Missing at highlands

While the world runs rushly to the future, the land of bocadillos still doubts amid an eternal present… or past.

 

By LUIS PAUCAR TEMOCHE

 

AYABACA, Peru –Ninety-nine miles after Piura City, Socchabamba [Sokchabamba] appears for the first time behind the window of a truck that I took random in Ayabaca. The picture of its disperse mountains and melancholic vegetation hasn’t more than splatting with the mud splashing out along the way.

 

I’m going to search the missing ones at the highlands, who were and who will be, to the land where the drug trafficking continues to be the invisible curtain killing police officers and flourishing like the coca leaves crops. The landscape hasn’t clear in the 45-minute trip, and the fog has been the only companion since we picked up eight miles behind. Nelly is my mate beside. With her, I departure on Ayabaca’s poderoso Cautivo, 1:00 am. Sunday. And now I look at her again, took in a black rod for not falling despite the bumps, with thher purple hands because of the cold corroding the bones, well dressed, blasting mascara because she slept along the whole trail. I neither see in her to the little 20-year-old yong female who left the place where the best bocadillo is made, destinated to the city, seeking a job that, because of God, came in.

 

Nelly is big-eyed, plain hair. Ten years before having shepherded mules, working lands, and peeling hens, the girl in her 20s was the province-female with pretty sung accent, quartered face, carious incisives. That one who arrived to Piura City with the sounded “gimme a little job, sir.” Months later, from Lima, her sister would call to serve the rich people, where, in spite of everything, they pay well, she assures.

 

We see one day later in this truck. And Nelly brings full pack bags, bags with groceries, and a feeling that haven’t let her quiet those ten years, when she was a housekeeper and furniture saleswoman. Nelly goes meeting his mother, maybe one last time, to deliver the little stuff she bought in the city, and a cellphone that will serve to listen to her voice. That’s it. To see again Lucho, Karina, Leo, and especially Dioselina, the lady she’ll introduce to me later.

 

The homesick of the landscape in green makes roaring this truck’s motor, dirty in its rear. The fog has vanished arriving to Socchabamba at least, that now it’s watched clustered in two mounts. It only appears a rusty sign without any grace, where the truck turned, apparently a detour. To the right, Aragoto, the Little Colombia, where –she says—many Socchabamba-natives go to plant coca. At the other side, the land that Nelly left 10 years ago.

 

Someone would say no one lives there but between hills, houses splash down until getting to one without a facade but a mud floor and a gray picture window. Nelly lived there, in a Little hut protected by a mountain where the Sun sets very early and it delays to shine the next day.

 

A dark, taciturn, electricityless place where newspapers don’t come, much less TV news, where the commercial centers fever is not felt, where many die because of hospitals or medical posts lack, where some know to write and few to read.

 

There, Nelly goes looking for her mother, the woman she ever wished to hold in her arms but she couldn’t because she was working. That rounded-face in her 50s who just today blasts crying when she sees her chinita became a woman.

• So how many time, Nelly?
• Yes, mom. (sobbings) I brought you something there, some stuff.
• OK, OK. Leave it pretty there, little girl. Let’s go. I haven’t recognized you neither – you are all a hombraza [mature guy].

 

Joyful’s not enough

“Socchabamba – know an impressing place.” The blog, ever motivational, engages the coastal guy for coming to this beautiful landscapes land, extraordinary sunsets, and happiness of a town emerging little by little. Perhaps, nobody minds to post on the web that in this place, the highest poverty levels in the region are registered, where basic services lack as water and light, where there’s no hospital, where locals have to walk for miles over miles, almost hours, to get to the city (as they call Ayabaca Downtown), and not dying from a fatal neumonia.

 

Poor, without a sol. Neither, they are understood that in Piura the commercial centers fever goes 99ºF. The spring has not come for them – everyday is a winter trespassing the poncho, the faded jean, the multicolored chullo.

 

Maybe that motivated Nelly to leave this land, and now that she comes back, she sees it similar like yesterday. Her school continues to be the rectangle of mud brick walls with wet-clay odor. At the place where –as said—a medical post, it continues the same, empty, sad like the Sun that accompanies this afternoon that seems an awakening, rather.

 

More than a century after Alexander von Humboldt came into ayabaca, “the two leagues to the north (almost 8 miles) over a quite unequal terrain,” according to his wwriting in his field diary, continue to be devastating. Neither its crops hectares, neither its people’s optimism can undo that missing land title.

 

Ten years later and Nelly is here, quitting to forget the land that saw her to born some February 20 years ago. And it’s not forgotten, and it won’t forget although everyone looks at her different because her decent-Piura-lady dye, black stretched jean, coat over coat, Avon parfum, who comes to leave some stuff to his mother, the woman of long skirts and a gold teeth.

 

Trotting

It’s 10:00 am. In the city, but it seems it were 6:00 in Socchabamba. I don’t know if going door to door for gathering these stories that remained silent, these ones that the wind carried out, and that the misty fog ever outwits. I rush the step one more hour and I’m here, looking at Nelly, and his mother, his brothers, some kids who wonder to see my photo camera for the first time.

 

Right there where nobody reaches. In this land where the plow doesn’t respect sex, where despite everything, nobody complains neither speaks because they’re already accostumed, according to Nelly,  right there… where the missing people are, crossing a mountain, on the ways wwhere few see, where the drug trafficking plays its rules, and where all the wheres can hold, on this essaying prairie.

 

I walk around on its mud ways, just some road, looking at the look of the condemned by the Andean air. I end eating moté and zango, and honey infusion that a Socchabamba woman gave me. In spite of everything, this town keeps its habits. And again, the mountain that gave me the welcome now outwits on me, on us, because of our ineptitude, because of our avarice – some die, some demand. What a life is ours!, I think right now.

 

The fried pork odor twists my senses. Open the way to avarice, to the disguised technology, that those people prefer to wait. Get laughing the last because so laughing better, as said.

• Take it – that little water is tasty, so honey infusion.

 

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