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The end of March was the grand despedida season, with farewell after farewell event filling the nights, and overlapping and competing for patronage. I, however, was going nowhere. I had already made my return to the immigration office.
The office in Sucre is far less chaotic or complicated than the one in Cochabamba. There are less foreign residents here. Instead of the long, crowded corridor and many rooms and desks of Cochabamba, the office in Sucre has only a few rooms. It is hard to get lost in the bureaucracy.
Even so, every time I step into one of these offices I am filled with a sense of unease. I find myself trying to look more presentable and respectable, and I find myself fumbling for a more polite, formal Spanish that I have never learned.
What is it about these places? I have never had a problem with extending my visa, and this time was no exception. The offices could even be comical, with many of the documents still banged out excruciatingly slowly on clamouring typewriters. None the less, when my documents are scrutinised, and old ones I had forgotten about resurface, and when I am asked the inevitable question ‘what are you doing in Bolivia?’, I feel an awful shudder of dread deep within me, which I must fight to suppress.
If this I what I feel, in the brief two minutes of my interview, what must the many Bolivians feel who must jump through innumerable hoops if they want to travel or live abroad? The stern faces and endless files of the Sucre immigration office are a pale imitation of the far greater apparatuses that watch over visitors to Australia, the US and Europe. The concern officials show here for gringos spending much time within their borders are borrowed from the far greater paranoia that western cultures feel towards the idea of strangers and foreigners in their midst. A friend of mine is, for instance, torn between her desire to finish her degree, and her desire to travel. As long as her degree is incomplete she has a better chance of gaining a tourist visa to the US, since she will have to return to Bolivia to finish her studies. She won’t become part of that great and fluid migrant mass that is so reviled and needed.
When I visit the office I take two copies from my passport – of my face and my entry stamp. In the past I had to take 200Bs ($30US), and had to surrender my passport for the night. This is nothing compared to the tests and checks and scrutinies that Bolivians face when and if they are able to travel. My passport opens endless doors to me; theirs narrows down their options enormously.
When I was delivered the question ‘what are you doing in Bolivia?’, I answered that I am writing articles about travel in the country. I had better make sure that is true, and that the articles are worth the silly sense of dread.
Autumn arrived in Sucre, replacing the summer tempests with long nights and mornings of cool rain. When the sun came out hummingbirds thrummed among the late flowers and the soggy street dogs re-took the streets. The hard sun lost its edge and the evenings grew longer and slower.
Another important date for the Bolivian calendar followed close behind the official start of autumn; March 23rd, remembered as the day that Bolivia lost its coastline to Chile in the war of the Pacific. The word in Spanish for this is enclaustromiento, which captures perfectly the sense of shrinking borders, and of confinement within the continent.
Every one of Bolivia’s neighbours had, at some point around the end of the nineteenth century, encroached into its territories, annexing them and their potential resource wealth. Brazil claimed great stretches of jungle just before the rubber trade collapsed. Paraguay claimed much of the Chaco badlands, but found none of the hoped-for petroleum there. Chile, on the other hand, not only took Bolivia’s coast, and its guano (used for fertiliser) and saltpetre (used in explosives) supplies, but subsequently found the world’s largest copper source in the previously-overlooked deserts that linked Bolivia to the coast.
It is the coast, though, that Bolivians yearn for. This is a cause that is still often brought up when Bolivians talk to me about their history; a source of shame and also vague and improbably hope that somehow someday a way to the ocean might open up again.
The War was fought between Chile – goaded on by British interests who sought to profit from the opening up of the nitrate (guano and saltpetre) resources – and Bolivia and Peru. Every time the War is brought up here, so too is the fact that Chile invaded during Carnival, a time held sacred and reserved for revelry. As a result Bolivia was caught off guard. Even so, the war carried on for several years, fought on land and sea, with old wooden warships and newer steel ones. The Chilean armed forces were far better equipped, bringing that terrible victory to Chile.
More neutral sources (i.e. Wikipedia) tell a slightly different story, with the exact territory before the war never specifically delineated (due to the rather rough partitioning up of South American in colonial times), and with a dispute over resources already raging when Chile sent in troops. Thereafter it was Bolivia that declared war.
Today the war is remembered mainly through the figure of Eduardo Avaroa, a civilian who lead the Bolivian defence in a skirmish, and an early casualty of the war. Every city seems to have a street and often a monument dedicated to Avaroa. Usually he is depicted already fallen, but raising his hand or gun or head in defiance, a national martyr and a symbol of the pervasive spirit of defiance toward larger, outside powers that is so characteristic here.
The chances of Bolivia ever escaping its enclaustromiento are basically zero. Not without another bitter war at least. This is probably why March 23 is still an important date. It is a chance to remember, and to dream about what Bolivia once was, and what it would be nice for it to someday be again. Until that unlikely golden age arrives, there is little to do but eat trout from Lake Titicaca and the other smaller bodies of water still belonging to Bolivia, and to imagine what that great and distant ocean must look and taste and smell and feel like.
Thanks to the wonderful resident gringos of Sucre, and to their personal libraries, I’ve somehow managed – in a city where the bookstores only sell stationery and in which the only people who read in the plazas or the cafes or on buses are foreigners – to keep myself entrenched in the realm of the highbrow and the literary. I’ve even been able to choose the direction my readings have taken, which is how I have returned to the world of Jose Saramago.
Please note, I’m about to completely spoil the plot for anyone who hasn’t read this book.
All the Names bears a number of similarities to The Double, which I’ve already blogged about. Both narratives see a very bored and single man becoming fixated on the search for another person whom he has never met. Both men delve into phone books and other types of catalogues, though in The Double the catalogue is a video store, while in All the Names it is – among other places – a cemetery.
All the Namesis a meditation on death and memory. At the centre of the novel is the question of what we do with the dead, and of where we go when we die. Saramago’s approach is humanist, though; there is no suggestion of afterlives here. At the most basic level, when we die we go to the cemetery and become a grave, and we go into the Central Registry and become a death certificate.
The protagonist, Senhor Jose, works in the Central Registry, where the all the names of the living are separated from those of the dead by an archaic filing system. Every life and every name is, in the Central Registry, reduced to dates of birth, marriage, divorce and death, and to the names of spouses and direct family. It is a reductive way of remembering the dead. It is also a way of forgetting them, of shelving them away in the dust and gloom of the registry.
Senhor Jose spends almost the entire novel searching for a woman he will never meet. In doing so he is trying to give detail to her life, to make it more than just the recorded dates of birth, death, etc. This is no easy task; the woman disappears and leaves few clues about her life or death. Before he reaches the end of his quest Senhor Jose knows he is approaching an impassable wall, a cul-de-sac which is the obscurity death casts over life.
A building sense of melancholy hangs over the narrative; Saramago is not seeking to cheat the simple, hard facts of death and of the cemetery and the registry. As a result the book is poignantly, hauntingly sad at times, and leaves an unnerving sense of loss which brought itching tears to my eyes. This is as much because of the loneliness that Senhor Jose never escapes as because of his musings on death.
Still, with Senhor Jose’s quest, Saramago depicts some of the small, dedicated efforts we make to ensure that we keep the dead in more than just the catalogues of cemetery and registry. A concern of the book is the keeping or intrusion of the dead among the living. The walls of the registry and cemetery are continually knocked down and expanded to make room for and contain all of the dead. Eventually the cemetery grows too big for walls, and the graves of the dead begin to overlap with the land of living.
The final act of Senhor Jose, aided by the authoritarian Registrar who provides a wonderful sub-plot, is to de-register the death of the woman, to destroy any recorded signs of her death, to place her file back amongst the living. It is a gesture that changes nothing, but which is about as much as can be done to give dignity to the dead, to ensure they never become just file and headstone. Even human memory is fickle, Saramago notes; there is much about a person that is irretrievably lost when they die; the the cul-de-sac that we, like Senhor Jose, arrive at in our remembering.
This is a sad book for one as vivacious as Saramago. He does nothing to try to evade or deny the cold inevitability of death, but his idea that the names of the dead belong alongside the names of the living, and not off in the dark repositories where lives are diminished and then forgotten has a sweet note to it. Life and death are, after all, close companions that one way or another belong side by side.
This week couchsurfing.com celebrated the registration of its one millionth member. This represents quite an achievement for a site that depends for its success upon the goodwill and good faith of people. The success and spread of couchsurfing across the globe (its million members and their couches are scattered across over two hundred countries. It is even possible to, for example, find a couch to stay on in Antarctica) seems to me to be a wonderful tonic to the general spread of consumptive, self-focused tourism.
I joined couchsurfing in 2006, as it was recovering from a near-fatal site crash, and as it was starting to enter the mainstream backpacker parlance. Now, two and a half years later, I almost never need to explain what couchsurfing is; I only need to drop the name and people understand what I am talking about.
Originally I had been sceptical of the project; when I first considered joining up I couldn’t see that anyway would want me in their home, and I wondered what nefarious purposes people might use the site for. I didn’t really begin to embrace the project until it occurred to me that most hostels were also full of people with un-hospitable and quite nefarious designs. A bathroom in a house is always cleaner than a hostel bathroom. I also had a few wonderful experiences getting started with CS in the Balkans. Although the concept of vegetarianism raised a few issues – and continues to do so quite often – I was met with overwhelming warmth and hospitality.
I really began to embrace CS when I travelled across the US. Between the nights on the greyhound and the nights on peoples’ couches, floors, spare beds and air mattresses I was able to experience a far broader spectrum of American life than I had anticipated. I knew what to expect in New York and California, but my favourite experiences came courtesy of the hospitality of friends and couchsurfers in such places as Ohio, Michigan, Alabama and Texas. There was no way I could have crossed the country on my budget, nor could I have seen half of what I had wanted to see if it hadn’t been for CS.
Thereafter I was well and truly hooked. During my year in Korea almost everyone I knew was a couchsurfer – either because I met them through CS or because I brought them into the CS fold. There have been occasions where things didn’t quite go as wanted; when, for example, a steak ended up on the plate before me, or a host became a little over-amorous, but these have been only the tiniest setbacks, and are a small price to pay for being given the opportunity to enter into the lives and homes of people all over the world, to see how they live, and to share with them food and tales.
Couchsurfing will no doubt continue to grow, as more of its million members start to try their luck with the kindness of strangers (currently although there are a million members of CS, there have only been some million and a half successful hostings. Given that I have stay with perhaps fifty people, and others have stayed with a lot more than me, it is clear that many CS members haven’t yet had then chance to stay with or to host people). It is an addictive thing, this meeting of and sharing with strangers, and it has utterly changed the way I travel. I’ve barely stayed in a dorm since signing up, and I see little reason ever to return to them. There are plenty of remote corners of the world that CS is yet to reach – there are not as many CSers in Bolivia as in its neighbouring countries, for example – but given its general purpose of connecting the people and fostering exchange, it seems inevitable that sooner or later there will be couches or floors or hammocks available pretty much anywhere that people care to visit.
It’s very hard to draw a defining line between work and play in Bolivia. There is none of the stoic solemnity surrounding work that seems to be the norm in the west. Most of the time the attitude towards work is frustratingly casual, while leisure is taken very, very seriously. Nothing is observed as fastidiously as the long lunch break, or the long night out.
Given the difficulties we gringos face in distinguishing work from play, it is very helpful to find one of Bolivia’s largest festivals, celebrated in and around Tarabuco, a town not far from Sucre, is named Pujllay, or ‘Play’ in Quechua.
Confusing matters slightly was the fact that I was sort of attending Pujllay in a work capacity. Although Condortrekkers is still not quite legally registered, we its representatives found ourselves taking a group of backpackers along to the festivities. This was never meant to constitute more than sharing transport, but somehow things got mixed up, and we ended up more or less as guides for the weekend.
The weekend was scorchingly hot, and the first to really feel the heat was the truck that was to take us to Tarabuco, which ran out of drive on a hill, and could go no further. We were forced to find another ride, and ended up perched in the back of a much larger truck, watching the green valleys roll by.
Tarabuco was its usual tranquil self on Saturday; the real festivities started out in the countryside in the tiny pueblos, and would only converge on the town on the following morning. We had a contact in the nearby pueblo of Pisily, and so with our group – who had turned out to be a rather excellent mix of open-minded and enthusiastic travellers – we hiked out of Tarabuco and up a long valley of flocks and fields. On the occasions when I make it out into the countryside I am always struck by its simple loveliness; the tiny stands of crops (who knew that potatoes grew such pretty purple flowers?), the lonely, elderly shepherds, the adobe houses and the steep hills and valleys.
On our route we passed a couple of other groups already returning, and when eventually we reached Pisily the sun was casting long sideways planes of gold across the land, and the people were resting after the festivities. Still, before the sun went down and the multitude of stars and satellites took to the sky, there was time to share the best meal of the weekend, and some very local firewater, as well as to see the men dance and play their hoarse pipes and flutes.
The Tarabuco region is famous for its handicrafts, and for this weekend the men were assembled in their finest gear. Leather hats styled upon the helmets of the conquistadores, and wide ponchos of deep red and black. When they danced they danced in thick-soled wooden shoes and enormous, clamouring spurs.
Despite our untimely arrival we were met with great warmth by the tiny pueblo. We numbered twelve and this was a huge number to make space for, and yet the only hesitation was that of the shy children, who hid among mothers’ skirts and could barely find a word to say to us.
We trekked back in the dark, the night cool on faces tinged poncho-red by sun and moonshine. All of Tarabuco turned out for a concert that evening, but few of us saw this through to the end. We were no match for the seriousness of local merrymaking.
Sunday was fiercely hot, and before our patio breakfast was done skin was burning and the Australians amongst us were scampering for sunscreen, hats and scarves. Overnight Tarabuco had transformed, with every street crammed with stalls selling handicrafts or snacks.
As we left the hostel a helicopter buzzed overhead, lowering itself over the fairground. Word surged through the streets that Evo had come, and instantly there were running, shouting forms everywhere as the whole town turned out to greet their president. Sucre may be anti-Evo, but this province as whole is pro-Evo, and this is particularly true in indigenous Tarabuco. By the time we reached the fairground people were already leaving, their heads hung low; it wasn’t their hero Evo, it was only the vice-president Alvaro Linares, a former guerilla turned intellectual. His motorcade stormed through the narrow streets and was well-greeted, but the momentary fervour aroused by the possibility of Evo had dissipated.
With Linares seated on a pavilion in the main plaza, the dances and processions and music began. They would continue almost unceasingly for the rest of the day.
Pujllay commemorates a battle during the struggle for independence, in which Tarabuco essentially won its freedom by beating back a Spanish contingent. Every year on the main fairground a giant Pukhara (a tall, decorated scaffold of wood) is erected, and offerings of fruit, cheese, beer, jars of olives, bottles of mayonnaise, and other wares are hung from this. At the top of the Pukhara the fresh carcass of a cow presides over the events, while down below the dance troops circle and cavort, until eventually some men climb the Pukhara to collect and distribute all its bounty to the waiting throngs below.
By the early afternoon the fairground was filled with people. Clouds of dust were kicked up by the shuffling, stomping feet of the indefatigable dancers, and thin skeins of bluish smoke drifted about the hundreds of hotplates and barbeques. The drink of choice during Pujllay is chicha, a local brew made of fermented corn and almost anything else. Traditionally the process is started by chewing the corn, though this is less common today. Under tents great buckets, barrels and vats of chicha were opened, and communal cups were dipped and passed, every drinker offering a brief libation to Pachamama, or mother earth, before throwing back the draughts that tasted of peach or orange or corn or foot.
We passed the entire day under the Pukhara, passing cups of chicha and chasing the shade. The dance groups continued relentlessly, the media descended upon the vice-president, and when he left he was farewelled warmly, the disappointment of his arrival forgotten. This was no doubt aided by the huge volumes of chicha consumed. As the day progressed the number of people stumbling into the river beds and arroyos to vent bursting bladders increased, as did the number of scuffles, the number of amorous intertwinings, the number of comatose forms lying in the dust, and the number of locals eager to talk to gringos, and to share yet more chicha with them.
As shade re-took the field men scrambled up and onto the Pukhara, and soon the grounds were flooded with celebratory breads and sausages and cheese and fruit and bottle of beer and mayonnaise. The cow remained nobly mounted at the top of the tower, and was still there when we left, cramming ourselves into a mini-bus, which surged into the twilight and towards Sucre, racing and dodging the other speeding buses, vans and trucks filled with dozy revellers. There is nothing as exhausting as play in Bolivia, and I would welcome the return of the week, of the working days, so I could get some rest before the next weekend bout of play.
