I'm sitting on a wobbly rock in the middle of Plaza de Armas, deflated pack on my back, resting between runs, when in the corner of my right eye I spot a gringa approaching. She looks sort of german. No big deal, twenty times a day around here. Now here's what happens, almost subliminal, a little mental sub-routine:
Shall we verb?
(Processing)
We shall not verb.
In a flash. Happening all over the world. I close my eyes again, brushed by the warm breeze. Then I hear,
"...cinqo soles..." It's her, closer, slim, about my height, short light hair, standard silvery yoga mat rolled on her backpack. She switches to English, "Massage, five sols." I decline, turn back away.
"That can't be comfortable." I look at her sort of smiling at me. What can't? Sitting on this rock?
"It is if you do it long enough."
"(Something.)"
Then I ask, "You mean sitting on my rocking rock?"
"I mean sitting with that back pack."
"It's okay, it's empty."
She nods, crosses the street and strikes up a conversation with a Peruvian woman on a park bench.
That's when it occurs to me that five sols ($1.74) is a damn good deal for a massage, so I cross over, wait for a pause in their talk, say "five sols?"
I pick up her pack, give her mine. Hers is about twenty pounds. She resists but not much.
I pretty much blew the massage. It was head and neck, fifteen minutes, and I found myself talking all through it - asking questions or answering. It was a little disconcerting - I didn't know I was so starved for communication - what was it, the english or the girlish? One must immerse oneself in a massage. But she had a story to tell. It started with her saying she lives in Ollantaytambo. If she lives here, why the pack?
Turns out she's just out of a clinic for falling off a mountain; she'd been hiking and slipped. A few bruised bones. They shot her up with something that knocked her out then forgot to feed her - she was supposed to ask - and she didn't eat for four days. I guess she'd eaten since.
But what I wangled out of her eventually is that she is an itinerant masseuse. She doesn't really have a place here; tonight she was going to sleep in a campground nearby for S/.10.
"The women here love me." She means the poorish women, who can afford her as a brief moment of luxury in their hard duty days. She has a lot of middle-aged female Quechua clients.
I get her to do the small of my back for another five; hit on her accent. "Texas?"
"Texas and Louisiana..." and I get a little biography. Nothing big; she's a "hippy at heart," been to most states but not California. How can you not get to California? She goes to Florida instead. I tell her Florida and Hawaii are the two states I've never seen. She's thinking of going to Brazil next, she's tired of the cold. I advise Colombia. She has wriggled her way down here through Mexico and Central America. She's forty years old.
She's rubbing my temples, says, "This is where the women ask me my name." I ask. It is Alegria.
She's going to Pisac at the other end of the valley tomorrow, because she's never been there.
She tells me that she had a job in a Cusco hotel, managing a kitchen, but quit because she wanted to see Machu Picchu. Not, to my eye or yours, enough reason.
After, we get some tea at a cheap restaurant on another side of the square; she wants black tea and is struggling to work that out with the proprietor. I intervene: "Mate negra." The guy lights up, so that's what she wants. For someone who works with the locals every day and has lived in several Latin American nations her Ess Pan Yol isn't that good. I also get her a sandwich. We've established that she's homeless and forty, and hippy at heart or not that's a hard row to hoe.
Of course I'm processing her situation and what it means to me. I feel myself slipping into rescue mode on one hand and escape mode on the other. I'm watching for her to probe at my weak points. She knows that.
She asks me what is my favorite memory. I say I don't have one, as soon as you institutionalize a memory you kill it (a sort of platitude I know), then I realize I DO have a favorite memory but before I can get it out, she's telling me hers and I see that is why she asked the question, so she could tell hers.
Alegria's favorite memory is sitting in a good chair with a cup of tea, reading.
You know, full disclosure, I don't recall whether I made my offer before we left the plaza or in the Coffee Tree at tea, but this is what I put out:
"If you'd prefer it to the campground, I have a spare room downstairs where I live; it may be a little funny with the land people because I'm moving out, but I am paying for the place so you can stay there if you want. There's a wood floor, no bed, a bathroom."
The sequence doesn't really matter except that was after she accepted that offer that she said, "When we get there I can give you a real massage."
I replied - and I had said it before - that I'd wait until the next time we met to really do justice to her massage. I didn't imagine that flash of disappointment.
I asked what she averaged in a day as a masseuse; she pondered, said about forty sols. I considered her lifestyle - the cheapest hostal she knows in town goes for S/.15; she knows the cheap eats. I said, "You can live on that."
We walked up the trail in the dark. It was fun. It was very dark and the dirt road had been taken out by a tractor/digger that day to widen the camino, and was it rough country. There was a narrow path left on the side and we walked that, trying not to fall off to the right. Actually, it wasn't much of a drop but we couldn't see that.
On that twenty minute (in the dark) walk we talked about some of her quasi-scientific theories - that topic had come and gone through the night - for instance, she had notes and sketches of Kufu's pyramid proposing that is a Helmholtz generator. We kicked it around, I wasn't persuaded, it sounded pretty new-age crap to me, but she did have some science, for a liberal arts dropout.
She wasn't boring. But could get to be that way. Or go the other.
We got there, I asked Ivan if it was okay to move the spare bed down from my place, working together we did it by sliding it over the side of the open balcón. I gave her a pillow and some blankets and told her to knock on the door in the morning.
In the morning she used my shower, I walked her to the gate, gave her S/. 20. She waved it away, saying, "We're good." I said "For your trip to Pisac." She took it. Actually, she did pretty much everything I told her to. Not everybody's like that.
I had been flip-flopping over whether to give her S/.20 or S/.100 - neither are that much. I asked her, "You had a job in Cusco? At a hotel?" She said she had had. "And they gave you a room?" They had. So I gave her the twenty.
She looked back at me a little doubtfully then, so I said, it just came out, "I won't be doing that much." She gave me over her shoulder a little smile of recognition.
Now the night before, as we got through the gate with my key I asked, "seriously, wanderlust or not, don't you wish you had a job and a house somewhere?" She answered, with a twist of you-fool annoyance,
"My favorite memory is sitting with a cup of tea. Of course I'd like to have a husband and house and a boring job somewhere."
I'd spent the night in and out of sleep worrying for her. She is forty years old living in a foreign land sleeping in campgrounds selling massages for a dollar seventy four cents and has no other prospects. I mean,
What if she wants to go home? What if she wants to get back to Louisiana?
She can't.
She doesn't have the money.
And there is the nightmare of the expat, of the world traveller. What if you can't go home?
What if you end up as the cautionary gringo.
Shall we verb?
(Processing)
We shall not verb.
In a flash. Happening all over the world. I close my eyes again, brushed by the warm breeze. Then I hear,
"...cinqo soles..." It's her, closer, slim, about my height, short light hair, standard silvery yoga mat rolled on her backpack. She switches to English, "Massage, five sols." I decline, turn back away.
"That can't be comfortable." I look at her sort of smiling at me. What can't? Sitting on this rock?
"It is if you do it long enough."
"(Something.)"
Then I ask, "You mean sitting on my rocking rock?"
"I mean sitting with that back pack."
"It's okay, it's empty."
She nods, crosses the street and strikes up a conversation with a Peruvian woman on a park bench.
That's when it occurs to me that five sols ($1.74) is a damn good deal for a massage, so I cross over, wait for a pause in their talk, say "five sols?"
I pick up her pack, give her mine. Hers is about twenty pounds. She resists but not much.
I pretty much blew the massage. It was head and neck, fifteen minutes, and I found myself talking all through it - asking questions or answering. It was a little disconcerting - I didn't know I was so starved for communication - what was it, the english or the girlish? One must immerse oneself in a massage. But she had a story to tell. It started with her saying she lives in Ollantaytambo. If she lives here, why the pack?
Turns out she's just out of a clinic for falling off a mountain; she'd been hiking and slipped. A few bruised bones. They shot her up with something that knocked her out then forgot to feed her - she was supposed to ask - and she didn't eat for four days. I guess she'd eaten since.
But what I wangled out of her eventually is that she is an itinerant masseuse. She doesn't really have a place here; tonight she was going to sleep in a campground nearby for S/.10.
"The women here love me." She means the poorish women, who can afford her as a brief moment of luxury in their hard duty days. She has a lot of middle-aged female Quechua clients.
I get her to do the small of my back for another five; hit on her accent. "Texas?"
"Texas and Louisiana..." and I get a little biography. Nothing big; she's a "hippy at heart," been to most states but not California. How can you not get to California? She goes to Florida instead. I tell her Florida and Hawaii are the two states I've never seen. She's thinking of going to Brazil next, she's tired of the cold. I advise Colombia. She has wriggled her way down here through Mexico and Central America. She's forty years old.
She's rubbing my temples, says, "This is where the women ask me my name." I ask. It is Alegria.
She's going to Pisac at the other end of the valley tomorrow, because she's never been there.
She tells me that she had a job in a Cusco hotel, managing a kitchen, but quit because she wanted to see Machu Picchu. Not, to my eye or yours, enough reason.
After, we get some tea at a cheap restaurant on another side of the square; she wants black tea and is struggling to work that out with the proprietor. I intervene: "Mate negra." The guy lights up, so that's what she wants. For someone who works with the locals every day and has lived in several Latin American nations her Ess Pan Yol isn't that good. I also get her a sandwich. We've established that she's homeless and forty, and hippy at heart or not that's a hard row to hoe.
Of course I'm processing her situation and what it means to me. I feel myself slipping into rescue mode on one hand and escape mode on the other. I'm watching for her to probe at my weak points. She knows that.
She asks me what is my favorite memory. I say I don't have one, as soon as you institutionalize a memory you kill it (a sort of platitude I know), then I realize I DO have a favorite memory but before I can get it out, she's telling me hers and I see that is why she asked the question, so she could tell hers.
Alegria's favorite memory is sitting in a good chair with a cup of tea, reading.
You know, full disclosure, I don't recall whether I made my offer before we left the plaza or in the Coffee Tree at tea, but this is what I put out:
"If you'd prefer it to the campground, I have a spare room downstairs where I live; it may be a little funny with the land people because I'm moving out, but I am paying for the place so you can stay there if you want. There's a wood floor, no bed, a bathroom."
The sequence doesn't really matter except that was after she accepted that offer that she said, "When we get there I can give you a real massage."
I replied - and I had said it before - that I'd wait until the next time we met to really do justice to her massage. I didn't imagine that flash of disappointment.
I asked what she averaged in a day as a masseuse; she pondered, said about forty sols. I considered her lifestyle - the cheapest hostal she knows in town goes for S/.15; she knows the cheap eats. I said, "You can live on that."
We walked up the trail in the dark. It was fun. It was very dark and the dirt road had been taken out by a tractor/digger that day to widen the camino, and was it rough country. There was a narrow path left on the side and we walked that, trying not to fall off to the right. Actually, it wasn't much of a drop but we couldn't see that.
On that twenty minute (in the dark) walk we talked about some of her quasi-scientific theories - that topic had come and gone through the night - for instance, she had notes and sketches of Kufu's pyramid proposing that is a Helmholtz generator. We kicked it around, I wasn't persuaded, it sounded pretty new-age crap to me, but she did have some science, for a liberal arts dropout.
She wasn't boring. But could get to be that way. Or go the other.
We got there, I asked Ivan if it was okay to move the spare bed down from my place, working together we did it by sliding it over the side of the open balcón. I gave her a pillow and some blankets and told her to knock on the door in the morning.
In the morning she used my shower, I walked her to the gate, gave her S/. 20. She waved it away, saying, "We're good." I said "For your trip to Pisac." She took it. Actually, she did pretty much everything I told her to. Not everybody's like that.
I had been flip-flopping over whether to give her S/.20 or S/.100 - neither are that much. I asked her, "You had a job in Cusco? At a hotel?" She said she had had. "And they gave you a room?" They had. So I gave her the twenty.
She looked back at me a little doubtfully then, so I said, it just came out, "I won't be doing that much." She gave me over her shoulder a little smile of recognition.
"My favorite memory is sitting with a cup of tea. Of course I'd like to have a husband and house and a boring job somewhere."
I'd spent the night in and out of sleep worrying for her. She is forty years old living in a foreign land sleeping in campgrounds selling massages for a dollar seventy four cents and has no other prospects. I mean,
What if she wants to go home? What if she wants to get back to Louisiana?
She can't.
She doesn't have the money.
And there is the nightmare of the expat, of the world traveller. What if you can't go home?
What if you end up as the cautionary gringo.
I had also spent the night arming myself against being the rescuer. She's not ready to be rescued. She has to get there herself. And soon.
And I warned myself that when I see her again and get that head rub that I have already been seduced once against my inner sage by a very knowing head massage and not to succumb. Verbing can be risky. But here I am, solitary and horny and counting the days to inability, so if this post disappears one night you'll know what happened.
The Cautionary Gringa.
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