Light
I remember that the light in Lima, especially in the early morning, was intensely bright, as if warning about the heat it planned to bring along later. We stayed in a pension, a sort of bed & breakfast hotel, while dad went around town looking for the right place to live. The pension sat behind a low garden wall on a boulevard in an ancient middle-class neighborhood called Miraflores. Somewhere, Vargas Llosa was writing about this neighborhood right then. Huge trees stood along the center of the boulevard. Their trunks had been painted white up to my eye level. Nearby was a large army barracks, with soldiers idling around the gate. At right angles to the boulevard, you could walk along past large houses within walls, until you got to one of several deeply shaded parks where young people necked and kids ran down gravel walks.
We drank café con leche, warm milk with a little coffee in it, by the pitcher. We ate little oval buns that were delivered every morning in a huge basket by a little boy. Some mornings we would wake up to a shrill panpipe kind of sound; this announced the knife-sharpening man, who ambled through the streets pushing a one-wheeled contraption hung with jingling cutlery. If you stopped him for his services he would turn the thing upside down so it stood on three legs, crank the wheel really fast with a bicycle pedal he had rigged up, and hold your knife against it until it gave off sparks.
We had been there a month or so when a group of generals pulled a coup d’etat against the president. The next few days, we stood on the front steps of our pension and watched tanks and armored troop carriers roll up and down the boulevard, in the traditional show of support for the new man, whose name was Juan Velasco. I held my mother’s hand and bounced with excitement. I was barely five years old.
The deposed president’s name was Francisco Belaunde. He was unusual in South America for the way he came to power, which was through an official, more or less peaceable election, but he wasn’t so unique in his lack of interest in the really grim stuff that was going on. Peru right then was going through its own version of the crisis of capitalism that struck all the Latin American countries in the second half of the 1960s. Half-baked industrialization plans had led to the collapse of the rural economy that had survived essentially unchanged since the Spanish conquistadors had set it up, and the people who had provided the labor for that economy, unneeded now, were moving in large numbers to the city, figuring they had at least a chance of surviving there. They gathered in poor inner-city neighborhoods and scraped by on the charity of relatives and strangers.
Every few weeks, a group of families would get together to buy some woven straw mats, about six feet on a side, and rent some trucks to carry them on. Then, in the middle of the night, they would drive out en masse to a trackless area somewhere on the sand dunes to the south of Lima or the rocky, dusty hills to the north. They would mark off some de facto streets, throw up frameworks of planks and sticks, nail the straw mats to them, tack a sheet of corrugated zinc on for a roof if they could get one, and move in their families, dogs and chickens. By morning there could be a town of several thousand where there had been nothing the day before. Buses, sewn together by their owner-drivers with rubber bands and speaker wire, would begin stopping there almost immediately. A market would pop into being somewhere between the new settlement and the nearest main road. Tank trucks full of water would begin rolling up as soon as the sand was packed firm enough to hold them, and people would line up to fill their jugs and buckets.
The year we arrived was when this “barriada” phenomenon really hit its stride, and Lima’s population began to multiply yearly. This was what my dad had come looking for. He immediately bought a Land Rover eight-seater and plunged into the barriadas looking for someone who would listen.
Categorised as: Memory, Uncategorized