chapter 9 - togetherness

There was a large group of Austrians who arrived in the night, and with everyone in the place having to share only two toilets they were NOT HAPPY. We kept out of their way, and got chatting to the daughter of the hostel owner. When we were leaving she thanked us for speaking her language. This surprised us. We’re in a Spanish speaking country. “Is this not common?” She shook his head emphatically. “Especially the people who speak English. They don’t try. If you don’t talk English to them, they just speak English louder.” “What about Austrians?” Hamish asked teasingly, knowing full well she was pissed off by the complaining group. She sniffed. “No, they speak all right. They are just rude.”

We took a collectivo to Urubamba, joined by two musicians, one with a guitar and wool covered drum, the other with a ten stringed ukulele, which he plunked away on. Lovely. More passengers were added along the way - ten would have been full, but we ended up with seventeen, one child on my lap and two on Hamish’s. Our bags were roped loosely to the roof and after every bump I looked back, half expecting to see them lying in the road. At one point the vehicle slowed to a stop. Much consternation by the driver and ticket taker. Three men got out and filled plastic bottles from a nearby stream, which were then brought into the front seat and emptied in amongst a tangle of electrical wires in the dashboard. We rode like stink after that.

There was only one other traveler, an engineer. Engineers always form some sort of club, they have their own language. He and Hamish shared their secret verbal handshake and extracted every possible reference point they could. This guy worked in the Middle East. “The money is good, but the challenges are even better. It’s like a new frontier. Anything you want to build, the most amazing hotels, towers, cities within cities. Innovative is not the word. Particularly in Dubai. That’s where you should go. That’s where you should start. An extraordinary place. It’s like the Las Vegas of the Middle East.”

I ask my questions and Hamish translates his into engineer-speak. He’ll learn more about building projects in Dubai in one hour than anyone else would in one month. Amazing that this man thinks I am the the intelligent one in the relationship! It has always seemed seems so obvious to me that it is him. “You should go,” I say, and then hypocritically resent him for considering it. He asks what I would do there. I wonder anew why he feels he needs me there. He says I am his spark. He says he needs me. I think he is just trying to please me. But then he really does want to please me. He always has.

Listening to him try to work it out, I feel the odd, old poison of resentment. Even for the trip which is ridiculous because it’s afforded me new perspectives as well. I don’t know. When I want to hole up in an island cabin with him he is wanting to expand into the world. When he wants to nestle in, I get restless. I rail against the times we are in separate places and chafe at the times we are too much in each others laps. It’s like we are traveling the same road but going in different directions, forever intersecting but never in concert.

chapter 9 - everyone is civilized

I was relieved we found a nice room in Pisac with a ‘bano’ down the hall. We seem to spend half our time drinking gallons of water to offset altitude and the other half looking for toilets. Concentration is required though: Peruvian plumbing allows for ‘organic material’ only, and several times I have forgotten and had to fish out loo roll before flushing. Thank goodness that’s only happened with number 1s so far!

First thing this morning we hiked up to the ruins, from whence we got a marvelous view of valley, town and tiny market way down below. Pisac’s Sunday market is famous, full of ceramics, jewelry, weavings, toys, woolens, brass. Hamish was torn between two carved chess sets, one pitting Spanish soldiers against Inca natives, the other, condors against llamas, but they are both too large to carry around. The market sprawled through narrow lanes, wide enough only for walking, a channel built down the middle to carry water and garbage. The odd pig or llama perambulation. I think of the first contact, and don’t wonder the Incas fell in awe when the Spaniards arrived on horseback. With no vehicles or pack animals of their own, llamas not able to carry much, a man on a horse must have appeared as one creature, ten feet tall with four legs and armour plating.

An old lady joined us as we walked – we always seem to attract old people and children - unspeaking, then gave us a flat roll of bread before she went off on her way. Proud people. This would have been the edge of the Inca territory. Such an empire. Mathematics, architecture, astronomy and agriculture flourished without tools as basic as a written language or the wheel. Those massive stones placed in walls with no wheel! No mortar either. How on earth did they do it? So many well-engineered mountain roads, too, but no maps of any of them. No documents at all. Amazing to think the Incan culture was only around for a hundred years or so, already on its way out before Pizarro even arrived, civil war breaking it apart. And while the Spanish plundered and hastened the inevitable, in so doing they chronicled a culture that would otherwise be unknown. So many other cultures remain mysteries, the Nasca, Easter Island. I wonder what more we would know about them if they had had the unlucky luck to have raiders who kept records. As we wandered we received smileless nods and toothly grins. We hand out coloured pencils and tiny globes to children, showing them their country and ours, which they examine before stuffing them under their ponchos. There can’t be many countries in the world left in which inhabitants dress as their ancestors did. I’ve seen photos upon photos, but somehow being here, seeing it for myself, smelling and tasting and hearing, something I’d lost from working in an office filters back. For the first time I question my choice of work, in what, six years? No seven. Can it be seven years that I’ve been working there? I’m in a rut. I don’t travel for pleasure anymore. No wonder I’m so miserable. Tying to make each edition the best, each map the best, the most well researched, the most dynamic, then moving on to the next one, and on and on. Maybe seven years is too long for anything. Living in one place, doing one thing, loving one person.

I look around and think this is where it begins. The actual place. Not necessarily just here, but any place. Old land peopled by centuries of civilizations that come and go, some lost, some known. I thought of our evening ensemble conversation in Cusco. How will we know what happens in places like this unless we are there to see it? To somehow be able to see it from wherever we are. To learn first hand, even if we can’t be lucky enough to travel here in person. I think I need to reevaluate. Maybe do something that is more in the world, to document today somehow, create a portal or something that is relevant to everyone, a farmer in Bolivia and a geologist in Belgium.

chapter 9 - bigger than all of us

I must have had more wine than I thought. I just can’t drink like that anymore, altitude or no. There were a few faces absent from breakfast, the drink outdid the drinkers, so I suppose we can feel proud of our dubious accomplishment of having risen at all. We said farewell to Sebastian who goes off to climb volcanoes. I imagine we’ll see him again. Probably on our doorstep. Every time we are at home for any length of time, we invariably get a few fellow travellers knocking on our door and asking to stay for a day or two, which often becomes a week or two or a month or two. It’s our own fault of course. We invite them. And then have the gall to enjoy their company.

It seems every other traveler is doing the Inca trail, which of course is why we won’t. I have heard tales of litter and erosion as well as inflated expense and exploitation of the locals who carry everything for a pittance. And I want to try something different, something outside the trail that I have mapped and followed enough through my work. It's very big these days - I must have worked on three publications at least. We chose instead to explore the Sacred Valley.

The little local bus to Pisac makes a dramatic hop over the mountain and down into the head of the valley, made more exciting by the fact that the driver preferred the curves of his girlfriend to those of the road. Peruvean buses always seem to include the driver’s girlfiend, little more than a girl, who sits in the front right seat, flirting and giggling with a high pitched warble, a distraction that is always conspicuously loud regardless of whether it’s day or night.

On the way we relived our days in Cusco, when I’d passed beyond my emotional abyss and stuffed it inside again. Rambles over Incan ruins at Sacsayhuaman, a name I can only remember by the mnemonic device ‘Sexy Woman”, hushed visits to churches awash with gold and silver, enormous oil paintings and mirrors reflecting back the pious gloom. The pulpit at San Blas was among the loveliest examples of wood carving I’ve even seen. “The Last Supper” in the Cathedral painted in quiet rebellion against Catholic conversion, guinea pig and chicha substituting bread and wine. A depiction of the 1650 earthquake including a black Jesus in procession instead of the usual pale ‘Spanish’ one. Incan sun and moon gods carved into altars, undetected by the conquistadors who mistook the Incas’ affinity to prayer a result of their influence. There is an irony in that every earthquake topples another bit of Spanish and post-Spanish architecuture, revealing the original foundations underneath, unshakeable, the Incan gods reigning supreme over the European one.

As I get older I understand the attraction of belief more. Not of organized religion with its rigidity and impositions where brotherly love relates to some brothers but not to others, but faith I suppose. Modern life is more and more disenfranchised. The world used to be so small. Then as new lands and foreign seas were discovered it grew larger. Some of these were conquered, some were colonized, some were merely found and mapped, the unknown gradually known, then visited, exploited, taken for granted, used up. Now the world is small again and in danger of becoming smaller, indifference and ignorance of what goes on beyond familiar borders. Technology and speed and urban living remove us from nature’s seasons and the essentials of life. Electricity has banished night, and removed the effects of cold and wind as well as the wonder of the skies and stars. When everything is available to us so easily we have no motive to go out and seek it. Sitting there in a tiny church amid the gold and silver and incense, the musty air, the whispers, I took a step outside of myself, felt that sense of wonder of being part of humanity. Knowing the world really is a big place. I think that’s what religion, or rather faith, can really give people.

chapter 9 - the children question

In the end we flew to Cusco rather than duplicate a long bus journey, and thrilled to the sight of puffing volcanoes that looked like pimples on the face of the earth below. We saw Chivay clearly too and the entire valley we’d just recently been through before swooping down into the ancient Inca capital. From the air I could just make out the puma shape it was constructed to depict.


Our hostel is run by a Swiss couple who have adopted a dozen or so Peruvian children and use the hostel profits to help other local homeless children. It’s immaculately clean, friendly and as the most wonderful courtyard full of flowers.

I’m a little ambiguous. Normally, I revel in being anywhere where there are a bevy of happy kids around, especially in Catholic countries where children are as necessary for a family’s survival as bread or water. But in this place I feel flooded. Maybe it’s the thin air making me so emotional. I well up and lie on the bed, refusing anything but clear liquids to help dispel the headache that has again returned. Hamish sat awhile in the courtyard, quietly bringing me tea and water and stroking my hair. I squeezed his hand to show him I appreciate his attention but I am most relieved when he goes off on his own to look over the town and I can shut the door and lie in the dark, alone to cry and shiver. In the afternoon the children came back from school and I heard them, chattering and laughing. I determined to face my misery, washed my face in cold water and sat in the courtyard where they play and read. Some came over to sit with me, show me card games and teach me words in their native Quechuan while I struggled with Spanish. One grave boy who unsmilingly stood on the fringes asked me suddenly “Are you married?” and I replied, “Yes, are you?” That brought a smile and I felt victorious.

Hamish returned and fit in like an older sibling, conversing in fluent Child about soccer and school. In the evening we sat in a candlelit common room and gradually met other guests, Spaniards Manuela and Paolo, a Cockney named Seb, a Dutch couple, Margot and Peter, the former being extremely pregnant - I poured myself a big glass of wine despite the altitude - and an American named Bradley.

Everyone got into the dance of conversation among strangers, starting with “what do you do” and going on from there. I sipped my wine gingerly, watching Hamish exchanging cultural reference points with Seb over old British TV shows from their childhood. There’s something comforting about talking to someone from our own country, even if they’d live in a completely different time or place within it.


From individual stories we expanded, talking at length about the perception of the world post-September 11. Wonderful to talk to an American traveller about it at last: we haven’t seen many, nor Canadians for that matter. As if the entire continent had been curfewed. Bradley was educated, intelligent, thoughtful and open-minded, interested in and knowledgable about the world around him, and yet was genuinely perplexed as to why anyone could feel animosity towards his country. Hamish complimented the Dutch couple on maintaining their national tradition. They looked puzzled at first and he enlightened them. “No matter how tiny the island, how remote the desert, how great the mountain, always the intrepid Dutch are there.” Peter smiled, “It’s because there are too many of us to fit in such a small country. Everytime someone returns home another of us must leave. It’s written in the constitution.”

“Ah I see. Nomadic tag.”

“Yes, that’s it exactly. I am surprised Britain has not thought to do the same thing.”

“Well, yes, after all ‘nomad is an island’.”

They shared a laugh and I knew Hamish had found another friend for life. He has a genius for finding and keeping friends.

Margot asked, “Have you noticed how many cell phones there are in Peru? Everyone has one it seems.”

Seb replied. “Internet cafes too. They are all over Chile as well, and even in Bolivia, the poorest country I’ve ever been in.”


“But how is that possible? Why are there so many when many villages still lack basic electricity?”

Bradley added “One girl in the seat opposite mine on the bus went through every single ring tone option during the entire journey. I heard ‘Jingle Bells’, ‘Scotland the Brave’, ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’, and all those classical tunes everyone knows one line of. I mean, just how familiar is Beethoven’s 9th and the Polovetsian Dances to a teenaged Peruvian?”

Paolo interjected, “Why should we think being wireless is so strange here? There’s no infrastructure, no understanding as to why wires are needed at all so there are no barriers to moving ahead technologoically.”

“Wireless before they are wired. What will this generation in countries such as this be capable of? What will they bring to the world’s future while we first world inhabitants sit complacently in our sense of superiority tied to our old infrastructure? Is it the same elsewhere? What about other third world countries, and by the way does anyone know what comprises the second world if there is such a thing and if so would they enlighten me? Has anyone experienced this in Africa or the Middle East recently?”

I love these kinds of evenings, hearing everyone’s stories and histories, opinions about the world and its treasures, ideas, thoughts, memories. While the others were embroiled in a deep consideration of the UN’s value in the present day, Hamish and I quietly exchanged news from home gleened from his afternoon’s visit to one of the aforementioned internet cafés.

“Niki’s third was born yesterday. Another boy. Akiko.”

“Is she ok?”

“Yes, all well.”

I smiled to myself. Of all the people to become a baby producer, Niki was the least likely!

“Sam emailed too. She just got a big contract in Silicon Valley.

“How is Kanoe?”

“Kanoe is out. She’s with Hellebore now. I told you about that didn’t I?”


“I can’t keep up with her partners. They all seem the same to me. Genderless creatures with hippy names."

Bradley asked me about the difference between a ‘Peters Projection’ and a ‘Winkel Tripel’ map.”
Margot interjected, “Isn’t it odd that they keep changing maps? That a new one comes out? Don’t you find it annoying?”

“Annoying? Oh no. It shows the earth still has something to tell us.”

“Countries change, borders change. Politically the world changes. But the shape of it doesn’t.”

“Sure it does. Topography is a moving science. Erosion, Eruptions, Earthquakes. Ice caps melting. Deserts shifting.”

“Like people, really” intoned Margot. “The self. We delve deeper and deeper inside a place or a thought the longer we are within it.”

“Bodies, too. They certainly change with age,” Seb guffawed while grasping either side of a portly belly with his big hands.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Peter rub Margot’s belly in that proprietory way expectant fathers have. Someone asked when she was due, the talk next turning to families. This is to be her first and she glimmers with the joy of it, vividly telling us everything about the room she has ready, the clothes she has made, the midwife she has hired, the plans she has formed. I was doing fine until she turned to me and asked, “What about you? Do you have children?”

Damn. That one simple question, one I am asked over and over as a middle aged married woman, one that I have developed answers for when I can and evasions for when I can’t. Whether it was the air or the wine or something else, I came undone, mumbled how my headache had returned and so sorry but I must go lie down and take a pill, and excused myself. On the way back to the room, the tears began their cascade. After all this time I am still never prepared for it. Someone once advised me to invent some children and have them staying with my mother. But when the question comes I halt, blush and shuffle, eyes down and I can’t quite get out the lie.

I wonder at the fairness at a limited future for so many mites growing up in ignorance and illness around the world while there’s no one to receive the future I envisaged for a family of my own. I have been lucky to be able to choose the sporadic turns my life has taken on the whole, but was unable to realize the one thing I always thought would be there waiting. Hamish joined me awhile later, lit a candle and turned to me, the impatience in his voice there, however hard he tried to mask it.

“You can’t hide away forever, love. There will be children everywhere we go all our lives.”

I sat up, tear stained and blotchy no doubt. Candlelight illuminates but also closes in the world, the only objects that exist lying within its circle, the bogeyman lying without. “But it’s different when you’re a woman. You never get asked about your children and why you don’t have them. You don’t get the suspicious looks that follow or, worse, the pitying looks. Woman who can conceive have no idea what it’s like not to be able to. Everyone thinks you can just go to a clinic, adopt, try harder. They have no idea that that’s not always enough, that money and effort can’t always do it, that wanting it is not enough.”

He sat on the bed.

“And we never seem to get it together at the right time. You’re always away building something. Or I am away. The time we do get to spend never seems to be the right time for my body. Men never have to worry about the right time. But it never seems to work out for me, and then another month is gone.”

He stroked my hair. “We must think of this positively. We can do all the things we would otherwise not be able to do if we had children.”

He’s said all this before. We’ve said all this. ‘We’ll adopt the world instead. Spend time with our friends’ children and give them weird and wondrous gifts to the envy and horror of their parents. Start new projects and add more friends. Run toward instead of away. Play the hand we’ve been dealt.’

Hamish always tries to sees the postive – no pain, no false hope, no desperate despair. I wonder if he will be so glass half full when he sees me at 50, 70. No grandchildrens’ photos to show, no stories to pass on. Niki tells me how lucky I am – my body still firm and slim, no interruptions in life and its activities, plans never prefaced by before or after cetain trimesters, school holidays, band camp. Sidney in her perfect world gamely offers advice gleaned from years of PTA and coffee morning conversations. Cross you legs above your chest for 20 minutes after sex. No caffeine for two weeks before trying. Sam is scathing about ‘middle aged mothers with accessory babies'. “Cosseted infants in strollers too wide for the sidewalks wheeled by smug women in floral dresses with the same boring haircut and body language saying ‘I’m a mother, let me through, stand aside and look at me, look at us.’ " Not having kids doesn’t bother Sam, but then nothing ever did. And I suspect being a lesbian invokes different speculations and expectations. At least she told me it does. People don’t treat her the same once they know. Depending on who it is, she’s treated either one of the boys or something less than human.

Hamish turned to face me, looking deep into my watery eyes. “You’ve always been the one saying what do we do next? There was always this “can do” attitude. Even when things failed, you were always the one to say try something else. This is a tough one I know. But you know we have tried everything. All those treatments, drugs, and the huge costs; we certainly can’t feel any regret for not having tried everything we could. And you especially went through such awful things. I hated that you were in such pain. And now you keep putting yourself though it again emotionally. Needlessly. There’s nothing else we can do.”

I looked down. “It’s so unfair. There are so many unwanted children, especially here, children by the dozen, poor and uneducated. And people always think we don’t like kids, that we don’t have them because we don’t want them, or that we’re at fault. ”

“Ignore them and what they say. They are ignorant and thoughtless.”

“But it’s hard. The situation will always be there. People will always ask if I have children and why not. It’s hard to accept completely. My body has rejected me, rejected you.” My voice broke and the words came out in short gasping sobs. I covered my face with my hands and wept. I couldn’t control it. I hated the loss of control, the utter abandonment of breath and thought.

Hamish held me and rocked me as he had been doing for years. “Shh, shh. I know. I know. I know what you feel.”

I pushed him away. “But …you…don’t…! You don’t. It’s not you is it? You can conceive no problem. It’s me. It’s my body’s fault. It’s my problem. The only way we could ….” I stopped suddenly.

“You’re talking about surrogacy aren’t you? Or adoption. You know how I feel. I don’t want to do that. We both found the same things, talked to the same people and agencies, heard the same horror stories.” Softening his tone, “I always wanted a piece of you in my child, a child that combined us, that had your deep golden brown eyes, your mental curiosity. I could handle donor insemination you remember. With that, there would still have been part of you there. I know it’s not logical or politically correct but you know, most people don’t get any sort of chance to really think about it. Those lucky and stupid enough to have kids after a night of beer. Having kids that way is biologically lucky, but you and I both know that intelligence has nothing to do with it. Any idiot can have a baby.”

“Except this idiot.”

I lay back on the bed, tired at the repetition. This was old ground. What was left to say? “Is this it then? You and me alone in the years. Is that enough? When you could have more?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

“No I don’t. I’m not a mind reader.”

‘But you are,’ I think to myself. ‘You’ve always been able to read my mind.’ I propped myself on one arm, and looked down at the pattern of the coverlet, picking at a loose red thread, unable to meet his eyes. “You and me. Maybe it is really a sign. Is this perhaps as far as it should go? I mean. You could have a baby with someone else, be a parent, with someone else. With me you never can. I’m 44, we both know that if it hasn’t happened yet with all the drugs and the in vitro and the icse and everything then it isn’t going to happen at all. You’re a man; age isn’t an issue with you. You can go out and start fresh at 40, 50, 60. You could walk down the aisle of a college graduation on a Zimmer frame and people would say “Isn’t he wonderful, a devoted father, he wanted children so much he had them at 72, good for him. But me – a woman in her mid-40s? I’m a freak. If I walked down the street with a baby I’d get called grandma” I paused. “Of course that won’t happen because I can’t have kids at all.” I hastened ahead, not letting him speak. “You know people still ask if there’s anything more we haven’t tried, anything more I haven’t tried. Even close friends. My mother. I know she thinks I’ve failed as a wife by not being able to give you children.”

I had another vision of myself aging. Walking along in some city in a servicable grey suit with brisk steps, a cell phone clamped to my ear, alone, childless, every Friday pouring over the cultural section of the newspaper, the weekend openings circled in red. But then of course I wouldn’t be alone, I’d have Hamish. I remind myself to include him in the vision and it’s an effort. I sometimes wonder if I’d tried to get pregnant in my 20s, when I was with Andrew, would I have been able to? All those years of birth control and care, were they for naught? A joke that Nature and God shared? ‘Let’s give her everything but that. Then we’ll see how strong she really is.’

Hamish was silent throughout my internal self-loathing but I could feel his presence, palpable in the dark. He is like a blanket, settling over me, comforting, stifling. ‘Stop it’, I think. It’s not fair to him. He can’t do anything about it. I try to throw off the blanket. “Of course I know it’s just me feeling sorry for myself. I can‘t help thinking if you were with someone else you’d be a father right now. You’d be such a fantastic father.”

“Now don’t start that. You’re being ridiculous. I don’t want to be with anyone else. We just have to….adjust.”

I knew that despite his confident words he was still wrestling with the philosophic side of it all. Or wrestling with me wrestling with the philosophic side of it all. We sat, separated by a few inches that might be miles as the velvet night enwrapped us both, tired, empty. The same feeling every time, the same words, the same outcomes. As if one of these times, one of us might have something new to add.

chapter 9 - family matters

“Fancy an empanada?” Hamish asked rubbing his hands in gastronomic anticipation.

Afterwards, still peckish, Hamish bought a hot sausage in a bun with onions, a skewered braid of intestines fizzing on a streetside brazier and a huge square of cake. “What?” he said to my look. “It’s our responsibility as visitors to try everything.” He has always taken those kinds of responsibilities very seriously.

Our last two days in Arequipa passed calmly, both of us trying not to show how hard we were trying for each other. We’d dress and go out, drink wine, collect email, talk to others, or sometimes we’d stay undressed and stay in, and play cards. I’ve taught Hamish Canasta but we know each other‘s moves so well it’s never much of a game. “I miss Babby.” I said out of the blue. Hamish nodded, knowing that the game is what brought her to my mind.

“She lived a good life. 93. Healthy to the end, dying in her home. Death is no more real than the horizon. It looks like the furthest point there is, but we can only see that far, as far as sight takes us. If we were to reach that horizon it would only lead us on to another one. And on and on.”

“I’m glad you knew her.”

“She was always welcoming to me.”

“She adored you! The minute you opened your mouth and that accent came out she was all ‘Oh Hamish, talk posh. Say something. Anything.’ Totally charmed. You could, and did, say the most outrageous things to her, and no matter what you said she loved it. She even laughed when you made fun of her cooking, calling her molasses cookies ‘hockey pucks’.”

“They were as good as.”

“I know. Babby was a horrible cook. But no one ever had the courage to tell her except you. And she loved it! I can see her now, sitting at the table, in her usual baseball cap and windbreaker.”
“Half squinting while she rasped 'Hit me' in a broken glass voice.”

“I noticed you got an email from your parents today. How are they?”

“Oh, fine. The usual. Mom wants to go to Palm Desert and Dad just wants to stay home and put in a row each of Oregon Blue Lakes and Purple Peacocks.”

He looked at me.

“Beans.”

“Of course they are.” Hamish looked back at his cards, then dumped a black three on the discard pile.

As I wrinkled my nose at him for freezing the deck, I picked up two cards and carried on, “Mom’s on the hunt for a new hobby, now that she’s finally given up smoking thank goodness. She wants to do something that doesn’t make her muddy, like the divining did. She’s considering fashion design, you know how she’s always loved clothes.” I started to laugh. “She got Dad to trace her outline on a piece of paper as she lay on the ground, which she then used as her pattern. But she is finding it difficult to make different sizes, and just adds half an inch all around, which doesn’t work apparently. Dad’s getting fed up with finding bits of fabric and thread all over the place, but Mom just says it’s pay back for all the seed packets and twine she’s had to deal with over the years.” I laid down 4 sixes. “It’s nice to see the bickering hasn’t stopped.”

“And yet I’ve never seen them anything but polite in public.”

“Oh yes, they are outstandingly polite in public. It’s how they work. It’s what keeps them together.”

“I’ve often wondered about that. They really are so different from each other. Unsuited in a way.”

“In almost every way. They’ve never really wanted the same things out of life and so they are always pulling at the opposite ends of the string. Dad was Mom’s parents’ choice. Things bound them when they were young - their children, house, work, friends. But those bonds are not enough anymore. Mom has started referring to Dad as her ‘current husband’, jokingly of course, but still. They should really have married other people I guess.”

“Did they ever consider that? Divorcing and remarrying?”

“Of course not! What would people say?”

“But you girls are all grown-up. People divorce all the time.”

“Not my parents. All the things they’ve said about other people divorcing would then be said about them. They wouldn’t be able to handle that.”

I sighed, fondly, given that I was several thousand miles away. When I was a teenager I thought my parents were idiots. Of course now I realize I was the idiot who had so much to learn.

chapter 9 - birds and beasts

The Convent of Santa Catalina is a fascinating city of women that shut out the world for hundreds of years. Still untouched by modernity. I try to imagine myself in such a place, living out my life without the company of men, babies, fathers and sons, and get caught up by the romance of the vision.

I was the same with ‘Juanita’, the mummified Inca princess hidden for centuries above 6,000 metres of volcanic ice and snow until her skin rolled into sunlight again only 6 years ago. What a story she tells, this fourteen year old, sacrificed after a week of fasting and several more of walking over high mountain passes wearing only sandals!

On Monday and Tuesday we went to the Colca Canyon, the deepest canyon in the world, twice as deep as the Grand Canyon. Ten of us crammed in a rusty old mini-van, bouncing our way up over the pass and down past Inca terracing to the village of Chivay. Stocky llamas, fuzzy alpacas and delicate vicunas moved about the high plains nibbling ichu grass and other plants that only grow at altitude. We drank coca leaf tea, a local remedy for altitude sickness that, despite the aura of illicit coca, was completely safe and totally ineffective. We are both a little dizzy and nauseated. I had a pounding headache and hoped the descent into Chivay would abate the effects, but it didn’t, our lungs used to sucking up thick sea level air.

The altitude made sleep difficult so we sat up and talked or played cards, then I read when Hamish dozed off. He is a born napper, able to go off at a moment’s notice even here. Here in this thin air his breathing was interrupted and tangled, which I knew to be common in such a place. He’d be snoring his usual rhythmic drone, then I would suddenly be aware of silence, realizing his breathing had actually stopped altogether. I told myself not to worry, then despite myself would start a boxing referree’s count. As I counted past 10 or so, just when I'd start to get totally freaked out, he would gasp and gulp in a huge scoop of air, waking himself groggily. Once, to take my mind off it, I wrapped a blanket around me and stepped outside to see the clearest stars above the line of valley stretching out before me, shadowed black below celestial lights. I was not prepared for the thin air to be so bitingly cold. Behind me I heard Hamish gasp himself awake again, after which he must have woken enough to see me at the door for he rose and came to stand with me awhile, wrapping both of us in his blanket, silent. I did not turn around, but leaned back against him, feeling his warmth, thankful to be together.

The next morning we rumbled along graavel roads to the end, where we waited at the deepest part of the canyon to be rewarded two hours later with the sight of Andean condors. They are enormous, 30 feet wide, their long feather ‘fingers’ coaxing air to slide under black and white wings in spirals of flight. They can soar for hours in this deep narrow place.

I wanted to join them, flying over myself in circles, spiraling until the centre, like Yeats’, did not hold, bursting out of the canyon and the bounds of earth to fly higher and higher beyond the reach of physical frailty and human limitations. My headache finally disappeared as soon as we descended back into Arequipa.

chapter 9 - seismic activity

In Arequipa Hamish and I had our first snarly moment of the trip. I’d been on edge all the way here, ever since I woke up from dozing on the bus to look out the window and see we were pitching along at high speed along a road, one side of which ribboned under a steep and rocky mountain scattered with enormous boulders holding back far too many others in a precarious manner, while on the other side was an equally steep plunge to the crashing sea. We swerved to avoid a boulder on the road, bounced through potholes the size of small cars and swung past dozens of little shrines, testaments to the lack of guardrails.

By the time we arrived in Arequipa I was a little shaky and the inside of my mouth was raw from having been chewed for the last several hours. I could see that it was a lovely city, but everywhere we walked all I could see was the effects of June’s earthquake, rubble and scaffolding. And that only reinforced the rubble I felt inside me.

“This posada is also full. They’re all full. Is there some reason they’re all full? Some festival? Some event? The time of year? Shouldn’t we have known about that before we came?

Of course what I meant to say was “Shouldn’t you have known about it before you brought me here?”, and Hamish knew it.

Hamish and I both know what’s missing between us, and have talked ourselves blue trying to figure out how to furnish it, but still I can’t prevent bringing it up at times, with fruitless repetition. So much time has been spent considering the process that we’ve omitted dealing with the results. I reexamine the empty wound, seasoning it, keeping it inflamed and painful for both of us. I behave like a shrew when really I want nothing more at such times as to hibernate in a dark hole.

We do find a place that is perfectly nice, perfectly clean, perfectly fine. I try to atone and make him dinner and we take pisco sours to the roof top to watch the stars, letting the sweet tang of the brandy and lemon concoction still the surface of internal waters. We talk about what to do tomorrow, and the next day. What we want to see, where we want to go, what we want to eat. The moon is waxing and we speculate as to where we will be when it is full. Even with the moon's light, the stars were in force. The Southern cross, the ‘jewel box’, Cetus, Centaurus, Canis Major, familiar constellations upside down and ending halfway through the sky, the Greeks who named them never having been this far south. It makes me feel drunk, giddy. Somewhere on the street a band is playing and Hamish clapped while I twirled madly, Martha Graham dancing on the rooftop.

chapter 9 - mathematical mystery

Following along the base of the world’s largest sand dune resonant with sand-boarders’ whoops, we arrived at the airport for our flight over the famous Nasca lines, early in the morning, before the desert winds became turbulent. Once in the air, it took a moment for the eyes to focus, and then suddenly the lines popped out, as if looking at a hologram. No wonder the Lines were only revealed when man began to fly: they are huge and can only really be seen from the air. Hamish was mesmerized.

I had no idea there were so many of the things, over 13 thousand! The monkey, spider and spaceman are the most well known and photographed figures, but there are squares, spirals, and thousands upon thousands of straight lines just going off across the desert, stretching into the horizon in every direction. The latest theory is they are part of an enormous terrestrial calendar, reflecting the movement of the stars and the sun. No one really knows for sure, the Nasca people having come and gone unchronicled. Time swallowed up the answer, leaving the lines as silent sentinels to the past. I kind of like it that the earth still holds such mysteries.

One the way back, the pilot of our tiny plane, sensing that we weren’t adverse to the notion of thrill, rode the now noticeable turbulence with fair-ground ride jolts. Hamish and I squealed to each other as our stomachsw lurched, and we simultaneously raised both our arms as high as we could in the cramped space, remembering other roller coasters. It’s so easy, this, being with someone I know so well, with by one word or gesture there’s a connection of some memory or private joke that has meaning only to us.

Places like this, the prairies and deserts and plains of the world, places where earth and sky share equal billing, are places that have always awed me. As a child I wondered how anyone could live in such a place, devoid of any interest, any landmark. But now I feel a connection whenever I am there. Connected to earth. To myself. A small speck of life in this enormous landscape, I am placed in the centre of the world in the middle of nowhere. Even when buffeted by the winds there’s a kind of tranquility that seeps into my soul, and will stay with me whenever I think back to them.

chapter 9 - modern conquistadors

We have arrived in Nasca without being mugged or murdered after all. It was a long day. No doubt the nine hours felt longer due to the limited comfort of Peruvian buses. We kept water consumption low to avoid the need for a toilet. Of course we could have joined the locals and make a dash outside to relieve ourselves on the road every time the bus picked up passengers but I didn’t fancy it somehow.

Surely the best way to see the awful Lima suburbs is from the window of a bus. Miles and miles of squalid shantytowns where millions of people exist. It always takes me a while to acclimatize to poverty. I never get used to the disbelief. As we passed the tiny shacks peopled by dozens of ragged children, aimless young men and hobbled old women, I began to absorb some of the dismalness. Why am I here anyway? I wanted a holiday at home this year after spending so much time on the road with business trips. It was all Hamish. No notice, just a playful note and a bag already packed. I want to look forward to such a trip, not just arrive and be handed an itinerary. I know he was trying to be thoughtful, but there are times I wonder if he knows me at all.

I must squelch these feelings. Hamish is so happy, he’s proud of what I do, never complains when I have to work late or have to dash off somewhere for weeks at a time. And he is thrilled to have secretly planned this trip for us, convinced this is what I want, what will make me happy. What will help get our lives back on track. It might of course, but I am too cynical to think it will. I know I’m lucky to have someone who cares so much about me. After all this time I still look at him and wonder how I deserve it. If I deserve it. He does so much for me, tries so hard. When I think back, Hamish has really been the only person in my entire life who has never told me I ‘should’ do or be anything. What an awful word that is, "should", full of guilt.

Once settled in Nasca, we set out for an explore. I haven’t had a proper explore for ages; business travel is so fixed. The word feels wrong though: ‘explore’ belongs to history. The world is known, all mapping complete. Discovery is biased. Anything new is a discovery of a sort.

We found a fascinating market, a labyrinth of stalls covered with plastic against the searing sun, that twisted along a snakelike path. I was arrested by one tiny place that sold history books, pictures and maps. Hamish goodnaturedly stopped and let me pour over curled scraps of paper, keeping up a casual conversation that was vaguely related. “Did you read about a new theory that the Chinese circumnavigated the globe almost a century before Magellan?”

“Yes, I will read it when it comes out but I am having a hard time believing it.”

“Why is that?”

“Don’t you remember how proud the Chinese were of their accomplishments and national history? Even now the nation denies suggestions that human life could possibly have began elsewhere, let alone someplace like Africa. If they really had gone off and circumnavigated the globe, why is this the first time we've heard of it? Doesn’t it surprise you that this has not been illustrated in any map?”

“Well, I’m still wondering if they really did invent toilet paper. I never saw any evidence that it was used in China when we were there.”

I smiled in spite of myself, remembering, then reflecting. We’re only a month away from 9/11; what will we feel looking back on this time in the future, individually and collectively? Will our later experiences change the way we remember feeling about the world? Was the crashing of the Trade Center really a seminal event as described so repeatedly, or is it the only first of many? Will records change, deleting current and more immediate reflections with others? The web and net and blog cultures have facilitated gut reaction reporting, easily deleted for another go at it, then another. Reminding. Reinventing. Showing the same pictures over and over, with different words each time.

I listen to news differently as I age. I question its motives, its authenticity. What’s on the radio or in newspapers is usually so truncated, showing maybe one part of one side of the story. Information is certainly not wisdom. Sometimes it’s barely information. And I do find what different countries consider newsworthy is fascinating. Floods, wars, the cost of bananas, the theft of an old lady’s purse, the exploitation of a young girl’s nakedness, two enormous towers falling in slow motion. The moves of the latest empire. Phoenician, Greek, Egyptian, Roman, Islamic, Scandinavian, Celtic, Tartar – no matter how large or small the country – Portugal, Spain, France, tiny Belgium and even tinier Holland, all were world powers. Leaders in trade and science and art. There’s no such thing as the dark ages; there was always some culture in full swing. We just don’t always have the records to prove it. Yesterday it was Britain who powered the world. Today, it’s the U.S.A. China will be next, if they want it. When will it change over? And how? An implosion like the Romans, crushed by their own decadence and ignorance? Or ebbing away like Britain, many of whose citizens still don’t quite believe that it’s over, that mistakes were made, that although some countries came of age due to its progressive policies, others railed against its patronistic decision-making. Or maybe it will come from without like Spain, an empire that grew smaller and smaller with each lost battle.

The Spanish empire is evident everywhere here. Looking over a faded old schoolbook about the War of the Pacific, I see that Peru’s perspective of that historcal event is startlingly different to that of Bolivia and Chile. I purchased a chart of Peru’s original coastline and intend to hunt out the other two. They’ll make an interesting triptych.