Living in Peru : your everyday companion

Richard Nisbet

It’s about a half a mile back toward town. I don’t know how we had missed it coming. The driver reminds me that I had told him it was near the condor. Near is relative.

This is a big dealership/garage with a gate, a guard, a few new cars up front and six or seven trucks undergoing surgery in the big covered garage at the back.  The driver takes me to where the trucks are and I spot Glen’s beast.   The red cab is tilted forward and several mechanics are poking around beneath.   I  get out and give the driver another two Sols.   He was smart to wait.   Or maybe he was smart enough to figure the whole thing out from the start.  

Glen is not in sight.  I go into the waiting room and ask for him.   I get laughs and shrugs.    When I go back out, a taxi pulls up and Glen disembarks with several big plastic containers of transmission  fluid.    

“They broke a line, the dumb fucks.  It’s gonna be a while.”   Glen is covered with grease.  There’s a break in the seam of the seat of his pants and his bare ass is showing through.  “These assholes don’t know how to do anything.   I’m having to show them how to put the tranny back together.” He lifts what must be a hundred pounds of fluid and strides toward his truck.

It was four thirty by now.   I followed Glen and asked for a prognosis.

“Forty five minutes. Maybe an hour.   Just take it easy mate.  We can still make Puno by ten, ten thirty.” He dives into the bowels of the engine and I go off to read a book.

An hour and a half later I had finished one book and started another.  I kept going back for an update and the time kept being pushed back.   At one point Glen said, “I figure we’ll skip Puno and  just keep going till we hit the border at Desaguadero and spend a few hours sleeping in the back of the truck.   They don’t open the border till six and I’ve got to be in La Paz by noon.”   

The shop is deserted now, except for Glen and his three mechanics.  Work lights below and within send shafts of light into the dark, giving the scene an eerie feel.  It is raining.  I remember how fast Glen drives, and how it’s late and I wonder how the truck handles curves on wet pavement.    This trip is beginning to have all the earmarks of an adventure.   I have mixed feelings.    I like an adventure, but I don’t like the thought of being maimed or killed in a truck mishap.   Since I am able to write this, I obviously escaped death, but there was adventure of another, completely unexpected sort, ahead of us.

Another hour and I’m hungry enough to nibble at the cold taco.  I’m sitting in the deserted reception room and I hear Glen shouting, “FUCK!”   The three know-nothing mechanics who are  working with him pick up the epithet.

“Fuck.  Fuck.  Fuck.”   In their mouths, the word somehow lacks Glen’s conviction.

But I am drawn back to the scene of the action.  There are bodies protruding from beneath and within the monster.   There are grunts and shouts and the clang of tools against metal.   The big red cab is still tilted up at a 45 degree angle.   Glen stands with a warm beer in hand raging over the ignorance of the mechanics.

I’m no help.  When it comes to automotive machinery I am worse than these targets of Glen’s wrath.   The only attempt I ever made was to adjust the valves on my VW poptop camper with my daughter reading instructions to me from “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Volkswagen Repair.”  Twenty-five miles later the engine blew.  I figure the best I can do is keep out of the way, so I go back to my new book and try to get into it.

Some time later I am startled by the sound of the truck roaring by the reception room door.   I grab my things and run out, thinking we are finally leaving.   But no, it’s only a test.   Glen slams on the brakes, throws it into reverse and screams backwards.  He stops.   “No good!” he shouts.  “The fuckin lines need more bleedin!”

He leaves the fuckin bleedin to the useless mechanics and begins to clean himself.  “Ere’s what I figger,” he says. “We’ll take a taxi into town and have a good feed before we take off and then we’ll drive all night.  No urry, just take it easy so’s we get to Desaguadero by dawn.”

I like the taking it easy part, but I wonder about driving all night. 

“Don’t worry. Times I’ve driven three days with no sleep...an no drugs either.”

Glen is standing there lathering up with goop and washing off several layers of grease and he seems perfectly comfortable wearing only his T-shirt and ripped pants and I am freezing even with my jacket on.   The man is made of strong stuff.

After more rounds of bleeding the transmission lines and testing the truck, Glen pronounces us ready.   I timidly ask about the brakes, which he assures me are okay.   

So we take a cab to town for a feed.

Glen has changed clothes and gotten most of the grease off himself.   “Ow’s my face?” he says.

“Okay.   You look like you need a shave.”

Glen wants to eat at Ukukus restaurant.  Ukukus is up at the far end of a pedestrian street called Procuradores, nicknamed Gringo Alley.  It begins at the west end of the Plaza de Armas and runs for a good city block.  There must be about fifty restaurants along the way and every one of them has someone in the alley trying to guide, or lure, or beg or drag you into their restaurant.  It’s another Cusco gauntlet.   Even before you enter Procuradores they attack,  Keros, El Cuate, La Dolce Vita, Tratamundos...and there’s Huilfredo, hawking for his restaurant.  I greet him with a hug.   He tries to get us into his place, but Glen’s determined.   “Naaa.   We’re going to Ukukus.”