Peru

          I was standing in the corner of the backyard of my grandma’s house, alone.  It was one of her infamous “Peru parties,” where she invited all her South American friends, plus some friends and family, prepared Peruvian and Ecuadorian food and drinks and hired an authentic Peruvian band. 

            At my grandma’s events, I felt like an outsider.  This particular one was on a spring weekend when I was in 9^th grade.  My grandma had hired a Peruvian band and some of the guests were dancing together, smiling.  One mother, who I didn’t recognize at all, was dancing with her two kids, swinging them around in circles.  One of her kids, a boy with white-blond hair who looked like he was about six years old, suddenly tripped and landed on the ground, crying.  The mother immediately scooped him up and sat him on a chair on the other side of the yard.

Toward the middle of the party, I remember being called over by my grandma’s friend, Eduardo Chamorro.

            “Your grandmother tells me you’re taking Spanish in school,” he said excitedly.  Then he started speaking rapidly in Spanish, which sounded like a string of random sounds to me, with one or two words I could recognize here and there.

            I was taking Spanish 7-8 at school, where I’d gotten plenty of practice reading Spanish out of textbooks and conjugating verbs, but almost none speaking it.  I smiled awkwardly at Eduardo. “You must be confusing me with one of my cousins,” I told him.  I darted away from him in the opposite direction as fast as I could, feeling embarrassed.

Then I receded back to my corner and tried to entertain myself.  I’d already finished the sudoku puzzle I’d brought with me.  I looked around for my cousins, but one was busy talking to my grandma’s friend and I couldn’t find the other.  So I just stood there uncomfortably by myself. 

A few minutes later, my grandma approached me.  “You must be hungry, Anna,” she said, smiling, and handed me a plate of food.  Of course, it was served on one of her many Peruvian plates, painted with Incan symbols and animals.  It had two tamales and a pile of white, slimy stuff that I didn’t recognize.  I pushed it to the side of my plate.

My mother’s family lived in Ecuador when she was in middle school and later, when she was in college, in Peru, where she visited for six months.  As a result, my mom, uncle, and grandmother all speak fluent Spanish, love Peruvian music, and have an affinity for South American culture.  My grandma, especially, prides herself on her South American connection and celebrates it as much as possible.  She has lots of friends, both in the US and outside, from South American countries.  She even had a Peruvian family, the Chamorros, live at her house when they first immigrated to America for six months. They are still good friends.  I see the Chamorros a lot, too—my grandma invites them to a lot of our family gatherings, like Thanksgivings and birthdays.

At my grandma’s parties, it seemed as if I was expected to be engaged and social, interacting with all of my grandma’s friends, most of whom I didn’t even know that well.  But I felt as though I couldn’t.  It wasn’t just the language barrier—I was completely disconnected from Peruvian culture. 

            A few weeks after my grandma’s party, my parents informed my sister and me that we were going on a trip to Peru for two and a half weeks over summer vacation.  I was nervous and excited; eager to learn about the places where my mom spent so much time, but anxious about going to a continent I’d never been to before.

When we landed in Lima, I got off the airplane and was immediately surrounded by thick, dark fog.  It was the middle of the night, around three in the morning, and after being on a plane for twelve hours, I was exhausted.  I was so tired I thought I was going to collapse while we were waiting for our luggage.  All I wanted to do was go back to my house in Berkeley and fall asleep in my own bed.  After our suitcases finally came, we took a taxi to a hotel pretty close to the airport. 

We were awoken by an alarm clock early the next morning.  It felt like I hadn’t slept at all, probably because it was four in the morning California time.  We scrambled into another taxi and returned to the airport, this time to board a tiny white plane, about the length of a school bus, to Urubamba, a small town.  My knees grazed the seat in front of me.  It was the loudest airplane I’ve ever been on; the plane’s roaring and groaning made it impossible to for me to listen to my iPod.  Already, I felt disoriented.

When we arrived in Urubamba, we went to the train station to go to Aguas Calientes, the town next to Machu Picchu.  The station was on the bottom of a sloping cobblestone road.  There were people everywhere—other tourist families huddled together, Peruvian vendors trying to sell souvenirs to travelers.

We pushed ourselves onto the train and found our car.  The seats were red and patchy; the cloth covering them looked like it had come from a frayed rug.  I sat next to my dad and stared out the window as the train slowly left Urubamba and headed into the Andes Mountains toward Aguas Calientes and Machu Picchu. 

            “Anna!  You have to see this!” My sister was repeatedly tapping me on my shoulder and I woke up from a nap.  “What is it? What’s going on?” I asked her. 

I heard indigenous Incan music with reed flutes playing a sharp, high-pitched melody.  I noticed it was coming from an old cassette player on a table in the corner.  About three men who had on painted tribal masks were parading down the aisle of the train, wearing embroidered Incan garments adorned with beads.  They were doing some sort of bizarre dance to the music, putting one arm behind their backs and one in the air and skipping in a rhythmic line.  They pranced up and down the aisle a number of times until one of them abruptly ran over to the cassette player, stopped the music, and disappeared behind two double doors into another car.  The other men immediately followed.

            Only a few minutes later, the masked men were back, this time carrying indigenous clothing and jewelry and trinkets, desperate to sell them to a passenger.  They were kind of creepy, these men; I could see their eyes fierce glaring at us through small holes in their masks.  When we declined their offer to buy anything, they stood there for a few seconds, stubbornly, hoping that we would change our minds, and then moved on to the next passenger.  I wondered if doing these fashion shows was the only way they could make money, and I felt sorry for them.

            I found the masked men’s whole “show” to be kind of bizarre.  For one thing, it seemed so out of context to see such a dramatic cultural display during the middle of a train ride.  I had no idea how to react to it.  But even more than that, the music, the men’s clothes, the trinkets they were trying to sell us—none of it seemed remotely familiar to me.  Everything felt very foreign.

            My family arrived in Aguas Calientes in the late afternoon. We exited the train in the middle of an outdoor market.  Vendors had tables lined with wool, fruits, necklaces, wooden carvings and other goods.  We pushed our way through the market and to the place we were staying across the road—an old, white concrete building. 

The next morning, we went to see Machu Picchu, the famous remnants of an Inca village.  We took a bus loaded with tourists.  We got off the bus at the top of a small mountain.  There, we could see the entire village of Aguas Calientes, as well as all of Machu Picchu.  In the ruins, there were stairs and small rooms carved onto the side of the lush, green hills.  In the distance, I could see llamas grazing.

            “You know, I visited Machu Picchu with my family when I was around your age.  We took a trip here when we were living in Ecuador,” my mom told me.

            “Really?” For some reason, that surprised me.  It was weird to think that my mom’s experiences traveling in South America were similar to my own.

            “Yeah.  It looks exactly the same as I remember it; the stone buildings, the caves…” Her voice trailed off.

            It was an ancient ruin, so what could have changed, anyway?

            When we were done exploring Machu Picchu, we climbed back onto the bus to go back to Aguas Calientes.  We’d been driving for three minutes when we reached a curve in the road.  There was a Peruvian boy, probably about eight years old, standing in the middle of the street, waving and smiling at the bus full of tourists.  Then, he promptly turned around and began running down the side of the hill.  A few minutes later, we reached another curve, and the little boy was back, leaping and waving enthusiastically.  The bus drove through about six more curves.  We started to look for the boy once we approached the curve, and sure enough, he would be there, grinning widely.  But, after each curve, the boy’s exhaustion from sprinting down the mountain became more and more noticeable; by the final turns he was clearly panting and was no longer leaping and smiling quite so gleefully.

            Finally, we reached the bottom of the hill and Aguas Calientes.  Before we got off the bus, the little boy who had been chasing us got on.  His face was rosy and droplets of sweat were dripping down his forehead.  I could hear his rapid, heavy breathing from the back of the bus.  He held out a wooden box for donations and walked down the aisle of the bus.  Almost everyone on the bus gave him money.  Every so a tourist would hold up a camera to take a picture of the little boy and he would immediately put on an enormous, toothy grin.  I felt sorry for him; sprinting down a mountain after a bus full of tourists was the only way he could make money.  I wondered if he had a family or parents or anyone to look out for him or take care of him.

            A few days later, we went back to Lima to visit some of our “family friends” who lived there.  Really, they were friends of my grandma whom my sister, my dad and I had never met, and my mom hadn’t seen in years.  They were relatives of the Chamorros, the family that I had met countless times at my grandma’s Peru parties.  I was still embarrassed from my encounter with Eduardo Chamorro before we’d left.

 My family took a taxi to get to the family’s house.  We drove through Miraflores, a beautiful neighborhood with lots of trees, downtown Lima, which had a huge mall, and then through the suburbs.  The taxi stopped outside a white, one-story house.  My mom, sister, dad and I walked together to the front porch, which was dusty and red.  One of us knocked on the door.

“Be polite, girls,” my mom reminded my sister and I.

            A few seconds later, a middle aged woman with short, dark brown, curly hair opened the door.  “Laura!” she exclaimed and went over to hug my mother.  After embracing my mom, she proceeded to hug my sister, my dad and finally me, though we had never met.

            “This is Maria, Eduardo Chamorro’s older sister,” my mom informed us.

            “Welcome! Come in, come in,” Maria said in broken English.  She quickly walked us through her house and into the backyard.  Sitting by a table were three other people.  My mom introduced them as Lucho, Iris and Clara, more relatives of the Chamorros.  All three of them hugged us and we sat us down next to them. 

            The table was completely covered with food that they had prepared especially for us.  The wood was barely visible under the platters of corn, pork, beans and drinks.  Lucho us poured glasses Inca Cola, a South American soda.  It was bright yellow and tasted like liquid bubblegum.  I would guess that my sister and I drank at least one full bottle of Inca Cola in the course of about two hours.

            They wanted to know all about us—all about our lives.  In their limited English, they asked me about school, what I did for fun, my family and friends.  They wanted to know how their relatives and friends in the states were doing.

            During the middle of our discussion, Maria suddenly got up from the table in the backyard and went into the house.  She came back carrying a photo album with a torn, navy blue cover.  She turned its wrinkled pages to the middle of the book and pointed at a picture.  It showed all Maria, Iris, Lucho and Clara surrounding my grandma, who was sitting in the middle of all of them with an enormous smile on her face. 

            “It was your abuelita’s birthday,” (they all referred to my grandma as Abuela or Abuelita), “and we threw her a party,” Maria told us.

            She smiled at us.  I smiled back, sincerely. 

            My stomach lurched as the airplane took off.  We were finally going back to California.  I looked out the window and strained my eyes to see through the fog that shrouded the city of Lima like a translucent cloak.  Through it I could make out twinkling city lights and a vast ocean.  I thought I could make out the Chamorros’ house.  I was probably wrong, but even pretending I could see it made me feel connected to the place I was leaving.  I thought about all the things I’d seen on my trip—those strangers on the train wearing masks, that little boy running down the hill at Machu Picchu—but more than those things, I remembered the family from Lima, how they took us in so welcomingly.  I knew that next time my Grandma had one of her “Peru parties,” I wasn’t going to stand alone in the corner.