Dispatch Number 77 -Notes From a Notebook III

Things You Don't Learn Reading Books
Latin American girlfriends are like wars. They are easy to start and terribly difficult to end.

On Getting There
"I'm not going back, but I don't know where I'm going."
-Scott, The BiPolar Traveler

Cat
Sun burns through the dust of windy arid Huanuco, a city that sits at the edge of the highlands between the Andes and the Amazon basin. Two hotel workers, men in their 20s throw a kitten the distance of a horseshoe pit into a garden fountain deep enough to drown it. The kitten learns it can swim. The men leave it in for some time wallowing in adolescent laughter, eventually they pull it out. The weeks old black kitten sits in shock in the grass next to the fountain.
Minutes earlier Scott, my suicidal American friend and I were discussing human evolution, Was man still evolving or locked into his present form?

Our discussion took place on a balcony above the fountain where we witnessed the cat being tossed. It was cruel.
Scott remarked in his deadpan fashion, I'm not sure humans have evolved.

Scott
Scott talks of suicide in a deep southern Tennessee drawl, morbid contemplations of the noose to put a stop to it all. He explained the importance of using a thick rope to perform the task comfortably and how to set the rope on the neck, not Hollywood style with broken vertebrae, but by gently starving the brain of blood and oxygen. I refer to him as my Suicidal American Friend in letters to friends. In fact, he owns a beautiful piece of white rope tied into a noose that always sits out in the open. He has carried ropes like this one for years, it gives him solace. He jokes to put me at ease, yet I know his musings have a tinge of realism.

He is safe; I am not the type to freak out and try to prevent him from his wishes. I am of the opinion that life is yours to do what you want with it and if he is going to do it, he will. I can only be a normal guy with him and let each of us take away what we need from our time together. The noose helps him keep perspective when his mood turns against the instinct of the heartbeat to live.

He does not seem over the edge, but families say that all the time of murderous or suicidal relations, you never know what lie inside. What I do enjoy about Scott is he possesses both LIFE and DEATH and that is more than I can say of most people I meet.

Chavin
Guided by my sometimes misguided idea of being an antitourist I told Scott I wanted to go to Chavin up in the mountains because the map showed a hot spring there. The idea was to go find a place to sleep and soak in the sulfur baths. Aside from the symbol stamped on our dog eared map of Peru we knew nothing of the place.

After six or seven stops to ask directions we found the nameless hot spring as the sun was setting only to be told by the old woman caretaker that, We open in the morning.

My antitourist wishes were met: we had no idea where to stay the night. The road was cut into a steep mountain side, everything perched on a ledge. Accommodations did not look encouraging, clusters of roadside adobe houses splattered with road mud and locals that stared at us as they prepared to shutter in for the night.

In the fading light of dusk the settlements looked disappointing and depressing. People stood in doorways of dirt-floor houses in wash-worn clothes, dreary muted colors as dusty as the dashboard of the truck. The same old lady pointed down the road with Latin American approximation for a place to sleep. Scott and I harbored silent thoughts of a rough night trying to sleep in a dumpy hospedaje with mice, unrelenting cold air and lumpy beds.

To our surprise Chavin was tidy and stood in stark contrast to all the towns we had passed, it had a colonial atmosphere of thick walled adobe buildings and a new plaza. We settled in for the night at the very comfortable La Casona. To my dismay in the morning I discovered the guidebook called attention to it all: Chavin, its hot spring and even our hotel. After traveling for two years I have learned that most everything has been discovered and Chavin was no exception. Tourism has become industrialized in its reach and scale taking the thrill away from the intrepid off the beaten path traveler. Part of my Latin American odyssey aside from cultural and language studies is searching for these out of the way places that have not been trampled by the tourist hoards.

Rumblings
The intentions of life, where do they go?

Italo Calvo
“In the square there is a wall where the old men sit and watch the world go by; he is seated in a row with them. Desires are already memories.”
-Italo Calvo

David
Huaraz, Peru