An American in Lima

Valley of Santa Eulalia, Peru, which has sun, big rocks and amazing avocado ice cream

There is no sun in Lima during the South American winter. No shifting light. No shadows. No way to tell 8 a.m. from 5 p.m.

Just a flat grey sky that stays put, like lint in the dryer basket.

I wrote about this yesterday in “Panzo de Burro” and now I’m at it again. This week I’m writing about the weather in Lima because it defines the city. And like many elemental things, it goes unnoticed but influences nearly everything.

The sunless Lima winter is strange, bordering on freakish. Surviving a Lima winter is like living on another planet — a planet where there is no sun, only a weak light reflected from, say, another moon. But since there is sunlight in Lima from December through March, Limenos know that there’s a sun up there, and they cling to that knowledge.

The sun will come back, the Limenos think. It will, it will.

Sunlight is always in the back of a Limeno’s mind.

Thus on the rare winter’s day when the sun does poke through for a few hours, Limenos act in a way that strikes outsiders as exaggerated. Que rico! El sol! they’ll exclaim, their voices high-pitched and giddy.

The que ricos! go on for a while; the Limenos are smiling; they’re laughing; they’re hysterical.

These are people who haven’t seen a crack of sunlight in six weeks.

A few hours later, the sun disappears into the garua fog, the shadows fade into the sidewalk, Limenos retreat into their normally sombre demeanors.

I know this because I have watched El Fotografo’s relatives undergo this transformation. The first time was in 2000, when we were visiting from Florida for a few weeks. I didn’t understand at the time what was going on. I thought that perhaps some of the relatives were bipolar.

Now that I have lived through one Lima winter and am enduring a second, I have more insight. Their (my) reaction isn’t a sign of mental imbalance; it’s a natural reaction to being given a sudden reprive from months of sunlight deprivation. The response probably has a clinical name. It’s about sunlight and the pituarity gland and maybe the release of yet-unnamed hormones.

We are desperately seeking sunlight.

The place where EF, EH and I visited this weekend is called Santa Eulalia, an impossible word for a gringa to pronounce: ay-oo-LAH-lee-ah.

It sounds like someone gargling.

Why does one go to Santa Eulalia-ia-ia?  To feel sunlight on one’s face.

(Actually, it’s also a magnet for bird-lovers, something I didn’t know on Friday when I posted “Extreme Bird Love, That” prior to leaving Lima for the weekend. Santa Eulalia also is home to a center for training Peace Corps volunteers.)

The town of Santa Eulalia is about an hour and a half east of Lima. Getting there involves nagivating horrific traffic and barren stretches of highway, and dust, dust, dust everywhere. Once you get to Eulalia, there’s more dust; however, there are bougainvilla poking over the fences and so it is a picturesque dust.

Up bumpy roads and past concrete brick compounds, tall eucalyptus trees bathed in dust, dusty dogs barking dry coughs, roadside stands with local women selling homemade avocado ice cream (!), dust on the seats where you sit to eat the ice cream.

At the end of a 20-minute climb up a dirt/dust/rock road, there is the very nice house that you rent with a bunch of people, and everyone is saying Que linda!

Because it is. It’s in the sunlight. It’s shining on everything. You can see your shadow and you feel human again.

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