Department of English
Writing the Journey: June 1999
Robert E. Garlitz
14 Rogers Street
Plymouth, NH 03264
Plymouth State College
603.536-3915
robertg@oz.plymouth.edu
Romancing Bolivia's Poor
Travelers romanticize the poor. It is inevitable and inescapable for Western
travel writers because they have all been to the three schools of writing for
the West---the Dead, the Dream and the nether realms or Roots.
Helene Cixous in her Wellek Library lectures, Three Steps on the Ladder of
Writing (Columbia, 1997),says that the strange science of writing is a "science of farewells.
Of reunitings." and a few lines later-"writing forms a passageway between two
shores." Images from travel run throughout Cixous work, but her principal
concern is to take us to the three schools which form writers: the School of
the Dead, the School of Dreams and the School of Roots.
"To begin (writing, living)," Cixous shows us, "we must have death. I like the
dead, they are the doorkeepers who while closing one side 'give' way to the
other. Writing is the effort not to forget that some picture of death is in
front of us. "Writing, in its noblest function, is the attempt to unerase, to
unearth, to find the primitive picture again, ours, the one that frightens us."(7)
Peter Mathiessen in 1960, traveling from Tiahuanaco to La Paz:
'The Indians themselves, on the other hand, look cleaner and more active and have been known to smile, . . .[than those in Peru]. At one point the car passed a funeral
procession, and the file of Indians was reflected in long rain puddles as they
shambled over the plain toward the road: the corpse was draped in a shiny black
material and was carried on a sort of thin stretcher which sagged sadly between
the four pallbearers. (73)
In La Paz on Saturday morning of March 19, about five a.m., I was awakened by
a cascade of gunfire--rifle shots, then machine guns, and finally the dull boom
of mortars. I was staying with friends, Dorry and Ted Blacque, whose handsome
house overlooks the steep gorge of the Choqueyapu River and is situated on the a
line between Army Headquarters and the Defense Ministry; the house is still
bullet-pocked from the last revolution, in 1952. I got up and went downstairs,
where the maid was very nervous and upset. 'Matan la gente, matan la gente,' she
said to me, wringing her hands. 'They are killing people.' (78: The Cloud
Forest, 1961; Penguin, 1989)
From another French writer, philosopher Jean Baudrillard in Fragments: Cool Memories III,1991-1995 (London: Verso, 1997):
In the Andean valleys of the Altiplano, the Indians live as though
inside their own transfigured bodies. The rock there has the substance of flesh,
and the colours--ochre, green and black--these oxydized, pastel shades--are the
colours of the insides of the body, of the mucous membranes, of organ
stereoscopies. . . . It is the Indians' fate to work in the mines, to extract that metal which shows at the surface of the rock, as it is sacrificially to extract organs from
a body. A difference here from the North American deserts, where the same
geological developments do not bespeak the same visceral presence or the same
sacrificial ritual. They are the site of a more superficial, unreal,
disincarnate delirium--being also admirable in their way. On the
. . . Altiplano, it seems that God himself and nature itself have become the
bloody metaphors of our own bodies. (44)
Cixous: "We write, we paint, throughout our entire lives as if we were going
to a foreign country, as if we were foreigners inside our own families, 'hinaus
in die Fremde der Heimat,' as Celan writes, that is where we go." (21)
The School of Dreams shapes travel writing because travel to a foreign place
is so much like a dream and because as Cixous says, quoting Tsvetaeva,
"what we find in dreams is the pure element of fear." (90)
In order to go to the School of Dreams, something must be displaced, starting with the bed. One has to get going. This is what writing is, starting off. It has to do with activity and passivity. This does not mean one will get there. Writing is not arriving; most of the time it's not arriving. One must go on foot, with the body. One has to go away, leave the self. How far must one not arrive in order to write, how far must one wander and wear out and have pleasure? One must walk as far as the night. One's own night. Walking through the self toward the dark. (65)
British journalist and travel writer, Matthew Parris, published an account of
his fourth trip to Peru in his book Inca-Kola which came out in 1990. He has
studied well in the school of dreams. He and his friends traveled through
Bolivia for short stretches. Here is his description of the poorest of the poor
who live in the Altiplano.
The new road from Cochabamba to La Paz is a daring construction, sweeping
majestically into the clouds. Doze off for ten minutes and you awake, suddenly
breathless---whether from the altitude or from the escarpment dropping away
almost at your wheels, it is hard to say. . . . As you climb, the people grow
poorer: grindingly poor, harsher than anything I had seen. . . . Here the
rural poor had made their contract with their environment. Earthquakes apart,
there were no surprises: just survival. But survival of a harsh and meagre
kind. (London: Wiedenfield & Nicholson: 256-257)
Later when the bus, named St Francis, stops for lunch, he and his companions try
to eat the thin soup and discover it contains a chicken claw, stomach lining,
and a cow's nose. The friend goes outside to be sick. Parrish, however, sees
the beauty of the scene:
And yet it was so beautiful. The shacks were of mud and tin, wretchedly poor; a
family of raven-haired piglets rootled around St Francis's wheels; and
everywhere was the smell of urine. But in a corner by the wall someone had
planted a flowering bush. Rubbish lay all around, yet its scarlet blooms would
have been the glory of any English garden. It was a red which made reds you
have seen before look like early attempts at the final colour. (260)
In La Paz Parris is moved by a sign on a lamp post in the old town plaza from
which the radical President Villaroel was hanged in 1946. Some of his last
words are engraved: "I am not an enemy of the rich but I am a friend of the
poor . . . This is my banner, my flag, my standard. And if for this banner I
must be broken . . . then I am disposed to die.' ( 258)
When he tries to sum up Bolivia, Parrish calls it a "mad, unlikely country."
There is a paradoxical feeling of permanence about Bolivia's turmoil. It
is a durable sort of fragility, for, in a way, they have hit the bottom. You
feel that it was ever thus, and life, now, will go on.
All that threatens Bolivia is a continuity of despair.
La Paz looks and feels like the capital of a mountain kingdom. It is a compact,
cobbled city, full of steep streets, swirly wrought-iron street lamps and grand
public buildings with stone facades in baroque style. Ceremonial guards in
nineteenth-century toytown uniforms goose step up and down outside the palaces.
On all three sides the walls of the Andes sweep upwards, enclosing the whole
town and adding to an atmosphere of siege, of suppressed hysteria, which hangs
in the thing air.
The city has "mad traffic."
The rich from La Paz can ski on a mountain-side above the city at the highest
ski-station in the world, where it is hardly possible to breathe. From these
snows, clear streams flow into what is---less famously---the highest slum in the
world [actually a new city above la Paz]: El Alto, whose poverty stunned even
the Pope. (268)
Cixous' third school of writing concerns Roots. By roots she means the "nether
realms" the "inferior realms" deep inside the writer. (118) And this shows up
in the writing as the crossing of borders. "The familiar and uncanny border
passing would be the one we are all periodically subjected to--that from one
country to another---. (124)
Parris has visited Peru a few times before and so he is taken with the
strangeness of Bolivia and all the ways it is not Peru. Eric Lawlor, a young
Irishman, traveled to Bolivia in the late 80s. His book In Bolivia recounts
that trip. He finds plenty of hell in Bolivia. On the altiplano and in La Paz
it is the terrible cold and altitude sickness.
To my enormous relief, Sucre was hot. Gloriously hot. I'd had enough of the
Altiplano's icy horrors. For two months, I had done little but battle searing
cold. In Potosí, I'd thought of nothing else. The struggle to stay warm
consumed me, reducing me to an animal existence. I lost all interest in the world. . . . I stopped reading--it was too cold to read a book---and shunned company. I no longer cared to talk to anyone, not even the innocuous Dr. Browne. Who could think of talking when his marrow had turned to ice? (106)
In Potosí Lawlor also studies the horrible past of that city when, three
centuries earlier, it was the capital of world silver mining.
In 1545 there was discovered in Potosí --the mountain for which the city is named--the richest silver deposit anywhere and for the next two centuries the imperial city flourished, becoming the biggest and richest in the Americas. By one estimate, Potosí was to yield 20,000 tons of silver." (95)
The phrase "as rich as Potosí became a byword around the world." In Potosí, it was said, even the poor wore silk.
Nearly everyone had money to spend, and in this emporium mundi one could buy anything one wanted. A writer of the time left this partial shopping list: Portuguese linens, French embroideries, Flemish tapestries, Dutch textiles,
German swords, Florentine satin, English hats, Venetian glass, Indian ivory,
Chinese porcelain, Angolan slaves, West Indian cocoa, Arabian perfumes, Persian
carpets, and Ceylonese diamonds.(96)
Potosí became virtually lawless. Nowhere was life more tenuous. To avoid
being killed, people wore chain mail and took fencing lessons. Men battled one
another in the streets--over mining claims, gambling debts, women. Especially
women, who, being in short supply, were ever in contention."(97)
Indian slavery was instituted in 1570 and not abolished until 1825 by Simon
Bolívar. (98) Between three and eight million lives were spent on working the
mines in this system. By 1750 the silver was exhausted and Potosí became a
ghost town. Still today there are tin mines. No slavery but working conditions
close to it.
The other hellish time in recent Bolivian history was the Chaco war with
Paraguay which ended in 1935. 60,000 Bolivians died, most of them altiplano
Indians. Lawlor talked with a survivor of the war. The survivor explained the
good that came of the Chaco war, the revolution. "Before the revolution, we
were poor. Now, we're destitute. . . . The revolution ruined us." From the
war and the revolution there were No gains. "There isn't a veteran in this town
who doesn't agree with me." (202)
The most up-to-date hellish reality Lawlor finds in Bolivia shows up most
clearly when he arrives in Santa Cruz. " I had been in Santa Cruz five minutes
when someone offered to sell me coke. (152) "Because Santa Cruz is the capital
of the coke industry, no one would believe that I had come here for any other
reason than to launch a career in drugs."
Lawlor spent three months in Bolivia. A Bolivian tells him when he hears this
that now he knows what it was like to live in the nineteenth century. Lawlor
agrees and waxes bleakly about Bolivia's shaky future. He does go to Carnival
in Copacabana, the great pilgrimage town on Lake Titicaca. At one point he sees
a man with a rose in his lapel, a groom on his way to his wedding. But Lawlor
doesn't have the same eye for flowers that Parris has and doesn't tell us its
color. Flowers are crucial, Cixous claims, and later we will find out why.
The best and most recent book on Bolivia treats the drug trade and all of its
corruption in-depth. It is Stone Cowboy by Mark Jacobs. It is a novel but one
informed by an astute traveler's vision. Jacobs is a career foreign service
officer who has lived in Bolivia, Paraguay, Spain and Turkey. Jacobs gives a
much more complex and subtle portrait of Bolivia's people through the eyes of
his main character, an American drifter stranded in the country named Roger. "A
lot of Americans vanish into Bolivia," says the dust jacket. Roger survives
after his release from the main prison at the opening of the story. Rogers sees
Bolivians as not wholly human. "All Bolivians were trolls, Roger had decided a
long time ago. They were short and dark and strange, not like people, really,
but humanlike to a certain extent.)" (1) Roger, a burned-out case who has been
to 23 countries in 10 years finds redemption and love and his treatment of the
trolls is finally more full of affection and admiration than we think on page
one. He speaks both Spanish and Aymara and for a while he works for a troll in
the new city on the altiplano above La Paz.
The Altiplano was a desert that had gotten lost, squeezed in between two ranges of the Andes at fourteen thousand feet. The ultimate natural high was what Claude, a French doper in el Panopticon who understood Bolivia better than most Bolivians, had called it. Real people couldn't survive long at that altitude, just llamas and alpacas. And trolls. Real people need air with something in it lungs could chew on. (New York: Soho Press, 1998: 3)
The bus breaks down.
The trolls filed off the bus like religious fatalists . . . . The driver, who apparently had no plan, sat by the roadside and chain-smoked cigarettes. Roger watched his face for a sign of distress, but none was there. That was a troll for you. . . . Roger crossed the highway and sat down cross-legged on an outcropping of shaly rock. Below him, in the brown bowl of the canyon, the lights were going on in La Paz. The skyscrapers
downtown looked ridiculously little in the vastness of the brown earth around
them. Toothpicks of light. On the far horizon the outlines of the mountain
Illimani were filed smooth in the twilight. For all the smoothness, the mountain dominated the city. The Indians worshipped the mountains as gods, someone had told Roger once, but that might have been pure bullshit, some tourist's stone fantasy. (3)
Roger finds work in El Alto.
WELCOME TO EL ALTO, THE CITY OF THE FUTURE, read one enthusiastic mural, which displayed troll workers in an attitude of defiance, holding their tools like weapons. . . . What it was was an Altiplano mud village multiplied several hundred times: the same crumbly adobe huts and walls, the same mud streets, the same Indians in their Andean stupor going about the business of surviving." (4)
A while later a straitlaced young woman named Agnes latches onto him and enlists his help in finding her brother Jonathan who had come to Bolivia to become a real magician, even a shaman. They eventually find him and find that he has become the private jester for a drug lord. Roger and Jonathan and Agnes go through a number of ordeals and searches and obstacles painful enough to be described as a harrowing of hell and finally meet
a true Indian wise man named Don Eulalio. The wise man takes Jonathan, known as
Flame to the locals, through a series of dialogues on the nature of the true
search.
Talking on and on in a flat voice that soothed all of them, he made
Flame see that what he needed to do was figure out what it was he really wanted.
Roger got lost again trying to understand, but the Moxo's Aymara wasn't good
enough for that, either, and it came out in translation: el objecto legitimo de
tu deseo, the legitimate object of your desire. Flame was grateful; Don Eulalio
had just save his life. His eyes teared, and Roger watched the Moxo's face to
see how all of it was hitting him. But Bolivians had the ability to turn their
faces into stones when they wanted to, and that's what the Moxo's was now."
(287)
In the final scene Don Eulalio performs a ritual designed to place them in
touch with Pachamama, the great mother goddess of the Andes. He chants. "It
was the sweetest music Roger had ever heard, ten times better than all the phony
pipe music they played to the tourists in La Paz." The brother, Flame, is able
to join Don Eulalio in the communing chant, demonstrating that he has "something
real, something that went way past the street magic he had started out with
years ago at home." Moxo, the drug lord, shoots Flame when he is in this
ecstatic mystical communion with Pachamama. Roger prays for the first time.
Agnes takes in the reality of her brother's death
wrapped up in herself, learning, Roger figured, how to live broken. It was going to take her a while. Before it all went away, Roger himself, still the stone cowboy in a manner of speaking, repeated the message he had sent up with the Pachamama. Not because he doubted it would get where it was going, but for the easy pleasure of the
words themselves: Give me back my heart, he heard. He was tired. He looked
around for a place to sit down. (292)
One final traveler's tale and then we will find the flowers we need. An American writer, Lucy McCauley, arrived in La Paz on the night of the solar eclipse. She fainted from Soroche, the altitude sickness. After getting used to the air and the city she found herself looking for romance with a man named Ricardo whom she met one night during fireworks on the Plaza Murillo. He is "a young administrator at city hall. He was handsome--pale, with hair black like seal skin. And his eyes, dark and long-lashed, reminded me of someone back home I missed" (379). He becomes insistent over the next few weeks and asks her to
have an affair. She has learned that he is married. "And besides, I found
short-term liaisons painful."
Even so, one day when I was feeling lonely and particularly isolated amid the swirling strangeness of the city, Ricardo appeared outside my door. I let him in. I was fresh from a shower, my hair was wet. I felt vulnerable and in need of comfort, and he had worn me down. He kissed my forehead. I told him I did not even know his last name. He wrote his name on a wide blank piece of paper. We kissed once before I pushed him away, ashamed, and suddenly, utterly sad.
He stood looking at me a moment. Then he said there was blood on my forehead.
I saw his mouth was bleeding, his front bottom gums.
She gives him a bottle of mineral water to drink and decides it will go no farther. She wipes off the blood. "Suddenly I felt a wave of loneliness, far more than before I'd let him
in. . . . When I looked up, still wiping my face, he said, "It's gone now." He didn't
explain the blood, but he shook his head--whether from shame or embarrassment or
disappointment, I never knew. We avoided each other after that day." (Woman's World. Ed. Marybeth Bond. San Francisco, 1998: 381)
A few weeks later McCaulay notices Ricardo on the Plaza reaching out to tap a tall
German woman new to the city on the shoulder.
We need flowers, because according to Cixous everything ends with flowers.
"Hell returns us to something mysterious and enchanted that we know nothing
about but that is deep inside us: our genesis." (151) "Perhaps flowers are our
last human stage." Matthew Parris is the traveler who gave us images of flowers
in Bolivia on the road from Cochabamba to La Paz.
And yet it was so beautiful. The shacks were of mud and tin, wretchedly poor; a family of raven-haired piglets rootled around St Francis's wheels; and
everywhere was the smell of urine. But in a corner by the wall someone had
planted a flowering bush. Rubbish lay all around, yet its scarlet blooms would
have been the glory of any English garden. It was a red which made reds you
have seen before look like early attempts at the final colour. 260
In the filthy yard "leathery old women were wrapped about the shoulders with
crimson and gold mantles so fine, so intricately worked, that no Englishwoman
would dare to soil them with use. These women were trailing them in the dirt.
And as with the yard, so with the people in it: filthy, threadbare, broken
down, but tinged always and at some point with an extravagant beauty. The
scarlet bush, the crimson mantles, seemed to burn like small flames, hovering
above the ashes which sustained them. Tiny points of intense colour, their
vitality sucked upwards from the parched earth and withered bodies to which they
clung. (260)