The neighborhood of San Gabriel had been renamed José Carlos Mariátegui, under the rule of the populist generals, in honor of Peru’s chief representative in the world communist conspiracy. Mariátegui, a Basque immigrant in the early 20th century, had been a friend of Lenin’s and a founder of the Third International, and was the patron saint of what remained of the traditional left in Peru. I suppose the choice of a name associated with communist revolution was no more incongruous than one associated with Christian compassion.
To get into MariГЎtegui, you turned left off the Pan American highway at an unmarked place where people had formed a spontaneous market and bus depot off to the left side of the road as you drove south from Lima. Rickety old buses and vans dodged women carrying big plastic mesh bags full of vegetables. At lunch stands shaded by sheets of plastic held up on bamboo legs, women fried strips of meat or cooked big pots of stew over kerosene stoves. Workers on their way home would swing off the buses and sit down on rough benches under the plastic sheets for a bite.
You proceeded up the broad, dusty main street of the barriada, which led up a slight slope at right angles to the highway, more or less where the river would have been if there were any water to drain out of this valley. Half a mile to either side, a line of hills provided the boundaries of the barriada. Sidewalks were unknown; pedestrians, children and dogs shared the space with cars and trucks. Satellite lumber yards and brick and concrete supply places alternated with the dwellings. The houses on the main drag tended to be a little more finished than average, with a greater proportion of brick and concrete to straw mats. Anywhere you turned off, straw mats would begin to predominate again a few yards in. There were no commercial establishments, like bank branches, doctors’ offices or retail stores. The economy here, huge as it was by now, operated strictly on a cash basis
The main road went on for several miles, cutting into the low, rocky hills that backstopped the coastal dunes. It petered out eventually when the ratio of level ground to hillside dropped below some unstated profitable level. To get to our house, you went about a half mile into the barriada and turned right on a street that was called 15 de abril, in honor of a battle in the war of independence, I think. You followed this street straight up to where the gravel and flinty, pocket-sized rock, which could be shaped to some degree with pick and shovel, met a strip of wheelbarrow-sized granite rubble, which couldn’t. This was the very outer edge of urbanization, and this is where my dad had come into possession of a lot to build his dream house on.