Last Days in Bolivia

Not a word is spoken until dinner, when the others and the imperative to converse created by their presence puts me in a mood of intense animation and joy. My sense of humour bounces off the warm walls and I know that my impression is a strong one, a good one. Opposite me, she is bashful but ravenous. Pretty. Exchanging a few words in French with the young boy from Bordeaux seems to upset her; though the conversation continues I see her mood visibly change. Later, before drifting into a heavy sleep, I learn that she was asked what she did back home - work, study, both? Having to answer neither keeps her up all night.

I eat my weight in eggs for breakfast and step into a white-rimmed dark. Full of stars, the sky nevertheless lacks the desert clarity I'd hoped for; the moon is bright and sunrise coming. Still, there is a profundity in the air cold enough to sting, in the half-asleep figures taking thoughtless photographs, in the quietude, in misty breaths, in morning. We get in the landcruiser. At first the seats and metal railings only inflict further cold. Putting seat belts on becomes a toil, as it does in the peak of summer back home. As soon as the front left tire is changed, though, and lunch is made and stowed, and we leave San Pedro with the rising sun at our backs, the cabin is warm and we are as excited as we are drowsy.

The next few hours are unmemorable. A few miradors, including one innocuous stop-off to breathe in the rarefied air of 5,500 meters, are all that justify a break from driving until midday. We then reach the first of a series of sulphuric Lagunas that signal our proximity to the Avaroa Reserve and the Chilean frontier. Shallow, teeming with flamingoes, it appears from behind a maze of mountains like a lost paradise, foul-smelling and bluer than the sky. The road to the shore is engulfed in a cloud of dust kicked up by other tour groups; our driver suggests getting out and taking the view in from afar. In half an hour we will eat.
Walking with the French boy, she speaks her language freely for the first time in over a month. Exhorted by their conversation to pair up with Lucia, with whom he usually walks, I decide my Spanish is too scrappy to engage her and walk alone instead.

A vague malaise comes over me. Faces from home suddenly crowd in upon my mind and the air is glittered; I see stars as, starved of oxygen, I did on those first days in Cusco. What a suffocating feeling it must be, I then think, to be forced to use a language not your own in all circumstances: for some time now I have sensed a resentment on her part, for the dreams she's having in English, for the hard time trying to write because that part of her mind is being stultified by another grammar, another syntax, requiring so much energy and concentration to employ well but repaying the favour only in allowing our communication to happen. Her art it hinders, her politics - for what is she at the moment but an Anglophone! - and therefore her sense of self, obfuscated by this all-consuming language of a million words. These and other worries distract me from the splendour of the water. And the flamingoes barely pique my interest until, when she is beside me again, I remember her saying that she was fed up with the French, mostly because of boys, whereupon it is as if a curtain goes up and I have emerged from a dark room to discover an oasis where my backyard should be.

They ceaselessly drag their beaks though the shallows, back and forth, back and forth, trawling for food. Hence they lack the grace one might have ascribed to them after watching The Lion King. But beautiful, and doubly so in fact, because I cannot seem to keep them near me long enough for a photograph. Their evasive skills keep me busy until lunchtime and, at the three or four similar lagunas we visit, until well into the afternoon.

...


"It's a rock that kind of looks like a tree. Let's all take pictures".
For all her glib jeers I get some good shots of her lying, snow-angel in sand, right next to the 'trunk' of our next sight. Now in arid yellow, closing in on the Atacama, what makes this rock formation more remarkable than perhaps it should be is its location, encircled by volcanoes of staggering size and beauty. The toilet is locked so I piss into burning earth. On my way back to the landcruiser i notice two mountain bikes, loaded with gear - swags, large canisters of water, bread. A pair of German guys my age have apparently shipped them over from home and are biking across the continent. Where do they sleep? How do they know which paths to take? We wave to one another; I sense a mutual envy, in the look of their smiles and the feel of mine. And I touch her arms, soft with shea butter. Think twice about what it means to be adventurous. Decide neither them nor I are typical examples. Get back in the idling jeep.

Mont Park Poems

At Work in an Old Asylum

there is an anteroom for

stationary

its walls once padded torn

spattered with piss shit blow

directly below the

ceiling fan

people swear they’ve felt a ghost

and come to think of it

my hands

sort of froze when i was fetching

manila folders

on the grounds are rubbished

barbecues

benches missing planks and palm

trees dying or dead

in under-heated underfed ranks

out-of-towners sacrificed to conceal

the terror

of wrecked levers and crankshafts

of brains

sent now to underpasses

multipurpose facilities

tombless flowerless graves

so every subdivided lot has

space

enough for three car garages

and the cubicles in my

office three monitors apiece

 ...

like a quavering lip the lawns

move unknowingly,

every blade weighted by ants

or wind, matt sweeping static

flickers to be praised and

sat amongst, brindle

leaves too damp to set alight

become spider webs

in out of focus eyes

become thorn garlands chainmail

hairs, eucalyptus mush slaking

curious thirsts, egg-specked

bearers of autumn’s uniform

autumn’s sappy vestments

cumquat saplings dripping

from fresh axe wounds

...

In nature I am anxious,

loath to disturb what is

no longer mine,

but of whom should I ask permission

to sit on this bench daubed

with lichen in the old asylum garden?

Beside me the beetles are dead,

cracked and petrified,

birds asleep in trees rooting

for water in the dry earth;

patients gone, dead, dying

somewhere with neither

mastery of their habitat nor their minds –

bereft of a figurehead

to authorise my presence here

am I not liable

to pay a fine or be locked up?

Then I see houses on my left,

gables for sliding down,

guttering full, and water tanks

still wrapped and detached

spread uselessly on their sides;

no-one living in them can help me.

Ekphrastic Response to Music

man of the water to landlocked kin

man inhabiting a piano

kidney-shaped profile writhing

hands afire feet uplifted leaves and

shattered glass elbows and head-throws

from an adrift to the shore-bound

listening to guttural pants and perfect

notes with equal joy, for the one

necessitates the other always, just-so;

top of his creaking life boat scrawled

with equations, microphones

ink-spattered, curses, agony, genius

unprofessionalism manifest in

half-sung covers and strange dedications,

dedications to pretty unknowns,  

in our winces, in his stowaway’s clothes

ill-fitting and sweat-soaked, hair

ragged, roused ragged eyes;

lyrically still a boy at times but at others

a sage ready to die.

“The fact is that his very being has been offered in self-sacrifice to the all-devouring glory of art;- well, to the glory of this world also, and to our own delights, and to the spiritual welfare of mankind” Jacques Maritain

Next morning I shower in a frigid trickle and cherish the privilege; this hotel frequently runs dry. After relieving myself it is necessary to bucket water from a large black barrel into the empty cistern so that it flushes, a technique evidently not mastered by whoever went before me. The last of the Sucre mangoes are devoured for breakfast despite having turned slightly astringent, like licking delicious battery-ends.

Instructed to bring snacks to keep sated between main meals, she concludes peculiarly that because there are no peanuts in the first tienda we enter, we may as well not buy anything. But since I know how that will anger her later on I pick up a bag of granola and packet of crackers literally moments before squeezing into the back of a white landcruiser. On its roof, secured by rope and an orange tarpaulin, are all six of our backpacks, jerry cans of fuel, two cylinders of gas and portable cooking stove, medical kit, sleeping bags, various other supplies. And as the desert sun gathers heat we roll out of Uyuni on rough roads at ridiculous speed.

Two of our companions are from Australia. Sitting beside me in the back - I am in the middle, she is on my left - is an engineer from Sydney, twenty-eight years old, dressed down, talkative, pretty. She smells of perfume and is quick to recount her travels, from the Bolivian Amazon to the Trans-Siberian Railway. The other Australian is a man of early middle age, red-haired and freckled, teaching university film studies in Perth. Joining us is a pair of unlikely friends; he an eighteen year old Frenchman living in Amsterdam, she Boliviana of the same age, born in Sucre but living and studying in Cochabamba, whose brother he happened to board with at school in Montreal. Both exude energy and spirit; I am glad for the chance to interact with them and observe them. Our driver wears a golfing cap over his slick black hair, and has a penchant for 80's dance music, in English and Spanish, that from the occasional synthesised voice declaiming 'DJ Jorge' over the music is obviously ripped from a podcast.
Lastly, the cook traveling with us has on an apron and blue visor and her pigtails have pompom-like objects braided into the ends.

After a brief sojourn at the so-called 'Train Cemetery', we race into the blinding pallor of the Salar de Uyuni, easily the largest salt flats on earth. Railway tracks extending beyond the distant range of mountains and volcanoes seem to beckon us forward like an arrow, like a once busy bath now untrammelled and lonely. Supposedly doubling as our guide, the driver mutters something in Spanish while keeping his eyes fixed on the windscreen, before the doors are open and we are wandering through a salt-producing township amongst other tour groups and their garrulous, animated guides. In the throng I drift into a house, inconspicuous from the outside, wherein a wood fired conveyor belt processes raw salt and, at the end, an overweight man on a stool uses a blow torch to melt shut the plastic bags once they contain enough of this 14 Boliviano - $2 - a palette commodity. His family, I'm told, have produced salt here since independence. In other words, well after the silver boom had run its course. After a demonstration he extends a cupped hand for money. I give him none. Ladies sell handicrafts and toilet paper from tables next to the cars. I do not buy anything.

Walking back to our landcruiser I feel my footing give way; these flats are covered in water, perhaps half an inch thick but deeper in untrodden areas. And my gaze turns instinctively to the spongy red rocks scattered over the flats. It is coral. Skin goosefleshed, I shiver in the ful heat of the sun. This otherworldly place, at an altitude of more than 4000 meters, was once the bed of some chimerical mountain sea. Delighted to have felt, so early on, my first pangs of awe in the face of our surrounds, I am dizzy with joy until we take to the solid track again, and my hand is on the sticky underside of her knee, my photographs always betraying a faint reflection of her through the window.

Changeless horizon, mountains moving closer and further away simultaneously, orange-striped heads of volcanoes hovering in the rippled beyond; I cannot tell if we exceed 150 kilometers an hour, stand immobile or siphon the earth in front of us away as if it were made of quicksilver. The eyes adjust to such a constant barrage of optical illusions by bowing to them, propitiating them and partaking in their mysteries to the extent that they become commonplace, that any number of impossible phenomena could occur without arousing more than a sense of calm, complicit knowing. But suddenly all is changed. No longer is the ground bare and white and flat. Imperceptibly hillocks of stony sand replace the salt, turn graver and potholed, smattered with furry shrubs and herds of Vicuna.

We brace for rough terrain by holding the seats in front of us; I am careful to avoid Lucia's neck, her bare arms, her thick black Aymara hair. Meanwhile the sun falls lower in the sky. Half the party is asleep until San Pedro appears on the fringe of another mountain range. Not to be confused with the eponymous city in Chile's Atacama Desert, it is a minuscule oasis town sustained by its touristic convenience and its Alpaca wool. Arriving before dusk, we lodge in a long concrete camphouse. Its rooms are threadbare but warm; latent heat in the cement should see us through the freezing desert night. And on the bedclothes - she and I are given the only matrimonial room - are embossed lions, tigers and other great animals of Africa.

Exploring the town center takes minutes. Dog packs with mangy stragglers chase sunning cats through the streets unpaved, unpeopled. True to the composition of even the smallest village the Plaza is the nucleus, the wellspring from which all living energy seems to emanate. Here I see market stalls perhaps shut at five (or whenever trading stopped), a local or two, trees shading some wooden benches fenced off with white lattice. The Plaza is also the dominion of God. Always, always a cathedral is standing in these Plazas, amidst squalor which bears utterly no relation to how beautiful are its gables, how white its walls, how high its steeple.
Days ago I read of the Cathedral in Arica, Chile. Commissioned while the city was still part of Peru, a small army of men was required to unload it from the nearby port and transport it to its present site. Those men were necessary because the building was designed and built in France by the studio of Gustave Eiffel, whose notable work is not hard to guess. The article included a picture which I studied eagerly, even admired. But something seemed amiss, amiss in light of the other places of worship I'd seen since arriving. Eiffel's cathedral was quintessentially French. In other words it looked incongruous, alien when compared to the continent's crumbling triumphs, such as the one we now took pictures of in San Pedro. The stone cairns on Incahuasi, that island of giant cacti we had visited earlier in the day, or on needle-thin mountain passes, innumerable white Christs blessing every city from above, and reverent street art passed by buses bearing images of the Saviour aglow next to girls in G-strings, but above all the churches built by the townspeople for the townspeople, no matter its fame or grace, Arica's Cathedral lacked everything that spoke to me of South American piety, that faith with all its whirpooling currents.

From the Plaza we walk uphill along a cobblestone road, rising steeply with the base of the mountains. Curious Alpacas poke their heads over fences, only to be spooked by the din of cameras aimed at them. The smell of our dinner seems to follow us on a wind colder now than five minutes before. At the highest rise a second chapel, or its steeple and back-end, stands, crowning a collection of ruined buildings closed off to the outside world by stone wall. The only gate is padlocked and we are too awestruck by the sight greeting us in the distance to bother with thoughts of vandalism. Pinkish sunset has swept over the desert, the plain we traversed in its entirety to get here, the one brimming with optical illusions, the one we now see laid out before us in colours impossible to replicate with a brush. With shaky footing I clamber up a boulder. It is warm to the touch like our lodge and warms me inside as well. Breaking a rule set this morning, that I would experience nature only as it intended, including audibly, I take out my I-pod. Put on ambient electronica reserved for revery and lullaby. My tattered cardigan keeps none of the frigid wind out. Some way off I see her, photographing a shepherdess and herd of Alpaca who happen to have crossed her path. Presently the music grips me; it is the sort of final element needed to bring on that magnificent oneness, magnificent as well as tragic, I often feel in nature and have seen my dad feel too. His feelings I have seen manifested in tears and though unable to see my own I know they have burst forth, I feel them gush through the threshold of not crying, the threshold we keep so watertight in our daily lives, and I laugh like an idiot as they flow, my shivers eventually heralding the arrival of unbearable cold, and dark. It lasted twenty-seven minutes; usually my 'moments' are shorter. When I remove the earphones a silence such as I have barely known resounds, amplifies my breathing. Getting down from the boulder is not easy because my legs have turned to butter. But hunger and the dim sight of her leaning on a fence spur me on. Politely I am loath to disturb her. A few steps later she catches me up; can I walk with you? Yes.

the apricot tree

the growth of my little apricot tree,

so pregnant with promise

has this very moment reminded me

of a proverb my mother told

whenever she washed my hair.

women with child, she would say

as warm water dripped – thinning

the washcloth’s engorged fibers –

onto my shut eyelids and shoulders

have bellies like sunflower buds.

sometimes if the moon is blue

the baby won’t come out
a baby like you but a sunflower,
and mummy will plant it in a meadow

where sunlight drips down from space

and dewdrops sparkle like eyes.

and those nights, hot bath-tired

I would dream of the mothers

holding brass watering cans,

beautiful mothers smiling.

but my meadow mothers started to grieve

more and more woefully

until on the last night I dreamt of them

they were uprooting their children,

flaying petals to the bud, poisoning with salt

the soil also smeared on their hands and lips.

your story hurt me, made me sick inside.

your sunflower-children have twisted me inside
I said to my own mother, and

went away. Now, years later,

the apricots are fruiting

but I’m not hungry for them, never hungry.

with a beautiful girl, discussing literature at rainbow serpent

As storm clouds grow and roil I tell her

I’ve no favourite authors; a poet who reads

no poems, non-literary, non-decorous,

an image seer and hoarder
of light boiled to glassy vision

but no thief –

running my mouth

I say ‘original’, straighten the tassels

on the Chai Tent’s ragged rug
and comment on the statuesque
cheeks the pre-dawn affords her.

“But if it’s as you say then what are

your ideas but untruths,

errors, dead letters in silvery water?
I bet there’s nothing in them
Proust hasn’t explored- and that

spiritualism was exhausted
by Hesse how many years before!”

                                                                        “Reading is, you know, like the writer’s
                                                                          test;

                                                                          know the minds

                                                                          who thought of it all, then

                                                                          try to think of more.”

Tassels gone awry again and

damp seeping through my pants,

I can hear Erik Satie’s nightmusic

When I see her literally fly into outer space.

By now it was three thirty. At best there were ninety minutes of daylight left before darkness fell, after which any glare refracted off the ice would do no more than impart a dim cruel clarity to his helplessness. James had no money, no Canadian SIM. Losing her was not an option. He shook the snow from his shoulders and walked. Dirty slush bore its way through the unstuck toes of his boots and anaesthetized his feet and his boot-heels made roguish slides from under him. With nobody on the street – nobody stupid enough – the world’s edges felt closer, closing. Silence more like a willful suppression of sound. And then, when the sparse whistle of the wind seemed to embody all nature gagged and in pain mingled with that plough’s horn, it described to James the turmoil fast seeping into his thoughts and interpretations. He was panicked. Consequently the landscape around him turned from white to bleak, ethereal to menacing. Wonder gave way to fear and, out of breath but colder than ever, he let his mind transform the snowstorm into a harbinger of ill and of bad.

Then, reaching the top of the stairs James saw that the deserted plain on which the chateau stood was littered with corpses. Fully hundreds of figures stood, featureless and half-collapsed, their faces blown from their heads and scattered on the snow before them. A fortunate few had retained their eyes, others their mouths or pipes, and one of the completely faceless majority still wore a black bowler hat. Not one nose, however, had stayed on. Because the snowmen were arranged in precise columns, if James looked through their rows at an angle the carrots, stuck tip-down, appeared to be markers for a kind of emergency runway, a last resort for planes run aground in the tempest. Presently he noticed that in front of and behind each column were magnificent ice sculptures depicting Elk and Moose and Indian braves. And on its perch the chateau, with icicles hanging from every awning, flags of Quebec and Canada flying from its two highest spires, channeled the grandest European palaces. Tracking old footsteps in zigzags and circles, James moved as if he were dreaming. Surely this was what she had wanted to show him! But there was still no sign of her anywhere. There was nobody.