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Do you ever have one of those days where, out looking for a bookstore, you pass a cute cafe and decide to go in there instead? And then you sit down at the table next to a German documetary filmmaker you recognize from a few nights before, who comes over to your table and starts talking about the time in Portugal he fell and cut his arm and they stitched it up for free? And then it starts to rain and all the people who were sitting in the garden outside the cafe come inside with their pots of tea, and one of the people who comes inside is Elton John, who sits at the table right next to yours, the one just recently vacated by the German documentary filmmaker, and smiles at you, and drinks his tea?
I <3 Nepal.
First things first. Noah reminded me that I haven’t given my new traveling companion proper credit – Small Bear had other engagements this week, so I’m adventuring these days with Octagon the squid. He’ll make it into a photo somewhere, but until then you should know that he is small, and blue, and very cuddly – I think it’s all the arms.
It’s the season of mud and green, just now. The air is thick enough to have its own color and texture, unbearably sticky until at once, unpredictably, the clouds and the trees and the buildings all condense, and instead of moving slowly through a fog you swim your way home through sheets of water, the smell of incense and garbage crushed into the ground by the sky until everything is clean except your feet in their sandals in the river of the streets. It happened like this when I was a half-hour walk away from the clinic last week, and after a few seconds it looked like I’d stepped into the shower without taking off my clothes – customarily late for dinner, I didn’t have time to hide under any of the offered awnings, so I kept stomping away and laughing (with miles of umbrella-sheltered Nepalis staring and laughing at me, including five men hiding under one popcorn cart in the mud who kept inviting me to hide under it with them) until I made it safely back and could wring myself out.
The clinic is as painful and fascinating as before – we diagnosed a new case of leprosy yesterday, and I spent the morning reading about a disease that no one in the states really ever sees. In the afternoon, some of the girls in wheelchairs wanted us to take them to the Pashupati temple, so we pushed them uphill and then let them drag us down, until at the temple door a guard stopped us and pointed to the sign saying “entrance for Hindus only”. We asked if we could take them just to the inner door, so they could see, and he said no. We asked if HE could push them into the inner door, so they could see, and he said no. We said ‘They are Hindu and they want to go into their temple!’ and he said no, and told us to leave. So we left, and were angry at how unfair it is, but the girls just said ‘this is the way it goes’. So it goes here, beautiful and strange and unfair, full of smiling children and hissing monkeys and leering old men, and tea. Lots of tea.
My first morning back in the neighborhood of barking dogs and bells! We made it in last night after a two day travel marathon, with a break in Hong Kong for Matt to lose an arm-wrestling contest with a 58 year old fortune teller, on the souvenir case of a temple guarded by dragons and ‘no photo’ signs.
Boudha smells just like I remember it. Incense, mud, garbage and flowers. I missed it here.
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From 3/18/09
Yesterday we went to Machu Picchu on a blue train, four hours through the sacred valley to Aguas Calientes and then on foot up a very long stone staircase through bromeliad jungle and the paths of small black butterflies. By the end of the stairs, there are clouds below you, blurring the green of the valley as it stretches, catty in an endless supply of warm sunbeams, down to the fat brown writhing of the river and the toy blue trains winding their way back and forth along its bank. At the top of the staircase you wait in a (that day) short line, turn a corner, and then you see, nested carefully among the huge boulders of a flattened mountaintop with terraces falling through all degrees, the shocking tidiness of a tiny city. Rock handed down pre-assembled from divine mathematicians, and everything in its place – here the guard tower at the highest point, here the rooms for storage, the temples, the observatory. And in the center of it all there is a tree standing exuberant guard over the mountaintop, trunk crouched under an untameable mane of pink flowers and red leaves, last survivor of the human war against jungle that woke each wall from its centuries of rest.
I imagine the original inhabitants of the city probably spent most of their free time watching the clouds, which in the few hours of our wandering presented a fuge of variations on water, air and light. Bach, in his free time in the afterlife, conducts these clouds. They wrap around the mountain and drift away, disconsolate. Light shifts like arrows to buried treasure – from brightness, all at once, all is dark except a circle, there, spotlit… then the clouds scurry to their places at the sides of the stage and the sun washes everything back into carefree, mysteryless day. A cloud statue wakes up hungry, born from the breath of the trees, peels itself from the hillside and sinks sticky and exhausted into the valley.
Cusco rolls over its valley matching the hillsides contour for contour, cobbled streets barely wide enough for the little taxis so that, as they pass, you press yourself against warm stone walls to make room. In the plaza San Blas, a woman with a parrot on her shoulder is making jewelry, sitting in the sun with a pile of shells and hemp, laughing. The parrot is a startling green against her hair, and soft – he will nibble your fingers if you stroke his head, but not too hard.
The conquistadors, in the name of their god and of Spain, tore down the Inca temple in Cusco and used its stones to build the base of a great cathedral at the city center, marble arches and weeping saints and catacombs with names of priests carved into the dark of the walls, the altar plated with 12,000 kilos of silver. In the same city, now, there is a garden filled with hummingbirds and looming golden clouds, and it is beginning to rain – first the smell from far off of heat suddenly quenched, then the sound of muted applause, and finally the rain itself, suitably announced, turning every surface to a mirror that the sky might better admire herself. The clouds sigh and give themselves over to the earth, rain through mist illuminated hanging soft and layered as ferns from the wall of a cave, covering over the cathedral walls and the Inca stones beneath.
Left to the plants and the rain, how long until the echoes of human longing for divinity and power wash away downhill? And when the stone and silver belong again to the hills, whose gods will take up residence?
Anyplace that smells like flowers and comes with pineapple juice for breakfast gets my seal of approval.
Safe and sound… adventures to come.
Squickable Warning: (Noah, this means you). This post is about an operation. It was scary. There are details of the scariness. If you don’t like to see the word ‘blood’ or think about the thing it represents, you shouldn’t read this.
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I watched my first operation – an emergency c-section in a hospital without running water, oxygen, blood or suction. The room was at least 100F, the only light from a bare fluorescent bulb hanging above the table. The anesthetist couldn’t stop shaking, the mother wouldn’t stop screaming, he tried four times to get a needle into her spine and, failing, put her under with a syringe of ketamine and a bottle of ether. While its familiar, solvent cabinet smell floated sticky and sweet over the room I stood back, trying not to get in the way (until the surgeon said ‘come over here, you can’t see anything from that far’), trying to imagine her dreams… falling asleep she kept talking to Jesus and with that much ketamine I wonder if she met him. So much blood. Everywhere. Dripping over the table, onto the floor, they ran out of towels to soak it up and had to squeeze out the old ones and use them again. In the face of such sharp knives, the woman seemed so fragile, and then there was a baby, blue and small and whole and strange, and one layer at a time the surgeon pieced its mother back together. Huge ugly nylon stitches to push the temporarily outside back in, and I realized my thoughts about fragility have been backwards all this time. The frightening thing is not the fragility of life, but its sheer unstoppable clawing abundance, the baby in the woman and the brutal, unglamorous sutures closing a gash that should have killed her, and the IV antibiotics because just for having the operation she was ‘already massively infected’, and outside life going on as it always had. I kept thinking ‘no one can live through this’, but… they did. They do. The woman lived. The child lived. We washed our hands and changed back into normal clothes and everything looked exactly the way it had before we went into the operating room and no one seemed to think it at all miraculous, what happened. A woman had a baby.
People make it alive to the end of every day. Millions of them.
Still in Kampala. Such a strange thing, asking new faces, new words, unwalked roads to fill in the spaces ordinarily occupied by home, lovers, friends, work. There are moments, bent double kneading the last traces of soap from my by now all-too-familiar little pile of laundry, where I want to set it all on fire and leave through the back door, pick a direction and start walking. To the airport. To Lake Victoria. Anywhere.
And how we sang in the kitchen last night! Washing nine kinds of starch and leftover greens off our stack of plates, until Vicky said No! I’ve gotta stop this before I go into the Spirit! It’s not fair to the Lord! He deserves to get some rest! Every sentence an exclamation as she told us not to talk about god anymore or we’d go mad, and it seemed like a real risk, three girls in the kitchen dancing and singing and telling stories without endings, red clay earth crawling in over everything. The rains haven’t started yet but every faucet in the whole house leaks to make up for it, out own private flood dripping from the bathrooms to the kitchen while mosquito noises pass back and forth electric picking up sparks from faraway thunderstorms. Every time I crush one between my hands I think the power might go out again.
