Blue eyes
We kids got used to being scrutinized very closely, our blue eyes and blond hair as unfamiliar as tails or fur. Women, especially, would swoon over our pigmentation. Some would offer wistfully to trade their dark eyes for our blue ones, which disturbed me a little, until I learned to joke along with them. In fact, there were lots of blue-eyed, blond Peruvians, but we and the people who were so interested in us didn’t know any of them. They lived, as they do today, in isolated communities behind high walls, where they get together to discuss the economy, elect presidents and so on. To the pobladores, they might as well have been from a distant country.
I didn’t like the constant inspections of my eye color, but the joy of all that sand usually overrode any misgivings I had about riding along with my dad on his rounds. Sometimes he would need to spend an hour or two in some family’s estera home, and I would be free to play in the sand as long as I didn’t wander too far from the shack. One time when he had taken particularly long, I had been playing with the little boy who lived there, digging a very deep hole in the sand with a couple of aluminum pots that had lost their handles. It was getting dark, but I was not happy about leaving. As we drove off, my dad observed that each of us boys wanted to be in the other’s place.
To help themselves understand the local culture, my parents enlisted a guitar teacher named Mr. Maguińa. He was an elderly man who drove a black Nash Rambler (I think) that was already ancient then. Every two weeks or so we would get together with another missionary family, the children on the floor and the grownups in a circle of chairs, and Mr. Maguińa would slowly work his way through his huge repertoire of songs that had been popular in Lima in the pre-Beatles era, showing my mother the chords as he went. One of my favorites was “Yo vendo unos ojos negros.” They were short, concise songs, mostly in three-quarter time, almost always sad in a detached, ironic sort of way, with many references to traveling great distances in pursuit of love or a memory. I can still hear almost every word of them.
Categorised as: Memory, Uncategorized