Going The Distance

Bernardo and Mani have got life sorted. They own a farm an hour outside Lima, where Mani grows the berries which she makes into jams and sells. They go to the farm 3 times a week for a night at a time, to collect berries and bring them into town. Diego, the youngest of their four sons, runs the farm (which grows much more than just Mani’s berries). And they have a boat. It’s on the water in Callao, a suburb north of central Lima, and the main port – it proclaims proudly – of South America. At the Yacht Club Peruano, a jetty stretches out into a calm sea peppered with little sailing and motor boats.

I love boats. Not that I can sail, but I love being on the water. And the sight of rows of little boats on the gentle swells of the Peruvian coastline makes me feel very happy. Bernardo and Mani are taking us out for a quick sail in their boat. It’s not a huge boat (and here is where I’ll expose my total ignorance) – maybe 25 feet, with two sails – but it’s perfect. We head out across the bay, Bernardo at the helm, through a regatta of hundreds of little optimists, all with 10 year old captains (apparently, Peru is regularly world champion in Optimist class sailing).

We interview Bernardo and Mani on the boat. Which is shit for Mike, who has to look through the viewfinder and subsequently gets pretty seasick, but great for the interview: Bernardo and Mani are typified by their energy and their joie de vivre, and getting them on the back of their boat is the ideal way of representing that.

Mani is a whirlwhind of energy. She is 65, but genuinely, she could be 30. She simply doesn’t stop, she laughs, and talks and enthuses and generally wraps people in her buzz. Bernardo is 15 years older, a spry 80 year old, but his personality is naturally calmer than hers. He was a dentist throughout his professional life, and Mani’s family were amongst his patients. She was coming to him for check ups when she was a 15 year old, so she always just saw him as the Doctor.

When she was 19, she rode a motorbike and had recently bought a small boat. She had just set up a small shop where she was growing and selling plants, and generally, she was the same whirlwind of life that she is now. Bernardo himself had just bought a boat, so the two of them started to talk about that. Bernardo asked her on a date (well, what he thought was a date, what she thought was just an invite to a party where he would have organised someone her own age for her…) and things kind of went from there. It took her a few dates to get the gist that he was actually want to date her, but it moved quickly from there when she did get it. He asked her to marry him within 3 months. And in January, they’ll celebrate 45 years of marriage.

What’s wonderful to learn about is their dynamic. Mani is the one with the big projects – the farm, her shop, her sons – she just doesn’t stop. Bernardo loves his music: he plays the piano and the violin exquisitely and sang for many years in Peru’s national choir. Their advice was that it’s really important to have your own interests, and not to be jealous of the other one’s interests. Mani loathed the operas which Bernardo loved, but over the years, she has gradually come to tolerate them. Bernardo is now a little more up with agriculture too… Also, they provide a nice balance to each other. Mani says that everyone who meets Bernardo adores him. He has a peace about him, a gentleness, a kindness and a generosity which make him wonderful. She, on the other hand, is the engine room. And it works very nicely.

We get back onto dry land, with sea air in our lungs and a fiendish hunger, so head to a popular restaurant called Pescados Capitales.

I’m sitting in a small motorcycle repair shop towards the outskirts of Lima. We’ve decided to give the bike, our trusty, uncomplaining steed, a little bit of love. Some new oil, a bit of a spit-and-polish, and hopefully some new tyres.

The shop is in an area of hundreds of mechanics workshops. They spill out on to the street, Mototaxis, exhaust pipes, glinting nuts and bolts. I’m sitting inside the shop on a plastic chair, there doesn’t appear to be any electricity – no overhead lights, but a small TV is blaring Mexican telenovelas at me so I must be wrong. 5 mechanics are crowded round the bike with Mike – never seen anything like this (“but it’s like an easy design of a Harley” apparently, so they are having no problems at all).
 
Lima has been a mixed bag so far. When we arrive in a new city, we always have a couple of days of tense, interview-finding orientation: asking all and sundry for inspiration, researching the names that we get, then making the tentative steps at contact – difficult in Spanish: emails are so impersonal and ignorable, but neither of us likes to be the one to phone and do the sell. We take turns at it. We now have about 10 different leads that we are chasing, no one has replied to emails or phonecalls, and we’re just feeling a bit burnt out. 

Though I’m now used to that initial tension as we desperately try to tell the story of a country through its couples – and the pressure to do justice to it, this time feels a bit different. I can’t really put my finger on what it is, but I’m just not as bothered, stressed or panicked as I usually am. Mike is stressed, but not to his usual levels. We discuss it and we come to the undeniable conclusion: we’re tired. Not just because of the powerful Pisco Sours which give us the daily Peruvian hangover, but profoundly. We’re 6 months down, and this routine is taking it out of us.

Who knows what’s going to come of all of this hard work? I think that’s the other thing which gets to us. We have to keep unremitting levels of determination, without any guarantee of return. I’m not despairing, like I was in Panama and early Bogota: now it’s just a fatigue. I’m enjoying the trip, but I’m just not as motivated as I was about the interviews. The little flame is going out, purely as a result of time and too little external support and recognition. Not that we need cheerleaders, but it would be really nice if a TV company phoned and said “we’ve heard about what you’re doing, it sounds really interesting…”

As well as the wonderful Bernardo and Mani, Mike’s great mate from university, Veronica, is half Peruvian, and her mother happens to be out here at the moment. We meet with Veronica’s cousin, Jonathan, who immediately gets the ball rolling on various ideas that we have had for Lima and Peru:

- we’d love to interview Keiko Fujimori, daughter of the ex-president, and her US husband, Mark. A long shot. Jonathan knows them so we send them an email, with huge hope.
- the Peruvian equivalent of Jamie Oliver is a man named Gaston, who has set up, with his wife, Astrid, a number of very successful restaurants both around Lima and in Latin capitals across the world. He trains young people from under-priviledged backgrounds to work as his chefs with huge success. Lima is very proud of this couple, lots of people suggest them to us. We manage to get Gaston’s assistants contact details from Veronica’s mother, but they are away for the next week and very busy in the run up to Christmas. Eek.
-Mike has the idea that we want to hunt down someone from the Inca Kola family. Peru is one of only two countries in the whole world where a national fizzy drink outsells Coca Cola – here it is a vibrant yellow, sugary fizz explosion called Inca Kola (the other is Scotland with Irn Bru). The Lindley family established the company in 1906, and recently sold it to Coca Cola…

These are all fairly long shots. And the longest shot of them all is Mario Vargas Llosa, one of the most famous living Latin American writers in the world. He spends most of his time in London, apparently, but for 3 months of the year, he is based in Lima. My cousin (let’s use this in the loosest possible sense – she’s part of Bernardo’s extended family) works for him as his assistant so I call her. He’s getting back from Mexico City, where he’s been giving a presentation, this Sunday. Next week, his diary is so full that he doesn’t even have a half hour slot to give us. She gives me his email to contact him directly.

What I would really like to do with Vargas Llosa is get his opinion on Latin literary love: the passion, the declarations, the customs of courtship. And perhaps the slightly less overblown reality of infidelity… He is also the master of social observation and political awareness, so it would be fascinating to pick his brains on Peruvian society. But, as I say, this is but a distant dream. Not only does he not have any spare time, but he’s unlikely to put his name to an independent documentary, when all he has to go on is my ropey Spanish…

My grandmother, Mary, was half-Peruvian. She grew up in Iquitos, in the Peruvian rainforest, with her British father and Peruvian mother. Mary then came to England when she was around 10 years old, and remained there subsequently, ultimately marrying my grandfather, Frank, a naval architect with Irish parents, who had started his career aged 14 as an apprentice at a Liverpool shipyard. My grandfather took a job in Genoa, then one of the biggest ports in Europe, at Lloyd’s Register of Shipping, and my father was effectively raised Italian.

All of which means that the Peruvian element of my family is buried. But not forgotten. I remembered proudly proclaiming to primary school friends that I was an eighth Peruvian; reading Paddington Bear with my mum and feeling a sense of pride that he was from “darkest Peru”; and telling anyone who dared to question my curious middle name “Donayre” (pronounced “Don-eye-ray”), that it was my Peruvian family’s surname. (Didn’t stop my best mate at school giving me shit about posh “Donayre kebabs”)

My grandmother didn’t really talk about Peru with me. To me, always a monolingual little Brit, she was simply a wonderful cocktail of languages and exoticism – my father said she could flit easily and totally fluently between Spanish, Italian and English – where his own father spoke stilted and uncomfortable Italian which made him, raised bilingual, squirm.

One of my favourite stories about my grandmother’s upbringing is one about “La Mano Peluda”. She grew up in bona fide rainforest: the loo was an outhouse, and more than that, it was an outhouse suspended above the rainforest canopy below. From what I understood, there was a set of steps up into the small wooden cabin, and the toilet seat framed the yawning expanse of forest ceiling beneath, so that sitting on the loo, one would feel the wind and the wildlife below one’s private areas, and perhaps hear the sound of the evacuation as it met with the foliage below.

Mary’s parents and servants would tell her and her siblings that if they were naughty, “La Mano Peluda” (The Hairy Hand) would emerge rapidly from the canopy and grab the children’s private bits violently.

Imagine the terror of hearing this as a small child. Sure beats anything my parents could come up with in London…!

So, for me, though I feel a total stranger to Peru (I studied Italian at university and have never spoken Spanish before), there is something about being here which feels familiar. Or, at least, like it should feel familiar. My grandmother sadly died on the day of my 28th birthday, in 2007, so I can’t phone her to chat to her my burgeoning conversational Spanish, nor to ask more about the places I should be going, the people I should be meeting.

That said, we still have links with the place. My uncle, Mary’s youngest son, married a Peruvian whose family all still live in Lima and has given me contact details. And my father has managed to track down what remains of our distant family here.

Bernardo and Mani are two of the nicest people I’ve ever met, let alone been related to. Bernardo’s aunt, Zoila, married Mary’s uncle (called Achilles Donayre – which is the coolest name I’ve ever heard…) and, this being Latin America, the families were all really close and knew each other well. Which is why Bernardo is stuck with me, his first cousin’s first cousin’s grand-daughter, all these years later.

The four of us go out for dinner together (Peruvian classics of Pisco Sours and Lomo Saltado) and exchange stories and laughter well into the night. It takes us about half that time to work out how we are related…

Brush ins with the police (Mike overtaking where it’s forbidden, twice), sandstorms and ceviche: we burn it down the coast from the glorious Huanchaco where I managed to convince my beloved husband to take a day off, down to Miraflores in Lima.

The whole thing takes 12 hours. Thick thick fog (typical of Lima – the Humboldt current delivers it to the city with glee) and some of the worse traffic we have seen so far. We sit for 2 hours in the rush hour darkness trying to navigate the huge metropolis, as polution coats our faces in a thick black layer. But we’re here now.

One wonderful thing happens during the day. We pull up to say hello to two bikers (there is a kind of unspoken code between the biker community, always an interest with each other) doing a similar route to us, Garry and Ron. While we are talking, a woman from the car repair shop we have stopped beside walks over to me and hands me a small, black carving of a head. She explains to me that it is Inca in its style and she’d like me to have it. I say, “how much?” to which she replies, “nothing, it’s a present, I’d like you to have it.” Extraordinary. I’m baffled at first – this doesn’t happen, ever – but then so so grateful. So we now have a very grumpy looking Inca travelling with us too, which I’ll always treasure. Until, of course, I realise I’m being used unwittingly as a mule…

Oh, and one other thing. We tend to be brutally heathen on driving days, ignoring all landmarks of any form in the name of getting to our destination – which mean that we miss out on cultural, archeological and geographical marvels. But we did have a quick peep at Chan Chan, the largest remains of an Adobe settlement anywhere in the world. We didn’t get out of the bike though, don’t be fooled…