The following conversations were, of course, entirely in Spanish. I translate them here, with some paraphrasing as my memory -- the lack thereof -- requires.
"Adios, Pepe," I said, gripping his roug hand with mine.
"Adios, Gabriel," said he, "Take care and good luck. Don't forget what we talked about."
"I won't."
We stood by the steep roadside leading up to the summit of Cerro San Cristobal, a small mountain on the north side of Lima with stunning views over the whole city. Except, of course, for the Pacific Ocean, which remains blanketed in fog for half the year. We went our separate ways, Pepe and I. I walked by the side of the steep paved road up to the summit, towards the enormous white cross. Pepe and his dog Rufu began to drag the six bags of sand we had filled down to the slums of Rimac below, where they would supposedly be sold for a one sol each -- approximately 33 US cents. Pepe and Rufu walked down the same set of narrow concrete stairs which we had all ascended nearly an hour earlier. While filling the bags with sand, we had stood near the top of those stairs and talked. We discussed Peru, and the many failings of its leading politicians. We discussed the United States, and how it was not the paragon of goodness many in the Third World thought it was -- but that it still held promise for millions around the world. We discussed life and love, and what it meant to have children and to be involved with women. We discussed the future, what we eached hoped it would bring, for ourselves, for our countries, for the world. A beautiful conversation with a beautiful view. But it had not started as such.
The first time I saw Pepe was at the base of the narrow stairway. I had climbed through the hillside slums of Rimac near the base of the Cerro San Cristobal. Rimac is notoriously poor and, therefore, dangerous. Rimac looks like your stereotpyical Third World slum (think City of God, for those of you who have seen that excellent film). The concrete shacks are dilapidated, and the only way through is on winding concrete stairways. The streets have no names and no numbers. I had yet to see a mailman. But Rimac was the friendliest place I had been in Lima. Everyone greeted me with a "Hola" or "Buenos Dias". Two young children leaning over the edge of a concrete wall above me beckoned me to talk and play with them. I felt safe; travel guide warnings be damned.
Above Rimac the wide winding stairway-streets stopped and the narrow stairway to Cerro San Cristobal began. Here there were six or seven street dogs resting in the sun. As I walked up the stairs into their realm, all began barking furiously and running down towards me. I reached down for some courage and continued, yelling "Shut Up!" and "Go Away!". One brave mutt jumped on my leg from behind, and received an accidental kick. The rest jumped and howled around me, but made no move to bite. This is when I first saw Pepe. He was dressed in a T-shirt and shorts, with a another shirt tied around his head and neck, and a ratty baseball cap on top. His dog, a black and brown retriever-type mutt, trailed behind him searching for food scraps. I continued up the narrow stairs twenty feet behind him and the dog. We reached a rocky platform out of sight and earshot from Rimac below, and, as I found out later, from the road above. Pepe turned and walked towards me.
"Give me the money," he said.
"No," I said, "Why should I?"
"Give me the money," he reiterated.
Now he moved a step closer and reached his hands into my front pockets. Unbeknownst to him, his hand were perilously close to almost 300 Peruvian soles, an American passport, and two ATM cards. I pulled his hands out, we struggled for a minute, and I pushed him back.
"Fifty cents," said he.
I pulled out ten cents and tossed it to him.
"That's it. That's all I will give you."
He sat down on the steps, blocking my path. I leaned against a rock a few feet in front of him. I watched the dog nervously and looked down the stairs to see if any other would-be robbers might be approaching. There was no sense in trying to yell for help. There was no one to hear me, let alone anyone willing to help.
"Listen, buddy," I said, stepping towards him. "Why are you trying to rob me?"
"I need food," he said, "For my children. I have many, many children." He put on what I can only describe as a pained puppy-dog face. "Please," he said. From a robber to a beggar.
"We will make a deal," I said after a minute of silence. "I will give you half of the change in my pocket if you will be my guide to the top of the mountain." I estimated that I had 4 or 5 soles in my back pocket. "But if you try to rob me again, you will get nothing. You understand me?"
He shook his head in agreement. I started to walk up towards him. He stood up and blocked my path.
"Now," he said, "Give me the money now. Give me the cash." He again tried to reach for my pockets, this time putting his full weight into me, sending us both back agains the rock. Again I grabbed him by the wrists, then used my shoulder to push him back to his perch on the steps.
"That is not the deal!" I yelled, my voice pitch rising. "Do we have a deal, or don't we? Because if not, I will just go back down the way I came and you will get nothing."
"There are crazy people down there," he said, "and they will cut you with machetes and kill you. They are crazy. You can't go back there."
"I'll take my chances," I said, "Deal or no deal?"
He agreed again to the deal, and again tried to convince me to give him the cash he knew I had in my front pocket.
"Look," I said, "I want to share with you. Sharing is good. You will help me get to the top, and I will share with you. But there is a difference between sharing and robbing. You are trying to rob me. I will not give you any money with robbery. Sharing, yes. Robbery, no. Understand?"
There was more arguing about what I should give him and when I should give it to him. More pained puppy-dog faces. More threats about what would happen if I tried to go back down to Rimac. At one point he tried to trick me into walking back down the stairs a little so he could go over to the edge of the platform to see if there were any friends he could call up to help do me in. Lucky for me Pepe was as friendless as I. We started talking on a more friendly basis after that, where I learned his name and the name of his dog. After a little while longer of him trying to haggle with me and me trying to befriend him, Pepe decided that it was time to start walking up. "Let's go," he said, "Call Rufu for me."
I still lacked some trust in Pepe, and chose to walk behind him on the trip up. He made no further attempts to take money from me, and instead began to act as a tour guide. I am still not sure whether he did this out of fidelity to our original agreement, or whether he simply had a lot to say about our surroundings and rarely had someone to listen.
"They are going to build a giant bridge here," he said, gesturing grandly to the mountainside.
"A bridge," I said, "or a cable car?"
"A cable car," he said, without missing a beat. "There," he said, pointing to a small white building ahead of us, "that is the engineers' building. I was an engineer, too. I help build this stairway that we are walking on."
I said nothing, just listened as he continued his stories and grand engineering designs, wavering on the line between tangible dreams and insanity. His voice took on emotion as he talked, seeming proud as he would if these grand designs had actually been built and I was the first passenger on Pepe's cable car. He carried his sand bags over his shoulder as if they were already full, his back already bending and twisting under the weight.
He told me little in the way of specifics about his family, and asked little about mine. He told me at various points about several children he had, a wife, or two other women, and a house in Rimac. His name, he said, was actually Jose -- but he preferred Pepe. He answered all my questions about Lima and Peru with all the authority of a tenured professor. I answered all his questions about the United States. When we went our separate ways, I gave him half of my back pocket change -- which turned out to be more than I thought. I could have easily changed my mind, ran up the road to the summit where some tourist buses and security people waited. Yet he had performed his guide services well, and I am not one to stiff on the tip.
The tour guide at the summit asked how I had gotten there without the bus, and I explained.
"I was robbed on the way up," I told her, "or at least they tried. But it's okay now, we're friends." She looked confused, and then smiled when I smiled. In all likelihood Pepe and I will never see each other again. We live in different worlds. But perhaps someday I will come back to Lima and ride the cable car to the top of Cerro San Cristobal. Pepe's dream.
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