Daily Life in Lima,  Earthquakes

Of Earthquakes and Philosophers

This past Monday (October 6), at around 6:50 p.m., El Híjo and I were sitting in the living room when we felt an enormous jolt.

EH leaped from the couch: “Earthquake!”

The rapid shaking last for ten seconds and stopped.

El Fotógrafo emerged from the kitchen where he was cooking a very fragrant Bolognese sauce. His brother was right behind him, wafting on the scent of sautéed garlic.

“Yes,” said his brother, stroking his beard. “This is October. The month of the earthquakes.” He paused thoughtfully. “Also May.”

Now is a good time in this blog to introduce El Filósofo, EF’s older brother and a lifetime Lima resident.

Plato and Aristotle by Rafael

El Filósofo lives two blocks away from us with his wife, La Organica, and two of their three grown children. EF’s brother is many things – an artist, an artisanal baker, a former Waldorf School teacher – but his identity, or his aura, if you will, is larger than all that. He is the quintessential philosophic Limeño, with a stoic, wry attitude toward all events, good or bad.

If the country’s economy is posting record gains and the critics are cheering the robustness of Peru’s democratic process, El Filósofo will remind you of the sudden military takeover of Peru in 1968.

If the power in your neighborhood goes out due to an unexplained municipal snafu, El Filósofo will light some candles from the Barrio Chino and explain why humanity is really better off without electricity.

If you are a frantic, overworked American mother (as I was in 2000) and you are in Lima with your two-year-old who drinks only soy milk and you have just discovered that boxed soy milk doesn’t exist in Peru, El Filósofo will helpfully explain how to take soy beans and squeeze the milk out of them BY HAND.

He will smile as he says this.

As it turns out, El Filósofo isn’t the only Limeño who likes to repeat the May/October earthquake adage.

The morning after the Lima earthquake – which registered a modest 4.0 degrees on the Richter scale – I brought up the event during my neighborhood exercise class.

The exercise teacher, a cheerful, disciplined woman with the body of an 18-year-old Olympian, put on that same patient face I had seen on El Filósofo.

Ah, si. Octubre. El mes de terremotos,” she said, pressing her palms together in unconscious supplication. “Y mayo también.”

Then she perked up and yelled at us to do twenty more sit-ups.

Comments like those of the exercise goddess and El Filósofo suggest how the human psyche adapts when faced with ongoing threats beyond one’s control. Peru, like other Andean countries located along the South American and Nazca tectonic plates, will always be subject to earthquakes. Their exact timing can’t be predicted. But to know or to believe that earthquakes tend to happen during certain months lends them a predictability — and hence makes the fear more bearable.

Living in a city prone to earthquakes, power outages and occasional military takeovers offers a person several coping options: become a nervous wreck, drink heavily or cultivate one’s inner philosopher.

Or, as I’ll describe in my next post, become a devotee of El Señor de los Milagros.

I am an American writer who lived in Lima for seven years (2007-2014), where I covered Andean traditions, melting glaciers and daily life in the capital for Miami Herald, MSNBC and Huffington Post. I now live and work in northern Florida where I champion climate change advocacy and compassionate, affordable eldercare.