Chupaca Livestock Market

It is still early, so the sun is hot and the road is still dusty and dry. A dog is barking from the roof of a faded, concrete house, and as the group of travelers walks to the market, the bark of the dog and the sound of the sun burning white, gringo skin is all that can be heard.

Beyond the town, the Andes Mountains are crisp and plump against the sky, as if a sleeper built them in his dreams.

They enter the livestock market, a hundred yards of tarp-covered shops and tied pigs, donkeys, sheep and cow. Max tries to commit to memory the sense of its machine-like bustle and its mixture of yellows and reds. I want to write about this, he says to himself. Nothing in the world is easier than not to write; and that is what he has done. Max has written nothing since he arrived in this dusty, yellow, sexual place. So he has to say “I will write about this,” because otherwise he won´t, too afraid that he will fail the richness of his experiences. How can I write, he reasons, about the small brown girl with dirty hands and a dirty pink shirt that holds a piglet like it is a pile of clothes, who has tears running down her cheeks? I cannot.

But I can try – I will – because whoever cares to read the stuff will be able to correct the twists and distortions in the imperfect lens, because he will know the imperfect lens grinder. He will know that the failed sketch is made by a young boy whose image of the world is formed during the terrible lucidity of insomnia or the terrible lucidity of loneliness or those moments when he is so happy that it is as if the world has stopped turning and everything is that single moment.

A pig is dragged squealing by a rope twisted on its back legs; a drum somewhere is beating. The odor of feces and fried meat mixes with the heat, the heat! which rises in waves off the yellow dirt and also the smell of humanity. Everything is dust, dry and yellow. The pig is thrown into a bag, jerking and alive, by a woman with a multi-colored skirt. She has two braids darker than the darkest black in the pupils of a bird´s eye. The drum continues to beat, a little quicker than the beating of the human heart.

A man leaning against a painted wall holds a rope tied to a lamb. Blood is caked in small spots on the top of the lamb´s head; flies dance in the flakes of dirt and blood in its fleece.

"What happened to the lamb?" Max asks to the man.

"A wolf" he says.

"Que lástima."

The man has sad, liquid-blues eyes. Deep marks are in his cheeks beneath his eyes. He holds a beautiful child in his left arm; her skin is the color of the mountains.

"How much to buy the lamb?"

"45 Soles"

"Cute and delicious, right?"

After the market, the group of travelers hikes to a top of a mountain and watches the blue and brown mountain range while sucking on orange slices.

For lunch, they eat on tables under straw huts. The sun glints off the skin of the chicken. “Tranquilo” says one of the travelers. Max hopes that one day it is he who can explain that in English no word is quite like “tranquilo” to communicate total, quiet contentness. While they eat, stray dogs circle the chairs for food and children throw rocks into baskets and laugh.

On the way back to town, Max sees the man with liquid-blue eyes. He is walking down the hill with his child and his lamb. He is moving so slowly that a butterfly flutters past him and loses itself in the sky.