For all that it is late December, the sun is beating down and the streets are hot. I have flown in on a Christmas eve, from a European winter. Flying down the Andes from Bogota I look out on grey-red wrinkled mountains, snow-capped peaks standing above them, crevassed valleys turning to green, and then as we come down towards the coast we are in thick cloud, until we drop below and cruise above the beach, with its jetties and container storage yards, fishing boats floating on swirls of dark blue, and dry brown rocky hillsides rising up above the plain. There is a river channel, with ugly concrete sides and a brown swirling current staining the sea.
The plane flies low over flat roofed buildings of board and block, with narrow lanes between, then wasteland, brown and lifeless, before touching down on a concrete runway as the sun sets below the sea.
A taxi takes me to “El Condorcito”, a decent hotel in tourist Lima, at $100 dollars a night. I will start a teaching job in a month’s time, on the edge of Lima. I need a place to stay and orient myself.
I take a bus out to La Molina – seven kilometres away, an hour on public transport. And I walk around the streets, looking for signs “alquilo” to rent, posted in the windows. I see a garden shed erected in a passageway, three dryboard rooms on a rooftop with a shared bathroom, and a basement room with a hole in the roof for a skylight. I opt for the room with the hole in the roof.
Each morning I walk to the roundabout where photos of the victims of terrorism in the 1980s are displayed on pedestals and catch a bus to the Panaderia. Pa-na-de-ri-a I say to the bus conductor, who looks at me in confusion and repeats – A-ve-nid-da-del-Sol? Hi-po-li-to-s?
And the man next to me says a-a-r-i-a and they give him his ticket without question.
Every day.
The house is in an estate closed off with high iron railings. I can enter through doorways in the fencing, but there is only one access for cars, with a security guard who checks for identification. On the southern side is the main highway, a dual carriageway, with the two sides of the road separated by a broad green linear park, thirty metres wide, running through the neighbourhood. To the north is an equally broad road, but more peaceful. It passes a football stadium and a reconstructed Inca building of moulded clay before reaching a dead end facing a rocky hillside.
After several weeks I see that a stream runs down the centre of the green park each Wednesday. Golden kingbirds sit on high branches, and vermilion flycatchers dip down to drink.
The school is at the upper end of a residential estate, surrounded by fencing and security guards. The people entering the estate with me in the morning are teachers, gardeners, cleaners, maids. We each show our identification. The students arrive by private car – usually large, high wheelbase, black SUVs with darkened windows.
My challenge as I explore the city is interpret what I see. And so I start to write.