peepholes

It is 8:15 p.m., jungle time. I open the gate to the fence of the housing/office complex where I am living and walk down the dirt road to the local store. Two days of rain have settled the dust into a hard packed clay, which will last only until the next bright sun. I salute the few people I pass with a “buenas noches” and am returned with the same. The stars are out and bright, and the ever-present rainforest symphony of frogs and cicadas and Carlos-only-knows-what kind of mad insect fiends blur into the comfortable white noise of familiarity.

Thieves abound here where unemployment is high and the poor are a highly visible majority, so walking alone through Pucallpa at night is inadvisable. The street is well lit, though, so I am vigilant but not afraid. It is only two blocks away. A moto-taxi grumbles by and three girls crossing my path remind me by their giggles that I am alone, and male, and white.

At the store I buy a two-litre plastic container of Coca-Cola for Anya, whose stomach is unsettled by the change in food. I quibble with the teenage boy in the store about my change. It makes me feel less an “extranjero” to argue in a streetwise fashion.

As I turn to go I glance over at six men gathered around a bar slapped onto the side of the store. They had been talking about something and I wonder if it is my presence that has shut them up, but as I walk by I noticed that their attention is fixed on a small yellow chick sitting on the bar. One of them who is smoking strokes it with his cigarette hand and murmers something that makes the others laugh. Then I am past.

This is a moment - like so many others - for which I wish I had a camera . They happen so often here, tiny visions that are really peep-holes into whole worlds outside that to which I have grown accustomed: a black puppy half-heartedly chasing a large white rooster through the noisome street of mid-day as the rooster’s owner hurls rocks and insults, or a whispy-bearded, highly-wrinkled old man in faded but pressed clothing pedaling very slowly by.

I am comforted by these things because they are possessed of some intangible element that is distinctly Peruvian. And while the indicators of change and the injection of American priorities and products abound, for now at least there remain vestiges of an untouched, different world. It is these that draw me out into the streets and it is for these that I am happy to be here again in a place where once before I lived, like this, without belonging.