Un Abrazo

14 March

Mateo is my host nephew. Six years old, loves Spiderman, Transformers, toy cars, and french fries. Cute and chubby, with black, bowl cut hair, he wants to be tall and fat and drive big trucks just like his dad when he grows up. He is silent and focused while eating, pushing rice, potato, and egg onto a flimsily-gripped large spoon with two fingertips and quickly sending the food to his tiny mouth, flinging bits all around his plate, like a little bird at the table we say. When talking he omits entirely the letter “R,” only occasionally being corrected by his grandma Elvira, mostly as warm recognition of his preciousness. His parents are separated, his dad living here with us in Chalaco, his mom in a place called Pedro Ruiz, a 14 hour bus ride away on the edge of a cloud forest that merges the northern Andes with the Amazon. He normally lives with his mom during the school year, March to December, and then with us during the summer break. His dad has been delaying the trip to take him back, in part because he doesn’t want to leave him, but mostly because Mateo seems to have more fun in Chalaco, playing make-believe with friends and cousins all day rather than watching cartoons alone in his room. Tomorrow night he’s supposed to leave for Pedro Ruiz.

After dinner he was pretending to be a super villain, and said to me and his grandma Elvira in a menacing tone that he would destroy us both. I acted real serious and asked why he would do such a thing to people that love him. He said it was a joke and threw his arms onto me, saying that it was the last hug he’d ever give me, and then ran off to help his dad fix something on his motorcycle. Elvira started crying, trying to fight or hide it. Was it the already felt absence of Mateo, or that his words reminded her of last hug she gave Carlos, her late husband, nearly two years ago. We’ve grown somewhat used to her sudden moments of public grief, solemnly going on with our meal, continuing the conversation but with a lower voice and slower pace. Here I was the only one at the table, and wished terribly for the courage to say something of console, put my hand on her back and let her know that she isn’t alone, that I’m sorry for her pain, but I just sat there choked, waiting for her to stand up and carry her solitary burden into the next room.


26 March

In the center of the very last row on the Albaca bus, heading back to Chalaco from a week away, dizzy from the heat and light, tank-top soaked in sweat, smashed between two men that smell of stale cigarette smoke and long days, searching for that air entering the bus through inch slits in the windows towards the front, delirious and slightly hungover, blood buzzing from the Dramamine. Awake again, climbing, mind reflexively jumping with every dramatic tilt of the hulking vessel, clenching impressed tire tracks, over fallen, cut and exposed earth and rock, around rigid turns that steeply drop deep into the valley. They say that in order to survive a bus falling, you must hug the seat in front of you as tightly as possible, not letting go until you’ve stopped overturning.

There are two agencies that travel between the department capitol, Piura, and Pacaipampa, the capitol of the district just an hour further inland from Chalaco. One agency is Albaca, the one I always take simply because my host family sells tickets from our house. The other is called Turpa or Yambur, depending who you ask or which sign you read. Last Friday, the 16th, I was in my house, waiting to leave Chalaco for a quick visit to Lima for a music festival and then to help out with a volunteer training in Trujillo, when Elvira received a call saying that the Turpa bus traveling from Pacaipampa to Chalaco had a mechanical failure and went off the side of the road. The news immediately spread around town and everyone began worrying about the number of deaths. Another passengers waiting to take the Albaca down to Piura commented to me as she washed her face in our backyard sink how the deaths are tragedy, but worse would be to live through it. Albaca pulled into a gathered crown carrying two of six survivors—one the ayudante, trembling, bloody and crying, the other a young woman taken off the bus in a stretcher of wool bed comforters. Twenty-two had been on board.

Albaca started up again, I said my goodbyes to Elvira and the kids, got on and sat down amongst soft rumors and floating dust. The woman next to me had been on since Pacaipampa, seen everything, had bought a ticket with Albaca because the Turpa office had been closed. She held her face in her hands, sighed and sobbed, called her family on the coast. They had heard on the radio, were worried sick. The air was hushed and our chofer moved along slowly, with and unnatural caution for the entire five drive.

Back at site, in the evening, in our internet café, a group of kids and adults were looking through photos of the crash. I overhear them talking about the ayudante and impulsively join the group, maybe to confront or understand the man whose shaking face I’ve seen all week. Here he is again, on the ground in a cow pasture, his leg twisted, wrought with pain. Without notice, they move onto the next picture, the two year old girl that had died, lying on her side in a white dress, her face and hair red. I turn away and can’t breathe, hurry outside and back home, into my room.

I don’t want this entry to make my family or anyone else worry about me. This is the first bus accident on this road and surely similar tragedies happen everywhere else, in the US, too. All the drivers are noticeably more cautious now, don’t even listen to music on the ride, and supposedly all the buses have been inspected and fixed up.