15 July 2005 | Vol. 5, No. 2

Echolalia Two: Peru

by TODD FREDSON & SARAH VAP

[Introducing Echolalia]

[Echolalia One: Gathering in South America]

The drivers begin a lane change when they're flush with the car they will follow.

—and, umm, I don't know how to say, it is our policy—maybe you can clean a little. I am, am sorry—it is our policy—

Oh, yeah, no problem. I put on the long-sleeve, button-up, collared shirt I'd attached to the outside of my backpack.

Yes, but—you could use the bathroom, no? Just over there.

My face. Does she want me to shave? I'm wearing clean clothes. I've showered... I'm even wearing deodorant. My hair is a little grown out, I guess, over my ears, curling against the back of my neck...

To get to gate C-3, to all the gates, you pass through a gauntlet of duty-free goods, a corridor about 40 steps long with women in business skirts, hair secure, holding bottles of perfume, Senora?

Sarah knows my smell. She is furious. She is disappointed I am so washed. What,

those smells are cleaner, formal, first class?

West side of the plane, bumpy blanket of cloud with the pinkorange sunset over it. East, the Andes. Just South enough for the peaks to have snow.

The hotel pickup password, winter.            Miraflores. The Scottsdale, or Beverly Hills, of Peru.

Inca Kola tastes like bubble gum, looks like urine or vegetable oil.

Black corn at the market, like blueberries on a husk.        Papayas twice the size of a football.

Old men with cigars, English menus, and waiters in white suits. Teeters on.

Did I tell you about le vieux in my village—and there were a few in other villages—conscripted by the French. Taken to Europe and taught to jump out of planes, to drop through the sky with a gun. Even now no one sees planes in Zraluo. I wanted to bring an in-flight meal to the chief's wife... .

If : (�They� lost their guns) (They lost �their� guns) (They �lost� their guns) (They lost their guns) they were shot. He did once—and he's angry now, pointing, talking Gouro through Mangui's translations. He fell asleep and someone took it. But a nurse, a nun maybe, snuck him another.

Above the burgundy tablecloth, this restaurant's decoration. Skeleton keys and muskets in a glass case on the wall.

Yes, did you notice this caf� is called Vivaldi. Only Vivaldi is played. At the Franciscan monastery today, the painting of the Last Supper, cultures stamping themselves on what they consider holy—to see themselves in what is holy? From Jerusalem to Rome to Assisi's St. Francis, to Spain, the Moors and to Peru, Lima, where we are, with our American sensitivities, looking at the painting... the Last Supper's room decorated with Spanish tiles and Moroccan rugs.

The only difference between sap and blood...

chlorophyll is structurally almost the same as the pigment of our blood, only iron in hemoglobin is replaced by magnesium in sap. (Wade Davis, One River)

endearment

fix fix fix fix fix fix fix fix fix.     peel

you a mandarin,

lay it on the bed, on the strip

of toilet paper.

Dear Todd & Sarah,

The second bag of rocks has been found. I've been sick for the past three days. Horrible dreams. In one a lizard I was chasing down in my kitchen—a large lizard—jumped at me and struck my stomach. I woke up yelling "OOOOOFFFFF." Scared the hell out of the cats who were napping peacefully with me. So I did a smudge around the house last night and the energy picked up. I feel better today but stayed home, took apart all the plumbing, cleaned out the pipes and reassembled it. The strange days of summer.

Whoa, I got off track there.

Kisses con leche,

Chris

endearment

darkening...regularity. snuggle goose—a bleating star. the unity

invisible on the surface. time

of another sort. great arc

of another sort. called ridiculous—serpentine. where am i,

where

the working-notion.

You say you are learning how to ask for things. I am learning how to do the things I ask for—

Begin to confuse, to confess, your stories with the stories of someone else, stories you were told there, that you were there to hear.

Up in front, the old man's breath rattles to a stop. Maybet three-quarters of the way from his village to the city.

The bus door opens, a cool breeze, from the snow-covered volcanoes across cultivated fields, we step off here, greenhouses of flowers...

Why should I be, why shouldn't you be.

Chris,

i'm sorry about your dreams. i've had some funky ones lately too, having to kill people and getting pursued. sticking up for something. they never seem to bother me though, not like stomach lizards. i've had a bloody nose from the altitude for awhile that is a nuisance. and as it is freezing cold, a hot shower will be nice soon. just heard back from a writer in la paz, about people to contact. one's a musician-writer. awesome. sarah wants me to add something gross about her body too... so... the bottom part of her face, the area around her lips up to her nose, is flaking off, chapped. and her hair is a vicious unwashed mess. disgusting. i can't even run my gloves through it.

much love to you, and to norman.

todd and sarah.

...she thinks maybe she's allergic to guinea pig guts...stuffed with corn and potatoes. i say, yummm... let's wash up. she also says she's not really that disgusting, that my vision is blurred by the altitude. it's just chapped lips. also, i am blinded by love (here, you must know, i am just taking dictation...don�t say that, that's mean. i hate you.) so as you can see, love is in winter bloom in peru. having blast, will write again soon.

the worst boyfriend sarah's ever had in peru,

todd.

endearment: the everyday humble.

uncomfortably, for her neck, the child

drinks rain.     you can never use sweetheart

too many times. basho said loneliness,

tenderness, slenderness. add

congeal... he says that's

what I should be working toward. and burnishment.

like to banish

to an underground hearth. little

reluctant goose—the moon

that hushes a bedroom. naps

a farmer's child in cottonwood—to impress

upon you.

My favorite syncretism:

Rasta-Muslims. Christian-Animism seems too cozy. Full-circle-paganish, religion before the church—before the Catholic Church's revision at the Council of Nicea. Reinterpreting symbols, losing reincarnation.

Reverence for ancestors, renewal of spirits—a way of living within the land. Who labeled animism a religion, anyway?

Tools to Negotiate

�'Why would a plant give a shit about Mozart? And even if it did, why should that impress us? I mean, they can eat light. Isn't that enough?'� (Wade Davis, One River)

The here-away... this is where memories loosen and coordinate. Motion located: getting out of what is renderable and verifiable, one incident leading to another, incident causing incident, place names and proper... linearity walking us out by the arms. What I've got coming.

The pigs are rooting in the river salal

            this way, this,

            waist-deep,

you need something to look up from            an occupation,

the pretty prairie without buffalo.

Dear Sarah and Todd,

I am living for the summer on an organic goat ranch lesbian commune in Colorado. This morning I milked five goats, then brushed one of the llamas, made a toy for the brand-new barn kittens out of hay and the string from feed sacks, mucked out stalls, and petted a sick baby goat who used to be unsociable but now wants me to hold him all the time. They tell me I am a born milker, because it took me a few days to milk as well as they did a year after they began. At night, the ranch resounds with the sounds of wailing and theatrical laughter and drumming. Then everyone retires to their respective tents and teepees and yurts and barns and houses; one woman is building a strawbale house with a compacted llama shit floor, and one of the goat ladies told me they were bringing electricity to the goat dairy so they could play Ani DiFranco to the goats in the morning. My little brother visited and thought the Telluride Bluegrass Festival was just like Woodstock. We bought mandolins and a fiddle from an old man with a totem pole on his front porch and a Beanie Babie collection. Our driveway here is a mile long.

Love always, Tessa Amara

A cow, her front knees bent, for the sweeter grass in the ditch. The railroad's clover.

Dad, any of Sarah's ailments seem to have to do with dehydration, as she refuses to drink anything cuz then she has to pee, and i've just learned that women hover over toilets on buses, because they are disgusting. (the toilets, not women). actually, all public toilets, sarah adds. so tip-toe hovering on buses that are hairpin turning for twenty hours. What's her problem, huh?

Cloudlet—our windows rattle when buses pass. Vows of Poverty, Stigmata... signs of suffering. We compare our discomforts each day.

If any of you have ever been on Maui's famed road to Hana—its narrow and incessant twisting, one-lane bridges... or the Going to the Sun Highway in Montana—you might imagine this goddamned bus. Sea-level to 14,000 feet on a paved and patched, pot-holed road in the mountains—twenty-four hours. One stop at a washed-out road.

Women sell mandarins, sour oranges, and bags of anise.

After, the bus smells like orange peels and anise instead of diapers, the bus toilet, the bubble gum of spilled Inka Cola. The trickle of towns into Cusco from the Sacred Valley of the Incas... San Jeronimo, San Agostino... broken down, half-walls. Bruising shins, trying to get arranged, patella pressing, rolling around the metal frame of the seat in front of you, everything rolling, sliding out from under the seats, into the aisle, under other seats, the heat cranked. Ribs, stomach sore from holding yourself upright against the corners. And then, at hour 20, against all odds, the attendant turns on a microphone, bracing herself against a seat, and holds the overhead rack. BINGO begins...

Passengers pass cards back. She calls out... C 68. Letting the overhead go, wedging the microphone between her forearm and bicep, she pushes down the slot on the BINGO master sheet, tossed for a moment against the door to the driver's cabin. Then she reaches back up, adjusts the speaker-screech.

B 17...

Counter-measures, wrap-around view—possibilities,

to see what settles—

stones to keep the roof on, the tin down.

Opposable thumbs and our ability to say when.

Royal Inka Hotels: The Sacred Valley and Cusco

I find myself walking around the Sacred Valley with Todd and Gonzalo, chanting over and over:

There was an old man of Peru, who dreamed he was eating his shoe. He woke in the night in a terrible fright and found it was perfectly true.

Saqsaywaman (sounds like sexy woman), means satisfield falcon.

Q'enqo means labyrinth or zigzag. Limestone, two carved uprights,

cylindrical over an egg-shaped pedestal.

Love is when you point out dogshit on the street in Lima so I don't step in it. Alpaca shit in the Sacred Valley. Teach me about buckets of water by the toilets, force-flushing.

Dandelions at the Incan showers. Dandelions at the Three Windows in Machu Picchu. Mama had a baby.

Why's a field of a single thing always beautiful? Dumptruck full of children in school uniforms. Navy blue sweaters, band instruments. In the town square, smaller children watch the older children practice for the Corpus Christi parades.

The hill leading into Cusco—three children at dusk sit in the cement-reinforced ditches which will empty of trash in the rainy season. Their schoolbooks and notebooks are open on their laps, car tires blur inches past. No electricity where they sleep, but here—streetlights, across from their mother and her table of chocolate bars, lollipops, bottles of San Antonio water.

Sara Crewe, The Little Princess:

Sexy Woman (spelled Saqsaywaman): This monumental complex is considered the first of the new seven wonders of the world. This huge construction was planned and built by Andean Man. The Incas called it House of the Sun and the Spaniards called it a fortress because of its zig-zag shape.

In Acopia, the ancient abuelo, grandfather, with the lip of coca leaves. Plenipotentiary. He walks right up to Todd, takes his hand, speaks with him for a long time in Quechua.

Lucho...

Perchance. Purchase. Train to Puno

Sandbanks of the river. Peru looks like Montana. Golden, dry mountains with no trees... bright blue sky. Then nightfall... the mountain line looks like a ruffle.

Willingly or unwillingly. One red cent.

Two girls and their father down the aisle of the train, dancing, singing, in bright traditional dress. High-pitched voices made by constricting the backs of their throats. Woven purses around the girls' necks, to deposit money. One puts a scarf around Todd's neck, and he dances with her for a song.

Next, the furred top of the drum—hairless and darker in the center where it's hit. Four Peruvian boys, porters at both ends of the ride, but in the middle of the Cusco-Puno line, black pants and brightly colored vests. One with reed pipes, one with the drum and pipes, two with guitars... up the aisle playing Simon and Garfunkel's �El Condor Pasa.�

Homeage, lineage. A thank-you gift.

Buckaroo n : local name for a cowboy [Alteration (perhaps influenced by buck), of Spanish vaquero from vaca, cow, from Latin vacca.]

Buccaneer. 1. A pirate, especially one of the freebooters who preyed on Spanish shipping in the West Indies during the 17th century. 2. A ruthless speculator or adventurer.

Dream: An elaborate wedding. Sidesaddle. Potato blossoms in our hair. The orchid-jungles, the newlyweds.

A vase with one red flower, the size of two folded hands, on the table between us on the train. As we pass one itty town, a boy throws s