Eguren's Lima

Over on that other site (Facebook) I posted an album titled Beaux Arts Lima--all buildings. Of course everyone talks about the Teatro Colon (Buenos Aires), the Palacio de Bellas Artes (Mexico City), but who talks about the over-the-top stylings of Lima's age of expansion? Paris had been redesigned and Barcelona's new modernista suburbs laid out by the time of the post-War of the Pacific building boom breached central Lima's ring wall (which in any case was less of a container of the physical city than of the field of power) and spilled madly into the pebbly agricultural lands, formerly inhabited by descendants of slaves, washerwomen, water sellers, ne'er-do-wells, and the occasional barefoot Franciscan. Big avenues were planned and paved, with circular plazas such as the Plaza Bolognesi where monuments to military heroes towered.

Most of these buildings are NOT well cared for--maybe "destroyed" would be a better descriptor. But they are beautiful buildings. They have a quality of exaggeration about them which I have to ascribe, however unwillingly, to the fact that they occupy an extreme end point (both physically and temporally) in the civic register of Belle Epoque buildings.

I'm still considering the twenties Belle Epoque because really Deco, although it did reach Lima, didn't have a huge impact. These buildings coincide exactly with the poetry of José María Eguren, that late fruit, man-out-of time, who went on writing exquisite modernista miniatures in the the age of Mariátegui and Vallejo. Another case-in-point, the Pabellón Morisco built in the Parque de la Exposición in 1921 as part of the centenial celebrations.

Number 3: grime

One more bitchy comment on Althaus, then I'll shut up: yes, it's true, it doesn't rain in Lima, but that is NOT a good thing. What it means is that everything (buildings, sidewalks, busses, human hair) quickly becomes coated in a dingy layer of atomized diesel exhaust and dust, which never washes off but rather builds up into an impregnable armor of drab. Okay, it's not strictly true that it doesn't rain. There are days in which you wake up to find the streets wet and the cars hissing as they go by on them. But this water comes from a fine mist known as the garúa which cannot be properly qualified as rain. Garúa does not have a cleansing effect.

As a demonstration I include a picture of this incredible house around the 43rd block of Arequipa, about which I will have more to say later. Notice the yellow "Vendo" sign. I don't know how long it's been there, but I think it's safe to say that the yellow no longer pops. Notice the incredible plaster or concrete work of the facade. All horizontal surfaces are stained a dark gray.

While we're on the topic of weather

The poet Clemente Althaus, best known for his derivative romantic odes and his patriotism, spent a few years in Europe in the 1850s and 1860s. Absence obviously makes the heart grow fond, because as he was coming home he wrote the following passage about Lima weather, which I found in his Obras poéticas de Clemente Althaus, Lima: Imprenta del Universo de Carlos Prince, 1872. I include a loose translation of my own, and some commentary.

¡Cuánto, oh mi Lima, anhelo
Ver de nuevo tu puro alegre cielo!
¡Cuánto echa el alma ménos tus iguales
Serenos días, y tus noches bellas,
De tus días rivales,
Donde todo su ejército de estrellas
En campo azul el firmamento aduna,
Y la luz de la luna,
No en lo claro, en lo suave solamente,
Es de la luz dïurna diferente!
¡Cuánto extraño tu blanda primavera,
Que alegre persevera
Y el año cambia en sempiterno Mayo;
Tu ambiente puro, sin cesar ageno,
Á la lluva y al trueno,
Y al siniestro relámpago y al rayo…

Now for my hasty translation:

Oh Lima, how I yearn once again to see
Your glad heavens, your pure skies!
How my soul longs for your serene days,
Equal one to the next; your fine nights
Rivaling the days in everything,
Where the blue field of the firmament
Congregates armies of stars;
Where the moon’s light,
Equaling daytime’s brightness,
Is yet immeasurably more velvet.
How I miss your tender springtime
Joyfully extended
Through a year of sempiternal May.
Your pure airs, always far remote
From thunder or rain
Or sinister lightning’s mighty blaze …

First thing to say is, what "pure" skies and "pure" airs? Did he somehow not remember the omnipresent mist and low clouds, blocking out most of the light, which have the added effect of making everything damp and thus nullifying whatever bodily warmth you might be conserving at any particular instant? What armies of stars in the blue field of the firmament might he be referring to? And does the absolute unchanging monotony of the climate translate, for him into "sempiternal May"? Only in a world--perhaps the southern winter--in which May is dark and cold and has no flowers. It should be fairly clear by now that not only was Althaus running on nostalgia when he wrote this, but also that he had blocked all conscious memory of sixty-degree days followed by sadder sixty-degree twilights and somewhat less sad (because you can't see the clouds) sixty-degree nights, all of which chase one another in endless succession.

Big Meat

While food = meat (Tara avoiding all dietary flesh), we are not raising Wren, strictly speaking, vegetarian. Tara doesn't complain if I offer her a morsel of chicken or sausage now and again. However, here we have a horse of a different color (actually, several dozen young pigs). At Mistura, the celebration of nationalism in the form of all things edible, we walked by this enormous installation of Chancho al palo, which looked delicious to me. Wren's comment: Mama, I don't like big meat.

Number 10: the food

We walk constantly. Strolling, we pass all manner of restaurants--small to large, "typical" to sterile-international, unpretentious to gastro-masterbatorgiastic. All have one thing in common: they serve food. The reason this troubles Tara is not simply that food = meat (she being a strict vegetariana). An ineffable Peruvian quality clings about all food in the greater Lima region, including Mexican and Italian.

Behold the frigging sun

This is the sky. Note its striking similarity in color and texture to the earth. This is what passes for a sunny day in Lima in September.

What Tara HATES about Lima

1) no internet; 2) no sun; 3) grime everywhere; 4) not charming; 5) no Spanish; 6) no money; 7) hurty foot; 8) no friends; 9) no jewelry; 10) the food. I might just start with number 2. What the hell, sun? Why so shy? I know it's nice to bury your head in the pillowy breasts of the clouds, but time to come up for air. This is getting ridiculous. We're not cold any more, not even Tara (who is ALWAYS cold), but for the last 56 days we've seen you maybe twice. It's SO depressing (or worse, because it makes you too tired for actual depression). Love, Kent