Continuará…

The people you spend your last day with are kind of instructive. When there’s no time left you try to dedicate it to the people you actually care about, and even when a few other people infiltrate that last day or two, you remember them.

I was in a weird mood that last night. I took a walk around the neighbourhood in the fading light and thought to myself: There are small things I haven’t done in Bolivia that I would have liked (mostly I wish I had seen Potosí), but if I haven’t done them by now, it’s too late to do them. Same as this story: if I haven’t said here what I wanted to say by now, then it’s also too late to do so.

Alex, the American Peace Corps guy, came back and allowed me to slightly indulge my “dude” side. He was a terrific friend in the moments he was here in the city. I said I would accompany him on a mad dash to Vietnam and Thailand in a few years, until I remembered how little I care about travelling beyond South America (and Mali) and how much I fear that part of the world.

I was with Liz the last night. I looked at the dimple on her forehead when she was thinking about something, her teeth when she smiled, her astonishing cartoon-exotic eyes, whose shape I had drawn on a napkin while waiting with Alex in an Italian restaurant. The goodbye was rushed and not really one as such, next to two impatient taxis at two in the morning, but she called me when we got to our respective houses and we found that we couldn’t hang up the phone, we just couldn’t do it, put the last nail in. The idea that I will in all likelihood never have a relationship with her again, that I have no hope of seeing her tomorrow, will not see her the day after that, does not leave me in a terrific state.

Three people came to see me off at the airport. Karina, who has a certain dazzling smile at times that I got to see all too seldom, flashed it on me that Thursday morning at the airport. She was regretful that we had not made the most of my time here, but I think we’d had our special moments and had done ok. I could marry her, I could imagine her in a white dress, her delicate frame waiting for me at the end of an altar with that open-lipped smile. Alex was there, and also Cinthia, who had only ever met me twice. I was pleasantly astonished by her presence, by the way she had reached out to me in a world and particularly a country in which people are not encouraged to do so and are thought out of their minds whenever they reach out beyond the comfort zone. Thank you, Cinthia.

I left three Bolivian girlfriends, two of them the uncommitted kind. Mari, the most devoted, called me on my phone while I was in waiting in Santa Cruz, literally only a few minutes before I left Bolivia for good. Intuitive timing. Her text messages, while sweet, reveal a spelling that is lower primary school level, but she has other qualities, a certain intuition that I did not see in 2006. As she puts it, she “always comes out ahead”. She had once commented to someone that the way I act here when I come to Bolivia, “It’s like he’s getting out of prison.” A clever and apt summation. This is unfair and only metaphorical, but back I go to that prison, Australia, the country that knows like no other how to crush my self-esteem and whose beat and rhythm have never touched my heart.

This escapade was a repetition, and I´ve been against repetition in theory for a while now, but in practice I can´t help myself and… and, for me, the time I spend in South America is never a waste.

The farewells

And so, the farewells, which began last night. Mari, who was the major bonus of this trip and from an all-round view gave me more than anyone else, even though I responded in a less heartfelt way to her with a few truths and a few lies, was last night. I could not have known how much I would grow to like her, how much her lively style when we talked in the mornings would make me smile, even though she´s someone I would not be with in a permanent sense because the style is different. She´s a woman, someone I am only able to obtain because Bolivia is good to me. She scornfully looks past so many suitors in her pragmatic fabulousness (“I realised that I couldn´t do that thing with the 48-year old anymore. What was I going to do, hold his cane?” You had to hear her voice, you had to be there) and can´t get enough of me. Unfathomable.

I am not sad. I don´t think about tomorrows, and consequently I do not feel heavy about tomorrow either. Maybe I´ve just stopped feeling things as intensely as I did. Elin says emotions should be roller-coaters so that you get to experience insane highs and the lows are just a consequence of that, but apart from frustration I´ve become a bit serene lately, Buddhistic evenness, even though Liz and Karina have both affected me deeply. I will say goodbye to Liz, but I hadn´t thought I would be seeing her within a year so that´s ok, if it takes ten years from here then it will take ten years. Karina me falló, she let me down, but that´s ok too. I will say goodbye to her, and will quite possibly not see her again. She did what she could, they both did. I love them and am grateful to them.

Fuck all you cocaine-sniffing wankers

Packing my bags, the subject of crossing borders and the danger of being planted briefly drifted into my brain, and then out. It´s the only time I ever think about the drug issue here, never at any other stage. In Australia if you mention Bolivia to Joe Dentist his response will often be, “Oh, they´ve got great cocaine down there.” My response to such people who make that connection is a withering but resounding FUCK YOU. The avenue to getting cocaine here is never actually through Bolivians; the paths are invariably through Argentine street dudes and gringos themselves. Bolivians just try to make their lives, and there´s much more to this place than white goddamn powder. Just thought I would get that protest in before this blog goes kaput.

Another Bolivian bedtime story

Another bedtime story, an indication of the lack of justice in this country, however high the fun levels are, and of why it´s probably just as well I´m getting out of here. A friend of Liz´s brother from Tarija way in the south of the country, from what Liz says a good guy, defended himself from a stabbing and accidentally killed his attacker. But the girl who perpetrated the attack (lower class; I know I say that I like doing lower class things at times but Liz is right, you have to watch yourself cause those girls are often pretty manipulative, pills in drinks and whatnot) had some contacts and obtained some great lawyers. Liz´s brother´s friend lost the case and got put away for ten years, and Tarija is too far away for anyone to visit him.

Beauty but fleeting

Another snapshot: Claudia, a pretty, short Camba (lowland, Santa Cruz chick) I met in my last hour before I left Oruro, the one who was “wearing devil horns”. I met her for a coffee when she arrived into Cochabamba on the Wednesday and then we, in the local jargon, “lost” each other until right now when I found myself near the bus terminal and I stayed with her in her last Cocha hour. I´m now meeting the good girls that I would kill for in Australia and quite wanted a month or two ago but now it´s too late to do anything about them. I found Stacey – whose phone had been stolen a day after giving me her number – through a roundabout route, but who cares, I ain´t seeing her again. Had a dinner with Cinthia, partial thrills, but adiós. And to accentuate the theme, as I type this near the bus terminal Pamela, the orginal “nice and pretty woman I feel a bit of something for” whose family owns a hotel near the terminal where I stayed the first night in November, has just tapped me on the shoulder here in this net café.

Claudia. She has Bolivian eyes and a somewhat gummy smile. I missed a few chances to go partying with her on the weekend (in fact, on my last Friday and Saturday night in Cochabamba I did not go out: the life of the rich and the glamorous) and now at the bus terminal she saw on my phone that there were affectionate messages sent to a Mari (affected) and to a Karina (real) and her heart sank a tad, realising that I´m not as true a person as she might have thought. Sow what you reap? Maybe I´m doing just that, but that´s such a glib line and I´m in the business of avoiding clichés. But the obligatory cheek kiss goodbye lasted longer than necessary and slipped to the lips for a fraction of a second.

I wonder: if I had met Liz in the midst of other girls rather than her being the very first one and in isolation, then I almost certainly would not have stuck by her, what with her busy uni schedule and lukewarm attitude at the beginning. I was presented to her family yesterday and there were no hitches, even the Dad was smiley, although he wouldn´t be if he knew the M-rated movie I´d been making with his number one pet daughter over the last two years. They live headed out towards nowhere where the roads are mere dirt and the scene is kind of rubbled-up, but behind a locked gate the house is quite nice. The Bolivian conundrum.

The “lesser” carnival

Sunday morning, my last in Bolivia. As I walked down the unusually tranquil Calle Santa Cruz a cool breeze blew through and the sun touched me but did not make life uncomfortable, rare in Cochabamba which does consistently have the best weather on Earth but when the sun shines in the summer you generally feel it in a semi-difficult way. I walked north towards the mountains and realised that I had been caught up in little routines for two months and had not taken advantage of living in such a magical place, which incidentally is not magical for the people actually living here.

The day before was the Cochabamba carnival. It´s not as good as the one in Oruro, there´s no sugarcoating that fact, but there´s still fun to be had in bits and pieces and the Cochabamba Corso seemed less anarchic than it had been two years ago. I walked along the route from start to finish, from the barrierless trickle of the beginning where the dancers line up to begin their steppy pilgrimage along the kilometres-long track, to the middle where the stands jumped with people, to the trickle the trail once again becomes at the end. In a week I knew I would be back in Australia but the information seemed quite abstract; I just don´t feel things as intensely as I used to. I noticed towards the end of the trail there were chaqueño dance demonstrations, from down in the south of the country in the Chaco desert near the Argentinian and Paraguayan borders. The men look like cowboys and the women wear large gold circle earrings and flamenco-style dresses which they flourish with their hands. Each time the music stopped I could see the dancers put their hands on their hips and literally gasp for air, and then the violins would pick up again and they would once again become their charming, elegant selves. I have to admire their marathon efforts.

History repeated itself as it often does (yes, yes, you just can´t invade Russia in the winter, we know that by now) when Elin and I were unable to say goodbye to each other when she moved on to Chile this morning. But she did ring me this time, I just wasn´t in a position to pick up the phone.

The class thing

Talked to Liz last night, about how we each seem to like everything that the other hates, at a superficial level since deeper down we are very similar people. As opposed to Karina, who is similar to me superficially (or at least was in 06) but we are very different people. Liz likes the Irish bar and other trendy up-themselves places, I like Top II and can even go an all-nighter at Miami on an adventurous night (note: here I always feel adventurous) and ne´er the ´twain shall meet. If I want to do very “Bolivian” things (which often relate to the lower, more traditional classes), and I often do, then I need to hook up with Mari, Zelma or Karina on the few times she ever goes out, and rare adventurous foreigners like Michael; but Liz and other foreigners, no.

Part of the reason for Liz´s dislikes is that you can´t go too far down in class here. I can, since I´m not part of the system and can basically do whatever I want short of laying a finger on a cholita, but I notice Bolivians do not touch what is underneath them, the world of the indigenous (the “Indians”), the cholitas with their braids, the slightly poorer Bolivians. There are nice girls at Top II who are more or less at my level, as in accessible in a class way, since even I can´t go lower than lower-middle class. Like Cinthia, oh – but when I ask the Toppers what they do, the answer is invariably that they study at San Simón, the free state university.

You can develop a servant mentality here. People will wash your clothes, clean your room, serve your meals, just pay the underclass a bit of money here and you barely have to lift a finger. But if I mention that a certain servant-type girl looks attractive, Bolivian guys I´m with will tell me that they “never look at that class”.

There are two ways to say “you” in Spanish, tú to your mates and to kids who are blatantly your age or younger than you and usted to people “above” you who need to be given respect. There are grey lines – I called Fatima tú even though she was my elder, but I´ve never gotten the hang of what to call people who fall on the grey lines. My landlady, a nice woman named Tania, always calls me usted so I always follow suit with her. I wondered why she didn´t switch to tú after a certain period of time until I realized she calls her own husband (Thomas, the German guy) usted, who calls her tú. Damn!

In a Peruvian book I read (Conversation in the Cathedral by Mario Vargas Llosa, an elaborate but sad work of fiction about the inability to alter one´s fate in the Peruvian nation under dictatorship and poverty) a younger white man calls his elder, black servant tú while the servant responds with usted, so tú vs. usted is not an age thing like I always thought but a class one. The servant then calls a whore he frequently meets up with usted, who responds with tú. I can´t swing it.

There´s a reggaeton song about a guy who goes to bed with an older woman and calls her usted (“I don´t care that you´re (usted) older than me”), but I can´t fathom two equals who go to bed together addressing each other in different ways. Maybe it´s about respect, or something. I can´t work out whether you lose warmth by calling someone usted or not, or if you are being rude if you call someone tú in the wrong moments, or what.

Oh well, back to Australia where there has never been an underclass and there still won´t be for at least the next twenty or thirty years, until the Sudanese pockets become untouchable ghettoes.

Cinthia

As the stands are slowly put up to line the streets for the danciness and celebratory ugliness of the Cochabamba carnival, two phone calls last night caused me to reflect on beautiful unexpectedness. Alex, the American dude, called from the shitholeness of his backward village somewhere on the Altiplano to say he´ll be back on the 12th, we´ll hang out, he´ll go to the airport with me in the morning and all! Then Cinthina incredibly stepped out of that coccoon that Bolivian girls are able to wrap themselves in and called me, even though I´ve only met her once, in the sordidness of Top Chopp II and caused me to rethink my adage that I had considered as irremediable and certain as the phases of the moon: Any Bolivian date/girl you are most excited about will always, always, always cancel on you. I can´t stress how overwhelmed I am that she called: it´s something that nice, gentle Bolivian girls just don´t do. If I never do a thing with her but talk about her studies and family, I will still be happy. I am out the door in less than a week and need to be because I don´t like the juggling act that things have become and the person that requires me to be, but even Liz didn´t get an entire blog named after her. Here´s to Cinthia, an unknown Cochala who I will see tonight and then most likely never again.

Oh carnaval!

I approach this computer knowing not what I will write but knowing that I must write something. My jaunt to Oruro was one of the more reckless things I´ve ever done, deciding without preparation to go to a city where I had no lodging and simply expecting to meet some random people, which I did, you can hardly not meet anyone at carrnival. But it was a controlled recklessness because I know how carnival works and know how to bend it to my will. I got there late on Saturday afternoon and strolled along the street, dodging the dancers behind and in front of me and the foam being sprayed at me from the crowd all around me.

At night a woman from Santa Cruz looked out for me and allowed me to stay out all night in the brutal cold of Oruro until I slept for half an hour of so on a seat in the Oruro bus terminal. That´s how much I love carnival, that´s what I´ll put up with to be able to mix with it, augment it with my own brand of shlepping around the streets of Oruro, energising the crowds, dancing from the central plaza all the way to the top of the hill where the parade ends and people looked at me with astonishment as I got covered in foam by little kids.

I left it too long to write this, I don´t feel like giving a comprehensive review, but I had to leave just as I met a cute girl from Santa Cruz on Sunday night wearing devil horns on her head. I could not go through another night there without a base, so chau Oruro, till next time when I´m fat and forty and no longer have the balls to jump out on the street and be an intricate part of carnival but will just watch it wishing I was young enough to do more, like I did when I was twenty-six.

In two years there I´ve never paid a single boliviano for lodging nor for a seat in the stands. I just like to walk around freely, and if the rather weak-willed police stop me entering the enclosure I know that I simply have to walk up one block and look for a place where there are no fences (ie. most of the trail except for the main plaza) and if you dance and the crowd get into your vibe then the police will just let you be. I didn´t even get robbed this time or anything, and virtually everyone loses at least their mobile phone there (I left mine in Cochabamba). I think I´m something of an Oruro master by now.

Till next time.

Reading into the water balloons

I seem to be able to walk through the war zone that is Cochabamba during carnival month almost completely unscathed this time. Gangs of teenage guys roam around the Prado armed with bagfuls of water balloons but they don´t even give me second glances (that´s what my next website should be called: secondglance.frivolous.com); it´s only the little kids who I have to worry about, and it´s cute when they try to hit you. The young hoons on the Prado (oh those crazy “hoons”, they´re just everywhere, right Pete?) seem to only want to throw their arsenal at women. I thought it was an apt commentary about mysoginism here, but I was told on the weekend – at carnvial, in Oruro, by a girl from Santa Cruz; just thought I would throw in a bunch of references to make myself look like a big man – that they aim for girls because they are more defenceless, a girl is not likely to pop a fist in anyone´s mouth in retaliation and besides, girls mainly aim to peg with water balloons only guys, in the same way that guys throw the balloons at girls. I noticed walking down a street in Oruro that a girl threatened me with a balloon in her hand and a smile on her face, and ignored my three cruceña companions.

It must be, well, either like primary school romances – the more I tease you, the more I like you – or I don´t know how to say this, it´s easier to mesh between the genders since you´re more socially allowed to: sexual attraction goes without saying. I do love saying cute things to women. (Liz once said to me: “You´re have a lot of charm with Bolivian women… although not with me.” We´d sort of past the flirty stage, if one had ever existed.) But Salman Rushdie once wrote that it´s a sad age when the only thing men and women have in common is passion.

That´s why I don´t write essays on feminism, everything gets a bit mixed up. Besides, a dude outwardly striving for women´s lib is kind of gay, however much I think things should be more equal. Next up: Carnival antics in Oruro!