Last night, I had dinner with Jenny and Adriana at the hotel restaurant. Armando could not come, so our city tour fell by the wayside. Ironically, Armando, in a wonderfully thoughtful gesture, had stopped by the hotel in the late afternoon to leave a personal hand written message for me, and I bumped into him in the lobby. I assured him it was fine. I was perfectly happy with a quiet dinner, and Jenny and Adriana turned out to be excellent company.
Adriana is adorable and obviously intelligent. She is studying communication, journalism and photography with a few courses in filmmaking. She and I agreed on the outlines of an ongoing photo-journalism project that she will conduct for Pan American Dreams in La Paz with the goal of producing a collection of photos and short videos centered on the juxtaposition of ancient and modern, which is everywhere in La Paz.On one of my walks, for example, I looked across to the opposite side of the steep cobblestoned street and saw a man in a business suit buying coca tea through a doorway window from an indian woman in a bowler hat and traditional dress. To punctuate the effect, there was a large vertical sign next to the serving window of her makeshift coca café advertising the internet kiosk next door.
After walking around the steeply hilly area of central La Paz for several hours yesterday afternoon, soaking up the sights, smells and sounds (I've totally adjusted to the altitude.), and after a hearty lunch of roasted chicken, soup and potatoes at a little terrace restaurant where I was the only non-local, I finally returned to the National Museum of Art (Museo Nacional de Arte) for a tour on my own.
Reto and Marta had spent the weekend and Monday taking side trips with René to fascinating historic sites around La Paz, including Lake Titicaca and Copacabana. They were now gone. I didn't have time on this trip to join them. There is much to explore on day trips while in La Paz, but it will have to wait for a future visit.
Nonetheless, the special energy at the heart of this ancient city is palpable. The Spanish officially christened it as Nuestra Señora de La Paz (Our Lady of Peace) in 1548, but it was an important indian village long before the Conquista. The streets and public plazas are full of people and energy during the day and early evening, with Aymara and Quechua women street vendors wearing their infamous bowler hats and colorful traditional fringed indian shawls and layered skirts. I'd now spent quite a few hours walking the city in both day and night. It does not take long to get caught up in the vibrant, colorful swirl of La Paz, while the underlying power and mystery of its history pull constantly at a more subliminal level.
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When I got to the museum, there were only a few people walking around viewing exhibits, with the largest crowd in the small but excellent modern art section. At least 60% of the museum's exhibit space is given over to art of the Conquista and its colonial aftermath. Lots of highly stylized and melodramatic renderings of Spanish soldiers in full armor, of sword wielding angels come to punish the unfaithful heathen, etc. It was painful stuff to wade through.
I finally discovered a tiny pre-Columbian room off the atrium space downstairs where the reception had taken place Monday night, far from the main exhibit spaces of the museum. Most visitors will simply miss it altogether. The sign on the door says only Prehispanic Room (Sala Prehispánica). This small space was filled with exhibits of artifacts such as vases, rudimentary tools, small sculptures and arrowheads. The charts and timelines on the walls above the encased exhibits were discolored with age.
The energy in this room almost overwhelmed me. Reading the timeline charts on the wall that claimed some of these exhibits dated back nearly 20,000 years antes Cristo (BC), more than 17,000 years before the first pyramids of Egypt, was profoundly moving, even if the dates were off by half. I spent about 40 minutes here, then had to go out into the atrium area and just sit down for a while to absorb what I was seeing and what I was feeling. Now I did not want to leave La Paz. I felt a pull to stay, to just forget everything and linger for a month, a year, whatever amount of time it might take to follow this path. I know that in this place, in the valley of La Paz, something primal lies, some deep connection to the roots of human history.
I mentioned all of this to Jenny and Adriana over dinner last night. They understood and I think appreciated the fact that I was sensitive to this deep history, but of course this is their home, and it looks different to them. Their lives are busy in modern La Paz, working in hi-rise offices and going to university classes every day. I've also been on the road for a month, sleeping in rugged conditions with no running water, staying in fleabag hotels, spending days on end on dusty backroads. I'm as exposed as a raw nerve.
LEAVING LA PAZ
I am leaving against an almost magnetic pull, but on the other hand, I've ignored everything for a month, both in the U.S. and in Bs As. Paola and Valeria have been looking after the apartment in Bs As. The May rent is now due.
I called René, our taxi driver from the first day with Reto and Marta. He agreed to help me be a tourist for half a day before I catch the bus back to Salta. I had seen a beautiful guitar, handmade by a Bolivian guitar maker, in a shop window on one of my walks, so that was our first stop. I rarely do touristy things, but today, I shopped. I bought the guitar, then we went looking for a case in colorful Linares street, which is full of little shops selling everything from jewelry to antique furniture. I bought a sturdy handmade wool guitar case woven in bright Andean colors, bought gifts of lovely silver jewelry for all of my friends in Buenos Aires.
At an antique shop, René and I found a striking looking old chair from the days of the Conquista, dated from 1745, all hand hewn antique wood and leather covering, so heavy the shipping to Los Angeles, even to Bs As, would have been a significant part of the cost. We negotiated a bit, the price was reasonable, but in the end, I took the shop owner's business card and walked away.
René and I had a lot of fun just driving around negotiating and occasionally buying. He had worked up hilarious imitations of both Reto and Marta and kept me laughing all morning. He had no one else to appreciate these imitations, so when he took me to the bus terminal in the early afternoon, he came inside to have lunch with me, and we chatted and laughed right up to the time the bus left.
