La ciudad y los perros: A mutt snoozes in front of an assault tank guarding the Presidential palace in downtown. (Photos by C-M.)
For most of my life, I’ve been making regular sojourns to Lima to visit my father’s family, a collection of hyper-nostalgic oddballs and eccentrics that have always led me to believe that Gabriel García Márquez doesn’t write fiction. But on this occasion, on assignment for a travel guide, I really had an opportunity to explore the city. And explore it, I did — from ceviche dives in La Victoria to the skulls of saints at the Santo Domingo Church in downtown to the high-end lounges of Barranco, where Lima’s beautiful people arrive to sip coca leaf sours and show off their money.
Lima is no thing of beauty. It clings precariously to a set of dusty, desert cliffs and is bathed in a perpetual fog six months out of the year. Much of its architecture is unremarkable, an assortment of concrete bunkers that appear to have been imported from 1960s East Germany. It is grimy. It is noisy. It is relentless in its sensory stimulation — from the food, which comes in a rainbow palette of nuclear colors, to the infinite supply of smog-belching buses, each of which is armed with a guy that hangs out the window and hollers the route: Arequipa, República, Abancaaaayyy.
But peel away the top layers and underneath you will find a city that is a novel waiting to be written. (And it has, by everyone from Sebastián Salazar Bondy to Mario Vargas Llosa to Daniel Alarcón.) It is in Lima that 2,000 year-old adobe pyramids sit silently in residential neighborhoods. It is in Lima that Andean cuy is doused in soy sauce and served Peking-style. And it is in Lima that well-to-do tennis moms and Ayacucho grandmothers in big skirts and braids all come together. It is a city imbued with a legacy of plunder and violence, but which has inherited all the pomp of a former viceregal capital. It is both ridiculous and sublime; one of the most preposterous settlements on earth. So, in homage to Salazar Bondy, C-Mon presents: Lima, the Surreal.
Click on images to supersize. Continue reading ‘Peru Dispatch: Lima the surreal.’