Cusco

By Phil Voysey

A failed plan can be a blessing. When Phil is unable to travel through South America because of visa restrictions he settles in Cusco, Peru. He realises it is the best chance he will ever have to learn Spanish and local culture, beginning a relationship with the fabled Inca city that will transform him.

Cusco – a journey from the head to the heart, is a memoir in three parts spanning the period 1985 till the present day. Part one explores Phil’s relationship with a local family and his struggle to learn Spanish. Who is he if he can’t communicate, if he can’t tell a joke? And what does it mean to love: a family whose language he can hardly speak, a Quechua friend with a drinking problem and an anger born of a violent history of conquest, Andrina a woman from California with a powerful sense of her destiny in Cusco, a girlfriend who greets him each day with love songs. In the background is his love for a woman he met in Canada before coming to Peru. But she has her own struggle with sexuality and God. At the end of part one Phil finds himself stranded on a border between Ecuador and Peru. It is not just a physical border, it is a border of the mind and heart. Where is he meant to be? Which direction is home, which way is love?

In part two Phil returns to Cusco to help American friend Andrina establish Chicuchas Wasi, a home for orphan and street kids. They return to an atmosphere of fear and suspicion. Peru has two active terrorist groups; the country is descending into political violence and economic chaos. Some locals suspect them of being child traffickers. Phil finds himself playing Dad to kids with tuberculosis and tragic stories of abandonment and neglect. The challenge is learning how to love these children and how to give without burning out. He doesn’t always succeed in rising to the best version of himself. One failure contributes to the death of a young baby.

In the last part of the memoir Phil returns to Cusco with his Dad. He reconnects with the Chicuchas Wasi kids after 17 years. They stay with the family in Cusco bringing two families together and giving Phil and his Dad a chance to see each other through different eyes. But a tragic death in the family reminds Phil of the harsh reality of Andean life where la tristeza(melancholy) is ever present and life is a constant dance and celebration of love, joy and sadness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Aug 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9781922812780

Book preview

Prologue

My mother wrote me into existence with these words penned in my scrapbook when I was born:

This man is freed from servile bands

Of want to rise or fear to fall

Lord of himself but not of lands

He hath nothing but hath all

It is a verse from seventeenth-century poet Sir Henry Wotton’s Character of a Happy Life. My mother imagined for me a future of happiness based on spiritual rather than material fulfilment. She wrote my destiny, setting me on that steep climb towards Maslow’s summit of self-actualisation with a solid foundation of Christian values and a Ventolin inhaler.

Of my three siblings, I was the one who had my mother’s lungs. She was sickly with asthma and chronic bronchiectasis, beginning each day bent over three pillows coughing up phlegm and spitting it into a plastic bowl lined with tissues. The sound of her spitting was like a morning mantra. The disease sapped her energy – asthma is enervating since it restricts the oxygen flow in the body – but it didn’t diminish her faith in God. Mum sang in the church choir and was secretary of the Methodist Missionary Fellowship. I wondered why God inflicted such a horrible disease on such a devout woman. Seeing Mum suffer sowed the first seeds of doubt about God and Christianity.

I was skinny and sickly too. I tried to overcome my asthma by playing rugby in winter and cricket in summer. Exercise was the only reliable way to manage the disease, although the summer pre-season road runs that reduced me to a crumpled breathless heap, and the cold winter nights that sucked the breath out of my lungs and set off the wheezing, were excruciating.

This was before Ventolin and steroid preventers and there were many long nights. I would wake in the middle of the night and cry out ‘Mum, I can’t breathe’ and she would be beside me in an instant, her sleeping pattern in perfect sync with my breathing, propping me up on two pillows, calming me down. That feeling of trying to breathe through a straw that had been crushed flat. Sheer panic. Only the sound of my wheezing in the darkness. My lungs straining, my chest rising and falling, rounding my shoulders.

‘Mum, I can’t breathe.’

‘Shhhh. Try to stay calm.’

She would lean across to mop the sweat from my forehead with a cold washer. I would start to cry.

‘Shhhh, try to stay calm. Concentrate on breathing.’

Wiping the tears from my face. Disappearing for a moment and returning with one of those vile Tedral tablets crushed up in a spoonful of honey so I could get it down without throwing up.

‘It will pass soon.’

She would start singing, ‘Go to sleep, go to sleep, da da da da da da …’ her voice so soothing, calming the panic, drowning out my wheezing, filling my lungs. To the sound of that voice, the voice that celebrated God every Sunday, I would fall asleep.

Perhaps it was asthma, the lack of oxygen flowing to my brain, that forged my restless, agitated spirit. Unable to sit still in a classroom, barely able to get through a university degree in teaching, unable to focus on processing leave forms as a Clerk Class One in the public service, short attention span, forever looking elsewhere for stimulation, wondering where the next breath was coming from. And living in Sydney, with its smallness and suburban mediocrity, certainty and predictability of a life trajectory of work, house, marriage, children, was like taking that straw, crushing it and sucking hard. I didn’t want the life of my father getting up each morning for forty years, catching the 7:45 city train to work as a security manager at the National Bank, working three jobs to pay off a mortgage, living for tennis on Saturday and Sunday. Ultimately, that is what gave me the impetus to escape, first to Zimbabwe then to Peru. I didn’t want to be my father; I didn’t want his life.

In the clean, dry air of Zimbabwe I learnt to live without asthma; I learnt the joy of being able to fill my lungs with air. But it was in the thin, rarefied air of Cusco, the old Inca capital at 3500 metres, where it is difficult to fill the lungs, that I learnt to value each breath. And when you know how to breathe you’re ready to love. Any Buddhist will tell you that.

PART 1:

THE FAMILY

1. Cusco, Peru, October 1985

I walk out of the Hotel Bellavista, Hotel Beautiful View, into grey overcast skies. My head is buzzing from the 3500-metre altitude. I’m concerned that the rarefied air might bring on an asthma attack or worse, soroche, altitude sickness, so I plod slowly, mindfully, concentrating on each breath, feeling the hardness of the cobblestones on my feet, still slippery from overnight rain, and the sharp air on my face.

Fifty metres down the street I come to a bridge and stop to take in the view. In the distance clouds fold like blankets over the mountains enclosing Cusco. Fifteen or twenty metres below is a disused railway line that, judging from the stalls and people moving about, has been converted into a market.

I keep moving. Past the Central Market bustling with street sellers, the intoxicating smell of herbs in the air. A campesina with pigtails halfway down her back, wearing a cardigan and skirt, pulls onions and potatoes out of sacks and arranges them neatly on her stall, barking orders at a man in Quechua.

The footpath along Avenida Ayacucho has potholes like craters so I keep one eye on the footpath and the other on the onrushing pedestrians.

So much bustle and noise. People on their way to work squeezing past, bumping shoulders, cars honking. In a section where the footpath widens a man has spread out a collection of nuts and bolts, nails and screws, many of them rusty. I’m in my own bubble, moving slowly against the tide.

My lungs feel the strain of the altitude and my legs are heavy, as if I’m walking in ski boots, but I keep moving. Down Avenida Sol. Money changers come at me flashing calculators and Peruvian soles.

‘Cambio dolares. Cambio dolares,’ a young woman says.

I’m not about to change money on the street. It doesn’t feel safe standing in public taking money out of my money belt. And I don’t know what the exchange rate is.

‘No gracias.’

A woman wanders past with coathangers for sale. A boy tries to sell me chewing gum and cigarettes. I stick to my bubble.

‘No gracias.’

Further down the street a woman has a selection of magazines and books spread out on the footpath. El Sexo is a title that stands out, next to booklets on Jesus. Up ahead a man is pissing against an adobe wall, holding his dick in a sort of leg spinner’s grip to maintain discretion. This is the pissing wall, judging by the stains and the smell.

My head is spinning from the altitude. This place is crazy and glorious. The air is invigorating. Such a relief after Lima with its suffocating air of diesel and dust that made me sneeze and wheeze. I had to get out of there. Cusco is so fresh and other-worldly. But I don’t know what I’m doing here. How can I be here when the love of my life is elsewhere, thousands of kilometres away?

I climb the steps of El Correo Central, my stomach churning. Veronica promised a letter would be waiting for me in Cusco.

The woman at the poste restante counter has a face as grey as her uniform. ‘V chica,’ I say. She gives me the pile of letters and postcards under ‘V’. So much for security: Viljoen, Van Huysen, Volker, Vance but no Voysey. Bugger.

Given the lack of security I wonder at the efficiency of the Peruvian postal system. What if someone else took the letter, deliberately or by mistake, and is reading it right now? What if it just got lost in the system somewhere in its journey from Strasbourg to Cusco? Maybe it’s sitting in a pile of other lost letters here or in the post office in Lima. What if Virginia has had a change of heart? What if she is cuddling up to some woman right now?

I push that thought away.

It’s a slow plod up Avenida Sol. I have nothing to do and nowhere to be. In the Plaza de Armas I sit on a wooden bench with my back to a cathedral and the statue of Christo Blanco, the White Christ, standing on a hill overlooking the city, arms outstretched like the one in Rio.

I start flicking through my guidebook, which tells me that my hotel is in the most dangerous part of town. Hotel Beautiful View is smack bang in the middle of an area known for pickpockets, thieves and muggers. Typical me, really. Not coming up with a solid plan. Spending thirteen hours on a train from Arequipa, not thinking about accommodation until fifteen minutes before arriving then cursorily picking out a name I liked without checking details about its location. I didn’t see any other gringos in the Hotel Beautiful View this morning at breakfast.

They are all here in the centre near to all the cafés, bars and travel agencies, where I should be, damn it.

A street seller approaches with jumpers and woven belts draped over her arm.

‘Comprame, Señor.’ Buy from me.

‘No gracias.’

Then a shoeshine boy with a Nike cap wants to shine my shoes.

‘No gracias.’

I am fluent in saying no. It is a safe default position. It means I don’t have to engage in conversation with the Spanish I don’t have. I don’t have to experience the frustration of not understanding, of constantly having to say ‘No entiendo’ (I don’t understand). I can stay in my bubble.

I’m a target sitting here so I keep moving. I wander into a narrow laneway where a beggar is playing a harp. He has a crude cardboard sign around his neck – Soy ciego, I’m blind – and a donation cup on the ground. He is playing ‘El Condor Pasa’, the Peruvian folk song made famous by Simon and Garfunkel. The walls on both sides are made from smooth, perfectly cut and fitted blocks of granite – andesite in actual fact, I will later discover. I run my finger along the red oxide joins. This must be the blood from the Inca slaves who sculpted these walls. So hard, so cold, so perfect. There is no space between the stones to squeeze even a pinhead of self-doubt. One stone has thirteen sides. When I glance up I can see the much cruder stone construction of the Spanish colonial buildings. This was the Spanish way. To assert their superiority by building on top of Inca walls, unwittingly demonstrating their crude barbarity. Where the stones meet is where civilisations clashed. It is where two worlds, the old and the new, carved out different truths.

I cross a road and enter another narrow laneway. It smells of shit and piss. In one corner there is the sloppy turd of a desperate person. Poor bugger. Must have drunk the local water. But these are Spanish walls so he might have been making a statement.

I continue up a cobblestone street, lined on both sides with whitewashed buildings with heavy wooden doors. The steep incline feels like the final ascent to a higher truth. My mind is buzzing, my lungs straining, my heart thumping. Which will come first: the asthma attack or the heart attack? But I keep moving because this path leads to somewhere, hopefully to a sense of purpose.

At an intersection with roads spoking in all directions and a fountain in the middle I take the street veering hard right only because it goes downhill. I focus on two things: breathing and avoiding the potholes in the footpath – a sound philosophy for life, I realise. There is a snow-capped mountain far off in the distance: Mt Ausangate, one of the apus or Gods protecting Cusco.

Halfway down I come across a sign: Instituto Cultural Norte Americano – North American Cultural Institute. A concrete three-storey building set back from the road. The Institute teaches English. I wander in, out of curiosity. A woman named Carmen with a big smile and exuberant personality greets me. She’s the director and speaks English with an American accent.

‘I see you have English classes here. Do you need teachers?’ I ask.

‘We do. Do you have experience as a teacher?’

‘I have a degree in teaching and a Diploma in Teaching English as a Foreign Language from the University of Sydney. I can bring in my qualifications if you want.’

‘No, no that’s great. Can you start this afternoon?’

‘Um. Sure.’

‘Fantastic. Classes run from five to eight. I don’t have a chance to talk right now but why don’t you come in at four and I can show you around. Here’s the course book you’ll be teaching. You just have to follow the lessons. This is Week 1.’

‘Ok.’

I wander back up the street in a state of disbelief. I can’t believe what I’ve done. Committed to teaching before having a chance to settle in. Dad would be proud of me; grasping at security and certainty as a first priority. I have to laugh at myself, and my father within me. I don’t wander well. I’m no Bruce Chatwin or Paul Theroux taking pleasure in the journey. For me travel is about arriving and having a safe place to put my money, passport and guitar. I’d done the same thing in Canada. Taken no time to look around before finding work at the Chateau Lake Louise as a bartender.

There is something profoundly satisfying about putting down roots in foreign soil, of getting to know a place, of discovering a sense of belonging far from home. Two years teaching in Zimbabwe taught me that. But the truth is I crave the security and stability I am trying to escape.

Working was always part of the plan. I bought a one-way ticket to Lima via Vancouver and Toronto. I had a friend in Calgary – she was more an infatuation – and had a visa to work in Canada. I would get bar work and earn extra money before heading to South America. In Peru I would spend three months learning Spanish before heading to Chile to find work as an English language teacher. After a few years I would continue on to Argentina. I was planning to be away for years. Driven by an existential need to be elsewhere and the desire to become completely fluent in a second language I had no thoughts of returning to Australia.

I’d been tossing up between Japan or South America, Japanese or Spanish. It was my sister Leah who convinced me that South America was the better choice. She’d experienced both cultures and had enjoyed living in South America more. Perhaps she’d been seduced by the experience of living out of expensive hotels with her business consultant husband in Santiago and Buenos Aires. Was she blinded to the undercurrent of violence in Latin America in the ‘70s: the Dirty War in Argentina, the atrocities of the Pinochet regime in Chile? Did she fully understand that in recommending South America she was recommending a part of the world with a reputation second to none for bloody dictatorships, terrorism and violent crime? Perhaps she did.

My plan was bold. My plan was courageous and inspired. My plan was completely fucked. What I didn’t understand was that I wouldn’t be able to enter Chile or Argentina without proof of onward travel. Why hadn’t the travel agent told me that? Why hadn’t she convinced me of the wisdom of getting a return ticket? And so here I am. Stuck in Peru without a ticket home and without the love of my life. Stuck with no plan while I develop a better plan. But at least I’ve got work. At least I know where I have to be at four every afternoon.

Teaching goes past in a blur. I have a class of thirty Level 3 students. They can have basic conversations so I have them practising introductions and getting to know each other.

After class I politely decline Carmen’s invitation to join a few of them for dinner. I just need to sleep. Outside, columns of water are slithering through the streets. October is the wet season in the Andes.

Closer to the centre I wander into a broasteria. It has three posters side by side over the front counter: Diego Maradona (aka God), Christ and a woman thrusting her naked bum existentially at the world. The holy trinity: Football, Religion and Sex.

I’m sitting at a table topped with cracked laminex eating roast chook, hot chips and a sliver of lettuce and tomato I can’t eat – salads washed in contaminated water are a promise of giardia or worse – when a young girl approaches. She is no more than nine or ten with slugs of snot trailing from her nose, matted hair and a jumper three sizes too big. She looks at my plate, holds her hand to her mouth in a hungry gesture and produces a plastic bag. She wants my food scraps, mainly bones. I’m about to give them to her when the owner chases her out of the restaurant.

I quickly pay and follow her outside. She is with a group of four children sorting through several plastic bags of food scraps. They disappear in the direction of the plaza. I follow at a distance.

The rain is tapping on my GORE-TEX. I am warm and snug and dry. The four children are wet, no doubt cold and hungry. I watch them sniffing glue from a plastic bag and picking at the food scraps some more.

I just observe from a safe distance under the colonnade bordering the plaza. They can’t know I’m here, watching them like some sort of poverty voyeur. I can’t approach them; I have no words to communicate. I literally have nothing to say. And what do I have to offer? I don’t want to give them money. That’s not the answer. I could buy them food. But something holds me back. A feeling of impotence, of inadequacy in the face of their hopelessness. It glues me to the stones.

They head across the plaza to the cathedral and huddle against the front door. It’s closed.

Of course it’s fucking closed. Catholicism is a ritualised faith that takes place on Sundays. You can do atrocious things during the week and go to confession on Sundays and be absolved of your sins in the eyes of God. That is why I am not a Christian.

I want someone to open the fucking door, let these kids in and feed them. If I had an axe I’d be tempted to bash it open. Instead I look on in silence as they wander off to find somewhere drier.

I walk briskly back to my hotel, through the Central Market where mangy dogs are scavenging through food scraps, and pull out my notebook. The words come in a rush.

Have you ever had a child pick the scraps from your plate ?

Have you ever had those muddied bloodshot eyes look imploringly into yours?

Have you seen them huddled under a blanket and a plastic sheet?

While the rain came down and the floodwater washed over their crusted feet

Chorus

You stand in your pulpit spewing out God’s word

Contraception’s an abomination you emphasis to your herd

But how many abandoned children starving on the streets

Will make you really listen to the sinners grovelling at your feet?

They wander the streets in their tattered clothes selling cigarettes

They have no home they have no hope they take anything they can get

They see what the future holds in the patchwork scarecrow forms

Of beggars lying in the gutter, cup empty spirit torn

Chorus

How do you feel that your hypocrisy takes food out of children’s mouths?

Leaves them starving desperate homeless and cold

Why don’t you look more closely at your church glistening with gold?

And see that there’s no God there, his spirit has been sold (repeat)

I play around with a simple chord progression: E – D – A. I give it a driving rhythm. It’s not long before I have a song: ‘El Mensaje a la Papa’, Message to the Pope. A few days later I discover I’ve made a mistake with the title. The Pope in Spanish is El Papa, not La Papa. I’ve written an angry song to The Potato. I decide to keep the original title since a potato has more to offer a hungry street kid than the Pope.

The intensity of my emotion takes me aback. It has taken only a day for this place to get under my skin and inside my bones. One day to experience disappointment and wonder, one day to discover a purpose in being here, one day to care.

2. Lima, Peru, September 1985

I arrived in Lima with only a few words of Spanish. I could say hola, si, no, gracias, por favor, and el pueblo unido jamas sera vencido – the people united will never be defeated. I’d learnt the phrase on a march through the streets of Sydney chanting for El Salvadorean independence – El pueblo unido jamas sera vencido, Nicaragua has won, El Salvador will win. I learnt it before I could locate El Salvador on a map. But I’d read Noam Chomsky’s Washington Connection and knew enough about the evils of Yankee imperialism in Latin America and everywhere to chant the phrase with passion.

Arriving with no Spanish was a deliberate strategy. As an English teacher I wanted to understand what it was like to learn a language from scratch, to understand what my students experienced. It was a strategy only a naive fool would have considered.

Lima was a scary place where a bit of Spanish might have been useful. In the ‘80s the city had a reputation for violent crime. There were pickpockets, muggers, kidnappers and two active terrorist groups: the Cuban inspired Tupac Amaru and the Maoist inspired Sendero Luminoso, the Shining Path, which, of the two, was the more fanatical, more dangerous and more likely to blow away a bumbling, stumbling tourist who found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Even the sun was too scared to reveal itself. Wandering around I could see it hiding behind a grey acrid-smelling pall of diesel and dust, steadfastly refusing to come out. In the wealthy suburb of San Isidro where I was staying there were three-metre walls and security gates protecting every house. On every flat roof, metal scaffolding protruding optimistically. Dogs barked at passers-by. Headlines such as ‘Secuestrados’ (Kidnapped), ‘Terrorismo’, ‘Asesinatos’ leapt off the front pages of newspapers. In the centre of the city, soldiers carrying semi-automatic rifles stood outside banks and on street corners, a disturbing reminder of how dangerous Lima was, but in a perverse way, comforting. They made me feel safe. I somehow imagined no one was going to attempt to rob me while they were around.

But they didn’t stop me being sensibly paranoid. Every traveller I met had a story of a fellow traveller who’d been robbed at knife or gunpoint – often they were repeating the same story that had done the rounds of the gringo trail. An American I met lost his backpack on arrival at the airport to thieves kindly offering to carry it to a waiting taxi. Welcome to Peru.

It was the inability to communicate that disoriented me most. I had my Berlitz Spanish for Travellers. It was useful in a static, controlled situation like a café where minimal language was needed, but in most other contexts it was useless. What was the point of being able to ask directions if I couldn’t understand the response? Donde va el bus? Where does this bus go? A useful question when I’m stuck in the middle of Lima trying to get back to San Isidro. However, being able to rattle off the phrase gave the impression of a fluency I didn’t have. The response would come back in Limeñan Spanish ramped up to warp speed, unfamiliar sounds jabbing at my brain: dadadadadadada daratatatatatatat, and I would not only be none the wiser, but frustrated and none the wiser.

I walked around Lima in those first days in a fog, sneezing and wheezing – breathing Lima air was like sticking my mouth over a vacuum cleaner and reversing the thrust – backpack on my chest, money belt tucked inside my jeans. When I sat down on a park bench or in a café I put one leg through the straps. I eyed everyone with suspicion: the old man reading his paper next to me on the park bench in the Plaza de San Martin, the woman glancing at me as I wandered down Avenida Union, the bunch of street kids playing tiros, marbles, in the Plaza de Armas. There were gangs of street kids known as pirañas for their ability to strip a hapless victim of all belongings within seconds.

This was the consequence of not having language to communicate. Distrust and fear filled the void where common sense and perspective should have been. My purpose was simple: don’t get robbed. And yet I had already been robbed. Robbed of being able to smile, laugh and have a good time. Surrounded by the bustle of life in Lima I felt so alone.

On my second day in Lima a young man walked up to me in Avenida Union and started talking to me in broken accented English.

‘Where are jou from?’ Spanish speakers had trouble pronouncing the ‘y’ sound.

‘Australia.’

‘Cangurus.’

‘Yes.’

I looked around to see if he had an accomplice and kept walking.

‘Sorry, I don’t speak bery good English.’

‘You’re doing ok. Your English is better than my Spanish.’

‘Thank you. I am learning English six month.’

‘Very good.’

‘My name is Justo. What’s yours?’

‘Phil.’

‘Jou want to eat ceviche?’

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s special Peruvian food. Come.’

I followed him to a local restaurant. Something about him made him trustworthy. Perhaps it was the neat, pressed pants and business shirt he was wearing. Perhaps it was his English. I could understand him. Struggling to cope with the unfamiliarity of Spanish swirling around me, that was a bonus. Something told me he was harmless. I just needed to connect with someone.

It would be too much to claim that I had a finely tuned intuition about strangers, that I could accurately distinguish the genuinely friendly person from the con artist and thief. In fact, I had a bad habit of following strangers through the streets of unfamiliar violent cities. I’d followed Kenyans posing as Ugandan refugees through the back streets of Nairobi, fear rising with each step but somehow unable to extricate myself from the situation. They led me to a restaurant filled with black faces, no whites in sight, where they engaged me in conversation about politics and African history – I was teaching African history at the time and thankfully knew something about the evils of colonialism – and asked for money so they could continue their education in Tanzania. I happily gave them the equivalent of twenty dollars for the relief of walking out alive. In Cairo I succumbed to a man’s offer to show me the sights of the city. He wore a pressed shirt and pants and shiny leather shoes – I don’t know why that impressed me. I knew something was up when he drove straight past the pyramids with no intention of stopping. His tour of Cairo turned out to be a tour of his relatives’ curio shops. The tour was not going to end until I bought something so I bought three