XXXIX. HUARAZ
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Water boils in Huaraz at seventy degrees centigrade.
It is very high. The altitude will set your heart jumping. The town is held in a ring
of bare sandrock mountains
but to the north rises one sudden angular fist of total snow. Andes! cried Herakles
as he entered the dining room.
They had stayed overnight in Huaraz’ Hotel Turístico. The dining room faced north
and was so dark against
the morning light outside they were all momentarily blinded. They sat.
I think we are the only guests
in this hotel, said Geryon looking around the empty tables. Ancash nodded.
No tourism in Peru anymore.
No foreigners? No foreigners, no Peruvians either. Nobody goes north of Lima
these days. Why? said Geryon.
Fear, said Ancash. This coffee tastes weird, said Herakles. Ancash poured coffee
and tasted it then spoke to his mother in Quechua.
She says it’s got blood in it. What do you mean blood? Cow blood, it’s a local recipe. Supposed to
strengthen your heart.
Ancash leaned toward his mother and said something that made her laugh.
But Herakles was gazing out the window.
This light is amazing! he said Looks like TV! Now he was putting on his jacket.
Who wants to go exploring?
Soon they were proceeding up the main street of Huaraz. It rises in sharp relations
of light towards the fist of snow.
Lining both sides of the street are small wooden tables where you can buy Chiclets,
pocket calculators, socks,
round loaves of hot bread, televisions, lengths of leather, Inca Kola, tombstones,
bananas, avocados, aspirin,
soap, AAA batteries, scrub brushes, car headlights, coconuts, American novels,
American dollars. The tables
are manned by women as small and tough as cowboys who wear layers of skirts
and a black fedora. Men wearing
dusty black suits and the fedora stand about in knots for discussion. Children
dressed in blue school uniforms
or track suits and the fedora chase around the tables. There are a few smiles,
many broken teeth, no anger.
Ancash and his mother were speaking Quechua all the time now or else Spanish
with Herakles. Geryon kept
the camera in his hand and spoke little. I am disappearing, he thought
but the photographs were worth it.
A volcano is not a mountain like others. Raising a camera to one’s face has effects
no one can calculate in advance.