in this country in seven months.
And the snack lady at the booth outside the market has thick-cut fresh camotes — sweet potato chips. It’s strange — the Peruvians don’t seem to have a word for chips. If you want potato chips at a stand that sells them, you just say papas, and for sweet potatoes you say camote. Either way they help complete a fine lunch, which is almost always followed by a necessary nap.
At 5 pm I have another Advanced 1 class with only four students, so I am getting to know all of them very well. Alex is about a fourteen year old boy who is very smart and quick to learn but also fourteen and not mature and likes to make jokes that no one thinks are funny. His favorite is to say with a very straight face “I like to eat dogs. (long pause) Hot dogs.”
Fabrizzio is a quiet, slight first year college student, hard to get a bead on, participating just enough. He acts as unintentional straight man to Alex’s bad comedy routine. Pamela, a smart and fashionable young woman, works as a dental assistant and is almost finished with dental school. She’s probably only a couple years older than Fabrizzio, but she looks at the two of them as boys. They all usually do their homework and are going to pass. Then there’s Jorge, a man of about fifty who does construction and writes books, or is trying to. A few times before he studied English but it got too hard and he quit, and is still trying to get a grasp on the language. He is too quick reverting to Spanish, doesn’t understand what I’m saying — but pretends he does — doesn’t do the homework and probably won’t pass.
Then at five minutes to seven I have to leave class early and walk to the other branch of the school, almost a mile away and uphill through the crowded rush hour sidewalks and bumper-to-bumper traffic of Avenida Ejercito, in time to get to a seven pm class for which I’m guaranteed to be late. This is the just-opened third class and I’ve taken over for a teacher colleague who has some kind of mysterious health ailment and needed to cut back her schedule. It’s an Intermediate 2 class, the tenth level, but these students are painfully behind and many should probably be back in the third level of Elementary.
There are enough teachers who don’t take the job seriously and don’t grade rigorously enough, so that weak students and whole classes can just slip through, especially if they’re teenagers with attitudes. Worse, a student who fails the class with a score of 60 or higher can study and re-take the exam to try to get a 70. This is called a “soft fail” and means that as long as you try at a bare minimum level, you can probably pass. I think the idea is that students who fail will be less likely to sign up and pay for the same class again, so it’s good business to keep people moving along.
This class doesn’t really even have teenagers with attitudes; there are some college students with attitude but that’s a lot easier to deal with. There are also plenty of adults who genuinely want to learn but are just behind. It was weird tonight, showing up and telling them that I was going to be their teacher from now on, that Lauren was sick and I think she’s okay but don’t know. I think they liked their old teacher and thought “who is this guy?” and “he’s gonna be hard”. It was kind of a rough class.
Preparations for this music gig are slow in building. I’ve been running through a lot of old songs, trying to work out a set list, don’t know if I’d say I’m practicing yet. I’ve decided to start with the oldest song of mine that I still know how to play, about walking down a path at dusk and wishing I could turn into the stream beside me, to dance right down the mountain. This sentiment seems appropriate for Perú.
Emily has in fact returned from her wanderings, and agreed to play in the show. The other night we had our first practice, and we had never really played just the two of us — it was always Elise there too — so at first it was a bit exploratory, our voices getting to know each other, learning how to talk about music for points of reference. Started teaching her a few of my songs, and we decided on a couple covers to work on. I think it’s gonna be fun to sing with her, but we have a long ways to go. Clint the percussionist insists that he’s in, but we haven’t actually practiced yet once, though he did text me a picture of the cajon he’s bought. The gig is a little more than two weeks away.
After my last class, feeling too worn down to cook dinner at 9:15, I stopped by the place up the street from the school, and picked up my go-to comfort food here: Chaufa de Chancho, Peruvian fried rice with pork. I get it about once a week — fourteen soles, about four dollars — and one night I’ll eat half of it, then cook up some fresh vegetables and scramble some eggs to revitalize the other half another night. While they cook my food I sit and watch Peruvian telenovelas on the TV and try hard to make sense of what they’re saying until I space out and forget that they’re speaking Spanish at all and just pay attention to the ridiculous acting.
Came home and talked to Sharon and Karolayn in the kitchen for a bit, various teacher de-briefings and gripings, then retire to my room to eat in silence. It was ten pm and I was nowhere close to sleep, so I practiced some of my songs and worked on an ongoing lengthy letter to my old friend Andrew Ward in New Orleans, and now I’ve been writing and it’s past my bedtime to go to sleep to wake up to do it all again.
