Barbara Drake-Vera's Blog: The Meltdown: Barbara Drake-Vera's blog
July 16, 2024
Excerpt from Melted Away
Chapter 2: The Diagnosis (opening)
Pigeons
Miraflores, Lima, Peru, January 2011
It was a warm Sunday afternoon in early January—not midwinter, but summer, in Peru—when I began dreaming of blue ice again.
Jorge and I were sprawled on opposite ends of the couch, his long, tanned legs intertwined with mine, our black Lab, Lola, snoring beside us on the tiled floor, as fat gray pigeons—cuculís, in Peruvian Spanish—cooed on the windowsill outside. Jorge was fiddling with a new hybrid camera he had bought for freelance work; I was leafing through a Forbes I had found in a doctor’s office a few days earlier, excited to find something in English to read (with just five months of classes, my Spanish had stalled at an intermediate level). The two-story house we had been renting since 2007 was located in the very neighborhood where Jorge had grown up. Directly across the street, framed by our living room window, was the park where Jorge and Henry had played as children, Parque Leoncio Prado. It was named for a Peruvian mariner who had been martyred in the nineteenth-century War of the Pacific, captured in bed by Chilean soldiers. The towering bronze statue in the center of the park showed Colonel Prado posing jauntily in his battle uniform, sword in hand, not flat on his back in his pajamas.
I peered over my magazine at Jorge, his face knit in concentration as he tested the camera settings. When we had met nearly twenty years ago, his hair had been past his shoulders and jet black, save for the white streak down the middle. Now it was cropped short and salt-and-pepper gray, the white tuffet still poking up defiantly. My own hair was long and strawberry blond, a detail that had caused a scene at Lima’s Plaza de Acho bullfighting arena two years earlier. As stringers for the Miami Herald reporting on Peru’s growing anti-bullfighting movement, Jorge and I had been allowed into Acho’s fabled callejón (alley), the inner circle where matadors prepare to enter the ring. A man in the audience had noticed me standing there, notepad in hand, and, scandalized, yelled to the crowd in Spanish: “A woman in the callejón! And a redhead, no less!” I was double bad luck for the toreros, as bullfighting tradition had it.
In addition to covering the bullfights, Jorge and I had been to the Snow Star pilgrimage twice since moving to Lima. We had collaborated on a photo story about it for NBC.com, and I wrote about it nonstop on my blog, An American in Lima; that led to freelance gigs “fixing” for NBC Nightly News, The Today Show, and Dateline, including a special on water wars in the Andes. But despite three and a half years of effort, I had not been able to sell a single article about the glacier or climate change to any publication in the United States, which was still fixated on the so-called debate over whether climate change even existed. Newspapers editors were more interested in stories about cultural change and my experiences as an expat. The “strange” and “exotic” sold back home, even in the literary realm. Before I left for Peru, the Florida Council on Arts and Culture had awarded me a fiction writing grant based on a factual account I had submitted of Mother’s Day traditions in the Andes. Perhaps they had thought the drunken mothers carousing on Cusco’s Plaza de Armas were figments inspired by magic realism.
The real was not real in the United States in 2011. And when it came to selling environmental stories, I lacked the science writing credentials to persuade editors to give me a chance. So, I just kept blogging and selling articles about “local color,” while Jorge turned to art photography, renting a studio in a crumbling colonial-era mansion downtown. For money, he helped produce programs on the environment for European TV stations, whose audiences did take these things seriously.
He was lucky to have those connections, I thought, enviously. All I had was an offer to teach English part-time at the Peruvian University of Applied Sciences (UPC), in the district of Monterrico. Hah, like I wanted to do that: endure a forty-five-minute cab ride each way to teach verb tenses to students at a for-profit university plunked down in the dirt mountains by the house of Jorge’s elderly uncle and aunt. “No, thank you,” I was planning on telling the university.
Jorge angled the camera lens toward my bare foot, which I shoved self-consciously under a cushion. My left big toe was sporting a thick yellow callous where the hiking boot had rubbed.
“Hey,” I warned.
“Don’t worry, I’ll delete it. I’m just trying out the exposure settings.”
I glanced at the essay I had been trying to read: “The Big Climate Hoax.”
“Forbes just published another stupid piece,” I began, citing the reporter’s name.
“Oh, that huevón [idiot],” said Jorge.
“Do you want to hear the lede? It’s all lies. This bullshit needs to be called out.”
A tiny spasm of annoyance creased his cheek.
“I thought you were done with that.”
“I’d still like to sell a story on Qoyllur Rit’i. Climate change might not be happening yet in the United States, but it soon will be. Lonnie Thompson told me so at Huaraz.”
He shook his head. “Look, Barbara, we went up to the glacier three times with Paco. I had my photo show downtown; we did that photo story together; you did that thing with Anne Thompson. We’ve done our bit for the environment.”
“But my story—” A flurry of anxiety rose in my chest.
“Stop it with that face. Hey, did you see this?”
He flashed the camera screen at me. “The glacier came back.”
It took me a second to recognize what the bulbous white-and-yellow mound was: my toe.
“Jerk,” I said, throwing a pillow at his head. It missed and bounced next to Lola, who leaped up, tail wagging.
“Hey,” he said. “Let’s go outside so I can try out the camera.”
***
The sun warmed our faces as Jorge, Lola, and I crossed the lane and entered the block-long park. The bisecting pathways were crowded with families enjoying a stroll after their 1:00 p.m. main meal (almuerzo): children skipping alongside their parents, nannies pushing strollers, grandparents held by the arm by young women in white scrubs—home health aides known as enfermeras técnicas. The women walked at a snail’s pace alongside their elderly charges, their white shoes measuring the length of each polished concrete paver.
Scrawny gray squirrels chattered in the trees overhead as we joined the Sunday afternoon procession. Jorge’s shutter fired as he surreptitiously took a flurry of photos over one shoulder, not even looking through the lens. Lola sniffed at the grass as we traced our usual route along the walkways: down to the yellow D’Onofrio ice cream cart, past the big house once owned by the family of a childhood friend who used to invite him after school to eat vanilla wafers, along the dusty shrubs where Jorge and Henry made a fort one summer and waged a month-long war with the neighborhood kids, back to the center of the park and to the heroic Colonel Prado, his bronze epaulets dabbed with pigeon shit.
A scuffed soccer ball bounced in front of us; Jorge stuck out a foot and kicked it back on the grass.
“Gracias,” a teenager called.
“De nada.”
“Let’s stop here,” I said, nodding at shaded bench.
I leaned back against the cool wooden slats, cuculís cooing and humping in the branches above, as Jorge discreetly filmed the people drifting by. Our German neighbors waved at us from a nearby sandpit, where their youngest child was digging with a spoon. In the flower bed next to them, a sweet-faced health aide was coaxing an older man out of the marigolds.
“Come here, señor,” she said in Spanish. “This way.” He shook his head. “Please, señor. We can have ice cream.”
I would never have the patience, I said to myself. Never.
I thought of my father, anger and guilt rising. No, my father did not want our help. Nor did he want to help us. Anyway, we had done all right here on our own, no thanks to him. That was how he wanted it: separate households, separate lives, an annual visit in which we flew up to Florida for the holidays—stilted interactions, him in his bathrobe half the day, playing solitaire at the kitchen table—at the end of which he looked visibly relieved when we pulled our rental car out of the driveway. His life was an endless round of doctor’s visits and Masonic meetings, trips to the vet, evenings with Charlie Brown and Turner Classic Movies. Who needed a daughter or a son-in-law when you were equipped with such plentitude and Boston Market takeout?
I could still picture the coupon tossed on the woven placemat. The orange-and-gold placemats of my beautiful dead mother, who was never coming back. Hole in my heart.
That had been back in 2006. The first year I saw the melting glacier and its turquoise-blue heart up close. The first time I tasted its ice and let it drip down my throat and let its dizzying chill lodge in my chest, a sensation that had never left me, if I was honest. Years later, I was still obsessed with a fifty thousand–year–old glacier. A feeling he didn’t share. We’d fought about it on our last pilgrimage, in 2009. Him and me, screaming in the tent. Paco got it, though. Our nervous, stubborn guide who herded llamas and alpacas in the shadow of Mount Ausangate.
“I want to go back,” I said out loud.
“What?” Jorge frowned as he looked away from his viewfinder.
“To Qoyllur Rit’i. I want to help out Paco and his family. I think your cousin Chata might want to come too.”
His face softened. “Barbara,” he said. It was a new face. Pitying was the word that came to mind. “Let it rest. You have that university that wants you to teach. Why not accept?”
“But I can get an assignment . . . 2011 is supposed to be my year. My horoscope said—”
A muscle twitched in his cheek. “You see this camera? I am going to use it for actual paying gigs, like the one with ARTE next week. I am not blowing eighteen hundred dollars on an expedition to some glacier in buttfuck Quispicanchi that nobody in their right mind cares about, besides Paco and his annoying mother.”
“I care about it.”
“Great, you pay for it.”
“I will!” I stood up, bumping my head on a branch. A startled cuculí flew out and landed on the sidewalk, fluffing its feathers. I grabbed Lola’s leash. “You’ll be dying to come along when you see the kind of interest I can stir up with this, this thing I’m going to write.”
***
The dining room was empty and still, shadows shifting in the high ceiling overhead. I unhooked Lola and let her flop down on the cool tile. Why did I get so worked up over these things? It was only a story, a story I probably wouldn’t sell. You win some, you lose some. So why couldn’t I give this story up? Why did I insist on fighting about it with Jorge, of all people, the person who had convinced me to climb the glacier in the first place?
I walked over to the Italian server and rested my palms on its cool, marble slab. “Cálmate,” it seemed to be saying, or whatever the Italian was for “chill out.” Observing me from the top shelf were the ancestors, as Jorge and I called them, photographs of my mother and Jorge’s parents (long dead), plus plaster statues of San Hilarion, the money saint, and San Martín de Porres, the first Black saint of the Americas. I picked up San Martín and stroked his nubby head; it was gritty under my thumb, the painted surface embedded with sand. He was the patron saint of barbers, sailors, and lost causes. Was that what my Qoyllur Rit’i struggles had become?
I set San Martín back on the shelf, beneath a photograph of pilgrims posing in front of the glacier during our second trip to Qoyllur Rit’i, in 2008. In just two years, the glacier had fled another forty feet up the mountain. One cold morning, Jorge and I climbed to the place where I had stood at the glacier’s edge, two years earlier, and found nothing but dirt and moraine. All the ice was gone—the huge, frozen, whale-like wall I had leaned against was no longer there. It was the strangest feeling, to stand where an enormous glacier had been and now was not. The effect was sudden, sharp, bewildering to the body—like entering a room expecting to see someone you love only to remember they’re dead. So, this is what the effects of rapid climate change feel like up close, I had thought, staring dumbly at the raw brown dirt, my body filled with a disorienting sadness I could not name. I was standing at a place that existed but no longer existed. I was there, but there was no “there” there.
Could you be homesick for a place that was vanishing into thin air? I wondered, tracing a finger over the plexiglass.
An Australian philosopher had coined a word for this. Solastalgia. The grief induced by seeing a familiar place gradually destroyed by climate change. It felt so personal, a crushing sadness mixed with helplessness and bewilderment. Standing where the glacier wasn’t had aroused a sharp, almost violent longing in me that day. Maybe if I close my eyes and think hard enough, this nightmare will end—the ice will creep back down the mountain.
Five pilgrims in feathered Amazonian headdresses were standing shoulder to shoulder in the harsh sunlight, the shrunken glacier behind them. Chunchos, their ceremonial role was called. The sad-faced older guy on the left had suggested they line up where the glacier used to end. He’d been coming to Qoyllur Rit’i for twenty years. Not even his teenage son was smiling. What was there to smile about? “This photo will appear in the American magazines, yes?” the sad-faced guy asked me afterward. “So the americanos will understand and help us?” Yes, yes, I had lied, telling myself I wasn’t lying.
I had let them down in 2008 and again in 2009. Was I about to do it again?
The doorbell buzzed, jolting me out of my brooding. Waving at me through the front window was a tall, thin woman with chestnut-brown hair and a tranquil smile. It was Jorge’s older cousin Chata, who lived with her husband on a horse farm outside Lima. In the early 1980s, she had studied anthropology at Universidad San Marcos, Peru’s oldest university. But Shining Path, Sendero Luminoso, had stopped all that. Doing fieldwork in the highlands became too dangerous.
I let her in, raising my head to kiss her cheek: At over six feet, she was unusually tall for a woman in Peru and had played for the national volleyball team. Her nickname, La Chata, translated as “Shorty.”
“Cousin,” she said in Spanish, handing me a large Tupperware container. “You left this at my parents’ house.”
I thanked her, blushing; last Sunday, Jorge and I had gone to a family almuerzo, and I brought my version of a Peruvian classic, papa a la huancaína (potatoes, Huancayo style). It was my first time using fresh ají peppers, and I had miscalculated the spiciness. An older relative had succumbed to a dramatic coughing fit and had to be carted off to the bedroom.
“You came all this way just to give me the Taper?” I asked.
“No, Dickie and I are just passing by,” she said, pointing to a Mercedes at the curb. “We’re on our way to Gorda’s.” (Gorda, or “Chubby,” was her skinny little sister.)
“Ah, good,” I said, setting the container on the sideboard.
Chata glanced at Jorge’s picture. “I would love to go to Qoyllur Rit’i someday. It would be fascinating to see the rituals, the pilgrims, the dancing, to observe. Are you going this year?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Well, maybe—”
The car honked outside.
“I have to go. Another time,” she said, kissing me goodbye.
I closed the front door and glanced at my watch: 4:05 p.m. Shit. More than an hour late.
I ducked into my office at the back of the house and dialed the Gainesville number, stroking Lola’s head as I gazed absently out the window. At the far end of the long, walled backyard was a fig tree supposedly grown from fruit brought from Spain by Pizarro and planted in the courtyard of the palace of government in 1536. Tio Jorge had picked some of the figs when he worked as minister of industry for President Bermúdez, in the 1970s, and given them to families in this neighborhood to plant. The tree was stumpy and not much to look at, and the figs were tough, but it was tantalizing to imagine that here in our dusty, pigeon-filled garden was a living connection to the founding of the City of Kings.
Six rings, eight rings. Where could he be? Our weekly ritual. He filled me in on his appointments, on and on about him, Charlie Brown barking in the background. It was okay he didn’t ask about me. All he needed to know was Jorge and I were in the “Land of the Incas,” as he bragged to his disinterested neighbors.
Twelve rings. Lola nudged my leg with her wet snout. “Where is he, girl?” I asked, opening the back door. I peered up at the twenty-foot-high walls surrounding the yard; cemented to the top were shards of thick green glass that poked out like angry teeth. They had been put there in the 1980s or ’90s to deter thieves and terrorists, a common practice in Lima during Shining Path times. There hadn’t been a bombing in the city since 2002, but nobody bothered removing the glass. Limeños just stopped seeing it, like they did the dust everywhere. Maybe if I lived here a few more years, I would stop noticing these things too.
I gave up at eighteen rings.
“Don’t worry, he’s probably out painting the fence or something,” Jorge said when he came inside an hour later. The earlier tension between us had evaporated, as it usually did.
“I’m not worried,” I said, lighting a votive on the sideboard. “I’m concerned. How do you say that in Spanish?”
“Preocupada.”
“Preoccupied.”
“No, worried.”
“So, what is concerned?”
“There is no difference.”
“Yes, there is,” I said, looking at the five guys lined up where the glacier wasn’t. “Those are two very different words.”
##end of excerpt
Learn more about Melted Away: A Memoir of Climate Change and Caregiving in Peru at https://barbaradrakevera.com
Pigeons
Miraflores, Lima, Peru, January 2011
It was a warm Sunday afternoon in early January—not midwinter, but summer, in Peru—when I began dreaming of blue ice again.
Jorge and I were sprawled on opposite ends of the couch, his long, tanned legs intertwined with mine, our black Lab, Lola, snoring beside us on the tiled floor, as fat gray pigeons—cuculís, in Peruvian Spanish—cooed on the windowsill outside. Jorge was fiddling with a new hybrid camera he had bought for freelance work; I was leafing through a Forbes I had found in a doctor’s office a few days earlier, excited to find something in English to read (with just five months of classes, my Spanish had stalled at an intermediate level). The two-story house we had been renting since 2007 was located in the very neighborhood where Jorge had grown up. Directly across the street, framed by our living room window, was the park where Jorge and Henry had played as children, Parque Leoncio Prado. It was named for a Peruvian mariner who had been martyred in the nineteenth-century War of the Pacific, captured in bed by Chilean soldiers. The towering bronze statue in the center of the park showed Colonel Prado posing jauntily in his battle uniform, sword in hand, not flat on his back in his pajamas.
I peered over my magazine at Jorge, his face knit in concentration as he tested the camera settings. When we had met nearly twenty years ago, his hair had been past his shoulders and jet black, save for the white streak down the middle. Now it was cropped short and salt-and-pepper gray, the white tuffet still poking up defiantly. My own hair was long and strawberry blond, a detail that had caused a scene at Lima’s Plaza de Acho bullfighting arena two years earlier. As stringers for the Miami Herald reporting on Peru’s growing anti-bullfighting movement, Jorge and I had been allowed into Acho’s fabled callejón (alley), the inner circle where matadors prepare to enter the ring. A man in the audience had noticed me standing there, notepad in hand, and, scandalized, yelled to the crowd in Spanish: “A woman in the callejón! And a redhead, no less!” I was double bad luck for the toreros, as bullfighting tradition had it.
In addition to covering the bullfights, Jorge and I had been to the Snow Star pilgrimage twice since moving to Lima. We had collaborated on a photo story about it for NBC.com, and I wrote about it nonstop on my blog, An American in Lima; that led to freelance gigs “fixing” for NBC Nightly News, The Today Show, and Dateline, including a special on water wars in the Andes. But despite three and a half years of effort, I had not been able to sell a single article about the glacier or climate change to any publication in the United States, which was still fixated on the so-called debate over whether climate change even existed. Newspapers editors were more interested in stories about cultural change and my experiences as an expat. The “strange” and “exotic” sold back home, even in the literary realm. Before I left for Peru, the Florida Council on Arts and Culture had awarded me a fiction writing grant based on a factual account I had submitted of Mother’s Day traditions in the Andes. Perhaps they had thought the drunken mothers carousing on Cusco’s Plaza de Armas were figments inspired by magic realism.
The real was not real in the United States in 2011. And when it came to selling environmental stories, I lacked the science writing credentials to persuade editors to give me a chance. So, I just kept blogging and selling articles about “local color,” while Jorge turned to art photography, renting a studio in a crumbling colonial-era mansion downtown. For money, he helped produce programs on the environment for European TV stations, whose audiences did take these things seriously.
He was lucky to have those connections, I thought, enviously. All I had was an offer to teach English part-time at the Peruvian University of Applied Sciences (UPC), in the district of Monterrico. Hah, like I wanted to do that: endure a forty-five-minute cab ride each way to teach verb tenses to students at a for-profit university plunked down in the dirt mountains by the house of Jorge’s elderly uncle and aunt. “No, thank you,” I was planning on telling the university.
Jorge angled the camera lens toward my bare foot, which I shoved self-consciously under a cushion. My left big toe was sporting a thick yellow callous where the hiking boot had rubbed.
“Hey,” I warned.
“Don’t worry, I’ll delete it. I’m just trying out the exposure settings.”
I glanced at the essay I had been trying to read: “The Big Climate Hoax.”
“Forbes just published another stupid piece,” I began, citing the reporter’s name.
“Oh, that huevón [idiot],” said Jorge.
“Do you want to hear the lede? It’s all lies. This bullshit needs to be called out.”
A tiny spasm of annoyance creased his cheek.
“I thought you were done with that.”
“I’d still like to sell a story on Qoyllur Rit’i. Climate change might not be happening yet in the United States, but it soon will be. Lonnie Thompson told me so at Huaraz.”
He shook his head. “Look, Barbara, we went up to the glacier three times with Paco. I had my photo show downtown; we did that photo story together; you did that thing with Anne Thompson. We’ve done our bit for the environment.”
“But my story—” A flurry of anxiety rose in my chest.
“Stop it with that face. Hey, did you see this?”
He flashed the camera screen at me. “The glacier came back.”
It took me a second to recognize what the bulbous white-and-yellow mound was: my toe.
“Jerk,” I said, throwing a pillow at his head. It missed and bounced next to Lola, who leaped up, tail wagging.
“Hey,” he said. “Let’s go outside so I can try out the camera.”
***
The sun warmed our faces as Jorge, Lola, and I crossed the lane and entered the block-long park. The bisecting pathways were crowded with families enjoying a stroll after their 1:00 p.m. main meal (almuerzo): children skipping alongside their parents, nannies pushing strollers, grandparents held by the arm by young women in white scrubs—home health aides known as enfermeras técnicas. The women walked at a snail’s pace alongside their elderly charges, their white shoes measuring the length of each polished concrete paver.
Scrawny gray squirrels chattered in the trees overhead as we joined the Sunday afternoon procession. Jorge’s shutter fired as he surreptitiously took a flurry of photos over one shoulder, not even looking through the lens. Lola sniffed at the grass as we traced our usual route along the walkways: down to the yellow D’Onofrio ice cream cart, past the big house once owned by the family of a childhood friend who used to invite him after school to eat vanilla wafers, along the dusty shrubs where Jorge and Henry made a fort one summer and waged a month-long war with the neighborhood kids, back to the center of the park and to the heroic Colonel Prado, his bronze epaulets dabbed with pigeon shit.
A scuffed soccer ball bounced in front of us; Jorge stuck out a foot and kicked it back on the grass.
“Gracias,” a teenager called.
“De nada.”
“Let’s stop here,” I said, nodding at shaded bench.
I leaned back against the cool wooden slats, cuculís cooing and humping in the branches above, as Jorge discreetly filmed the people drifting by. Our German neighbors waved at us from a nearby sandpit, where their youngest child was digging with a spoon. In the flower bed next to them, a sweet-faced health aide was coaxing an older man out of the marigolds.
“Come here, señor,” she said in Spanish. “This way.” He shook his head. “Please, señor. We can have ice cream.”
I would never have the patience, I said to myself. Never.
I thought of my father, anger and guilt rising. No, my father did not want our help. Nor did he want to help us. Anyway, we had done all right here on our own, no thanks to him. That was how he wanted it: separate households, separate lives, an annual visit in which we flew up to Florida for the holidays—stilted interactions, him in his bathrobe half the day, playing solitaire at the kitchen table—at the end of which he looked visibly relieved when we pulled our rental car out of the driveway. His life was an endless round of doctor’s visits and Masonic meetings, trips to the vet, evenings with Charlie Brown and Turner Classic Movies. Who needed a daughter or a son-in-law when you were equipped with such plentitude and Boston Market takeout?
I could still picture the coupon tossed on the woven placemat. The orange-and-gold placemats of my beautiful dead mother, who was never coming back. Hole in my heart.
That had been back in 2006. The first year I saw the melting glacier and its turquoise-blue heart up close. The first time I tasted its ice and let it drip down my throat and let its dizzying chill lodge in my chest, a sensation that had never left me, if I was honest. Years later, I was still obsessed with a fifty thousand–year–old glacier. A feeling he didn’t share. We’d fought about it on our last pilgrimage, in 2009. Him and me, screaming in the tent. Paco got it, though. Our nervous, stubborn guide who herded llamas and alpacas in the shadow of Mount Ausangate.
“I want to go back,” I said out loud.
“What?” Jorge frowned as he looked away from his viewfinder.
“To Qoyllur Rit’i. I want to help out Paco and his family. I think your cousin Chata might want to come too.”
His face softened. “Barbara,” he said. It was a new face. Pitying was the word that came to mind. “Let it rest. You have that university that wants you to teach. Why not accept?”
“But I can get an assignment . . . 2011 is supposed to be my year. My horoscope said—”
A muscle twitched in his cheek. “You see this camera? I am going to use it for actual paying gigs, like the one with ARTE next week. I am not blowing eighteen hundred dollars on an expedition to some glacier in buttfuck Quispicanchi that nobody in their right mind cares about, besides Paco and his annoying mother.”
“I care about it.”
“Great, you pay for it.”
“I will!” I stood up, bumping my head on a branch. A startled cuculí flew out and landed on the sidewalk, fluffing its feathers. I grabbed Lola’s leash. “You’ll be dying to come along when you see the kind of interest I can stir up with this, this thing I’m going to write.”
***
The dining room was empty and still, shadows shifting in the high ceiling overhead. I unhooked Lola and let her flop down on the cool tile. Why did I get so worked up over these things? It was only a story, a story I probably wouldn’t sell. You win some, you lose some. So why couldn’t I give this story up? Why did I insist on fighting about it with Jorge, of all people, the person who had convinced me to climb the glacier in the first place?
I walked over to the Italian server and rested my palms on its cool, marble slab. “Cálmate,” it seemed to be saying, or whatever the Italian was for “chill out.” Observing me from the top shelf were the ancestors, as Jorge and I called them, photographs of my mother and Jorge’s parents (long dead), plus plaster statues of San Hilarion, the money saint, and San Martín de Porres, the first Black saint of the Americas. I picked up San Martín and stroked his nubby head; it was gritty under my thumb, the painted surface embedded with sand. He was the patron saint of barbers, sailors, and lost causes. Was that what my Qoyllur Rit’i struggles had become?
I set San Martín back on the shelf, beneath a photograph of pilgrims posing in front of the glacier during our second trip to Qoyllur Rit’i, in 2008. In just two years, the glacier had fled another forty feet up the mountain. One cold morning, Jorge and I climbed to the place where I had stood at the glacier’s edge, two years earlier, and found nothing but dirt and moraine. All the ice was gone—the huge, frozen, whale-like wall I had leaned against was no longer there. It was the strangest feeling, to stand where an enormous glacier had been and now was not. The effect was sudden, sharp, bewildering to the body—like entering a room expecting to see someone you love only to remember they’re dead. So, this is what the effects of rapid climate change feel like up close, I had thought, staring dumbly at the raw brown dirt, my body filled with a disorienting sadness I could not name. I was standing at a place that existed but no longer existed. I was there, but there was no “there” there.
Could you be homesick for a place that was vanishing into thin air? I wondered, tracing a finger over the plexiglass.
An Australian philosopher had coined a word for this. Solastalgia. The grief induced by seeing a familiar place gradually destroyed by climate change. It felt so personal, a crushing sadness mixed with helplessness and bewilderment. Standing where the glacier wasn’t had aroused a sharp, almost violent longing in me that day. Maybe if I close my eyes and think hard enough, this nightmare will end—the ice will creep back down the mountain.
Five pilgrims in feathered Amazonian headdresses were standing shoulder to shoulder in the harsh sunlight, the shrunken glacier behind them. Chunchos, their ceremonial role was called. The sad-faced older guy on the left had suggested they line up where the glacier used to end. He’d been coming to Qoyllur Rit’i for twenty years. Not even his teenage son was smiling. What was there to smile about? “This photo will appear in the American magazines, yes?” the sad-faced guy asked me afterward. “So the americanos will understand and help us?” Yes, yes, I had lied, telling myself I wasn’t lying.
I had let them down in 2008 and again in 2009. Was I about to do it again?
The doorbell buzzed, jolting me out of my brooding. Waving at me through the front window was a tall, thin woman with chestnut-brown hair and a tranquil smile. It was Jorge’s older cousin Chata, who lived with her husband on a horse farm outside Lima. In the early 1980s, she had studied anthropology at Universidad San Marcos, Peru’s oldest university. But Shining Path, Sendero Luminoso, had stopped all that. Doing fieldwork in the highlands became too dangerous.
I let her in, raising my head to kiss her cheek: At over six feet, she was unusually tall for a woman in Peru and had played for the national volleyball team. Her nickname, La Chata, translated as “Shorty.”
“Cousin,” she said in Spanish, handing me a large Tupperware container. “You left this at my parents’ house.”
I thanked her, blushing; last Sunday, Jorge and I had gone to a family almuerzo, and I brought my version of a Peruvian classic, papa a la huancaína (potatoes, Huancayo style). It was my first time using fresh ají peppers, and I had miscalculated the spiciness. An older relative had succumbed to a dramatic coughing fit and had to be carted off to the bedroom.
“You came all this way just to give me the Taper?” I asked.
“No, Dickie and I are just passing by,” she said, pointing to a Mercedes at the curb. “We’re on our way to Gorda’s.” (Gorda, or “Chubby,” was her skinny little sister.)
“Ah, good,” I said, setting the container on the sideboard.
Chata glanced at Jorge’s picture. “I would love to go to Qoyllur Rit’i someday. It would be fascinating to see the rituals, the pilgrims, the dancing, to observe. Are you going this year?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Well, maybe—”
The car honked outside.
“I have to go. Another time,” she said, kissing me goodbye.
I closed the front door and glanced at my watch: 4:05 p.m. Shit. More than an hour late.
I ducked into my office at the back of the house and dialed the Gainesville number, stroking Lola’s head as I gazed absently out the window. At the far end of the long, walled backyard was a fig tree supposedly grown from fruit brought from Spain by Pizarro and planted in the courtyard of the palace of government in 1536. Tio Jorge had picked some of the figs when he worked as minister of industry for President Bermúdez, in the 1970s, and given them to families in this neighborhood to plant. The tree was stumpy and not much to look at, and the figs were tough, but it was tantalizing to imagine that here in our dusty, pigeon-filled garden was a living connection to the founding of the City of Kings.
Six rings, eight rings. Where could he be? Our weekly ritual. He filled me in on his appointments, on and on about him, Charlie Brown barking in the background. It was okay he didn’t ask about me. All he needed to know was Jorge and I were in the “Land of the Incas,” as he bragged to his disinterested neighbors.
Twelve rings. Lola nudged my leg with her wet snout. “Where is he, girl?” I asked, opening the back door. I peered up at the twenty-foot-high walls surrounding the yard; cemented to the top were shards of thick green glass that poked out like angry teeth. They had been put there in the 1980s or ’90s to deter thieves and terrorists, a common practice in Lima during Shining Path times. There hadn’t been a bombing in the city since 2002, but nobody bothered removing the glass. Limeños just stopped seeing it, like they did the dust everywhere. Maybe if I lived here a few more years, I would stop noticing these things too.
I gave up at eighteen rings.
“Don’t worry, he’s probably out painting the fence or something,” Jorge said when he came inside an hour later. The earlier tension between us had evaporated, as it usually did.
“I’m not worried,” I said, lighting a votive on the sideboard. “I’m concerned. How do you say that in Spanish?”
“Preocupada.”
“Preoccupied.”
“No, worried.”
“So, what is concerned?”
“There is no difference.”
“Yes, there is,” I said, looking at the five guys lined up where the glacier wasn’t. “Those are two very different words.”
##end of excerpt
Learn more about Melted Away: A Memoir of Climate Change and Caregiving in Peru at https://barbaradrakevera.com
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