olé

Snip, snap – badaBOOM! and it´s all over. This is it, folks, the next to last hurrah. I abandoned the children whom I´ve been teaching to draw what they see and to question authority. I´ve finished with the orphans whom the authorities have declined to let us take home, no questions asked. One more week here in the none-too-deepest and not-so-darkest Amazon and then I will – in the words of Ernest Hemingway (if he ever thought to say them) – bow to the crowd and fade.

First, though, I´ll transition myself by taking my lovely wife on the backs of burros to the lovely mountains to take many photographs of the quaint little natives in their quaint little flea-ridden adobe cottages. We´ll eat grilled mountain corn and feel impetuous to the strains of the pan flute and charanga as they pluck and blow that age-old Simon and Garfunkel classic, El Condor Pasa. You know the words… I´d rather be an American than a third-world person, yes I would – if I only could… sing along!

Cynicism is so unbecoming in a child of the Truth, which I aim to be. Let me sidestep for a moment that raging bull and wave a flag for beauty, love and Peruvian cuisine. Hurrah! I harangue, of course, to sideslip with a flourish the malevolent, hornéd truth – that I am sad to leave again a way of being that feels so natural since it is so deeply woven into the fabric of my memories. This – here – is pieces of how I was. As easy as it has been to slide, heels together, into a posture of proper belonging, the fact is that I am not home here. Or there, or anywhere. In truth, I feel less like the matador and more like the bull – bewildered, instinctive and mis-placed.

There is, however, no escaping your part. Something must die, bull or man – the crowd demands it – so I will draw my sword. We murder to dissect, they say, so I have written this and murdered the sadness, smothering it under an avalanche of roses. Adieu, Peru.