A Memory of Peru

A Memory of Per- by Carl Vonderau.

More than forty years ago I set out across Latin America, a trip that would lead me into the rest of my life. A train, then two long bus trips lifted me up the Andes to Cusco. A doctor there wanted to practice his English and bought me soup at a market. That night and the next morning I shivered and vomited and suffered through explosive diarrhea. But I didn’t die.

In the afternoon I wandered into a small cafe to celebrate my survival with a bottle of Inca Kola. Maybe the tables inside were metal and laminate, but I’m not sure anymore. At the one next to mine, a man in a white shirt and black pants drank beer with two indigenous women. I don’t remember exactly what his companions wore but I think wide black skirts and petticoats underneath, white blouses, and red sweaters. Scarves striped with green, red, purple and blue. One of the woman was large and wore a brown Andean fedora. Watching them, I felt myself come alive again. These three people represented the foreign lives I wanted to feel and absorb on my journey.

The man invited me to join them and poured beer into a spare glass. He and the two women must have known from my age and accent in Spanish that I was a student. The prettier woman beside the man was his sister and the large woman next to him was a friend. We smiled and drank and spoke. The large woman across from me had black hair and a full face, and dark penetrating eyes. She winked several times at me and I was uncomfortable with what she meant. Then she said, “Do you want to make love?”

Stunned, I acted as if I didn’t understand her Spanish.

The man in the white shirt caught my attention. He extended and retracted his palms in quick motions. His finger pointed at me and the smiling woman.

I couldn’t pretend any longer. “No, gracias,” I said.

I don’t know how the man’s sister reacted. I couldn’t escape the determined eyes of the large woman. “What is it that you do?” she said. She cupped her hand and floated it forward and backward in the air as if around an imaginary pole.

My face heated up. I must have stared down at my half glass of beer, desperate to end the conversation. Maybe a question could give me an escape. “Why is it you want to make love with me?”

Without hesitation she said, “I want a son with blue eyes.”

I couldn’t find words. This was more frightening than I could imagine.

The person I am now would have asked questions. Why did she believe a son would have my blue eyes? Was this all she wanted in a father? She was a native Peruvian and her roots in this land extended back before Pizarro. Why did she long to have a white child? But such questions never occurred to me when I was so shocked and humiliated.

A stranger leaned over from behind my chair. He pointed to another table behind us. I fled with him to sit with his two male friends. One of those men rose and offered himself to the woman I’d refused. She stared at me and shook her head.

The three men poured me beer. Hoping to restore my image, I said, “A man can’t have sex with just anyone and still be a man.”

They nodded thoughtfully. “But that costs money,” one of them said.

After a few minutes, the large woman and her two friends rose. I was afraid to look at them. She came to my table and leaned down so I and my new friends could hear clearly. “You prefer men, don’t you?” she said.

Maybe I shook my head. Maybe I said that wasn’t true. I remember feeling dizzy.

In the years since, the details of that day have faded, but the scope of what I see—who I was and who I am now—has broadened. I spent much of my career working with Latin America. Now my sons are men, both years older than I was that afternoon. One has green eyes, the other blue. They have never been close to Peru, never studied Spanish. Our family has hugged each other for a generation, but we will never share that world I felt that day.

My own private memory of this event returns several times each year, my insides seesawing between humor and sadness, both tinged with shame. After working thirty years in banking, I look more skeptically at it now. I wonder if those two women and their friend were trying to lure me somewhere to rob me. That large woman didn’t really think I could give her a blue-eyed child, did she? But the younger part of me believes that was exactly what she wanted.

 

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